The Complete H. P.

LOVECRAFT Reader
(68 Stories Included)


***


CONTENTS:
The Nameless City
The Festival
The Colour out of Space
The Call of Cthulhu
The Dunwich Horror
The Whisperer in Darkness
Dreams in the Witch-house
The Haunter of the Dark
The Shadow over Innsmouth
The Shadow out of Time
At the Mountain of Madness
The Case of Charles Dexter Ward
Azathoth
Beyond the Wall of Sleep
Celephais
Cool Air
Dagon
Ex Oblivione
Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family
From Beyond
He
Herbert West: Reanimator
Hypnos
Imprisoned with the Pharaohs
In the Vault
Medusa's Coil
Memory
Nyarlathotep
Pickman's Model
Poetry of the Gods
The Alchemist
The Beast in the Cave
The Book
The Cats of Ulthar
The Crawling Chaos
The Descendant
The Doom That Came to Sarnath
The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath
The Evil Clergyman
The Horror at Martin's Beach
The Horror at Red Hook
The Hound
The Lurking Fear
The Moon Bog
The Music of Erich Zann
The Other Gods
The Outsider
The Picture in the House
The Quest of Iranon
The Rats in the Walls
The Shunned House
The Silver Key
The Statement of Randolph Carter
The Strange High House in the Mist
The Street
The Temple
The Terrible Old Man
The Thing on the Doorstep
The Tomb
The Transition of Juan Romero
The Tree
The Unnamable
The White Ship
Through the Gates of the Silver Key
What the Moon Brings
Polaris
The Very Old Folk

THE NAMELESS CITY
When I drew nigh the nameless city I knew it was accursed. I was traveling in a parched and
terrible valley under the moon, and afar I saw it protruding uncannily above the sands as parts of a
corpse may protrude from an ill-made grave. Fear spoke from the age-worn stones of this hoary
survivor of the deluge, this great-grandfather of the eldest pyramid; and a viewless aura repelled me
and bade me retreat from antique and sinister secrets that no man should see, and no man else had
dared to see..
Remote in the desert of Araby lies the nameless city, crumbling and inarticulate, its low walls
nearly hidden by the sands of uncounted ages. It must have been thus before the first stones of
Memphis were laid, and while the bricks of Babylon were yet unbaked. There is no legend so old as
to give it a name, or to recall that it was ever alive; but it is told of in whispers around campfires and
muttered about by grandams in the tents of sheiks so that all the tribes shun it without wholly knowing
why. It was of this place that Abdul Alhazred the mad poet dreamed of the night before he sang his
unexplained couplet:
That is not dead which can eternal lie, And with strange aeons death may die.
I should have known that the Arabs had good reason for shunning the nameless city, the city told
of in strange tales but seen by no living man, yet I defied them and went into the untrodden waste with
my camel. I alone have seen it, and that is why no other face bears such hideous lines of fear as mine;
why no other man shivers so horribly when the night wind rattles the windows. When I came upon it
in the ghastly stillness of unending sleep it looked at me, chilly from the rays of a cold moon amidst
the desert's heat. And as I returned its look I forgot my triumph at finding it, and stopped still with my
camel to wait for the dawn.
For hours I waited, till the east grew grey and the stars faded, and the grey turned to roseate light
edged with gold. I heard a moaning and saw a storm of sand stirring among the antique stones though
the sky was clear and the vast reaches of desert still. Then suddenly above the desert's far rim came
the blazing edge of the sun, seen through the tiny sandstorm which was passing away, and in my
fevered state I fancied that from some remote depth there came a crash of musical metal to hail the
fiery disc as Memnon hails it from the banks of the Nile. My ears rang and my imagination seethed as
I led my camel slowly across the sand to that unvocal place; that place which I alone of living men
had seen.
In and out amongst the shapeless foundations of houses and places I wandered, finding never a
carving or inscription to tell of these men, if men they were, who built this city and dwelt therein so
long ago. The antiquity of the spot was unwholesome, and I longed to encounter some sign or device
to prove that the city was indeed fashioned by mankind. There were certain proportions and
dimensions in the ruins which I did not like. I had with me many tools, and dug much within the walls
of the obliterated edifices; but progress was slow, and nothing significant was revealed. When night
and the moon returned I felt a chill wind which brought new fear, so that I did not dare to remain in
the city. And as I went outside the antique walls to sleep, a small sighing sandstorm gathered behind
me, blowing over the grey stones though the moon was bright and most of the desert still.
I awakened just at dawn from a pageant of horrible dreams, my ears ringing as from some metallic
peal. I saw the sun peering redly through the last gusts of a little sandstorm that hovered over the
nameless city, and marked the quietness of the rest of the landscape. Once more I ventured within
those brooding ruins that swelled beneath the sand like an ogre under a coverlet, and again dug vainly
for relics of the forgotten race. At noon I rested, and in the afternoon I spent much time tracing the
walls and bygone streets, and the outlines of the nearly vanished buildings. I saw that the city had
been mighty indeed, and wondered at the sources of its greatness. To myself I pictured all the
spendours of an age so distant that Chaldaea could not recall it, and thought of Sarnath the Doomed,
that stood in the land of Mnar when mankind was young, and of 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 effaced any carvings which may have been outside.
Very low and sand-choked were all the dark apertures near me, but I cleared on with my spade and
crawled through it, carrying a torch to reveal whatever mysteries it might hold. When I was inside I
saw that the cavern was indeed a temple, and beheld plain signs of the race that had lived and
worshipped before the desert was a desert. Primitive altars, pillars, and niches, all curiously low,
were not absent; and though I saw no sculptures or frescoes, there were many singular stones clearly
shaped into symbols by artificial means. The lowness of the chiselled chamber was very strange, for
I could hardly kneel upright; but the area was so great that my torch showed only part of it at a time. I
shuddered oddly in some of the far corners; for certain altars and stones suggested forgotten rites of
terrible, revolting and inexplicable nature and made me wonder what manner of men could have made
and frequented such a temple. When I had seen all that the place contained, I crawled out again, avid
to find what the temples might yield.
Night had now approached, yet the tangible things I had seen made curiosity stronger than fear, so
that I did not flee from the long mooncast shadows that had daunted me when first I saw the nameless
city. In the twilight I cleared another aperture and with a new torch crawled into it, finding more
vague stones and symbols, though nothing more definite than the other temple had contained the room
was just as low, but much less broad, ending in a very narrow passage crowded with obscure and
cryptical shrines. About these shrines I was prying when the noise of a wind and my camel outside
broke through the stillness and drew me forth to see what could have frightened the beast.
The moon was gleaming vividly over the primitive ruins, lighting a dense cloud of sand that
seemed blown by a strong but decreasing wind from some point along the cliff ahead of me. I knew it
was this chilly, sandy wind which had disturbed the camel and was about to lead him to a place of
better shelter when I chanced to glance up and saw that there was no wind atop the cliff. This
astonished me and made me fearful again, but I immediately recalled the sudden local winds that I had
seen and heard before at sunrise and sunset, and judged it was a normal thing. I decided it came from
some rock fissure leading to a cave, and watched the troubled sand to trace it to its source; soon
perceiving that it came from the black orifice of a temple a long distance south of me, almost out of
sight. Against the choking sand-cloud I plodded toward this temple, which as I neared it loomed
larger than the rest, and shewed a doorway far less clogged with caked sand. I would have entered
had not the terrific force of the icy wind almost quenched my torch. It poured madly out of the dark
door, sighing uncannily as it ruffled the sand and spread among the weird ruins. Soon it grew fainter
and the sand grew more and more still, till finally all was at rest again; but a presence seemed stalking
among the spectral stones of the city, and when I glanced at the moon it seemed to quiver as though
mirrored in unquiet waters. I was more afraid than I could explain, but not enough to dull my thirst for
wonder; so as soon as the wind was quite gone I crossed into the dark chamber from which it had
come.
This temple, as I had fancied from the outside, was larger than either of those I had visited
before; and was presumably a natural cavern since it bore winds from some region beyond. Here I
could stand quite upright, but saw that the stones and altars were as low as those in the other temples.
On the walls and roof I beheld for the first time some traces of the pictorial art of the ancient race,
curious curling streaks of paint that had almost faded or crumbled away; and on two of the altars I
saw with rising excitement a maze of well-fashioned curvilinear carvings. As I held my torch aloft it
seemed to me that the shape of the roof was too regular to be natural, and I wondered what the
prehistoric cutters of stone had first worked upon. Their engineering skill must have been vast.
Then a brighter flare of the fantastic flame showed that form which I had been seeking, the
opening to those remoter abysses whence the sudden wind had blown; and I grew faint when I saw
that it was a small and plainly artificial door chiselled in the solid rock. I thrust my torch within,
beholding a black tunnel with the roof arching low over a rough flight of very small, numerous and
steeply descending steps. I shall always see those steps in my dreams, for I came to learn what they
meant. At the time I hardly knew whether to call them steps or mere footholds in a precipitous
descent. My mind was whirling with mad thoughts, and the words and warning of Arab prophets
seemed to float across the desert from the land that men know to the nameless city that men dare not
know. Yet I hesitated only for a moment before advancing through the portal and commencing to
climb cautiously down the steep passage, feet first, as though on a ladder.
It is only in the terrible phantasms of drugs or delirium that any other man can have such a descent
as mine. The narrow passage led infinitely down like some hideous haunted well, and the torch I held
above my head could not light the unknown depths toward which I was crawling. I lost track of the
hours and forgot to consult my watch, though I was frightened when I thought of the distance I must
have be traversing. There were changes of direction and of steepness; and once I came to a long,
low, level passage where I had to wriggle my feet first along the rocky floor, holding torch at arm's
length beyond my head. The place was not high enough for kneeling. After that were more of the
steep steps, and I was still scrambling down interminably when my failing torch died out. I do not
think I noticed it at the time, for when I did notice it I was still holding it above me as if it were
ablaze. I was quite unbalanced with that instinct for the strange and the unknown which had made me a
wanderer upon earth and a haunter of far, ancient, and forbidden places.
In the darkness there flashed before my mind fragments of my cherished treasury of daemonic
lore; sentences from Alhazred the mad Arab, paragraphs from the apocryphal nightmares of
Damascius, and infamous lines from the delirious Image du Monde of Gauthier de Metz. I repeated
queer extracts, and muttered of Afrasiab and the daemons that floated with him down the Oxus; later
chanting over and over again a phrase from one of Lord Dunsany's tales--"The unreveberate
blackness of the abyss." Once when the descent grew amazingly steep I recited something in sing-
song from Thomas Moore until I feared to recite more:
A reservoir of 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 Seat 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 that they were firmly
fastened.
I saw that the passage was a long one, so floundered ahead rapidly in a creeping run that would
have seemed horrible had any eye watched me in the blackness; crossing from side to side
occasionally to feel of my surroundings and be sure the walls and rows of cases still stretched on.
Man is so used to thinking visually that I almost forgot the darkness and pictured the endless corridor
of wood and glass in its low-studded monotony as though I saw it. And then in a moment of
indescribable emotion I did see it.
Just when my fancy merged into real sight I cannot tell; but there came a gradual glow ahead, and
all at once I knew that I saw the dim outlines of a corridor and the cases, revealed by some unknown
subterranean phosphorescence. For a little while all was exactly as I had imagined it, since the glow
was very faint; but as I mechanically kept stumbling ahead into the stronger light I realised that my
fancy had been but feeble. This hall was no relic of crudity like the temples in the city above, but a
monument of the most magnificent and exotic art. Rich, vivid, and daringly fantastic designs and
pictures formed a continuous scheme of mural paintings whose lines and colours were beyond
description. The cases were of a strange golden wood, with fronts of exquisite glass, and containing
the mummified forms of creatures outreaching in grotesqueness the most chaotic dreams of man.
To convey any idea of these monstrosities is impossible. They were of the reptile kind, with
body lines suggestion sometimes the crocodile, sometimes the seal, but more often nothing of which
either the naturalist or the palaeontologist ever heard. In size they approximated a small man, and their
fore-legs bore delicate and evident feet curiously like human hands and fingers. But strangest of all
were their heads, which presented a contour violating all known biological principles. To nothing
can such things be well compared--in one flash I thought of comparisons as varied as the cat, the
bullfrog, the mythic Satyr, and the human being. Not Jove himself had had so colossal and
protuberant a forehead, yet the horns and the noselessness and the alligator-like jaw placed things
outside all established categories. I debated for a time on the reality of the mummies, half suspecting
they were artificial idols; but soon decided they were indeed some palaeogean species which had
lived when the nameless city was alive. To crown their grotesqueness, most of them were
gorgeously enrobed in the costliest of fabrics, and lavishly laden with ornaments of gold, jewels, and
unknown shining metals.
The importance of these crawling creatures must have been vast, for they held first place among
the wild designs on the frescoed walls and ceiling. With matchless skill had the artist drawn them in a
world of their own, wherein they had cities and gardens fashioned to suit their dimensions; and I
could not help but think that their pictured history was allegorical, perhaps showing the progress of
the race that worshipped them. These creatures, I said to myself, were to men of the nameless city
what the she-wolf was to Rome, or some totem-beast is to a tribe of Indians.
Holding this view, I could trace roughly a wonderful epic of the nameless city; the tale of a
mighty seacoast metropolis that ruled the world before Africa rose out of the waves, and of its
struggles as the sea shrank away, and the desert crept into the fertile valley that held it. I saw its wars
and triumphs, its troubles and defeats, and afterwards its terrible fight against the desert when
thousands of its people--here represented in allegory by the grotesque reptiles--were driven to
chisel their way down 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 connection with the awesome
descent I had made was unmistakable. I even recognized 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
had never ceased to worship. Now that the light was better I studied the pictures more closely and,
remembering that the strange reptiles must represent the unknown men, pondered upon the customs of
the nameless city. Many things were peculiar and inexplicable. The civilization, which included a
written alphabet, had seemingly risen to a higher order than those immeasurably later civilizations of
Egypt and Chaldaea, yet there were curious omissions. I could, for example, find no pictures to
represent deaths or funeral customs, save such as were related to wars, violence, and plagues; and I
wondered at the reticence shown concerning natural death. It was as though an ideal of immortality
had been fostered as a cheering illusion.
Still nearer the end of the passage was painted scenes of the utmost picturesqueness and
extravagance: contrasted views of the nameless city in its desertion and growing ruin, and of the
strange new realm of paradise to which the race had hewed its way through the stone. In these views
the city and the desert valley were shewn always by moonlight, golden nimbus hovering over the
fallen walls, and half-revealing the splendid perfection of former times, shown spectrally and
elusively by the artist. The paradisal scenes were almost too extravagant to be believed, portraying a
hidden world of eternal day filled with glorious cities and ethereal hills and valleys. At the very last
I thought I saw signs of an artistic anticlimax. The paintings were less skillful, and much more bizarre
than even the wildest of the earlier scenes. They seemed to record a slow decadence of the ancient
stock, coupled with a growing ferocity toward the outside world from which it was driven by the
desert. The forms of the people--always represented by the sacred reptiles--appeared to be
gradually wasting away, through their spirit as shewn hovering above the ruins by moonlight gained
in proportion. Emaciated priests, displayed as reptiles in ornate robes, cursed the upper air and all
who breathed it; and one terrible final scene shewed a primitive-looking man, perhaps a pioneer of
ancient Irem, the City of Pillars, torn to pieces by members of the elder race. I remember how the
Arabs fear the nameless city, and was glad that beyond this place the grey walls and ceiling were
bare.
As I viewed the pageant of mural history I had approached very closely to the end of the low-
ceiled hall, and was aware of a gate through which came all of the illuminating phosphorescence.
Creeping up to it, I cried aloud in transcendent amazement at what lay beyond; for instead of other and
brighter chambers there was only an illimitable void of uniform radiance, such one might fancy when
gazing down from the peak of Mount Everest upon a sea of sunlit mist. Behind me was a passage so
cramped that I could not stand upright in it; before me was an infinity of subterranean effulgence.
Reaching down from the passage into the abyss was the head of a steep flight of steps--small
numerous steps like those of black passages I had traversed--but after a few feet the glowing
vapours concealed everything. Swung back open against the left-hand wall of the passage was a
massive door of brass, incredibly thick and decorated with fantastic bas-reliefs, which could if
closed shut the whole inner world of light away from the vaults and passages of rock. I looked at the
step, and for the nonce dared not try them. I touched the open brass door, and could not move it. Then
I sank prone to the stone floor, my mind aflame with prodigious reflections which not even a death-
like exhaustion could banish.
As I lay still with closed eyes, free to ponder, many things I had lightly noted in the frescoes
came back to me with new and terrible significance--scenes representing the nameless city in its
heyday--the vegetations of the valley around it, and the distant lands with which its merchants traded.
The allegory of the crawling creatures puzzled me by its universal prominence, and I wondered that
it would be so closely followed in a pictured history of such importance. In the frescoes the
nameless city had been shewn in proportions fitted to the reptiles. I wondered what its real
proportions and magnificence had been, and reflected a moment on certain oddities I had noticed in
the ruins. I thought curiously of the lowness of the primal temples and of the underground corridor,
which were doubtless hewn thus out of deference to the reptile deities there honoured; though it
perforce reduced the worshippers to crawling. Perhaps the very rites here involved crawling in
imitation of the creatures. No religious theory, however, could easily explain why the level
passages in that awesome descent should be as low as the temples--or lower, since one could not
even kneel in it. As I thought of the crawling creatures, whose hideous mummified forms were so
close to me, I felt a new throb of fear. Mental associations are curious, and I shrank from the idea that
except for the poor primitive man torn to pieces in the last painting, mine was the only human form
amidst the many relics and symbols of the primordial life.
But as always in my strange and roving existence, wonder soon drove out fear; for the luminous
abyss and what it might contain presented a problem worthy of the greatest explorer that a weird
world of mystery lay far down that flight of peculiarly small steps I could not doubt, and I hoped to
find there those human memorials which the painted corridor had failed to give. The frescoes had
pictured unbelievable cities, and valleys in this lower realm, and my fancy dwelt on the rich and
colossal ruins that awaited me.
My fears, indeed, concerned the past rather than the future. Not even the physical horror of my
position in that cramped corridor of dead reptiles and antediluvian frescoes, miles below the world I
knew and faced by another world of eery light and mist, could match the lethal dread I felt at the
abysmal antiquity of the scene and its soul. An ancientness so vast that measurement is feeble seemed
to leer down from the primal stones and rock-hewn temples of the nameless city, while the very latest
of the astounding maps in the frescoes shewed oceans and continents that man has forgotten, with
only here and there some vaguely familiar outlines. Of what could have happened in the geological
ages since the paintings ceased and the death-hating race resentfully succumbed to decay, no man
might say. Life had once teemed in these caverns and in the luminous realm beyond; now I was alone
with vivid relics, and I trembled to think of the countless ages through which these relics had kept a
silent deserted vigil.
Suddenly there came another burst of that acute fear which had intermittently seized me ever since
I first saw the terrible valley and the nameless city under a cold moon, and despite my exhaustion I
found myself starting frantically to a sitting posture and gazing back along the black corridor toward
the tunnels that rose to the outer world. My sensations were like those which had made me shun the
nameless city at night, and were as inexplicable as they were poignant. In another moment, however, I
received a still greater shock in the form of a definite sound--the first which had broken the utter
silence of these tomb-like depths. It was a deep, low moaning, as of a distant throng of condemned
spirits, and came from the direction in which I was staring. Its volume rapidly grew, till it soon
reverberated rightfully through the low passage, and at the same time I became conscious of an
increasing draught of old air, likewise flowing from the tunnels and the city above. The touch of this
air seemed to restore my balance, for I instantly recalled the sudden gusts which had risen around the
mouth of the abyss each sunset and sunrise, one of which had indeed revealed the hidden tunnels to
me. I looked at my watch and saw that sunrise was near, so bracing myself to resist the gale that was
sweeping down to its cavern home as it had swept forth at evening. My fear again waned low, since a
natural phenomenon tends to dispel broodings over the unknown.
More and more madly poured the shrieking, moaning night wind into the gulf of the inner earth. I
dropped prone again and clutched vainly at the floor for fear of being swept bodily through the open
gate into the phosphorescent abyss. Such fury I had not expected, and as I grew aware of an actual
slipping of my form toward the abyss I was beset by a thousand new terrors of apprehension and
imagination. The malignancy of the blast awakened incredible fancies; once more I compared myself
shudderingly to the only human image in that frightful corridor, the man who was torn to pieces by
the nameless race, for in the fiendish clawing of the swirling currents there seemed to abide a
vindictive rage all the stronger because it was largely impotent. I think I screamed frantically near the
last--I was almost mad--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 babbling over and over that unexplainable
couplet of the mad Arab Alhazred, who dreamed of the nameless city:
That is not dead which can eternal lie, And with strange aeons even death may die.
Only the grim brooding desert gods know what really took place--what indescribable struggles
and scrambles in the dark I endured or what Abaddon guided me back to life, where I must always
remember and shiver in the night wind till oblivion--or worse--claims me. Monstrous, unnatural,
colossal, was the thing--too far beyond all the ideas of man to be believed except in the silent
damnable small hours of the morning when one cannot sleep.
I have said that the fury of the rushing blast was infernal-- cacodaemoniacal--and that its voices
were hideous with the pent-up viciousness of desolate eternities. Presently these voices, while still
chaotic before me, seemed to my beating brain to take articulate form behind me; and down there in
the grave of unnumbered aeon-dead antiquities, leagues below the dawn-lit world of men, I heard the
ghastly cursing and snarling of strange-tongued fiends. Turning, I saw outlined against the luminous
aether of the abyss that could not be seen against the dusk of the corridor--a nightmare horde of
rushing devils; hate distorted, grotesquely panoplied, half transparent devils of a race no man might
mistake--the crawling reptiles of the nameless city.
And as the wind died away I was plunged into the ghoul-pooled darkness of earth's bowels; for
behind the last of the creatures the great brazen door clanged shut with a deafening peal of metallic
music whose reverberations swelled out to the distant world to hail the rising sun as Memnon hails it
from the banks of the Nile.

THE FESTIVAL
Efficiut Daemones, ut quae non sunt, sic tamen quasi sint, conspicienda hominibus exhibeant.
--Lacantius
(Devils so work that things which are not appear to men as if they were real.)
I was far from home, and the spell of the eastern sea was upon me. In the twilight I heard it
pounding on the rocks, and I knew it lay just over the hill where the twisting willows writhed against
the clearing sky and the first stars of evening. And because my fathers had called me to the old town
beyond, I pushed on through the shallow, new-fallen snow along the road that soared lonely up to
where Aldebaran twinkled among the trees; on toward the very ancient town I had never seen but
often dreamed of.
It was the Yuletide, that men call Christmas though they know in their hearts it is older than
Bethlehem and Babylon, older than Memphis and mankind. It was the Yuletide, and I had come at last
to the ancient sea town where my people had dwelt and kept festival in the elder time when festival
was forbidden; where also they had commanded their sons to keep festival once every century, that
the memory of primal secrets might not be forgotten. Mine were an old people, and were old even
when this land was settled three hundred years before. And they were strange, because they had
come as dark furtive folk from opiate southern gardens of orchids, and spoken another tongue before
they learnt the tongue of the blue-eyed fishers. And now they were scattered, and shared only the
rituals of mysteries that none living could understand. I was the only one who came back that night to
the old fishing town as legend bade, for only the poor and the lonely remember.
Then beyond the hill's crest I saw Kingsport outspread frostily in the gloaming; snowy Kingsport
with its ancient vanes and steeples, ridgepoles and chimney-pots, wharves and small bridges, willow-
trees and graveyards; endless labyrinths of steep, narrow, crooked streets, and dizzy church-crowned
central peak that time durst not touch; ceaseless mazes of colonial houses piled and scattered at all
angles and levels like a child's disordered blocks; antiquity hovering on grey wings over winter-
whitened gables and gambrel roofs; fanlights and small-paned windows one by one gleaming out in
the cold dusk to join Orion and the archaic stars. And against the rotting wharves the sea pounded; the
secretive, immemorial sea out of which the people had come in the elder time.
Beside the road at its crest a still higher summit rose, bleak and windswept, and I saw that it was a
burying-ground where black gravestones stuck ghoulishly through the snow like the decayed
fingernails of a gigantic corpse. The printless road was very lonely, and sometimes I thought I heard
a distant horrible creaking as of a gibbet in the wind. They had hanged four kinsmen of mine for
witchcraft in 1692, but I did not know just where.
As the road wound down the seaward slope I listened for the merry sounds of a village at
evening, but did not hear them. Then I thought of the season, and felt that these old Puritan folk might
well have Christmas customs strange to me, and full of silent hearthside prayer. So after that I did not
listen for merriment or look for wayfarers, kept on down past the hushed lighted farmhouses and
shadowy stone walls to where the signs of ancient shops and sea taverns creaked in the salt breeze,
and the grotesque knockers of pillared doorways glistened along deserted unpaved lanes in the light
of little, curtained windows.
I had seen maps of the town, and knew where to find the home of my people. It was told that I
should be known and welcomed, for village legend lives long; so I hastened through Back Street to
Circle Court, and across the fresh snow on the one full flagstone pavement in the town, to where
Green Lane leads off behind the Market House. The old maps still held good, and I had no trouble;
though at Arkham they must have lied when they said the trolleys ran to this place, since I saw not a
wire overhead. Snow would have hid the rails in any case. I was glad I had chosen to walk, for the
white village had seemed very beautiful from the hill; and now I was eager to knock at the door of my
people, the seventh house on the left in Green Lane, with an ancient peaked roof and jutting second
storey, all built before 1650.
There were lights inside the house when I came upon it, and I saw from the diamond window-
panes that it must have been kept very close to its antique state. The upper part overhung the narrow
grass-grown street and nearly met the over-hanging part of the house opposite, so that I was almost in
a tunnel, with the low stone doorstep wholly free from snow. There was no sidewalk, but many
houses had high doors reached by double flights of steps with iron railings. It was an odd scene, and
because I was strange to New England I had never known its like before. Though it pleased me, I
would have relished it better if there had been footprints in the snow, and people in the streets, and a
few windows without drawn curtains.
When I sounded the archaic iron knocker I was half afraid. Some fear had been gathering in me,
perhaps because of the strangeness of my heritage, and the bleakness of the evening, and the
queerness of the silence in that aged town of curious customs. And when my knock was answered I
was fully afraid, because I had not heard any footsteps before the door creaked open. But I was not
afraid long, for the gowned, slippered old man in the doorway had a bland face that reassured me; and
though he made signs that he was dumb, he wrote a quaint and ancient welcome with the stylus and
wax tablet he carried.
He beckoned me into a low, candle-lit room with massive exposed rafters and dark, stiff, sparse
furniture of the seventeenth century. The past was vivid there, for not an attribute was missing. There
was a cavernous fireplace and a spinning-wheel at which a bent old woman in loose wrapper and
deep poke-bonnet sat back toward me, silently spinning despite the festive season. An indefinite
dampness seemed upon the place, and I marvelled that no fire should be blazing. The high-backed
settle faced the row of curtained windows at the left, and seemed to be occupied, though I was not
sure. I did not like everything about what I saw, and felt again the fear I had had. This fear grew
stronger from what had before lessened it, for the more I looked at the old man's bland face the more
its very blandness terrified me. The eyes never moved, and the skin was too much like wax. Finally I
was sure it was not a face at all, but a fiendishly cunning mask. But the flabby hands, curiously
gloved, wrote genially on the tablet and told me I must wait a while before I could be led to the place
of the festival.
Pointing to a chair, table, and pile of books, the old man now left the room; and when I sat down to
read I saw that the books were hoary and mouldy, and that they included old Morryster's wild
Marvels of Science, the terrible Saducismus Triumphatus of Joseph Glanvil, published in 1681, the
shocking Daemonolatreja of Remigius, printed in 1595 at Lyons, and worst of all, the unmentionable
Necronomicon of the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred, in Olaus Wormius' forbidden Latin translation; a
book which I had never seen, but of which I had heard monstrous things whispered. No one spoke to
me, but I could hear the creaking of signs in the wind outside, and the whir of the wheel as the
bonneted old woman continued her silent spinning, spinning. I thought the room and the books and the
people very morbid and disquieting, but because an old tradition of my fathers had summoned me to
strange feastings, I resolved to expect queer things. So I tried to read, and soon became tremblingly
absorbed by something I found in that accursed Necronomicon; a thought and a legend too hideous
for sanity or consciousness, but I disliked it when I fancied I heard the closing of one of the
windows that the settle faced, as if it had been stealthily opened. It had seemed to follow a whirring
that was not of the old woman's spinning-wheel. This was not much, though, for the old woman was
spinning very hard, and the aged clock had been striking. After that I lost the feeling that there were
persons on the settle, and was reading intently and shudderingly when the old man came back booted
and dressed in a loose antique costume, and sat down on that very bench, so that I could not see him. It
was certainly nervous waiting, and the blasphemous book in my hands made it doubly so. When
eleven struck, however, the old man stood up, glided to a massive carved chest in a corner, and got
two hooded cloaks; one of which he donned, and the other of which he draped round the old woman,
who was ceasing her monotonous spinning. Then they both started for the outer door; the woman
lamely creeping, and the old man, after picking up the very book I had been reading, beckoning me as
he drew his hood over that unmoving face or mask.
We went out into the moonless and tortuous network of that incredibly ancient town; went out as
the lights in the curtained windows disappeared one by one, and the Dog Star leered at the throng of
cowled, cloaked figures that poured silently from every doorway and formed monstrous processions
up this street and that, past the creaking sigus and antediluvian gables, the thatched roofs and
diamond-paned windows; threading precipitous lanes where decaying houses overlapped and
crumbled together; gliding across open courts and churchyards where the bobbing lanthorns made
eldritch drunken constellations.
Amid these hushed throngs I followed my voiceless guides; jostled by elbows that seemed
preternaturally soft, and pressed by chests and stomachs that seemed abnormally pulpy; but seeing
never a face and hearing never a word. Up, up, up, the eery columns slithered, and I saw that all the
travellers were converging as they flowed near a sort of focus of crazy alleys at the top of a high
hill in the centre of the town, where perched a great white church. I had seen it from the road's crest
when I looked at Kingsport in the new dusk, and it had made me shiver because Aldebaran had seemed
to balance itself a moment on the ghostly spire.
There was an open space around the church; partly a churchyard with spectral shafts, and partly a
half-paved square swept nearly bare of snow by the wind, and lined with unwholesomely archaic
houses having peaked roofs and overhanging gables. Death-fires danced over the tombs, revealing
gruesome vistas, though queerly failing to cast any shadows. Past the churchyard, where there were
no houses, I could see over the hill's summit and watch the glimmer of stars on the harbour, though
the town was invisible in the dark. Only once in a while a lantern bobbed horribly through serpentine
alleys on its way to overtake the throng that was now slipping speechlessly into the church. I waited
till the crowd had oozed into the black doorway, and till all the stragglers had followed. The old man
was pulling at my sleeve, but I was determined to be the last. Crossing the threshold into the
swarming temple of unknown darkness, I turned once to look at the outside world as the churchyard
phosphorescence cast a sickly glow on the hilltop pavement. And as I did so I shuddered. For though
the wind had not left much snow, a few patches did remain on the path near the door; and in that
fleeting backward look it seemed to my troubled eyes that they bore no mark of passing feet, not even
mine.
The church was scarce lighted by all the lanthorns that had entered it, for most of the throng had
already vanished. They had streamed up the aisle between the high pews to the trap-door of the
vaults which yawned loathsomely open just before the pulpit, and were now squirming noiselessly in.
I followed dumbly down the foot-worn steps and into the dark, suffocating crypt. The tail of that
sinuous line of night-marchers seemed very horrible, and as I saw them wriggling into a venerable
tomb they seemed more horrible still. Then I noticed that the tomb's floor had an aperture down
which the throng was sliding, and in a moment we were all descending an ominous staircase of
rough-hewn stone; a narrow spiral staircase damp and peculiarly odorous, that wound endlessly
down into the bowels of the hill past monotonous walls of dripping stone blocks and crumbling
mortar. It was a silent, shocking descent, and I observed after a horrible interval that the walls and
steps were changing in nature, as if chiselled out of the solid rock. What mainly troubled me was that
the myriad footfalls made no sound and set up no echoes. After more aeons of descent I saw some
side passages or burrows leading from unknown recesses of blackness to this shaft of nighted
mystery. Soon they became excessively numerous, like impious catacombs of nameless menace; and
their pungent odour of decay grew quite unbearable. I knew we must have passed down through the
mountain and beneath the earth of Kingsport itself, and I shivered that a town should be so aged and
maggoty with subterraneous evil.
Then I saw the lurid shimmering of pale light, and heard the insidious lapping of sunless waters.
Again I shivered, for I did not like the things that the night had brought, and wished bitterly that no
forefather had summoned me to this primal rite. As the steps and the passage grew broader, I heard
another sound, the thin, whining mockery of a feeble flute; and suddenly there spread out before me
the boundless vista of an inner world--a vast fungous shore litten by a belching column of sick
greenish flame and washed by a wide oily river that flowed from abysses frightful and unsuspected
to join the blackest gulfs of immemorial ocean.
Fainting and gasping, I looked at that unhallowed Erebus of titan toadstools, leprous fire and
slimy water, and saw the cloaked throngs forming a semicircle around the blazing pillar. It was the
Yule-rite, older than man and fated to survive him; the primal rite of the solstice and of spring's
promise beyond the snows; the rite of fire and evergreen, light and music. And in the stygian grotto I
saw them do the rite, and adore the sick pillar of flame, and throw into the water handfuls gouged out
of the viscous vegetation which glittered green in the chlorotic glare. I saw this, and I saw
something amorphously squatted far away from the light, piping noisomely on a flute; and as the thing
piped I thought I heard noxious muffled flutterings in the foetid darkness where I could not see. But
what frightened me most was that flaming column; spouting volcanically from depths profound and
inconceivable, casting no shadows as healthy flame should, and coating the nitrous stone with a nasty,
venomous verdigris. For in all that seething combustion no warmth lay, but only the clamminess of
death and corruption.
The man who had brought me now squirmed to a point directly beside the hideous flame, and
made stiff ceremonial motions to the semi-circle he faced. At certain stages of the ritual they did
grovelling obeisance, especially when he held above his head that abhorrent Necronomicon he had
taken with him; and I shared all the obeisances because I had been summoned to this festival by the
writings of my forefathers. Then the old man made a signal to the half-seen flute-player in the
darkness, which player thereupon changed its feeble drone to a scarce louder drone in another key;
precipitating as it did so a horror unthinkable and unexpected. At this horror I sank nearly to the
lichened earth, transfixed with a dread not of this or any world, but only of the mad spaces between
the stars.
Out of the unimaginable blackness beyond the gangrenous glare of that cold flame, out of the
tartarean leagues through which that oily river rolled uncanny, unheard, and unsuspected, there
flopped rhythmically a horde of tame, trained, hybrid winged things that no sound eye could ever
wholly grasp, or sound brain ever wholly remember. They were not altogether crows, nor moles,
nor buzzards, nor ants, nor vampire bats, nor decomposed human beings; but something I cannot and
must not recall. They flopped limply along, half with their webbed feet and half with their
membranous wings; and as they reached the throng of celebrants the cowled figures seized and
mounted them, and rode off one by one along the reaches of that unlighted river, into pits and
galleries of panic where poison springs feed frightful and undiscoverable cataracts.
The old spinning woman had gone with the throng, and the old man remained only because I had
refused when he motioned me to seize an animal and ride like the rest. I saw when I staggered to my
feet that the amorphous flute-player had rolled out of sight, but that two of the beasts were patiently
standing by. As I hung back, the old man produced his stylus and tablet and wrote that he was the true
deputy of my fathers who had founded the Yule worship in this ancient place; that it had been decreed
I should come back, and that the most secret mysteries were yet to be performed. He wrote this in a
very ancient hand, and when I still hesitated he pulled from his loose robe a seal ring and a watch,
both with my family arms, to prove that he was what he said. But it was a hideous proof, because I
knew from old papers that that watch had been buried with my great-great-great-great-grandfather in
1698.
Presently the old man drew back his hood and pointed to the family resemblance in his face, but I
only shuddered, because I was sure that the face was merely a devilish waxen mask. The flopping
animals were now scratching restlessly at the lichens, and I saw that the old man was nearly as
restless himself. When one of the things began to waddle and edge away, he turned quickly to stop it;
so that the suddenness of his motion dislodged the waxen mask from what should have been his head.
And then, because that nightmare's position barred me from the stone staircase down which we had
come, I flung myself into the oily underground river that bubbled somewhere to the caves of the sea;
flung myself into that putrescent juice of earth's inner horrors before the madness of my screams
could bring down upon me all the charnel legions these pest-gulfs might conceal.
At the hospital they told me I had been found half-frozen in KingsportHarbour at dawn, clinging
to the drifting spar that accident sent to save me. They told me I had taken the wrong fork of the hill
road the night before, and fallen over the cliffs at Orange Point; a thing they deduced from prints
found in the snow. There was nothing I could say, because everything was wrong. Everything was
wrong, with the broad windows showing a sea of roofs in which only about one in five was ancient,
and the sound of trolleys and motors in the streets below. They insisted that this was Kingsport, and I
could not deny it. When I went delirious at hearing that the hospital stood near the old churchyard on
Central Hill, they sent me to St. Mary's Hospital in Arkham, where I could have better care. I liked it
there, for the doctors were broad-minded, and even lent me their influence in obtaining the carefully
sheltered copy of Alhazred's objectionable Necronomicon from the library of MiskatonicUniversity.
They said something about a "psychosis" and agreed I had better get any harassing obsessions off my
mind.
So I read that hideous chapter, and shuddered doubly because it was indeed not new to me. I had
seen it before, let footprints tell what they might; and where it was I had seen it were best forgotten.
There was no one--in waking hours--who could remind me of it; but my dreams are filled with terror,
because of phrases I dare not quote. I dare quote only one paragraph, put into such English as I can
make from the awkward Low Latin.
"The nethermost caverns," wrote the mad Arab, "are not for the fathoming of eyes that see; for
their marvels are strange and terrific. Cursed the ground where dead thoughts live new and oddly
bodied, and evil the mind that is held by no head. Wisely did Ibn Schacabao say, that happy is the tomb
where no wizard hath lain, and happy the town at night whose wizards are all ashes. For it is of old
rumour that the soul of the devil-bought hastes not from his charnel clay, but fats and instructs the
very worm that gnaws; till out of corruption horrid life springs, and the dull scavengers of earth wax
crafty to vex it and swell monstrous to plague it. Great holes secretly are digged where earth's pores
ought to suffice, and things have learnt to walk that ought to crawl."

THE COLOUR OUT OF SPACE
West of Arkham the hills rise wild, and there are valleys with deep woods that no axe has ever
cut. There are dark narrow glens where the trees slope fantastically, and where thin brooklets trickle
without ever having caught the glint of sunlight. On the gentle slopes there are farms, ancient and
rocky, with squat, moss-coated cottages brooding eternally over old New England secrets in the lee
of great ledges; but these are all vacant now, the wide chimneys crumbling and the shingled sides
bulging perilously beneath low gambrel roofs.
The old folk have gone away, and foreigners do not like to live there. French-Canadians have
tried it, Italians have tried it, and the Poles have come and departed. It is not because of anything that
can be seen or heard or handled, but because of something that is imagined. The place is not good
for imagination, and does not bring restful dreams at night. It must be this which keeps the foreigners
away, for old Ammi Pierce has never told them of anything he recalls from the strange days. Ammi,
whose head has been a little queer for years, is the only one who still remains, or who ever talks of
the strange days; and he dares to do this because his house is so near the open fields and the travelled
roads around Arkham.
There was once a road over the hills and through the valleys, that ran straight where the blasted
heath is now; but people ceased to use it and a new road was laid curving far toward the south.
Traces of the old one can still be found amidst the weeds of a returning wilderness, and some of
them will doubtless linger even when half the hollows are flooded for the new reservoir. Then the
dark woods will be cut down and the blasted heath will slumber far below blue waters whose surface
will mirror the sky and ripple in the sun. And the secrets of the strange days will be one with the
deep's secrets; one with the hidden lore of old ocean, and all the mystery of primal earth.
When I went into the hills and vales to survey for the new reservoir they told me the place was
evil. They told me this in Arkham, and because that is a very old town full of witch legends I thought
the evil must 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 beside its own elder mystery. It was morning when I saw it, but
shadow lurked always there. The trees grew too thickly, and their trunks were too big for any healthy
New England wood. There was too much silence in the dim alleys between them, and the floor was
too soft with the dank moss and mattings of infinite years of decay.
In the open spaces, mostly along the line of the old road, there were little hillside farms;
sometimes with all the buildings standing, sometimes with only 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 these five
acres of grey desolation that sprawled open to the sky like a great spot eaten by acid in the woods
and fields? It lay largely to the north of the ancient road line, but encroached a little on the other side.
I felt an odd reluctance about approaching, and did so at last only because my business took me
through and past it. There was no vegetation of any kind on that broad expanse, but only a fine grey
dust or ash which no wind seemed ever to blow about. The trees near it were sickly and stunted, and
many dead trunks stood or lay rotting at the rim. As I walked hurriedly by I saw the tumbled bricks and
stones of an old chimney and cellar on my right, and the yawning black maw of an abandoned well
whose stagnant vapours played strange tricks with the hues of the sunlight. Even the long, dark
woodland climb beyond seemed welcome in contrast, and I marvelled no more at the frightened
whispers of Arkham people. There had been no house or ruin near; even in the old days the place
must have been lonely and remote. And at twilight, dreading to repass that ominous spot, I walked
circuitously back to the town by the curious road on the south. I vaguely wished some clouds would
gather, for an odd timidity about the deep skyey voids above had crept into my soul.
In the evening I asked old people in Arkham about the blasted heath, and what was meant by that
phrase "strange days" which so many evasively muttered. I could not, however, get any good
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 ancient place, and had begun to exude the faint miasmal odour which clings
about houses that have stood too long. Only with persistent knocking could I rouse the aged man, and
when he shuffled timidly to the door 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 showed; relief at the doom of the dark ancient valleys through
which he had roamed all his life. They were better under water now--better under water since the
strange days. And with this opening his husky voice sank low, while his body leaned forward and his
right forefinger began to point shakily and impressively.
It was then that I heard the story, and as the rambling voice scraped and whispered on I shivered
again and again spite the summer day. Often I had to recall the speaker from ramblings, piece out
scientific points which he knew only by a fading parrot memory of professors' talk, or bridge over
gaps, where his sense of logic and continuity broke down. When he was done I did not wonder that
his mind had snapped a trifle, or that the folk of Arkham would not speak much of the blasted heath. I
hurried back before sunset to my hotel, unwilling to have the stars come out above me in the open;
and the next day returned to Boston to give up my position. I could not go into that dim chaos of old
forest and slope again, or face another time that grey blasted heath where the black well yawned deep
beside the tumbled bricks and stones. The reservoir will soon be built now, and all those elder
secrets will be safe forever under watery fathoms. But even then I do not believe I would like to visit
that country by night--at least not when the sinister stars are out; and nothing could bribe me to drink
the new city water of Arkham.
It all began, old Ammi said, with the meteorite. Before that time there had been no wild legends at
all since the witch trials, and even then these western woods were not feared half so much as the
small island in the Miskatonic where the devil held court beside a curious lone altar older than the
Indians. These were not haunted woods, and their fantastic dusk was never terrible till the strange
days. Then there had come that white noontide cloud, that string of explosions in the air, and that
pillar of smoke from the valley far in the wood. And by night all Arkham had heard of the great rock
that fell out of the sky and bedded itself in the ground beside the well at the Nahum Gardner place.
That was the house which had stood where the blasted heath was to come--the trim white Nahum
Gardner house amidst its fertile gardens and orchards.
Nahum had come to town to tell people about the stone, and dropped in at Ammi Pierce's on the
way. Ammi was forty then, and all the queer things were fixed very strongly in his mind. He and his
wife had gone with the three professors from MiskatonicUniversity who hastened out the next
morning to see the weird visitor from unknown stellar space, and had wondered why Nahum had
called it so large the day before. It had shrunk, Nahum said as he pointed out the big brownish mound
above the ripped earth and charred grass near the archaic well-sweep in his front yard; but the wise
men answered that stones do not shrink. Its heat lingered persistently, and Nahum declared it had
glowed faintly in the night. The professors tried it with a geologist's hammer and found it was oddly
soft. It was, in truth, so soft as to be almost plastic; and they gouged rather than chipped a specimen to
take back to the college for testing. They took it in an old pail borrowed from Nahum's kitchen, for
even the small piece refused to grow cool. On the trip back they stopped at Ammi's to rest, and
seemed thoughtful when Mrs. Pierce remarked that the fragment was growing smaller and burning the
bottom of the pail. Truly, it was not large, but perhaps they had taken less than they thought.
The day after that--all this was in June of '82--the professors had trooped out again in a great
excitement. As they passed Ammi's they told him what queer things the specimen had done, and how it
had faded wholly away when they put it in a glass beaker. The beaker had gone, too, and the wise men
talked of the strange stone's affinity for silicon. It had acted quite unbelievably in that well-ordered
laboratory; doing nothing at all and showing no occluded gases when heated on charcoal, being
wholly negative in the borax bead, and soon proving itself absolutely non-volatile at any producible
temperature, including that of the oxy-hydrogen blowpipe. On an anvil it appeared highly malleable,
and in the dark its luminosity was very marked. Stubbornly refusing to grow cool, it soon had the
college in a state of real excitement; and when upon heating before the spectroscope it displayed
shining bands unlike any known colours of the normal spectrum there was much breathless talk of
new elements, bizarre optical properties, and other things which puzzled men of science are wont to
say when faced by the unknown.
Hot as it was, they tested it in a crucible with all the proper reagents. Water did nothing.
Hydrochloric acid was the same. Nitric acid and even aqua regia merely hissed and spattered against
its torrid invulnerability. Ammi had difficulty in recalling all these things, but recognized some
solvents as I mentioned them in the usual order of use. There were 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 show that they had attacked the substance at all. It was a metal, though, beyond a doubt.
It was magnetic, for one thing; and after its immersion in the acid solvents there seemed to be faint
traces of the Widmanstatten figures found on meteoric iron. When the cooling had grown very
considerable, the testing was carried on in glass; and it was in a glass beaker that they left all the
chips made of the original fragment during the work. The next morning both chips and beaker were
gone without trace, and only a charred spot marked the place on the wooden shelf where they had
been.
All this the professors told Ammi as they paused at his door, and once more he went with them to
see the stony messenger from the stars, though this time his wife did not accompany him. It had now
most 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 embedded in the
substance. The colour, which resembled some of the bands in the meteor's strange spectrum, was
almost impossible to describe; and it was only by analogy that they called it colour at all. Its texture
was glossy, and upon tapping it appeared to promise both 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. 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 a
caved-in earth. Digging had borne no fruit, and the scientists verified the fact of the utter vanishment.
The failure was total; so that nothing was left to do but go back to the laboratory and test again the
disappearing fragment left carefully cased in lead. That fragment lasted a week, at the end of which
nothing of value had been learned of it. When it had gone, no residue was left behind, and in time the
professors felt scarcely sure they had indeed seen with waking eyes that cryptic vestige of the
fathomless gulfs outside; that lone, weird message from other universes and other realms of matter,
force, and entity.
As was natural, the Arkham papers made much of the incident with its collegiate sponsoring, and
sent reporters to talk with Nahum Gardner and his family. At least one Boston daily also sent a scribe,
and Nahum quickly became a kind of local celebrity. He was a lean, genial person of about fifty,
living with his wife and three sons on the pleasant farmstead in the valley. He and Ammi exchanged
visits frequently, as did their wives; and Ammi had nothing but praise for him after all these years. He
seemed slightly proud of the notice his place had attracted, and talked often of the meteorite in the
succeeding weeks. That July and August were hot; and Nahum worked hard at his haying in the ten-
acre pasture across Chapman's Brook; his rattling wain wearing deep ruts in the shadowy lanes
between. The labour tired him more than it had in other years, and he felt that age was beginning to
tell on him.
Then fell the time of fruit and harvest. The pears and apples slowly ripened, and Nahum vowed
that his orchards were prospering as never before. The fruit was growing to phenomenal size and
unwonted gloss, and in such abundance that extra barrels were ordered to handle the future crop. But
with the ripening came sore disappointment, for of all that gorgeous array of specious lusciousness
not one single jot was fit to eat. Into the fine flavour of the pears and apples had crept a stealthy
bitterness and sickishness, so that even the smallest bites induced a lasting disgust. It was the same
with the melons and tomatoes, and Nahum sadly saw that his entire crop was lost. Quick to connect
events, he declared that the meteorite had poisoned the soil, and thanked Heaven that most of the
other crops were in the upland lot along the road.
Winter came early, and was very cold. Ammi saw Nahum less often than usual, and observed that
he had begun to look worried. The rest of his family too, seemed to have grown taciturn; and were
far from steady in their church-going or their attendance at the various social events of the
countryside. For this reserve or melancholy no cause could be found, though all the household
confessed now and then to poorer health and a feeling of vague disquiet. Nahum himself gave the
most definite statement of anyone when he said he was disturbed about certain footprints in the snow.
They were the usual winter prints of red squirrels, white rabbits, and foxes, but the brooding farmer
professed to see something not quite right about their nature and arrangement. He was never specific,
but appeared to think that they were not as characteristic of the anatomy and habits of squirrels and
rabbits and foxes as they ought to be. Ammi listened without interest to this talk until one night when
he drove past Nahum's house in his sleigh on the way back from Clark's Comer. There had been a
moon, and a rabbit had run across the road, and the leaps of that rabbit were longer than either Ammi
or his horse liked. The latter, indeed, had almost run away when brought up by a firm rein. Thereafter
Ammi gave Nahum's tales more respect, and wondered why the Gardner dogs seemed so cowed and
quivering every morning. They had, it developed, nearly lost the spirit to bark.
In February the McGregor boys from Meadow Hill were out shooting woodchucks, and not far
from the Gardner place bagged a very peculiar specimen. The proportions of its body seemed
slightly altered in a queer way impossible to describe, while its face had taken on an expression
which no one ever saw in a woodchuck before. The boys were genuinely frightened, and threw the
thing away at once, so that only their grotesque tales of it ever reached the people of the
countryside. But the shying of horses near Nahum's house had now become an acknowledged thing,
and all the basis for a cycle of whispered legend was fast taking form.
People vowed that the snow melted faster around Nahum's than it did anywhere else, and early in
March there was an awed discussion in Potter's general store at Clark's Corners. Stephen Rice had
driven past Gardner's in the morning, and had noticed the skunk-cabbages coming up through the mud
by the woods across the road. Never were things of such size seen before, and they held strange
colours that could not be put into any words. Their shapes were monstrous, and the horse had snorted
at an odour which struck Stephen as wholly unprecedented. That afternoon several persons drove
past to see the abnormal growth, and all agreed that plants of that kind ought never to sprout in a
healthy world. The bad fruit of the fall before was freely mentioned, and it went from mouth to mouth
that there was poison in Nahum's ground. Of course it was the meteorite; and remembering how
strange the men from the college had found that stone to be, several farmers spoke about the matter to
them.
One day they paid Nahum a visit; but having no love of wild tales and folklore were very
conservative in what they inferred. The plants were certainly odd, but all skunk-cabbages are more or
less odd in shape and hue. Perhaps some mineral element from the stone had entered the soil, but it
would soon be washed away. And as for the footprints and frightened horses--of course this was
mere country talk which such a phenomenon as the aerolite would be certain to start. There was
really nothing for serious men to do in cases of wild gossip, for superstitious rustics will say and
believe anything. And so all through the strange days the professors stayed away in contempt. Only
one of them, when given two phials of dust for analysis in a police job over a year and half later,
recalled that the queer colour of that skunk-cabbage had been very like one of the anomalous bands
of light shown by the meteor fragment in the college spectroscope, and like the brittle globule found
imbedded in the stone from the abyss. The samples in this analysis case gave the same odd bands at
first, though later they lost the property.
The trees budded prematurely around Nahum's, and at night they swayed ominously in the wind.
Nahum's second son Thaddeus, a lad of fifteen, swore that they swayed also when there was no wind;
but even the gossips would not credit this. Certainly, however, restlessness was in the air. The entire
Gardner family developed the habit of stealthy listening, though not for any sound which they could
consciously name. The listening was, indeed, rather a product of moments when consciousness
seemed half to slip away. Unfortunately such moments increased week by week, till it became
common speech that "something was wrong with all Nahum's folks." When the early saxifrage came
out it had another strange colour; not quite like that of the skunk-cabbage, but plainly related and
equally unknown to anyone who saw it. Nahum took some blossoms to Arkham and showed them to
the editor of the Gazette, but that dignitary did no more than write a humorous article about them, in
which the dark fears of rustics were held up to polite ridicule. It was a mistake of Nahum's to tell a
stolid city man about the way the great, overgrown mourning-cloak butterflies behaved in connection
with these saxifrages.
April brought a kind of madness to the country folk, and began that disuse of the road past
Nahum's which led to its ultimate abandonment. It was the vegetation. All the orchard trees
blossomed forth in strange colours, and through the stony soil of the yard and adjacent pasturage
there sprang up a bizarre growth which only a botanist could connect with the proper flora of the
region. No sane wholesome colours were anywhere to be seen except in the green grass and
leafage; but everywhere were those hectic and prismatic variants of some diseased, underlying
primary tone without a place among the known tints of earth. The "Dutchman's breeches" became a
thing of sinister menace, and the bloodroots grew insolent in their chromatic perversion. Ammi and
the Gardners thought that most of the colours had a sort of haunting familiarity, and decided that they
reminded one of the brittle globule in the meteor. Nahum ploughed and sowed the ten-acre pasture
and the upland lot, but did nothing with the land around the house. He knew it would be of no use, and
hoped that the summer's strange growths would draw all the poison from the soil. He was prepared
for almost anything now, and had grown used to the sense of something near him waiting to be heard.
The shunning of his house by neighbors told on him, of course; but it told on his wife more. The
boys were better off, being at school each day; but they could not help being frightened by the
gossip. Thaddeus, an especially sensitive youth, suffered the most.
In May the insects came, and Nahum's place became a nightmare of buzzing and crawling. Most of
the creatures seemed not quite usual in their aspects and motions, and their nocturnal habits
contradicted all former experience. The Gardners took to watching at night--watching in all
directions at random for something--they could not tell what. It was then that they owned that
Thaddeus had been right about the trees. Mrs. Gardner was the next to see it from the window as she
watched the swollen boughs of a maple against a moonlit sky. The boughs surely moved, and there
was no wind. It must be the sap. Strangeness had come into everything growing now. Yet it was none
of Nahum's family at all who made the next discovery. Familiarity had dulled them, and what they
could not see was glimpsed by a timid windmill salesman from Bolton who drove by one night in
ignorance of the country legends. What he told in Arkham was given a short paragraph in the Gazette;
and it was there that all the farmers, Nahum included, saw it first. The night had been dark and the
buggy-lamps faint, but around a farm in the valley which everyone knew from the account must be
Nahum's, the darkness had been less thick. A dim though distinct luminosity seemed to inhere in all
the vegetation, grass, leaves, and blossoms alike, while at one moment a detached piece of the
phosphorescence appeared to stir furtively in the yard near the barn.
The grass had so far seemed untouched, and the cows were freely pastured in the lot near the
house, but toward the end of May the milk began to be bad. Then Nahum had the cows driven to the
uplands, after which this trouble ceased. Not long after this the change in grass and leaves became
apparent to the eye. All the verdure was going grey, and was developing a highly singular quality of
brittleness. Ammi was now the only person who ever visited the place, and his visits were becoming
fewer and fewer. When school closed the Gardners were virtually cut off from the world, and
sometimes let Ammi do their errands in town. They were failing curiously both physically and
mentally, and no one was surprised when the news of Mrs. Gardner's madness stole around.
It happened in June, about the anniversary of the meteor's fall, and the poor woman screamed
about things in the air which she could not describe. In her raving there was not a single specific
noun, but only verbs and pronouns. Things moved and changed and fluttered, and ears tingled to
impulses which were not wholly sounds. Something was taken away--she was being drained of
something--something was fastening itself on her that ought not to be--someone must make it keep
off--nothing was ever still in the night--the walls and windows shifted. Nahum did not send her to the
county asylum, but let her wander about the house as long as she was harmless to herself and others.
Even when her expression changed he did nothing. But when the boys grew afraid of her, and
Thaddeus nearly fainted at the way she made faces at him, he decided to keep her locked in the attic.
By July she had ceased to speak and crawled on all fours, and before that month was over Nahum got
the mad notion that she was slightly luminous in the dark, as he now clearly saw was the case with the
nearby vegetation.
It was a little before this that the horses had stampeded. Something had aroused them in the night,
and their neighing and kicking in their stalls had been terrible. There seemed virtually nothing to do
to calm them, and when Nahum opened the stable door they all bolted out like frightened woodland
deer. It took a week to track all four, and when found they were seen to be quite useless and
unmanageable. Something had snapped in their brains, and each one had to be shot for its own good.
Nahum borrowed a horse from Ammi for his haying, but found it would not approach the barn. It
shied, balked, and whinnied, and in the end he could do nothing but drive it into the yard while the men
used their own strength to get the heavy wagon near enough the hayloft for convenient pitching. And
all the while the vegetation was turning grey and brittle. Even the flowers whose hues had been so
strange were greying now, and the fruit was coming out grey and dwarfed and tasteless. The asters
and golden-rod bloomed grey and distorted, and the roses and zinneas and hollyhocks in the front
yard were such blasphemous-looking things that Nahum's oldest boy Zenas cut them down. The
strangely puffed insects died about that time, even the bees that had left their hives and taken to the
woods.
By September all the vegetation was fast crumbling to a greyish powder, and Nahum feared that
the trees would die before the poison was out of the soil. His wife now had spells of terrific
screaming, and he and the boys were in a constant state of nervous tension. They shunned people
now, and when school opened the boys did not go. But it was Ammi, on one of his rare visits, who
first realised that the well water was no longer good. It had an evil taste that was not exactly fetid nor
exactly salty, and Ammi advised his friend to dig another well on higher ground to use till the soil
was good again. Nahum, however, ignored the warning, for he had by that time become calloused to
strange and unpleasant things. He and the boys continued to use the tainted supply, drinking it as
listlessly and mechanically as they ate their meagre and ill-cooked meals and did their thankless and
monotonous chores through the aimless days. There was something of stolid resignation about them
all, as if they walked half in another world between lines of nameless guards to a certain and familiar
doom.
Thaddeus went mad in September after a visit to the well. He had gone with a pail and had come
back empty-handed, shrieking and waving his arms, and sometimes lapsing into an inane titter or a
whisper about "the moving colours down there." Two in one family was pretty bad, but Nahum was
very brave about it. He let the boy run about for a week until he began stumbling and hurting himself,
and then he shut him in an attic room across the hall from his mother's. The way they screamed at
each other from behind their locked doors was very terrible, especially to little Merwin, who
fancied they talked in some terrible language that was not of earth. Merwin was getting frightfully
imaginative, and his restlessness was worse after the shutting away of the brother who had been his
greatest playmate.
Almost at the same time the mortality among the livestock commenced. Poultry turned greyish and
died very quickly, their meat being found dry and noisome upon cutting. Hogs grew inordinately fat,
then suddenly began to undergo loathsome changes which no one could explain. Their meat was of
course useless, and Nahum was at his wit's end. No rural veterinary would approach his place, and
the city veterinary from Arkham was openly baffled. The swine began growing grey and brittle and
falling to pieces before they died, and their eyes and muzzles developed singular alterations. It was
very inexplicable, for they had never been fed from the tainted vegetation. Then something struck the
cows. Certain areas or sometimes the whole body would be uncannily shrivelled or compressed, and
atrocious collapses or disintegrations were common. In the last stages--and death was always the
result--there would be a greying and turning brittle like that which beset the hogs. There could be no
question of poison, for all the cases occurred in a locked and undisturbed barn. No bites of prowling
things could have brought the virus, for what live beast of earth can pass through solid obstacles? It
must be only natural disease--yet what disease could wreak such results was beyond any mind's
guessing. When the harvest came there was not an animal surviving on the place, for the stock and
poultry were dead and the dogs had run away. These dogs, three in number, had all vanished one
night and were never heard of again. The five cats had left some time before, but their going was
scarcely noticed since there now seemed to be no mice, and only Mrs. Gardner had made pets of the
graceful felines.
On the nineteenth of October Nahum staggered into Ammi's house with hideous news. The death
had come to poor Thaddeus in his attic room, and it had come in a way which could not be told.
Nahum had dug a grave in the railed family plot behind the farm, and had put therein what he found.
There could have been nothing from outside, for the small barred window and locked door were
intact; but it was much as it had been in the barn. Ammi and his wife consoled the stricken man as best
they could, but shuddered as they did so. Stark terror seemed to cling round the Gardners and all they
touched, and the very presence of one in the house was a breath from regions unnamed and
unnamable. Ammi accompanied Nahum home with the greatest reluctance, and did what he might to
calm the hysterical sobbing of little Merwin. Zenas needed no calming. He had come of late to do
nothing but stare into space and obey what his father told him; and Ammi thought that his fate was
very merciful. Now and then Merwin's screams were answered faintly from the attic, and in response
to an inquiring look Nahum said that his wife was getting very feeble. When night approached, Ammi
managed to get away; for not even friendship could make him stay in that spot when the faint glow of
the vegetation began and the trees may or may not have swayed without wind. It was really lucky for
Ammi that he was not more imaginative. Even as things were, his mind was bent ever so slightly; but
had he been able to connect and reflect upon all the portents around him he must inevitably have
turned a total maniac. In the twilight he hastened home, the screams of the mad woman and the nervous
child ringing horribly in his ears.
Three days later Nahum burst into Ammi's kitchen in the early morning, and in the absence of his
host stammered out a desperate tale once more, while Mrs. Pierce listened in a clutching fright. It
was little Merwin this time. He was gone. He had gone out late at night with a lantern and pail for
water, and had never come back. He'd been going to pieces for days, and hardly knew what he was
about. Screamed at everything. There had been a frantic shriek from the yard then, but before the
father could get to the door the boy was gone. There was no glow from the lantern he had taken, and
of the child himself no trace. At the time Nahum thought the lantern and pail were gone too; but when
dawn came, and the man had plodded back from his all-night search of the woods and fields, he had
found some very curious things near the well. There was a crushed and apparently somewhat melted
mass of iron which had certainly been the lantern; while a bent handle and twisted iron hoops beside
it, both half-fused, seemed to hint at the remnants of the pail. That was all. Nahum was past imagining,
Mrs. Pierce was blank, and Ammi, when he had reached home and heard the tale, could give no
guess. Merwin was gone, and there would be no use in telling the people around, who shunned all
Gardners now. No use, either, in telling the city people at Arkham who laughed at everything. Thad
was gone, and now Merwin was gone. Something was creeping and creeping and waiting to be seen
and heard. Nahum would go soon, and he wanted Ammi to look after his wife and Zenas if they
survived him. It must all be a judgment of some sort; though he could not fancy what for, since he had
always walked uprightly in the Lord's ways so far as he knew.
For over two weeks Ammi saw nothing of Nahum; and then, worried about what might have
happened, he overcame his fears and paid the Gardner place a visit. There was no smoke from the
great chimney, and for a moment the visitor was apprehensive of the worst. The aspect of the whole
farm was shocking--greyish withered grass and leaves on the ground, vines falling in brittle
wreckage from archaic walls and gables, and great bare trees clawing up at the grey November sky
with a studied malevolence which Ammi could not but feel had come from some subtle change in the
tilt of the branches. But Nahum was alive, after all. He was weak, and lying on a couch in the low-
ceiled kitchen, but perfectly conscious and able to give simple orders to Zenas. The room was
deadly cold; and as Ammi visibly shivered, the host shouted huskily to Zenas for more wood. Wood,
indeed, was sorely needed; since the cavernous fireplace was unlit and empty, with a cloud of soot
blowing about in the chill wind that came down the chimney. Presently Nahum asked him if the extra
wood had made him any more comfortable, and then Ammi saw what had happened. The stoutest cord
had broken at last, and the hapless farmer's mind was proof against more sorrow.
Questioning tactfully, Ammi could get no clear data at all about the missing Zenas. "In the well--
he lives in the well--" was all that the clouded father would say. Then there flashed across the
visitor's mind a sudden thought of the mad wife, and he changed his line of inquiry. "Nabby? Why,
here she is!" was the surprised response of poor Nahum, and Ammi soon saw that he must search for
himself. Leaving the harmless babbler on the couch, he took the keys from their nail beside the door
and climbed the creaking stairs to the attic. It was very close and noisome up there, and no sound
could be heard from any direction. Of the four doors in sight, only one was locked, and on this he
tried various keys of the ring he had taken. The third key proved the right one, and after some
fumbling Ammi threw open the low white door.
It was quite dark inside, for the window was small and half-obscured by the crude wooden bars;
and Ammi could see nothing at all on the wide-planked floor. The stench was beyond enduring, and
before proceeding further he had to retreat to another room and return with his lungs filled with
breathable air. When he did enter he saw something dark in the corner, and upon seeing it more
clearly he screamed outright. While he screamed he thought a momentary cloud eclipsed the
window, and a second later he felt himself brushed as if by some hateful current of vapour. Strange
colours danced before his eyes; and had not a present horror numbed him he would have thought of
the globule in the meteor that the geologist's hammer had shattered, and of the morbid vegetation that
had sprouted in the spring. As it was he thought only of the blasphemous monstrosity which
confronted him, and which all too clearly had shared the nameless fate of young Thaddeus and the
livestock. But the terrible thing about the horror was that it very slowly and perceptibly moved as it
continued to crumble.
Ammi would give me no added particulars of this scene, but the shape in the comer does not
reappear in his tale as a moving object. There are things which cannot be mentioned, and what is done
in common humanity is sometimes cruelly judged by the law. I gathered that no moving thing was left
in that attic room, and that to leave anything capable of motion there would have been a deed so
monstrous as to damn any accountable being to eternal torment. Anyone but a stolid farmer would
have fainted or gone mad, but Ammi walked conscious through that low doorway and locked the
accursed secret behind him. There would be Nahum to deal with now; he must be fed and tended, and
removed to some place where he could be cared for.
Commencing his descent of the dark stairs. Ammi heard a thud below him. He even thought a
scream had been suddenly choked off, and recalled nervously the clammy vapour which had brushed
by him in that frightful room above. What presence had his cry and entry started up? Halted by some
vague fear, he heard still further sounds below. Indubitably there was a sort of heavy dragging, and a
most detestably sticky noise as of some fiendish and unclean species of suction. With an associative
sense goaded to feverish heights, he thought unaccountably of what he had seen upstairs. Good God!
What eldritch dream-world was this into which he had blundered? He dared move neither backward
nor forward, but stood there trembling at the black curve of the boxed-in staircase. Every trifle of the
scene burned itself into his brain. The sounds, the sense of dread expectancy, the darkness, the
steepness of the narrow step--and merciful Heaven!--the faint but unmistakable luminosity of all the
woodwork in sight; steps, sides, exposed laths, and beams alike.
Then there burst forth a frantic whinny from Ammi's horse outside, followed at once by a clatter
which told of a frenzied runaway. In another moment horse and buggy had gone beyond earshot,
leaving the frightened man on the dark stairs to guess what had sent them. But that was not all. There
had been another sound out there. A sort of liquid splash--water--it must have been the well. He had
left Hero untied near it, and a buggy wheel must have brushed the coping and knocked in a stone. And
still the pale phosphorescence glowed in that detestably ancient woodwork. God! how old the house
was! Most of it built before 1670, and the gambrel roof no later than 1730.
A feeble scratching on the floor downstairs now sounded distinctly, and Ammi's grip tightened on
a heavy stick he had picked up in the attic for some purpose. Slowly nerving himself, he finished his
descent and walked boldly toward the kitchen. But he did not complete the walk, because what he
sought was no longer there. It had come to meet him, and it was still alive after a fashion. Whether it
had crawled or whether it had been dragged by any external forces, Ammi could not say; but the
death had been at it. Everything had happened in the last half-hour, but collapse, greying, and
disintegration were already far advanced. There was a horrible brittleness, and dry fragments were
scaling off. Ammi could not touch it, but looked horrifiedly into the distorted parody that had been a
face. "What was it, Nahum--what was it?" He whispered, and the cleft, bulging lips were just able to
crackle out a final answer.
"Nothin'...nothin'...the colour...it burns...cold an' wet, but it burns...it lived in the well...I seen it...a
kind of smoke...jest like the flowers last spring...the well shone at night...Thad an' Merwin an'
Zenas...everything alive...suckin' the life out of everything...in that stone...it must a' come in that stone
pizened the whole place...dun't know what it wants...that round thing them men from the college dug
outen the stone...they smashed it...it was the same colour...jest the same, like the flowers an'
plants...must a' ben more of 'em...seeds...seeds...they growed...I seen it the fust time this week...must a'
got strong on Zenas...he was a big boy, full o' life...it beats down your mind an' then gets ye...burns ye
up...in the well water...you was right about that...evil water...Zenas never come back from the
well...can't git away...draws ye...ye know summ'at's comin' but tain't no use...I seen it time an' agin
senct Zenas was took...whar's Nabby, Ammi?...my head's no good...dun't know how long sense I fed
her...it'll git her ef we ain't keerful...jest a colour...her face is gittin' to hev that colour sometimes
towards night...an' it burns an' sucks...it come from some place whar things ain't as they is here...one
o' them professors said so...he was right...look out, Ammi, it'll do suthin' more...sucks the life out..."
But that was all. That which spoke could speak no more because it had completely caved in.
Ammi laid a red checked tablecloth over what was left and reeled out the back door into the fields.
He climbed the slope to the ten-acre pasture and stumbled home by the north road and the woods. He
could not pass that well from which his horses had run away. He had looked at it through the
window, and had seen that no stone was missing from the rim. Then the lurching buggy had not
dislodged anything after all--the splash had been something else--something which went into the
well after it had done with poor Nahum.
When Ammi reached his house the horses and buggy had arrived before him and thrown his wife
into fits of anxiety. Reassuring her without explanations, he set out at once for Arkham and notified
the authorities that the Gardner family was no more. He indulged in no details, but merely told of the
deaths of Nahum and Nabby, that of Thaddeus being already known, and mentioned that the cause
seemed to be the same strange ailment which had killed the live-stock. He also stated that Merwin and
Zenas had disappeared. There was considerable questioning at the police station, and in the end Ammi
was compelled to take three officers to the Gardner farm, together with the coroner, the medical
examiner, and the veterinary who had treated the diseased animals. He went much against his will, for
the afternoon was advancing and he feared the fall of night over that accursed place, but it was some
comfort to have so many people with him.
The six men drove out in a democrat-wagon, following Ammi's buggy, and arrived at the pest-
ridden farmhouse about four o'clock. Used as the officers were to gruesome experiences, not one
remained unmoved at what was found in the attic and under the red checked tablecloth on the floor
below. The whole aspect of the farm with its grey desolation was terrible enough, but those two
crumbling objects were beyond all bounds. No one could look long at them, and even the medical
examiner admitted that there was very little to examine. Specimens could be analysed, of course, so
he busied himself in obtaining them--and here it develops that a very puzzling aftermath occurred at
the college laboratory where the two phials of dust were finally taken. Under the spectroscope both
samples gave off an unknown spectrum, in which many of the baffling bands were precisely like
those which the strange meteor had yielded in the previous year. The property of emitting this
spectrum vanished in a month, the dust thereafter consisting mainly of alkaline phosphates and
carbonates.
Ammi would not have told the men about the well if he had thought they meant to do anything then
and there. It was getting toward sunset, and he was anxious to be away. But he could not help
glancing nervously at the stony curb by the great sweep, and when a detective questioned him he
admitted that Nahum had feared something down there so much so that he had never even thought of
searching it for Merwin or Zenas. After that nothing would do but that they empty and explore the
well immediately, so Ammi had to wait trembling while pail after pail of rank water was hauled up
and splashed on the soaking ground outside. The men sniffed in disgust at the fluid, and toward the
last held their noses against the foetor they were uncovering. It was not so long a job as they had
feared it would be, since the water was phenomenally low. There is no need to speak too exactly of
what they found. Merwin and Zenas were both there, in part, though the vestiges were mainly
skeletal. There were also a small deer and a large dog in about the same state, and a number of bones
of small animals. The ooze and slime at the bottom seemed inexplicably porous and bubbling, and a
man who descended on hand-holds with a long pole found that he could sink the wooden shaft to any
depth in the mud of the floor without meeting any solid obstruction.
Twilight had now fallen, and lanterns were brought from the house. Then, when it was seen that
nothing further could be gained from the well, everyone went indoors and conferred in the ancient
sitting-room while the intermittent light of a spectral half-moon played wanly on the grey desolation
outside. The men were frankly nonplussed by the entire case, and could find no convincing common
element to link the strange vegetable conditions, the unknown disease of live-stock and humans, and
the unaccountable deaths of Merwin and Zenas in the tainted well. They had heard the common
country talk, it is true; but could not believe that anything contrary to natural law had occurred. No
doubt the meteor had poisoned the soil, but the illness of persons and animals who had eaten nothing
grown in that soil was another matter. Was it the well water? Very possibly. It might be a good idea
to analyze it. But what peculiar madness could have made both boys jump into the well? Their deeds
were so similar-and the fragments showed that they had both suffered from the grey brittle death.
Why was everything so grey and brittle?
It was the coroner, seated near a window overlooking the yard, who first noticed the glow about
the well. Night had fully set in, and all the abhorrent grounds seemed faintly luminous with more than
the fitful moonbeams; but this new glow was something definite and distinct, and appeared to shoot up
from the black pit like a softened ray from a searchlight, giving dull reflections in the little ground
pools where the water had been emptied. It had a very queer colour, and as all the men clustered
round the window Ammi gave a violent start. For this strange beam of ghastly miasma was to him of
no unfamiliar hue. He had seen that colour before, and feared to think what it might mean. He had
seen it in the nasty brittle globule in that aerolite two summers ago, had seen it in the crazy vegetation
of the springtime, and had thought he had seen it for an instant that very morning against the small
barred window of that terrible attic room where nameless things had happened. It had flashed there a
second, and a clammy and hateful current of vapour had brushed past him--and then poor Nahum had
been taken by something of that colour. He had said so at the last--said it was like the globule and the
plants. After that had come the runaway in the yard and the splash in the well and now that well was
belching forth to the night a pale insidious beam of the same demoniac tint.
It does credit to the alertness of Ammi's mind that he puzzled even at that tense moment over a
point which was essentially scientific. He could not but wonder at his gleaning of the same
impression from a vapour glimpsed in the daytime, against a window opening on the morning sky, and
from a nocturnal exhalation seen as a phosphorescent mist against the black and blasted landscape. It
wasn't right--it was against Nature--and he thought of those terrible last words of his stricken friend,
"It come from some place whar things ain't as they is here...one o' them professors said so..."
All three horses outside, tied to a pair of shrivelled saplings by the road, were now neighing and
pawing frantically. The wagon driver started for the door to do something, but Ammi laid a shaky
hand on his shoulder. "Dun't go out thar," he whispered. "They's more to this nor what we know.
Nahum said somethin' lived in the well that sucks your life out. He said it must be some'at growed
from a round ball like one we all seen in the meteor stone that fell a year ago June. Sucks an' burns,
he said, an' is jest a cloud of colour like that light out thar now, that ye can hardly see an' can't tell
what it is. Nahum thought it feeds on everything livin' an' gits stronger all the time. He said he seen it
this last week. It must be somethin' from away off in the sky like the men from the college last year
says the meteor stone was. The way it's made an' the way it works ain't like no way 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 allied and bodiless line of linkage with subterrene
horrors writhing and struggling below the black roots.
Not a man breathed for several seconds. Then a cloud of darker depth passed over the moon, and
the silhouette of clutching branches faded out momentarily. At this there was a general cry; muffled
with awe, but husky and almost identical from every throat. For the terror had not faded with the
silhouette, and in a fearsome instant of deeper darkness the watchers saw wriggling at that tree top
height a thousand tiny points of faint and unhallowed radiance, tipping each bough like the fire of St.
Elmo or the flames that come down on the apostles' heads at Pentecost. It was a monstrous
constellation of unnatural light, like a glutted swarm of corpse-fed fireflies dancing hellish
sarabands over an accursed marsh, and its colour was that same nameless intrusion which Ammi had
come to recognize and dread. All the while the shaft of phosphorescence from the well was getting
brighter and brighter, bringing to the minds of the huddled men, a sense of doom and abnormality
which far outraced any image their conscious minds could form. It was no longer shining out; it was
pouring out; and as the shapeless stream of unplaceable colour left the well it seemed to flow
directly into the sky.
The veterinary shivered, and walked to the front door to drop the heavy extra bar across it. Ammi
shook no less, and had to tug and point for lack of controllable voice when he wished to draw notice
to the growing luminosity of the trees. The neighing and stamping of the horses had become utterly
frightful, but not a soul of that group in the old house would have ventured forth for any earthly
reward. With the moments the shining of the trees increased, while their restless branches seemed to
strain more and more toward verticality. The wood of the well-sweep was shining now, and presently
a policeman dumbly pointed to some wooden sheds and bee-hives near the stone wall on the west.
They were commencing to shine, too, though the tethered vehicles of the visitors seemed so far
unaffected. Then there was a wild commotion and clopping in the road, and as Ammi quenched the
lamp for better seeing they realized that the span of frantic greys had broken their sapling and run off
with the democrat-wagon.
The shock served to loosen several tongues, and embarrassed whispers were exchanged. "It
spreads on everything organic that's been around here," muttered the medical examiner. No one
replied, but the man who had been in the well gave a hint that his long pole must have stirred up
something intangible. "It was awful," he added. "There was no bottom at all. Just ooze and bubbles
and the feeling of something lurking under there." Ammi's horse still pawed and screamed
deafeningly in the road outside, and nearly drowned its owner's faint quaver as he mumbled his
formless reflections. "It come from that stone--it growed down thar--it got everything livin'--it fed
itself on 'em, mind and body--Thad an' Merwin, Zenas an' Nabby--Nahum was the last--they all drunk
the water--it got strong on 'em--it come from beyond, whar things ain't like they be here--now it's
goin' home--"
At this point, as the column of unknown colour flared suddenly stronger and began to weave itself
into fantastic suggestions of shape which each spectator described differently, there came from poor
tethered Hero such a sound as no man before or since ever heard from a horse. Every person in that
low-pitched sitting room stopped his ears, and Ammi turned away from the window in horror and
nausea. Words could not convey it--when Ammi looked out again the hapless beast lay huddled inert
on the moonlit ground between the splintered shafts of the buggy. That was the last of Hero till they
buried him next day. But the present was no time to mourn, for almost at this instant a detective
silently called attention to something terrible in the very room with them. In the absence of the
lamplight it was clear that a faint phosphorescence had begun to pervade the entire apartment. It
glowed on the broad-planked floor and the fragment of rag carpet, and shimmered over the sashes of
the small-paned windows. It ran up and down the exposed corner-posts, coruscated about the shelf
and mantel, and infected the very doors and furniture. Each minute saw it strengthen, and at last it was
very plain that healthy living things must leave that house.
Ammi showed them the back door and the path up through the fields to the ten-acre pasture. They
walked and stumbled as in a dream, and did not dare look back till they were far away on the high
ground. They were glad of the path, for they could not have gone the front way, by that well. It was
bad enough passing the glowing barn and sheds, and those shining orchard trees with their gnarled,
fiendish contours; but thank Heaven the branches did their worst twisting high up. The moon went
under some very black clouds as they crossed the rustic bridge over Chapman's Brook, and it was
blind groping from there to the open meadows.
When they looked back toward the valley and the distant Gardner place at the bottom they saw a
fearsome sight. At the farm was shining with the hideous unknown blend of colour; trees, buildings,
and even such grass and herbage as had not been wholly changed to lethal grey brittleness. The
boughs were all straining skyward, tipped with tongues of foul flame, and lambent tricklings of the
same monstrous fire were creeping about the ridgepoles of the house, barn and sheds. It was a scene
from a vision of Fuseli, and over all the rest reigned that riot of luminous amorphousness, that alien
and undimensioned rainbow of cryptic poison from the well--seething, feeling, lapping, reaching,
scintillating, straining, and malignly bubbling in its cosmic and unrecognizable chromaticism.
Then without warning the hideous thing shot vertically up toward the sky like a rocket or meteor,
leaving behind no trail and disappearing through a round and curiously regular hole in the clouds
before any man could gasp or cry out. No watcher can ever forget that sight, and Ammi stared blankly
at the stars of Cygnus, Deneb twinkling above the others, where the unknown colour had melted into
the Milky Way. But his gaze was the next moment called swiftly to earth by the crackling in the
valley. It was just that. Only a wooden ripping and crackling, and not an explosion, as so many others
of the party vowed. Yet the outcome was the same, for in one feverish kaleidoscopic instant there
burst up from that doomed and accursed farm a gleamingly eruptive cataclysm of unnatural sparks and
substance; blurring the glance of the few who saw it, and sending forth to the zenith a bombarding
cloudburst of such coloured and fantastic fragments as our universe must needs disown. Through
quickly reclosing vapours they followed the great morbidity that had vanished, and in another second
they had vanished too. Behind and below was only a darkness to which the men dared not return, and
all about was a mounting wind which seemed to sweep down in black, frore gusts from interstellar
space. It shrieked and howled, and lashed the fields and distorted woods in a mad cosmic frenzy, till
soon the trembling party realized it would be no use waiting for the moon to show what was left
down there at Nahum's.
Too awed even to hint theories, the seven shaking men trudged back toward Arkham by the north
road. Ammi was worse than his fellows, and begged them to see him inside his own kitchen, instead
of keeping straight on to town. He did not wish to cross the blighted, wind-whipped woods alone to
his home on the main road. For he had had an added shock that the others were spared, and was
crushed forever with a brooding fear he dared not even mention for many years to come. As the rest
of the watchers on that tempestuous hill had stolidly set their faces toward the road, Ammi had
looked back an instant at the shadowed valley of desolation so lately sheltering his ill-starred friend.
And from that stricken, far-away spot he had seen something feebly rise, only to sink down again
upon the place from which the great shapeless horror had shot into the sky. It was just a colour--but
not any colour of our earth or heavens. And because Ammi recognized that colour, and knew that this
last faint remnant must still lurk down there in the well, he has never been quite right since.
Ammi would never go near the place again. It is forty-four years now since the horror happened,
but he has never been there, and will be glad when the new reservoir blots it out. I shall be glad, too,
for I do not like the way the sunlight changed colour around the mouth of that abandoned well I
passed. I hope the water will always be very deep--but even so, I shall never drink it. I do not think I
shall visit the Arkham country hereafter. Three of the men who had been with Ammi returned the next
morning to see the ruins by daylight, but there were not any real ruins. Only the bricks of the
chimney, the stones of the cellar, some mineral and metallic litter here and there, and the rim of that
nefandous well. Save for Ammi's dead horse, which they towed away and buried, and the buggy
which they shortly returned to him, everything that had ever been living had gone. Five eldritch acres
of dusty grey desert remained, nor has anything ever grown there since. To this day it sprawls open
to the sky like a great spot eaten by acid in the woods and fields, and the few who have ever dared
glimpse it in spite of the rural tales have named it "the blasted heath."
The rural tales are queer. They might be even queerer if city men and college chemists could be
interested enough to analyze the water from that disused well, or the grey dust that no wind seems to
disperse. Botanists, too, ought to study the stunted flora on the borders of that spot, for they might
shed light on the country notion that the blight is spreading--little by little, perhaps an inch a year.
People say the colour of the neighboring herbage is not quite right in the spring, and that wild things
leave queer prints in the light winter snow. Snow never seems quite so heavy on the blasted heath as
it is elsewhere. Horses--the few that are left in this motor age--grow skittish in the silent valley; and
hunters cannot depend on their dogs too near the splotch of greyish dust.
They say the mental influences are very bad, too; numbers went queer in the years after Nahum's
taking, and always they lacked the power to get away. Then the stronger-minded folk all left the
region, and only the foreigners tried to live in the crumbling old homesteads. They could not stay,
though; and one sometimes wonders what insight beyond ours their wild, weird stories of whispered
magic have given them. Their dreams at night, they protest, are very horrible in that grotesque
country; and surely the very look of the dark realm is enough to stir a morbid fancy. No traveler has
ever escaped a sense of strangeness in those deep ravines, and artists shiver as they paint thick
woods whose mystery is as much of the spirits as of the eye. I myself am curious about the sensation
I derived from my one lone walk before Ammi told me his tale. When twilight came I had vaguely
wished some clouds would gather, for an odd timidity about the deep skyey voids above had crept
into my soul.
Do not ask me for my opinion. I do not know--that is all. There was no one but Ammi to question;
for Arkham people will not talk about the strange days, and all three professors who saw the aerolite
and its coloured globule are dead. There were other globules--depend upon that. One must have fed
itself and escaped, and probably there was another which was too late. No doubt it is still down the
well--I know there was something wrong with the sunlight I saw above the miasmal brink. The rustics
say the blight creeps an inch a year, so perhaps there is a kind of growth or nourishment even now.
But whatever demon 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 the laws that are not of our cosmos. This was no fruit of such
worlds and suns as shine on the telescopes and photographic plates of our observatories. This was
no breath from the skies whose motions and dimensions our astronomers measure or deem too vast to
measure. It was just a colour out of space--a frightful messenger from unformed realms of infinity
beyond all Nature as we know it; from realms whose mere existence stuns the brain and numbs us
with the black cosmic gulfs it throws open before our frenzied eyes.
I doubt very much if Ammi consciously lied to me, and I do not think his tale was all a freak of
madness as the townsfolk had forewarned. Something terrible came to the hills and valleys on that
meteor, and something terrible--though I know not in what proportion--still remains. I shall be glad to
see the water come. Meanwhile I hope nothing will happen to Ammi. He saw so much of the thing--
and its influence was so insidious. Why has he never been able to move away? How clearly he
recalled those dying words of Nahum's--"Can't git away--draws ye--ye know summ'at's comin' but
tain't no use--". Ammi is such a good old man--when the reservoir gang gets to work I must write the
chief engineer to keep a sharp watch on him. I would hate to think of him as the grey, twisted, brittle
monstrosity which persists more and more in troubling my sleep.

THE CALL OF CTHULHU
Of such great powers or beings there may be conceivably a survival...a survival of a hugely
remote period when...consciousness was manifested, perhaps, in shapes and forms long since
withdrawn before the tide of advancing humanity...forms of which poetry and legend alone have
caught a flying memory and called them gods, monsters, mythical beings of all sorts and kinds...
--Algernon Blackwood
I. The Horror In Clay
The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its
contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not
meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto
harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such
terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the
revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.
Theosophists have guessed at the awesome grandeur of the cosmic cycle wherein our world and
human race form transient incidents. They have hinted at strange survivals in terms which would
freeze the blood if not masked by a bland optimism. But it is not from them that there came the single
glimpse of forbidden eons which chills me when I think of it and maddens me when I dream of it. That
glimpse, like all dread glimpses of truth, flashed out from an accidental piecing together of separated
things--in this case an old newspaper item and the notes of a dead professor. I hope that no one else
will accomplish this piecing out; certainly, if I live, I shall never knowingly supply a link in so
hideous a chain. I think that the professor, too, 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 BrownUniversity,
Providence, Rhode Island. Professor Angell was widely known as an authority on ancient
inscriptions, and had frequently been resorted to by the heads of prominent museums; so that his
passing at the age of ninety-two may be recalled by many. Locally, interest was intensified by the
obscurity of the cause of death. The professor had been stricken whilst returning from the Newport
boat; falling suddenly; as witnesses said, after having been jostled by a nautical-looking negro who
had come from one of the queer dark courts on the precipitous hillside which formed a short cut
from the waterfront to the deceased's home in Williams Street. Physicians were unable to find any
visible disorder, but concluded after perplexed debate that some obscure lesion of the heart, induced
by the brisk ascent of so steep a hill by so elderly a man, was responsible for the end. At the time I
saw no reason to dissent from this dictum, but latterly I am inclined to wonder--and more than wonder.
As my great-uncle's heir and executor, for he died a childless widower, I was expected to go
over his papers with some thoroughness; and for that purpose moved his entire set of files and boxes
to my quarters in Boston. Much of the material which I correlated will be later published by the
American Archaeological Society, but there was one box which I found exceedingly puzzling, and
which I felt much averse from showing to other eyes. It had been locked and I did not find the key till
it occurred to me to examine the personal ring which the professor carried in his pocket. Then,
indeed, I succeeded in opening it, but when I did so seemed only to be confronted by a greater and
more closely locked barrier. For what could be the meaning of the queer clay bas-relief and the
disjointed jottings, ramblings, and cuttings which I found? Had my uncle, in his latter years become
credulous of the most superficial impostures? I resolved to search out the eccentric sculptor
responsible for this apparent disturbance of an old man's peace of mind.
The bas-relief was a rough rectangle less than an inch thick and about five by six inches in area;
obviously of modern origin. Its designs, however, were far from modern in atmosphere and
suggestion; for, although the vagaries of cubism and futurism are many and wild, they do not often
reproduce that cryptic regularity which lurks in prehistoric writing. And writing of some kind the
bulk of these designs seemed certainly to be; though my memory, despite much the papers and
collections of my uncle, failed in any way to identify this particular species, or even hint at its
remotest affiliations.
Above these apparent hieroglyphics was a figure of evident pictorial intent, though its
impressionistic execution forbade a very clear idea of its nature. It seemed to be a sort of monster, or
symbol representing a monster, of a form which only a diseased fancy could conceive. If I say that
my somewhat extravagant imagination yielded simultaneous pictures of an octopus, a dragon, and a
human caricature, I shall not be unfaithful to the spirit of the thing. A pulpy, tentacled head
surmounted a grotesque and scaly body with rudimentary wings; but it was the general outline of the
whole which made it most shockingly frightful. Behind the figure was a vague suggestions of a
Cyclopean architectural background.
The writing accompanying this oddity was, aside from a stack of press cuttings, in Professor
Angell's most recent hand; and made no pretense to 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 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 outr mental illness and outbreaks of
group folly or mania in the spring of 1925.
The first half of the principal manuscript told a very particular tale. It appears that on March 1st,
1925, a thin, dark young man of neurotic and excited aspect had called upon Professor Angell bearing
the singular clay bas-relief, which was then exceedingly damp and fresh. His card bore the name of
Henry Anthony Wilcox, and my uncle had recognized him as the youngest son of an excellent family
slightly known to him, who had latterly been studying sculpture at the Rhode Island School of Design
and living alone at the Fleur-de-LysBuilding 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 archeological knowledge in identifying the hieroglyphics of the bas-relief. He
spoke in a dreamy, stilted manner which suggested pose and alienated sympathy; and my uncle
showed some sharpness in replying, for the conspicuous freshness of the tablet implied kinship with
anything but archeology. Young Wilcox's rejoinder, which impressed my uncle enough to make him
recall and record it verbatim, was of a fantastically poetic cast which must have typified his whole
conversation, and which I have since found highly characteristic of him. He said, "It is new, indeed,
for I made it last night in a dream of strange cities; and dreams are older than brooding Tyre, or the
contemplative Sphinx, or garden-girdled Babylon."
It was then that he began that rambling tale which suddenly played upon a sleeping memory and
won the fevered interest of my uncle. There had been a slight earthquake tremor the night before, the
most considerable felt in New England for some years; and Wilcox's imagination had been keenly
affected. Upon retiring, he had had an unprecedented dream of great Cyclopean cities of Titan blocks
and sky-flung monoliths, all dripping with green ooze and sinister with latent horror. Hieroglyphics
had covered the walls and pillars, and from some undetermined point below had come a voice that
was not a voice; a chaotic sensation which only fancy could transmute into sound, but which he
attempted to render by the almost unpronounceable jumble of letters: "Cthulhu fhtagn."
This verbal jumble was the key to the recollection which excited and disturbed Professor Angell.
He questioned the sculptor with scientific minuteness; and studied with frantic intensity the bas-relief
on which the youth had found himself working, chilled and clad only in his night clothes, when
waking had stolen bewilderingly over him. My uncle blamed his old age, Wilcox afterwards said, for
his slowness in recognizing both hieroglyphics and pictorial design. Many of his questions seemed
highly out of place to his visitor, especially those which tried to connect the latter with strange cults
or societies; and Wilcox could not understand the repeated promises of silence which he was
offered in exchange for an admission of membership in some widespread mystical or paganly
religious body. When Professor Angell became convinced that the sculptor was indeed ignorant of
any cult or system of cryptic lore, he besieged his visitor with demands for future reports of dreams.
This bore regular fruit, for after the first interview the manuscript records daily calls of the young
man, during which he related startling fragments of nocturnal imaginery whose burden was always
some terrible Cyclopean vista of dark and dripping stone, with a subterrene voice or intelligence
shouting monotonously in enigmatical sense-impacts uninscribable save as gibberish. The two
sounds frequently repeated are those rendered by the letters "Cthulhu" and "R'lyeh."
On March 23, the manuscript continued, Wilcox failed to appear; and inquiries at his quarters
revealed that he had been stricken with an obscure sort of fever and taken to the home of his family in
Waterman Street. He had cried out in the night, arousing several other artists in the building, and had
manifested since then only alternations of unconsciousness and delirium. My uncle at once
telephoned the family, and from that time forward kept close watch of the case; calling often at the
Thayer Street office of Dr. Tobey, whom he learned to be in charge. The youth's febrile mind,
apparently, was dwelling on strange things; and the doctor shuddered now and then as he spoke of
them. They included not only a repetition of what he had formerly dreamed, but touched wildly on a
gigantic thing "miles high" which walked or lumbered about.
He at no time fully described this object but occasional frantic words, as repeated by Dr. Tobey,
convinced the professor that it must be identical with the nameless monstrosity he had sought to
depict in his dream-sculpture. Reference to this object, the doctor added, was invariably a prelude to
the young man's subsidence into lethargy. His temperature, oddly enough, was not greatly above
normal; but the whole condition was otherwise such as to suggest true fever rather than mental
disorder.
On April 2 at about 3 P.M. every trace of Wilcox's malady suddenly ceased. He sat upright in bed,
astonished to find himself at home and completely ignorant of what had happened in dream or reality
since the night of March 22. Pronounced well by his physician, he returned to his quarters in three
days; but to Professor Angell he was of no further assistance. All traces of strange dreaming had
vanished with his recovery, and my uncle kept no record of his night-thoughts after a week of
pointless and irrelevant accounts of thoroughly usual visions.
Here the first part of the manuscript ended, but references to certain of the scattered notes gave
me much material for thought--so much, in fact, that only the ingrained skepticism then forming my
philosophy can account for my continued distrust of the artist. The notes in question were those
descriptive of the dreams of various persons covering the same period as that in which young
Wilcox had had his strange visitations. My uncle, it seems, had quickly instituted a prodigiously far-
flung body of inquires amongst nearly all the friends whom he could question without impertinence,
asking for nightly reports of their dreams, and the dates of any notable visions for some time past.
The reception of his request seems to have varied; but he must, at the very least, have received more
responses than any ordinary man could have handled without a secretary. This original
correspondence was not preserved, but his notes formed a thorough and really significant digest.
Average people in society and business--New England's traditional "salt of the earth"--gave an
almost completely negative result, though scattered cases of uneasy but formless nocturnal
impressions appear here and there, always between March 23 and April 2--the period of young
Wilcox's delirium. Scientific men were little more affected, though four cases of vague description
suggest fugitive glimpses of strange landscapes, and in one case there is mentioned a dread of
something abnormal.
It was from the artists and poets that the pertinent answers came, and I know that panic would have
broken loose had they been able to compare notes. As it was, lacking their original letters, I half
suspected the compiler of having asked leading questions, or of having edited the correspondence in
corroboration of what he had latently resolved to see. That is why I continued to feel that Wilcox,
somehow cognizant of the old data which my uncle had possessed, had been imposing on the veteran
scientist. These responses from esthetes told disturbing tale. From February 28 to April 2 a large
proportion of them had dreamed very bizarre things, the intensity of the dreams being immeasurably
the stronger during the period of the sculptor's delirium. Over a fourth of those who reported
anything, reported scenes and half-sounds not unlike those which Wilcox had described; and some of
the dreamers confessed acute fear of the gigantic nameless thing visible toward the last. One case,
which the note describes with emphasis, was very sad. The subject, a widely known architect with
leanings toward theosophy and occultism, went violently insane on the date of young Wilcox's
seizure, and expired several months later after incessant screamings to be saved from some escaped
denizen of hell. Had my uncle referred to these cases by name instead of merely by number, I should
have attempted some corroboration and personal investigation; but as it was, I succeeded in tracing
down only a few. All of these, however, bore out the notes in full. I have often wondered if all the
the objects of the professor's questioning felt as puzzled as did this fraction. It is well that no
explanation shall ever reach them.
The press cuttings, as I have intimated, touched on cases of panic, mania, and eccentricity during
the given period. Professor Angell must have employed a cutting bureau, for the number of extracts
was tremendous, and the sources scattered throughout the globe. Here was a nocturnal suicide in
London, where a lone sleeper had leaped from a window after a shocking cry. Here likewise a
rambling letter to the editor of a paper in South America, where a fanatic deduces a dire future from
visions he has seen. A dispatch from California describes a theosophist colony as donning white
robes en masse for some "glorious fulfilment" which never arrives, whilst items from India speak
guardedly of serious native unrest toward the end of March 22-23.
The west of Ireland, too, is full of wild rumour and legendry, and a fantastic painter named
Ardois-Bonnot hangs a blasphemous Dream Landscape in the Paris spring salon of 1926. And so
numerous are the recorded troubles in insane asylums that only a miracle can have stopped the
medical fraternity from noting strange parallelisms and drawing mystified conclusions. A weird
bunch of cuttings, all told; and I can at this date scarcely envisage the callous rationalism with which
I set them aside. But I was then convinced that young Wilcox had known of the older matters
mentioned by the professor.
II. The Tale of Inspector Legrasse
The older matters which had made the sculptor's dream and bas-relief so significant to my uncle
formed the subject of the second half of his long manuscript. Once before, it appears, Professor
Angell had seen the 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 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
PrincetonUniversity, 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 Esquimaux wizards and
the Louisiana swamp-priests had chanted to their kindred idols was something very like this: the
word-divisions being guessed at from traditional breaks in the phrase as chanted aloud:
"Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn."
Legrasse had one point in advance of Professor Webb, for several among his mongrel prisoners
had repeated to him what older celebrants had told them the words meant. This text, as given, ran
something like this:
"In his house at R'lyeh dead Cthulhu waits dreaming."
And now, in response to a general and urgent demand, Inspector Legrasse related as fully as
possible his experience with the swamp worshippers; telling a story to which I could see my uncle
attached profound significance. It savoured of the wildest dreams of myth-maker and theosophist, and
disclosed an astonishing degree of cosmic imagination among such half-castes and pariahs as might
be least expected to possess it.
On November 1st, 1907, there had come to the New Orleans police a frantic summons from the
swamp and lagoon country to the south. The squatters there, mostly primitive but good-natured
descendants of Lafitte's men, were in the grip of stark terror from an unknown thing which had stolen
upon them in the night. It was voodoo, apparently, but voodoo of a more terrible sort than they had
ever known; and some of their women and children had disappeared since the malevolent tom-tom had
begun its incessant beating far within the black haunted woods where no dweller ventured. There
were insane shouts and harrowing screams, soul-chilling chants and dancing devil-flames; and, the
frightened messenger added, the people could stand it no more.
So a body of twenty police, filling two carriages and an automobile, had set out in the late
afternoon with the shivering squatter as a guide. At the end of the passable road they alighted, and for
miles splashed on in silence through the terrible cypress woods where day never came. Ugly roots
and malignant hanging nooses of Spanish moss beset them, and now and then a pile of dank stones or
fragment of a rotting wall intensified by its hint of morbid habitation a depression which every
malformed tree and every fungous islet combined to create. At length the squatter settlement, a
miserable huddle of huts, hove in sight; and hysterical dwellers ran out to cluster around the group
of bobbing lanterns. The muffled beat of tom-toms was now faintly audible far, far ahead; and a
curdling shriek came at infrequent intervals when the wind shifted. A reddish glare, too, seemed to
filter through pale undergrowth beyond the endless avenues of forest night. Reluctant even to be left
alone again, each one of the cowed squatters refused point-blank to advance another inch toward the
scene of unholy worship, so Inspector Legrasse and his nineteen colleagues plunged on unguided
into black arcades of horror that none of them had ever trod before.
The region now entered by the police was one of traditionally evil repute, substantially unknown
and untraversed by white men. There were legends of a hidden lake unglimpsed by mortal sight, in
which dwelt a huge, formless white polypous thing with luminous eyes; and squatters whispered that
bat-winged devils flew up out of caverns in inner earth to worship it at midnight. They said it had
been there before D'Iberville, before La Salle, before the Indians, and before even the wholesome
beasts and birds of the woods. It was nightmare itself, and to see it was to die. But it made men dream,
and so they knew enough to keep away. The present voodoo orgy was, indeed, on the merest fringe
of this abhorred area, but that location was bad enough; hence perhaps the very place of the worship
had terrified the squatters more than the shocking sounds and incidents.
Only poetry or madness could do justice to the noises heard by Legrasse's men as they ploughed
on through the black morass toward the red glare and muffled tom-toms. There are vocal qualities
peculiar to men, and vocal qualities peculiar to beasts; and it is terrible to hear the one when the
source should yield the other. Animal fury and orgiastic license here whipped themselves to
daemoniac heights by howls and squawking ecstacies that tore and reverberated through those
nighted woods like pestilential tempests from the gulfs of hell. Now and then the less organized
ululation would cease, and from what seemed a well-drilled chorus of hoarse voices would rise in
sing-song chant that hideous phrase or ritual:
"Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn."
Then the men, having reached a spot where the trees were thinner, came suddenly in sight of the
spectacle itself. Four of them reeled, one fainted, and two were shaken into a frantic cry which the
mad cacophony of the orgy fortunately deadened. Legrasse dashed swamp water on the face of the
fainting man, and all stood trembling and nearly hypnotised with horror.
In a natural glade of the swamp stood a grassy island of perhaps an acre's extent, clear of trees
and tolerably dry. On this now leaped and twisted a more indescribable horde of human abnormality
than any but a Sime or an Angarola could paint. Void of clothing, this hybrid spawn were braying,
bellowing, and writhing about a monstrous ring-shaped bonfire; in the centre of which, revealed by
occasional rifts in the curtain of flame, stood a great granite monolith some eight feet in height; on
top of which, incongruous in its diminutiveness, rested the noxious carven statuette. From a wide
circle of ten scaffolds set up at regular intervals with the flame-girt monolith as a centre hung, head
downward, the oddly marred bodies of the helpless squatters who had disappeared. It was inside this
circle that the ring of worshippers jumped and roared, the general direction of the mass motion being
from left to right in endless Bacchanal between the ring of bodies and the ring of fire.
It may have been only imagination and it may have been only echoes which induced one of the
men, an excitable Spaniard, to fancy he heard antiphonal responses to the ritual from some far and
unillumined spot deeper within the wood of ancient legendry and horror. This man, Joseph D.
Galvez, I later met and questioned; and he proved distractingly imaginative. He indeed went so far as
to hint of the faint beating of great wings, and of a glimpse of shining eyes and a mountainous white
bulk beyond the remotest trees but I suppose he had been hearing too much native superstition.
Actually, the horrified pause of the men was of comparatively brief duration. Duty came first; and
although there must have been nearly a hundred mongrel celebrants in the throng, the police relied on
their firearms and plunged determinedly into the nauseous rout. For five minutes the resultant din and
chaos were beyond description. Wild blows were struck, shots were fired, and escapes were made;
but in the end Legrasse was able to count some forty-seven sullen prisoners, whom he forced to
dress in haste and fall into line between two rows of policemen. Five of the worshippers lay dead,
and two severely wounded ones were carried away on improvised stretchers by their fellow-
prisoners. The image on the monolith, of course, was carefully removed and carried back by
Legrasse.
Examined at headquarters after a trip of intense strain and weariness, the prisoners all proved to
be men of a very low, mixed-blooded, and mentally aberrant type. Most were seamen, and a sprinkling
of Negroes and mulattoes, largely West Indians or Brava Portuguese from the Cape Verde Islands,
gave a colouring of voodooism to the heterogeneous cult. But before many questions were asked, it
became manifest that something far deeper and older than Negro fetishism was involved. Degraded
and ignorant as they were, the creatures held with surprising consistency to the central idea of their
loathsome faith.
They worshipped, so they said, the Great Old Ones who lived ages before there were any men,
and who came to the young world out of the sky. Those Old Ones were gone now, inside the earth
and under the sea; but their dead bodies had told their secrets in dreams to the first men, who formed
a cult which had never died. This was that cult, and the prisoners said it had always existed and
always would exist, hidden in distant wastes and dark places all over the world until the time when the
great priest Cthulhu, from his dark house in the mighty city of R'lyeh under the waters, should rise
and bring the earth again beneath his sway. Some day he would call, when the stars were ready, and
the secret cult would always be waiting to liberate him.
Meanwhile no more must be told. There was a secret which even torture could not extract.
Mankind was not absolutely alone among the conscious things of earth, for shapes came out of the
dark to visit the faithful few. But these were not the Great Old Ones. No man had ever seen the Old
Ones. The carven idol was great Cthulhu, but none might say whether or not the others were
precisely like him. No one could read the old writing now, but things were told by word of mouth.
The chanted ritual was not the secret--that was never spoken aloud, only whispered. The chant meant
only this: "In his house at R'lyeh dead Cthulhu waits dreaming."
Only two of the prisoners were found sane enough to be hanged, and the rest were committed to
various institutions. All denied a part in the ritual murders, and averred that the killing had been done
by Black Winged Ones which had come to them from their immemorial meeting-place in the haunted
wood. But of those mysterious allies no coherent account could ever be gained. What the police did
extract, came mainly from the immensely aged mestizo named Castro, who claimed to have sailed to
strange ports and talked with undying leaders of the cult in the mountains of China.
Old Castro remembered bits of hideous legend that paled the speculations of theosophists and
made man and the world seem recent and transient indeed. There had been aeons when other Things
ruled on the earth, and They had had great cities. Remains of Them, he said the deathless Chinamen
had told him, were still be found as Cyclopean stones on islands in the Pacific. They all died vast
epochs of time before men came, but there were arts which could revive Them when the stars had
come round again to the right positions in the cycle of eternity. They had, indeed, come themselves
from the stars, and brought Their images with Them.
These Great Old Ones, Castro continued, were not composed altogether of flesh and blood.
They had shape--for did not this star-fashioned image prove it?--but that shape was not made of
matter. When the stars were right, They could plunge from world to world through the sky; but when
the stars were wrong, They could not live. But although They no longer lived, They would never
really die. They all lay in stone houses in Their great city of R'lyeh, preserved by the spells of
mighty Cthulhu for a glorious 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 fleshly
minds of mammals.
Then, whispered Castro, those first men formed the cult around tall 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
happened. The great stone city R'lyeh, with its monoliths and sepulchres, had sunk beneath the waves;
and the deep waters, full of the one primal mystery through which not even thought can pass, had cut
off the spectral intercourse. But memory never died, and the high-priests said that the city would rise
again when the stars were right. Then came out of the earth the black spirits of earth, mouldy and
shadowy, and full of dim rumours picked up in caverns beneath forgotten sea-bottoms. But of them
old Castro dared not speak much. He cut himself off hurriedly, and no amount of persuasion or
subtlety could elicit more in this direction. The size of the Old Ones, too, he curiously declined to
mention. Of the cult, he said that he thought the centre lay amid the pathless desert of Arabia, where
Irem, the City of Pillars, dreams hidden and untouched. It was not allied to the European witch-cult,
and was virtually unknown beyond its members. No book had ever really hinted of it, though the
deathless Chinamen said that there were double meanings in the Necronomicon of the mad Arab
Abdul Alhazred which the initiated might read as they chose, especially the much-discussed couplet:
That is not dead which can eternal lie,
And with strange aeons even death may die.
Legrasse, deeply impressed and not a little bewildered, had inquired in vain concerning the
historic affiliations of the cult. Castro, apparently, had told the truth when he said that it was wholly
secret. The authorities at TulaneUniversity could shed no light upon either cult or image, and now
the detective had come to the highest authorities in the country and met with no more than the
Greenland tale of Professor Webb.
The feverish interest aroused at the meeting by Legrasse's tale, corroborated as it was by the
statuette, is echoed in the subsequent correspondence of those who attended; although scant mention
occurs in the formal publications of the society. Caution is the first care of those accustomed to face
occasional charlatanry and imposture. Legrasse for some time lent the image to Professor Webb, but
at the latter's death it was returned to him and remains in his possession, where I viewed it not long
ago. It is truly a terrible thing, and unmistakably akin to the dream-sculpture of young Wilcox.
That my uncle was excited by the tale of the sculptor I did not wonder, for what thoughts must
arise upon hearing, after a knowledge of what Legrasse had learned of the cult, of a sensitive young
man who had dreamed not only the figure and exact hieroglyphics of the swamp-found image and the
Greenland devil tablet, but had come in his dreams upon at least three of the precise words of the
formula uttered alike by Esquimaux diabolists and mongrel Louisianans? Professor Angell's instant
start on an investigation of the utmost thoroughness was eminently natural; though privately I
suspected young Wilcox of having heard of the cult in some indirect way, and of having invented a
series of dreams to heighten and continue the mystery at my uncle's expense. The dream-narratives
and cuttings collected by the professor were, of course, strong corroboration; but the rationalism of
my mind and the extravagance of the whole subject led me to adopt what I thought the most sensible
conclusions. So, after thoroughly studying the manuscript again and correlating the theosophical and
anthropological notes with the cult narrative of Legrasse, I made a trip to Providence to see the
sculptor and give him the rebuke I thought proper for so boldly imposing upon a learned and aged
man.
Wilcox still lived alone in the Fleur-de-Lys Building in Thomas Street, a hideous Victorian
imitation of seventeenth century Breton Architecture which flaunts its stuccoed front amidst the
lovely 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. Then I told him who I was, he displayed some interest; for my uncle had
excited his curiosity in probing his strange dreams, yet had never explained the reason for the study.
I did not enlarge his knowledge in this regard, but sought with some subtlety to draw him out. In a
short time I became convinced 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 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 almost
inexplicable perversity the coincidence of the dream notes and odd cuttings collected by Professor
Angell.
One thing I began to suspect, and which I now fear I know, is that my uncle's death was far from
natural. He fell on a narrow hill street leading up from an ancient waterfront swarming with foreign
mongrels, after a careless push from a Negro sailor. I did not forget the mixed blood and marine
pursuits of the cult-members in Louisiana, and would not be surprised to learn of secret methods and
rites and beliefs. Legrasse and his men, it is true, have been let alone; but in Norway a certain seaman
who saw things is dead. Might not the deeper inquiries of my uncle after encountering the sculptor's
data have come to sinister ears? I think Professor Angell died because he knew too much, or because
he was likely to learn too much. Whether I shall go as he did remains to be seen, for I have learned
much now.
III. The Madness from the Sea
If heaven ever wishes to grant me a boon, it will be a total effacing of the results of a mere
chance which fixed my eye on a certain stray piece of shelf-paper. It was nothing on which I would
naturally have stumbled in the course of my daily round, for it was an old number of an Australian
journal, the Sydney Bulletin for April 18, 1925. It had escaped even the cutting bureau which had at
the time of its issuance been avidly collecting material for my uncle's research.
I had largely given over my inquiries into what Professor Angell called the "Cthulhu Cult", and
was visiting a learned friend in 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 3421', W. Longitude 15217', with one
living and one dead man aboard.
The Vigilant left Valparaiso March 25th, and on April 2nd was driven considerably south of her
course by exceptionally heavy storms and monster waves. On April 12th the derelict was sighted; and
though apparently deserted, was found upon boarding to contain one survivor in a half-delirious
condition and one man who had evidently been dead for more than a week. The living man was
clutching a horrible stone idol of unknown origin, about foot in height, regarding whose nature
authorities at Sydney University, the Royal Society, and the Museum in College Street all profess
complete bafflement, and which the survivor says he found in the cabin of the yacht, in a small carved
shrine of common pattern.
This man, after recovering his senses, told an exceedingly strange story of piracy and slaughter.
He is Gustaf Johansen, a Norwegian of some intelligence, and had been second mate of the two-
masted schooner Emma of Auckland, which sailed for Callao February 20th with a complement of
eleven men. The Emma, he says, was delayed and thrown widely south of her course by the great
storm of March 1st, and on March 22nd, in S. Latitude 4951' W. Longitude 12834', 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 marvellous
of all, what deep and more than natural linkage of dates was this which gave a malign and now
undeniable significance to the various turns of events so carefully noted by my uncle?
March 1st--or February 28th according to the International Date Line--the earthquake and storm
had come. From Dunedin the Alert and her noisome crew had darted eagerly forth as if imperiously
summoned, and on the other side of the earth poets and artists had begun to dream of a strange, dank
Cyclopean city whilst a young sculptor had moulded in his sleep the form of the dreaded Cthulhu.
March 23rd the crew of the Emma landed on an unknown island and left six men dead; and on that date
the dreams of sensitive men assumed a heightened vividness and darkened with dread of a giant
monster's malign pursuit, whilst an architect had gone mad and a sculptor had lapsed suddenly into
delirium! And what of this storm of April 2nd--the date on which all dreams of the dank city ceased,
and Wilcox emerged unharmed from the bondage of strange fever? What of all this--and of those
hints of old Castro about the sunken, star-born Old Ones and their coming reign; their faithful cult and
their mastery of dreams? Was I tottering on the brink of cosmic horrors beyond man's power to bear?
If so, they must be horrors of the mind alone, for in some way the second of April had put a stop to
whatever monstrous menace had begun its siege of mankind's soul.
That evening, after a day of hurried cabling and arranging, I bade my host adieu and took a train
f or 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 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 479', W. Longitude l2343', 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 mates frightened description.
Without knowing what futurism is like, Johansen achieved something very close to it when he
spoke of the city; for instead of describing any definite structure or building, he dwells only on
broad impressions of vast angles and stone surfaces--surfaces too great to belong to anything right
or proper for this earth, and impious with horrible images and hieroglyphs. I mention his talk about
angles because it suggests something Wilcox had told me of his awful dreams. He said that the
geometry of the dream-place he saw was abnormal, non-Euclidean, and loathsomely redolent of
spheres and dimensions apart from ours. Now an unlettered seaman felt the same thing whilst gazing
at the terrible reality.
Johansen and his men landed at a sloping mud-bank on this monstrous Acropolis, and clambered
slipperily up over titan oozy blocks which could have been no mortal staircase. The very sun of
heaven seemed distorted when viewed through the polarising miasma welling out from this sea-
soaked perversion, and twisted menace and suspense lurked leeringly in those crazily elusive angles
of carven rock where a second glance 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.
THE DUNWICH HORROR
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 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 Aylesbury
pike just beyond Dean's Corners he comes upon a lonely and curious country.
The ground gets higher, and the brier-bordered stone walls press closer and closer against the
ruts of the dusty, curving road. The trees of the frequent forest belts seem too large, and the wild
weeds, brambles and grasses attain a luxuriance not often found in settled regions. At the same time
the planted fields appear singularly few and barren; while the sparsely scattered houses wear a
surprisingly uniform aspect of age, squalor, and dilapidation.
Without knowing why, one hesitates to ask directions from the gnarled solitary figures spied now
and then on crumbling doorsteps or on the sloping, rock-strewn meadows. Those figures are so
silent and furtive that one feels somehow confronted by forbidden things, with which it would be
better to have nothing to do. When a rise in the road brings the mountains in view above the deep
woods, the feeling of strange uneasiness is increased. The summits are too rounded and symmetrical
to give a sense of comfort and naturalness, and sometimes the sky silhouettes with especial clearness
the queer circles of tall stone pillars with which most of them are crowned.
Gorges and ravines of problematical depth intersect the way, and the crude wooden bridges
always seem of dubious safety. When the road dips again there are stretches of marshland that one
instinctively dislikes, and indeed almost fears at evening when unseen whippoorwills chatter and the
fireflies come out in abnormal profusion to dance to the raucous, creepily insistent rhythms of
stridently piping bull-frogs. The thin, shining line of the Miskatonic's upper reaches has an oddly
serpent-like suggestion as it winds close to the feet of the domed hills among which it rises.
As the hills draw nearer, one heeds their wooded sides more than their stone-crowned tops.
Those sides loom up so darkly and precipitously that one wishes they would keep their distance, but
there is no road by which to escape them. Across a covered bridge one sees a small village huddled
between the stream and the vertical slope of RoundMountain, and wonders at the cluster of rotting
gambrel roofs bespeaking an earlier architectural period than that of the neighbouring region. It is
not reassuring to see, on a closer glance, that most of the houses are deserted and falling to ruin, and
that the broken-steepled church now harbours the one slovenly mercantile establishment of the
hamlet. One dreads to trust the tenebrous tunnel of the bridge, yet there is no way to avoid it. Once
across, it is hard to prevent the impression of a faint, malign odour about the village street, as of the
massed mould and decay of centuries. It is always a relief to get clear of the place, and to follow the
narrow road around the base of the hills and across the level country beyond till it rejoins the
Aylesbury pike. Afterwards one sometimes learns that one has been through Dunwich.
Outsiders visit Dunwich as seldom as possible, and since a certain season of horror all the
signboards pointing towards it have been taken down. The scenery, judged by an ordinary aesthetic
canon, is more than commonly beautiful; yet there is no influx of artists or summer tourists. Two
centuries ago, when talk of witch-blood, Satan-worship, and strange forest presences was not
laughed at, it was the custom to give reasons for avoiding the locality. In our sensible age--since the
Dunwich horror of 1928 was hushed up by those who had the town's and the world's welfare at heart-
-people shun it without knowing exactly why. Perhaps one reason--though it cannot apply to
uninformed strangers--is that the natives are now repellently decadent, having gone far along that path
of retrogression so common in many New England backwaters. They have come to form a race by
themselves, with the well-defined mental and physical stigmata of degeneracy and inbreeding. The
average of their intelligence is woefully low, whilst their annals reek of overt viciousness and of
half-hidden murders, incests, and deeds of almost unnameable violence and perversity. The old
gentry, representing the two or three armigerous families which came from Salem in 1692, have kept
somewhat above the general level of decay; though many branches are sunk into the sordid populace
so deeply that only their names remain as a key to the origin they disgrace. Some of the Whateleys
and Bishops still send their eldest sons to Harvard and Miskatonic, though those sons seldom return
to the mouldering gambrel roofs under which they and their ancestors were born.
No one, even those who have the facts concerning the recent horror, can say just what is the
matter with Dunwich; though old legends speak of unhallowed rites and conclaves of the Indians,
amidst which they called forbidden shapes of shadow out of the great rounded hills, and made wild
orgiastic prayers that were answered by loud crackings and rumblings from the ground below. In
1747 the Reverend Abijah Hoadley, newly come to the Congregational Church at DunwichVillage,
preached a memorable sermon on the close presence of Satan and his imps; in which he said:
"It must be allow'd, that these Blasphemies of an infernall Train of Daemons are Matters of too
common Knowledge to be deny'd; the cursed Voices of Azazel and Buzrael, of Beelzebub and
Belial, being heard now from under Ground by above a Score of credible Witnesses now living. I
myself did not more than a Fortnight ago catch a very plain Discourse of evill Powers in the Hill
behind my House; wherein there were a Rattling and Rolling, Groaning, Screeching, and Hissing,
such as no Things of this Earth could raise up, and which must needs have come from those Caves
that only black Magick can discover, and only the Divell unlock".
Mr. Hoadley disappeared soon after delivering this sermon, but the text, printed in Springfield, is
still extant. Noises in the hills continued to be reported from year to year, and still form a puzzle to
geologists and physiographers.
Other traditions tell of foul odours near the hill-crowning circles of stone pillars, and of rushing
airy presences to be heard faintly at certain hours from stated points at the bottom of the great
ravines; while still others try to explain the Devil's Hop Yard--a bleak, blasted hillside where no
tree, shrub, or grass-blade will grow. Then, too, the natives are mortally afraid of the numerous
whippoorwills which grow vocal on warm nights. It is vowed that the birds are psychopomps lying
in wait for the souls of the dying, and that they time their eerie cries in unison with the sufferer's
struggling breath. If they can catch the fleeing soul when it leaves the body, they instantly flutter
away chittering in daemoniac laughter; but if they fail, they subside gradually into a disappointed
silence.
These tales, of course, are obsolete and ridiculous; because they come down from very old
times. Dunwich is indeed ridiculously old--older by far than any of the communities within thirty
miles of it. South of the village one may still spy the cellar walls and chimney of the ancient Bishop
house, which was built before 1700; whilst the ruins of the mill at the falls, built in 1806, form the
most modern piece of architecture to be seen. Industry did not flourish here, and the nineteenth-
century factory movement proved short-lived. Oldest of all are the great rings of rough-hewn stone
columns on the hilltops, but these are more generally attributed to the Indians than to the settlers.
Deposits of skulls and bones, found within these circles and around the sizeable table-like rock on
Sentinel Hill, sustain the popular belief that such spots were once the burial-places of the
Pocumtucks; even though many ethnologists, disregarding the absurd improbability of such a theory,
persist in believing the remains Caucasian.
II.
It was in the township of Dunwich, in a large and partly inhabited farmhouse set against a hillside
four miles from the village and a mile and a half from any other dwelling, that Wilbur Whateley was
born at 5 a.m. on Sunday, the second of February, 1913. This date was recalled because it was
Candlemas, which people in Dunwich curiously observe under another name; and because the noises
in the hills had sounded, and all the dogs of the countryside had barked persistently, throughout the
night before. Less worthy of notice was the fact that the mother was one of the decadent Whateleys,
a somewhat deformed, unattractive albino woman of thirty-five, living with an aged and half-insane
father about whom the most frightful tales of wizardry had been whispered in his youth. Lavinia
Whateley had no known husband, but according to the custom of the region made no attempt to
disavow the child; concerning the other side of whose ancestry the country folk might--and did--
speculate as widely as they chose. On the contrary, she seemed strangely proud of the dark, goatish-
looking infant who formed such a contrast to her own sickly and pink-eyed albinism, and was heard to
mutter many curious prophecies about its unusual powers and tremendous future.
Lavinia was one who would be apt to mutter such things, for she was a lone creature given to
wandering amidst thunderstorms in the hills and trying to read the great odorous books which her
father had inherited through two centuries of Whateleys, and which were fast falling to pieces with
age and wormholes. She had never been to school, but was filled with disjointed scraps of ancient
lore that Old Whateley had taught her. The remote farmhouse had always been feared because of Old
Whateley's reputation for black magic, and the unexplained death by violence of Mrs Whateley when
Lavinia was twelve years old had not helped to make the place popular. Isolated among strange
influences, Lavinia was fond of wild and grandiose day-dreams and singular occupations; nor was
her leisure much taken up by household cares in a home from which all standards of order and
cleanliness had long since disappeared.
There was a hideous screaming which echoed above even the hill noises and the dogs' barking
on the night Wilbur was born, but no known doctor or midwife presided at his coming. Neighbours
knew nothing of him till a week afterward, when Old Whateley drove his sleigh through the snow
into DunwichVillage and discoursed incoherently to the group of loungers at Osborne's general
store. There seemed to be a change in the old man--an added element of furtiveness in the clouded
brain which subtly transformed him from an object to a subject of fear--though he was not one to be
perturbed by any common family event. Amidst it all he showed some trace of the pride later noticed
in his daughter, and what he said of the child's paternity was remembered by many of his hearers
years afterward.
'I dun't keer what folks think--ef Lavinny's boy looked like his pa, he wouldn't look like nothin' ye
expeck. Ye needn't think the only folks is the folks hereabouts. Lavinny's read some, an' has seed
some things the most o' ye only tell abaout. I calc'late her man is as good a husban' as ye kin find this
side of Aylesbury; an' ef ye knowed as much abaout the hills as I dew, ye wouldn't ast no better
church weddin' nor her'n. Let me tell ye suthin--some day yew folks'll hear a child o' Lavinny's a-
callin' its father's name on the top o' Sentinel Hill!'
The only person who saw Wilbur during the first month of his life were old Zechariah Whateley,
of the undecayed Whateleys, and Earl Sawyer's common-law wife, Mamie Bishop. Mamie's visit was
frankly one of curiosity, and her subsequent tales did justice to her observations; but Zechariah came
to lead a pair of Alderney cows which Old Whateley had bought of his son Curtis. This marked the
beginning of a course of cattle-buying on the part of small Wilbur's family which ended only in 1928,
when the Dunwich horror came and went; yet at no time did the ramshackle 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 farm-house, and they
could never find more than ten or twelve anaemic, bloodless-looking specimens. Evidently some
blight or distemper, perhaps sprung from the unwholesome pasturage or the diseased fungi and
timbers of the filthy barn, caused a heavy mortality amongst the Whateley animals. Odd wounds or
sores, having something of the aspect of incisions, seemed to afflict the visible cattle; and once or
twice during the earlier months certain callers fancied they could discern similar sores about the
throats of the grey, unshaven old man and his slattemly, crinkly-haired albino daughter.
In the spring after Wilbur's birth Lavinia resumed her customary rambles in the hills, bearing in
her misproportioned arms the swarthy child. Public interest in the Whateleys subsided after most of
the country folk had seen the baby, and no one bothered to comment on the swift development which
that newcomer seemed every day to exhibit. Wilbur's growth was indeed phenomenal, for within
three months of his birth he had attained a size and muscular power not usually found in infants under
a full year of age. His motions and even his vocal sounds showed a restraint and deliberateness
highly peculiar in an infant, and no one was really unprepared when, at seven months, he began to
walk unassisted, with falterings which another month was sufficient to remove.
It was somewhat after this time--on Hallowe'en--that a great blaze was seen at midnight on the top
of Sentinel Hill where the old table-like stone stands amidst its tumulus of ancient bones.
Considerable talk was started when Silas Bishop--of the undecayed Bishops--mentioned having seen
the boy running sturdily up that hill ahead of his mother about an hour before the blaze was remarked.
Silas was rounding up a stray heifer, but he nearly forgot his mission when he fleetingly spied the
two figures in the dim light of his lantern. They darted almost noiselessly through the underbrush,
and the astonished watcher seemed to think they were entirely unclothed. Afterwards he could not be
sure about the boy, who may have had some kind of a fringed belt and a pair of dark trunks or trousers
on. Wilbur was never subsequently seen alive and conscious without complete and tightly buttoned
attire, the disarrangement or threatened disarrangement of which always seemed to fill him with
anger and alarm. His contrast with his squalid mother and grandfather in this respect was thought very
notable until the horror of 1928 suggested the most valid of reasons.
The next January gossips were mildly interested in the fact that 'Lavinny's black brat' had
commenced to talk, and at the age of only eleven months. His speech was somewhat remarkable both
because of its difference from the ordinary accents of the region, and because it displayed a freedom
from infantile lisping of which many children of three or four might well be proud. The boy was not
talkative, yet when he spoke he seemed to reflect some elusive element wholly unpossessed by
Dunwich and its denizens. The strangeness did not reside in what he said, or even in the simple
idioms he used; but seemed vaguely linked with his intonation or with the internal organs that
produced the spoken sounds. His facial aspect, too, was remarkable for its maturity; for though he
shared his mother's and grandfather's chinlessness, his firm and precociously shaped nose united
with the expression of his large, dark, almost Latin eyes to give him an air of quasi-adulthood and
well-nigh preternatural intelligence. He was, however, exceedingly ugly despite his appearance of
brilliancy; there being something almost goatish or animalistic about his thick lips, large-pored,
yellowish skin, coarse crinkly hair, and oddly elongated ears. He was soon disliked even more
decidedly than his mother and grandsire, and all conjectures about him were spiced with references
to the bygone magic of Old Whateley, and how the hills once shook when he shrieked the dreadful
name of Yog-Sothoth in the midst of a circle of stones with a great book open in his arms before him.
Dogs abhorred the boy, and he was always obliged to take various defensive measures against their
barking menace.
III.
Meanwhile Old Whateley continued to buy cattle without measurably increasing the size of his
herd. He also cut timber and began to repair the unused parts of his house--a spacious, peak-roofed
affair whose rear end was buried entirely in the rocky hillside, and whose three least-ruined ground-
floor rooms had always been sufficient for himself and his daughter.
There must have been prodigious reserves of strength in the old man to enable him to accomplish
so much hard labour; and though he still babbled dementedly at times, his carpentry seemed to show
the effects of sound calculation. It had already begun as soon as Wilbur was born, when one of the
many tool sheds had been put suddenly in order, clapboarded, and fitted with a stout fresh lock. Now,
in restoring the abandoned upper storey of the house, he was a no less thorough craftsman. His mania
showed itself only in his tight boarding-up of all the windows in the reclaimed section--though many
declared that it was a crazy thing to bother with the reclamation at all.
Less inexplicable was his fitting up of another downstairs room for his new grandson--a room
which several callers saw, though no one was ever admitted to the closely-boarded upper storey.
This chamber he lined with tall, firm shelving, along which he began gradually to arrange, in
apparently careful order, all the rotting ancient books and parts of books which during his own day
had been heaped promiscuously in odd corners of the various rooms.
'I made some use of 'em,' he would say as he tried to mend a torn black-letter page with paste
prepared on the rusty kitchen stove, 'but the boy's fitten to make better use of 'em. He'd orter hev 'em
as well so as he kin, for they're goin' to be all of his larnin'.'
When Wilbur was a year and seven months old--in September of 1914--his size and
accomplishments were almost alarming. He had grown as large as a child of four, and was a fluent
and incredibly intelligent talker. He ran freely about the fields and hills, and accompanied his mother
on all her wanderings. At home he would pore diligently over the queer pictures and charts in his
grandfather's books, while Old Whateley would instruct and catechize him through long, hushed
afternoons. By this time the restoration of the house was finished, and those who watched it
wondered why one of the upper windows had been made into a 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
synchronized with bursts of flame--'them witch Whateleys' doin's'--from the summit of Sentinel Hill.
Wilbur was growing up uncannily, so that he looked like a boy of ten as he entered his fourth year.
He read avidly by himself now; but talked much less than formerly. A settled taciturnity was
absorbing him, and for the first time people began to speak specifically of the dawning look of evil
in his goatish face. He would sometimes mutter an unfamiliar jargon, and chant in bizarre rhythms
which chilled the listener with a sense of unexplainable terror. The aversion displayed towards him
by dogs had now become a matter of wide remark, and he was obliged to carry a pistol in order to
traverse the countryside in safety. His occasional use of the weapon did not enhance his popularity
amongst the owners of canine guardians.
The few callers at the house would often find Lavinia alone on the ground floor, while odd cries
and footsteps resounded in the boarded-up second storey. She would never tell what her father and
the boy were doing up there, though once she turned pale and displayed an abnormal degree of fear
when a jocose fish-pedlar tried the locked door leading to the stairway. That pedlar told the store
loungers at DunwichVillage that he thought he heard a horse stamping on that floor above. The
loungers reflected, thinking of the door and runway, and of the cattle that so swiftly disappeared.
Then they shuddered as they recalled tales of Old Whateley's youth, and of the strange things that are
called out of the earth when a bullock is sacrificed at the proper time to certain heathen gods. It had
for some time been noticed that dogs had begun to hate and fear the whole Whateley place as
violently as they hated and feared young Wilbur personally.
In 1917 the war came, and Squire Sawyer Whateley, as chairman of the local draft board, had hard
work finding a quota of young Dunwich men fit even to be sent to development camp. The
government, alarmed at such signs of wholesale regional decadence, sent several officers and
medical experts to investigate; conducting a survey which New England newspaper readers may still
recall. It was the publicity attending this investigation which set reporters on the track of the
Whateleys, and caused the Boston Globe and Arkham Advertiser to print flamboyant Sunday stories
of young Wilbur's precociousness, Old Whateley's black magic, and the shelves of strange books,
the sealed second storey of the ancient farmhouse, and the weirdness of the whole region and its hill
noises. Wilbur was four and a half then, and looked like a lad of fifteen. His lips and cheeks were
fuzzy with a coarse dark down, and his voice had begun to break.
Earl Sawyer went out to the Whateley place with both sets of reporters and camera men, and
called their attention to the queer stench which now seemed to trickle down from the sealed upper
spaces. It was, he said, exactly like a smell he had found in the toolshed abandoned when the house
was finally repaired; and like the faint odours which he sometimes thought he caught near the stone
circle on the mountains. Dunwich folk read the stories when they appeared, and grinned over the
obvious mistakes. They wondered, too, why the writers made so much of the fact that Old Whateley
always paid for his cattle in gold pieces of extremely ancient date. The Whateleys had received their
visitors with ill-concealed distaste, though they did not dare court further publicity by a violent
resistance or refusal to talk.
IV.
For a decade the annals of the Whateleys sink indistinguishably into the general life of a morbid
community used to their queer ways and hardened to their May Eve and All-Hallows orgies. Twice a
year they would light fires on the top of Sentinel Hill, at which times the mountain rumblings would
recur with greater and greater violence; while at all seasons there were strange and portentous
doings at the lonely farm-house. In the course of time callers professed to hear sounds in the sealed
upper storey even when all the family were downstairs, and they wondered how swiftly or how
lingeringly a cow or bullock was usually sacrificed. There was talk of a complaint to the Society for
the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals but nothing ever came of it, since Dunwich folk are never
anxious to call the outside world's attention to themselves.
About 1923, when Wilbur was a boy of ten whose mind, voice, stature, and bearded face gave all
the impressions of maturity, a second great siege of carpentry went on at the old house. It was all
inside the sealed upper part, and from bits of discarded lumber people concluded that the youth and
his grandfather had knocked out all the partitions and even removed the attic floor, leaving only one
vast open void between the ground storey and the peaked roof. They had torn down the great central
chimney, too, and fitted the rusty range with a flimsy outside tin stove-pipe.
In the spring after this event Old Whateley noticed the growing number of whippoorwills that
would come out of Cold Spring Glen to chirp under his window at night. He seemed to regard the
circumstance as one of great significance, and told the loungers at Osborn's that he thought his time
had almost come.
'They whistle jest in tune with my breathin' naow,' he said, 'an' I guess they're gittin' ready to ketch
my soul. They know it's a-goin' aout, an' dun't calc'late to miss it. Yew'll know, boys, arter I'm gone,
whether they git me er not. Ef they dew, they'll keep up a-singin' an' laffin' till break o' day. Ef they
dun't they'll kinder quiet daown like. I expeck them an' the souls they hunts fer hev some pretty tough
tussles sometimes.'
On Lammas Night, 1924, Dr Houghton of Aylesbury was hastily summoned by Wilbur Whateley,
who had lashed his one remaining horse through the darkness and telephoned from Osborn's in the
village. He found Old Whateley in a very grave state, with a cardiac action and stertorous breathing
that told of an end not far off. The shapeless albino daughter and oddly bearded grandson stood by
the bedside, whilst from the vacant abyss overhead there came a disquieting suggestion of rhythmical
surging or lapping, as of the waves on some level beach. The doctor, though, was chiefly disturbed
by the chattering night birds outside; a seemingly limitless legion of whippoorwills that cried their
endless message in repetitions timed diabolically to the wheezing gasps of the dying man. It was
uncanny and unnatural--too much, thought Dr Houghton, like the whole of the region he had entered
so reluctantly in response to the urgent call.
Towards one o'clock Old Whateley gained consciousness, and interrupted his wheezing to choke
out a few words to his grandson.
'More space, Willy, more space soon. Yew grows--an' that grows faster. It'll be ready to serve ye
soon, boy. Open up the gates to Yog-Sothoth with the long chant that ye'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 MiskatonicUniversity called upon him one day
and departed pale and puzzled, he was fully six and three-quarters feet tall.
Through all the years Wilbur had treated his half-deformed albino mother with a growing
contempt, finally forbidding her to go to the hills with him on May Eve and Hallowmass; and in 1926
the poor creature complained to Mamie Bishop of being afraid of him.
'They's more abaout him as I knows than I kin tell ye, Mamie,' she said, 'an' naowadays they's more
nor what I know myself. I vaow afur Gawd, I dun't know what he wants nor what he's a-tryin' to dew.'
That Hallowe'en the hill noises sounded louder than ever, and fire burned on Sentinel Hill as
usual; but people paid more attention to the rhythmical screaming of vast flocks of unnaturally belated
whippoorwills which seemed to be assembled near the unlighted Whateley farmhouse. After
midnight their shrill notes burst into a kind of pandemoniac cachinnation which filled all the
countryside, and not until dawn did they finally quiet down. Then they vanished, hurrying southward
where they were fully a month overdue. What this meant, no one could quite be certain till later.
None of the countryfolk seemed to have died--but poor Lavinia Whateley, the twisted albino, was
never seen again.
In the summer of 1927 Wilbur repaired two sheds in the farmyard and began moving his books and
effects out to them. Soon afterwards Earl Sawyer told the loungers at Osborn's that more carpentry
was going on in the Whateley farmhouse. Wilbur was closing all the doors and windows on the
ground floor, and seemed to be taking out partitions as he and his grandfather had done upstairs four
years before. He was living in one of the sheds, and Sawyer thought he seemed unusually worried
and tremulous. People generally suspected him of knowing something about his mother's
disappearance, and very few ever approached his neighbourhood now. His height had increased to
more than seven feet, and showed no signs of ceasing its development.
V.
The following winter brought an event no less strange than Wilbur's first trip outside the
Dunwich region. Correspondence with the Widener Library at Harvard, the Bibliothque Nationale
in Paris, the British Museum, the University of Buenos Ayres, and the Library of Miskatonic
University at Arkham had failed to get him the loan of a book he desperately wanted; so at length he
set out in person, shabby, dirty, bearded, and uncouth of dialect, to consult the copy at Miskatonic,
which was the nearest to him geographically. Almost eight feet tall, and carrying a cheap new valise
from Osborne's general store, this dark and goatish gargoyle appeared one day in Arkham in quest of
the dreaded volume kept under lock and key at the college library--the hideous Necronomicon of the
mad Arab Abdul Alhazred in Olaus Wormius' Latin version, as printed in Spain in the seventeenth
century. He had never seen a city before, but had no thought save to find his way to the university
grounds; where indeed, he passed heedlessly by the great white-fanged watchdog that barked with
unnatural fury and enmity, and tugged frantically at its stout 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 had trod earth's fields, and where They still tread them,
and why no one can behold Them as They tread. By Their smell can men sometimes know Them near,
but of Their semblance can no man know, saving only in the features of those They have begotten on
mankind; and of those are there many sorts, differing in likeness from man's truest eidolon to that
shape without sight or substance which is Them. They walk unseen and foul in lonely places where
the Words have been spoken and the Rites howled through at their Seasons. The wind gibbers with
Their voices, and the earth mutters with Their consciousness. They bend the forest and crush the
city, yet may not forest or city behold the hand that smites. Kadath in the cold waste hath known Them,
and what man knows Kadath? The ice desert of the South and the sunken isles of Ocean hold stones
whereon Their seal is engraver, but who 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. I! Shub-Niggurath! As a foulness shall ye know Them. Their hand is at your throats, yet ye
see Them not; and Their habitation is even one with your guarded threshold. Yog-Sothoth is the key
to the gate, whereby the spheres meet. Man rules now where They ruled once; They shall soon rule
where man rules now. After summer is winter, after winter summer. They wait patient and potent, for
here shall They reign again.
Dr. 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, en' it 'ud be a mortal sin to let a red-tape rule hold me up.
Let me take it along, Sir, an' I'll swar they wun't nobody know the difference. I dun't need to tell ye I'll
take good keer of it. It wan't me that put this Dee copy in the shape it is...'
He stopped as he saw firm denial on the librarian's face, and his own goatish features grew
crafty. Armitage, half-ready to tell him he might make a copy of what parts he needed, thought
suddenly of the possible consequences and checked himself. There was too much responsibility in
giving such a being the key to such blasphemous outer spheres. Whateley saw how things stood, and
tried to answer lightly.
'Wal, all right, ef ye feel that way abaout it. Maybe Harvard won't be so fussy as yew be.' And
without saying more he rose and strode out of the building, stooping at each doorway.
Armitage heard the savage yelping of the great watchdog, and studied Whateley's gorilla-like
lope as he crossed the bit of campus visible from the window. He thought of the wild tales he had
heard, and recalled the old Sunday stories in the Advertiser; these things, and the lore he had picked
up from Dunwich rustics and villagers during his one visit there. Unseen things not of earth--or at
least not of tridimensional earth--rushed foetid and horrible through New England's glens, and
brooded obscenely on the mountain tops. Of this he had long felt certain. Now he seemed to sense
the close presence of some terrible part of the intruding horror, and to glimpse a hellish advance in
the black dominion of the ancient and once passive nightmare. He locked away the Necronomicon
with a shudder of disgust, but the room still reeked with an unholy and unidentifiable stench. 'As a
foulness shall ye know them,' he quoted. Yes--the odour was the same as that which had sickened him
at the Whateley farmhouse less than three years before. He thought of Wilbur, goatish and ominous,
once again, and laughed mockingly at the village rumours of his parentage.
'Inbreeding?' Armitage muttered half-aloud to himself. 'Great God, what simpletons! Show them
Arthur Machen's Great God Pan and they'll think it a common Dunwich scandal! But what thing--what
cursed shapeless influence on or off this three-dimensional earth--was Wilbur Whateley's father?
Born on Candlemas--nine months after May Eve of 1912, when the talk about the queer earth noises
reached clear to Arkham--what walked on the mountains that May night? What Roodmas horror
fastened itself on the world in half-human flesh and blood?'
During the ensuing weeks Dr Armitage set about to collect all possible data on Wilbur Whateley
and the formless presences around Dunwich. He got in communication with Dr Houghton of
Aylesbury, who had attended Old Whateley in his last illness, and found much to ponder over in the
grandfather's last words as quoted by the physician. A visit to DunwichVillage failed to bring out
much that was new; but a close survey of the Necronomicon, in those parts which Wilbur had sought
so avidly, seemed to supply new and terrible clues to the nature, methods, and desires of the strange
evil so vaguely threatening this planet. Talks with several students of archaic lore in Boston, and
letters to many others elsewhere, gave him a growing amazement which passed slowly through
varied degrees of alarm to a state of really acute spiritual fear. As the summer drew on he felt dimly
that something ought to be done about the lurking terrors of the upper Miskatonic valley, and about
the monstrous being known to the human world as Wilbur Whateley.
VI.
The Dunwich horror itself came between Lammas and the equinox in 1928, and Dr Armitage was
among those who witnessed its monstrous prologue. He had heard, meanwhile, of Whateley's
grotesque trip to Cambridge, and of his frantic efforts to borrow or copy from the Necronomicon at
the Widener Library. Those efforts had been in vain, since Armitage had issued warnings of the
keenest intensity to all librarians having charge of the dreaded volume. Wilbur had been shockingly
nervous at Cambridge; anxious for the book, yet almost equally anxious to get home again, as if he
feared the results of being away long.
Early in August the half-expected outcome developed, and in the small hours of the third Dr
Armitage was awakened suddenly by the wild, fierce cries of the savage watchdog on the college
campus. Deep and terrible, the snarling, half-mad growls and barks continued; always in mounting
volume, but with hideously significant pauses. Then there rang out a scream from a wholly different
throat--such a scream as roused half the sleepers of Arkham and haunted their dreams ever
afterwards--such a scream as could come from no being born of earth, or wholly of earth.
Armitage, hastening into some clothing and rushing across the street and lawn to the college
buildings, saw that others were ahead of him; and heard the echoes of a burglar-alarm still shrilling
from the library. An open window showed black and gaping in the moonlight. What had come had
indeed completed its entrance; for the barking and the screaming, now fast fading into a mixed low
growling and moaning, proceeded unmistakably from within. Some instinct warned Armitage that what
was taking place was not a thing for unfortified eyes to see, so he brushed back the crowd with
authority as he unlocked the vestibule door. Among the others he saw Professor Warren Rice and Dr
Francis Morgan, men to whom he had told some of his conjectures and misgivings; and these two he
motioned to accompany him inside. The inward sounds, except for a watchful, droning whine from
the dog, had by this time quite subsided; but Armitage now perceived with a sudden start that a loud
chorus of whippoorwills among the shrubbery had commenced a damnably rhythmical piping, as if in
unison with the last breaths of a dying man.
The building was full of a frightful stench which Dr Armitage knew too well, and the three men
rushed across the hall to the small genealogical reading-room whence the low whining came. For a
second nobody dared to turn on the light, then Armitage summoned up his courage and snapped the
switch. One of the three--it is not certain which--shrieked aloud at what sprawled before them among
disordered tables and overturned chairs. Professor Rice declares that he wholly lost consciousness
for an instant, though he did not stumble or fall.
The thing that lay half-bent on its side in a foetid pool of greenish-yellow ichor and tarry
stickiness was almost nine feet tall, and the dog had torn off all the clothing and some of the skin. It
was not quite dead, but twitched silently and spasmodically while its chest heaved in monstrous
unison with the mad piping of the expectant whippoorwills outside. Bits of shoe-leather and
fragments of apparel were scattered about the room, and just inside the window an empty canvas sack
lay where it had evidently been thrown. Near the central desk a revolver had fallen, a dented but
undischarged cartridge later explaining why it had not been fired. The thing itself, however,
crowded out all other images at the time. It would be trite and not wholly accurate to say that no
human pen could describe it, but one may properly say that it could not be vividly visualized by
anyone whose ideas of aspect and contour are too closely bound up with the common life-forms of
this planet and of the three known dimensions. It was partly human, beyond a doubt, with very manlike
hands and head, and the goatish, chinless face had the stamp of the Whateley's upon it. But the torso
and lower parts of the body were teratologically fabulous, so that only generous clothing could ever
have enabled it to walk on earth unchallenged or uneradicated.
Above the waist it was semi-anthropomorphic; though its chest, where the dog's rending paws
still rested watchfully, had the leathery, reticulated hide of a crocodile or alligator. The back was
piebald with yellow and black, and dimly suggested the squamous covering of certain snakes. Below
the waist, though, it was the worst; for here all human resemblance left off and sheer phantasy began.
The skin was thickly covered with coarse black fur, and from the abdomen a score of long greenish-
grey tentacles with red sucking mouths protruded limply.
Their arrangement was odd, and seemed to follow the symmetries of some cosmic geometry
unknown to earth or the solar system. On each of the hips, deep set in a kind of pinkish, ciliated orbit,
was what seemed to be a rudimentary eye; whilst in lieu of a tail there depended a kind of trunk or
feeler with purple annular markings, and with many evidences of being an undeveloped mouth or
throat. The limbs, save for their black fur, roughly resembled the hind legs of prehistoric earth's
giant saurians, and terminated in ridgy-veined pads that were neither hooves nor claws. When the
thing breathed, its tail and tentacles rhythmically changed colour, as if from some circulatory cause
normal to the non-human greenish tinge, whilst in the tail it was manifest as a yellowish appearance
which alternated with a sickly grayish-white in the spaces between the purple rings. Of genuine
blood there was none; only the foetid greenish-yellow ichor which trickled along the painted floor
beyond the radius of the stickiness, and left a curious discoloration behind it.
As the presence of the three men seemed to rouse the dying thing, it began to mumble without
turning or raising its head. Dr Armitage made no written record of its mouthings, but asserts
confidently that nothing in English was uttered. At first the syllables defied all correlation with any
speech of earth, but towards the last there came some disjointed fragments evidently taken from the
Necronomicon, that monstrous blasphemy in quest of which the thing had perished. These fragments,
as Armitage recalls them, ran something like 'N'gai, n'gha'ghaa, bugg-shoggog, y'hah: Yog-Sothoth,
Yog-Sothoth...' They trailed off into nothingness as the whippoorwills shrieked in rhythmical
crescendos of unholy anticipation.
Then came a halt in the gasping, and the dog raised its head in a long, lugubrious howl. A change
came over the yellow, goatish face of the prostrate thing, and the great black eyes fell in appallingly.
Outside the window the shrilling of the whippoorwills had suddenly ceased, and above the murmurs
of the gathering crowd there came the sound of a panic-struck whirring and fluttering. Against the
moon vast clouds of feathery watchers rose and raced from sight, frantic at that which they had
sought for prey.
All at once the dog started up abruptly, gave a frightened bark, and leaped nervously out of the
window by which it had entered. A cry rose from the crowd, and Dr Armitage shouted to the men
outside that no one must be admitted till the police or medical examiner came. He was thankful that
the windows were just too high to permit of peering in, and drew the dark curtains carefully down
over each one. By this time two policemen had arrived; and Dr Morgan, meeting them in the
vestibule, was urging them for their own sakes to postpone entrance to the stench-filled reading-
room till the examiner came and the prostrate thing could be covered up.
Meanwhile frightful changes were taking place on the floor. One need not describe the kind and
rate of shrinkage and disintegration that occurred before the eyes of Dr Armitage and Professor
Rice; but it is permissible to say that, aside from the external appearance of face and hands, the really
human element in Wilbur Whateley must have been very small. When the medical examiner came,
there was only a sticky whitish mass on the painted boards, and the monstrous odour had nearly
disappeared. Apparently Whateley had had no skull or bony skeleton; at least, in any true or stable
sense. He had taken somewhat after his unknown father.
VII.
Yet all this was only the prologue of the actual Dunwich horror. Formalities were gone through
by bewildered officials, abnormal details were duly kept from press and public, and men were sent to
Dunwich and Aylesbury to look up property and notify any who might be heirs of the late Wilbur
Whateley. They found the countryside in great agitation, both because of the growing rumblings
beneath the domed hills, and because of the unwonted stench and the surging, lapping sounds which
came increasingly from the great empty shell formed by Whateley's boarded-up farmhouse. Earl
Sawyer, who tended the horse and cattle during Wilbur's absence, had developed a woefully acute
case of nerves. The officials devised excuses not to enter the noisome boarded place; and were glad
to confine their survey of the deceased's living quarters, the newly mended sheds, to a single visit.
They filed a ponderous report at the courthouse in Aylesbury, and litigations concerning heirship are
said to be still in progress amongst the innumerable Whateleys, decayed and undecayed, of the upper
Miskatonic valley.
An almost interminable manuscript in strange characters, written in a huge ledger and adjudged a
sort of diary because of the spacing and the variations in ink and penmanship, presented a baffling
puzzle to those who found it on the old bureau which served as its owner's desk. After a week of
debate it was sent to MiskatonicUniversity, together with the deceased's collection of strange books,
for study and possible translation; but even the best linguists soon saw that it was not likely to be
unriddled with ease. No trace of the ancient gold with which Wilbur and Old Whateley had always
paid their debts has yet been discovered.
It was in the dark of September ninth that the horror broke loose. The hill noises had been very
pronounced during the evening, and dogs barked frantically all night. Early risers on the tenth noticed
a peculiar stench in the air. About seven o'clock Luther Brown, the hired boy at George Corey's,
between Cold Spring Glen and the village, rushed frenziedly back from his morning trip to Ten-Acre
Meadow with the cows. He was almost convulsed with fright as he stumbled into the kitchen; and in
the yard outside the no less frightened herd were pawing and lowing pitifully, having followed the
boy back in the panic they shared with him. Between gasps Luther tried to stammer out his tale to Mrs
Corey.
'Up thar in the rud beyont the glen, Mis' Corey--they's suthin' ben thar! It smells like thunder, an'
all the bushes an' little trees is pushed back from the rud like they'd a haouse ben moved along of it.
An' that ain't the wust, nuther. They's prints in the rud, Mis' Corey--great raound prints as big as
barrel-heads, all sunk dawon deep like a elephant had ben along, only they's a sight more nor four
feet could make! I looked at one or two afore I run, an' I see every one was covered with lines
spreadin' aout from one place, like as if big palm-leaf fans--twict or three times as big as any they is-
-hed of ben paounded dawon into the rud. An' the smell was awful, like what it is around Wizard
Whateley's ol' haouse...'
Here he faltered, and seemed to shiver afresh with the fright that had sent him flying home. Mrs
Corey, unable to extract more information, began telephoning the neighbours; thus starting on its
rounds the overture of panic that heralded the major terrors. When she got Sally Sawyer,
housekeeper at Seth Bishop's, the nearest place to Whateley's, it became her turn to listen instead of
transmit; for Sally's boy Chauncey, who slept poorly, had been up on the hill towards Whateley's, and
had dashed back in terror after one look at the place, and at the pasturage where Mr Bishop's cows
had been left out all night.
'Yes, Mis' Corey,' came Sally's tremulous voice over the party wire, 'Cha'ncey he just come back
a-postin', and couldn't half talk fer bein' scairt! He says Ol' Whateley's house is all bowed up, with
timbers scattered raound like they'd ben dynamite inside; only the bottom floor ain't through, but is all
covered with a kind o' tar-like stuff that smells awful an' drips daown offen the aidges onto the
graoun' whar the side timbers is blowed away. An' they's awful kinder marks in the yard, tew--great
raound marks bigger raound than a hogshead, an' all sticky with stuff like is on the browed-up haouse.
Cha'ncey he says they leads off into the medders, whar a great swath wider'n a barn is matted daown,
an' all the stun walls tumbled every whichway wherever it goes.
'An' he says, says he, Mis' Corey, as haow he sot to look fer Seth's caows, frightened ez he was
an' faound 'em in the upper pasture nigh the Devil's Hop Yard in an awful shape. Haff on 'em's clean
gone, an' nigh haff o' them that's left is sucked most dry o' blood, with sores on 'em like they's ben on
Whateleys cattle ever senct Lavinny's black brat was born. Seth hes gone aout naow to look at 'em,
though I'll vaow he won't keer ter git very nigh Wizard Whateley's! Cha'ncey didn't look keerful ter
see whar the big matted-daown swath led arter it leff the pasturage, but he says he thinks it p'inted
towards the glen rud to the village.
'I tell ye, Mis' Corey, they's suthin' abroad as hadn't orter be abroad, an' I for one think that black
Wilbur Whateley, as come to the bad end he deserved, is at the bottom of the breedin' of it. He wa'n't
all human hisself, I 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' las' night, an' towards mornin' Cha'ncey he heered the whippoorwills so
laoud in Col' Spring Glen he couldn't sleep nun. Then he thought he heered another faint-like saound
over towards Wizard Whateley's--a kinder rippin' or tearin' o' wood, like some big box er crate was
bein' opened fur off. What with this an' that, he didn't git to sleep at all till sunup, an' no sooner was he
up this mornin', but he's got to go over to Whateley's an' see what's the matter. He see enough I tell
ye, Mis' Corey! This dun't mean no good, an' I think as all the men-folks ought to git up a party an' do
suthin'. I know suthin' awful's abaout, an' feel my time is nigh, though only Gawd knows jest what it is.
'Did your Luther take accaount o' whar them big tracks led tew? No? Wal, Mis' Corey, ef they
was on the glen rud this side o' the glen, an' ain't got to your haouse yet, I calc'late they must go into
the glen itself. They would do that. I 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 dawon thar ef ye stand in the right place,
atween the rock falls an' Bear's Den.'
By that noon fully three-quarters of the men and boys of Dunwich were trooping over the roads
and meadows between the newmade Whateley ruins and Cold Spring Glen, examining in horror the
vast, monstrous prints, the maimed Bishop cattle, the strange, noisome wreck of the farmhouse, and
the bruised, matted vegetation of the fields and roadside. Whatever had burst loose upon the world
had assuredly gone down into the great sinister ravine; for all the trees on the banks were bent and
broken, and a great avenue had been gouged in the precipice-hanging underbrush. It was as though a
house, launched by an avalanche, had slid down through the tangled growths of the almost vertical
slope. From below no sound came, but only a distant, undefinable foetor; and it is not to be wondered
at that the men preferred to stay on the edge and argue, rather than descend and beard the unknown
Cyclopean horror in its lair. Three dogs that were with the party had barked furiously at first, but
seemed cowed and reluctant when near the glen. Someone telephoned the news to the Aylesbury
Transcript; but the editor, accustomed to wild tales from Dunwich, did no more than concoct a
humorous paragraph about it; an item soon afterwards reproduced by the Associated Press.
That night everyone went home, and every house and barn was barricaded as stoutly as possible.
Needless to say, no cattle were allowed to remain in open pasturage. About two in the morning a
frightful stench and the savage barking of the dogs awakened the household at Elmer Frye's, on the
eastern edge of Cold Spring Glen, and all agreed that they could hear a sort of muffled swishing or
lapping sound from somewhere outside. Mrs Frye proposed telephoning the neighbours, and Elmer
was about to agree when the noise of splintering wood burst in upon their deliberations. It came,
apparently, from the barn; and was quickly followed by a hideous screaming and stamping amongst
the cattle. The dogs slavered and crouched close to the feet of the fear-numbed family. Frye lit a
lantern through force of habit, but knew it would be death to go out into that black farmyard. The
children and the women-folk whimpered, kept from screaming by some obscure, vestigial instinct of
defence which told them their lives depended on silence. At last the noise of the cattle subsided to a
pitiful moaning, and a great snapping, crashing, and crackling ensued. The Fryes, huddled together in
the sitting-room, did not dare to move until the last echoes died away far down in Cold Spring Glen.
Then, amidst the dismal moans from the stable and the daemoniac piping of the late whippoorwills in
the glen, Selina Frye tottered to the telephone and spread what news she could of the second phase
of the horror.
The next day all the countryside was in a panic; and cowed, uncommunicative groups came and
went where the fiendish thing had occurred. Two titan swaths of destruction stretched from the glen
to the Frye farmyard, monstrous prints covered the bare patches of ground, and one side of the old
red barn had completely caved in. Of the cattle, only a quarter could be found and identified. Some of
these were in curious fragments, and all that survived had to be shot. Earl Sawyer suggested that help
be asked from Aylesbury or Arkham, but others maintained it would be of no use. Old Zebulon
Whateley, of a branch that hovered about halfway between soundness and decadence, made darkly
wild suggestions about rites that ought to be practiced on the hill-tops. He came of a line where
tradition ran strong, and his memories of chantings in the great stone circles were not altogether
connected with Wilbur and his grandfather.
Darkness fell upon a stricken countryside too passive to organize for real defence. In a few cases
closely related families would band together and watch in the gloom under one roof; but in general
there was only a repetition of the barricading of the night before, and a futile, ineffective gesture of
loading muskets and setting pitchforks handily about. Nothing, however, occurred except some hill
noises; and when the day came there were many who hoped that the new horror had gone as swiftly
as it had come. There were even bold souls who proposed an offensive expedition down in the glen,
though they did not venture to set an actual example to the still reluctant majority.
When night came again the barricading was repeated, though there was less huddling together of
families. In the morning both the Frye and the Seth Bishop households reported excitement among the
dogs and vague sounds and stenches from afar, while early explorers noted with horror a fresh set of
the monstrous tracks in the road skirting Sentinel Hill. As before, the sides of the road showed a
bruising indicative of the blasphemously stupendous bulk of the horror; whilst the conformation of
the tracks seemed to argue a passage in two directions, as if the moving mountain had come from
Cold Spring Glen and returned to it along the same path. At the base of the hill a thirty-foot swath of
crushed shrubbery saplings led steeply upwards, and the seekers gasped when they saw that even the
most perpendicular places did not deflect the inexorable trail. Whatever the horror was, it could
scale a sheer stony cliff of almost complete verticality; and as the investigators climbed round to the
hill's summit by safer routes they saw that the trail ended--or rather, reversed--there.
It was here that the Whateleys used to build their hellish fires and chant their hellish rituals by the
table-like stone on May Eve and Hallowmass. Now that very stone formed the centre of a vast space
thrashed around by the mountainous horror, whilst upon its slightly concave surface was a thick and
foetid deposit of the same tarry stickiness observed on the floor of the ruined Whateley farmhouse
when the horror escaped. Men looked at one another and muttered. Then they looked down the hill.
Apparently the horror had descended by a route much the same as that of its ascent. To speculate was
futile. Reason, logic, and normal ideas of motivation stood confounded. Only old Zebulon, who was
not with the group, could have done justice to the situation or suggested a plausible explanation.
Thursday night began much like the others, but it ended less happily. The whippoorwills in the
glen had screamed with such unusual persistence that many could not sleep, and about 3 A.M. all the
party telephones rang tremulously. Those who took down their receivers heard a fright-mad voice
shriek out, 'Help, oh, my Gawd!...' and some thought a crashing sound followed the breaking off of
the exclamation. There was nothing more. No one dared do anything, and no one knew till morning
whence the call came. Then those who had heard it called everyone on the line, and found that only
the Fryes did not reply. The truth appeared an hour later, when a hastily assembled group of armed
men trudged out to the Frye place at the head of the glen. It was horrible, yet hardly a surprise. There
were more swaths and monstrous prints, but there was no longer any house. It had caved in 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 language both ancient and modern; its very alphabet,
notwithstanding a general resemblance to the heavily-shaded Arabic used in Mesopotamia, being
absolutely unknown to any available authority. The final conclusion of the linguists was that the text
represented an artificial alphabet, giving the effect of a cipher; though none of the usual methods of
cryptographic solution seemed to furnish any clue, even when applied on the basis of every tongue
the writer might conceivably have used. The ancient books taken from Whateley's quarters, while
absorbingly interesting and in several cases promising to open up new and terrible lines of research
among philosophers and men of science, were of no assistance whatever in this matter. One of them,
a heavy tome with an iron clasp, was in another unknown alphabet--this one of a very different cast,
and resembling Sanskrit more than anything else. The old ledger was at length given wholly into the
charge of Dr Armitage, both because of his peculiar interest in the Whateley matter, and because of
his wide linguistic learning and skill in the mystical formulae of antiquity and the middle ages.
Armitage had an idea that the alphabet might be something esoterically used by certain forbidden
cults which have come down from old times, and which have inherited many forms and traditions
from the wizards of the Saracenic world. That question, however, he did not deem vital; since it
would be unnecessary to know the origin of the symbols if, as he suspected, they were used as a
cipher in a modern language. It was his belief that, considering the great amount of text involved, the
writer would scarcely have wished the trouble of using another speech than his own, save perhaps in
certain special formulae and incantations. Accordingly he attacked the manuscript with the
preliminary assumption that the bulk of it was in English.
Dr Armitage knew, from the repeated failures of his colleagues, that the riddle was a deep and
complex one; and that no simple mode of solution could merit even a trial. All through late August he
fortified himself with the mass lore of cryptography; drawing upon the fullest resources of his own
library, and wading night after night amidst the arcana of Trithemius' Poligraphia, Giambattista Porta's
De Furtivis Literarum Notis, De Vigenere's Traite des Chiffres, Falconer's Cryptomenysis Patefacta,
Davys' and Thicknesse's eighteenth-century treatises, and such fairly modern authorities as Blair, van
Marten and Kluber's script itself, and in time became convinced that he had to deal with one of those
subtlest and most ingenious of cryptograms, in which many separate lists of corresponding letters are
arranged like the multiplication table, and the message built up with arbitrary key-words known only
to the initiated. The older authorities seemed rather more helpful than the newer ones, and Armitage
concluded that the code of the manuscript was one of great antiquity, no doubt handed down through a
long line of mystical experimenters. Several times he seemed near daylight, only to be set back by
some unforeseen obstacle. Then, as September approached, the clouds began to clear. Certain
letters, as used in certain parts of the manuscript, emerged definitely and unmistakably; and it became
obvious that the text was indeed in English.
On the evening of September second the last major barrier gave way, and Dr Armitage read for
the first time a continuous passage of Wilbur Whateley's annals. It was in truth a diary, as all had
thought; and it was couched in a style clearly showing the mixed occult erudition and general
illiteracy of the strange being who wrote it. Almost the first long passage that Armitage deciphered,
an entry dated November 26, 1916, proved highly startling and disquieting. It was written, he
remembered, by a child of three and a half who looked like a lad of twelve or thirteen.
Today learned the Aklo for the Sabaoth (it ran), which did not like, it being answerable from the
hill and not from the air. That upstairs more ahead of me than I had thought it would be, and is not like
to have much earth brain. Shot Elam Hutchins's collie Jack when he went to bite me, and Elam says he
would kill me if he dast. I guess he won't. Grandfather kept me saying the Dho formula last night, and
I think I saw the inner city at the 2 magnetic poles. I shall go to those poles when the earth is cleared
off, if I can't break through with the Dho-Hna formula when I commit it. They from the air told me at
Sabbat that it will be years before I can clear off the earth, and I guess grandfather will be dead then,
so I shall have to learn all the angles of the planes and all the formulas between the Yr and the
Nhhngr. They from outside will help, but they cannot take body without human blood. That upstairs
looks it will have the right cast. I can see it a little when I make the Voorish sign or blow the powder
of Ibn Ghazi at it, and it is near like them at May Eve on the Hill. The other face may wear off some. I
wonder how I shall look when the earth is cleared and there are no earth beings on it. He that came
with the Aklo Sabaoth said I may be transfigured there being much of outside to work on.
Morning found Dr Armitage in a cold sweat of terror and a frenzy of wakeful concentration. He
had not left the manuscript all night, but sat at his table under the electric light turning page after page
with shaking hands as fast as he could decipher the cryptic text. He had nervously telephoned his
wife he would not be home, and when she brought him a breakfast from the house he could scarcely
dispose of a mouthful. All that day he read on, now and then halted maddeningly as a reapplication of
the complex key became necessary. Lunch and dinner were brought him, but he ate only the smallest
fraction of either. Toward the middle of the next night he drowsed off in his chair, but soon woke
out of a tangle of nightmares almost as hideous as the truths and menaces to man's existence that he
had uncovered.
On the morning of September fourth Professor Rice and Dr Morgan insisted on seeing him for a
while, and departed trembling and ashen-grey. That evening he went to bed, but slept only fitfully.
Wednesday--the next day--he was back at the manuscript, and began to take copious notes both from
the current sections and from those he had already deciphered. In the small hours of that night he
slept a little in a easy chair in his office, but was at the manuscript again before dawn. Some time
before noon his physician, Dr Hartwell, called to see him and insisted that he cease work. He
refused; intimating that it was of the most vital importance for him to complete the reading of the
diary and promising an explanation in due course of time. That evening, just as twilight fell, he
finished his terrible perusal and sank back exhausted. His wife, bringing his dinner, found him in a
half-comatose state; but he was conscious enough to warn her off with a sharp cry when he saw her
eyes wander toward the notes he had taken. Weakly rising, he gathered up the scribbled papers and
sealed them all in a great envelope, which he immediately placed in his inside coat pocket. He had
sufficient strength to get home, but was so clearly in need of medical aid that Dr Hartwell was
summoned at once. As the doctor put him to bed he could only mutter over and over again, 'But what,
in God's name, can we do?'
Dr Armitage slept, but was partly delirious the next day. He made no explanations to Hartwell, but
in his calmer moments spoke of the imperative need of a long conference with Rice and Morgan. His
wilder wanderings were very startling indeed, including frantic appeals that something in a boarded-
up farmhouse be destroyed, and fantastic references to some plan for the extirpation of the entire
human race and all animal and vegetable life from the earth by some terrible elder race of beings
from another dimension. He would shout that the world was in danger, since the Elder Things wished
to strip it and drag it away from the solar system and cosmos of matter into some other plane or phase
of entity from which it had once fallen, vigintillions of aeons ago. At other times he would call for
the dreaded Necronomicon and the Daemonolatreia of Remigius, in which he seemed hopeful of
finding some formula to check the peril he conjured up.
'Stop them, stop 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 whisky of Dunwich had raised up. Armitage, half stunned, could only telephone
for Rice and Morgan. Far into the night they discussed, and the next day was a whirlwind of
preparation on the part of them all. Armitage knew he would be meddling with terrible powers, yet
saw that there was no other way to annul the deeper and more malign meddling which others had done
before him.
IX.
Friday morning Armitage, Rice, and Morgan set out by motor for Dunwich, arriving at the village
about one in the afternoon. The day was pleasant, but even in the brightest sunlight a kind of quiet
dread and portent seemed to hover about the strangely domed hills and the deep, shadowy ravines of
the stricken region. Now and then on some mountain top a gaunt circle of stones could be glimpsed
against the sky. From the air of hushed fright at Osborn's store they knew something hideous had
happened, and soon learned of the annihilation of the Elmer Frye house and family. Throughout that
afternoon they rode around Dunwich, questioning the natives concerning all that had occurred, and
seeing for themselves with rising pangs of horror the drear Frye ruins with their lingering traces of
the tarry stickiness, the blasphemous tracks in the Frye yard, the wounded Seth Bishop cattle, and the
enormous swaths of disturbed vegetation in various places. The trail up and down Sentinel Hill
seemed to Armitage of almost cataclysmic significance, and he looked long at the sinister altar-like
stone on the summit.
At length the visitors, apprised of a party of State Police which had come from Aylesbury that
morning in response to the first telephone reports of the Frye tragedy, decided to seek out the
officers and compare notes as far as practicable. This, however, they found more easily planned than
performed; since no sign of the party could be found in any direction. There had been five of them in
a car, but now the car stood empty near the ruins in the Frye yard. The natives, all of whom had talked
with the policemen, seemed at first as perplexed as Armitage and his companions. Then old Sam
Hutchins thought of something and turned pale, nudging Fred Farr and pointing to the dank, deep
hollow that yawned close by.
'Gawd,' he gasped, 'I 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 perambuians in
tenebris...The old librarian rehearsed the formulae he had memorized, and clutched the paper
containing the alternative one he had not memorized. He saw that his electric flashlight was in
working order. Rice, beside him, took from a valise a metal sprayer of the sort used in combating
insects; whilst Morgan uncased the big-game rifle on which he 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 north-west. The men from Arkham were undecided what to do. Seeking shelter from the
increasing rainfall beneath one of the few undestroyed Frye outbuildings, they debated the wisdom
of waiting, or of taking the aggressive and going down into the glen in quest of their nameless,
monstrous quarry. The downpour waxed in heaviness, and distant peals of thunder sounded from far
horizons. Sheet lightning shimmered, and then a forky bolt flashed near at hand, as if descending into
the accursed glen itself. The sky grew very dark, and the watchers hoped that the storm would prove
a short, sharp one followed by clear weather.
It was still gruesomely dark when, not much over an hour later, a confused babel of voices
sounded down the road. Another moment brought to view a frightened group of more than a dozen
men, running, shouting, and even whimpering hysterically. Someone in the lead began sobbing out
words, and the Arkham men started violently when those words developed a coherent form.
'Oh, my Gawd, my Gawd,' the voice choked out. 'It's a-goin' agin, an' this time by day! It's aout--it's
aout an' a-movin' this very minute, an' only the Lord knows when it'll be on us all!'
The speaker panted into silence, but another took up his message.
'Nigh on a haour ago Zeb Whateley here heered the 'phone a-ringin', an' it was Mis' Corey,
George's wife, that 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 fust an' look at the graound. It was all mud an' water, an' the sky was dark, an' the rain was
wipin' aout all tracks abaout as fast as could be; but beginnin' at the glen maouth, whar the trees hed
moved, they was still some o' them awful prints big as bar'ls like he seen Monday.'
At this point the first excited speaker interrupted.
'But that ain't the trouble naow--that was only the start. Zeb here was callin' folks up an' everybody
was a-listenin' in when a call from Seth Bishop's cut in. His haousekeeper Sally was carryin' on fit to
kill--she'd jest seed the trees a-bendin' beside the rud, an' says they was a kind o' mushy saound, like a
elephant puffin' an' treadin', a-headin' fer the haouse. Then she up an' spoke suddent of a fearful smell,
an' says her boy Cha'ncey was a-screamin' as haow it was jest like what he smelt up to the Whateley
rewins Monday mornin'. An' the dogs was barkin' an' whinin' awful.
'An' then she let aout a turrible yell, an' says the shed daown the rud had jest caved in like the
storm hed blowed it over, only the wind w'an't strong enough to dew that. Everybody was a-listenin',
an' we could hear lots o' folks on the wire a-gaspin'. All to onct Sally she yelled again, an' says the
front yard picket fence hed just crumbled up, though they wa'n't no sign o' what done it. Then
everybody on the line could hear Cha'ncey an' old Seth Bishop a-yellin' tew, an' Sally was shriekin'
aout that suthin' heavy hed struck the haouse--not lightnin' nor nothin', but suthin' heavy again' the
front, that kep' a-launchin' itself agin an' agin, though ye couldn't see nothin' aout the front winders.
An' then...an' then...'
Lines of fright deepened on every face; and Armitage, shaken as he was, had barely poise enough
to prompt the speaker.
'An' then....Sally she yelled aout, "O help, the haouse is a-cavin' in"...an' on the wire we could
hear a turrible crashin' an' a hull flock o' screaming...jes like when Elmer Frye's place was took, only
wuss...'
The man paused, and another of the crowd spoke.
'That's all--not a saound nor squeak over the 'phone arter that. Jest still-like. We that heerd it got
aout Fords an' wagons an' rounded up as many able-bodied men-folks as we could git, at Corey's
place, an' come up here ter see what yew thought best ter dew. Not but what I think it's the Lord's
jedgment fer our iniquities, that no mortal kin ever set aside.'
Armitage saw that the time for positive action had come, and spoke decisively to the faltering
group of frightened rustics.
'We must follow it, boys.' He made his voice as reassuring as possible. 'I believe there's a chance
of putting it out of business. You men know that those Whateleys were wizards--well, this thing is a
thing of wizardry, and must be put down by the same means. I've seen Wilbur Whateley's diary and
read some of the strange old books he used to read; and I think I know the right kind of spell to recite
to make the thing fade away. Of course, one can't be sure, but we can always take a chance. It's
invisible--I knew it would be--but there's powder in this long-distance sprayer that might make it
show up for a second. Later on we'll try it. It's a frightful thing to have alive, but it isn't as bad as what
Wilbur would have let in if he'd lived longer. You'll never know what the world escaped. Now we've
only this one thing to fight, and it can't multiply. It can, though, do a lot of harm; so we mustn't hesitate
to rid the community of it.
'We must follow it--and the way to begin is to go to the place that has just been wrecked. Let
somebody lead the way--I don't know your roads very well, but I've an idea there might be a shorter
cut across lots. How about it?'
The men shuffled about a moment, and then Earl Sawyer spoke softly, pointing with a grimy
finger through the steadily lessening rain.
'I guess ye kin git to Seth Bishop's quickest by cuttin' across the lower medder here, wadin' the
brook at the low place, an' climbin' through Carrier's mowin' an' the timber-lot beyont. That comes
aout on the upper rud mighty nigh Seth's--a leetle t'other side.'
Armitage, with Rice and Morgan, started to walk in the direction indicated; and most of the natives
followed slowly. The sky was growing lighter, and there were signs that the storm had worn itself
away. When Armitage inadvertently took a wrong direction, Joe Osborn warned him and walked
ahead to show the right one. Courage and confidence were mounting, though the twilight of the
almost perpendicular wooded hill which lay towards the end of their short cut, and among whose
fantastic ancient trees they had to scramble as if up a ladder, put these qualities to a severe test.
At length they emerged on a muddy road to find the sun coming out. They were a little beyond the
Seth Bishop place, but bent trees and hideously unmistakable tracks showed what had passed by. Only
a few moments were consumed in surveying the ruins just round the bend. It was the Frye incident all
over again, and nothing dead or living was found in either of the collapsed shells which had been the
Bishop house and barn. No one cared to remain there amidst the stench and tarry stickiness, but all
turned instinctively to the line of horrible prints leading on towards the wrecked Whateley farmhouse
and the altar-crowned slopes of Sentinel Hill.
As the men passed the site of Wilbur Whateley's abode they shuddered visibly, and seemed again
to mix hesitancy with their zeal. It was no joke tracking down something as big as a house that one
could not see, but that had all the vicious malevolence of a daemon. Opposite the base of Sentinel
Hill the tracks left the road, and there was a fresh bending and matting visible along the broad swath
marking the monster's former route to and from the summit.
Armitage produced a pocket telescope of considerable power and scanned the steep green side
of the hill. Then he handed the instrument to Morgan, whose sight was keener. After a moment of
gazing Morgan cried out sharply, passing the glass to Earl Sawyer and indicating a certain spot on the
slope with his finger. Sawyer, as clumsy as most non-users of optical devices are, fumbled a while;
but eventually focused the lenses with Armitage's aid. When he did so his cry was less restrained
than Morgan's had been.
'Gawd almighty, the grass an' bushes is a'movin'! It's a-goin' up--slow-like--creepin'--up ter the
top this minute, heaven only knows what fur!'
Then the germ of panic seemed to spread among the seekers. It was one thing to chase the
nameless entity, but quite another to find it. Spells might be all right--but suppose they weren't?
Voices began questioning Armitage about what he knew of the thing, and no reply seemed quite to
satisfy. Everyone seemed to feel himself in close proximity to phases of Nature and of being utterly
forbidden and wholly outside the sane experience of mankind.
X.
In the end the three men from Arkham--old, white-bearded Dr Armitage, stocky, iron-grey
Professor Rice, and lean, youngish Dr Morgan, ascended the mountain alone. After much patient
instruction regarding its focusing and use, they left the telescope with the frightened group that
remained in the road; and as they climbed they were watched closely by those among whom the glass
was passed round. It was hard going, and Armitage had to be helped more than once. High above the
toiling group the great swath trembled as its hellish maker repassed with snail-like deliberateness.
Then it was obvious that the pursuers were gaining.
Curtis Whateley--of the undecayed branch--was holding the telescope when the Arkham party
detoured radically from the swath. He told the crowd that the men were evidently trying to get to a
subordinate peak which overlooked the swath at a point considerably ahead of where the shrubbery
was now bending. This, indeed, proved to be true; and the party were seen to gain the minor elevation
only a short time after the invisible blasphemy had passed it.
Then Wesley Corey, who had taken the glass, cried out that Armitage was adjusting the sprayer
which Rice held, and that something must be about to happen. The crowd stirred uneasily, recalling
that his sprayer was expected to give the unseen horror a moment of visibility. Two or three men
shut their eyes, but Curtis Whateley snatched back the telescope and strained his vision to the utmost.
He saw that Rice, from the party's point of advantage above and behind the entity, had an excellent
chance of spreading the potent powder with marvellous effect.
Those without the telescope saw only an instant's flash of grey cloud--a cloud about the size of a
moderately large building--near the top of the mountain. Curtis, who held the instrument, dropped it
with a piercing shriek into the ankle-deep mud of the road. He reeled, and would have crumbled to
the ground had not two or three others seized and steadied him. All he could do was moan half-
inaudibly.
'Oh, oh, great Gawd...that...that...'
There was a pandemonium of questioning, and only Henry Wheeler thought to rescue the fallen
telescope and wipe it clean of mud. Curtis was past all coherence, and even isolated replies were
almost too much for him.
'Bigger'n a barn...all made o' squirmin' ropes...hull thing sort o' shaped like a hen's egg bigger'n
anything with dozens o' legs like hogs-heads that haff shut up when they step...nothin' solid abaout it-
-all like jelly, an' made o' sep'rit wrigglin' ropes pushed clost together...great bulgin' eyes all over
it...ten or twenty maouths or trunks a-stickin' aout all along the sides, big as stove-pipes an all a-
tossin' an openin' an' shuttin'...all grey, with kinder blue or purple rings...an' Gawd it Heaven--that haff
face on top...'
This final memory, whatever it was, proved too much for poor Curtis; and he collapsed
completely before he could say more. Fred Farr and Will Hutchins carried him to the roadside and
laid him on the damp grass. Henry Wheeler, trembling, turned the rescued telescope on the mountain
to see what he might. Through the lenses were discernible three tiny figures, apparently running
towards the summit as fast as the steep incline allowed. Only these--nothing more. Then everyone
noticed a strangely unseasonable noise in the deep valley behind, and even in the underbrush of
Sentinel Hill itself. It was the piping of unnumbered whippoorwills, and in their shrill chorus there
seemed to lurk a note of tense and evil expectancy.
Earl Sawyer now took the telescope and reported the three figures as standing on the topmost
ridge, virtually level with the altar-stone but at a considerable distance from it. One figure, he said,
seemed to be raising its hands above its head at rhythmic intervals; and as Sawyer mentioned the
circumstance the crowd seemed to hear a faint, half-musical sound from the distance, as if a loud
chant were accompanying the gestures. The weird silhouette on that remote peak must have been a
spectacle of infinite grotesqueness and impressiveness, but no observer was in a mood for aesthetic
appreciation. 'I guess he's sayin' the spell,' whispered Wheeler as he snatched back the telescope.
The whippoorwills were piping wildly, and in a singularly curious irregular rhythm quite unlike that
of the visible ritual.
Suddenly the sunshine seemed to lessen without the intervention of any discernible cloud. It was a
very peculiar phenomenon, and was plainly marked by all. A rumbling sound seemed brewing beneath
the hills, mixed strangely with a concordant rumbling which clearly came from the sky. Lightning
flashed aloft, and the wondering crowd looked in vain for the portents of storm. The chanting of the
men from Arkham now became unmistakable, and Wheeler saw through the glass that they were all
raising their arms in the rhythmic incantation. From some farmhouse far away came the frantic barking
of dogs.
The change in the 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 showed a certain mistiness around the altar-stone on the
distant height. No one, however, had been using the telescope at that instant. The whippoorwills
continued their irregular pulsation, and the men of Dunwich braced themselves tensely against some
imponderable menace with which the atmosphere seemed surcharged.
Without warning came those deep, cracked, raucous vocal sounds which will never leave the
memory of the stricken group who heard them. Not from any human throat were they born, for the
organs of man can yield no such acoustic perversions. Rather would one have said they came from
the pit itself, had not their source been so unmistakably the altar-stone on the peak. It is almost
erroneous to call them sounds at all, since so much of their ghastly, infra-bass timbre spoke to dim
seats of consciousness and terror far subtler than the ear; yet one must do so, since their form was
indisputably though vaguely that of half-articulate words. They were loud--loud as the rumblings and
the thunder above which they echoed--yet did they come from no visible being. And because
imagination might suggest a conjectural source in the world of non-visible beings, the huddled
crowd at the mountain's base huddled still closer, and winced as if in expectation of a blow.
Ygnailh...ygnaiih...thflthkh'ngha....Yog-Sothoth...rang the hideous croaking out of space.
Y'bthnk...h'ehye--n'grkdl'lh...
The speaking impulse seemed to falter here, as if some frightful psychic struggle were going on.
Henry Wheeler strained his eye at the telescope, but saw only the three grotesquely silhouetted
human figures on the peak, all moving their arms furiously in strange gestures as their incantation
drew near its culmination. From what black wells of Acherontic fear or feeling, from what
unplumbed gulfs of cosmic consciousness or obscure, long-latent heredity, were those half-
articulate thunder-croakings drawn? Presently they began to gather renewed force and coherence as
they grew in stark, utter, ultimate frenzy.
Eh-y-ya-ya-yahaah--e'yayayaaaa...ngh'aaaaa...ngh'aaa... h'yuh...h'yuh...HELP! HELP!...ff--ff--ff--
FATHER! FATHER! YOG-SOTHOTH!...
But that was all. The pallid group in the road, still reeling at the indisputably English syllables
that had poured thickly and thunderously down from the frantic vacancy beside that shocking altar-
stone, were never to hear such syllables again. Instead, they jumped violently at the terrific report
which seemed to rend the hills; the deafening, cataclysmic peal whose source, be it inner earth or
sky, no hearer was ever able to place. A single lightning bolt shot from the purple zenith to the altar-
stone, and a great tidal wave of viewless force and indescribable stench swept down from the hill to
all the countryside. Trees, grass, and under-brush were whipped into a fury; and the frightened
crowd at the mountain's base, weakened by the lethal foetor that seemed about to asphyxiate them,
were almost hurled off their feet. Dogs howled from the distance, green grass and foliage wilted to
a curious, sickly yellow-grey, and over field and forest were scattered the bodies of dead
whippoorwills.
The stench left quickly, but the vegetation never came right again. To this day there is something
queer and unholy about the growths on and around that fearsome hill Curtis Whateley was only just
regaining consciousness when the Arkham men came slowly down the mountain in the beams of a
sunlight once more brilliant and untainted. They were grave and quiet, and seemed shaken by
memories and reflections even more terrible than those which had reduced the group of natives to a
state of cowed quivering. In reply to a jumble of questions they only shook their heads and
reaffirmed one vital fact.
'The thing has gone for ever,' Armitage said. 'It has been split up into what it was originally made
of, and can never exist again. It was an impossibility in a normal world. Only the least fraction was
really matter in any sense we know. It was like its father--and most of it has gone back to him in some
vague realm or dimension outside our material universe; some vague abyss out of which only the
most accursed rites of human blasphemy could ever have called him for a moment on the hills.'
There was a brief silence, and in that pause the scattered senses of poor Curtis Whateley began
to knit back into a sort of continuity; so that he put his hands to his head with a moan. Memory seemed
to pick itself up where it had left off, and the horror of the sight that had prostrated him burst in upon
him again.
'Oh, oh, my Gawd, that haff face--that haff face on top of it... that face with the red eyes an'
crinkly albino hair, an' no chin, like the 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
crystallized into fresh terror. Only old Zebulon Whateley, who wanderingly remembered ancient
things but who had been silent heretofore, spoke aloud.
'Fifteen year' gone,' he rambled, 'I heered 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
I
Bear in mind closely that I did not see any actual visual horror at the end. To say that a mental
shock was the cause of what I inferred--that last straw which sent me racing out of the lonely Akeley
farmhouse and through the wild domed hills of Vermont in a commandeered motor at night--is to
ignore the plainest facts of my final experience. Notwithstanding the deep things I saw and heard, and
the admitted vividness the impression produced on me by these things, I cannot prove even now
whether I was right or wrong in my hideous inference. For after all Akeley's disappearance
establishes nothing. People found nothing amiss in his house despite the bullet-marks on the outside
and inside. It was just as though he had walked out casually for a ramble in the hills and failed to
return. There was not even a sign that a guest had been there, or that those horrible cylinders and
machines had been stored in the study. That he had mortally feared the crowded green hills and
endless trickle of brooks among which he had been born and reared, means nothing at all, either; for
thousands are subject to just such morbid fears. Eccentricity, moreover, could easily account for his
strange acts and apprehensions toward the last.
The whole matter began, so far as I am concerned, with the historic and unprecedented Vermont
floods of November 3, 1927. I was then, as now, an instructor of literature at MiskatonicUniversity in
Arkham, Massachusetts, and an enthusiastic amateur student of New England folklore. Shortly after
the flood, amidst the varied reports of hardship, suffering, and organized relief which filled the
press, there appeared certain odd stories of things found floating in some of the swollen rivers; so
that many of my friends embarked on curious discussions and appealed to me to shed what light I
could on the subject. I felt flattered at having my folklore study taken so seriously, and did what I
could to belittle the wild, vague tales which seemed so clearly an outgrowth of old rustic
superstitions. It amused me to find several persons of education who insisted that some stratum of
obscure, distorted fact might underlie the rumors.
The tales thus brought to my notice came mostly through newspaper cuttings; though one yarn had
an oral source and was repeated to a friend of mine in a letter from his mother in Hardwick, Vermont.
The type of thing described was essentially the same in all cases, though there seemed to be three
separate instances involved--one connected with the WinooskiRiver near Montpelier, another
attached to the WestRiver in WindhamCounty beyond Newfane, and a third centering in the
Passumpsic in CaledoniaCounty above Lyndonville. Of course many of the stray items mentioned
other instances, but on analysis they all seemed to boil down to these three. In each case country folk
reported seeing one or more very bizarre and disturbing objects in the surging waters that poured
down from the unfrequented hills, and there was a widespread tendency to connect these sights with a
primitive, half-forgotten cycle of whispered legend which old people resurrected for the occasion.
What people thought they saw were organic shapes not quite like any they had ever seen before.
Naturally, there were many human bodies washed along by the streams in that tragic period; but those
who described these strange shapes felt quite sure that they were not human, despite some
superficial resemblances in size and general outline. Nor, said the witnesses, could they have been
any kind of animal known to Vermont. They were pinkish things about five feet long; with
crustaceous bodies bearing vast pairs of dorsal fins or membranous wings and several sets of
articulated limbs, and with a sort of convoluted ellipsoid, covered with multitudes of very short
antennae, where a head would ordinarily be. It was really remarkable how closely the reports from
different sources tended to coincide; though the wonder was lessened by the fact that the old
legends, shared at one time throughout the hill country, furnished a morbidly vivid picture which
might well have coloured the imaginations of all the witnesses concerned. It was my conclusion that
such witnesses--in every case naive and simple backwoods folk--had glimpsed the battered and
bloated bodies of human beings or farm animals in the whirling currents; and had allowed the half-
remembered folklore to invest these pitiful objects with fantastic attributes.
The ancient folklore, while cloudy, evasive, and largely forgotten by the present generation, was
of a highly singular character, and obviously reflected the influence of still earlier Indian tales. I
knew it well, though I had never been in Vermont, through the exceedingly rare monograph of Eli
Davenport, which embraces material orally obtained prior to 1839 among the oldest people of the
state. This material, moreover, closely coincided with tales which I had personally heard from
elderly rustics in the mountains of New Hampshire. Briefly summarized, it hinted at a hidden race of
monstrous beings which lurked somewhere among the remoter hills--in the deep woods of the
highest peaks, and the dark valleys where streams trickle from unknown sources. These beings were
seldom glimpsed, but evidences of their presence were reported by those who had ventured farther
than usual up the slopes of certain mountains or into certain deep, steep-sided gorges that even the
wolves shunned.
There were queer footprints or claw-prints in the mud of brook-margins and barren patches, and
curious circles of stones, with the grass around them worn away, which did not seem to have been
placed or entirely shaped by Nature. There were, too, certain caves of problematical depth in the
sides of the hills; with mouths closed by boulders in a manner scarcely accidental, and with more than
an average quota of the queer prints leading both toward and away from them--if indeed the direction
of these prints could be justly estimated. And worst of all, there were the things which adventurous
people had seen very rarely in the twilight of the remotest valleys and the dense perpendicular
woods above the limits of normal hill-climbing.
It would have been less uncomfortable if the stray accounts of these things had not agreed so
well. As it was, nearly all the rumors had several points in common; averring that the creatures were
a sort of huge, light-red crab with many pairs of legs and with two great batlike wings in the middle
of the back. They sometimes walked on all their legs, and sometimes on the hindmost pair only, using
the others to convey large objects of indeterminate nature. On one occasion they were spied in
considerable numbers, a detachment of them wading along a shallow woodland watercourse three
abreast in evidently disciplined formation. Once a specimen was seen flying--launching itself from
the top of a bald, lonely hill at night and vanishing in the sky after its great flapping wings had been
silhouetted an instant against the full moon
These things seemed content, on the whole, to let mankind alone; though they were at times held
responsible for the disappearance of venturesome individuals--especially persons who built houses
too close to certain valleys or too high up on certain mountains. Many localities came to be known as
inadvisable to settle in, the feeling persisting long after the cause was forgotten. People would look
up at some of the neighbouring mountain-precipices with a shudder, even when not recalling how
many settlers had been lost, and how many farmhouses burnt to ashes, on the lower slopes of those
grim, green sentinels.
But while according to the earliest legends the creatures would appear to have harmed only those
trespassing on their privacy; there were later accounts of their curiosity respecting men, and of their
attempts to establish secret outposts in the human world. There were tales of the queer claw-prints
seen around farmhouse windows in the morning, and of occasional disappearances in regions outside
the obviously haunted areas. Tales, besides, of buzzing voices in imitation of human speech which
made surprising offers to lone travelers on roads and cart-paths in the deep woods, and of children
frightened out of their wits by things seen or heard where the primal forest pressed close upon their
door-yards. In the final layer of legends--the layer just preceding the decline of superstition and the
abandonment of close contact with the dreaded places--there are shocked references to hermits and
remote farmers who at some period of 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 whispers admitted that there was not much to fear from those
things now that they were used to the presence of houses and settlements, and now that human beings
let their chosen territory severely alone.
All this I had long known from my reading, and from certain folk tales picked up in New
Hampshire; hence when the flood-time rumours began to appear, I could easily guess what
imaginative background had evolved them. I took great pains to explain this to my friends, and was
correspondingly amused when several contentious souls continued to insist on a possible element of
truth in the reports. Such persons tried to point out that the early legends had a significant persistence
and uniformity, and that the virtually unexplored nature of the Vermont hills made it unwise to be
dogmatic about what might or might not dwell among them; nor could they be silenced by my
assurance that all the myths were of a well-known pattern common to most of mankind and determined
by early phases of imaginative experience which always produced the same type of delusion.
It was of no use to demonstrate to such opponents that the Vermont myths differed but little in
essence from those universal legends of natural personification which filled the ancient world with
fauns and dryads and satyrs, suggested the kallikanzarai of modern Greece, and gave to wild Wales
and Ireland their dark hints of strange, small, and terrible hidden races of troglodytes and burrowers.
No use, either, to point out the even more startlingly similar belief of the Nepalese hill tribes in the
dreaded Mi-Go or "Abominable Snow-Men" who lurk hideously amidst the ice and rock pinnacles of
the Himalayan summits. When I brought up this evidence, my opponents turned it against me by
claiming that it must imply some actual historicity for the ancient tales; that it must argue the real
existence of some queer elder earth-race, driven to hiding after the advent and dominance of mankind,
which might very conceivably have survived in reduced numbers to relatively recent times--or even
to the present.
The more I laughed at such theories, the more these stubborn friends asseverated them; adding
that even without the heritage of legend the recent reports were too clear, consistent, detailed, and
sanely prosaic in manner of telling, to be completely ignored. Two or three fanatical extremists went
so far as to hint at possible meanings in the ancient Indian tales which gave the hidden beings a
nonterrestrial origin; citing the extravagant books of Charles Fort with their claims that voyagers
from other worlds and outer space have often visited the earth. Most of my foes, however, were
merely romanticists who insisted on trying to transfer to real life the fantastic lore of lurking "little
people" made popular by the magnificent horror-fiction of Arthur Machen.
II
As was only natural under the circumstances, this piquant debating finally got into print in the form
of letters to the Arkham Advertiser; some of which were copied in the press of those Vermont
regions whence the flood-stories came. The Rutland Herald gave half a page of extracts from the
letters on both sides, while the Brattleboro Reformer reprinted one of my long historical and
mythological summaries in full, with some accompanying comments in "The Pendrifter's" thoughtful
column which supported and applauded my skeptical conclusions. By the spring of 1928 I was almost
a well-known figure in Vermont, notwithstanding the fact that I had never set foot in the state. Then
came the challenging letters from Henry Akeley which impressed me so profoundly, and which took
me for the first and last time to that fascinating realm of crowded green precipices and muttering
forest streams.
Most of what I know of Henry Wentworth Akeley was gathered by correspondence with his
neighbours, and with his only son in California, after my experience in his lonely farmhouse. He was,
I discovered, the last representative on his home soil of a long, locally distinguished line of jurists,
administrators, and gentlemen-agriculturists. In him, however, the family mentally had veered away
from practical affairs to pure scholarship; so that he had been a notable student of mathematics,
astronomy, biology, anthropology, and folklore at the University of Vermont. I had never previously
heard of him, and he did not give many autobiographical details in his communications; but from the
first I saw he was a man of character, education, and intelligence, albeit a recluse with very little
worldly sophistication.
Despite the incredible nature of what he claimed, I could not help at once taking Akeley more
seriously than I had taken any of the other challengers of my views. For one thing, he was really
close to the actual phenomena--visible and tangible--that he speculated so grotesquely about; and for
another thing, he was amazingly willing to leave his conclusions in a 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 circumstance deserving investigation, however
little it might have to do with the fantastic causes he assigned. Later on I received from him certain
material proofs which placed the matter on a somewhat different and bewilderingly bizarre basis.
I cannot do better than transcribe in full, so far as is possible, the long letter in which Akeley
introduced himself, and which formed such an important landmark in my own intellectual history. It is
no longer in my possession, but my memory holds almost every word of its portentous message; and
again I affirm my confidence in the sanity of the man who wrote it. Here is the text--a text which
reached me in the cramped, archaic-looking scrawl of one who had obviously not mingled much with
the world during his sedate, scholarly life. R.F.D. #2,
Townshend, Windham Co., Vermont. May 5,1928
Albert N. Wilmarth, Esq., 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. Elliott Smith, and so on. It is no news to me
that tales of hidden races are as old as all mankind. I have seen the reprints of letters from you, and
those agreeing with you, in the Rutland Herald, and guess I know about where your controversy
stands at the present time.
What I desire to say now is, that I am afraid your adversaries are nearer right than yourself, even
though all reason seems to be on your side. They are nearer right than they realise themselves--for
of course they go only by theory, and cannot know what I know. If I knew as little of the matter as
they, I would feel justified in believing as they do. I would be wholly on your side.
You can see that I am having a hard time getting to the point, probably because I really dread
getting to the point; but the upshot of the matter is that I have certain evidence that monstrous things
do indeed live in the woods on the high hills which nobody visits. I have not seen any of the things
floating in the rivers, as reported, but I have seen things like them under circumstances I dread to
repeat. I have seen footprints, and of late have seen them nearer my own home (I live in the old
Akeley place south of TownshendVillage, on the side of DarkMountain) than I dare tell you now.
And I have overheard voices in the woods at certain points that I will not even begin to describe on
paper.
At one place I heard them so much that I took a phonograph therewith a dictaphone attachment and
wax blank--and I shall try to arrange to have you hear the record I got. I have run it on the machine for
some of the old people up here, and one of the voices had nearly scared them paralysed by reason of
its likeness to a certain voice (that buzzing voice in the woods which Davenport mentions) that their
grandmothers have told about and mimicked for them. I know what most people think of a man who
tells about "hearing voices"--but before you draw conclusions just listen to this record and ask some
of the older backwoods people what they think of it. If you can account for it normally, very well; but
there must be something behind it. Ex nihilo nihil fit, you know.
Now my object in writing you is not to start an argument but to give you information which I think
a man of your tastes will find deeply interesting. This is private. Publicly I am on your side, for
certain things show me that it does not do for people to know too much about these matters. My own
studies are now wholly private, and I would not think of saying anything to attract people's attention
and cause them to visit the places I have explored. It is true--terribly true--that there are non-human
creatures watching us all the time; with spies among us gathering information. It is from a wretched
man who, if he was sane (as I think he was) was one of those spies, that I got a large part of my clues
to the matter. He later killed himself, but I have reason to think there are others now.
The things come from another planet, being able to live in interstellar space and fly through it on
clumsy, powerful wings which have a way of resisting the aether but which are too poor at steering
to be of much use in helping them about on earth. I will tell you about this later if you do not dismiss
me at once as a madman. They come here to get metals from mines that go deep under the hills, and I
think I know where they come from. They will not hurt us if we let them alone, but no one can say
what will happen if we get too curious about them. Of course a good army of men could wipe out
their mining colony. That is what they are afraid of. But if that happened, more would come from
outside--any number of them. They could easily conquer the earth, but have not tried so far because
they have not needed to. They would rather leave things as they are to save bother.
I think they mean to get rid of me because of what I have discovered. There is a great black stone
with unknown hieroglyphics half worn away which I found in the woods on Round Hill, east of here;
and after I took it home everything became different. If they think I suspect too much they will either
kill me or take me off the earth to where they come from. They like to take away men of learning
once in a while, to keep informed on the state of things in the human world.
This leads me to my secondary purpose in addressing you--namely, to urge you to hush up the
present debate rather than give it more publicity. People must be kept away from these hills, and in
order to effect this, their curiosity ought not to be aroused any further. Heaven knows there is peril
enough anyway, with promoters and real estate men flooding Vermont with herds of summer people
to overrun the wild places and cover the hills with cheap bungalows.
I shall welcome further communication with you, and shall try to send you that phonograph record
and black stone (which is so worn that photographs don't show much) by express if you are willing. I
say "try" because I think those creatures have a way of tampering with things around here. There is a
sullen furtive fellow named Brown, on a farm near the village, who I think is their spy. Little by little
they are trying to cut me off from our world because I know too much about their world.
They have the most amazing way of finding out what I do. You may not even get this letter. I think
I shall have to leave this part of the country and go live with my son in San Diego, Cal., if things get
any worse, but it is not easy to give up the place you were born in, and where your family has lived
for six generations. Also, I would hardly dare sell this house to anybody now that the creatures have
taken notice of it. They seem to be trying to get the black stone back and destroy the phonograph
record, but I shall not let them if I can help it. My great police dogs always hold them back, for there
are very few here as yet, and they are clumsy in getting about. As I have said, their wings are not
much use for short flights on earth. I am on the very brink of deciphering that stone--in a very terrible
way--and with your knowledge of folklore you may be able to supply the missing links enough to
help me. I suppose you know all about the fearful myths antedating the coming of man to the earth--
the Yog-Sothoth and Cthulhu cycles--which are hinted at in the Necronomicon. I had access to a
copy of that once, and hear that you have one in your college library under lock and key.
To conclude, Mr. Wilmarth, I think that with our respective studies we can be very useful to each
other. I don't wish to put you in any peril, and suppose I ought to warn you that possession of the
stone and the record won't be very safe; but I think you will find any risks worth running for the sake
of knowledge. I will drive down to Newfane or Brattleboro to send whatever you authorize me to
send, for the express offices there are more to be trusted. I might say that I live quite alone now,
since I can't keep hired help any more. They won't stay because of the things that try to get near the
house at night, and that keep the dogs barking continually. I am glad I didn't get as deep as this into the
business while my wife was alive, for it would have driven her mad.
Hoping that I am not bothering you unduly, and that you will decide to get in touch with me rather
than throw this letter into the waste basket as a madman's raving, I am
Yrs. very truly, Henry W. Akeley
P.S. I am making some extra prints of certain photographs taken by me, which I think will help to
prove a number of the points I have touched on. The old people think they are monstrously true. I
shall send you these very soon if you are interested.
H. W. A.
It would be difficult to describe my sentiments upon reading this strange document for the first
time. By all ordinary rules, I ought to have laughed more loudly at these extravagances than at the far
milder theories which had previously moved me to mirth; yet something in the tone of the letter made
me take it with paradoxical seriousness. Not that I believed for a moment in the hidden race from the
stars which my correspondent spoke of; but that, after some grave preliminary doubts, I grew to feel
oddly sure of his sanity and sincerity, and of his confrontation by some genuine though singular and
abnormal phenomenon which he could not explain except in this imaginative way. It could not be as
he thought it, I reflected, yet on the other hand, it could not be otherwise than worthy of
investigation. The man seemed unduly excited and alarmed about something, but it was hard to think
that all cause was lacking. He was so specific and logical in certain ways--and after all, his yarn did
fit in so perplexingly well with some of the old myths--even the wildest Indian legends.
That he had really overheard disturbing voices in the hills, and had really found the black stone
he spoke about, was wholly possible despite the crazy inferences he had made--inferences probably
suggested by the man who had claimed to be a spy of the outer beings and had later killed himself. It
was easy to deduce that this man must have been wholly insane, but that he probably had a streak of
perverse outward logic which made the naive Akeley--already prepared for such things by his
folklore studies--believe his tale. As for the latest developments--it appeared from his inability to
keep hired help that Akeley's humbler rustic neighbours were as convinced as he that his house was
besieged by uncanny things at night. The dogs really barked, too.
And then the matter of that phonograph record, which I could not but believe he had obtained in
the way he said. It must mean something; whether animal noises deceptively like human speech, or the
speech of some hidden, night-haunting human being decayed to a state not much above that of lower
animals. From this my thoughts went back to the black hieroglyphed stone, and to speculations upon
what it might mean. Then, too, what of the photographs which Akeley said he was about to send, and
which the old people had found so convincingly terrible?
As I re-read the cramped handwriting I felt as never before that my credulous opponents might
have more on their side than I had conceded. After all, there might be some queer and perhaps
hereditarily misshapen outcasts in those shunned hills, even though no such race of star-born
monsters as folklore claimed. And if there were, then the presence of strange bodies in the flooded
streams would not be wholly beyond belief. Was it too presumptuous to suppose that both the old
legends and the recent reports had this much of reality behind them? But even as I harboured these
doubts I felt ashamed that so fantastic a piece of bizarrerie as Henry Akeley's wild letter had brought
them up.
In the end I answered Akeley's letter, adopting a tone of friendly interest and soliciting further
particulars. His reply came almost by return mail; and contained, true to promise, a number of Kodak
views of scenes and objects illustrating what he had to tell. Glancing at these pictures as I took them
from the envelope, I felt a curious sense of fright and nearness to forbidden things; for in spite of the
vagueness of most of them, they had a damnably suggestive power which was intensified by the fact
of their being genuine photographs--actual optical links with what they portrayed, and the product of
an impersonal transmitting process without prejudice, fallibility, or mendacity.
The more I looked at them, the more I saw that my 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 grassblades in the field of vision gave a clear index of scale and left no
possibility of a tricky double exposure. I have called the thing a "footprint," but "claw-print" would
be a better term. Even now I can scarcely describe it save to say that it was hideously crablike, and
that there seemed to be some ambiguity about its direction. It was not a very deep or fresh print, but
seemed to be about the size of an average man's foot. From a central pad, pairs of saw-toothed
nippers projected in opposite directions--quite baffling as to function, if indeed the whole object
were exclusively an organ of locomotion.
Another photograph--evidently a time-exposure taken in deep shadow--was of the mouth of a
woodland cave, with a boulder of rounded regularity choking the aperture. On the bare ground in
front of, it one could just discern a dense network of curious tracks, and when I studied the picture
with a magnifier I felt uneasily sure that the tracks were like the one in the other view. A third
pictured showed a druid-like circle of standing stones on the summit of a wild hill. Around the
cryptic circle the grass was very much beaten down and worn away, though I could not detect any
footprints even with the glass. The extreme remoteness of the place was apparent from the veritable
sea of tenantless mountains which formed the background and stretched away toward a misty horizon.
But if the most disturbing of all the views was that of the footprint, the most curiously suggestive
was that of the great black stone found in the Round Hill woods. Akeley had photographed it on what
was evidently his study table, for I could see rows of books and a bust of Milton in the background.
The thing, as nearly as one might guess, had faced the camera vertically with a somewhat irregularly
curved surface of one by two feet; but to say anything definite about that surface, or about the
general shape of the whole mass, almost defies the power of language. What outlandish geometrical
principles had guided its cutting--for artificially cut it surely was--I could not even begin to guess;
and never before had I seen anything which struck me as so strangely and unmistakably alien to this
world. Of the hieroglyphics on the surface I could discern very few, but one or two that I did see
gave rather a shock. Of course they might be fraudulent, for others besides myself had read the
monstrous and abhorred Necronomicon of the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred; but it nevertheless made me
shiver to recognise certain ideographs which study had taught me to link with the most blood-
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 connections--Yuggoth, Great Cthulhu,
Tsathoggua, YogSothoth, R'lyeh, Nyarlathotep, Azathoth, Hastur, Yian, Leng, the Lake of Hali,
Bethmoora, the Yellow Sign, L'mur-Kathulos, Bran, and the Magnum Innominandum--and was drawn
back through nameless aeons and inconceivable dimensions to worlds of elder, outer entity at which
the crazed author of the Necronomicon had only guessed in the vaguest way. I was told of the pits of
primal life, and of the streams that had trickled down therefrom; and finally, of the tiny rivulets from
one of those streams which had become entangled with the destinies of our own earth.
My brain whirled; and where before I had attempted to explain things away, I now began to
believe in the most abnormal and incredible wonders. The array of vital evidence was damnably vast
and overwhelming; and the cool, scientific attitude of Akeley--an attitude removed as far as
imaginable from the demented, the fanatical, the hysterical, or even the extravagantly speculative--
had a tremendous effect on my thought and judgment. By the time I laid the frightful letter aside I
could understand the fears he had come to entertain, and was ready to do anything in my power to
keep people away from those wild, haunted hills. Even now, when time has dulled the impression and
made me half-question my own experience and horrible doubts, there are things in that letter of
Akeley's which I would not quote, or even form into words on paper. I am almost glad that the letter
and record and photographs are gone now--and I wish, for reasons I shall soon make clear, that the
new planet beyond Neptune had not been discovered.
With the reading of that letter my public debating about the Vermont horror permanently ended.
Arguments from opponents remained unanswered or put off with promises, and eventually the
controversy petered out into oblivion. During late May and June I was in constant correspondence
with Akeley; though once in a while a letter would be lost, so that we would have to retrace our
ground and perform considerable laborious copying. What we were trying to do, as a whole, was to
compare notes in matters of obscure mythological scholarship and arrive at a clearer correlation of
the Vermont horrors with the general body of primitive world legend.
For one thing, we virtually decided that these morbidities and the hellish Himalayan Mi-Go were
one and the same order of incarnated nightmare. There was also absorbing zoological conjectures,
which I would have referred to Professor Dexter in my own college but for Akeley's imperative
command to tell no one of the matter before us. If I seem to disobey that command now, it is only
because I think that at this stage a warning about those farther Vermont hills--and about those
Himalayan peaks which bold explorers are more and more determined to ascend--is more conducive
to public safety than silence would be. One specific thing we were leading up to was a deciphering
of the hieroglyphics on that infamous black stone--a deciphering which might well place us in
possession of secrets deeper and more dizzying than any formerly known to man.
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, BellowsFalls, Newfane,
and South Londonderry in the most inexplicable and seemingly unmotivated way. Brown's voice, he
felt convinced, was one of those he had overheard on a certain occasion in a very terrible
conversation; and he had once found a footprint or clawprint near Brown's house which might
possess the most ominous significance. It had been curiously near some of Brown's own footprints--
footprints that faced toward it.
So the record was shipped from Brattleboro, whither Akeley drove in his Ford car along the
lonely Vermont back roads. He confessed in an accompanying note that he was beginning to be afraid
of those roads, and that he would not even go into Townshend for supplies now except in broad
daylight. It did not pay, he repeated again and again, to know too much unless one were very remote
from those silent and problematical hills. He would be going to California pretty soon to live with
his son, though it was hard to leave a place where all one's memories and ancestral feelings centered.
Before trying the record on the commercial machine which I borrowed from the college
administration building I carefully went over all the explanatory matter in Akeley's various letters.
This record, he had said, was obtained about 1 A.M. on the 1st of May, 1915, near the closed mouth
of a cave where the wooded west slope of DarkMountain rises out of Lee's swamp. The place had
always been unusually plagued with strange voices, this being the reason he had brought the
phonograph, dictaphone, and blank in expectation of results. Former experience had told him that May
Eve--the hideous Sabbat-night of underground European legend--would probably be more fruitful
than any other date, and he was not disappointed. It was noteworthy, though, that he never again heard
voices at that particular spot.
Unlike most of the overheard forest voices, the substance of the record was quasi-ritualistic, and
included one palpably human voice which Akeley had never been able to place. It was not Brown's,
but seemed to be that of a man of greater cultivation. The second voice, however, was the real crux
of the thing--for this was the accursed buzzing which had no likeness to humanity despite the human
words which it uttered in good English grammar and a scholarly accent.
The recording phonograph and dictaphone had not worked uniformly well, and had of course
been at a great disadvantage because of the remote and muffled nature of the overheard ritual; so that
the actual speech secured was very fragmentary. Akeley had given me a transcript of what he
believed the spoken words to be, and I glanced through this again as I prepared the machine for
action. The text was darkly mysterious rather than openly horrible, though a knowledge of its origin
and manner of gathering gave it all the associative horror which any words could well possess. I
will present it here in full as I remember it--and I am fairly confident that I know it correctly by heart,
not only from reading the transcript, but from playing the record itself over and over again. It is not a
thing which one might readily forget! (Indistinguishable Sounds)
(A Cultivated Male Human Voice)
...is the Lord of the Wood, even to...and the gifts of the men of Leng...so from the wells of night
to the gulfs of space, and from the gulfs of space to the wells of night, ever the praises of Great
Cthulhu, of Tsathoggua, and of Him Who is not to be Named. Ever Their praises, and abundance to
the Black Goat of the Woods. Ia! Shub-Niggurath! The Goat with a Thousand Young!
(A Buzzing Imitation of Human Speech)
Ia! Shub-Niggurath! The Black Goat of the Woods with a Thousand Young!
(Human Voice)
And it has come to pass that the Lord of the Woods, being...seven and nine, down the onyx
steps...(tri)butes to Him in the Gulf, Azathoth, He of Whom Thou has taught us marv(els)...on the
wings of night out beyond space, out beyond th...to That whereof Yuggoth is the youngest child,
rolling alone in black aether at the rim...
(Buzzing Voice)
...go out among men and find the ways thereof, that He in the Gulf may know. To Nyarlathotep,
Mighty Messenger, must all things be told. And He shall put on the semblance of men, the waxen
mask and the robe that hides, and come down from the world of Seven Suns to mock...
(Human Voice)
(Nyarl)athotep, Great Messenger, bringer of strange joy to Yuggoth through the void, Father of
the Million Favoured Ones, Stalker among...
(Speech Cut Off by End of Record)
Such were the words for which I was to listen when I started the phonograph. It was with a trace
of genuine dread and reluctance that I pressed the lever and heard the preliminary scratching of the
sapphire point, and I was glad that the first faint, fragmentary words were in a human voice--a
mellow, educated voice which seemed vaguely Bostonian in accent, and which was certainly not that
of any native of the Vermont hills. As I listened to the tantalisingly feeble rendering, I seemed to find
the speech identical with Akeley's carefully prepared transcript. On it chanted, in that mellow
Bostonian voice..."Ia! Shub-Niggurath! The Goat with a Thousand Young!..."
And then I heard the other voice. To this hour I shudder retrospectively when I think of how it
struck me, prepared though I was by Akeley's accounts. Those to whom I have since described the
record profess to find nothing but cheap imposture or madness in it; but could they have the accursed
thing itself, or read the bulk of Akeley's correspondence, (especially that terrible and encyclopaedic
second letter), I know they would think differently. It is, after all, a tremendous pity that I did not
disobey Akeley and play the record for others--a tremendous pity, too, that all of his letters were
lost. To me, with my first-hand impression of the actual sounds, and with my knowledge of the
background and surrounding circumstances, the voice was a monstrous thing. It swiftly followed the
human voice in ritualistic response, but in my imagination it was a morbid echo winging its way
across unimaginable abysses from unimaginable outer hells. It is more than two years now since I last
ran off that blasphemous waxen cylinder; but at this moment, and at all other moments, I can still hear
that feeble, fiendish buzzing as it reached me for the first time.
"Ia! Shub-Niggurath! The Black Goat of the Woods with a Thousand Young!"
But though the voice is always in my ears, I have not even yet been able to analyse it well enough
for a graphic description. It was like the drone of some loathsome, gigantic insect ponderously
shaped into the articulate speech of an alien species, and I am perfectly certain that the organs
producing it can have no resemblance to the vocal organs of man, or indeed to those of any of the
mammalia. There were singularities in timbre, range, and overtones which placed this phenomenon
wholly outside the sphere of humanity and earth-life. Its sudden advent that first time almost stunned
me, and I heard the rest of the record through in a sort of abstracted daze. When the longer passage
of buzzing came, there was a sharp intensification of that feeling of blasphemous infinity which had
struck me during the shorter and earlier passage. At last the record ended abruptly, during an
unusually clear speech of the human and Bostonian voice; but I sat stupidly staring long after the
machine had automatically stopped.
I hardly need say that I gave that shocking record many another playing, and that I made exhaustive
attempts at analysis and comment in comparing notes with Akeley. It would be both useless and
disturbing to repeat here all that we concluded; but I may hint that we agreed in believing we had
secured a clue to the source of some of the most repulsive primordial customs in the cryptic elder
religions of mankind. It seemed plain to us, also, that there were ancient and elaborate alliance;
between the hidden outer creatures and certain members of the human race. How extensive these
alliances were, and how their state today might compare with their state in earlier ages, we had no
means of guessing; yet at best there was room for a limitless amount of horrified speculation. There
seemed to be an awful, immemorial linkage in several definite stages betwixt man and nameless
infinity. The blasphemies which appeared on earth, it was hinted, came from the dark planet Yuggoth,
at the rim of the solar system; but this was itself merely the populous outpost of a frightful
interstellar race whose ultimate source must lie far outside even the Einsteinian space-time
continuum or greatest known cosmos.
Meanwhile we continued to discuss the black stone and the best way of getting it to Arkham--
Akeley deeming it inadvisable to have me visit him at the scene of his nightmare studies. For some
reason or other, Akeley was afraid to trust the thing to any ordinary or expected transportation route.
His final idea was to take it across country to BellowsFalls 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 fulfillment of inevitable tendencies, and had no real hope at all of
its recovery. He spoke of the undoubted telepathic and hypnotic powers of the hill creatures and
their agents, and in one letter hinted that he did not believe the stone was on this earth any longer. For
my part, I was duly enraged, for I had felt there was at least a chance of learning profound and
astonishing things from the old, blurred hieroglyphs. The matter would have rankled bitterly in my
mind had not Akeley's immediately subsequent letters brought up a new phase of the whole horrible
hill problem which at once seized all my attention.
IV
The unknown things, Akeley wrote in a script grown pitifully tremulous, had begun to close in on
him with a wholly new degree of determination. The nocturnal barking of the dogs whenever the
moon. was dim or absent was hideous now, and there had been attempts to molest him on the lonely
roads he had to traverse by day. On the second of August, while bound for the village in his car, he
had found a tree-trunk laid in his path at a point where the highway ran through a deep patch of
woods; while the savage barking of the two great dogs he had with him told all too well of the things
which must have been lurking near. What would have happened had the dogs not been there, he did
not dare guess--but he never went out now without at least two of his faithful and powerful pack.
Other road experiences had occurred on August fifth and sixth; a shot grazing his car on one
occasion, and the barking of the dogs telling of unholy woodland presences on the other.
On August fifteenth I received a frantic letter which disturbed me greatly, and which made me
wish Akeley could put aside his lonely reticence and call in the aid of the law. There had been
frightful happening on the night of the 12-13th, bullets flying outside the farmhouse, and three of the
twelve great dogs being found shot dead in the morning. There were myriads of claw-prints in the
road, with the human prints of Walter Brown among them. Akeley had started to telephone to
Brattleboro for more dogs, but the wire had gone dead before he had a chance to say much. Later he
went to Brattleboro in his car, and learned there that linemen had found the main cable neatly cut at a
point where it ran through the deserted hills north of Newfane. But he was about to start home with
four fine new dogs, and several cases of ammunition for his big-game repeating rifle. The letter was
written at the post office in Brattleboro, and came through to me without delay.
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 connection with the strange hill problem. The thing was reaching out so.
Would it suck me in and engulf me? In replying to his letter I urged him to seek help, and hinted that I
might take action myself if he did not. I spoke of visiting Vermont in person in spite of his wishes,
and of helping him explain the situation to the proper authorities. In return, however, I received only
a telegram from Bellows Falls which read thus:
APPRECIATE YOUR POSITION BUT CAN DO NOTHING TAKE NO ACTION YOURSELF
FOR IT COULD ONLY HARM BOTH WAIT FOR EXPLANATION
HENRY AKELY
But the affair was steadily deepening. Upon my replying to the telegram I received a shaky note
from Akeley with the astonishing news that he had not only never sent the wire, but had not received
the letter from me to which it was an obvious reply. Hasty inquiries by him at Bellows Falls had
brought out that the message was deposited by a strange sandy-haired man with a curiously thick,
droning voice, though more than this he could not learn. The clerk showed him the original text as
scrawled in pencil by the sender, but the handwriting was wholly unfamiliar. It was noticeable that the
signature was misspelled--A-K-E-L-Y, without the second "E." Certain conjectures were inevitable,
but amidst the obvious crisis he did not stop to elaborate upon them,
He spoke of the death of more dogs and the purchase of still others, and of the exchange of
gunfire which had become a settled feature each moonless night. Brown's prints, and the prints of at
least one or two more shod human figures, were now found regularly among the claw-prints in the
road, and at the back of the farmyard. It was, Akeley admitted, a pretty bad business; and before long
he would probably have to go to live with his California son whether or not he could sell the old
place. But it was not easy to leave the only spot one could really think of as home. He must try to
hang on a little longer; perhaps he could scare off the intruders--especially if he openly gave up all
further attempts to penetrate their secrets.
Writing Akeley at once, I renewed my offers of aid, and spoke again of visiting him and helping
him convince the authorities of his dire peril. In his reply he seemed less set against that plan than his
past attitude would have led one to predict, but said he would like to hold off a little while longer--
long enough to get his things in order and reconcile himself to the idea of leaving an almost morbidly
cherished birthplace. People looked askance at his studies and speculations and it would be better to
get quietly off without setting the countryside in a turmoil and creating widespread doubts of his own
sanity. He had had enough, he admitted, but he wanted to make a dignified exit if he could.
This letter reached me on the 28th of August, and I prepared and mailed as encouraging a reply as
I could. Apparently the encouragement had effect, for Akeley had fewer terrors to report when he
acknowledged my note. He was not very optimistic, though, and expressed the belief that it was only
the full moon season which was holding the creatures off. He hoped there would not be many
densely cloudy nights, and talked vaguely of boarding in Brattleboro when the moon waned. Again I
wrote him encouragingly but on September 5th there came a fresh communication which had
obviously crossed my letter in the mails; and to this I could not give any such hopeful response. In
view of its importance I believe I had better give it in full--as best I can do from memory of the shaky
script. It ran substantially as follows:
Monday
Dear Wilmarth
A rather discouraging P. S. to my last. Last night was thickly cloudy--though no rain--and not a bit
of moonlight got through. Things were pretty bad, and I think the end is getting near, in spite of all
we have hoped. After midnight something landed on the roof of the house, and the dogs all rushed up
to see what it was. I could hear them snapping and tearing around, and then one managed to get on the
roof by jumping from the low ell. There was a terrible fight up there, and I heard a frightful buzzing
which I'll never forget. And then there was a shocking smell. About the same time bullets came
through the window and nearly grazed me. I think the main line of the hill creatures had got close to
the house when the dogs divided because of the roof business. What was up there I don't know yet,
but I'm afraid the creatures are learning to steer better with their space wings. I put out the light and
used the windows for loopholes, and raked all around the house with rifle fire aimed just high
enough not to hit the dogs. That seemed to end the business, but in the morning I found great pools of
blood in the yard, besides pools of a green sticky stuff that had the worst odour I have ever smelled.
I climbed up on the roof and found more of the sticky stuff there. Five of the dogs were killed--I'm
afraid I hit one myself by aiming too low, for he was shot in the back. Now I am setting the panes the
shots broke, and am going to Brattleboro for more dogs. I guess the men at the kennels think I am
crazy. Will drop another note later. Suppose I'll be ready for moving in a week or two, though it
nearly kills me to think of it.
Hastily--Akeley
But this was not the only letter from Akeley to cross mine. On the next morning--September 6th--
still another came; this time a frantic scrawl which utterly unnerved me and put me at a loss what to
say or do next. Again I cannot do better than quote the text as faithfully as memory will let me.
Tuesday
Clouds didn't break, so no moon again--and going into the wane anyhow. I'd have the house wired
for electricity and put in a searchlight if I didn't know they'd cut the cables as fast as they could be
mended.
I think I am going crazy. It may be that all I have ever written you is a dream or madness. It was
bad enough before, but this time it is too much. They talked to me last night--talked in that cursed
buzzing voice and told me things that I dare not repeat to you. I heard them plainly above the barking
of the dogs, and once when they were drowned out a human voice helped them. Keep out of this,
Wilmarth--it is worse than either you or I ever suspected. They don't mean to let me get to California
now--they want to take me off alive, or what theoretically and mentally amounts to alive--not only to
Yuggoth, but beyond that--away outside the galaxy and possibly beyond the last curved rim of space.
I told them I wouldn't go where they wish, or in the terrible way they propose to take me, but I'm
afraid it will be no use. My place is so far out that they may come by day as well as by night before
long. Six more dogs killed, and I felt presences all along the wooded parts of the road when I drove
to Brattleboro today. It was a mistake for me to try to send you that phonograph record and black
stone. Better smash the record before it's too late. Will drop you another line tomorrow if I'm still
here. Wish I could arrange to get my books and things to Brattleboro and board there. I would run off
without anything if I could but something inside my mind holds me back. I can slip out to Brattleboro,
where I ought to be safe, but I feel just as much a prisoner there as at the house. And I seem to know
that I couldn't get much farther even if I dropped everything and tried. It is horrible--don't get mixed
up in this.
Yrs--Akeley
I did not sleep at all the night after receiving this terrible thing, and was utterly baffled as to
Akeley's remaining degree of sanity. The substance of the note was wholly insane, yet the manner of
expression--in view of all that had gone before--had a grimly potent quality of convincingness. I
made no attempt to answer it, thinking it better to wait until Akeley might have time to reply to my
latest communication. Such a reply indeed came on the following day, though the fresh material in it
quite overshadowed any of the points brought up by the letter nominally answered. Here is what I
recall of the text, scrawled and blotted as it was in the course of a plainly frantic and hurried
composition. Wednesday
W--
Your letter came, but it's no use to discuss anything any more. I am fully resigned. Wonder that I
have even enough will power left to fight them off. Can't escape even if I were willing to give up
everything and run. They'll get me.
Had a letter from them yesterday--R.F.D. man brought it while I was at Brattleboro. Typed and
postmarked BellowsFalls. 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 rundown farmers to come within a
mile of my house for love or money. The mail-carrier hears what they say and jokes me about it--
God! If I only dared tell him how real it is! I think I'll try to get him to notice the prints, but he comes
in the afternoon and they're usually about gone by that time. If I kept one by setting a box or pan over
it, he'd think surely it was a fake or joke.
Wish I hadn't gotten to be such a hermit, so folks don't drop around as they used to. I've never
dared show the black stone or the Kodak pictures, or play that record, to anybody but the ignorant
people. The others would say I faked the whole business and do nothing but laugh. But I may yet try
showing the pictures. They give those claw-prints clearly, even if the things that made them can't be
photographed. What a shame nobody else saw that thing this morning before it went to nothing!
But I don't know as I care. After what I've been through, a madhouse is as good a place as any.
The doctors can help me make up my mind to get away from this house, and that is all that will save
me.
Write my son George if you don't hear soon. Goodbye, smash that record, and don't mix up in this.
Yrs--Akeley
This letter frankly plunged me into the blackest of terror. I did not know what to say in answer, but
scratched off some incoherent words of advice and encouragement and sent them by registered mail.
I recall urging Akeley to move to Brattleboro at once, and place himself under the protection of the
authorities; adding that I would come to that town with the phonograph record and help convince the
courts of his sanity. It was time, too, I think I wrote, to alarm the people generally against this thing in
their midst. It will be observed that at this moment of stress my own belief in all Akeley had told and
claimed was virtually complete, though I did think his failure to get a picture of the dead monster was
due not to any freak of Nature but to some excited slip of his own.
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 showed clearly how totally we had
misjudged and misinterpreted the purpose of the Outer Ones in maintaining their secret colony on this
planet.
It seems that the evil legends about what they have offered to men, and what they wish in
connection with the earth, are wholly the result of an ignorant misconception of allegorical speech--
speech, of course, moulded by cultural backgrounds and thought-habits vastly different from
anything we dream of. My own conjectures, I freely own, shot as widely past the mark as any of the
guesses of illiterate farmers and savage Indians. What I had thought morbid and shameful and
ignominious is in reality awesome and mind-expanding and even glorious--my previous estimate
being merely a phase of man's eternal tendency to hate and fear and shrink from the utterly different.
Now I regret the harm I have inflicted upon these alien and incredible beings in the course of our
nightly skirmishes. If only I had consented to talk peacefully and reasonably with them in the first
place! But they bear me no grudge, their emotions being organised very differently from ours. It is
their misfortune to have had as their human agents in Vermont some very inferior specimens--the late
Walter Brown, for example. He prejudiced me vastly against them. Actually, they have never
knowingly harmed men, but have often been cruelly wronged and spied upon by our species. There is
a whole secret cult of evil men (a man of your mystical erudition will understand me when I link them
with Hastur and the Yellow Sign) devoted to the purpose of tracking them down and injuring them on
behalf of monstrous powers from other dimensions. It is against these aggressors--not against normal
humanity--that the drastic precautions of the Outer Ones are directed. Incidentally, I learned that many
of our lost letters were stolen not by the Outer Ones but by the emissaries of this malign cult.
All that the Outer Ones wish of man is peace and non-molestation and an increasing intellectual
rapport. This latter is absolutely necessary now that our inventions and devices are expanding our
knowledge and motions, and making it more and more impossible for the Outer Ones' necessary
outposts to exist secretly on this planet. The alien beings desire to know mankind more fully, and to
have a few of mankind's philosophic and scientific leaders know more about them. With such an
exchange of knowledge all perils will pass, and a satisfactory modus vivendi be established. The
very idea of any attempt to enslave or degrade mankind is ridiculous.
As a beginning of this improved rapport, the Outer Ones have naturally chosen me--whose
knowledge of them is already so considerable--as their primary interpreter on earth. Much was told
me last night--facts of the most stupendous and vista-opening nature--and more will be subsequently
communicated to me both orally and in writing. I shall not be called upon to make any trip outside just
yet, though I shall probably wish to do so later on--employing special means and transcending
everything which we have hitherto been accustomed to regard as human experience. My house will
be besieged no longer. Everything has reverted to normal, and the dogs will have no further
occupation. In place of terror I have been given a rich boon of knowledge and intellectual adventure
which few other mortals have ever shared.
The Outer Beings are perhaps the most marvellous organic things in or beyond all space and
time-members of a cosmos-wide race of which all other life-forms are merely degenerate variants.
They are more vegetable than animal, if these terms can be applied to the sort of matter composing
them, and have a somewhat fungoid structure; though the presence of a chlorophyll-like substance
and a very singular nutritive system differentiate them altogether from true cormophytic fungi.
Indeed, the type is composed of a form of matter totally alien to our part of space--with electrons
having a wholly different vibration-rate. That is why the beings cannot be photographed on the
ordinary camera films and plates of our known universe, even though our eyes can see them. With
proper knowledge, however, any good chemist could make a photographic emulsion which would
record their images.
The genus is unique in its ability to traverse the heatless and airless interstellar void in full
corporeal form, and some of its variants cannot do this without mechanical aid or curious surgical
transpositions. Only a few species have the ether-resisting wings characteristic of the Vermont
variety. Those inhabiting certain remote peaks in the Old World were brought in other ways. Their
external resemblance to animal life, and to the sort of structure we understand as material, is a matter
of parallel evolution rather than of close kinship. Their brain-capacity exceeds that of any other
surviving life-form, although the winged types of our hill country are by no means the most highly
developed. Telepathy is their usual means of discourse, though we have rudimentary vocal organs
which, after a slight operation (for surgery is an incredibly expert and everyday thing among them),
can roughly duplicate the speech of such types of organism as still use speech.
Their main immediate abode is a still undiscovered and almost lightless planet at the very edge of
our solar system--beyond Neptune, and the ninth in distance from the sun. It is, as we have inferred,
the object mystically hinted at as "Yuggoth" in certain ancient and forbidden writings; and it will soon
be the scene of a strange focussing of thought upon our world in an effort to facilitate mental
rapport. I would not be surprised if astronomers become sufficiently sensitive to these thought-
currents to discover Yuggoth when the Outer Ones wish them to do so. But Yuggoth, of course, is
only the stepping-stone. The main body of the beings inhabits strangely organized abysses wholly
beyond the utmost reach of any human imagination. The space-time globule which we recognize as
the totality of all cosmic entity is only an atom in the genuine infinity which is theirs. And as much of
this infinity as any human brain can hold is eventually to be opened up to me, as it has been to not
more than fifty other men since the human race has existed.
You will probably call this raving at first, Wilmarth, but in time you will appreciate the titanic
opportunity I have stumbled upon. I want you to share as much of it as is possible, and to that end must
tell you thousands of things that won't go on paper. In the past I have warned you not to come to see
me. Now that all is safe, I take pleasure in rescinding that warning and inviting you.
Can't you make a trip up here before your college term opens? It would be marvelously delightful
if you could. Bring along the phonograph record and all my letters to you as consultative data--we
shall need them in piecing together the whole tremendous story. You might bring the Kodak prints,
too, since I seem to have mislaid the negatives and my own prints in all this recent excitement. But
what a wealth of facts I have to add to all this groping and tentative material--and what a stupendous
device I have to supplement my additions!
Don't hesitate--I am free from espionage now, and you will not meet anything unnatural or
disturbing. Just come along and let my car meet you at the Brattleboro station--prepare to stay as long
as you can, and expect many an evening of discussion of things beyond all human conjecture. Don't
tell anyone about it, of course--for this matter must not get to the promiscuous public.
The train service to Brattleboro is not bad--you can get a timetable in Boston. Take the B. & M.
t o Greenfield, and then change for the brief remainder of the way. I suggest your taking the
convenient 4:10 P.M.--standard--from Boston. This gets into Greenfield at 7:35, and at 9:19 a train
leaves there which reaches Brattleboro at 10:01. That is weekdays. Let me know the date and I'll have
my car on hand at the station.
Pardon this typed letter, but my handwriting has grown shaky of late, as you know, and I don't feel
equal to long stretches of script. I got this new Corona in Brattleboro yesterday--it seems to work
very well.
Awaiting word, and hoping to see you shortly with the phonograph record and all my letters--and
the Kodak prints--
I am
Yours in anticipation, Henry W. Akeley
TO ALBERT N. WILMARTH, ESQ., MISKATONIC UNIVERSITY, ARKHAM, MASS.
The complexity of my emotions upon reading, re-reading, and pondering over this strange and
unlooked-for letter is past adequate description. I have said that I was at once relieved and made
uneasy, but this expresses only crudely the overtones of diverse and largely subconscious feelings
which comprised both the relief and the uneasiness. To begin with, the thing was so antipodally at
variance with the whole chain of horrors preceding it--the change of mood from stark terror to cool
complacency and even exultation was so unheralded, lightning-like, and complete! I could scarcely
believe that a single day could so alter the psychological perspective of one who had written that
final frenzied bulletin of Wednesday, no matter what relieving disclosures that day might have
brought. At certain moments a sense of conflicting unrealities made me wonder whether this whole
distantly reported drama of fantastic forces were not a kind of half-illusory dream created largely
within my own mind. Then I thought of the phonograph record and gave way to still greater
bewilderment.
The letter seemed so unlike anything which could have been expected! As I analysed my
impression, I saw that it consisted of two distinct phases. First, granting that Akeley had been sane
before and was still sane, the indicated change in the situation itself was so swift and unthinkable.
And secondly, the change in Akeley's own manner, attitude, and language was so vastly beyond the
normal or the predictable. The man's whole personality seemed to have undergone an insidious
mutation--a mutation so deep that one could scarcely reconcile his two aspects with the supposition
that both represented equal sanity. Word-choice, spelling--all were subtly different. And with my
academic sensitiveness to prose style, I could trace profound divergences in his commonest
reactions and rhythm-responses. Certainly, the emotional cataclysm or revelation which could
produce so radical an overturn must be an extreme one indeed! Yet in another way the letter seemed
quite characteristic of Akeley. The same old passion for infinity--the same old scholarly
inquisitiveness. I could not a moment--or more than a moment--credit the idea of spuriousness or
malign substitution. Did not the invitation--the willingness to have me test the truth of the letter in
person--prove its genuineness?
I did not retire Saturday night, but sat up thinking of the shadows and marvels behind the letter I
had received. My mind, aching from the quick succession of monstrous conceptions it had been
forced to confront during the last four months, worked upon this 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 ONE EIGHT TRAIN WEDNESDAY
DONT FORGET RECORD AND LETTERS AND PRINTS KEEP DESTINATION QUIET
EXPECT GREAT REVELATIONS
AKELEY
Receipt of this message in direct response to one sent to Akeley--and necessarily delivered to
his house from the Townshend station either by official messenger or by a restored telephone
service--removed any lingering subconscious doubts I may have had about the authorship of the
perplexing letter. My relief was marked--indeed, it was greater than I could account for at the time;
since all such doubts had been rather deeply buried. But I slept soundly and long that night, and was
eagerly busy with preparations during the ensuing two days.
VI
On Wednesday I started as agreed, taking with me a valise full of simple necessities and scientific
data, including the hideous phonograph record, the Kodak prints, and the entire file of Akeley's
correspondence. As requested, I had told no one where I was going; for I could see that the matter
demanded utmost privacy, even allowing for its most favourable turns. The thought of actual mental
contact with alien, outside entities was stupefying enough to my trained and somewhat prepared mind;
and this being so, what might one think of its effect on the vast masses of uninformed laymen? I do not
know whether dread or adventurous expectancy was uppermost in me as I changed trains at Boston
and began the long westward run out of familiar regions into those I knew less thoroughly. Waltham-
-Concord--Ayer--Fitchburg--Gardner--Athol--
My train reached Greenfield seven minutes late, but the northbound connecting express had been
held. Transferring in haste, I felt a curious breathlessness as the cars rumbled on through the early
afternoon sunlight into territories I had always read of but had never before visited. I knew I was
entering an altogether older-fashioned and more primitive New England than the mechanised,
urbanised coastal and southern areas where all my life had been spent; an unspoiled, ancestral New
England without the foreigners and factory-smoke, bill-boards and concrete roads, of the sections
which modernity has touched. There would be odd survivals of that continuous native life whose
deep roots make it the one authentic outgrowth of the landscape--the continuous native life which
keeps alive strange ancient memories, and fertilises the soil for shadowy, marvellous, and seldom-
mentioned beliefs.
Now and then I saw the blue Connecticut River gleaming in the sun, and after leaving Northfield
we crossed it. Ahead loomed green and cryptical hills, and when the conductor came around I
learned that I was at last in Vermont. He told me to set my watch back an hour, since the northern hill
country will have no dealings with new-fangled daylight time schemes. As I did so it seemed to me
that I was likewise turning the calendar back a century.
The train kept close to the river, and across in New Hampshire I could see the approaching slope
of steep Wantastiquet, about which singular old legends cluster. Then streets appeared on my left,
and a green island showed in the stream on my right. People rose and filed to the door, and I
followed them. The car stopped, and I alighted beneath the long train-shed of the Brattleboro station.
Looking over the line of waiting motors I hesitated a moment to see which one might turn out to
be the Akeley Ford, but my identity was divined before I could take the initiative. And yet it was
clearly not Akeley himself who advanced to meet me with an outstretched hand and a mellowly
phrased query as to whether I was indeed Mr. Albert N. Wilmarth of Arkham. This man bore no
resemblance to the bearded, grizzled Akeley of the snapshot; but was a younger and more urbane
person, fashionably dressed, and wearing only a small, dark moustache. His cultivated voice held an
odd and almost disturbing hint of vague familiarity, though I could not definitely place it in my
memory.
As I surveyed him I heard him explaining that he was a friend of my prospective host's who had
come down from Townshend in his stead. Akeley, he declared, had suffered a sudden attack of some
asthmatic trouble, and did not feel equal to making a trip in the outdoor air. It was not serious,
however, and there was to be no change in plans regarding my visit. I could not make out just how
much this Mr. Noyes--as he announced himself--knew of Akeley's researches and discoveries,
though it seemed to me that his casual manner stamped him as a comparative outsider. Remembering
what a hermit Akeley had been, I was a trifle surprised at the ready availability of such a friend; but
did not let my puzzlement deter me from entering the motor to which he gestured me. It was not the
small ancient car I had expected from Akeley's descriptions, but a large and immaculate specimen of
recent pattern--apparently Noyes's own, and bearing Massachusetts license plates with the amusing
"sacred codfish" device of that year. My guide, I concluded, must be a summer transient in the
Townshend region.
Noyes climbed into the car beside me and started it at once. I was glad that he did not overflow
with conversation, for some peculiar atmospheric tensity made me feel disinclined to talk. The town
seemed very attractive in the afternoon sunlight as we swept up an incline and turned to the right into
the main street. It drowsed like the older New England cities which one remembers from boyhood,
and something in the collocation of roofs and steeples and chimneys and brick walls formed contours
touching deep viol-strings of ancestral emotion. I could tell that I was at the gateway of a region
half-bewitched through the piling-up of unbroken time-accumulations; a region where old, strange
things have had a chance to grow and linger because they have never been stirred up.
As we passed out of Brattleboro my sense of constraint and foreboding increased, for a vague
quality in the hill-crowded countryside with its towering, threatening, close-pressing green and
granite slopes hinted at obscure secrets and immemorial survivals which might or might not be
hostile to mankind. For a time our course followed a broad, shallow river which flowed down from
unknown hills in the north, and I shivered when my companion told me it was the WestRiver. It was in
this stream, I recalled from newspaper items, that one of the morbid crablike beings had been seen
floating after the floods.
Gradually the country around us grew wilder and more deserted. Archaic covered bridges
lingered fearsomely out of the past in pockets of the hills, and the half-abandoned railway track
paralleling the river seemed to exhale a nebulously visible air of desolation. There were awesome
sweeps of vivid valley where great cliffs rose, New England's virgin granite showing grey and
austere through the verdure that scaled the crests. There were gorges where untamed streams
leaped, bearing down toward the river the unimagined secrets of a thousand pathless peaks.
Branching away now and then were narrow, half-concealed roads that bored their way through solid,
luxuriant masses of forest among whose primal trees whole armies of elemental spirits might well
lurk. As I saw these I thought of how Akeley had been molested by unseen agencies on his drives
along this very route, and did not wonder that such things could be.
The quaint, sightly village of Newfane, reached in less than an hour, was our last link with that
world which man can definitely call his own by virtue of conquest and complete occupancy. After
that we cast off all allegiance to immediate, tangible, and time-touched things, and entered a fantastic
world of hushed unreality in which the narrow, ribbon-like road rose and fell and curved with an
almost sentient and purposeful caprice amidst the tenantless green peaks and half-deserted valleys.
Except for the sound of the motor, and the faint stir of the few lonely farms we passed at infrequent
intervals, the only thing that reached my ears was the gurgling, insidious trickle of strange waters
from numberless hidden fountains in the shadowy woods.
The nearness and intimacy of the dwarfed, domed hills now became veritably breath-taking. Their
steepness and abruptness were even greater than I had imagined from hearsay, and suggested nothing
in common with the prosaic objective world we know. The dense, unvisited woods on those
inaccessible slopes seemed to harbour alien and incredible things, and I felt that the very outline of
the hills themselves held some strange and aeon-forgotten meaning, as if they were vast hieroglyphs
left by a rumoured titan race whose glories live only in rare, deep dreams. All the legends of the
past, and all the stupefying imputations of Henry Akeley's letters and exhibits, welled up in my
memory to heighten the atmosphere of tension and growing menace. The purpose of my visit, and the
frightful abnormalities it postulated struck at me all at once with a chill sensation that nearly over-
balanced my ardour for strange delvings.
My guide must have noticed my disturbed attitude; for as the road grew wilder and more
irregular, and our motion slower and more jolting, his occasional pleasant comments expanded into a
steadier flow of discourse. He spoke of the beauty and weirdness of the country, and revealed some
acquaintance with the folklore studies of my prospective host. From his polite questions it was
obvious that he knew I had come for a scientific purpose, and that I was bringing data of some
importance; but he gave no sign of appreciating the depth and awfulness of the knowledge which
Akeley had finally reached.
His manner was so cheerful, normal, and urbane that his remarks ought to have calmed and
reassured me; but oddly enough. I felt only the more disturbed as we bumped and veered onward into
the unknown wilderness of hills and woods. At times it seemed as if he were pumping me to see what
I knew of the monstrous secrets of the place, and with every fresh utterance that vague, teasing,
baffling familiarity in his voice increased. It was not an ordinary or healthy familiarity despite the
thoroughly wholesome and cultivated nature of the voice. I somehow linked it with forgotten
nightmares, and felt that I might go mad if I recognised it. If any good excuse had existed, I think I
would have turned back from my visit. As it was, I could not well do so--and it occurred to me that a
cool, scientific conversation with Akeley himself after my arrival would help greatly to pull me
together.
Besides, there was a strangely calming element of cosmic beauty in the hypnotic landscape
through which we climbed and plunged fantastically. Time had lost itself in the labyrinths behind, and
around us stretched only the flowering waves of faery and the recaptured loveliness of vanished
centuries--the hoary groves, the untainted pastures edged with gay autumnal blossoms, and at vast
intervals the small brown farmsteads nestling amidst huge trees beneath vertical precipices of
fragrant brier and meadow-grass. Even the sunlight assumed a supernal glamour, as if some special
atmosphere or exhalation mantled the whole region. I had seen nothing like it before save in the
magic vistas that sometimes form the backgrounds of Italian primitives. Sodoma and Leonardo
conceived such expanses, but only in the distance, and through the vaultings of Renaissance arcades.
We were now burrowing bodily through the midst of the picture, and I seemed to find in its
necromancy a thing I had innately known or inherited and for which I had always been vainly
searching.
Suddenly, after rounding an obtuse angle at the top of a sharp ascent, the car came to a standstill.
On my left, across a well-kept lawn which stretched to the road and flaunted a border of whitewashed
stones, rose a white, two-and-a-half-story house of unusual size and elegance for the region, with a
congenes of contiguous or arcade-linked barns, sheds, and windmill behind and to the right. I
recognised it at once from the snapshot I had received, and was not surprised to see the name of
Henry Akeley on the galvanised-iron mailbox near the road. For some distance back of the house a
level stretch of marshy and sparsely-wooded land extended, beyond which soared a steep, thickly-
forested hillside ending in a jagged leafy crest. This latter, I knew, was the summit of Dark Mountain,
half way up which we must have climbed already.
Alighting from the car and taking my valise, Noyes asked me to wait while he went in and notified
Akeley of my advent. He himself, he added, had important business elsewhere, and could not stop for
more than a moment. As he briskly walked up the path to the house I climbed out of the car myself,
wishing to stretch my legs a little before settling down to a sedentary conversation. My feeling of
nervousness and tension had risen to a maximum again now that I was on the actual scene of the
morbid beleaguering described so hauntingly in Akeley's letters, and I honestly dreaded the coming
discussions which were to link me with such alien and forbidden worlds.
Close contact with the utterly bizarre is often more terrifying than inspiring, and it did not cheer
me to think that this very bit of dusty road was the place where those monstrous tracks and that foetid
green ichor had been found after moonless nights of fear and death. Idly I noticed that none of
Akeley's dogs seemed to be about. Had he sold them all as soon as the Outer Ones made peace with
him? Try as I might, I could not have the same confidence in the depth and sincerity of that peace
which appeared in Akeley's final and queerly different letter. After all, he was a man of much
simplicity and with little worldly experience. Was there not, perhaps, some deep and sinister
undercurrent beneath the surface of the new alliance?
Led by my thoughts, my eyes turned downward to the powdery road surface which had held such
hideous testimonies. The last few days had been dry, and tracks of all sorts cluttered the rutted,
irregular highway despite the unfrequented nature of the district. With a vague curiosity I began to
trace the outline of some of the heterogeneous impressions, trying meanwhile to curb the flights of
macabre fancy which the place and its memories suggested. There was something menacing and
uncomfortable in the funereal stillness, in the muffled, subtle trickle of distant brooks, and in the
crowding green peaks and black-wooded precipices that choked the narrow horizon.
And then an image shot into my consciousness which made those vague menaces and flights of
fancy seem mild and insignificant indeed. I have said that I was scanning the miscellaneous prints in
the road with a kind of idle curiosity--but all at once that curiosity was shockingly snuffed out by a
sudden and paralysing gust of active terror. For though the dust tracks were in general confused and
overlapping, and unlikely to arrest any casual gaze, my restless vision had caught certain details near
the spot where the path to the house joined the highway; and had recognised beyond doubt or hope
the frightful significance of those details. It was not for nothing, alas, that I had pored for hours over
the Kodak views of the Outer Ones' claw-prints which Akeley had sent. Too well did I know the
marks of those loathsome nippers, and that hint of ambiguous direction which stamped the horrors as
no creatures of this planet. No chance had been left me for merciful mistake. Here, indeed, in
objective form before my own eyes, and surely made not many hours ago, were at least three marks
which stood out blasphemously among the surprising plethora of blurred footprints leading to and
from the Akeley farmhouse. They were the hellish tracks of the living fungi from Yuggoth.
I pulled myself together in time to stifle a scream. After all, what more was there than I might
have expected, assuming that I had really believed Akeley's letters? He had spoken of making peace
with the things. Why, then, was it strange that some of them had visited his house? But the terror was
stronger than the reassurance. Could any man be expected to look unmoved for the first time upon the
claw-marks of animate beings from outer depths of space? Just then I saw Noyes emerge from the
door and approach with a brisk step. I must, I reflected, keep command of myself, for the chances
were that this genial friend knew nothing of Akeley's profoundest and most stupendous probings into
the forbidden.
Akeley, Noyes hastened to inform me, was glad and ready to see me; although his sudden attack
of asthma would prevent him from being a very competent host for a day or two. These spells hit him
hard when they came, and were always accompanied by a debilitating fever and general weakness. He
never was good for much while they lasted--had to talk in a whisper, and was very clumsy and feeble
in getting about. His feet and ankles swelled, too, so that he had to bandage them like a gouty old
beef-eater. Today he was in rather bad shape, so that I would have to attend very largely to my own
needs; but he was none the less eager for conversation. I would find him in the study at the left of the
front hall--the room where the blinds were shut. He had to keep the sunlight out when he was ill, for
his eyes were very sensitive.
As Noyes bade me adieu and rode off northward in his car I began to walk slowly toward the
house. The door had been left ajar for me; but before approaching and entering I cast a searching
glance around the whole place, trying to decide what had struck me as so intangibly queer about it.
The barns and sheds looked trimly prosaic enough, and I noticed Akeley's battered Ford in its
capacious, unguarded shelter. Then the secret of the queerness reached me. It was the total silence.
Ordinarily a farm is at least moderately murmurous from its various kinds of livestock, but here all
signs of life were missing. What of the hens and the dogs? The cows, of which Akeley had said he
possessed several, might conceivably be out to pasture, and the dogs might possibly have been sold;
but the absence of any trace of cackling or grunting was truly singular.
I did not pause long on the path, but resolutely entered the open house door and closed it behind
me. It had cost me a distinct psychological effort to do so, and now that I was shut inside I had a
momentary longing for precipitate retreat. Not that the place was in the least sinister in visual
suggestion; on the contrary, I thought the graceful late-colonial hallway very tasteful and
wholesome, and admired the evident breeding of the man who had furnished it. What made me wish to
flee was something very attenuated and indefinable. Perhaps it was a certain odd odour which I
thought I noticed--though I well knew how common musty odours are in even the best of ancient
farmhouses.
VII
Refusing to let these cloudy qualms overmaster me, I recalled Noyes's instructions and pushed
open the six-panelled, brass-latched white door on my left. The room beyond was darkened as I had
known before; and as I entered it I noticed that the queer odour was stronger there. There likewise
appeared to be some faint, half-imaginary rhythm or vibration in the air. For a moment the closed
blinds allowed me to see very little, but then a kind of apologetic hacking or whispering sound drew
my attention to a great easy-chair in the farther, darker corner of the room. Within its shadowy depths
I saw the white blur of a man's face and hands; and in a moment I had crossed to greet the figure who
had tried to speak. Dim though the light was, I perceived that this was indeed my host. I had studied
the Kodak picture repeatedly, and there could be no mistake about this firm, weather-beaten face with
the cropped, grizzled beard.
But as I looked again my recognition was mixed with sadness and anxiety; for certainly, his face
was that of a very sick man. I felt that there must be something more than asthma behind that strained,
rigid, immobile expression and unwinking glassy stare; and realised how terribly the strain of his
frightful experiences must have told on him. Was it not enough to break any human being--even a
younger man than this intrepid delver into the forbidden? The strange and sudden relief, I feared, had
come too late to save him from something like a general breakdown. There was a touch of the pitiful
in the limp, lifeless way his lean hands rested in his lap. He had on a loose dressing-gown, and was
swathed around the head and high around the neck with a vivid yellow scarf or hood.
And then I saw that he was trying to talk in the same hacking whisper with which he had greeted
me. It was a hard whisper to catch at first, since the grey moustache concealed all movements of the
lips, and something in its timbre disturbed me greatly; but by concentrating my attention I could soon
make out its purport surprisingly well. The accent was by no means a rustic one, and the language
was even more polished than correspondence had led me to expect.
"Mr. Wilmarth, I presume? You must pardon my not rising. I am quite ill, as Mr. Noyes must have
told you; but I could not resist having you come just the same. You know what I wrote in my last
letter--there is so much to tell you tomorrow when I shall feel better. I can't say how glad I am to see
you in person after all our many letters. You have the file with you, of course? And the Kodak prints
and records? Noyes put your valise in the hall--I suppose you saw it. For tonight I fear you'll have to
wait on yourself to a great extent. Your room is upstairs--the one over this--and you'll see the
bathroom door open at the head of the staircase. There's a meal spread for you in the dining-room--
right through this door at your right--which you can take whenever you feel like it. I'll be a better
host tomorrow--but just now weakness leaves me helpless.
"Make yourself at home--you might take out the letters and pictures and records and put them on
the table here before you go upstairs with your bag. It is here that we shall discuss them--you can
see my phonograph on that corner stand.
"No, thanks--there's nothing you can do for me. I know these spells of old. Just come back for a
little quiet visiting before night, and then go to bed when you please. I'll rest right here--perhaps
sleep here all night as I often do. In the morning I'll be far better able to go into the things we must go
into. You realise, of course, the utterly stupendous nature of the matter before us. To us, as to only a
few men on this earth, there will be opened up gulfs of time and space and knowledge beyond
anything within the conception of human science or philosophy.
"Do you know that Einstein is wrong, and that certain objects and forces can move with a velocity
greater than that of light? With proper aid I expect to go backward and forward in time, and actually
see and feel the earth of remote past and future epochs. You can't imagine the degree to which those
beings have carried science. There is nothing they can't do with the mind and body of living
organisms. I expect to visit other planets, and even other stars and galaxies. The first trip will be to
Yuggoth, the nearest world fully peopled by the beings. It is a strange dark orb at the very rim of our
solar system--unknown to earthly astronomers as yet. But I must have written you about this. At the
proper time, you know, the beings there will direct thought-currents toward us and cause it to be
discovered--or perhaps let one of their human allies give the scientists a hint.
"There are mighty cities on Yuggoth--great tiers of terraced towers built of black stone like the
specimen I tried to send you. That came from Yuggoth. The sun shines there no brighter than a star,
but the beings need no light. They have other subtler senses, and put no windows in their great
houses and temples. Light even hurts and hampers and confuses them, for it does not exist at all in the
black cosmos outside time and space where they came from originally. To visit Yuggoth would
drive any weak man mad--yet I am going there. The black rivers of pitch that flow under those
mysterious cyclopean bridges--things built by some elder race extinct and forgotten before the
beings came to Yuggoth from the ultimate voids--ought to be enough to make any man a Dante or Poe
if he can keep sane long enough to tell what he has seen.
"But remember--that dark world of fungoid gardens and windowless cities isn't really terrible. It
is only to us that it would seem so. Probably this world seemed just as terrible to the beings when
they first explored it in the primal age. You know they were here long before the fabulous epoch of
Cthulhu was over, and remember all about sunken R'lyeh when it was above the waters. They've been
inside the earth, too--there are openings which human beings know nothing of--some of them in these
very Vermont hills--and great worlds of unknown life down there; blue-litten K'n-yan, red-litten Yoth,
and black, lightless N'kai. It's from N'kai that frightful Tsathoggua came--you know, the amorphous,
toad-like god-creature mentioned in the Pnakotic Manuscripts and the Necronomicon and the
Commoriom myth-cycle preserved by the Atlantean high-priest Klarkash-Ton.
"But we will talk of all this later on. It must be four or five o'clock by this time. Better bring the
stuff from your bag, take a bite, and then come back for a comfortable chat."
Very slowly I turned and began to obey my host; fetching my valise, extracting and depositing the
desired articles, and finally ascending to the room designated as mine. With the memory of that
roadside claw-print fresh in my mind, Akeley's whispered paragraphs had affected me queerly; and
the hints of familiarity with this unknown world of fungous life--forbidden Yuggoth--made my flesh
creep more than I cared to own. I was tremendously sorry about Akeley's illness, but had to confess
that his hoarse whisper had a hateful as well as pitiful quality. If only he wouldn't gloat so about
Yuggoth and its black secrets!
My room proved a very pleasant and well-furnished one, devoid alike of the musty odour and
disturbing sense of vibration; and after leaving my valise there I descended again to greet Akeley and
take the lunch he had set out for me. The dining-room was just beyond the study, and I saw that a
kitchen extended still farther in the same direction. On the dining-table an ample array of sandwiches,
cake, and cheese awaited me, and a Thermos-bottle beside a cup and saucer testified that hot coffee
had not been forgotten. After a well-relished meal I poured myself a liberal cup of coffee, but found
that the culinary standard had suffered a lapse in this one detail. My first spoonful revealed a faintly
unpleasant acrid taste, so that I did not take more. Throughout the lunch I thought of Akeley sitting
silently in the great chair in the darkened next room.
Once I went in to beg him to share the repast, but he whispered that he could eat nothing as yet.
Later on, just before he slept, he would take some malted milk--all he ought to have that day.
After lunch I insisted on clearing the dishes away and washing them in the kitchen sink--
incidentally emptying the coffee which I had not been able to appreciate. Then returning to the
darkened study I drew up a chair near my host's corner and prepared for such conversation as he
might feel inclined to conduct. The letters, pictures, and record were still on the large centre-table,
but for the nonce we did not have to draw upon them. Before long I forgot even the bizarre odour and
curious suggestions of vibration.
I have said that there were things in some of Akeley's letters--especially the second and most
voluminous one--which I would not dare to quote or even form into words on paper. This hesitancy
applies with still greater force to the things I heard whispered that evening in the darkened room
among the lonely hills. Of the extent of the cosmic horrors unfolded by that raucous voice I cannot
even hint. He had known hideous things before, but what he had learned since making his pact with
the Outside Things was almost too much for sanity to bear. Even now I absolutely refused to believe
what he implied about the constitution of ultimate infinity, the juxtaposition of dimensions, and the
frightful position of our known cosmos of space and time in the unending chain of linked cosmos-
atoms which makes up the immediate super-cosmos of curves, angles, and material and semi-material
electronic organisation.
Never was a sane man more dangerously close to the arcana of basic entity--never was an organic
brain nearer to utter annihilation in the chaos that transcends form and force and symmetry. I learned
whence Cthulhu first came, and why half the great temporary stars of history had flared forth. I
guessed--from hints which made even my informant pause timidly--the secret behind the Magellanic
Clouds and globular nebulae, and the black truth veiled by the immemorial allegory of Tao. The
nature of the Doels was plainly revealed, and I was told the essence (though not the source) of the
Hounds of Tindalos. The legend of Yig, Father of Serpents, remained figurative no longer, and I
started with loathing when told of the monstrous nuclear chaos beyond angled space which the
Necronomicon had mercifully cloaked under the name of Azathoth. It was shocking to have the
foulest nightmares of secret myth cleared up in concrete terms whose stark, morbid hatefulness
exceeded the boldest hints of ancient and mediaeval mystics. Ineluctably I was led to believe that the
first whisperers of these accursed tales must have had discourse with Akeley's Outer Ones, and
perhaps have visited outer cosmic realms as Akeley now proposed visiting them.
I was told of the Black Stone and what it implied, and was glad that it had not reached me. My
guesses about those hieroglyphics had been all too correct! And yet Akeley now seemed reconciled
to the whole fiendish system he had stumbled upon; reconciled and eager to probe farther into the
monstrous abyss. I wondered what beings he had talked with since his last letter to me, and whether
many of them had been as human as that first emissary he had mentioned. The tension in my head grew
insufferable, and I built up all sorts of wild theories about that queer, persistent odour and those
insidious hints of vibration in the darkened room.
Night was falling now, and as I recalled what Akeley had written me about those earlier nights I
shuddered to think there would be no moon. Nor did I like the way the farmhouse nestled in the lee of
that colossal forested slope leading up to Dark Mountain's unvisited crest. With Akeley's permission
I lighted a small oil lamp, turned it low, and set it on a distant bookcase beside the ghostly bust of
Milton; but afterward I was sorry I had done so, for it made my host's strained, immobile face and
listless hands look damnably abnormal and corpselike. He seemed half-incapable of motion, though I
saw him nod stiffly once in awhile.
After what he had told, I could scarcely imagine what profounder secrets he was saving for the
morrow; but at last it developed that his trip to Yuggoth and beyond--and my own possible
participation in it--was to be the next day's topic. He must have been amused by the start of horror I
gave at hearing a cosmic voyage on my part proposed, for his head wabbled violently when I showed
my fear. Subsequently he spoke very gently of how human beings might accomplish--and several
times had accomplished--the seemingly impossible flight across the interstellar void. It seemed that
complete human bodies did not indeed make the trip, but that the prodigious surgical, biological,
chemical, and mechanical skill of the Outer Ones had found a way to convey human brains without
their concomitant physical structure.
There was a harmless way to extract a brain, and a way to keep the organic residue alive during
its absence. The bare, compact cerebral matter was then immersed in an occasionally replenished
fluid within an ether-tight cylinder of a metal mined in Yuggoth, certain electrodes reaching through
and connecting at will with elaborate instruments capable of duplicating the three vital faculties of
sight, hearing, and speech. For the winged fungus-beings to carry the brain-cylinders intact through
space was an easy matter. Then, on every planet covered by their civilisation, they would find plenty
of adjustable faculty-instruments capable of being connected with the encased brains; so that after a
little fitting these travelling intelligences could be given a full sensory and articulate life--albeit a
bodiless and mechanical one--at each stage of their journeying through and beyond the space-time
continuum. It was as simple as carrying a phonograph record about and playing it wherever a
phonograph of corresponding make exists. Of its success there could be no question. Akeley was not
afraid. Had it not been brilliantly accomplished again and again?
For the first time one of the inert, wasted hands raised itself and pointed stiffly to a high shelf on
the farther side of the room. There, in a neat row, stood more than a dozen cylinders of a metal I had
never seen before--cylinders about a foot high and somewhat less in diameter, with three curious
sockets set in an isosceles triangle over the front convex surface of each. One of them was linked at
two of the sockets to a pair of singular-looking machines that stood in the background. Of their
purport I did not need to be told, and I shivered as with ague. Then I saw the hand point to a much
nearer corner where some intricate instruments with attached cords and plugs, several of them much
like the two devices on the shelf behind the cylinders, were huddled together.
"There are four kinds of instruments here, Wilmarth," whispered the voice. "Four kinds--three
faculties each--makes twelve pieces in all. You see there are four different sorts of beings
represented in those cylinders up there. Three humans, six fungoid beings who can't navigate space
corporeally, two beings from Neptune (God! if you could see the body this type has on its own
planet!), and the rest entities from the central caverns of an especially interesting dark star beyond the
galaxy. In the principal outpost inside Round Hill you'll now and then find more cylinders and
machines--cylinders of extra-cosmic brains with different senses from any we know--allies and
explorers from the uttermost Outside--and special machines for giving them impressions and
expression in the several ways suited at once to them and to the comprehensions of different types of
listeners. Round Hill, like most of the beings' main outposts all through the various universes, is a
very cosmopolitan place. Of course, only the more common types have been lent to me for
experiment.
"Here--take the three machines I point to and set them on the table. That tall one with the two
glass lenses in front--then the box with the vacuum tubes and sounding-board--and now the one with
the metal disc on top. Now for the cylinder with the label 'B-67' pasted on it. Just stand in that
Windsor chair to reach the shelf. Heavy? Never mind! Be sure of the number--B-67. Don't bother that
fresh, shiny 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 machine over to the extreme right--first the lens one, then the disc one, and
then the tube one. That's right. I might as well tell you that this is a human being--just like any of us.
I'll give you a taste of some of the others tomorrow."
To this day I do not know why I obeyed those whispers so slavishly, or whether I thought Akeley
was mad or sane. After what had gone before, I ought to have been prepared for anything; but this
mechanical mummery seemed so like the typical vagaries of crazed inventors and scientists that it
struck a chord of doubt which even the preceding discourse had not excited. What the whisperer
implied was beyond all human belief--yet were not the other things still farther beyond, and less
preposterous only because of their remoteness from tangible concrete proof?
As my mind reeled amidst this chaos, I became conscious of a mixed grating and whirring from
all three of the machines lately linked to the cylinder--a grating and whirring which soon subsided
into a virtual noiselessness. What was about to happen? Was I to hear a voice? And if so, what proof
would I have that it was not some cleverly concocted radio device talked into by a concealed but
closely watched speaker? Even now I am unwilling to swear just what I heard, or just what
phenomenon really took place before me. But something certainly seemed to take place.
To be brief and plain, the machine with the tubes and sound-box began to speak, and with a point
and intelligence which left no doubt that the speaker was actually present and observing us. The
voice was loud, metallic, lifeless, and plainly mechanical in every detail of its production. It was
incapable of inflection or expressiveness, but scraped and rattled on with a deadly precision and
deliberation.
"Mr. Wilmarth," it said, "I hope I do not startle you. I am a human being like yourself, though my
body is now resting safely under proper vitalising treatment inside Round Hill, about a mile and a half
east of here. I myself am here with you--my brain is in that cylinder and I see, hear, and speak through
these electronic vibrators. In a week I am going across the void as I have been many times before,
and I expect to have the pleasure of Mr. Akeley's company. I wish I might have yours as well; for I
know you by sight and reputation, and have kept close track of your correspondence with our friend. I
am, of course, one of the men who have become allied with the outside beings visiting our planet. I
met them first in the Himalayas, and have helped them in various ways. In return they have given me
experiences such as few men have ever had.
"Do you realise what it means when I say I have been on thirty-seven different celestial bodies--
planets, dark stars, and less definable objects--including eight outside our galaxy and two outside the
curved cosmos of space and time? All this has not harmed me in the least. My brain has been removed
from my body by fissions so adroit that it would be crude to call the operation surgery. The visiting
beings have methods which make these extractions easy and almost normal--and one's body never
ages when the brain is out of it. The brain, I may add, is virtually immortal with its mechanical
faculties and a limited nourishment supplied by occasional changes of the preserving fluid.
"Altogether, I hope most heartily that you will decide to come with Mr. Akeley and me. The
visitors are eager to know men of knowledge like yourself, and to show them the great abysses that
most of us have had to dream about in fanciful ignorance. It may seem strange at first to meet them,
but I know you will be above minding that. I think Mr. Noyes will go along, too--the man who
doubtless brought you up here in his car. He has been one of us for years--I suppose you recognised
his voice as one of those on the record Mr. Akeley sent you."
At my violent start the speaker paused a moment before concluding. "So Mr. Wilmarth, I will
leave the matter to you; merely adding that a man with your love of strangeness and folklore ought
never to miss such a chance as this. There is nothing to fear. All transitions are painless; and there is
much to enjoy in a wholly mechanised state of sensation. When the electrodes are disconnected, one
merely drops off into a sleep of especially vivid and fantastic dreams.
"And now, if you don't mind, we might adjourn our session till tomorrow. Good night--just turn all
the switches back to the left; never mind the exact order, though you might let the lens machine be
last. Good night, Mr. Akeley--treat our guest well! Ready now with those switches?"
That was all. I obeyed mechanically and shut off all three switches, though dazed with doubt of
everything that had occurred. My head was still reeling as I heard Akeley's whispering voice telling
me that I might leave all the apparatus on the table just as it was. He did not essay any comment on
what had happened, and indeed no comment could have conveyed much to my burdened faculties. I
heard him telling me I could take the lamp to use in my room, and deduced that he wished to rest alone
in the dark. It was surely time he rested, for his discourse of the afternoon and evening had been such
as to exhaust even a vigorous man. Still dazed, I bade my host good night and went upstairs with the
lamp, although I had an excellent pocket flashlight with me.
I was glad to be out of that downstairs study with the queer odour and vague suggestions of
vibration, yet could not of course escape a hideous sense of dread and peril and cosmic abnormality
as I thought of the place I was in and the forces I was meeting. The wild, lonely region, the black,
mysteriously forested slope towering so close behind the house; the footprint in the road, the sick,
motionless whisperer in the dark, the hellish cylinders and machines, and above all the invitations to
strange surgery and stranger voyagings--these things, all so new and in such sudden succession,
rushed in on me with a cumulative force which sapped my will and almost undermined my physical
strength.
To discover that my guide Noyes was the human celebrant in that monstrous bygone Sabbat-ritual
on the phonograph record was a particular shock, though I had previously sensed a dim, repellent
familiarity in his voice. Another special shock came from my own attitude toward my host whenever I
paused to analyse it; for much as I had instinctively liked Akeley as revealed in his correspondence, I
now found that he filled me with a distinct repulsion. His illness ought to have excited my pity; but
instead, it gave me a kind of shudder. He was so rigid and inert and corpselike--and that incessant
whispering was so hateful and unhuman!
It occurred to me that this whispering was different from anything else of the kind I had ever
heard; that, despite the curious motionlessness of the speaker's moustache-screened lips, it had a
latent strength and carrying-power remarkable for the wheezing of an asthmatic. I had been able to
understand the speaker when wholly across the room, and once or twice it had seemed to me that the
faint but penetrant sounds represented not so much weakness as deliberate repression--for what
reason I could not guess. From the first I had felt a disturbing quality in their timbre. Now, when I
tried to weigh the matter, I thought I could trace this impression to a kind of subconscious familiarity
like that which had made Noyes's voice so hazily ominous. But when or where I had encountered the
thing it hinted at, was more than I could tell.
One thing was certain--I would not spend another night here. My scientific zeal had vanished
amidst fear and loathing, and I felt nothing now but a wish to escape from this net of morbidity and
unnatural revelation. I knew enough now. It must indeed be true that strange cosmic linkages do exist-
-but such things are surely not meant for normal human beings to meddle with.
Blasphemous influences seemed to surround me and press chokingly upon my senses. Sleep, I
decided, would be out of the question; so I merely extinguished the lamp and threw myself on the bed
fully dressed. No doubt it was absurd, but I kept ready for some unknown emergency; gripping in my
right hand the revolver I had brought along, and holding the pocket flashlight in my left. Not a sound
came from below, and I could imagine how my host was sitting there with cadaverous stiffness in the
dark.
Somewhere I heard a clock ticking, and was vaguely grateful for the normality of the sound. It
reminded me, though, of another thing about the region which disturbed me--the total absence of
animal life. There were certainly no farm beasts about, and now I realised that even the accustomed
night-noises of wild living things were absent. Except for the sinister trickle of distant unseen
waters, that stillness was anomalous--interplanetary--and I wondered what star-spawned, intangible
blight could be hanging over the region. I recalled from old legends that dogs and other beasts had
always hated the Outer Ones, and thought of what those tracks in the road might mean.
VIII
Do not ask me how long my unexpected lapse into slumber lasted, or how much of what ensued
was sheer dream. If I tell you that I awakened at a certain time, and heard and saw certain things, you
will merely answer that I did not wake then; and that everything was a dream until the moment when I
rushed out of the house, stumbled to the shed where I had seen the old Ford, and seized that ancient
vehicle for a mad, aimless race over the haunted hills which at last landed me--after hours of jolting
and winding through forest-threatened labyrinths--in a village which turned out to be Townshend.
You will also, of course, discount everything else in my report; and declare that all the pictures,
record-sounds, cylinder-and-machine sounds, and kindred evidences were bits of pure deception
practiced on me by the missing Henry Akeley. You will even hint that he conspired with other
eccentrics to carry out a silly and elaborate hoax--that he had the express shipment removed at
Keene, and that he had Noyes make that terrifying wax record. It is odd, though, that Noyes has not
ever yet been identified; that he was unknown at any of the villages near Akeley's place, though he
must have been frequently in the region. I wish I had stopped to memorize the license-number of his
car--or perhaps it is better after all that I did not. For I, despite all you can say, and despite all I
sometimes try to say to myself, know that loathsome outside influences must be lurking there in the
half-unknown hills--and that, those influences have spies and emissaries in the world of men. To keep
as far as possible from such influences and such emissaries is all that I ask of life in future.
When my frantic story sent a sheriff's posse out to the farmhouse, Akeley was gone without
leaving a trace. His loose dressing gown, yellow scarf, and foot-bandages lay on the study floor
near his corner. easy-chair, and it could not be decided whether any of his other apparel had vanished
with him. The dogs and livestock were indeed missing, and there were some curious bullet-holes
both on the house's exterior and on some of the walls within; but beyond this nothing unusual could
be detected. No cylinders or machines, none of the evidences I had brought in my valise, no queer
odour or vibration-sense, no foot-prints in the road, and none of the problematical things I glimpsed
at the very last.
I stayed a week in Brattleboro after my escape, making inquiries among people of every kind who
had known Akeley; and the results convince me that the matter is no figment of dream or delusion.'
Akeley's queer purchase of dogs and ammunition and chemicals, and the cutting of his telephone
wires, are matters of record; while all who knew him--including his son in California--concede that
his occasional remarks on strange studies had a certain consistency. Solid citizens believe he was
mad, and unhesitatingly pronounce all reported evidences mere hoaxes devised with insane cunning
and perhaps abetted by eccentric associates; but the lowlier country folk sustain his statements in
every detail. He had showed some of these rustics his photographs and black stone, and had played
the hideous record for them; and they all said the footprints and buzzing voice were like those
described in ancestral legends.
They said, too, that suspicious sights and sounds had been noticed increasingly around Akeley's
house after he found the black stone, and that the place was now avoided by everybody except the
mail man and other casual, tough-minded people. Dark Mountain and Round Hill were both
notoriously haunted spots, and I could find no one who had ever closely explored either. Occasional
disappearances of natives throughout the district's history were well attested, and these now included
the semi-vagabond Walter Brown, whom Akeley's letters had mentioned. I even came upon one
farmer who thought he had personally glimpsed one of the queer bodies at flood-time in the swollen
West River, but his tale was too confused to be really valuable.
When I left Brattleboro I resolved never to go back to Vermont, and I feel quite certain I shall
keep my resolution. Those wild hills are surely the outpost of a frightful cosmic race--as I doubt all
the less since reading that a new ninth planet has been glimpsed beyond Neptune, just as those
influences had said it would be glimpsed. Astronomers, with a hideous appropriateness they little
suspect, have named this thing "Pluto." I feel, beyond question, that it is nothing less than nighted
Yuggoth--and I shiver when I try to figure out the real reason why its monstrous denizens wish it to
be known in this way at this especial time. I vainly try to assure myself that these daemoniac creatures
are not gradually leading up to some new policy hurtful to the earth and its normal inhabitants.
But I have still to tell of the ending of that terrible night in the farmhouse. As I have said, I did
finally drop into a troubled doze; a doze filled with bits of dream which involved monstrous
landscape-glimpses. Just what awaked me I cannot yet say, but that I did indeed awake at this given
point I feel very certain. My first confused impression was of stealthily creaking floor-boards in the
hall outside my door, and of a clumsy, muffled fumbling at the latch. This, however, ceased almost at
once; so that my really clear impressions begin with the voices heard from the study below. There
seemed to be several speakers, and I judged that they were controversially engaged.
By the time I had listened a few seconds I was broad awake, for the nature of the voices was such
as to make all thought of sleep ridiculous. The tones were curiously varied, and no one who had
listened to that accursed phonograph record could harbour any doubts about the nature of at least two
of them. Hideous though the idea was, I knew that I was under the same roof with nameless things
from abysmal space; for those two voices were unmistakably the blasphemous buzzings which the
Outside Beings used in their communication with men. The two were individually different--different
in pitch, accent, and tempo--but they were both of the same damnable general kind.
A third voice was indubitably that of a mechanical utterance-machine connected with one of the
detached brains in the cylinders. There was as little doubt about that as about the buzzings; for the
loud, metallic, lifeless voice of the previous evening, with its inflectionless, expressionless
scraping and rattling, and its impersonal precision and deliberation, had been utterly unforgettable.
For a time I did not pause to question whether the intelligence behind the scraping was the identical
one which had formerly talked to me; but shortly afterward I reflected that any brain would emit vocal
sounds of the same quality if linked to the same mechanical speech-producer; the only possible
differences being in language, rhythm, speed, and pronunciation. To complete the eldritch colloquy
there were two actually human voices--one the crude speech of an unknown and evidently rustic man,
and the other the suave Bostonian tones of my erstwhile guide Noyes.
As I tried to catch the words which the stoutly-fashioned floor so bafflingly intercepted, I was
also conscious of a great deal of stirring and scratching and shuffling in the room below; so that I
could not escape the impression that it was full of living beings--many more than the few whose
speech I could single out. The exact nature of this stirring is extremely hard to describe, for very
few good bases of comparison exist. Objects seemed now and then to move across the room like
conscious entities; the sound of their footfalls having something about it like a loose, hard-surfaced
clattering--as of the contact of ill-coordinated surfaces of horn or hard rubber. It was, to use a more
concrete but less accurate comparison, as if people with loose, splintery wooden shoes were
shambling and rattling about on the polished board floor. Of the nature and appearance of those
responsible for the sounds, I did not care to speculate.
Before long I saw that it would be impossible to distinguish any connected discourse. Isolated
words--including the names of Akeley and myself--now and then floated up, especially when uttered
by the mechanical speech-producer; but their true significance was lost for want of continuous
context. Today I refuse to form any definite deductions from them, and even their frightful effect on
me was one of suggestion rather than of revelation. A terrible and abnormal conclave, I felt certain,
was assembled below me; but for what shocking deliberations I could not tell. It was curious how
this unquestioned sense of the malign and the blasphemous pervaded me despite Akeley's assurances
of the Outsider's friendliness.
With patient listening I began to distinguish clearly between voices, even though I could not
grasp much of what any of the voices said. I seemed to catch certain typical emotions behind some of
the speakers. One of the buzzing voices, for example, held an unmistakable note of authority; whilst
the mechanical voice, notwithstanding its artificial loudness and regularity, seemed to be in a position
of subordination and pleading. Noyes's tones exuded a kind of conciliatory atmosphere. The others I
could make no attempt to interpret. I did not hear the familiar whisper of Akeley, but well knew that
such a sound could never penetrate the solid flooring of my room.
I will try to set down some of the few disjointed words and other sounds I caught, labelling the
speakers of the words as best I know how. It was from the speech-machine that I first picked up a few
recognisable phrases. (The Speech-Machine)
"...brought it on myself...sent back the letters and the record... end on it...taken in...seeing and
hearing...damn you...impersonal force, after all...fresh, shiny cylinder...great God..."
(First Buzzing Voice)
"...time we stopped...small and human...Akeley...brain...saying..."
(Second Buzzing Voice)
"Nyarlathotep...Wilmarth...records and letters...cheap imposture..."
(Noyes)
"...(an unpronounceable word or name, possibly N'gah-Kthun) harmless...peace...couple of
weeks...theatrical...told you that before..."
(First Buzzing Voice)
"...no reason...original plan...effects...Noyes can watch Round Hill...fresh cylinder...Noyes's
car..."
(Noyes)
"...well...all yours...down here...rest...place..."
(Several Voices at Once in Indistinguishable Speech)
(Many Footsteps, Including the Peculiar Loose Stirring or Clattering)
(A Curious Sort of Flapping Sound)
(The Sound of an Automobile Starting and Receding)
(Silence)
That is the substance of what my ears brought me as I lay rigid upon that strange upstairs bed in
the haunted farmhouse among the daemoniac hills--lay there fully dressed, with a revolver clenched
in my right hand and a pocket flashlight gripped in my left. I became, as I have said, broad awake; but
a kind of obscure paralysis nevertheless kept me inert till long after the last echoes of the sounds had
died away. I heard the wooden, deliberate ticking of the ancient Connecticut clock somewhere far
below, and at last made out the irregular snoring of a sleeper. Akeley must have dozed off after the
strange session, and I could well believe that he needed to do so.
Just what to think or what to do was more than I could decide After all, what had I heard beyond
things which previous information might have led me to expect? Had I not known that the nameless
Outsiders were now freely admitted to the farmhouse? No doubt Akeley had been surprised by an
unexpected visit from them. Yet something in that fragmentary discourse had chilled me
immeasurably, raised the most grotesque and horrible doubts, and made me wish fervently that I might
wake up and prove everything a dream. I think my subconscious mind must have caught something
which my consciousness has not yet recognised. But what of Akeley? Was he not my friend, and
would he not have protested if any harm were meant me? The peaceful snoring below seemed to cast
ridicule on all my suddenly intensified fears.
Was it possible that Akeley had been imposed upon and used as a lure to draw me into the hills
with the letters and pictures and phonograph record? Did those beings mean to engulf us both in a
common destruction because we had come to know too much? Again I thought of the abruptness and
unnaturalness of that change in the situation which must have occurred between Akeley's penultimate
and final letters. Something, my instinct told me, was terribly wrong. All was not as it seemed. That
acrid coffee which I refused--had there not been an attempt by some hidden, unknown entity to drug
it? I must talk to Akeley at once, and restore his sense of proportion. They had hypnotised him with
their promises of cosmic revelations, but now he must listen to reason. We must get out of this
before it would be too late. If he lacked the will power to make the break for liberty. I would supply
it. Or if I could not persuade him to go, I could at least go myself. Surely he would let me take his
Ford and leave it in a garage in Brattleboro. I had noticed it in the shed--the door being left unlocked
and open now that peril was deemed past--and I believed there was a good chance of its being ready
for instant use. That momentary dislike of Akeley which I had felt during and after the evening's
conversation was all gone now. He was in a position much like my own, and we must stick together.
Knowing his indisposed condition, I hated to wake him at this juncture, but I knew that I must. I could
not stay in this place till morning as matters stood.
At last I felt able to act, and stretched myself vigorously to regain command of my muscles.
Arising with a caution more impulsive than deliberate, I found and donned my hat, took my valise, and
started downstairs with the flashlight's aid. In my nervousness I kept the revolver clutched in my right
hand, being able to take care of both valise and flashlight with my left. Why I exerted these
precautions I do not really know, since I was even then on my way to awaken the only other occupant
of the house.
As I half-tiptoed down the creaking stairs to the lower hall I could hear the sleeper more plainly,
and noticed that he must be in the room on my left--the living-room I had not entered. On my right was
the gaping blackness of the study in which I had heard the voices. Pushing open the unlatched door
of the living-room I traced a path with the flashlight toward the source of the snoring, and finally
turned the beams on the sleeper's face. But in the next second I hastily turned them away and
commenced a catlike retreat to the hall, my caution this time springing from reason as well as from
instinct. For the sleeper on the couch was not Akeley at all, but my quondam guide Noyes.
Just what the real situation was, I could not guess; but common sense told me that the safest thing
was to find out as much as possible before arousing anybody. Regaining the hall, I silently closed
and latched the living-room door after me; thereby lessening the chances of awakening Noyes. I now
cautiously entered the dark study, where I expected to find Akeley, whether asleep or awake, in the
great corner chair which was evidently his favorite resting-place. As I advanced, the beams of my
flashlight caught the great centre-table, revealing one of the hellish cylinders with sight and hearing
machines attached, and with a speech machine standing close by, ready to be connected at any
moment. This, I reflected, must be the encased brain I had heard talking during the frightful
conference; and for a second I had a perverse impulse to attach the speech machine and see what it
would say.
It must, I thought, be conscious of my presence even now; since the sight and hearing attachments
could not fail to disclose the rays of my flashlight and the faint creaking of the floor beneath my feet.
But in the end I did not dare meddle with the thing. I idly saw that it was the fresh shiny cylinder with
Akeley's name on it, which I had noticed on the shelf earlier in the evening and which my host had
told me not to bother. Looking back at that moment, I can only regret my timidity and wish that I had
boldly caused the apparatus to speak. God knows what mysteries and horrible doubts and questions of
identity it might have cleared up! But then, it may be merciful that I let it alone.
From the table I turned my flashlight to the corner where I thought Akeley was, but found to my
perplexity that the great easy-chair was empty of any human occupant asleep or awake. From the seat
to the floor there trailed voluminously the familiar old dressing-gown, and near it on the floor lay the
yellow scarf and the huge foot-bandages I had thought so odd. As I hesitated, striving to conjecture
where Akeley might be, and why he had so suddenly discarded his necessary sick-room garments, I
observed that the queer odour and sense of vibration were no longer in the room. What had been their
cause? Curiously it occurred to me that I had noticed them only in Akeley's vicinity. They had been
strongest where he sat, and wholly absent except in the room with him or just outside the doors of
that room. I paused, letting the flashlight wander about the dark study and racking my brain for
explanations of the turn affairs had taken.
Would to Heaven I had quietly left the place before allowing that light to rest again on the vacant
chair. As it turned out, I did not leave quietly; but with a muffled shriek which must have disturbed,
though it did not quite awake, the sleeping sentinel across the hall. That shriek, and Noyes's still-
unbroken snore, are the last sounds I ever heard in that morbidity-choked farmhouse beneath the
black-wooded crest of haunted mountain--that focus of transcosmic horror amidst the lonely green
hills and curse-muttering brooks of a spectral rustic land.
It is a wonder that I did not drop flashlight, valise, and revolver in my wild scramble, but
somehow I failed to lose any of these. I actually managed to get out of that room and that house
without making any further noise, to drag myself and my belongings safely into the old Ford in the
shed, and to set that archaic vehicle in motion toward some unknown point of safety in the black,
moonless night. The ride that followed was a piece of delirium out of Poe or Rimbaud or the
drawings of Dore, but finally I reached Townshend. That is all. If my sanity is still unshaken, I am
lucky. Sometimes I fear what the years will bring, especially since that new planet Pluto has been so
curiously discovered.
As I have implied, I let my flashlight return to the vacant easy-chair after its circuit of the room;
then noticing for the first time the presence of certain objects in the seat, made inconspicuous by the
adjacent loose folds of the empty dressing-gown. These are the objects, three in number, which the
investigators did not find when they came later on. As I said at the outset, there was nothing of actual
visual horror about them. The trouble was in what they led one to infer. Even now I have my moments
of half-doubt--moments in which I half-accept the scepticism of those who attribute my whole
experience to dream and nerves and delusion.
The three things were damnably clever constructions of their kind, and were furnished with
ingenious metallic clamps to attach them to organic developments of which I dare not form any
conjecture. I hope--devoutly hope--that they were the waxen products of a master artist, despite what
my inmost fears tell me. Great God! That whisperer in darkness with its morbid odour and vibrations!
Sorcerer, emissary, changeling, outsider...that hideous repressed buzzing...and all the time in that
fresh, shiny cylinder on the shelf...poor devil..."Prodigious surgical, biological, chemical, and
mechanical skill...
For the things in the chair, perfect to the last, subtle detail of microscopic resemblance--or
identity--were the face and hands of Henry Wentworth Akeley.

DREAMS IN THE WITCH-HOUSE
Whether the dreams brought on the fever or the fever brought on the dreams Walter Gilman did
not know. Behind everything crouched the brooding, festering horror of the ancient town, and of the
mouldy, unhallowed garret gable where he wrote and studied and wrestled with figures and formulae
when he was not tossing on the meagre iron bed. His ears were growing sensitive to a preternatural
and intolerable degree, and he had long ago stopped the cheap mantel clock whose ticking had come
to seem like a thunder of artillery. At night the subtle stirring of the black city outside, the sinister
scurrying of rats in the wormy partitions, and the creaking of hidden timbers in the centuried house,
were enough to give him a sense of strident pandemonium. The darkness always teemed with
unexplained sound--and yet he sometimes shook with fear lest the noises he heard should subside and
allow him to hear certain other fainter noises which he suspected were lurking behind them.
He was in the changeless, legend-haunted city of Arkham, with its clustering gambrel roofs that
sway and sag over attics where witches hid from the King's men in the dark, olden years of the
Province. Nor was any spot in that city more steeped in macabre memory than the gable room which
harboured him--for it was this house and this room which had likewise harboured old Keziah Mason,
whose flight from Salem Gaol at the last no one was ever able to explain. That was in 1692--the
gaoler had gone mad and babbled of a small white-fanged furry thing which scuttled out of Keziah's
cell, and not even Cotton Mather could explain the curves and angles smeared on the grey stone walls
with some red, sticky fluid.
Possibly Gilman ought not to have studied so hard. Non-Euclidean calculus and quantum physics
are enough to stretch any brain, and when one mixes them with folklore, and tries to trace a strange
background of multi-dimensional reality behind the ghoulish hints of the Gothic tales and the wild
whispers of the chimney-corner, one can hardly expect to be wholly free from mental tension.
Gilman came from Haverhill, but it was only after he had entered college in Arkham that he began to
connect his mathematics with the fantastic legends of elder magic. Something in the air of the hoary
town worked obscurely on his imagination. The professors at Miskatonic had urged him to slacken
up, and had voluntarily cut down his course at several points. Moreover, they had stopped him from
consulting the dubious old books on forbidden secrets that were kept under lock and key in a vault at
the university library. But all these precautions came late in the day, so that Gilman had some terrible
hints from the dreaded Necronomicon of Abdul Alhazred, the fragmentary Book of Eibon, and the
suppressed 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 EssexCounty records about Keziah Mason's trial, and what she had admitted under
pressure to the Court of Oyer and Terminer had fascinated Gilman beyond all reason. She had told
Judge Hathorne of lines and curves that could be made to point out directions leading through the
walls of space to other spaces beyond, and had implied that such lines and curves were frequently
used at certain midnight meetings in the dark valley of the white stone beyond Meadow Hill and on
the unpeopled island in the river. She had spoken also of the Black Man, of her oath, and of her new
secret name of Nahab. Then she had drawn those devices on the walls of her cell and vanished.
Gilman believed strange things about Keziah, and had felt a queer thrill on learning that her
dwelling was still standing after more than two hundred and thirty-five years. When he heard the
hushed Arkham whispers about Keziah's persistent presence in the old house and the narrow streets,
about the irregular human tooth-marks left on certain sleepers in that and other houses, about the
childish cries heard near May-Eve, and Hallowmass, about the stench often noted in the old house's
attic just after those dreaded seasons, and about the small, furry, sharp-toothed thing which haunted
the mouldering structure and the town and nuzzled people curiously in the black hours before dawn,
he resolved to live in the place at any cost. A room was easy to secure, for the house was unpopular,
hard to rent, and long given over to cheap lodgings. Gilman could not have told what he expected to
find there, but he knew he wanted to be in the building where some circumstance had more or less
suddenly given a mediocre old woman of the Seventeenth Century an insight into mathematical depths
perhaps beyond the utmost modern delvings of Planck, Heisenberg, Einstein, and de Sitter.
He studied the timber and plaster walls for traces of cryptic designs at every accessible spot
where the paper had peeled, and within a week managed to get the eastern attic room where Keziah
was held to have practised her spells. It had been vacant from the first--for no one had ever been
willing to stay there long--but the Polish landlord had grown wary about renting it. Yet nothing
whatever happened to Gilman till about the time of the fever. No ghostly Keziah flitted through the
sombre halls and chambers, no small furry thing crept into his dismal eyrie to nuzzle him, and no
record of the witch's incantations rewarded his constant search. Sometimes he would take walks
through shadowy tangles of unpaved musty-smelling lanes where eldritch brown houses of unknown
age leaned and tottered and leered mockingly through narrow, small-paned windows. Here he knew
strange things had happened once, and there was a faint suggestion behind the surface that everything
of that monstrous past might not--at least in the darkest, narrowest, and most intricately crooked
alleys--have utterly perished. He also rowed out twice to the ill-regarded island in the river, and
made a sketch of the singular angles described by the moss-grown rows of grey standing stones
whose origin was so obscure and immemorial.
Gilman's room was of good size but queerly irregular shape; the north wall 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 showed where a window had heen boarded up at a very remote date. The loft above the
ceiling--which must have had a slanting floor--was likewise inaccessible. When Gilman climbed up a
ladder to the cob-webbed level loft above the rest of the attic he found vestiges of a bygone aperture
tightly and heavily covered with ancient planking and secured by the stout wooden pegs common in
Colonial carpentry. No amount of persuasion, however, could induce the stolid landlord to let him
investigate either of these two closed spaces.
As time wore along, his absorption in the irregular wall and ceiling of his room increased; for he
began to read into the odd angles a mathematical significance which seemed to offer vague clues
regarding their purpose. Old Keziah, he reflected, might have had excellent reasons for living in a
room with peculiar angles; for was it not through certain angles that she claimed to have gone
outside the boundaries of the world of space we know? His interest gradually veered away from the
unplumbed voids beyond the slanting surfaces, since it now appeared that the purpose of those
surfaces concerned the side he was on.
The touch of brain-fever and the dreams began early in February. For some time, apparently, the
curious angles of Gilman's room had been having a strange, almost hypnotic effect on him; and as the
bleak winter advanced he had found himself staring more and more intently at the corner where the
down-slanting ceiling met the inward-slanting wall. About this period his inability to concentrate on
his formal studies worried him considerably, his apprehensions about the mid-year examinations
being very acute. But the exaggerated sense of 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 country records containing her testimony and that of her
accusers were so damnably suggestive of things beyond human experience--and the descriptions of
the darting little furry object which served as her familiar were so painfully realistic despite their
incredible details.
That object--no larger than a good-sized rat and quaintly called by the townspeople "Brown
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
organization and faculties were somehow marvellously transmuted and obliquely projected--though
not without a certain grotesque relationship to his normal proportions and properties.
The abysses were by no means vacant, being crowded with indescribably angled masses of alien-
hued substance, some of which appeared to be organic while others seemed inorganic. A few of the
organic objects tended to awake vague memories in the back of his mind, though he could form no
conscious idea of what they mockingly resembled or suggested. In the later dreams he began to
distinguish separate categories into which the organic objects appeared to be divided, and which
seemed to involve in each case a radically different species of conduct-pattern and basic motivation.
Of these categories one seemed to him to include objects slightly less illogical and irrelevant in
their motions than the members of the other categories.
All the objects--organic and inorganic alike--were totally beyond description or even
comprehension. Gilman sometimes compared the inorganic matter to prisms, labyrinths, clusters of
cubes and planes, and Cyclopean buildings; and the organic things struck him variously as groups of
bubbles, octopi, centipedes, living Hindoo idols, and intricate arabesques roused into a kind of
ophidian animation. Everything he saw was unspeakably menacing and horrible; and whenever one of
the organic entities appeared by its motions to be noticing him, he felt a stark, hideous fright which
generally jolted him awake. Of how the organic entities moved, he could tell no more than of how he
moved himself. In time he observed a further mystery--the tendency of certain entities to appear
suddenly out of empty space, or to disappear totally with equal suddenness. The shrieking, roaring
confusion of sound which permeated the abysses was past all analysis as to pitch, timbre or rhythm;
but seemed to be synchronous with vague visual changes in all the indefinite objects, organic and
inorganic alike. Gilman had a constant sense of dread that it might rise to some unbearable degree of
intensity during one or another of its obscure, relentlessly inevitable fluctuations.
But it was not in these vortices of complete alienage that he saw Brown Jenkin. That shocking
little horror was reserved for certain lighter, sharper dreams which assailed him just before he
dropped into the fullest depths of sleep. He would be lying in the dark fighting to keep awake when a
faint lambent glow would seem to shimmer around the centuried room, showing in a violet mist the
convergence of angled planes which had seized his brain so insidiously. The horror would appear to
pop out of the rat-hole in the corner and patter toward him over the sagging, wide-planked floor with
evil expectancy in its tiny, bearded human face; but mercifully, this dream always melted away before
the object got close enough to nuzzle him. It had hellishly long, sharp, canine teeth; Gilman tried to
stop up the rat-hole every day, but each night the real tenants of the partitions would gnaw away the
obstruction, whatever it might be. Once he had the landlord nail a tin over it, but the next night the rats
gnawed a fresh hole, in making which they pushed or dragged out into the room a curious little
fragment of bone.
Gilman did not report his fever to the doctor, for he knew he could not pass the examinations if
ordered to the college infirmary when every moment was needed for cramming. As it was, he failed
in Calculus D and Advanced General Psychology, though not without hope of making up lost ground
before the end of the term.
It was in March when the fresh element entered his lighter preliminary dreaming, and the
nightmare shape of Brown Jenkin began to be companioned by the nebulous blur which grew more
and more to resemble a bent old woman. This addition disturbed him more than he could account for,
but finally he decided that it was like an ancient crone whom he had twice actually encountered in the
dark tangle of lanes near the abandoned wharves. On those occasions the evil, sardonic, and
seemingly unmotivated stare of the beldame had set him almost shivering--especially the first time
when an overgrown rat darting across the shadowed mouth of a neighbouring alley had made him
think irrationally of Brown Jenkin. Now, he reflected, those nervous fears were being mirrored in
his disordered dreams. That the influence of the old house was unwholesome he could not deny, but
traces of his early morbid interest still held him there. He argued that the fever alone was
responsible for his nightly fantasies, and that when the touch abated he would be free from the
monstrous visions. Those visions, however, were of absorbing vividness and convincingness, and
whenever he awaked he retained a vague sense of having undergone much more than he remembered.
He was hideously sure that in unrecalled dreams he had talked with both Brown Jenkin and the old
woman, and that they had been urging him to go somewhere with them and to meet a third being of
greater potency.
Toward the end of March he began to pick up in his mathematics, though the other studies
bothered him increasingly. He was getting an intuitive knack for solving Riemannian equations, and
astonished Professor Upham by his comprehension of fourth-dimensional and other problems which
had floored all the rest of the class. One afternoon there was a discussion of possible freakish
curvatures in space, and of theoretical points of approach or even contact between our part of the
cosmos and various other regions as distant as the farthest stars or the transgalactic gulfs
themselves--or even as fabulously remote as the tentatively conceivable cosmic units beyond the
whole Einsteinian space-time continuum. 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 one would not be destructive of
biological integrity as we understand it. Gilman could not be very clear about his reasons for this last
assumption, but his haziness here was more than overbalanced by his clearness on other complex
points. Professor Upham especially liked his demonstration of the kinship of higher mathematics to
certain phases of magical lore transmitted down the ages from an ineffable antiquity--human or pre-
human--whose knowledge of the cosmos and its laws was greater than ours.
Around 1 April Gilman worried 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-scratching came from the black voids beyond the slanting wall and above the slanting ceiling?
His pathologically sensitive ears began to listen for faint footfalls in the immemorially sealed loft
overhead, and sometimes the illusion of such things was agonizingly realistic.
However, he knew that he had actually become a somnambulist; for twice at night his room had
been found vacant, though with all his clothing in place. Of this he had been assured by Frank
Elwood, the one fellow-student whose poverty forced him to room in this 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 loom-fixer named Joe Mazurewicz who had a room on the ground floor. Mazurewicz
had told long, rambling stories about the ghost of old Keziah and the furry sharp-fanged, nuzzling
thing, and had said he was so badly haunted at times that only his silver crucifix--given him for the
purpose by Father Iwanicki of St. Stanislaus' Church--could bring him relief. Now he was praying
because the Witches' Sabbath was drawing near. May Eve was Walpurgis Night, when hell's blackest
evil roamed the earth and all the slaves of Satan gathered for nameless rites and deeds. It was always
a very bad 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 the doctor's office on the sixteenth of the month, and was surprised to find
his temperature was not as high as he had feared. The physician questioned him sharply, and advised
him to see a nerve specialist. On reflection, he was glad he had not consulted the still more
inquisitive college doctor. Old Waldron, who had curtailed his activities before, would have made
him take a rest--an impossible thing now that he was so close to great results in his equations. He
was certainly near the boundary between the known universe and the fourth dimension, and who could
say how much farther he might go?
But even as these thoughts came to him he wondered at the source of his strange confidence. Did
all of this perilous sense of immininence come from the formulae on the sheets he covered day by
day? The soft, stealthy, imaginary footsteps in the sealed loft above were unnerving. And now, too,
there was a growing feeling that somebody was constantly persuading him to do something terrible
which he could not do. How about the somnambulism? Where did he go sometimes in the night? And
what was that faint suggestion of sound which once in a while seemed to trickle through the
confusion of identifiable sounds even in broad daylight and full wakefulness? Its rhythm did not
correspond to anything on earth, unless perhaps to the cadence of one or two unmentionable Sabbat-
chants, and sometimes he feared it corresponded to certain attributes of the vague shrieking or
roaring in those wholly alien abysses of dream.
The dreams were meanwhile getting to be atrocious. In the lighter preliminary phase the evil old
woman was now of fiendish distinctness, and Gilman knew she was the one who had frightened him in
the slums. Her bent back, long nose, and shrivelled chin were unmistakable, and her shapeless brown
garments were like those he remembered. The expression on her face was one of hideous
malevolence and exultation, and when he awaked he could recall a croaking voice that persuaded and
threatened. He must meet the Black Man and go with them all to the throne of Azathoth at the centre of
ultimate chaos. That was what she said. He must sign the book of Azathoth in his own blood and take
a new secret name now that his independent delvings had gone so far. What kept him from going with
her and Brown Jenkin and the other to the throne of Chaos where the thin flutes pipe mindlessly was
the fact that he had seen the name "Azathoth" in the Necronomicon, and knew it stood for a primal evil
too horrible for description.
The old woman always appeared out of thin air near the corner where the downward slant met the
inward slant. She seemed to crystallize at a point closer to the ceiling than to the floor, and every
night she was a little nearer and more distinct before the dream shifted. Brown Jenkin, too was
always a little nearer at the last, and its yellowish-white fangs glistened shockingly in that unearthly
violet phosphorescence. Its shrill loathsome tittering struck more and more into Gilman's head, and
he could remember in the morning how it had pronounced the words "Azathoth" and "Nyarlathotep."
In the deeper dreams everything was likewise more distinct, and Gilman felt that the twilight
abysses around him were those of the fourth dimension. Those organic entities whose motions
seemed least flagrantly irrelevant and unmotivated were probably projections of life-forms from our
own planet, including human beings. What the others were in their own dimensional sphere or
spheres he dared not try to think. Two of the less irrelevantly moving things--a rather large
congeries of iridescent, prolately spheroidal bubbles and a very much smaller polyhedron of
unknown colours and rapidly shifting surface angles--seemed to take notice of him and follow him
about or float ahead as he changed position among the titan prisms, labyrinths, cube-and-plane
clusters and quasi-buildings; and all the while the vague shrieking and roaring waxed louder and
louder, as if approaching some monstrous climax of utterly unendurable intensity.
During the night of 19-20 April the new development occurred. Gilman was half involuntarily
moving about in the twilight abysses with the bubble-mass and the small polyhedron floating ahead
when he noticed the peculiarly regular angles formed by the edges of some gigantic neighbouring
prism-clusters. In another second he was out of the abyss and standing tremulously on a rocky
hillside bathed in intense, diffused green light. He was barefooted and in his nightclothes. and when
he tried to walk discovered that he could scarcely lift his feet. A swirling vapour hid everything but
the immediate sloping terrain from sight, and he shrank from the thought of the sounds, that might
surge out of that vapour.
Then he saw the two shapes laboriously crawling toward him--the old woman and the little furry
thing. The crone strained up to her knees and managed to cross her arms in a singular fashion, while
Brown Jenkin pointed in a certain direction with a horribly anthropoid forepaw which it raised with
evident difficulty. Spurred by an impulse he did not originate, Gilman dragged himself forward along
a course determined by the angle of the old woman's arms and the direction of the small monstrosity's
paw, and before he had shuffled three steps he was back in the twilight abysses. Geometrical shapes
seethed around him, and he fell dizzily and interminably. At last he woke in his bed in the crazily
angled garret of the eldritch old house.
He was good for nothing that morning, and stayed away from all his classes. Some unknown
attraction was pulling his eyes in a seemingly irrelevant direction, for he could not help staring at a
certain vacant spot on the floor. As the day advanced, the focus of his unseeing eyes changed
position, and by noon he had conquered the impulse to stare at vacancy. About two o'clock he went
out for lunch and as he threaded the narrow lanes of the city he found himself turning always to the
southeast. Only an effort halted him at a cafeteria in Church Street, and after the meal he felt the
unknown pull still more strongly.
He would have to consult a nerve specialist after all--perhaps there was a connection with his
somnambulism--but meanwhile he might at least try to break the morbid spell himself. Undoubtedly he
could still manage to walk away from the pull, so with great resolution he headed against it and
dragged himself deliberately north along Garrison Street. By the time he had reached the bridge over
the Miskatonic he was in a cold perspiration, and he clutched at the iron railing as he gazed upstream
at the ill-regarded island whose regular lines of ancient standing stones brooded sullenly in the
afternoon sunlight.
Then he gave a start. For there was a clearly visible living figure on that desolate island, and a
second glance told him it was certainly the strange old woman whose sinister aspect had worked
itself so disastrously into his dreams. The tall grass near her was moving, too, as if some other
living thing were crawling close to the ground. When the old woman began to turn toward him he
fled precipitately off the bridge and into the shelter of the town's labyrinthine waterfront alleys.
Distant though the island was, he felt that a monstrous and invincible evil could flow from the
sardonic stare of that bent, ancient figure in brown.
The southeastwards pull still held, and only with tremendous resolution could Gilman drag
himself into the old house and up the rickety stairs. For hours he sat silent and aimless, with his eyes
shifting gradually westward. About six o'clock his sharpened ears caught the whining prayers of Joe
Mazurewicz two floors below, and in desperation he seized his hat and walked out into the sunset-
golden streets, letting the now directly southward pull carry him where it might. An hour later
darkness found him in the open fields beyond Hangman's Brook, with the glimmering spring stars
shining ahead. The urge to walk was gradually changing to an urge to leap mystically into space, and
suddenly he realized just where the source of the pull lay.
It was in the sky. A definite point among the stars had a claim on him and was calling him.
Apparently it was a point somewhere between Hydra and Argo Navis, and he knew that he had been
urged toward it ever since he had awaked soon after dawn. In the morning it had been underfoot, and
now it was roughly south but stealing toward the west. What was the meaning of this new thing? Was
he going mad? How long would it last? Again mustering his resolution, Gilman turned and dragged
himself back to the sinister old house.
Mazurewicz was waiting for him at the door, and seemed both anxious and reluctant to whisper
some fresh bit of superstition. It was about the witch-light. Joe had been out celebrating the night
before--and it was Patriots' Day in Massachusetts--and had come home after midnight. Looking up at
the house from outside, he had thought at first that 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 the mention of a violet light in the
garret window was of frightful import. It was a lambent glow of this sort which always played about
the old woman and the small furry thing in those lighter, sharper dreams which prefaced his plunge
into unknown abysses, and the thought that a wakeful second person could see the dream-luminance
was utterly beyond sane harborage. Yet where had the fellow got such an odd notion? Had he himself
talked as well as walked around the house in his sleep? No, Joe said, he had not--but he must check
up on this. Perhaps Frank Elwood could tell him something, though he hated to ask.
Fever--wild dreams--somnambulism--illusions of sounds--a pull toward a point in the sky--and
now a suspicion of insane sleep-talking! He must stop studying, see a nerve specialist, and take
himself in hand. When he climbed to the second storey he paused at Elwood's door but saw that the
other youth was out. Reluctantly he continued up to his garret room and sat down in the dark. His
gaze was still pulled to the southward, but he also found himself listening intently for some sound in
the closed loft above, and half imagining that an evil violet light seeped down through an
infinitesimal crack in the low, slanting ceiling.
That night as Gilman slept, the violet light broke upon him with heightened intensity, and the old
witch and small furry thing, getting closer than ever before, mocked him with inhuman squeals and
devilish gestures. He was glad to sink into the vaguely roaring twilight abysses, though the pursuit
of that iridescent bubble-congeries and that kaleidoscopic little polyhedron was menacing and
irritating. Then came the shift as vast converging planes of a slippery-looking substance loomed
above and below him--a shift which ended in a flash of delirium and a blaze of unknown, alien light in
which yellow, carmine, and indigo were madly and inextricably blended.
He was half lying on a high, fantastically balustraded terrace above a boundless jungle of
outlandish, incredible peaks, balanced planes, domes, minarets, horizontal disks poised on pinnacles,
and numberless forms of still greater wildness--some of stone and some of metal--which glittered
gorgeously in the mixed, almost blistering glare from a poly-chromatic sky. Looking upward he saw
three stupendous disks of flame, each of a different hue, and at a different height above an infinitely
distant curving horizon of low mountains. Behind him tiers of higher terraces towered aloft as far as
he could see. The city below stretched away to the limits of vision, and he hoped that no sound
would well up from it.
The pavement from which he easily raised himself was a veined polished stone beyond his
power to identify, and the tiles were cut in bizarre-angled shapes which struck 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
the chaos of mixed effulgences, and their nature utterly defied conjecture. They represented some
ridged barrel-shaped objects with thin horizontal arms radiating spoke-like from a central ring and
with vertical knobs or bulbs projecting from the head and base of the barrel. Each of these knobs was
the hub of a system of five long, flat, triangularly tapering arms arranged around it like the arms of a
starfish--nearly horizontal, but curving slightly away from the central barrel. The base of the bottom
knob was fused to the long railing with so delicate a point of contact that several figures had been
broken off and were missing. The figures were about four and a half inches in height, while the
spiky arms gave them a maximum diameter of about two and a half inches.
When Gilman stood up, the tiles felt hot to his bare feet. He was wholly alone, and his first act
was to walk to the balustrade and look dizzily down at the endless, Cyclopean city almost two
thousand feet below. As he listened he thought a rhythmic confusion of faint musical pipings
covering a wide tonal range welled up from the narrow streets beneath, and he wished he might
discern the denizens of the place. The sight turned him giddy after a while, so that he would have
fallen to the pavement had he not clutched instinctively at the lustrous balustrade. His right hand fell
on one of the projecting figures, the touch seeming to steady him slightly. It was too much, however,
for the exotic delicacy of the metal-work, and the spiky figure snapped off under his grasp. Still half
dazed, he continued to clutch it as his other hand seized a vacant space on the smooth railing.
But now his over-sensitive ears caught something behind him, and he looked back across the
level terrace. Approaching him softly though without apparent furtiveness were five figures, two of
which were the sinister old woman and the fanged, furry little animal. The other three were what sent
him unconscious; for they were living entities about eight feet high, shaped precisely like the spiky
images on the balustrade, and propelling themselves by a spider-like wriggling of their lower set of
starfish-arms.
Gilman awoke in his bed, drenched by a cold perspiration and with a smarting sensation in his
face, hands and feet. Springing to the floor, he washed and dressed in frantic haste, as if it were
necessary for him to get out of the house as quickly as possible. He did not know where he wished
to go, but felt that once more he would have to sacrifice his classes. The odd pull toward that spot in
the sky between Hydra and Argo had abated, but another of even greater strength had taken its place.
Now he felt that he must go north--infinitely north. He dreaded to cross the bridge that gave a view
of the desolate island in the Miskatonic, so went over the Peabody Avenue bridge. Very often he
stumbled, for his eyes and ears were chained to an extremely lofty point in the blank blue sky.
After about an hour he got himself under better control, and saw that he was far from the city. All
around him stretched the bleak emptiness of salt marshes, while the narrow road ahead led to
Innsmouth--that ancient, half-deserted town which Arkham people were so curiously unwilling to
visit. Though the northward pull had not diminished, he resisted it as he had resisted the other pull,
and finally found that he could almost balance the one against the other. Plodding back to town and
getting some coffee at a soda fountain, he dragged himself into the public library and browsed
aimlessly among the lighter magazines. Once he met some friends who remarked how oddly
sunburned he looked, but he did not tell them of his walk. At three o'clock he took some lunch at a
restaurant, noting meanwhile that the pull had either lessened or divided itself. After that he killed the
time at a cheap cinema show, seeing the inane performance over and over again without paying any
attention to it.
About nine at night he drifted homeward and shuffled into the ancient house. Joe Mazurewicz was
whining unintelligible prayers, and Gilman hastened up to his own garret chamber without pausing to
see if Elwood was in. It was when he turned on the feeble electric light that the shock came. At once
he saw there was something on the table which did not belong there, and a second look left no room
for doubt. Lying on its side--for it could not stand up alone--was the exotic spiky figure which in his
monstrous dream he had broken off the fantastic balustrade. No detail was missing. The ridged,
barrel-shaped center, the thin radiating arms, the knobs at each end, and the flat, slightly outward-
curving starfish-arms spreading from those knobs--all were there. In the electric light the colour
seemed to be a kind of iridescent grey veined with green; and Gilman could see amidst his horror and
bewilderment that one of the knobs ended in a jagged break, corresponding to its former point of
attachment to the dream-railing.
Only his tendency toward a dazed stupor prevented him from screaming aloud. This fusion of
dream and reality was too much to bear. Still dazed, he clutched at the spiky thing and staggered
downstairs to Landlord Dombrowski's quarters. The whining prayers of the superstitious loom-fixer
were still sounding through the mouldy halls, but Gilman did not mind them now. The landlord was in,
and greeted him pleasantly. No, he had not seen that thing before and did not know anything about it.
But his wife had said she found a funny tin thing in one of the beds when she fixed the rooms at noon,
and maybe that was it. Dombrowski called her, and she waddled in. Yes, that was the thing. She had
found it in the young gentleman's bed--on the side next the wall. It had looked very queer to her, but
of course the young gentleman had lots of queer things in his room--books and curios and pictures
and markings on paper. She certainly knew nothing about it.
So Gilman climbed upstairs again in mental turmoil, convinced that he was either still dreaming or
that his somnambulism had run to incredible extremes and led him to depredations in unknown places.
Where had he got this outr 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 disorganized even to mind it. That
cryptical pull from the north was getting very strong again, though it seemed now to come from a
lower place in the sky.
In the dazzling violet light of dream the old woman and the fanged, furry thing came again and
with a greater distinctness than on any former occasion. This time they actually reached him, and he
felt the crone's withered claws clutching at him. He was pulled out of bed and into empty space, and
for a moment he heard a rhythmic roaring and saw the twilight amorphousness of the vague abysses
seething around him. But that moment was very brief, for presently he was in a crude, windowless
little space with rough beams and planks rising to a peak just above his head, and with a curious
slanting floor underfoot. Propped level on that floor were low cases full of books of every degree
of antiquity and disintegration, and in the centre were a table and bench, both apparently fastened in
place. Small objects of unknown shape and nature were ranged on the tops of the cases, and in the
flaming violet light Gilman thought he saw a counterpart of the spiky image which had puzzled him
so horribly. On the left the floor fell abruptly away, leaving a black triangular gulf out of which,
after a second's dry rattling, there presently climbed the hateful little furry thing with the yellow
fangs and bearded human face.
The evilly-grinning beldame still clutched him, and beyond the table stood a figure he had never
seen before--a tall, lean man of dead black colouration but without the slightest sign of negroid
features: wholly devoid of either hair or beard, and wearing as his only garment a shapeless robe of
some heavy black fabric. His feet were indistinguishable because of the table and bench, but he must
have been shod, since there was a clicking whenever he changed position. The man did not speak, and
bore no trace of expression on his small, regular features. He merely pointed to a book of
prodigious size which lay open on the table, while the beldame thrust a huge grey quill into Gilman's
right hand. Over everything was a pall of intensely maddening fear, and the climax was reached when
the furry thing ran up the dreamer's clothing to his shoulders and then down his left arm, finally biting
him sharply in the wrist just below his cuff. As the blood spurted from this wound Gilman lapsed into
a faint.
He awaked on the morning of the twenty-second with a pain in his left wrist, and saw that his cuff
was brown with dried blood. His recollections were very confused, but the scene with the black man
in the unknown space stood out vividly. The rats must have bitten him as he slept, giving rise to the
climax of that frightful dream. Opening the door, he saw that the flour on the corridor floor was
undisturbed except for the huge prints of the loutish fellow who roomed at the other end of the
garret. So he had not been sleep-walking this time. But something would have to be done about those
rats. He would speak to the landlord about them. Again he tried to stop up the hole at the base of the
slanting wall, wedging in a candlestick which seemed of about the right size. His ears were ringing
horribly, as if with the residual echoes of some horrible noise heard in dreams.
As he bathed and changed clothes he tried to recall what he had dreamed after the scene in the
violet-litten space, but nothing definite would crystallize in his mind. That scene itself must have
corresponded to the sealed loft overhead, which had begun to attack his imagination so violently, but
later impressions were faint and hazy. There were suggestions of the vague, twilight abysses, and of
still vaster, blacker abysses beyond them--abysses in which all fixed suggestions were absent. He
had been taken there by the bubble-congeries and the little polyhedron which always dogged him; but
they, like himself, had changed to wisps of mist in this farther void of ultimate blackness. Something
else had gone on ahead--a larger wisp which now and then condensed into nameless approximations
of form--and he thought that their progress had not been in a straight line, but rather along the alien
curves and spirals of some ethereal vortex which obeyed laws unknown to the physics and
mathematics of any conceivable cosmos. Eventually there had been a hint of vast, leaping shadows,
of a monstrous, half-acoustic pulsing, and of the thin, monotonous piping of an unseen flute--but that
was all. Gilman decided he had picked up that last conception from what he had read in the
Necronomicon about the mindless entity Azathoth, which rules all time and space from a black throne
at the centre of Chaos.
When the blood was washed away the wrist wound proved very slight, and Gilman puzzled over
the location of the two tiny punctures. It occurred to him that there was no blood on the bedspread
where he had lain--which was very curious in view of the amount on his skin and cuff. Had he been
sleep-walking within his room, and had the rat bitten him as he sat in some chair or paused in some
less rational position? He looked in every corner for brownish drops or stains, but did not find any.
He had better, he thought, 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
loom-fixer which welled up from the ground floor. Elwood was in, thank heaven, and appeared to be
stirring about. There was time for a little conversation before leaving for breakfast and college, so
Gilman hurriedly poured forth an account of his recent dreams and fears. His host was very
sympathetic, and agreed that something ought to be done. He was shocked by his guest's drawn,
haggard aspect, and noticed the queer, abnormal-looking sunburn which others had remarked during
the past week.
There was not much, though, that he could say. He had not seen Gilman on any sleep-walking
expedition, and had no idea what the curious image could be. He had, though, heard the French-
Canadian who lodged just under Gilman talking to Mazurewicz one evening. They were telling each
other how badly they dreaded the coming of Walpurgis Night, now only a few days off; and were
exchanging pitying comments about the poor, doomed young gentleman. Desrochers, the fellow
under Gilman's room, had spoken of nocturnal footsteps shod and unshod, and of the violet light he
saw one night when he had stolen fearfully up to peer through Gilman's keyhole. He had not dared to
peer, he told Mazurewicz, after he had glimpsed that light through the cracks around the door. There
had been soft talking, too--and as he began to describe it his voice had sunk to an inaudible whisper.
Elwood could not imagine what had set these superstitious creatures gossiping, but supposed
their imaginations had been roused by Gilman's late hours and somnolent walking and talking on the
one hand, and by the nearness of traditionally-feared May Eve on the other hand. That 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
showed the queer image to several professors, all of whom were intensely interested, though none
of them could shed any light upon its nature or origin. That night he slept on a couch which Elwood
had had the landlord bring to the second-storey room, and for the first time in weeks was wholly free
from disquieting dreams. But the feverishness still hung on, and the whines of the loom-fixer were an
unnerving influence.
During the next few days Gilman enjoyed an almost perfect immunity from morbid manifestations.
He had, Elwood said, showed no tendency to talk or rise in his sleep; and meanwhile the landlord was
putting rat-poison everywhere. The only disturbing element was the talk among the superstitious
foreigners, whose imaginations had become highly excited. Mazurewicz was always trying to make
him get a crucifix, and finally forced one upon him which he said had been blessed by the good
Father Iwanicki. Desrochers, too, had something to say; in fact, he insisted that cautious steps had
sounded in the now vacant room above him on the first and second nights of Gilinan's absence from it.
Paul Choynski thought he heard sounds in the halls and on the stairs at night, and claimed that his door
had been softly tried, while Mrs. Dombrowski vowed she had seen Brown Jenkin for the first time
since All-Hallows. But such nave reports could mean very little, and Gilman let the cheap metal
crucifix hang idly from a knob on his host's dresser.
For three days Gilman and Elwood canvassed the local museums in an effort to identify the
strange spiky image, but always without success. In every quarter, however, interest was intense; for
the utter alienage of the thing was a tremendous challenge to scientific curiosity. One of the small
radiating arms was broken off and subjected to chemical analysis. Professor Ellery found platinum,
iron and tellurium in the strange alloy; but mixed with these were at least three other apparent
elements of high atomic weight which chemistry was absolutely powerless to classify. Not only did
they fail to correspond with any known element, but they did not even fit the vacant places reserved
for probable elements in the periodic system. The mystery remains unsolved to this day, though the
image is on exhibition at the museum of Miskatonic University.
On the morning of April twenty-seventh a fresh rat-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 eons; and it was by no means impossible that Keziah had actually mastered the
art of passing through dimensional gates. Tradition emphasizes the uselessness of material barriers
in halting a witch's notions, and who can say what underlies the old tales of broomstick rides through
the night?
Whether a modern student could ever gain similar powers from mathematical research alone, was
still to be seen. 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 abysses flashed
past him, but in another second he thought he was in a dark, muddy, unknown alley of foetid odors
with the rotting walls of ancient houses towering up on every hand.
Ahead was the robed black man he had seen in the peaked space in the other dream, while from a
lesser distance the old woman was beckoning and grimacing imperiously. Brown Jenkin was rubbing
itself with a kind of affectionate playfulness around the ankles of the black man, which the deep mud
largely concealed. There was a dark open doorway on the right, to which the black man silently
pointed. Into this the grinning crone started, dragging Gilman after her by his pajama sleeves. There
were evil-smelling staircases which creaked ominously, and on which the old woman seemed to
radiate a faint violet light; and finally a door leading off a landing. The crone fumbled with the latch
and pushed the door open, motioning to Gilman to wait, and disappearing inside the black aperture.
The youth's over-sensitive ears caught a hideous strangled cry, and presently the beldame came
out of the room bearing a small, senseless form which she thrust at the dreamer as if ordering him to
carry it. The sight of this form, and the expression on its face, broke the spell. Still too dazed to cry
out, he plunged recklessly down the noisome staircase and into the mud outside, halting only when
seized and choked by the waiting black man. As consciousness departed he heard the faint, shrill
tittering of the fanged, rat-like abnormality.
On the morning of the twenty-ninth Gilman awaked into a maelstrom of horror. The instant he
opened his eyes he knew something was terribly wrong, for he was back in his old garret room with
the slanting wall and ceiling, sprawled on the now unmade bed. His throat was aching inexplicably,
and as he struggled to a sitting posture he saw with growing fright that his feet and pajama bottoms
were brown with caked mud. For the moment his recollections were hopelessly hazy, but he knew at
least that he must have been sleep-walking. Elwood had been lost too deeply in slumber to hear and
stop him. On the floor were confused muddy prints, but oddly enough they did not extend all the way
to the door. The more Gilman looked at them, the more peculiar they seemed; for in addition to those
he could recognize as his there were some smaller, almost round markings--such as the legs of a
large chair or a table might make, except that most of them tended to be divided into halves. There
were also some curious muddy rat-tracks leading out of a fresh hole and back into it again. Utter
bewilderment and the fear of madness racked Gilman as he staggered to the door and saw that there
were no muddy prints outside. The more he remembered of his hideous dream the more terrified he
felt, and it added to his desperation to hear Joe Mazurewicz chanting mournfully two floors below.
Descending to Elwood's room he roused his still-sleeping host and began telling of how he had
found himself, but Elwood could form no idea of what might really have happened. Where Gilman
could have been, how he got back to his room without making tracks in the hall, and how the muddy,
furniture-like prints came to be mixed with his in the garret chamber, were wholly beyond
conjecture. Then there were those dark, livid marks on his throat, as if he had tried to strangle
himself. He put his hands up to them, but found that they did not even approximately fit. While they
were talking, Desrochers dropped in to say that he had heard a terrific clattering overhead in the dark
small hours. No, there had been no one on the stairs after midnight, though just before midnight he
had heard faint footfalls in the garret, and cautiously descending steps he did not like. It was, he
added, a very bad time of year for Arkham. The young gentleman had better be sure to wear the
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.
But what threw Gilman into a cold perspiration was the report of a pair of revellers who had been
walking past the mouth of the gangway just after midnight. They admitted they had been drunk, but
both vowed they had seen a crazily dressed trio furtively entering the dark passageway. There had,
they said, been a huge robed negro, a little old woman in rags, and a young white man in his night-
clothes. The old woman had been dragging the youth, while around the feet of the negro a tame rat
was rubbing and weaving in the brown mud.
Gilman sat in a daze all the afternoon, and Elwood--who had meanwhile seen the papers and
formed terrible conjectures from them--found him thus when he came home. This time neither could
doubt but that something hideously serious was closing in around them. Between the phantasms of
nightmare and the realities of the objective world a monstrous and unthinkable relationship was
crystallizing, and only stupendous vigilance could avert still more direful developments. Gilman must
see a specialist sooner or later, but not just now, when all the papers were full of this kidnapping
business.
Just what had really happened was maddeningly obscure, and for a moment both Gilman and
Elwood exchanged whispered theories of the wildest kind. Had Gilman unconsciously succeeded
better than he knew in his studies of space and its dimensions? Had he actually slipped outside our
sphere to points unguessed and unimaginable? Where--if anywhere--had he been on those nights of
demoniac alienage? The roaring twilight abysses--the green hillside--the blistering terrace--the
pulls from the stars--the ultimate black vortex--the black man --the muddy alley and the stairs--the old
witch and the fanged, furry horror--the bubble-congeries and the little polyhedron--the strange
sunburn--the wrist-wound--the unexplained image--the muddy feet--the throat marks--the tales and
fears of the superstitious foreigners--what did all this mean? To what extent could the laws of sanity
apply to such a case?
There was no sleep for either of them that night, but next day they both cut classes and drowsed.
This was April thirtieth, and with the dusk would come the hellish Sabbat-time which all the
foreigners and the superstitious old folk feared. Mazurewicz came home at six o'clock and said
people at the mill were whispering that the Walpurgis revels would be held in the dark ravine beyond
Meadow Hill where the old white stone stands in a place queerly devoid of all plant-life. Some of
them had even told the police and advised them to look there for the missing Wolejko child, but they
did not believe anything would be done. Joe insisted that the poor young gentleman wear his nickel-
chained crucifix, and Gilman put it on and dropped it inside his shirt to humour the fellow.
Late at night the two youths sat drowsing in their chairs, lulled by the praying of the loom-fixer
on the floor below. Gilman listened as he nodded, his preternaturally sharpened hearing seeming to
strain for some subtle, dreaded murmur beyond the noises in the ancient house. Unwholesome
recollections of things in the Necronomicon and the Black Book welled up, and he found himself
swaying to infandous rhythms said to pertain to the blackest ceremonies of the Sabbat and to have an
origin outside the time and space we comprehend.
Presently he realized what he was listening for--the hellish chant of the celebrants in the distant
black valley. How did he know so much about what they expected? How did he know the time when
Nahab and her acolyte were due to bear the brimming bowl which would follow the black cock and
the black goat? He saw that Elwood had dropped asleep, and tried to call out and waken him.
Something, however, closed his throat. He was not his own master. Had he signed the black man's
book after all?
Then his fevered, abnormal hearing caught the distant, windborne notes. Over miles of hill and
field and alley they came, but he recognized them none the less. The fires must be lit, and the dancers
must be starting in. How could he keep himself from going? What was it that had enmeshed him?
Mathematics--folklore--the house--old Keziah--Brown Jenkin...and now he saw that there was a
fresh rat-hole in the wall near his couch. Above the distant chanting and the nearer praying of Joe
Mazurewicz came another sound--a stealthy, determined scratching in the partitions. He hoped the
electric lights would not go out. Then he saw the fanged, bearded little face in the rat-hole--the
accursed little face which he at last realized bore such a shocking, mocking resemblance to old
Keziah's--and heard the faint fumbling at the door.
The screaming twilight abysses flashed before him, and he felt himself helpless in the formless
grasp of the iridescent bubble-congeries. Ahead raced the small, kaleidoscopic polyhedron and all
through the churning void there was a heightening and acceleration of the vague tonal pattern which
seemed to foreshadow some unutterable and unendurable climax. He seemed to know what was
coming--the monstrous burst of Walpurgis-rhythm in whose cosmic timbre would be concentrated all
the primal, ultimate space-time seethings which lie behind the massed spheres of matter and
sometimes break forth in measured reverberations that penetrate faintly to every layer of entity and
give hideous significance throughout the worlds to certain dreaded periods.
But all this vanished in a second. He was again in the cramped, violet-litten peaked space with the
slanting floor, the low cases of ancient books, the bench and table, the queer objects, and the
triangular gulf at one side. On the table lay a small white figure--an infant boy, unclothed and
unconscious--while on the other side stood the monstrous, leering old woman with a gleaming,
grotesque-hafted knife in her right hand, and a queerly proportioned pale metal bowl covered with
curiously chased designs and having delicate lateral handles in her left. She was intoning some
croaking ritual in a language which Gilman could not understand, but which seemed like something
guardedly quoted in the Necronomicon.
As the scene grew clearer he saw the ancient crone bend forward and extend the empty bowl
across the table--and unable to control his own emotions, he reached far forward and took it in both
hands, noticing as he did so its comparative lightness. At the same moment the disgusting form of
Brown Jenkin scrambled up over the brink of the triangular black gulf on his left. The crone now
motioned him to hold the bowl in a certain position while she raised the huge, grotesque knife above
the small white victim as high as her right hand could reach. The fanged, furry thing began tittering a
continuation of the unknown ritual, while the witch croaked loathsome responses. Gilman felt a
gnawing poignant abhorrence shoot through his mental and emotional paralysis, and the light metal
bowl shook in his grasp. A second later the downward motion of the knife broke the spell
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 demoniac dexterity,
had been busy while the witch was throttling him, and his efforts had been in vain. What he had
prevented the knife from doing to the victim's chest, the yellow fangs of the furry blasphemy had
done to a wrist--and the bowl so lately on the floor stood full beside the small lifeless body.
In his dream-delirium Gilman heard the hellish alien-rhythmed chant of the Sabbat coming from an
infinite distance, and knew the black man must be there. Confused memories mixed themselves with
his mathematics, and he believed his subconscious mind held the angles which he needed to guide
him back to the normal world alone and unaided for the first time. He felt sure he was in the
immemorially sealed loft above his own room, but whether he could ever escape through the slanting
floor or the long-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 instincts to take him back to the right part of space. How could he be sure he would not land
on that green-litten hillside of a far planet, on the tessellated terrace above the city of tentacled
monsters somewhere beyond the galaxy or in the spiral black vortices of that ultimate void of Chaos
where reigns the mindless demon-sultan Azathoth?
Just before he made the plunge the violet light went out and left him in utter blackness. The
witch--old Keziah--Nahab--that must have meant her death. And mixed with the distant chant of the
Sabbat and the whimpers of Brown Jenkin in the gulf below he thought he heard another and wilder
whine from unknown depths. Joe Mazurewicz--the prayers against the Crawling Chaos now turning
to an inexplicably triumphant shriek--worlds of sardonic actuality impinging on vortices of febrile
dream--I! Shub-Niggurath! The Goat with a Thousand Young...
They found Gilman on the floor of his queerly-angled old garret room long before dawn, for the
terrible cry had brought Desrochers and Choynski and Dombrowski and Mazurewicz at once, and had
even wakened the soundly sleeping Elwood in his chair. He was alive, and with open, staring eyes,
but seemed largely unconscious. On his throat were the marks of murderous hands, and on his left
ankle was a distressing rat-bite. His clothing was badly rumpled and Joe's crucifix was missing,
Elwood trembled, afraid even to speculate what new form his friend's sleep-walking had taken.
Mazurewicz seemed half dazed because of a "sign" he said he had had in response to his prayers, and
he crossed himself frantically when the squealing and whimpering of a rat sounded from beyond the
slanting partition.
When the dreamer was settled on his couch in Elwood's room they sent for Doctor Malkowski--a
local practitioner who would repeat no tales where they might prove embarrassing--and he gave
Gilman two hypodermic injections which caused him to relax in something like natural drowsiness.
During the day the patient regained consciousness at times and whispered his newest dream
disjointedly to Elwood. It was a painful process, and at its very start brought out a fresh and
disconcerting fact.
Gilman--whose ears had so lately possessed an abnormal sensitiveness--was now stone-deaf.
Doctor Malkowski, summoned again in haste, told Elwood that both ear-drums were ruptured, as if by
the impact of some stupendous sound intense beyond all human conception or endurance. How such a
sound could have been heard in the last few hours without arousing all the Miskatonic Valley was
more than the honest physician could say.
Elwood wrote his part of the colloquy on paper, so that a fairly easy communication was
maintained. Neither knew what to make of the whole chaotic business, and decided it would be better
if they thought as little as possible about it. Both, though, agreed that they must leave this ancient and
accursed house as soon as it could be arranged. Evening papers spoke of a police raid on some
curious revellers in a ravine beyond Meadow Hill just before dawn, and mentioned that the white
stone there was an object of age-long superstitious regard. Nobody had been caught, but among the
scattering fugitives had been glimpsed a huge negro. In another column it was stated that no trace of
the missing child Ladislas Wolejko had been found.
The crowning horror came that very night. Elwood will never forget it, and was forced to stay
out of college the rest of the term because of the resulting nervous breakdown. He had thought he
heard rats in the partition all the evening, but paid little attention to them. Then, long after both he and
Gilman had retired, the atrocious shrieking began. Elwood jumped up, turned on the lights and rushed
over to his guest's couch. The occupant was emitting sounds of veritably inhuman nature, as if racked
by some torment beyond description. He was writhing under the bedclothes, and a great stain was
beginning to appear on the blankets.
Elwood scarcely dared to touch him, but gradually the screaming and writhing subsided. By this
time Dombrowski, Choynski, Desrochers, Mazurewicz, and the top-floor lodger were all crowding
into the doorway, and the landlord had sent his wife back to telephone for Doctor Malkowaki.
Everybody shrieked when a large rat-like form suddenly jumped out from beneath the ensanguined
bedclothes and scuttled across the floor to a fresh, open hole close by. When the doctor arrived and
began to pull down those frightful covers Walter Gilman was dead.
It would be barbarous to do more than suggest what had killed Gilman. There had been virtually a
tunnel through his body--something had eaten his heart out. Dombrowski, frantic at the failure of his
rat-poisoning efforts, cast aside all thought of his lease and within a week had moved with all his
older lodgers to a dingy but less ancient house in Walnut Street. The worst thing for a while was
keeping Joe Mazurewicz quiet; for the brooding loom-fixer would never stay sober, and was
constantly whining and muttering about spectral and terrible things.
It seems that on that last hideous night Joe had stooped to look at the crimson rat-tracks which led
from Gilman's couch to the near-by hole. On the carpet they were very indistinct, but a piece of open
flooring intervened between the carpet's edge and the baseboard. There Mazurewicz had found
something monstrous--or thought he had, for no one else could quite agree with him despite the
undeniable queerness of the prints. The tracks on the flooring were certainly vastly unlike the
average prints of a rat but even Choynski and Desrochers would not admit that they were like the
prints of four tiny human hands.
The house was never rented again. As soon as Dombrowski left it the pall of its final desolation
began to descend, for people shunned it both on account of its old reputation and because of the new
foetid odour. Perhaps the ex-landlord's rat-poison had worked after all, for not long after his
departure the place became a neighbourhood nuisance. Health officials traced the smell to the closed
spaces above and beside the eastern garret room, and agreed that the number of dead rats must be
enormous. They decided, however, that it was not worth their while to hew open and disinfect the
long-sealed spaces; for the foetor would soon be over, and the locality was not one which
encouraged fastidious standards. Indeed, there were always vague local tales of unexplained
stenches upstairs in the Witch-House just after May-Eve and Hallowmass. The neighbours
acquiesced in the inertia--but the foetor none the less formed an additional count against the place.
Toward the last the house was condemned as a habitation by the building inspector.
Gilman's dreams and their attendant circumstances have never been explained. Elwood, whose
thoughts on the entire episode are sometimes almost maddening, came back to college the next
autumn and was graduated in the following June. He found the spectral gossip of the town much
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 storey was choked with
debris from above, but no one took the trouble to touch the mess before the inevitable razing of the
decrepit structure. That ultimate step came in the following December, and it was when Gilman's old
room was cleared out by reluctant, apprehensive workmen that the gossip began.
Among the rubbish which had crashed through the ancient slanting ceiling were several things
which made the workmen pause and call in the police. Later the police in turn called in the coroner
and several professors from the university. There were bones--badly crushed and splintered, but
clearly recognizable as human--whose manifestly modern date conflicted puzzlingly with the remote
period at which their only possible lurking place, the low, slant-floored loft overhead, had
supposedly been sealed from all human access. The coroner's physician decided that some belonged
to a small child, while certain others--found mixed with shreds of rotten brownish cloth--belonged
to a rather undersized, bent female of advanced years. Careful sifting of debris also disclosed many
tiny bones of rats caught in the collapse, as well as older rat-bones gnawed by small fangs in a
fashion now and then highly productive of controversy and reflection.
Other objects found included the mangled fragments of many books and papers, together with a
yellowish dust left from the total disintegration of still older books and papers. All, without
exception, appeared to deal with black magic in its most advanced and horrible forms; and the
evidently recent date of certain items is still a mystery as unsolved as that of the modern human bones.
An even greater mystery is the absolute homogeneity of the crabbed, archaic writing found on a wide
range of papers whose conditions and watermarks suggest age differences of at least one hundred
and fifty to two hundred years. To some, though, the greatest mystery of all is the variety of utterly
inexplicable objects--objects whose shapes, materials, types of workmanship, and purposes baffle all
conjecture--found scattered amidst the wreckage in evidently diverse states of injury. One of these
things--which excited several Miskatonic professors profoundly is a badly damaged monstrosity
plainly resembling the strange image which Gilman gave to the college museum, save that it is large,
wrought of some peculiar bluish stone instead of metal, and possessed of a singularly angled
pedestal with undecipherable hieroglyphics.
Archaeologists and anthropologists are still trying to explain the bizarre designs chased on a
crushed bowl of light metal whose inner side bore ominous brownish stains when found. Foreigners
and credulous grandmothers are equally garrulous about the modern nickel crucifix with broken
chain mixed in the rubbish and shiveringly identified by Joe Maturewicz as that which he had given
poor 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 at the time.
Still others, including Joe himself, have theories too wild and fantastic for sober credence.
When the slanting wall of Gilman's room was torn out, the once-sealed triangular space between
that partition and the house's north wall was found to contain much less structural debris, even in
proportion to its size, than the room itself, though it had a ghastly layer of older materials which
paralyzed the wreckers with horror. In brief, the floor was a veritable ossuary of the bones of small
children--some fairly modern, but others extending back in infinite gradations to a period so remote
that crumbling was almost complete. On this deep bony layer rested a knife of great size, obvious
antiquity, and grotesque, ornate, and exotic design--above which the debris was piled.
In the midst of this debris, wedged between a fallen plank and a cluster of cemented bricks from
the ruined chimney, was an object destined to cause more bafflement, veiled fright, and openly
superstitious talk in Arkham than anything else discovered in the haunted and accursed building.
This object was the partly crushed skeleton of a huge diseased rat, whose abnormalities of form
are still a topic of debate and source of singular reticence among the members of Miskatonic's
department of comparative anatomy. Very little concerning this skeleton has leaked out, but the
workmen who found it whisper in shocked tones about the long, brownish hairs with which it was
associated.
The bones of the tiny paws, it is rumoured, imply prehensile characteristics more typical of a
diminutive monkey than of a rat, while the small skull with its savage yellow fangs is of the utmost
anomalousness, appearing from certain angles like a miniature, monstrously degraded parody of a
human skull. The workmen crossed themselves in fright when they came upon this blasphemy, but
later burned candles of gratitude in St. Stanislaus' Church because of the shrill, ghostly tittering they
felt they would never hear again.

THE HAUNTER OF THE DARK
I have seen the dark universe yawning
Where the black planets roll without aim,
Where they roll in their horror unheeded,
Without knowledge or lustre or name.
Cautious investigators will hesitate to challenge the common belief that Robert Blake was killed
by lightning, or by some profound nervous shock derived from an electrical discharge. It is true that
the window he faced was unbroken, but nature has shown herself capable of many freakish
performances. The expression on his face may easily have arisen from some obscure muscular
source unrelated to anything he saw, while the entries in his diary are clearly the result of a fantastic
imagination aroused by certain local superstitions and by certain old matters he had uncovered. As
for the anomalous conditions at the deserted church of Federal Hill--the shrewd analyst is not slow
in attributing them to some charlatanry, conscious or unconscious, with at least some of which Blake
was secretly connected.
For after all, the victim was a writer and painter wholly devoted to the field of myth, dream,
terror, and superstition, and avid in his quest for scenes and effects of a bizarre, spectral sort. His
earlier stay in the city--a visit to a strange old man as deeply given to occult and forbidden lore as
he--had ended amidst death and flame, and it must have been some morbid instinct which drew him
back from his home in Milwaukee. He may have known of the old stories despite his statements to the
contrary in the diary, and his death may have nipped in the bud some stupendous hoax destined to have
a literary reflection.
Among those, however, who have examined and correlated all this evidence, there remain several
who cling to less rational and commonplace theories. They are inclined to take much of Blake's diary
at its face value, and point significantly to certain facts such as the undoubted genuineness of the old
church record, the verified existence of the disliked and unorthodox Starry Wisdom sect prior to
1877, the recorded disappearance of an inquisitive reporter named Edwin M. Lillibridge in 1893, and-
-above all--the look of monstrous, transfiguring fear on the face of the young writer when he died. It
was one of these believers who, moved to fanatical extremes, threw into the bay the curiously angled
stone and its strangely adorned metal box found in the old church steeple--the black windowless
steeple, and not the tower where Blake's diary said those things originally were. Though widely
censured both officially and unofficially, this man--a reputable physician with a taste for odd
folklore--averred that he had rid the earth of something too dangerous to rest upon it.
Between these two schools of opinion the reader must judge for himself. The papers have given
the tangible details from a sceptical angle, leaving for others the drawing of the picture as Robert
Blake saw it--or thought he saw it--or pretended to see it. Now studying the diary closely,
dispassionately, and at leisure, let us summarize the dark chain of events from the expressed point of
view of their chief actor.
Young Blake returned to Providence in the winter of 1934-5, taking the upper floor of a venerable
dwelling in a grassy court off College Street--on the crest of the great eastward hill near the
BrownUniversity campus and behind the marble John Hay Library. It was a cosy and fascinating
place, in a little garden oasis of village-like antiquity where huge, friendly cats sunned themselves
atop a convenient shed. The square Georgian house had a monitor roof, classic doorway with fan
carving, small-paned windows, and all the other earmarks of early nineteenth century workmanship.
Inside were six-panelled doors, wide floor-boards, a curving colonial staircase, white Adam-period
mantels, and a rear set of rooms three steps below the general level.
Blake's study, a large southwest chamber, overlooked the front garden on one side, while its west
windows--before one of which he had his desk--faced off from the brow of the hill and commanded
a splendid view of the lower town's outspread roofs and of the mystical sunsets that flamed behind
them. On the far horizon were the open countryside's purple slopes. Against these, some two miles
away, rose the spectral hump of Federal Hill, bristling with huddled roofs and steeples whose
remote outlines wavered mysteriously, taking fantastic forms as the smoke of the city swirled up and
enmeshed them. Blake had a curious sense that he was looking upon some unknown, ethereal world
which might or might not vanish in dream if ever he tried to seek it out and enter it in person.
Having sent home for most of his books, Blake bought some antique furniture suitable for his
quarters and settled down to write and paint--living alone, and attending to the simple housework
himself. His studio was in a north attic room, where the panes of the monitor roof furnished
admirable lighting. During that first winter he produced five of his best-known short stories--The
Burrower Beneath, The Stairs in the Crypt, Shaggai, In the Vale of Pnath, and The Feaster from the
Stars--and painted seven canvases; studies of nameless, unhuman monsters, and profoundly alien, non-
terrestrial landscapes.
At sunset he would often sit at his desk and gaze dreamily off at the outspread west--the dark
towers of Memorial Hall just below, the Georgian court-house belfry, the lofty pinnacles of the
downtown section, and that shimmering, spire-crowned mound in the distance whose unknown streets
and labyrinthine gables so potently provoked his fancy. From his few local aquaintances he learned
that the far-off slope was a vast Italian quarter, though most of the houses were remnant of older
Yankee and Irish days. Now and then he would train his field-glasses on that spectral, unreachable
world beyond the curling smoke; picking out individual roofs and chimneys and steeples, and
speculating upon the bizarre and curious mysteries they might house. Even with optical aid Federal
Hill seemed somehow alien, half fabulous, and linked to the unreal, intangible marvels of Blake's
own tales and pictures. The feeling would persist long after the hill had faded into the violet, lamp-
starred twilight, and the court-house floodlights and the red Industrial Trust beacon had blazed up to
make the night grotesque.
Of all the distant objects on Federal Hill, a certain huge, dark church most fascinated Blake. It
stood out with especial distinctness at certain hours of the day, and at sunset the great tower and
tapering steeple loomed blackly against the flaming sky. It seemed to rest on especially high ground;
for the grimy faade, and the obliquely seen north side with sloping roof and the tops of great
pointed windows, rose boldly above the tangle of surrounding ridgepoles and chimney-pots.
Peculiarly grim and austere, it appeared to be built of stone, stained and weathered with the smoke
and storms of a century and more. The style, so far as the glass could show, was that earliest
experimental form of Gothic revival which preceded the stately Upjohn period and held over some
of the outlines and proportions of the Georgian age. Perhaps it was reared around 1810 or 1815.
As months passed, Blake watched the far-off, forbidding structure with an oddly mounting
interest. Since the vast windows were never lighted, he knew that it must be vacant. The longer he
watched, the more his imagination worked, till at length he began to fancy curious things. He
believed that a vague, singular aura of desolation hovered over the place, so that even the pigeons
and swallows shunned its smoky eaves. Around other towers and belfries his glass would reveal
great flocks of birds, but here they never rested. At least, that is what he thought and set down in his
diary. He pointed the place out to several friends, but none of them had even been on Federal Hill or
possessed the faintest notion of what the church was or had been.
In the spring a deep restlessness gripped Blake. He had begun his long-planned novel--based on a
supposed survival of the witch-cult in Maine--but was strangely unable to make progress with it.
More and more he would sit at his westward window and gaze at the distant hill and the black,
frowning steeple shunned by the birds. When the delicate leaves came out on the garden boughs the
world was filled with a new beauty, but Blake's restlessness was merely increased. It was then that he
first thought of crossing the city and climbing bodily up that fabulous slope into the smoke-wreathed
world of dream.
Late in April, just before the aeon-shadowed Walpurgis time, Blake made his first trip into the
unknown. Plodding through the endless downtown streets and the bleak, decayed squares beyond, he
came finally upon the ascending avenue of century-worn steps, sagging Doric porches, and blear-
paned cupolas which he felt must lead up to the long-known, unreachable world beyond the mists.
There were dingy blue-and-white street signs which meant nothing to him, and presently he noted the
strange, dark faces of the drifting crowds, and the foreign signs over curious shops in brown,
decade-weathered buildings. Nowhere could he find any of the objects he had seen from afar; so that
once more he half fancied that the Federal Hill of that distant view was a dream-world never to be
trod by living human feet.
Now and then a battered church faade or crumbling spire came in sight, but never the blackened
pile that he sought. When he asked a shopkeeper about a great stone church the man smiled and shook
his head, though he spoke English freely. As Blake climbed higher, the region seemed stranger and
stranger, with bewildering mazes of brooding brown alleys leading eternally off to the south. He
crossed two or three broad avenues, and once thought he glimpsed a familiar tower. Again he asked
a merchant about the massive church of stone, and this time he could have sworn that the plea of
ignorance was feigned. The dark man's face had a look of fear which he tried to hide, and Blake saw
him make a curious sign with his right hand.
Then suddenly a black spire stood out against the cloudy sky on his left, above the tiers of brown
roofs lining the tangled southerly alleys. Blake knew at once what it was, and plunged toward it
through the squalid, unpaved lanes that climbed from the avenue. Twice he lost his way, but he
somehow dared not ask any of the patriarchs or housewives who sat on their doorsteps, or any of the
children who shouted and played in the mud of the shadowy lanes.
At last he saw the tower plain against the southwest, and a huge stone bulk rose darkly at the end
of an alley. Presently he stood in a wind-swept open square, quaintly cobblestoned, with a high bank
wall on the farther side. This was the end of his quest; for upon the wide, iron-railed, weed-grown
plateau which the wall supported--a separate, lesser world raised fully six feet above the
surrounding streets--there stood a grim, titan bulk whose identity, despite Blake's new perspective,
was beyond dispute.
The vacant church was in a state of great decrepitude. Some of the high stone buttresses had
fallen, and several delicate finials lay half lost among the brown, neglected weeds and grasses. The
sooty Gothic windows were largely unbroken, though many of the stone 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 priest warned everybody
against it, vowing that a monstrous evil had once dwelt there and left its mark. He himself had heard
dark whispers of it from his father, who recalled certain sounds and rumours from his boyhood.
There had been a bad sect there in the old days--an outlaw sect that called up awful things from
some unknown gulf of night. It had taken a good priest to exorcise what had come, though there did
be those who said that merely the light could do it. If Father O'Malley were alive there would be
many a thing he could tell. But now there was nothing to do but let it alone. It hurt nobody now, and
those that owned it were dead or far away. They had run away like rats after the threatening talk in
'77, when people began to mind the way folks vanished now and then in the neighbourhood. Some day
the city would step in and take the property for lack of heirs, but little good would come of anybody's
touching it. Better it be left alone for the years to topple, lest things be stirred that ought to rest
forever in their black abyss.
After the policeman had gone Blake stood staring at the sullen steepled pile. It excited him to find
that the structure seemed as sinister to others as to him, and he wondered what grain of truth might lie
behind the old tales the bluecoat had repeated. Probably they were mere legends evoked by the evil
look of the place, but even so, they were like a strange coming to life of one of his own stories.
The afternoon sun came out from behind dispersing clouds, but seemed unable to light up the
stained, sooty walls of the old temple that towered on its high plateau. It was odd that the green of
spring had not touched the brown, withered growths in the raised, iron-fenced yard. Blake found
himself edging nearer the raised area and examining the bank wall and rusted fence for possible
avenues of ingress. There was a terrible lure about the blackened fane which was not to be resisted.
The fence had no opening near the steps, but round on the north side were some missing bars. He
could go up the steps and walk round on the narrow coping outside the fence till he came to the gap.
If the people feared the place so wildly, he would encounter no interference.
He was on the embankment and almost inside the fence before anyone noticed him. Then, looking
down, he saw the few people in the square edging away and making the same sign with their right
hands that the shopkeeper in the avenue had made. Several windows were slammed down, and a fat
woman darted into the street and pulled some small children inside a rickety, unpainted house. The
gap in the fence was very easy to pass through, and before long Blake found himself wading amidst
the rotting, tangled growths of the deserted yard. Here and there the worn stump of a headstone told
him that there had once been burials in the field; but that, he saw, must have been very long ago. The
sheer bulk of the church was oppressive now that he was close to it, but he conquered his mood and
approached to try the three great doors in the faade. All were securely locked, so he began a circuit
of the Cyclopean building in quest of some minor and more penetrable opening. Even then he could
not be sure that he wished to enter that haunt of desertion and shadow, yet the pull of its strangeness
dragged him on automatically.
A yawning and unprotected cellar window in the rear furnished the needed aperture. Peering in,
Blake saw a subterrene gulf of cobwebs and dust faintly litten by the western sun's filtered rays.
Debris, old barrels, and ruined boxes and furniture of numerous sorts met his eye, though over
everything lay a shroud of dust which softened all sharp outlines. The rusted remains of a hot-air
furnace showed that the building had been used and kept in shape as late as mid-Victorian times.
Acting almost without conscious initiative, Blake crawled through the window and let himself
down to the dust-carpeted and debris-strewn concrete floor. The vaulted cellar was a vast one,
without partitions; and in a corner far to the right, amid dense shadows, he saw a black archway
evidently leading upstairs. He felt a peculiar sense of oppression at being actually within the great
spectral building, but kept it in check as he cautiously scouted about--finding a still-intact barrel amid
the dust, and rolling it over to the open window to provide for his exit. Then, bracing himself, he
crossed the wide, cobweb-festooned space toward the arch. Half-choked with the omnipresent dust,
and covered with ghostly gossamer fibres, he reached and began to climb the worn stone steps which
rose into the darkness. He had no light, but groped carefully with his hands. After a sharp turn he 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, hour-glass pulpit, and sounding-
board and its titanic ropes of cobweb stretching among the pointed arches of the gallery and
entwining the clustered Gothic columns. Over all this hushed desolation played a hideous leaden
light as the declining afternoon sun sent its rays through the strange, half-blackened panes of the
great apsidal windows.
The paintings on those windows were so obscured by soot that Blake could scarcely decipher
what they had represented, but from the little he could make out he did not like them. The designs
were largely conventional, and his knowledge of obscure symbolism told him much concerning some
of the ancient patterns. The few saints depicted bore expressions distinctly open to criticism, while
one of the windows seemed to show merely a dark space with spirals of curious luminosity scattered
about in it. Turning away from the windows, Blake noticed that the cobwebbed cross above the altar
was not of the ordinary kind, but resembled the primordial ankh or crux ansata of shadowy Egypt.
In a rear vestry room beside the apse Blake found a rotting desk and ceiling-high shelves of
mildewed, disintegrating books. Here for the first time he received a positive shock of objective
horror, for the titles of those books told him much. They were the black, forbidden things which
most sane people have never even heard of, or have heard of only in furtive, timorous whispers; the
banned and dreaded repositories of equivocal secret and immemorial formulae which have trickled
down the stream of time from the days of man's youth, and the dim, fabulous days before man was. He
had himself read many of them--a Latin version of the abhorred Necronomicon, the sinister Liber
Ivonis, the infamous Cultes des Goules of Comte d'Erlette, the Unaussprechlichen Kulten of von
Junzt, and old Ludvig Prinn's hellish De Vermis Mysteriis. But there were others he had known
merely by reputation or not at all--the Pnakotic Manuscripts, the Book of Dzyan, and a crumbling
volume of wholly unidentifiable characters yet with certain symbols and diagrams shuddering
recognizable to the occult student. Clearly, the lingering local rumours had not lied. This place had
once been the seat of an evil older than mankind and wider than the known universe.
In the ruined desk was a small leatherbound record-book filled with entries in some odd
cryptographic medium. The manuscript writing consisted of the common traditional symbols used
today in astronomy and anciently in alchemy, astrology, and other dubious arts--the devices of the
sun, moon, planets, aspects, and zodiacal signs--here massed in solid pages of text, with divisions and
paragraphings suggesting that each symbol answered to some alphabetical letter.
In the hope of later solving the cryptogram, Blake bore off this volume in his coat pocket. Many
of the great tomes on the shelves fascinated him unutterably, and he felt tempted to borrow them at
some later time. He wondered how they could have remained undisturbed so long. Was he the first to
conquer the clutching, pervasive fear which had for nearly sixty years protected this deserted place
from visitors?
Having now thoroughly explored the ground floor, Blake ploughed again through the dust of the
spectral nave to the front vestibule, where he had seen a door and staircase presumably leading up to
the blackened tower and steeple--objects so long familiar to him at a distance. The ascent was a
choking experience, for dust lay thick, while the spiders had done their worst in this constricted
place. The staircase was a spiral with high, narrow wooden treads, and now and then Blake passed a
clouded window looking dizzily out over the city. Though he had seen no ropes below, he expected
to find a bell or peal of bells in the tower whose narrow, louvre-boarded lancet windows his field-
glass had studied so often. Here he was doomed to disappointment; for when he attained the top of
the stairs he found the tower chamber vacant of chimes, and clearly devoted to vastly different
purposes.
The room, about fifteen feet square, was faintly lighted by four lancet windows, one on each
side, which were glazed within their screening of decayed louvre-boards. These had been further
fitted with tight, opaque screens, but the latter were now largely rotted away. In the centre of the
dust-laden floor rose a curiously angled stone pillar dome four feet in height and two in average
diameter, covered on each side with bizarre, crudely incised and wholly unrecognizable
hieroglyphs. On this pillar rested a metal box of peculiarly asymmetrical form; its hinged lid thrown
back, and its interior holding what looked beneath the decade-deep dust to be an egg-shaped or
irregularly spherical object some four inches through. Around the pillar in a rough circle were
seven high-backed Gothic chairs still largely intact, while behind them, ranging along the dark-
panelled walls, were seven colossal images of crumbling, black-painted plaster, resembling more
than anything else the cryptic carven megaliths of mysterious Easter Island. In one corner of the
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 29 Dec. 1844.
Congregation 97 by end of '45.
1846--3 disappearances--first mention of Shining Trapezohedron.
7 disappearances 1848--stories of blood sacrifice begin.
Investigation 1853 comes to nothing--stories of sounds.
Fr O'Malley tells of devil-worship with box found in great Egyptian ruins--says they call up
something that can't exist in light. Flees a little light, and banished by strong light. Then has to be
summoned again. Probably got this from deathbed confession of Francis X. Feeney, who had joined
Starry Wisdom in '49. These people say the Shining Trapezohedron shows them heaven & other
worlds, & that the Haunter of the Dark tells them secrets in some way.
Story of Orrin B. Eddy 1857. They call it up by gazing at the crystal, & have a secret language of
their own.
200 or more in cong. 1863, exclusive of men at front.
Irish boys mob church in 1869 after Patrick Regan's disappearance.
Veiled article in J. 14 March '72, but people don't talk about it.
6 disappearances 1876--secret committee calls on Mayor Doyle.
Action promised Feb. 1877--church closes in April.
Gang--Federal Hill Boys--threaten Dr--and vestrymen in May.
181 persons leave city before end of '77--mention no names.
Ghost stories begin around 1880--try to ascertain truth of report that no human being has entered
church since 1877.
Ask Lanigan for photograph of place taken 1851...
Restoring the paper to the pocketbook and placing the latter in his coat, Blake turned to look down
at the skeleton in the dust. The implications of the notes were clear, and there could be no doubt but
that this man had come to the deserted edifice forty-two years before in quest of a newspaper
sensation which no one else had been bold enough to attempt. Perhaps no one else had known of his
plan--who could tell? But he had never returned to his paper. Had some bravely-suppressed fear
risen to overcome him and bring on sudden heart-failure? Blake stooped over the gleaming bones and
noted their peculiar state. Some of them were badly scattered, and a few seemed oddly dissolved at
the ends. Others were strangely yellowed, with vague suggestions of charring. This charring
extended to some of the fragments of clothing. The skull was in a very peculiar state--stained
yellow, and with a charred aperture in the top as if some powerful acid had eaten through the solid
bone. What had happened to the skeleton during its four decades of silent entombment here Blake
could not imagine.
Before he realized it, he was looking at the stone again, and letting its curious influence call up a
nebulous pageantry in his mind. He saw processions of robed, hooded figures whose outlines were
not human, and looked on endless leagues of desert lined with carved, sky-reaching monoliths. He
saw towers and walls in nighted depths under the sea, and vortices of space where wisps of black
mist floated before thin shimmerings of cold purple haze. And beyond all else he glimpsed an infinite
gulf of darkness, where solid and semisolid forms were known only by their windy stirrings, and
cloudy patterns of force seemed to superimpose order on chaos and hold forth a key to all the
paradoxes and arcana of the worlds we know.
Then all at once the spell was broken by an access of gnawing, indeterminate panic fear. Blake
choked and turned away from the stone, conscious of some formless alien presence close to him and
watching him with horrible intentness. He felt entangled with something--something which was not in
the stone, but which had looked through it at him--something which would ceaselessly follow him
with a cognition that was not physical sight. Plainly, the place was getting on his nerves--as well it
might in view of his gruesome find. The light was waning, too, and since he had no 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
hack. Was there a subtle phosphorescence of radio-activity about the thing? What was it that the dead
man's notes had said concerning a Shining Trapezohedron? What, anyway, was this abandoned lair of
cosmic evil? What had been done here, and what might still be lurking in the bird-shunned shadows?
It seemed now as if an elusive touch of foetor had arisen somewhere close by, though its source was
not apparent. Blake seized the cover of the long-open box and snapped it down. It moved easily on its
alien hinges, and closed completely over the unmistakably glowing stone.
At the sharp click of that closing a soft stirring sound seemed to come from the steeple's eternal
blackness overhead, beyond the trap-door. Rats, without question--the only living things to reveal
their presence in this accursed pile since he had entered it. And yet that stirring in the steeple
frightened him horribly, so that he plunged almost wildly down the spiral stairs, across the ghoulish
nave, into the vaulted basement, out amidst the gathering dust of the deserted square, and down
through the teeming, fear-haunted alleys and avenues of Federal Hill towards the sane central streets
and the home-like brick sidewalks of the college district.
During the days which followed, Blake told no one of his expedition. Instead, he read much in
certain books, examined long years of newspaper files downtown, and worked feverishly at the
cryptogram in that leather volume from the cobwebbed vestry room. The cipher, he soon saw, was
no simple one; and after a long period of endeavour he felt sure that its language could not be
English, Latin, Greek, French, Spanish, Italian, or German. Evidently he would have to draw upon the
deepest wells of his strange erudition.
Every evening the old impulse to gaze westwards returned, and he saw the black steeple as of
yore amongst the bristling roofs of a distant and half-fabulous world. But now it held a fresh note of
terror for him. He knew the heritage of evil lore it masked, and with the knowledge his vision ran riot
in queer new ways. The birds of spring were returning, and as he watched their sunset flights he
fancied they avoided the gaunt, lone spire as never before. When a flock of them approached it, he
thought, they would wheel and scatter in panic confusion--and he could guess at the wild twitterings
which failed to reach him across the intervening miles.
It was in June that Blake's diary told of his victory over the cryptogram. The text was, he found,
in the dark Aklo language used by certain cults of evil antiquity, and known to him in a halting way
through previous researches. The diary is strangely reticent about what Blake deciphered, but he
was patently awed and disconcerted by his results. There are references to a Haunter of the Dark
awaked by gazing into the Shining Trapezohedron, and insane conjectures about the black gulfs of
chaos from which it was called. The being is spoken of as holding all knowledge, and demanding
monstrous sacrifices. Some of Blake's entries show fear lest the thing, which he seemed to regard as
summoned, stalk abroad; though he adds that the streetlights form a bulwark which cannot be crossed.
Of the Shining Trapezohedron he speaks often, calling it a window on all time and space, and
tracing its history from the days it was fashioned on dark Yuggoth, before ever the Old Ones brought
it to earth. It was treasured and placed in its curious box by the crinoid things of Antarctica, salvaged
from their ruins by the serpent-men of Valusia, and peered at aeons later in Lemuria by the first
human beings. It crossed strange lands and stranger seas, and sank with Atlantis before a Minoan
fisher meshed it in his net and sold it to swarthy merchants from nighted Khem. The Pharaoh
Nephren-Ka built around it a temple with a windowless crypt, and did that which caused his name to
be stricken from all monuments and records. Then it slept in the ruins of that evil fane which the
priests and the new Pharaoh destroyed, till the delver's spade once more brought it forth to curse
mankind.
Early in July the newspapers oddly supplement Blake's entries, though in so brief and casual a
way that only the diary has called general attention to their contribution. It appears that a new fear had
been growing on Federal Hill since a stranger had entered the dreaded church. The Italians
whispered of unaccustomed stirrings and bumpings and scrapings in the dark windowless steeple, and
called on their priests to banish an entity which haunted their dreams. Something, they said, was
constantly watching at a door to see if it were dark enough to venture forth. Press items mentioned
the longstanding local superstitions, but failed to shed much light on the earlier background of the
horror. It was obvious that the young reporters of today are no antiquarians. In writing of these things
in his diary, Blake expresses a curious kind of remorse, and talks of the duty of burying the Shining
Trapezohedron and of banishing what he had evoked by letting daylight into the hideous jutting spire.
At the same time, however, he displays the dangerous extent of his fascination, and admits a morbid
longing--pervading even his dreams--to visit the accursed tower and gaze again into the cosmic
secrets of the glowing stone.
Then something in the Journal on the morning of 17 July threw the diarist into a veritable fever of
horror. It was only a variant of the other half-humorous items about the Federal Hill restlessness, but
to Blake it was somehow very terrible indeed. In the night a thunderstorm had put the city's lighting-
system out of commission for a full hour, and in that black interval the Italians had nearly gone mad
with fright. Those living near the dreaded church had sworn that the thing in the steeple had taken
advantage of the street lamps' absence and gone down into the body of the church, flopping and
bumping around in a viscous, altogether dreadful way. Towards the last it had bumped up to the
tower, where there were sounds of the shattering of glass. It could go wherever the darkness
reached, but light would always send it fleeing.
When the current blazed on again there had been a shocking commotion in the tower, for even the
feeble light trickling through the grime-blackened, louvre-boarded windows was too much for the
thing. It had bumped and slithered up into its tenebrous steeple just in time--for a long dose of light
would have sent it back into the abyss whence the crazy stranger had called it. During the dark hour
praying crowds had clustered round the church in the rain with lighted candles and lamps somehow
shielded with folded paper and umbrellas--a guard of light to save the city from the nightmare that
stalks in darkness. Once, those nearest the church declared, the outer door had rattled hideously.
But even this was not the worst. That evening in the Bulletin Blake read of what the reporters had
found. Aroused at last to the whimsical news value of the scare, a pair of them had defied the frantic
crowds of Italians and crawled into the church through the cellar window after trying the doors in
vain. They found the dust of the vestibule and of the spectral nave ploughed up in a singular way,
with pits of rotted cushions and satin pew-linings scattered curiously around. There was a bad odour
everywhere, and here and there were bits of yellow stain and patches of what looked like charring.
Opening the door to the tower, and pausing a moment at the suspicion of a scraping sound above, they
found the narrow spiral stairs wiped roughly clean.
In the tower itself a similarly half-swept condition existed. They spoke of the heptagonal stone
pillar, the overturned Gothic chairs, and the bizarre plaster images; though strangely enough the
metal box and the old mutilated skeleton were not mentioned. What disturbed Blake the most--except
for the hints of stains and charring and bad odours--was the final detail that explained the crashing
glass. Every one of the tower's lancet windows was broken, and two of them had been darkened in a
crude and hurried way by the stuffing of satin pew-linings and cushion-horsehair into the spaces
between the slanting exterior louvre-boards. More satin fragments and bunches of horsehair lay
scattered around the newly swept floor, as if someone had been interrupted in the act of restoring the
tower to the absolute blackness of its tightly curtained days.
Yellowish stains and charred patches were found on the ladder to the windowless spire, but when
a reporter climbed up, opened the horizontally-sliding trap-door and shot a feeble flashlight beam
into the black and strangely foetid space, he saw nothing but darkness, and a heterogeneous litter of
shapeless fragments near the aperture. The verdict, of course, was charlatanry. Somebody had played
a joke on the superstitious hill-dwellers, or else some fanatic had striven to bolster up their fears for
their own supposed good. Or perhaps some of the younger and more sophisticated dwellers had
staged an elaborate hoax on the outside world. There was an amusing aftermath when the police sent
an officer to verify the reports. Three men in succession found ways of evading the assignment, and
the fourth went very reluctantly and returned very soon without adding to the account given by the
reporters.
From this point onwards Blake's diary shows a mounting tide of insidious horror and nervous
apprehension. He upbraids himself for not doing something, and speculates wildly on the
consequences of another electrical breakdown. It had been verified that on three occasions--during
thunderstorms--he telephoned the electric light company in a frantic vein and asked that desperate
precautions against a lapse of power be taken. Now and then his entries show concern over the
failure of the reporters to find the metal box and stone, and the strangely marred old skeleton, when
they explored the shadowy tower room. He assumed that these things had been removed--whither,
and by whom or what, he could only guess. But his worst fears concerned himself, and the kind of
unholy rapport he felt to exist between his mind and that lurking horror in the distant steeple--that
monstrous thing of night which his rashness had called out of the ultimate black spaces. He seemed
to feel a constant tugging at his will, and callers of that period remember how he would sit
abstractedly at his desk and stare out of the west window at that far-off spire-bristling mound beyond
the swirling smoke of the city. His entries dwell monotonously on certain terrible dreams, and of a
strengthening of the unholy rapport in his sleep. There is mention of a night when he awakened to
find himself fully dressed, outdoors, and headed automatically down College Hill towards the west.
Again and again he dwells on the fact that the thing in the steeple knows where to find him.
The week following 30 July is recalled as the time of Blake's partial breakdown. He did not
dress, and ordered all his food by telephone. Visitors remarked the cords he kept near his bed, and he
said that sleep-walking had forced him to bind his ankles every night with knots which would
probably hold or else waken him with the labour of untying. In his diary he told of the hideous
experience which had brought the collapse. After retiring on the night of the 30th, he had suddenly
found himself groping about in an almost black space. All he could see were short, faint, horizontal
streaks of bluish light, but he could smell an overpowering foetor and hear a curious jumble of soft,
furtive sounds above him. Whenever he moved he stumbled over something, and at each noise there
would come a sort of answering sound from above--a vague stirring, mixed with the cautious sliding
of wood on wood.
Once his groping hands encountered a pillar of stone with a vacant top, whilst later he found
himself clutching the rungs of a ladder built into the wall, and fumbling his uncertain way upwards
towards some region of intenser stench where a hot, searing blast beat down against him. Before his
eyes a kaleidoscopic range of phantasmal images played, all of them dissolving at intervals into the
picture of a vast, unplumbed abyss of night wherein whirled suns and worlds of an even profounder
blackness. He thought of the ancient legends of Ultimate Chaos, at whose centre sprawls the blind
idiot god Azathoth, Lord of All Things, encircled by his flopping horde of mindless and amorphous
dancers, and lulled by the thin monotonous piping of a demoniac flute held in nameless paws.
Then a sharp report from the outer world broke through his stupor and roused him to the
unutterable horror of his position. What it was, he never knew--perhaps it was some belated peal
from the fireworks heard all summer on Federal Hill as the dwellers hail their various patron saints,
or the saints of their native villages in Italy. In any event he shrieked aloud, dropped frantically from
the ladder, and stumbled blindly across the obstructed floor of the almost lightless chamber that
encompassed him.
He knew instantly where he was, and plunged recklessly down the narrow spiral staircase,
tripping and bruising himself at every turn. There was a nightmare flight through a vast 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 8 August. Lightning struck repeatedly in all parts
of the city, and two remarkable fireballs were reported. The rain was torrential, while a constant
fusillade of thunder brought sleeplessness to thousands. Blake was utterly frantic in his fear for the
lighting system, and tried to telephone the company around 1 A.M. though by that time service had
been temporarily cut off in the interests of safety. He recorded everything in his diary--the large,
nervous, and often undecipherable, hieroglyphs telling their own story of growing frenzy and
despair, and of entries scrawled blindly in the dark.
He had to keep the house dark in order to see out of the window, and it appears that most of his
time was spent at his desk, peering anxiously through the rain across the glistening miles of
downtown roofs at the constellation of distant lights marking Federal Hill. Now and then he would
fumblingly make an entry in his diary, so that detached phrases such as "The lights must not go"; "It
knows where I am"; "I must destroy it"; and "it is calling to me, but perhaps it means no injury this
time"; are found scattered down two of the pages.
Then the lights went out all over the city. It happened at 2.12 A.M. according to power-house
records, but Blake's diary gives no indication of the time. The entry is merely, "Lights out--God help
me." On Federal Hill there were watchers as anxious as he, and rain-soaked knots of men paraded the
square and alleys around the evil church with umbrella-shaded candles, electric flashlights, oil
lanterns, crucifixes, and obscure charms of the many sorts common to southern Italy. They blessed
each flash of lightning, and made cryptical signs of fear with their right hands when a turn in the
storm caused the flashes to lessen and finally to cease altogether. A rising wind blew out most of the
candles, so that the scene grew threatening dark. Someone roused Father Merluzzo of Spirito Santo
Church, and he hastened to the dismal square to pronounce whatever helpful syllables he could. Of
the restless and curious sounds in the blackened tower, there could be no doubt whatever.
For what happened at 2.35 we have the testimony of the priest, a young, intelligent, and well-
educated person; of Patrolman William J. Monohan of the Central Station, an officer of the highest
reliability who had paused at that part of his beat to inspect the crowd; and of most of the seventy-
eight men who had gathered around the church's high back wall--especially those in the square
where the eastward faade 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 faade. The tower was invisible
now that the candles would not burn, but as the object neared the ground the people knew that it was
the smoke-grimed louvre-boarding of that tower's east window.
Immediately afterwards an utterly unbearable foetor welled forth from the unseen heights,
choking and sickening the trembling watchers, and almost prostrating those in the square. At the same
time the air trembled with a vibration as of flapping wings, and a sudden east-blowing wind more
violent than any previous blast snatched off the hats and wrenched the dripping umbrellas from the
crowd. Nothing definite could be seen in the candleless night, though some upward-looking
spectators thought they glimpsed a great spreading blur of denser blackness against the inky sky--
something like a formless cloud of smoke that shot with meteorlike speed towards the east.
That was all. The watchers were half numbed with fright, awe, and discomfort, and scarcely knew
what to do, or whether to do anything at all. Not knowing what had happened, they did not relax their
vigil; and a moment later they sent up a prayer as a sharp flash of belated lightning, followed by an
earsplitting crash of sound, rent the flooded heavens. Half an hour later the rain stopped, and in
fifteen minutes more the street lights sprang on again, sending the weary, bedraggled watchers
relievedly back to their homes.
The next day's papers gave these matters minor mention in connection with the general storm
reports. It seems that the great lightning flash and deafening explosion which followed the Federal
Hill occurrence were even more tremendous farther east, where a burst of the singular foetor was
likewise noticed. The phenomenon was most marked over College Hill, where the crash awakened
all the sleeping inhabitants and led to a bewildered round of speculations. Of those who were already
awake only a few saw the anomalous blaze of light near the top of the hill, or noticed the
inexplicable upward rush of air which almost stripped the leaves from the trees and blasted the plants
in the gardens. It was agreed that the lone, sudden lightning-bolt must have struck somewhere in this
neighbourhood, though no trace of its striking could afterwards be found. A youth in the Tau Omega
fraternity house thought he saw a grotesque and hideous mass of smoke in the air just as the
preliminary flash burst, but his observation has not been verified. All of the few observers, however,
agree as to the violent gust from the west and the flood of intolerable stench which preceded the
belated stroke, whilst evidence concerning the momentary burned odour after the stroke is equally
general.
These points were discussed very carefully because of their probable connection with the death
of Robert Blake. Students in the Psi Delta house, whose upper rear windows looked into Blake's
study, noticed the blurred white face at the westward window on the morning of the ninth, and
wondered what was wrong with the expression. When they saw the same face in the same position
that evening, they felt worried, and watched for the lights to come up in his apartment. Later they rang
the bell of the darkened flat, and finally had a policeman force the door.
The rigid body sat bolt upright at the desk by the window, and when the intruders saw the glassy,
bulging eyes, and the marks of stark, convulsive fright on the twisted features, they turned away in
sickened dismay. Shortly afterwards the coroner's physician made an examination, and despite the
unbroken window reported electrical shock, or nervous tension induced by electrical discharge, as
the cause of death. The hideous expression he ignored altogether, deeming it a not improbable result
of the profound shock as experienced by a person of such abnormal imagination and unbalanced
emotions. He deduced these latter qualities from the books, paintings, and manuscripts found in the
apartment, and from the 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 Doctor Dexter, who
threw the curious box and angled stone--an object certainly self-luminous as seen in the black
windowless steeple where it was found--into the deepest channel of Narragansett Bay. Excessive
imagination and neurotic unbalance on Blake's part, aggravated by knowledge of the evil bygone cult
whose startling traces he had uncovered, form the dominant interpretation given those final frenzied
jottings. These are the entries--or all that can be made of them:
Lights still out--must be five minutes now. Everything depends on lightning. Yaddith grant it will
keep up!...Some influence seems beating through it...Rain and thunder and wind deafen...The thing is
taking hold of my mind...
Trouble with memory. I see things I never knew before. Other worlds and other
galaxies...Dark...The lightning seems dark and the darkness seems light...
It cannot be the real hill and church that I see in the pitch-darkness. Must be retinal impression left
by flashes. Heaven grant the Italians are out with their candles if the lightning stops!
What am I afraid of? Is it not an avatar of Nyarlathotep, who in antique and shadowy Khem even
took the form of man? I remember Yuggoth, and more distant Shaggai, and the ultimate void of the
black planets...
The long, winging flight through the void...cannot cross the universe of light...re-created by the
thoughts caught in the Shining Trapezohedron...send it through the horrible abysses of radiance...
My name is Blake--Robert Harrison Blake of 620 East Knapp Street, Milwaukee, Wisconsin...I am
on this planet...
Azathoth have mercy!--the lightning no longer flashes--horrible--I can see everything with a
monstrous sense that is not sight--light is dark and dark is light...those people on the
hill...guard...candles and charms...their priests...
Sense of distance gone--far is near and near is far. No light--no glass--see that steeple--that
tower--window--can hear--Roderick Usher--am mad or going mad--the thing is stirring and fumbling
in the tower.
I am it and it is I--I want to get out...must get out and unify the forces...it knows where I am...
I am Robert Blake, but I see the tower in the dark. There is a monstrous odour...senses
transfigured...boarding at that tower window cracking and giving way...I...ngai...ygg...
I see it--coming here--hell-wind--titan blue--black wing--Yog Sothoth save me--the three-lobed
burning eye...

THE SHADOW OVER INNSMOUTH
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 it is even now only beginning to show signs of a
sluggishly revived existence.
Complaints from many liberal organizations were met with long confidential discussions, and
representatives were taken on trips to certain camps and prisons. As a result, these societies became
surprisingly passive and reticent. Newspaper men were harder to manage, but seemed largely to
cooperate with the government in the end. Only one paper--a tabloid always discounted because of
its wild policy--mentioned the deep diving submarine that discharged torpedoes downward in the
marine abyss just beyond Devil Reef. That item, gathered by chance in a haunt of sailors, seemed
indeed rather far-fetched; since the low, black reef lay a full mile and a half out from
InnsmouthHarbour.
People around the country and in the nearby towns muttered a great deal among themselves, but
said very little to the outer world. They had talked about dying and half-deserted Innsmouth for
nearly a century, and nothing new could be wilder or more hideous than what they had whispered and
hinted at years before. Many things had taught them secretiveness, and there was no need to exert
pressure on them. Besides, they really knew little; for wide salt marshes, desolate and unpeopled,
kept neighbors off from Innsmouth on the landward side.
But at last I am going to defy the ban on speech about this thing. Results, I am certain, are so
thorough that no public harm save a shock of repulsion could ever accrue from a hinting of what was
found by those horrified men at Innsmouth. Besides, what was found might possibly have more than
one explanation. I do not know just how much of the whole tale has been told even to me, and I have
many reasons for not wishing to probe deeper. For my contact with this affair has been closer than
that of any other layman, and I have carried away impressions which are yet to drive me to drastic
measures.
It was I who fled frantically out of Innsmouth in the early morning hours of July 16, 1927, and
whose frightened appeals for government inquiry and action brought on the whole reported episode.
I was willing enough to stay mute while the affair was fresh and uncertain; but now that it is an old
story, with public interest and curiosity gone, I have an odd craving to whisper about those few
frightful hours in that ill-rumored and evilly-shadowed seaport of death and blasphemous
abnormality. The mere telling helps me to restore confidence in my own faculties; to reassure myself
that I was not the first to succumb to a contagious nightmare hallucination. It helps me, too, in making
up my mind regarding a certain terrible step which lies ahead of me.
I never heard of Innsmouth till the day before I saw it for the first and--so far--last time. I was
celebrating my coming of age by a tour of New England--sightseeing, antiquarian, and genealogical-
-and had planned to go directly from ancient Newburyport to Arkham, whence my mother's family
was derived. I had no car, but was travelling by train, trolley and motor-coach, always seeking the
cheapest possible route. In Newburyport they told me that the steam train was the thing to take to
Arkham; and it was only at the station ticket-office, when I demurred at the high fare, that I learned
about Innsmouth. The stout, shrewd-faced agent, whose speech shewed him to be no local man,
seemed sympathetic toward my efforts at economy, and made a suggestion that none of my other
informants had offered.
"You could take that old bus, I suppose," he said with a certain hesitation, "but it ain't thought
much of hereabouts. It goes through Innsmouth--you may have heard about that--and so the people
don't like it. Run by an Innsmouth fellow--Joe Sargent--but never gets any custom from here, or
Arkham either, I guess. Wonder it keeps running at all. I s'pose it's cheap enough, but I never see
mor'n two or three people in it--nobody but those Innsmouth folk. Leaves the square--front of
Hammond's Drug Store--at 10 a.m. and 7 p.m. unless they've changed lately. Looks like a terrible
rattletrap--I've never been on it."
That was the first I ever heard of shadowed Innsmouth. Any reference to a town not shown on
common maps or listed in recent guidebooks would have interested me, and the agent's odd manner of
allusion roused something like real curiosity. A town able to inspire such dislike in it its neighbors, I
thought, must be at least rather unusual, and worthy of a tourist's attention. If it came before Arkham I
would stop off there and so I asked the agent to tell me something about it. He was very deliberate,
and spoke with an air of feeling slightly superior to what he said.
"Innsmouth? Well, it's a queer kind of a town down at the mouth of the Manuxet. Used to be almost
a city--quite a port before the War of 1812--but all gone to pieces in the last hundred years or so. No
railroad now--B. and M. never went through, and the branch line from Rowley was given up years
ago.
"More empty houses than there are people, I guess, and no business to speak of except fishing
and lobstering. Everybody trades mostly either here or in Arkham or Ipswich. Once they had quite a
few mills, but nothing's left now except one gold refinery running on the leanest kind of part time.
"That refinery, though, used to 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 been some kind of
foreigner--they say a South Sea islander--so everybody raised Cain when he married an Ipswich girl
fifty years ago. They always do that about Innsmouth people, and folks here and hereabouts always
try to cover up any Innsmouth blood they have in 'em. But Marsh's children and grandchildren look
just like anyone else far's I can see. I've had 'em pointed out to me here--though, come to think of it,
the elder children don't seem to be around lately. Never saw the old man.
"And why is everybody so down on Innsmouth? Well, young fellow, you mustn't take too much
stock in what people here say. They're hard to get started, but once they do get started they never let
up. They've been telling things about Innsmouth--whispering 'em, mostly--for the last hundred years,
I guess, and I gather they're more scared than anything else. Some of the stories would make you
laugh--about old Captain Marsh driving bargains with the devil and bringing imps out of hell to live
in Innsmouth, or about some kind of devil-worship and awful sacrifices in some place near the
wharves that people stumbled on around 1845 or thereabouts--but I come from Panton, Vermont, and
that kind of story don't go down with me.
"You ought to hear, though, what some of the old-timers tell about the black reef off the coast--
Devil Reef, they call it. It's well above water a good part of the time, and never much below it, but at
that you could hardly call it an island. The story is that there's a whole legion of devils seen
sometimes on that reef--sprawled about, or darting in and out of some kind of caves near the top. It's a
rugged, uneven thing, a good bit over a mile out, and toward the end of shipping days sailors used to
make big detours just to avoid it.
"That is, sailors that didn't hail from Innsmouth. One of the things they had against old Captain
Marsh was that he was supposed to land on it sometimes at night when the tide was right. Maybe he
did, for I dare say the rock formation was interesting, and it's just barely possible he was looking for
pirate loot and maybe finding it; but there was talk of his dealing with demons there. Fact is, I guess
on the whole it was really the Captain that gave the bad reputation to the reef.
"That was before the big epidemic of 1846, when over half the folks in Innsmouth was carried
off. They never did quite figure out what the trouble was, but it was probably some foreign kind of
disease brought from China or somewhere by the shipping. It surely was bad enough--there was
riots over it, and all sorts of ghastly doings that I don't believe ever got outside of town--and it left
the place in awful shape. Never came back--there can't be more'n 300 or 400 people living there now.
"But the real thing behind the way folks feel is simply race prejudice--and I don't say I'm blaming
those that hold it. I hate those Innsmouth folks myself, and I wouldn't care to go to their town. I s'pose
you know--though I can see you're a Westerner by your talk--what a lot our New England ships used
to have to do with queer ports in Africa, Asia, the South Seas, and everywhere else, and what queer
kinds of people they sometimes brought back with 'em. You've probably heard about the Salem man
that came home with a Chinese wife, and maybe you know there's still a bunch of Fiji Islanders
somewhere around Cape Cod.
"Well, there must be something like that back of the Innsmouth people. The place always was
badly cut off from the rest of the country by marshes and creeks and we can't be sure about the ins and
outs of the matter; but it's pretty clear that old Captain Marsh must have brought home some odd
specimens when he had all three of his ships in commission back in the twenties and thirties. There
certainly is a strange kind of streak in the Innsmouth folks today--I don't know how to explain it but it
sort of makes you crawl. You'll notice a little in Sargent if you take his bus. Some of 'em have queer
narrow heads with flat noses and bulgy, stary eyes that never seem to shut, and their skin ain't quite
right. Rough and scabby, and the sides of the necks are all shriveled or creased up. Get bald, too,
very young. The older fellows look the worst--fact is, I don't believe I've ever seen a very old chap
of that kind. Guess they must die of looking in the glass! Animals hate 'em--they used to have lots of
horse trouble before the autos came in.
"Nobody around here or in Arkham or Ipswich will have anything to do with 'em, and they act kind
of offish themselves when they come to town or when anyone tries to fish on their grounds. Queer
how fish are always thick off Innsmouth Harbour when there ain't any anywhere else around--but just
try to fish there yourself and see how the folks chase you off! Those people used to come here on
the railroad--walking and taking the train at Rowley after the branch was dropped--but now they use
that bus.
"Yes, there's a hotel in Innsmouth--called the Gilman House--but I don't believe it can amount to
much. I wouldn't advise you to try it. Better stay over here and take the ten o'clock bus tomorrow
morning; then you can get an evening bus there for Arkham at eight o'clock. There was a factory
inspector who stopped at the Gilman a couple of years ago and he had a lot of unpleasant hints about
the place. Seems they get a queer crowd there, for this fellow heard voices in other rooms--though
most of 'em was empty--that gave him the shivers. It was foreign talk he thought, but he said the bad
thing about it was the kind of voice that sometimes spoke. It sounded so unnatural--slopping like, he
said--that he didn't dare undress and go to sleep. Just waited up and lit out the first thing in the
morning. The talk went on most all night.
"This fellow--Casey, his name was--had a lot to say about how the Innsmouth folk watched him
and seemed kind of on guard. He found the Marsh refinery a queer place--it's in an old mill on the
lower falls of the Manuxet. What he said tallied up with what I'd heard. Books in bad shape, and no
clear account of any kind of dealings. You know it's always been a kind of mystery where the
Marshes get the gold they refine. They've never seemed to do much buying in that line, but years ago
they shipped out an enormous lot of ingots.
"Used to be talk of a queer foreign kind of jewelry that the sailors and refinery men sometimes
sold on the sly, or that was seen once or twice on some of the Marsh women-folks. People allowed
maybe old Captain Obed traded for it in some heathen port, especially since he always ordered stacks
of glass beads and trinkets such as seafaring men used to get for native trade. Others thought and still
think he'd found an old pirate cache out on Devil Reef. But here's a funny thing. The old Captain's
been dead these sixty years, and there's ain't been a good-sized ship out of the place since the Civil
War; but just the same the Marshes still keep on buying a few of those native trade things--mostly
glass and rubber gewgaws, they tell me. Maybe the Innsmouth folks like 'em to look at themselves--
Gawd knows they've gotten to be about as bad as South Sea cannibals and Guinea savages.
"That plague of '46 must have taken off the best blood in the place. Anyway, they're a doubtful lot
now, and the Marshes and other rich folks are as bad as any. As I told you, there probably ain't more'n
400 people in the whole town in spite of all the streets they say there are. I guess they're what they
call 'white trash' down South--lawless and sly, and full of secret things. They get a lot of fish and
lobsters and do exporting by truck. Queer how the fish swarm right there and nowhere else.
"Nobody can ever keep track of these people, and state school officials and census men have a
devil of a time. You can bet that prying strangers ain't welcome around Innsmouth. I've heard
personally of more'n one business or government man that's disappeared there, and there's loose talk
of one who went crazy and is out at Danvers now. They must have fixed up some awful scare for that
fellow.
"That's why I wouldn't go at night if I was you. I've never been there and have no wish to go, but I
guess a daytime trip couldn't hurt you--even though the people hereabouts will advise you not to
make it. If you're just sightseeing, and looking for old-time stuff, Innsmouth ought to be quite a place
for you."
And so I spent part of that evening at the Newburyport Public Library looking up data about
Innsmouth. When I had tried to question the natives in the shops, the lunchroom, the garages, and the
fire station, I had found them even harder to get started than the ticket agent had predicted; and
realized that I could not spare the time to overcome their first instinctive reticence. They had a kind
of obscure suspiciousness, as if there were something amiss with anyone too much interested in
Innsmouth. At the Y. M. C. A., where I was stopping, the clerk merely discouraged my going to such
a dismal, decadent place; and the people at the library shewed much the same attitude. Clearly, in the
eyes of the educated, Innsmouth was merely an exaggerated case of civic degeneration.
The Essex County histories on the library shelves had very little to say, except that the town was
founded in 1643, noted for shipbuilding before the Revolution, a seat of great marine prosperity in
the early 19th century, and later a minor factory center using the Manuxet as power. The epidemic and
riots of 1846 were very sparsely treated, as if they formed a discredit to the county.
References to decline were few, though the significance of the later record was unmistakable.
After the Civil War all industrial life was confined to the Marsh Refining Company, and the
marketing of gold ingots formed the only remaining bit of major commerce aside from the eternal
fishing. That fishing paid less and less as the price of the commodity fell and large-scale
corporations offered competition, but there was never a dearth of fish around InnsmouthHarbour.
Foreigners seldom settled there, and there was some discreetly veiled evidence that a number of
Poles and Portuguese who had tried it had been scattered in a peculiarly drastic fashion.
Most interesting of all was a glancing reference to the strange jewelry vaguely associated with
Innsmouth. It had evidently impressed the whole countryside more than a little, for mention was made
of specimens in the museum of Miskatonic University at Arkham, and in the display room of the
Newburyport Historical Society. The fragmentary descriptions of these things were bald and
prosaic, but they hinted to me an undercurrent of persistent strangeness. Something about them
seemed so odd and provocative that I could not put them out of my mind, and despite the relative
lateness of the hour I resolved to see the local sample--said to be a large, queerly-proportioned
thing evidently meant for a tiara--if it could possibly be arranged.
The librarian gave me a note of introduction to the curator of the Society, a Miss Anna Tilton,
who lived nearby, and after a brief explanation that ancient gentlewoman was kind enough to pilot me
into the closed building, since the hour was not outrageously late. The collection was a notable one
indeed, but in my present mood I had eyes for nothing but the bizarre object which glistened in a
corner cupboard under the electric lights.
It took no excessive sensitiveness to beauty to make me literally gasp at the strange, unearthly
splendour of the alien, opulent phantasy that rested there on a purple velvet cushion. Even now I can
hardly describe what I saw, though it was clearly enough a sort of tiara, as the description had said. It
was tall in front, and with a very large and curiously irregular periphery, as if designed for a head of
almost freakishly elliptical outline. The material seemed to be predominantly gold, though a weird
lighter lustrousness hinted at some strange alloy with an equally beautiful and scarcely identifiable
metal. Its condition was almost perfect, and one could have spent hours in studying the striking and
puzzlingly untraditional designs--some simply geometrical, and some plainly marine--chased or
moulded in high relief on its surface with a craftsmanship of incredible skill and grace.
The longer I looked, the more the thing fascinated me; and in this fascination there was a
curiously disturbing element hardly to be classified or accounted for. At first I decided that it was
the queer other-worldly quality of the art which made me uneasy. All other art objects I had ever
seen either belonged to some known racial or national stream, or else were consciously modernistic
defiances of every recognized stream. This tiara was neither. It clearly belonged to some settled
technique of infinite maturity and perfection, yet that technique was utterly remote from any--Eastern
or Western, ancient or modern--which I had ever heard of or seen exemplified. It was as if the
workmanship were that of another planet.
However, I soon saw that my uneasiness had a second and perhaps equally potent source residing
in the pictorial and mathematical suggestion of the strange designs. The patterns all hinted of remote
secrets and unimaginable abysses in time and space, and the monotonously aquatic nature of the
reliefs became almost sinister. Among these reliefs were fabulous monsters of abhorrent
grotesqueness and malignity--half ichthyic and half batrachian in suggestion--which one could not
dissociate from a certain haunting and uncomfortable sense of pseudomemory, as if they called up
some image from deep cells and tissues whose retentive functions are wholly primal and awesomely
ancestral. At times I fancied that every contour of these blasphemous fish-frogs was over-flowing
with the ultimate quintessence of unknown and inhuman evil.
In odd contrast to the tiara's aspect was its brief and prosy history as related by Miss Tilton. It had
been pawned for a ridiculous sum at a shop in State Street in 1873, by a drunken Innsmouth man
shortly afterward killed in a brawl. The Society had acquired it directly from the pawnbroker, at once
giving it a display worthy of its quality. It was labeled as of probable East-Indian or Indochinese
provenance, though the attribution was frankly tentative.
Miss Tilton, comparing all possible hypotheses regarding its origin and its presence in New
England, was inclined to believe that it formed part of some exotic pirate hoard discovered by old
Captain Obed Marsh. This view was surely not weakened by the insistent offers of purchase at a high
price which the Marshes began to make as soon as they knew of its presence, and which they
repeated to this day despite the Society's unvarying determination not to sell.
As the good lady shewed me out of the building she made it clear that the pirate theory of the
Marsh fortune was a popular one among the intelligent people of the region. Her own attitude toward
shadowed Innsmouth--which she never seen--was one of disgust at a community slipping far down
the cultural scale, and she assured me that the rumours of devil-worship were partly justified by a
peculiar secret cult which had gained force there and engulfed all the orthodox churches.
It was called, she said, "The Esoteric Order of Dagon," and was undoubtedly a debased, quasi-
pagan thing imported from the East a century before, at a time when the Innsmouth fisheries seemed
to be going barren. Its persistence among a simple people was quite natural in view of the sudden and
permanent return of abundantly fine fishing, and it soon came to be the greatest influence in the town,
replacing Freemasonry altogether and taking up headquarters in the old Masonic Hall on New Church
Green.
All this, to the pious Miss Tilton, formed an excellent reason for shunning the ancient town of
decay and desolation; but to me it was merely a fresh incentive. To my architectural and historical
anticipations was now added an acute anthropological zeal, and I could scarcely sleep in my small
room at the "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-Newburyport--soon verified.
There were only three passengers--dark, unkempt men of sullen visage and somewhat youthful
cast--and when the vehicle stopped they clumsily shambled out and began walking up State Street in a
silent, almost furtive fashion. The driver also alighted, and I watched him as he went into the drug
store to make some purchase. This, I reflected, must be the Joe Sargent mentioned by the ticket-agent;
and even before I noticed any details there spread over me a wave of spontaneous aversion which
could be neither checked nor explained. It suddenly struck me as very natural that the local people
should not wish to ride on a bus owned and driven by this man, or to visit any oftener than possible
the habitat of such a man and his kinsfolk.
When the driver came out of the store I looked at him more carefully and tried to determine the
source of my evil impression. He was a thin, stoop-shouldered man not much under six feet tall,
dressed in shabby blue civilian clothes and wearing a frayed golf cap. His age was perhaps thirty-
five, but the odd, deep creases in the sides of his neck made him seem older when one did not study
his dull, expressionless face. He had a narrow head, bulging, watery-blue eyes that seemed never to
wink, a flat nose, a receding forehead and chin, and singularly undeveloped ears. His long thick lip
and coarse-pored, greyish cheeks seemed almost beardless except for some sparse yellow hairs that
straggled and curled in irregular patches; and in places the surface seemed queerly irregular, as if
peeling from some cutaneous disease. His hands were large and heavily veined, and had a very
unusual greyish-blue tinge. The fingers were strikingly short in proportion to the rest of the
structure, and seemed to have a tendency to curl closely into the huge palm. As he walked toward the
bus I observed his peculiarly shambling gait and saw that his feet were inordinately immense. The
more I studied them the more I wondered how he could buy any shoes to fit them.
A certain greasiness about the fellow increased my dislike. He was evidently given to working or
lounging around the fish docks, and carried with him much of their characteristic smell. Just what
foreign blood was in him I could not even guess. His oddities certainly did not look Asiatic,
Polynesian, Levantine or negroid, yet I could see why the people found him alien. I myself would
have thought of biological degeneration rather than alienage.
I was sorry when I saw there would be no other passengers on the bus. Somehow I did not like
the idea of riding alone with this driver. But as leaving time obviously approached I conquered my
qualms and followed the man aboard, extending him a dollar bill and murmuring the single word
"Innsmouth." He looked curiously at me for a second as he returned forty cents change without
speaking. I took a seat far behind him, but on the same side of the bus, since I wished to watch the
shore during the journey.
At length the decrepit vehicle stared with a jerk, and rattled noisily past the old brick buildings of
State Street amidst a cloud of vapour from the exhaust. Glancing at the people on the sidewalks, I
thought I detected in them a curious wish to avoid looking at the bus--or at least a wish to avoid
seeming to look at it. Then we turned to the left into High Street, where the going was smoother;
flying by stately old mansions of the early republic and still older colonial farmhouses, passing the
Lower Green and Parker River, and finally emerging into a long, monotonous stretch of open shore
country.
The day was warm and sunny, but the landscape of sand and sedge-grass, and stunted shrubbery
became more and desolate as we proceeded. Out the window I could see the blue water and the sandy
line of Plum Island, and we presently drew very near the beach as our narrow road veered off from
the main highway to Rowley and Ipswich. There were no visible houses, and I could tell by the state
of the road that traffic was very light hereabouts. The weather-worn telephone poles carried only
two wires. Now and then we crossed crude wooden bridges over tidal creeks that wound far inland
and promoted the general isolation of the region.
Once in a while I noticed dead stumps and crumbling foundation-walls above the drifting sand, and
recalled the old tradition quoted in one of the histories I had read, that this was once a fertile and
thickly-settled countryside. The change, it was said, came simultaneously with the Innsmouth
epidemic of l846, and was thought by simple folk to have a dark connection with hidden forces of
evil. Actually, it was caused by the unwise cutting of woodlands near the shore, which robbed the
soil of the best protection and opened the way for waves of wind-blown sand.
At last we lost sight of PlumIsland and saw the vast expanse of the open Atlantic on our left. Our
narrow course began to climb steeply, and I felt a singular sense of disquiet in looking at the lonely
crest ahead where the rutted road-way met the sky. It was as if the bus were about to keep on in its
ascent, leaving the sane earth altogether and merging with the unknown arcana of upper air and
cryptical sky. The smell of the sea took on ominous implications, and the silent driver's bent, rigid
back and narrow head became more and more hateful. As I looked at him I saw that the back of his
head was almost as hairless as his face, having only a few straggling yellow strands upon a grey
scabrous surface.
Then we reached the crest and beheld the outspread valley beyond, where the Manuxet joins the
sea just north of the long line of cliffs that culminate in Kingsport Head and veer off toward Cape
Ann. On the far misty horizon I could just make out the dizzy profile of the Head, topped by the queer
ancient house of which so many legends are told; but for the moment all my attention was captured by
the nearer panorama just below me. I had, I realized, come face to face with rumour-shadowed
Innsmouth.
It was a town of wide extent and dense construction, yet one with a portentous dearth of visible
life. From the tangle of chimney-pots scarcely a wisp of smoke came, and the three tall steeples
loomed stark and unpainted against the seaward horizon. One of them was crumbling down at the top,
and in that and another there were only black gaping holes where clock-dials should have been. The
vast huddle of sagging gambrel roofs and peaked gables conveyed with offensive clearness the idea
of wormy decay, and as we approached along the now descending road I could see that many roofs
had wholly caved in. There were some large square Georgian houses, too, with hipped roofs,
cupolas, and railed "widow's walks." These were mostly well back from the water, and one or two
seemed to be in moderately sound condition. Stretching inland from among them I saw the rusted,
grass-grown line of the abandoned railway, with leaning telegraph-poles now devoid of wires, and
the half-obscured lines of the old carriage roads to Rowley and Ipswich.
The decay was worst close to the waterfront, though in its very midst I could spy the white belfry
of a fairly well preserved brick structure which looked like a small factory. The harbour, long
clogged with sand, was enclosed by an ancient stone breakwater; on which I could begin to discern
the minute forms of a few seated fishermen, and at whose end were what looked like the foundations
of a bygone lighthouse. A sandy tongue had formed inside this barrier and upon it I saw a few
decrepit cabins, moored dories, and scattered lobster-pots. The only deep water seemed to be where
the river poured out past the belfried structure and turned southward to join the ocean at the
breakwater's end.
Here and there the ruins of wharves jutted out from the shore to end in indeterminate rottenness,
those farthest south seeming the most decayed. And far out at sea, despite a high tide, I glimpsed a
long, black line scarcely rising above the water yet carrying a suggestion of odd latent malignancy.
This, I knew, must be Devil Reef. As I looked, a subtle, curious sense of beckoning seemed
superadded to the grim repulsion; and oddly enough, I found this overtone more disturbing than the
primary impression.
We met no one on the road, but presently began to pass deserted farms in varying stages of ruin.
Then I noticed a few inhabited houses with rags stuffed in the broken windows and shells and dead
fish lying about the littered yards. Once or twice I saw listless-looking people working in barren
gardens or digging clams on the fishy-smelling beach below, and groups of dirty, simian-visaged
children playing around weed-grown doorsteps. Somehow these people seemed more disquieting
than the dismal buildings, for almost every one had certain peculiarities of face and motions which I
instinctively disliked without being able to define or comprehend them. For a second I thought this
typical physique suggested some picture I had seen, perhaps in a book, under circumstances of
particular horror or melancholy; but this pseudo-recollection passed very quickly.
As the bus reached a lower level I began to catch the steady note of a waterfall through the
unnatural stillness, The leaning, unpainted houses grew thicker, lined both sides of the road, and
displayed more urban tendencies than did those we were leaving behind, The panorama ahead had
contracted to a street scene, and in spots I could see where a cobblestone pavement and stretches of
brick sidewalk had formerly existed. All the houses were apparently deserted, and there were
occasional gaps where tumbledown chimneys and cellar walls told of buildings that had collapsed.
Pervading everything was the most nauseous fishy odour imaginable.
Soon cross streets and junctions began to appear; those on the left leading to shoreward realms of
unpaved squalor and decay, while those on the right shewed vistas of departed grandeur. So far I had
seen no people in the town, but there now came signs of a sparse habitation--curtained windows here
and there, and an occasional battered motorcar at the curb. Pavement and sidewalks were increasingly
well-defined, and though most of the houses were quite old--wood and brick structures of the early
19th century--they were obviously kept fit for habitation. As an amateur antiquarian I almost lost my
olfactory disgust and my feeling of menace and repulsion amidst this rich, unaltered survival from the
past.
But I was not to reach my destination without one very strong impression of poignantly
disagreeable quality. The bus had come to a sort of open concourse or radial point with churches on
two sides and the bedraggled remains of a circular green in the centre, and I was looking at a large
pillared hall on the right-hand junction ahead. The structure's once white paint was now gray and
peeling and the black and gold sign on the pediment was so faded that I could only with difficulty
make out the words "Esoteric Order of Dagon." This, then was the former Masonic Hall now given
over to a degraded cult. As I strained to decipher this inscription my notice was distracted by the
raucous tones of a cracked bell across the street, and I quickly turned to look out the window on my
side of the coach.
The sound came from a squat stone church of manifestly later date than most of the houses, built
in a clumsy Gothic fashion and having a disproportionately high basement with shuttered windows.
Though the hands of its clock were missing on the side I glimpsed, I knew that those hoarse strokes
were tolling the hour of eleven. Then suddenly all thoughts of time were blotted out by an onrushing
image of sharp intensity and unaccountable horror which had seized me before I knew what it really
was. The door of the church basement was open, revealing a rectangle of blackness inside. And as I
looked, a certain object crossed or seemed to cross that dark rectangle; burning into my brain a
momentary conception of nightmare which was all the more maddening because analysis could not
shew a single nightmarish quality in it.
It was a living object--the first except the driver that I had seen since entering the compact part of
the town--and had I been in a steadier mood I would have found nothing whatever of terror in it.
Clearly, as I realised a moment later, it was the pastor; clad in some peculiar vestments doubtless
introduced since the Order of Dagon had modified the ritual of the local churches. The thing which
had probably caught my first subconscious glance and supplied the touch of bizarre horror was the
tall tiara he wore; an almost exact duplicate of the one Miss Tilton had shown me the previous
evening. This, acting on my imagination, had supplied namelessly sinister qualities to the
indeterminate face and robed, shambling form beneath it. There was not, I soon decided, any reason
why I should have felt that shuddering touch of evil pseudo-memory. Was it not natural that a local
mystery cult should adopt among its regimentals an unique type of head-dress made familiar to the
community in some strange way--perhaps as treasure-trove?
A very thin sprinkling of repellent-looking youngish people now became visible on the
sidewalks--lone individuals, and silent knots of two or three. The lower floors of the crumbling
houses sometimes harboured small shops with dingy signs, and I noticed a parked truck or two as we
rattled along. The sound of waterfalls became more and more distinct, and presently I saw a fairly
deep river-gorge ahead, spanned by a wide, iron-railed highway bridge beyond which a large square
opened out. As we clanked over the bridge I looked out on both sides and observed some factory
buildings on the edge of the grassy bluff or part way down. The water far below was very abundant,
and I could see two vigorous sets of falls upstream on my right and at least one downstream on my
left. From this point the noise was quite deafening. Then we rolled into the large semicircular square
across the river and drew up on the right-hand side in front of a tall, cupola crowned building with
remnants of yellow paint and with a half-effaced sign proclaiming it to be the Gilman House.
I was glad to get out of that bus, and at once proceeded to check my valise in the shabby hotel
lobby. There was only one person in sight--an elderly man without what I had come to call the
"Innsmouth look"--and I decided not to ask him any of the questions which bothered me; remembering
that odd things had been noticed in this hotel. Instead, I strolled out on the square, from which the bus
had already gone, and studied the scene minutely and appraisingly.
One side of the cobblestoned open space was the straight line of the river; the other was a
semicircle of slant-roofed brick buildings of about the 1800 period, from which several streets
radiated away to the southeast, south, and southwest. Lamps were depressingly few and small--all
low-powered incandescents--and I was glad that my plans called for departure before dark, even
though I knew the moon would be bright. The buildings were all in fair condition, and included
perhaps a dozen shops in current operation; of which one was a grocery of the First National chain,
others a dismal restaurant, a drug store, and a wholesale fish-dealer's office, and still another, at the
eastward extremity of the square near the river an office of the town's only industry--the Marsh
Refining Company. There were perhaps ten people visible, and four or five automobiles and motor
trucks stood scattered about. I did not need to be told that this was the civic centre of Innsmouth.
Eastward I could catch blue glimpses of the harbour, against which rose the decaying remains of
three once beautiful Georgian steeples. And toward the shore on the opposite bank of the river I saw
the white belfry surmounting what I took to be the Marsh refinery.
For some reason or other I chose to make my first inquiries at the chain grocery, whose
personnel was not likely to be native to Innsmouth. I found a solitary boy of about seventeen in
charge, and was pleased to note the brightness and affability which promised cheerful information.
He seemed exceptionally eager to talk, and I soon gathered that he did not like the place, its fishy
smell, or its furtive people. A word with any outsider was a relief to him. He hailed from Arkham,
boarded with a family who came from Ipswich, and went back whenever he got a moment off. His
family did not like him to work in Innsmouth, but the chain had transferred him there and he did not
wish to give up his job.
There was, he said, no public library or chamber of commerce in Innsmouth, but I could probably
find my way about. The street I had come down was Federal. West of that were the fine old residence
streets--Broad, Washington, Lafayette, and Adams--and east of it were the shoreward slums. It was in
these slums--along Main Street--that I would find the old Georgian churches, but they were all long
abandoned. It would be well not to make oneself too conspicuous in such neighbourhoods--
especially north of the river since the people were sullen and hostile. Some strangers had even
disappeared.
Certain spots were almost forbidden territory, as he had learned at considerable cost. One must
not, for example, linger much around the Marsh refinery, or around any of the still used churches, or
around the pillared Order of Dagon Hall at New Church Green. Those churches were very odd--all
violently disavowed by their respective denominations elsewhere, and apparently using the queerest
kind of ceremonials and clerical vestments. Their creeds were heterodox and mysterious, involving
hints of certain marvelous transformations leading to bodily immorality--of a sort--on this earth. The
youth's own pastor--Dr. Wallace of Asbury M. E. Church in Arkham--had gravely urged him not to
join any church in Innsmouth.
As for the Innsmouth people--the youth hardly knew what to make of them. They were as furtive
and seldom seen as animals that live in burrows, and one could hardly imagine how they passed the
time apart from their desultory fishing. Perhaps--judging from the quantities of bootleg liquor they
consumed--they lay for most of the daylight hours in an alcoholic stupor. They seemed sullenly
banded together in some sort of fellowship and understanding--despising the world as if they had
access to other and preferable spheres of entity. Their appearance--especially those staring,
unwinking eyes which one never saw shut--was certainly shocking enough; and their voices were
disgusting. It was awful to hear them chanting in their churches at night, and especially during their
main festivals or revivals, which fell twice a year on April 30th and October 31st.
They were very fond of the water, and swam a great deal in both river and harbour. Swimming
races out to Devil Reef were very common, and everyone in sight seemed well able to share in this
arduous sport. When one came to think of it, it was generally only rather young people who were
seen about in public, and of these the oldest were apt to be the most tainted-looking. When exceptions
did occur, they were mostly persons with no trace of aberrancy, like the old clerk at the hotel. One
wondered what became of the bulk of the older folk, and whether the "Innsmouth look" were not a
strange and insidious disease-phenomenon which increased its hold as years advanced.
Only a very rare affliction, of course, could bring about such vast and radical anatomical changes
in a single individual after maturity--changes invoking osseous factors as basic as the shape of the
skull--but then, even this aspect was no more baffling and unheard-of than the visible features of the
malady as a whole. It would be hard, the youth implied, to form any real conclusions regarding such a
matter; since one never came to know the natives personally no matter how long one might live in
Innsmouth.
The youth was certain that many specimens even worse than the worst visible ones were kept
locked indoors in some places. People sometimes heard the queerest kind of sounds. The tottering
waterfront hovels north of the river were reputedly connected by hidden tunnels, being thus a
veritable warren of unseen abnormalities. What kind of foreign blood--if any--these beings had, it
was impossible to tell. They sometimes kept certain especially repulsive characters out of sight
when government and others from the outside world came to town.
It would be of no use, my informant said, to ask the natives anything about the place. The only one
who would talk was a very aged but normal looking man who lived at the poorhouse on the north rim
of the town and spent his time walking about or lounging around the fire station. This hoary
character, Zadok Allen, was 96 years old and somewhat touched in the head, besides being the town
drunkard. He was a strange, furtive creature who constantly looked over his shoulder as if afraid of
something, and when sober could not be persuaded to talk at all with strangers. He was, however,
unable to resist any offer of his favorite poison; and once drunk would furnish the most astonishing
fragments of whispered reminiscence.
After all, though, little useful data could be gained from him; since his stories were all insane,
incomplete hints of impossible marvels and horrors which could have no source save in his own
disordered fancy. Nobody ever 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 inhabitants it was no wonder such illusions were current. None of
the non-natives ever stayed out late at night, there being a widespread impression that it was not wise
to do so. Besides, the streets were loathsomely dark.
As for business--the abundance of fish was certainly almost uncanny, but the natives were taking
less and less advantage of it. Moreover, prices were falling and competition was growing. Of course
the town's real business was the refinery, whose commercial office was on the square only a few
doors east of where we stood. Old Man Marsh was never seen, but sometimes went to the works in a
closed, curtained car.
There were all sorts of rumors about how Marsh had come to look. He had once been a great
dandy; and people said he still wore the frock-coated finery of the Edwardian age curiously adapted
to certain deformities. His son had formerly conducted the office in the square, but latterly they had
been keeping out of sight a good deal and leaving the brunt of affairs to the younger generation. The
sons and their sisters had come to look very queer, especially the elder ones; and it was said that
their health was failing.
One of the Marsh daughters was a repellent, reptilian-looking woman who wore an excess of
weird jewellery clearly of the same exotic tradition as that to which the strange tiara belonged. My
informant had noticed it many times, and had heard it spoken of as coming from some secret hoard,
either of pirates or of demons. The clergymen--or priests, or whatever they were called nowadays--
also wore this kind of ornament as a headdress; but one seldom caught glimpses of them. Other
specimens the youth had not seen, though many were rumoured to exist around Innsmouth.
The Marshes, together with the other three gently bred families of the town--the Waites, the
Gilmans, and the Eliots--were all very retiring. They lived in immense houses along Washington
Street, and several were reputed to harbour in concealment certain living kinsfolk whose personal
aspect forbade public view, and whose deaths had been reported and recorded.
Warning me that many of the street signs were down, the youth drew for my benefit a rough but
ample and painstaking sketch map of the town's salient features. After a moment's study I felt sure that
it would be of great help, and pocketed it with profuse thanks. Disliking the dinginess of the single
restaurant I had seen, I bought a fair supply of cheese crackers and ginger wafers to serve as a lunch
later on. My program, I decided, would be to thread the principal streets, talk with any non-natives I
might encounter, and catch the eight o'clock coach for Arkham. The town, I could see, formed a
significant and exaggerated example of communal decay; but being no sociologist I would limit my
serious observations to the field of architecture.
Thus I began my systematic though half-bewildered tour of Innsmouth's narrow, shadow-blighted
ways. Crossing the bridge and turning toward the roar of the lower falls, I passed close to the Marsh
refinery, which seemed to be oddly free from the noise of industry. The building stood on the steep
river bluff near a bridge and an open confluence of streets which I took to be the earliest civic
center, displaced after the Revolution by the present Town Square.
Re-crossing the gorge on the Main Street bridge, I struck a region of utter desertion which
somehow made me shudder. Collapsing huddles of gambrel roofs formed a jagged and fantastic
skyline, above which rose the ghoulish, decapitated steeple of an ancient church. Some houses along
Main Street were tenanted, but most were tightly boarded up. Down unpaved side streets I saw the
black, gaping windows of deserted hovels, many of which leaned at perilous and incredible angles
through the sinking of part of the foundations. Those windows stared so spectrally that it took
courage to turn eastward toward the waterfront. Certainly, the terror of a deserted house swells in
geometrical rather than arithmetical progression as houses multiply to form a city of stark desolation.
The sight of such endless avenues of fishy-eyed vacancy and death, and the thought of such linked
infinities of black, brooding compartments given over to cob-webs and memories and the conqueror
worm, start up vestigial fears and aversions that not even the stoutest philosophy can disperse.
Fish Street was as deserted as Main, though it differed in having many brick and stone
warehouses still in excellent shape. Water Street was almost its duplicate, save that there were great
seaward gaps where wharves had been. Not a living thing did I see except for the scattered
fishermen on the distant break-water, and not a sound did I hear save the lapping of the harbour tides
and the roar of the falls in the Manuxet. The town was getting more and more on my nerves, and I
looked behind me furtively as I picked my way back over the tottering Water Street bridge. The Fish
Street bridge, according to the sketch, was in ruins.
North of the river there were traces of squalid life--active fish-packing houses in Water Street,
smoking chimneys and patched roofs here and there, occasional sounds from indeterminate sources,
and infrequent shambling forms in the dismal streets and unpaved lanes--but I seemed to find this even
more oppressive than the southerly desertion. For one thing, the people were more hideous and
abnormal than those near the centre of the town; so that I was several times evilly reminded of
something utterly fantastic which I could not quite place. Undoubtedly the alien strain in the
Innsmouth folk was stronger here than farther inland--unless, indeed, the "Innsmouth look" were a
disease rather than a blood stain, in which case this district might be held to harbour the more
advanced cases.
One detail that annoyed me was the distribution of the few faint sounds I heard. They ought
naturally to have come wholly from the visibly inhabited houses, yet in reality were often strongest
inside the most rigidly boarded-up facades. There were creakings, scurryings, and hoarse doubtful
noises; and I thought uncomfortably about the hidden tunnels suggested by the grocery boy. Suddenly
I found myself wondering what the voices of those denizens would be like. I had heard no speech so
far in this quarter, and was unaccountably anxious not to do so.
Pausing only long enough to look at two fine but ruinous old churches at Main and Church
Streets, I hastened out of that vile waterfront slum. My next logical goal was New Church Green, but
somehow or other I could not bear to repass the church in whose basement I had glimpsed the
inexplicably frightening form of that strangely diademmed priest or pastor. Besides, the grocery
youth had told me that churches, as well as the Order of Dagon Hall, were not advisable
neighbourhoods for strangers.
Accordingly I kept north along Main to Martin, then turning inland, crossing Federal Street safely
north of the Green, and entering the decayed patrician neighbourhood of northern Broad,
Washington, Lafayette, and Adams Streets. Though these stately old avenues were ill-surfaced and
unkempt, their elm-shaded dignity had not entirely departed. Mansion after mansion claimed my gaze,
most of them decrepit and boarded up amidst neglected grounds, but one or two in each street
shewing signs of occupancy. In Washington Street there was a row of four or five in excellent repair
and with finely-tended lawns and gardens. The most sumptuous of these--with wide terraced
parterres extending back the whole way to Lafayette Street--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 absence of cats and
dogs from Innsmouth. Another thing which puzzled and disturbed me, even in some of the best-
preserved mansions, was the tightly shuttered condition of many third-story and attic windows.
Furtiveness and secretiveness seemed universal in this hushed city of alienage and death, and I could
not escape the sensation of being watched from ambush on every hand by sly, staring eyes that never
shut.
I shivered as the cracked stroke of three sounded from a belfry on my left. Too well did I recall
the squat church from which those notes came. Following Washington Street toward the river, I now
faced a new zone of former industry and commerce; noting the ruins of a factory ahead, and seeing
others, with the traces of an old railway station and covered railway bridge beyond, up the gorge on
my right.
The uncertain bridge now before me was posted with a warning sign, but I took the risk and
crossed again to the south bank where traces of life reappeared. Furtive, shambling creatures stared
cryptically in my direction, and more normal faces eyed me coldly and curiously. Innsmouth was
rapidly becoming intolerable, and I turned down Paine Street toward the Square in the hope of getting
some vehicle to take me to Arkham before the still-distant starting-time of that sinister bus.
It was then that I saw the tumbledown fire station on my left, and noticed the red faced, bushy-
bearded, watery eyed old man in nondescript rags who sat on a bench in front of it talking with a pair
of unkempt but not abnormal looking firemen. This, of course, must be Zadok Allen, the half-crazed,
liquorish nonagenarian whose tales of old Innsmouth and its shadow were so hideous and incredible.
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 with him; yet the
thought of this aged witness to the town's decay, with memories going back to the early days of ships
and factories, was a lure that no amount of reason could make me resist. After all, the strangest and
maddest of myths are often merely symbols or allegories based upon truth--and old Zadok must have
seen everything which went on around Innsmouth for the last ninety years. Curiosity flared up beyond
sense and caution, and in my youthful egotism I fancied I might be able to sift a nucleus of real
history from the confused, extravagant outpouring I would probably extract with the aid of raw
whiskey.
I knew that I could not accost him then and there, for the firemen would surely notice and object.
Instead, I reflected, I would prepare by getting some bootleg liquor at a place where the grocery boy
had told me it was plentiful. Then I would loaf near the fire station in apparent casualness, and fall in
with old Zadok after he had started on one of his frequent rambles. The youth had said that he was
very restless, seldom sitting around the station for more than an hour or two at a time.
A quart bottle of whiskey was easily, though not cheaply, obtained in the rear of a dingy variety-
store just off the Square in Eliot Street. The dirty-looking fellow who waited on me had a touch of
the staring "Innsmouth look", but was quite civil in his way; being perhaps used to the custom of such
convivial strangers--truckmen, gold-buyers, and the like--as were occasionally in town.
Reentering the Square I saw that luck was with me; for--shuffling out of Paine Street around the
corner of the Gilman House--I glimpsed nothing less than the tall, lean, tattered form of old Zadok
Allen himself. In accordance with my plan, I attracted his attention by brandishing my newly-
purchased bottle: and soon realised that he had begun to shuffle wistfully after me as I turned into
Waite Street on my way to the most deserted region I could think of.
I was steering my course by the map the grocery boy had prepared, and was aiming for the
wholly abandoned stretch of southern waterfront which I had previously visited. The only people in
sight there had been the fishermen on the distant breakwater; and by going a few squares south I
could get beyond the range of these, finding a pair of seats on some abandoned wharf and being free
to question old Zadok unobserved for an indefinite time. Before I reached Main Street I could hear a
faint and wheezy "Hey, Mister!" behind me and I presently allowed the old man to catch up and take
copious pulls from the quart bottle.
I began putting out feelers as we walked amidst the omnipresent desolation and crazily tilted
ruins, but found that the aged tongue did not loosen as quickly as I had expected. At length I saw a
grass-grown opening toward the sea between crumbling brick walls, with the weedy length of an
earth-and-masonry wharf projecting beyond. Piles of moss-covered stones near the water promised
tolerable seats, and the scene was sheltered from all possible view by a ruined warehouse on the
north. Here, I thought was the ideal place for a long secret colloquy; so I guided my companion
down the lane and picked out spots to sit in among the mossy stones. The air of death and desertion
was ghoulish, and the smell of fish almost insufferable; but I was resolved to let nothing deter me.
About four hours remained for conversation if I were to catch the eight o'clock coach for
Arkham, and I began to dole out more liquor to the ancient tippler; meanwhile eating my own frugal
lunch. In my donations I was careful not to overshoot the mark, for I did not wish Zadok's vinous
garrulousness to pass into a stupor. After an hour his furtive taciturnity shewed signs of
disappearing, but much to my disappointment he still sidetracked my questions about Innsmouth and its
shadow-haunted past. He would babble of current topics, revealing a wide acquaintance with
newspapers and a great tendency to philosophise in a sententious village fashion.
Toward the end of the second hour I feared my quart of whiskey would not be enough to produce
results, and was wondering whether I had better leave old Zadok and go back for more. Just then,
however, chance made the opening which my questions had been unable to make; and the wheezing
ancient's rambling took a turn that caused me to lean forward and listen alertly. My back was toward
the fishy-smelling sea, but he was facing it and something or other had caused his wandering gaze to
light on the low, distant line of Devil Reef, then showing plainly and almost fascinatingly above the
waves. The sight seemed to displease him, for he began a series of weak curses which ended in a
confidential whisper and a knowing leer. He bent toward me, took hold of my coat lapel, and hissed
out some hints that could not be mistaken,
"Thar's whar it all begun--that cursed place of all wickedness whar the deep water starts. Gate o'
hell--sheer drop daown to a bottom no saoundin'-line kin tech. 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 aprivateerin' in the War of 1812 or lost with the Elizy brig an'
the Ranger scow--both on 'em Gilman venters. Obed Marsh he had three ships afloat--brigantine
Columby, brig Hefty, an' barque Sumatry Queen. He was the only one as kep' on with the East-Injy an'
Pacific trade, though Esdras Martin's barkentine Malay Bride made a venter as late as twenty-eight.
"Never was nobody like Cap'n Obed--old limb o' Satan! Heh, heh! I kin mind him a-tellin' abaout
furren parts, an' callin' all the folks stupid for goin' to Christian meetin' an' bearin' their 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 again' folks's doin' any heathen things. Told
abaout an island east of Othaheite whar they was a lot o' stone ruins older'n anybody knew anything
abaout, kind o' like them on Ponape, in the Carolines, but with carven's of faces that looked like the
big statues on Easter Island. Thar was a little volcanic island near thar, too, whar they was other ruins
with diff'rent carvin'--ruins all wore away like they'd ben under the sea onct, an' with picters of awful
monsters all over 'em.
"Wal, Sir, Matt he says the natives araound thar had all the fish they cud ketch, an' sported
bracelets an' armlets an' head rigs made aout o' a queer kind o' gold an' covered with picters o'
monsters jest like the ones carved over the ruins on the little island--sorter fish-like frogs or
froglike fishes that was drawed in all kinds o' positions likes they was human bein's. Nobody cud get
aout o' them whar they got all the stuff, an' all the other natives wondered haow they managed to find
fish in plenty even when the very next island had lean pickin's. Matt he got to wonderon' too an' so did
Cap'n Obed. Obed he notices, besides, that lots of the hn'some young folks ud drop aout o' sight fer
good from year to year, an' that they wan't many old folks around. Also, he thinks some of the folks
looked durned queer even for 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 about--an'
wouldn't believe ef they did hear. It seems these Kanakys was sacrificin' heaps o' their young men an'
maidens to some kind o' god-things that lived under the sea, an' gittin' all kinds o' favour in return.
They met the things on the little islet with the queer ruins, an' it seems them awful picters o' frog-fish
monsters was supposed to be picters o' these things. Mebbe they was the kind o' critters as got all the
mermaid stories an' sech started.
"They had all kinds a' cities on the sea-bottom, an' this island was heaved up from thar. Seem they
was some of the things alive in the stone buildin's when the island come up sudden to the surface,
That's how the Kanakys got wind they was daown thar. Made sign-talk as soon as they got over bein'
skeert, an' pieced up a bargain afore long.
"Them things liked human sacrifices. Had had 'em ages afore, but lost track o' the upper world
after a time. What they done to the victims it ain't fer me to say, an' I guess Obed 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 twice every
year--May-Eve an' Hallawe'en--reg'lar as cud be. Also give some a' the carved knick-knacks they
made. What the things agreed to give in return was plenty a' fish--they druv 'em in from all over the
sea--an' a few gold-like things naow an' then.
"Wal, as I says, the natives met the things on the little volcanic islet--goin' thar in canoes with the
sacrifices et cet'ry, and bringin' back any of the gold-like jools as was comin' to 'em. At fust the
things didn't never go onto the main island, but arter a time they come to want to. Seems they hankered
arter mixin' with the folks, an' havin' j'int ceremonies on the big days--May-Eve an' Hallowe'en. Ye
see, they was able to live both in ant aout o' water--what they call amphibians, I guess. The Kanakys
told 'em as haow folks from the other islands might wanta wipe 'an out if they got wind o' their bein'
thar, but they says they dun't keer much, because they cud wipe aout the hull brood o' humans ef they
was willin' to bother--that is, any as didn't be, sarten signs sech as was used onct by the lost Old
Ones, whoever they was. But not wantin' to bother, they'd lay low when anybody visited the island.
"When it come to matin' with them toad-lookin' fishes, the Kanakys kind o' balked, but finally they
larnt something as put a new face on the matter. Seems that human folks has got a kind a' relation to
sech water-beasts--that everything alive come aout o' the water onct an' only needs a little change to
go back agin. Them things told the Kanakys that ef they mixed bloods there'd be children as ud look
human at fust, but later turn more'n more like the things, till finally they'd take to the water an' jine the
main lot o' things daown har. An' this is the important part, young feller--them as turned into fish
things an' went into the water wouldn't never die. Them things never died excep' they was kilt violent.
"Wal, Sir, it seems by the time Obed knowed them islanders they was all full o' fish blood from
them deep-water things. When they got old an' begun to shew it, they was kep' hid until they felt like
takin' to the water an' quittin' the place. Some was more teched than others, an' some never did change
quite enough to take to the water; but mosily they turned out jest the way them things said. Them as
was born more like the things changed arly, but them as was nearly human sometimes stayed on the
island till they was past seventy, though they'd usually go daown under for trial trips afore that. Folks
as had took to the water gen'rally come back a good deal to visit, so's a man ud often be a'talkin' to his
own five-times-great-grandfather who'd left the dry land a couple o' hundred years or so afore.
"Everybody got aout o' the idee o' dyin'--excep' in canoe wars with the other islanders, or as
sacrifices to the sea-gods daown below, or from snakebite or plague or sharp gallopin' ailments or
somethin' afore they cud take to the water--but simply looked forrad to a kind o' change that wa'n't a
bit horrible 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 o' 'em. The idee was to drop it daown
with the right kind o' prayers an' sech. Walakea allowed as the things was scattered all over the
world, so's anybody that looked abaout cud find a nest an' bring 'em up ef they was wanted.
"Matt he didn't like this business at all, an' wanted Obed shud keep away from the island; but the
Cap'n was sharp fer gain, an' faound he cud get them gold-like things so cheap it ud pay him to make a
specialty of them. Things went on that way for years an' Obed got enough o' that gold-like stuff to
make him start the refinery in Waite's old run-daown fullin' mill. He didn't dass sell the pieces like
they was, for folks ud be all the time askin' questions. All the same his crews ud get a piece an'
dispose of it naow and then, even though they was swore to keep quiet; an' he let his women-folks
wear some o' the pieces as was more human-like than most.
"Well, come abaout thutty-eight--when I was seven year' old--Obed he faound the island people
all wiped aout between v'yages. Seems the other islanders had got wind o' what was goin' on, and had
took matters into their own hands. S'pose they must a had, after all, them old magic signs as the sea
things says was the only things they was afeard of. No tellin' what any o' them Kanakys will chance to
git a holt of when the sea-bottom throws up some island with ruins older'n the deluge. Pious cusses,
these was--they didn't leave nothin' standin' on either the main island or the little volcanic islet excep'
what parts of the ruins was too big to knock daown. In some places they was little stones strewed
abaout--like charms--with somethin' on 'em like what ye call a swastika naowadays. Prob'ly them was
the Old Ones' signs. Folks all wiped aout no trace o' no gold-like things an' none the nearby Kanakys
ud breathe a word abaout the matter. Wouldn't even admit they'd ever ben any people on that island.
"That naturally hit Obed pretty hard, seein' as his normal trade was doin' very poor. It hit the
whole of Innsmouth, too, because in seafarint days what profited the master of a ship gen'lly profited
the crew proportionate. Most of the folks araound the taown took the hard times kind o' sheep-like an'
resigned, but they was in bad shape because the fishin' was peterin' aout an' the mills wan't doin' none
too well.
"Then's the time Obed he begun a-cursin' at the folks fer bein' dull sheep an' prayin' to a Christian
heaven as didn't help 'em none. He told 'em he'd knowed o' folks as prayed to gods that give somethin'
ye reely need, an' says ef a good bunch o' men ud stand by him, he cud mebbe get a holt o' sarten
paowers as ud bring plenty o' fish an' quite a bit of gold. 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 get clost to sea-things
like they'd heard tell on, but them as didn't know what 'twas all abaout got kind o' swayed by what
Obed had to say, and begun to ast him what he cud do to sit 'em on the way to the faith as ud bring 'em
results."
Here the old man faltered, mumbled, and lapsed into a moody and apprehensive silence; glancing
nervously over his shoulder and then turning back to stare fascinatedly at the distant black reef. When
I spoke to him he did not answer, so I knew I would have to let him finish the bottle. The insane yarn I
was hearing interested me profoundly, for I fancied there was contained within it a sort of crude
allegory based upon the strangeness of Innsmouth and elaborated by an imagination at once creative
and full of scraps of exotic legend. Not for a moment did I believe that the tale had any really
substantial foundation; but none the less the account held a hint of genuine terror if only because it
brought in references to strange jewels clearly akin to the malign tiara I had seen at Newburyport.
Perhaps the ornaments had, after all, come from some strange island; and possibly the wild stories
were lies of the bygone Obed himself rather than of this antique toper.
I handed Zadok the bottle, and he drained it to the last drop. It was curious how he could stand so
much whiskey, for not even a trace of thickness had come into his high, wheezy voice. He licked the
nose of the bottle and slipped it into his pocket, then beginning to nod and whisper softly to himself. I
bent close to catch any articulate words he might utter, and thought I saw a sardonic smile behind the
stained bushy whiskers. Yes--he was really forming words, and I could grasp a fair proportion of
them.
"Poor Matt--Matt he 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 mightly
little critter, but I heerd what I heerd an, seen what I seen--Dagon an' Ashtoreth--Belial an'
Beelzebub--Golden Caff an' the idols o' Canaan an' the Philistines--Babylonish abominations--Mene,
mene, tekel, 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? Hey, heh, heh--then jest tell me, young feller, why Cap'n Obed an' twenty
odd other folks used to row aout to Devil Reef in the dead o' night an' chant things so laoud ye cud
hear 'em all over taown when the wind was right? Tell me that, hey? An' tell me why Obed was 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 their-selves with them gold-like things Obed brung? Hey?"
The watery blue eyes were almost savage and maniacal now, and the dirty white beard bristled
electrically. Old Zadok probably saw me shrink back, for he began to cackle evilly.
"Heh, heh, heh, heh! 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 cupola a-watchin' shapes as wa'n't human
shapes?...Heh?...Heh, heh, heh ..."
The old man was getting hysterical, and I began to shiver with a nameless alarm. He laid a gnarled
claw on my shoulder, and it seemed to me that its shaking was not altogether that of mirth.
"S'pose one night ye seed somethin' heavy heaved offen Obed's dory beyond the reef' and then
learned next day a young feller was missin' from home. Hey! Did anybody ever see hide or hair o'
Hiram Gilman agin. Did they? An' Nick Pierce, an' Luelly Waite, an' Adoniram Saouthwick, an' Henry
Garrison. Hey? Heh, heh, heh, heh...Shapes talkin' sign language with their hands...them as had reel
hands ...
"Wal, Sir, that was the time Obed begun to git on his feet agin. Folks see his three darters a-
wearin' gold-like things as nobody'd never see on 'em afore, an' smoke stared comin' aout o' the
refin'ry chimbly. Other folks was prosp'rin, too--fish begun to swarm into the harbour fit to kill an'
heaven knows what sized cargoes we begun to ship aout to Newb'ryport, Arkham, an' Boston. '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 folk
organised the Esoteric Order 0' 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 and thutty-two others
was in gaol, with everybody a-wonderin' jest what was afoot and jest what charge agin 'em cud he got
to holt. God, ef anybody'd look'd ahead...a couple o' weeks later, when nothin' had ben throwed into
the sea fer thet long..."
Zadok was shewing sings of fright and exhaustion, and I let him keep silence for a while, though
glancing apprehensively at my watch. The tide had turned and was coming in now, and the sound of
the waves seemed to arouse him. I was glad of that tide, for at high water the fishy smell might not be
so bad. Again I strained to catch his whispers.
"That awful night...I seed 'em. I was up in the cupalo...hordes of 'em...swarms of 'em...all over the
reef an' swimmin' up the harbour into the Manuxet...God, what happened in the streets of Innsmouth
that night...they rattled our door, but pa wouldn't open...then he clumb aout the kitchen winder with his
musket to find Selecman Mowry an' see what he cud do...Maounds o' the dead an' the dyin'...shots and
screams...shaoutin' in Ol Squar an' Taown Squar an' New Church Green--gaol throwed open...--
proclamation...treason...called it the plague when folks come in an' faoud haff our people
missin'...nobody left but them as ud jine in with Obed an' them things or else keep quiet...never heard
o' my pa no more..."
The old man was panting and perspiring profusely. His grip on my shoulder tightened.
"Everything cleaned up in the mornin'--but they was traces...Obed he kinder takes charge an' says
things is goin' to be changed... others'll worship with us at meetin'-time, an' sarten haouses hez got to
entertin guests...they wanted to mix like they done with the Kanakys, an' he for one didn't feel baound
to stop 'em. Far gone, was Obed...jest like a crazy man on the subjeck. He says they brung us fish an'
treasure, an' shud hev what they hankered after..."
"Nothin' was to be diff'runt on the 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 o' us
took. Them as ud help special, ud git special rewards--gold an' sech--No use balkin', fer they was
millions of 'em daown thar. They'd ruther not start risin' an' wipin' aout human-kind, but ef they was
gave away an' forced to, they cud do a lot toward jest that. We didn't hev them old charms to cut 'em
off like folks in the Saouth Sea did, an' them Kanakys 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 0' Dagon--an' the children shud
never die, but go back to the Mother Hydra an' Father Dagon what we all come from onct...Ia! Ia!
Cthulhu fhtagn! Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah-nagl fhtaga--"
Old Zadok was fast lapsing into stark raving, and I held my breath. Poor old soul--to what pitiful
depths of hallucination had his liquor, plus his hatred of the decay, alienage, and disease around him,
brought that fertile, imaginative brain? He began to moan now, and tears were coursing down his
channelled checks into the depths of his beard.
"God, what I seen senct I was fifteen year' old--Mene, mene, tekel, upharsin!--the folks as was
missin', and them as kilt theirselves--them as told things in Arkham or Ipswich or sech places was all
called crazy, like you're callin' me right naow--but God, what I seen--They'd a kilt me long ago fer'
what I know, only I'd took the fust an' secon' Oaths o' Dago offen Obed, so was pertected unlessen a
jury of 'em proved I told things knowin' an' delib'rit...but I wudn't take the third Oath--I'd a died
ruther'n take that--
"It got wuss araound Civil War time, when children born senct 'forty-six begun to grow up--some
'em, that is. I was afeared--never did no pryin' arter that awful night, an' never see one o'--them--clost
to in all my life. That is, never no full-blooded one. I went to the war, an' ef I'd a had any guts or
sense I'd a never come back, but settled away from here. But folks wrote me things wa'n't so bad.
That, I s'pose, was because gov'munt draft men was in taown arter 'sixty-three. Arter the war it was
jest as bad agin. People begun to fall off--mills an' shops shet daown--shippin' stopped an' the
harbour choked up--railrud give up--but they...they never stopped swimmin' in an' aout o' the river
from that cursed reef o' Satan--an' more an' more attic winders got a-boarded up, an' more an' more
noises was heerd in haouses as wa'n't s'posed to hev nobody in 'em...
"Folks aoutside hev their stories abaout us--s'pose you've heerd a plenty on 'em, seein' what
questions ye ast--stories abaout things they've seed naow an' then, an' abaout that queer joolry as still
comes in from somewhars an' ain't quite all melted up--but nothin' never gits def'nite. Nobody'll
believe nothin'. They call them gold-like things pirate loot, an' allaow the Innsmouth folks hez furren
blood or is dis-tempered or somethin'. Beside, them that lives here shoo off as many strangers as
they kin, an' encourage the rest not to git very cur'ous, specially raound night time. Beasts balk at the
critters--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 hav nothin' to do with Innsmouth folks naow. Barnabas Marsh that runs the refin'ry now is
Obed's grandson by his fust wife--son of Onesiphorus, his eldest son, but his mother was another o'
them as wa'n't never seen aoutdoors.
"Right naow Barnabas is abaout changed. Can't shet his eyes no more, an' is all aout o' shape.
They say he still wears clothes, but he'll take to the water soon. Mebbe he's tried it already--they do
sometimes go daown for little spells afore they go daown for good. Ain't ben seed abaout in public
fer nigh on ten year'. Dun't know haow his poor wife kin feel--she come from Ipiwich, an' they nigh
lynched Barnabas when he courted her fifty odd year' ago. Obed he died in 'seventy-eight an' all the
next gen'ration is gone naow--the fust wife's children dead, and the rest...God knows..."
The sound of the incoming tide was now very insistent, and little by little it seemed to change the
old man's mood from maudlin tearfulness to watchful fear. He would pause now and then to renew
those nervous glances over his shoulder or out toward the reef, and despite the wild absurdity of his
tale, I could not help beginning to share his apprehensiveness. Zadok now grew shriller, seemed to
be trying to whip up his courage with louder speech.
"Hey, yew, why dun't ye say somethin'? Haow'd ye like to be livin' in a taown like this, with
everything a-rottin' an' dyin', an' boarded-up monsters crawlin' an' bleatin' an' barkin' an' hoppin' araoun'
black cellars an' attics every way ye turn? Hey? Haow'd ye like to hear the haowlin' night arter night
from the churches an' Order 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! Yew jest
set still an' listen to me, boy--this is what I ain't never told nobody...I says I didn't get to do pryin' arter
that night--but I faound things about jest the same!"
"Yew want to know what the reel horror is, hey? Wal, it's this--it ain't what them fish devils hez
done, but what they're a-goin' to do! They're a-bringin' things up aout o' whar they come from into the
taown--been doin' it fer years, an' slackenin' up lately. Them haouses north o' the river be-twixt Water
an' Main Streets is full of 'em--them devils an' what they brung--an' when they git ready...I say, when
they git...ever hear tell of a shoggoth?
"Hey, d'ye hear me? I tell ye I know what them things be--I seen 'em one night when...eh-ahhh-ah!
e'yahhh..."
The hideous suddenness and inhuman 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! Get aout o' here! They seen us--git aout fer your life! Dun't wait fer nothin'--
they know naow--Run fer it--quick--aout o' this taown--"
Another heavy wave dashed against the loosing masonry of the bygone wharf, and changed the
mad ancient's whisper to another inhuman and blood-curdling scream. "E-yaahhhh!...Yheaaaaaa!..."
Before I could recover my scattered wits he had relaxed his clutch on my shoulder and dashed
wildly inland toward the street, reeling northward around the ruined warehouse wall.
I glanced back at the sea, but there was nothing there. And when I reached Water Street and
looked along it toward the north there was no remaining trace of Zadok Allen.
IV
I can hardly describe the mood in which I was left by this harrowing episode--an episode at once
mad and pitiful, grotesque and terrifying. The grocery boy had prepared me for it, yet the reality left
me none the less bewildered and disturbed. Puerile though the story was, old Zadok's insane
earnestness and horror had communicated to me a mounting unrest which joined with my earlier sense
of loathing for the town and its blight of intangible shadow.
Later I might sift the tale and extract some nucleus of historic allegory; just now I wished to put it
out of my head. The hour grown perilously late--my watch said 7:15, and the Arkham bus left Town
Square at eight--so I tried to give my thoughts as neutral and practical a cast as possible, meanwhile
walking rapidly through the deserted streets of gaping roofs and leaning houses toward the hotel
where I had checked my valise and would find my bus.
Though the golden light of late afternoon gave the ancient roofs and decrepit chimneys an air of
mystic loveliness and peace, I could not help glancing over my shoulder now and then. I would
surely be very glad to get out of malodorous and fear-shadowed Innsmouth, and wished there were
some other vehicle than the bus driven by that sinister-looking fellow Sargent. Yet I did not hurry too
precipitately, for there were architectural details worth viewing at every silent corner; and I could
easily, I calculated, cover the necessary distance in a half-hour.
Studying the grocery youth's map and seeking a route I had not traversed before, I chose Marsh
Street instead of State for my approach to Town Square. Near the corner of Fall Street I began to see
scattered groups of furtive whisperers, and when I finally reached the Square I saw that almost all the
loiterers were congregated around the door of the Gilman House. It seemed as if many bulging,
watery, unwinking eyes looked oddly at me as I claimed my valise in the lobby, and I hoped that none
of these unpleasant creatures would be my fellow-passengers on the coach.
The bus, rather early, rattled in with three passengers somewhat before eight, and an evil-looking
fellow on the sidewalk muttered a few indistinguishable words to the driver. Sargent threw out a
mail-bag and a roll of newspapers, and entered the hotel; while the passengers--the same men whom I
had seen arriving in Newburyport that morning--shambled to the sidewalk and exchanged some faint
guttural words with a loafer in a language I could have sworn was not English. I boarded the empty
coach and took the seat I had taken before, but was hardly settled before Sargent re-appeared and
began mumbling in a throaty voice of peculiar repulsiveness.
I was, it appeared, in very bad luck. There had been something wrong with the engine, despite the
excellent time made from Newburyport, and the bus could not complete the journey to Arkham. No, it
could not possibly be repaired that night, nor was there any other way of getting transportation out of
Innsmouth either to Arkham or elsewhere. Sargent was sorry, but I would have to stop over at the
Gilman. Probably the clerk would make the price easy for me, but there was nothing else to do.
Almost dazed by this sudden obstacle, and violently dreading the fall of night in this decaying and
half-unlighted town, I left the bus and reentered the hotel lobby; where the sullen queer-looking night
clerk told me I could have Room 428 on next the top floor--large, but without running water--for a
dollar.
Despite what I had heard of this hotel in Newburyport, I signed the register, paid my dollar, let
the clerk take my valise, and followed that sour, solitary attendant up three creaking flights of stairs
past dusty corridors which seemed wholly devoid of life. My room was a dismal rear one with two
windows and bare, cheap furnishings, overlooked a dingy court-yard otherwise hemmed in by low,
deserted brick blocks, and commanded a view of decrepit westward-stretching roofs with a marshy
countryside beyond. At the end of the corridor was a bathroom--a discouraging relique with ancient
marble bowl, tin tub, faint electric light, and musty wooded paneling around all the plumbing fixtures.
It being still daylight, I descended to the Square and looked around for a dinner of some sort;
noticing as I did so the strange glances I received from the unwholesome loafers. Since the grocery
was closed, I was forced to patronise the restaurant I had shunned before; a stooped, narrow-headed
man with staring, unwinking eyes, and a flat-nosed wench with unbelievably thick, clumsy hands being
in attendance. The service was all of the counter type, and it relieved me to find that much was
evidently served from cans and packages. A bowl of vegetable soup with crackers was enough for
me, and I soon headed back for my cheerless room at the Gilman; getting a evening paper and a fly-
specked magazine from the evil-visaged clerk at the rickety stand beside his desk.
As twilight deepened I turned on the one feeble electric bulb over the cheap, iron-framed bed,
and tried as best I could to continue the reading I had begun. I felt it advisable to keep my mind
wholesomely occupied, for it would not do to brood over the abnormalities of this ancient, blight-
shadowed town while I was still within its borders. The insane yarn I had heard from the aged
drunkard did not promise very pleasant dreams, and I felt I must keep the image of his wild, watery
eyes as far as possible from my imagination.
Also, I must not dwell on what that factory inspector had told the Newburyport ticket-agent about
the Gilman House and the voices of its nocturnal tenants--not on that, nor on the face beneath the tiara
in the black church doorway; the face for whose horror my conscious mind could not account. It
would perhaps have been easier to keep my thoughts from disturbing topics had the room not been so
gruesomely musty. As it was, the lethal mustiness blended hideously with the town's general fishy
odour and persistently focussed one's fancy on death and decay.
Another thing that disturbed me was the absence of a bolt on the door of my room. One had been
there, as marks clearly shewed, but there were signs of recent removal. No doubt it had been out of
order, like so many other things in this decrepit edifice. In my nervousness I looked around and
discovered a bolt on the clothes press which seemed to be of the same size, judging from the marks,
as the one formerly on the door. To gain a partial relief from the general tension I busied myself by
transferring this hardware to the vacant place with the aid of a handy three-in-one device including a
screwdriver which I kept on my key-ring. The bolt fitted perfectly, and I was somewhat relieved
when I knew that I could shoot it firmly upon retiring. Not that I had any real apprehension of its need,
but that any symbol of security was welcome in an environment of this kind. There were adequate
bolts on the two lateral doors to connecting rooms, and these I proceeded to fasten.
I did not undress, but decided to read till I was sleepy and then lie down with only my coat, collar,
and shoes off. Taking a pocket flash light from my valise, I placed it in my trousers, so that I could
read my watch if I woke up later in the dark. Drowsiness, however, did not come; and when I stopped
to analyse my thoughts I found to my disquiet that I was really unconsciously listening for something-
-listening for something which I dreaded but could not name. That inspector's story must have
worked on my imagination more deeply than I had suspected. Again I tried to read, but found that I
made no progress.
After a time I seemed to hear the stairs and corridors creak at intervals as if with footsteps, and
wondered if the other rooms were beginning to fill up. There were no voices, however, and it struck
me that there was something subtly furtive about the creaking. I did not like it, and debated whether I
had better try to sleep at all. This town had some queer people, and there had undoubtedly been
several disappearances. Was this one of those inns where travelers were slain for their money?
Surely I had no look of excessive prosperity. Or were the towns folk really so resentful about
curious visitors? Had my obvious sightseeing, with its frequent map-consultations, aroused
unfavorable notice. It occurred to me that I must be in a highly nervous state to let a few random
creakings set me off speculating in this fashion--but I regretted none the less that I was unarmed.
At length, feeling a fatigue which had nothing of drowsiness in it, I bolted the newly outfitted hall
door, turned off the light, and threw myself down on the hard, uneven bed--coat, collar, shoes, and
all. In the darkness every faint noise of the night seemed magnified, and a flood of doubly unpleasant
thoughts swept over me. I was sorry I had put out the light, yet was too tired to rise and turn it on
again. Then, after a long, dreary interval, and prefaced by a fresh creaking of stairs and corridor,
there came that soft, damnably unmistakable sound which seemed like a malign fulfillment of all my
apprehensions. Without the least shadow of a doubt, the lock of my door was being tried--cautiously,
furtively, tentatively--with a key.
My sensations upon recognising this sign of actual peril were perhaps less rather than more
tumultuous because of my previous vague fears. I had been, albeit without definite reason,
instinctively on my guard--and that was to my advantage in the new and real crisis, whatever it might
turn out to be. Nevertheless the change in the menace from vague premonition to immediate reality
was a profound shock, and fell upon me with the force of a genuine blow. It never once occurred to
me that the fumbling might be a mere mistake. Malign purpose was all I could think of, and I kept
deathly quiet, awaiting the would-be intruder's next move.
After a time the cautious rattling ceased, and I heard the room to the north entered with a pass-
key. Then the lock of the connecting door to my room was softly tried. The bolt held, of course, and
I heard the floor creak as the prowler left the room. After a moment there came another soft rattling,
and I knew that the room to the south of me was being entered. Again a furtive trying of a bolted
connecting door, and again a receding creaking. This time the creaking went along the hall and down
the stairs, so I knew that the prowler had realised the bolted condition of my doors and was giving up
his attempt for a greater or lesser time, as the future would shew.
The readiness with which I fell into a plan of action proves that I must have been subconsciously
fearing some menace and considering possible avenues of escape for hours. From the first I felt that
the unseen 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 recognized
human speech. Then I thought with renewed force of what the factory inspector had heard in the
night in this mouldering and pestilential building.
Having filled my pockets with the flashlight's aid, I put on my hat and tiptoed to the windows to
consider chances of descent. Despite the state's safety regulations there was no fire escape on this
side of the hotel, and I saw that my windows commanded only a sheer three story drop to the cobbled
courtyard. On the right and left, however, some ancient brick business blocks abutted on the hotel;
their slant roofs coming up to a reasonable jumping distance from my fourth-story level. To reach
either of these lines of buildings I would have to be in a room two from my own--in one case on the
north and in the other case on the south--and my mind instantly set to work what chances I had of
making the transfer.
I could not, I decided, risk an emergence into the corridor; where my footsteps would surely be
heard, and where the difficulties of entering the desired room would be insuperable. My progress, if
it was to be made at all, would have to be through the less solidly-built connecting doors of the
rooms; the locks and bolts of which I would have to force violently, using my shoulder as a
battering-ram whenever they were set against me. This, I thought, would be possible owing to the
rickety nature of the house and its fixtures; but I realised I could not do it noiselessly. I would have
to count on sheer speed, and the chance of getting to a window before any hostile forces became
coordinated enough to open the right door toward me with a pass-key. My own outer door I
reinforced by pushing the bureau against it--little by little, in order to make a minimum of sound.
I perceived that my chances were very slender, and was fully prepared for any calamity. Even
getting to another roof would not solve the problem for there would then remain the task of reaching
the ground and escaping from the town. One thing in my favour was the deserted and ruinous state of
the abutting building and the number of skylights gaping blackly open in each row.
Gathering from the grocery boy's map that the best route out of town was southward, I glanced
first at the connecting door on the south side of the room. It was designed to open in my direction,
hence I saw--after drawing the bolt and finding other fastening in place--it was not a favorable one
for forcing. Accordingly abandoning it as a route, I cautiously moved the bedstead against it to
hamper any attack which might be made on it later from the next room. The door on the north was
hung to open away from me, and this--though a test proved it to be locked or bolted from the other
side--I knew must be my route. If I could gain the roofs of the buildings in Paine Street and descend
successfully to the ground level, I might perhaps dart through the courtyard and the adjacent or
opposite building to Washington or Bates--or else emerge in Paine and edge around southward into
Washington. In any case, I would aim to strike Washington somehow and get quickly out of the Town
Square region. My preference would be to avoid Paine, since the fire station there might be open all
night.
As I thought of these things I looked out over the squalid sea of decaying roofs below me, now
brightened by the beams of a moon not much past full. On the right the black gash of the river-gorge
clove the panorama; abandoned factories and railway station clinging barnacle-like to its sides.
Beyond it the rusted railway and the Rowley road led off through a flat marshy terrain dotted with
islets of higher and dryer scrub-grown land. On the left the creek-threaded country-side was nearer,
the narrow road to Ipswich gleaming white in the moonlight. I could not see from my side of the
hotel the southward route toward Arkham which I had determined to take.
I was irresolutely speculating on when I had better attack the northward door, and on how I could
least audibly manage it, when I noticed that the vague noises underfoot had given place to a fresh and
heavier creaking of the stairs. A wavering flicker of light shewed through my transom, and the
boards of the corridor began to groan with a ponderous load. Muffled sounds of possible vocal
origin approached, and at length a firm knock came at my outer door.
For a moment I simply held my breath and waited. Eternities seemed to elapse, and the nauseous
fishy odour of my environment seemed to mount suddenly and spectacularly. Then the knocking was
repeated--continuously, and with growing insistence. I knew that the time for action had come, and
forthwith drew the bolt of the northward connecting door, bracing myself for the task of battering it
open. The knocking waxed louder, and I hoped that its volume would cover the sound of my efforts.
At last beginning my attempt, I lunged again and again at the thin paneling with my left shoulder,
heedless of shock or pain. The door resisted even more than I expected, but I did not give in. And all
the while the clamour at the outer door increased.
Finally the connecting door gave, but with such a crash that I knew those outside must have heard.
Instantly the outside knocking became a violent battering, while keys sounded ominously in the hall
doors of the rooms on both sides of me. Rushing through the newly opened connexion, I succeeded
in bolting the northerly hall door before the lock could 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 though, and had my right knee and shoulder against a hall
door which was visibly opening inward. My pressure took the opener off guard, for the thing shut as
I pushed, so that I could slip the well-conditioned bolt as I had done with the other door. As I gained
this respite I heard the battering at the two other doors abate, while a confused clatter came from the
connecting door I had shielded with the bedstead. Evidently the bulk of my assailants had entered the
southerly room and were massing in a lateral attack. But at the same moment a pass-key sounded in the
next door to the north, and I knew that a nearer peril was at hand.
The northward connecting door was wide open, but there was no time to think about checking the
already turning lock in the hall. All I could do was to shut and bolt the open connecting door, as well
as its mate on the opposite side--pushing a bedstead against the one and a bureau against the other,
and moving a washstand in front of the hall door. I must, I saw, trust to such makeshift barriers to
shield me till I could get out the window and on the roof of the Paine Street block. But even in this
acute moment my chief horror was something apart from the immediate weakness of my defenses. I
was shuddering because not one of my pursuers, despite some hideous panting, grunting, and
subdued barkings at odd intervals, was uttering an unmuffled or intelligible vocal sound.
As I moved the furniture and rushed toward the windows I heard a frightful scurrying along the
corridor toward the room north of me, and perceived that the southward battering had ceased. Plainly,
most of my opponents were about to concentrate against the feeble connecting door which they knew
must open directly on me. Outside, the moon played on the ridgepole of the block below, and I saw
that the jump would be desperately hazardous because of the steep surface on which I must land.
Surveying the conditions, I chose the more southerly of the two windows as my avenue of
escape; planning to land on the inner slope of the roof and make for the nearest sky-light. Once inside
one of the decrepit brick structures I would have to reckon with pursuit; but I hoped to descend and
dodge in and out of yawning doorways along the shadowed courtyard, eventually getting to
Washington Street and slipping out of town toward the south.
The clatter at the northerly connecting door was now terrific, and I saw that the weak panelling
was beginning to splinter. Obviously, the besiegers had brought some ponderous object into play as
a battering-ram. The bedstead, however, still held firm; so that I had at least a faint chance of making
good my escape. As I opened the window I noticed that it was flanked by heavy velour draperies
suspended from a pole by brass rings, and also that there was a large projecting catch for the shutters
on the exterior. Seeing a possible means of avoiding the dangerous jump, I yanked at the hangings and
brought them down, pole and all; then quickly hooking two of the rings in the shutter catch and
flinging the drapery outside. The heavy folds reached fully to the abutting roof, and I saw that the
rings and catch would be likely to bear my weight. So, climbing out of the window and down the
improvised rope ladder, I left behind me forever the morbid and horror-infested fabric of the Gilman
House.
I landed safely on the loose slates of the steep roof, and succeeded in gaining the gaping black
skylight without a slip. Glancing up at the window I had left, I observed it was still dark, though far
across the crumbling chimneys to the north I could see lights ominously blazing in the Order of
Dagon Hall, the Baptist church, and the Congregational church which I recalled so shiveringly.
There had seemed to be no one in the courtyard below, and I hoped there would be a chance to get
away before the spreading of a general alarm. Flashing my pocket lamp into the skylight, I saw that
there were no steps down. The distance was slight, however, so I clambered over the brink and
dropped; striking a dusty floor littered with crumbling boxes and barrels.
The place was ghoulish-looking, but I was past minding such impressions and made at once for
the staircase revealed by my flashlight--after a hasty glance at my watch, which shewed the hour to
be 2 a.m. The steps creaked, but seemed tolerably sound; and I raced down past a barnlike second
storey to the ground floor. The desolation was complete, and only echoes answered my footfalls. At
length I reached the lower hall at the end of which I saw a faint luminous rectangle marking the
ruined Paine Street doorway. Heading the other way, I found the back door also open; and darted out
and down five stone steps to the grass-grown cobblestones of the courtyard.
The moonbeams did not reach down here, but I could just see my way about without using the
flashlight. Some of the windows on the Gilman House side were faintly glowing, and I thought I
heard confused sounds within. Walking softly over to the Washington Street side I perceived several
open doorways, and chose the nearest as my route out. The hallway inside was black, and when I
reached the opposite end I saw that the street door was wedged immovably shut. Resolved to try
another building, I groped my way back toward the courtyard, but stopped short when close to the
doorway.
For out of an opened door in the Gilman House a large crowd of doubtful shapes was pouring--
lanterns bobbing in the darkness, and horrible croaking voices exchanging low cries in what was
certainly not English. The figures moved uncertainly, and I realized to my relief that they did not
know where I had gone; but for all that they sent a shiver of horror through my frame. Their features
were indistinguishable, but their crouching, shambling gait was abominably repellent. And worst of
all, I perceived that one figure was strangely robed, and unmistakably surmounted by a tall tiara of a
design altogether too familiar. As the figures spread throughout the courtyard, I felt my fears
increase. Suppose I could find no egress from this building on the street side? The fishy odour was
detestable, and I wondered I could stand it without fainting. Again groping toward the street, I opened
a door off the hall and came upon an empty room with closely shuttered but sashless windows.
Fumbling in the rays of my flashlight, I found I could open the shutters; and in another moment had
climbed outside and was fully closing the aperture in its original manner.
I was now in Washington Street, and for the moment saw no living thing nor any light save that of
the moon. From several directions in the distance, however, I could hear the sound of hoarse voices,
of footsteps, and of a curious kind of pattering which did not sound quite like footsteps. Plainly I had
no time to lose. The points of the compass were clear to me, and I was glad that all the street lights
were turned off, as is often the custom on strongly moonlit nights in prosperous rural regions. Some
of the sounds came from the south, yet I retained my design of escaping in that direction. There
would, I knew, be plenty of deserted doorways to shelter me in case I met any person or group who
looked like pursuers.
I walked rapidly, softly, and close to the ruined houses. While hatless and dishevelled after my
arduous climb, I did not look especially noticeable; and stood a good chance of passing unheeded if
forced to encounter any casual wayfarer.
At Bates Street I drew into a yawning vestibule while two shambling figures crossed in front of
me, but was soon on my way again and approaching the open space where Eliot Street obliquely
crosses Washington at the intersection of South. Though I had never seen this space, it had looked
dangerous to me on the grocery youth's map; since the moonlight would have free play there. There
was no use trying to evade it, for any alternative course would involve detours of possibly
disastrous visibility and delaying effect. The only thing to do was to cross it boldly and openly;
imitating the typical shamble of the Innsmouth folk as best I could, and trusting that no one--or at least
no pursuer of mine--would be there.
Just how fully the pursuit was organised--and indeed, just what its purpose might be--I could
form no idea. There seemed to be unusual activity in the town, but I judged that the news of my
escape from the Gilman had not yet spread. I would, of course, soon have to shift from Washington
to some other southward street; for that party from the hotel would doubtless be after me. I must have
left dust prints in that last old building, revealing how I had gained the street.
The open space was, as I had expected, strongly moonlit; and I saw the remains of a parklike,
iron-railed green in its center. Fortunately no one was about though a curious sort of buzz or roar
seemed to be increasing in the direction of Town Square. South Street was very wide, leading
directly down a slight declivity to the waterfront and commanding a long view out to sea; and I hoped
that no one would be glancing up it from afar as I crossed in the bright moonlight.
My progress was unimpeded, and no fresh sound arose to hint that I had been spied. Glancing
about me, I involuntarily let my pace slacken for a second to take in the sight of the sea, gorgeous in
the burning moonlight at the street's end. Far out beyond the breakwater was the dim, dark line of
Devil Reef, and as I glimpsed it I could not help thinking of all the hideous legends I had heard in the
last twenty-four hours--legends which portrayed this ragged rock as a veritable gateway to realms of
unfathomed horror and inconceivable abnormality.
Then, without warning, I saw the intermittent flashes of light on the distant reef. They were
definite and unmistakable, and awaked in my mind a blind horror beyond all rational proportion. My
muscles tightened for panic flight, held in only by a certain unconscious caution and half-hypnotic
fascination. And to make matters worse, there now flashed forth from the lofty cupola of the Gilman
House, which loomed up to the northeast behind me, a series of analogous though differently spaced
gleams which could be nothing less than an answering signal.
Controlling my muscles, and realising afresh--how plainly visible I was, I resumed my brisker
and feignedly shambling pace; though keeping my eyes on that hellish and ominous reef as long as
the opening of South Street gave me a seaward view. What the whole proceeding meant, I could not
imagine; unless it involved some strange rite connected with Devil Reef, or unless some party had
landed from a ship on that sinister rock. I now bent to the left around the ruinous green; still gazing
toward the ocean as it blazed in the spectral summer moonlight, and watching the cryptical flashing of
those nameless, unexplainable beacons.
It was then that the most horrible impression of all was borne in upon me--the impression which
destroyed my last vestige of self-control and sent me running frantically southward past the yawning
black doorways and fishily staring windows of that deserted nightmare street. For at a closer glance I
saw that the moonlit waters between the reef and the shore were far from empty. They were alive
with a teeming horde of shapes swimming inward toward the town; and even at my vast distance and in
my single moment of perception I could tell that the bobbing heads and flailing arms were alien and
aberrant in a way scarcely to be expressed or consciously formulated.
My frantic running ceased before I had covered a block, for at my left I began to hear something
like the hue and cry of organised pursuit. There were footsteps and 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 people could not have known what route I intended to take. If this were so,
I would have to make my retreat across country away from any road; but how could I do that in view
of the marshy and creek-riddled nature of all the surrounding region? For a moment my brain reeled--
both from sheer hopelessness and from a rapid increase in the omnipresent fishy odour.
Then I thought of the abandoned railway to Rowley, whose solid line of ballasted, weed-grown
earth still stretched off to the northwest from the crumbling station on the edge at the river-gorge.
There was just a chance that the townsfolk would not think of that; since its briar-choked desertion
made it half-impassable, and the unlikeliest of all avenues for a fugitive to choose. I had seen it
clearly from my hotel window and knew about how it lay. Most of its earlier length was
uncomfortably visible from the Rowley road, and from high places in the town itself; but one could
perhaps crawl inconspicuously through the undergrowth. At any rate, it would form my only chance
of deliverance, and there was nothing to do but try it.
Drawing inside the hall of my deserted shelter, I once more consulted the grocery boy's map with
the aid of the flashlight. The immediate problem was how to reach the ancient railway; and I now saw
that the safest course was ahead to Babson Street; then west to Lafayette--there edging around but not
crossing an open space homologous to the one I had traversed--and subsequently back northward and
westward in a zigzagging line through Lafayette, Bates, Adam, and Bank streets--the latter skirting
the river gorge--to the abandoned and dilapidated station I had seen from my window. My reason for
going ahead to Babson was that I wished neither to recross the earlier open space nor to begin my
westward course along a cross street as broad as South.
Starting once more, I crossed the street to the right-hand side in order to edge around into 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 dogtrot, trusting to luck not to encounter any observing eye.
Next the corner of Babson Street I saw to my alarm that one of the houses was still inhabited, as
attested by curtains at the window; but there were no lights within, and I passed it without disaster.
In Babson Street, which crossed Federal and might thus reveal me to the searchers, I clung as
closely as possible to the sagging, uneven buildings; twice pausing in a doorway as the noises
behind me momentarily increased. The open space ahead shone wide and desolate under the moon,
but my route would not force me to cross it. During my second pause I began to detect a fresh
distribution of vague sounds; and upon looking cautiously out from cover beheld a motor car darting
across the open space, bound outward along Eliot Street, which there intersects both Babson and
Lafayette.
As I watched--choked by a sudden rise in the fishy odour after a short abatement--I saw a band of
uncouth, crouching shapes loping and shambling in the same direction; and knew that this must be the
party guarding the Ipswich road, since that highway forms an extension of Eliot Street. Two of the
figures I glimpsed were in voluminous robes, and one wore a peaked diadem which glistened
whitely in the moonlight. The gait of this figure was so odd that it sent a chill through me--for it
seemed to me the creature was almost hopping.
When the last of the band was out of sight I resumed my progress; darting around the corner into
Lafayette Street, and crossing Eliot very hurriedly lest stragglers of the party be still advancing
along that thoroughfare. I did hear some croaking and clattering sounds far off toward Town Square,
but accomplished the passage without disaster. My greatest dread was in re-crossing broad and
moonlit South Street--with its seaward view--and I had to nerve myself for the ordeal. Someone
might easily be looking, and possible Eliot Street stragglers could not fail to glimpse me from either
of two points. At the last moment I decided I had better slacken my trot and make the crossing as
before in the shambling gait of an average Innsmouth native.
When the view of the water again opened out--this time on my right--I was half-determined not to
look at it at all. I could not however, resist; but cast a sidelong glance as I carefully and imitatively
shambled toward the protecting shadows ahead. There was no ship visible, as I had half-expected
there would be. Instead, the first thing which caught my eye was a small rowboat pulling in toward
the abandoned wharves and laden with some bulky, tarpaulin-covered object. Its rowers, though
distantly and indistinctly seen, were of an especially repellent aspect. Several swimmers were still
discernible; while on the far black reef I could see a faint, steady glow unlike the winking beacon
visible before, and of a curious colour which I could not precisely identify. Above the slant roofs
ahead and to the right there loomed the tall cupola of the Gilman House, but it was completely dark.
The fishy odour, dispelled for a moment by some merciful breeze, now closed in again with
maddening intensity.
I had not quite crossed the street when I heard a muttering band advancing along Washington from
the north. As they reached the broad open space where I had had my first disquieting glimpse of the
moonlit water I could see them plainly only a block away--and was horrified by the bestial
abnormality of their faces and the doglike sub-humanness of their crouching gait. One man moved in
a positively simian way, with long arms frequently touching the ground; while another figure--robed
and tiaraed--seemed to progress in an almost hopping fashion. I judged this party to be the one I had
seen in the Gilman's courtyard--the one, therefore, most closely on my trail. As some of the figures
turned to look in my direction I was transfixed with fright, yet managed to preserve the casual,
shambling gait I had assumed. To this day I do not know whether they saw me or not. If they did, my
stratagem must have deceived them, for they passed on across the moonlit space without varying
their course--meanwhile croaking and jabbering in some hateful guttural patois I could not identify.
Once more in shadow, I resumed my former dog-trot past the leaning and decrepit houses that
stared blankly into the night. Having crossed to the western sidewalk I rounded the nearest corner
into Bates Street where I kept close to the buildings on the southern side. I passed two houses
shewing signs of habitation, one of which had faint lights in upper rooms, yet met with no obstacle.
As I turned into Adams Street I felt measurably safer, but received a shook when a man reeled out of
a black doorway directly in front of me. He proved, however, too hopelessly drunk to be a menace;
so that I reached the dismal ruins of the Bank Street warehouses in safety.
No one was stirring in that dead street beside the river-gorge, and the roar of the waterfalls quite
drowned my foot steps. It was a long dog-trot to the ruined station, and the great brick warehouse
walls around me seemed somehow more terrifying than the fronts of private houses. At last I saw the
ancient arcaded station--or what was left of it--and made directly for the tracks that started from its
farther end.
The rails were rusty but mainly intact, and not more than half the ties had rotted away. Walking or
running on such a surface was very difficult; but I did my best, and on the whole made very fair time.
For some distance the line kept on along the gorge's brink, but at length I reached the long covered
bridge where it crossed the chasm at a dizzying height. The condition of this bridge would determine
my next step. If humanly possible, I would use it; if not, I would have to risk more street wandering
and take the nearest intact highway bridge.
The vast, barnlike length of the old bridge gleamed spectrally in the moonlight, and I saw that the
ties were safe for at least a few feet within. Entering, I began to use my flashlight, and was almost
knocked down by the cloud of bats that flapped past me. About half-way across there was a perilous
gap in the ties which I feared for a moment would halt me; but in the end I risked a desperate jump
which fortunately succeeded.
I was glad to see the moonlight again when I emerged from that macabre tunnel. The old tracks
crossed River Street at grade, and at once veered off into a region increasingly rural and with less
and less of Innsmouth's abhorrent fishy odour. Here the dense growth of weeds and briers hindered
me and cruelly tore at my clothes, but I was none the less glad that they were there to give me
concealment in case of peril. I knew that much of my route must be visible from the Rowley road.
The marshy region began very abruptly, with the single track on a low, grassy embankment where
the weedy growth was somewhat thinner. Then came a sort of island of higher ground, where the
line passed through a shallow open cut choked with bushes and brambles. I was very glad of this
partial shelter, since at this point the Rowley road was uncomfortably near according to my window
view. At the end of the cut it would cross the track and swerve off to a safer distance; but meanwhile
I must be exceedingly careful. I was by this time thankfully certain that the railway itself was not
patrolled.
Just before entering the cut I glanced behind me, but saw no pursuer. The ancient spires and roofs
of decaying Innsmouth gleamed lovely and ethereal in the magic yellow moonlight, and I thought of
how they must have looked in the old days before the shadow fell. Then, as my gaze circled inland
from the town, something less tranquil arrested my notice and held me immobile for a second.
What I saw--or fancied I saw--was a disturbing suggestion of undulant motion far to the south; a
suggestion which made me conclude that a very large horde must be pouring out of the city along the
level Ipswich road. The distance was great and I could distinguish nothing in detail; but I did not at all
like the look of that moving column. It undulated too much, and glistened too brightly in the rays of
the now westering moon. There was a suggestion of sound, too, though the wind was blowing the
other way--a suggestion of bestial scraping and bellowing even worse than the muttering of the
parties I had lately overheard.
All sorts of unpleasant conjectures crossed my mind. I thought of those very extreme Innsmouth
types said to be hidden in crumbling, centuried warrens near the waterfront; I thought, too, of those
nameless swimmers I had seen. Counting the parties so far glimpsed, as well as those presumably
covering other roads, the number of my pursuers must be strangely large for a town as depopulated
as Innsmouth.
Whence could come the dense personnel of such a column as I now beheld? Did those ancient,
unplumbed warrens teem with a twisted, uncatalogued, and unsuspected life? Or had some unseen
ship indeed landed a legion of unknown outsiders on that hellish reef? Who were they? Why were
they here? And if such a column of them was scouring the Ipswich road, would the patrols on the
other roads be likewise augmented?
I had entered the brush-grown cut and was struggling along at a very slow pace when that
damnable fishy odour again waxed dominant. Had the wind suddenly changed eastward, so that it blew
in from the sea and over the town? It must have, I concluded, since I now began to hear shocking
guttural murmurs from that hitherto silent direction. There was another sound, too--a kind of
wholesale, colossal flopping or pattering which somehow called up images of the most detestable
sort. It made me think illogically of that unpleasantly undulating column on the far-off Ipswich road.
And then both stench and sounds grew stronger, so that I paused shivering and grateful for the
cut's protection. It was here, I recalled, that the Rowley road drew so close to the old railway before
crossing westward and diverging. Something was coming along that road, and I must lie low till its
passage and vanishment in the distance. Thank heaven these creatures employed no dogs for tracking-
-though perhaps that would have been impossible amidst the omnipresent regional odour. Crouched
in the bushes of that sandy cleft I felt reasonably safe, even though I knew the searchers would have
to cross the track in front of me not much more than a hundred yards away. I would be able to see
them, but they could not, except by a malign miracle, see me.
All at once I began dreading to look at them as they passed. I saw the close moonlit space where
they would surge by, and had curious thoughts about the irredeemable pollution of that space. They
would perhaps be the worst of all Innsmouth types--something one would not care to remember.
The stench waxed overpowering, and the noises swelled to a bestial babel of croaking, baying
and barking without the least suggestion of human speech. Were these indeed the voices of my
pursuers? Did they have dogs after all? So far I had seen none of the lower animals in Innsmouth.
That flopping or pattering was monstrous--I could not look upon the degenerate creatures
responsible for it. I would keep my eyes shut till the sound receded toward the west. The horde was
very close now--air foul with their hoarse snarlings, and the ground almost shaking with their alien-
rhythmed footfalls. My breath nearly ceased to come, and I put every ounce of will-power into the
task of holding my eyelids down.
I am not even yet willing to say whether what followed was a hideous actuality or only a
nightmare hallucination. The later action of the government, after my frantic appeals, would tend to
confirm it as a monstrous truth; but could not an hallucination have been repeated under the quasi-
hypnotic spell of that ancient, haunted, and shadowed town? Such places have strange properties, and
the legacy of insane legend might well have acted on more than one human imagination amidst those
dead, stench-cursed streets and huddles of rotting roofs and crumbling steeples. Is it not possible that
the germ of an actual contagious madness lurks in the depths of that shadow over Innsmouth? Who
can be sure of reality after hearing things like the tale of old Zadok Allen? The government men
never found poor Zadok, and have no conjectures to make as to what became of him. Where does
madness leave off and reality begin? Is it possible that even my latest fear is sheer delusion?
But I must try to tell what I thought I saw that night under the mocking yellow moon--saw surging
and hopping down the Rowley road in plain sight in front of me as I crouched among the wild
brambles of that desolate railway cut. Of course my resolution to keep my eyes shut had failed. It
was foredoomed to failure--for who could crouch blindly while a legion of croaking, baying entities
of unknown source flopped noisomely past, scarcely more than a hundred yards away?
I thought I was prepared for the worst, and I really ought to have been prepared considering what
I had seen before.
My other pursuers had been accursedly abnormal--so should I not have been ready to face a
strengthening of the abnormal element; to look upon forms in which there was no mixture of the
normal at all? I did not open my eyes until the raucous clamour came loudly from a point obviously
straight ahead. Then I knew that a long section of them must be plainly in sight where the sides of the
cut flattened out and the road crossed the track--and I could no longer keep myself from sampling
whatever 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 demoniac, 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--urging inhumanly
through the spectral moonlight in a grotesque, malignant saraband of fantastic nightmare. And some
of them had tall tiaras of that nameless whitish-gold metal...and some were strangely robed...and one,
who led the way, was clad in a ghoulishly humped black coat and striped trousers, and had a man's
felt hat perched on the shapeless thing that answered for a head.
I think their predominant colour was a greyish-green, though they had white bellies. They were
mostly shiny and slippery, but the ridges of their backs were scaly. Their forms vaguely suggested
the anthropoid, while their heads were the heads of fish, with prodigious bulging eyes that never
closed. At the sides of their necks were palpitating gills, and their long paws were webbed. They
hopped irregularly, sometimes on two legs and sometimes on four. I was somehow glad that they had
no more than four limbs. Their croaking, baying voices, clearly 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 the evil tiara at Newburyport still fresh? They were the blasphemous
fish-frogs of the nameless design--living and horrible--and as I saw them I knew also of what that
humped, tiaraed priest in the black church basement had fearsomely reminded me. Their number was
past guessing. It seemed to me that there were limitless swarms of them and certainly my momentary
glimpse could have shewn only the least fraction. In another instant everything was blotted out by a
merciful fit of fainting; the first I had ever had.
V
It was a gentle daylight rain that awaked me front my stupor in the brush-grown railway cut, and
when I staggered out to the roadway ahead I saw no trace of any prints in the fresh mud. The fishy
odour, too, was gone, Innsmouth's ruined roofs and toppling steeples loomed up greyly toward the
southeast, but not a living creature did I spy in all the desolate salt marshes around. My watch was
still going, and told me that the hour was past noon.
The reality of what I had been through was highly uncertain in my mind, but I felt that something
hideous lay in the background. I must get away from evil-shadowed Innsmouth--and accordingly I
began to test my cramped, wearied powers of locomotion. Despite weakness hunger, horror, and
bewilderment I found myself after a time able to walk; so started slowly along the muddy road to
Rowley. Before evening I was in village, getting a meal and providing myself with presentable
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 jewelry said to be in the MiskatonicUniversityMuseum. 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. B. Lapham Peabody--was
very courteous about assisting me, and expressed unusual interest when I told him I was a grandson
of Eliza Orne of Arkham, who was born in 1867 and had married James Williamson of Ohio at the
age of seventeen.
It seemed that a 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 the 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 a
connected chart I could construct.
I did not exactly relish this task, for the atmosphere of the Williamson home had always
depressed me. There was a strain of morbidity there, and my mother had never encouraged my
visiting her parents as a child, although she always welcomed her father when he came to Toledo.
My Arkham-born grandmother had seemed strange and almost terrifying to me, and I do not think I
grieved when she disappeared. I was eight years old then, and it was said that she had wandered off
in grief after the suicide of my Uncle Douglas, her eldest son. He had shot himself after a trip to
New England--the same trip, no doubt, which had caused him to be recalled at the Arkham Historical
Society.
This uncle had resembled her, and I had never liked him either. Something about the staring,
unwinking expression of both of them had given me a vague, unaccountable uneasiness. My mother
and Uncle Walter had not looked like that. They were like their father, though poor little cousin
Lawrence--Walter's son--had been almost perfect duplicate of his grandmother before his condition
took him to the permanent seclusion of a sanitarium at Canton. I had not seen him in four years, but my
uncle once implied that his state, both mental and physical, was very bad. This worry had probably
been a major cause of his mother's death two years before.
My grandfather and his widowed son Walter now comprised the Cleveland household, but the
memory of older times hung thickly over it. I still disliked the place, and tried to get my researches
done as quickly as possible. Williamson records and traditions were supplied in abundance by my
grandfather; though for Orne material I had to depend on my uncle Walter, who put at my disposal the
contents of all his files, including notes, letters, cuttings, heirlooms, photographs, and miniatures.
It was in going over the letters and pictures on the Orne side that I began to acquire a kind of
terror of my own ancestry. As I have said, my grandmother and Uncle Douglas had always disturbed
me. Now, years after their passing, I gazed at their pictured faces with a measurably heightened
feeling of repulsion and alienation. I could not at first understand the change, but gradually a horrible
sort of comparison began to obtrude itself on my unconscious mind despite the steady refusal of my
consciousness to admit even the least suspicion of it. It was clear that the typical expression of these
faces now suggested something it had not suggested before--something which would bring stark
panic if too openly thought of.
But the worst shock came when my uncle shewed me the Orne jewellery in a downtown safe
deposit vault. Some of the items were delicate and inspiring enough, but there was one box of
strange old pieces descended from my mysterious great-grandmother which my uncle was almost
reluctant to produce. They were, he said, of very grotesque and almost repulsive design, and had
never to his knowledge been publicly worn; though my grandmother used to enjoy looking at them.
Vague legends of bad luck clustered around them, and my great-grandmother's French governess had
said they ought not to be worn in New England, though it would be quite safe to wear them in
Europe.
As my uncle began slowly and grudgingly to unwrap the things he urged me not to be shocked by
the strangeness and frequent hideousness of the designs. Artists and archaeologists who had seen
them pronounced their workmanship superlatively and exotically exquisite, though no one seemed
able to define their exact material or assign them to any specific art tradition. There were two
armlets, a tiara, and a kind of pectoral; the latter having in high relief certain figures of almost
unbearable extravagance.
During this description I had kept a tight rein on my emotions, but my face must have betrayed my
mounting fears. My uncle looked concerned, and paused in his unwrapping to study my countenance. I
motioned to him to continue, which he did with renewed signs of reluctance. He seemed to expect
some demonstration when the first piece--the tiara--became visible, but I doubt if he expected quite
what actually happened. I did not expect it, either, for I thought I was thoroughly forewarned
regarding what the jewellery would turn out to be. What I did was to faint silently away, just as I had
done in that brier-choked railway cut a year before.
From that day on my life has been a nightmare of brooding and apprehension nor do I know how
much is hideous truth and how much madness. My great-grandmother had been a Marsh of unknown
source whose husband 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 trick? What was it the ancient toper had
muttered about the line of my eyes to Captain Obed's? In Arkham, too, the curator had told me I had
the true Marsh eyes. Was Obed Marsh my own great-great-grandfather? Who--or what--then, was my
great-great-grandmother? But perhaps this was all madness. Those whitish-gold ornaments might
easily have been bought from some Innsmouth sailor by the father of my great-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 splendors await me below, and I shall seek them
soon. Ia-R'lyehl Cihuiha flgagnl id Ia! No, I shall not shoot myself--I cannot be made to shoot
myself!
I shall plan my cousin's escape from that Canton mad-house, and together we shall go to marvel-
shadowed Innsmouth. We shall swim out to that brooding reef in the sea and dive down through black
abysses to Cyclopean and many-columned Y'ha-nthlei, and in that lair of the Deep Ones we shall
dwell amidst wonder and glory for ever.

THE SHADOW OUT OF TIME
I
After twenty-two years of nightmare and terror, saved only by a desperate conviction of the
mythical source of certain impressions, I am unwilling to vouch for the truth of that which I think I
found in Western Australia on the night of 17-18 July 1935. There is reason to hope that my
experience was wholly or partly an hallucination--for which, indeed, abundant causes existed. And
yet, its realism was so hideous that I sometimes find hope impossible.
If the thing did happen, then man must be prepared to accept notions of the cosmos, and of his own
place in the seething vortex of time, whose merest mention is paralysing. He must, too, be placed on
guard against a specific, lurking peril which, though it will never engulf the whole race, may impose
monstrous and unguessable horrors upon certain venturesome members of it.
It is for this latter reason that I urge, with all the force of my being, final abandonment of all the
attempts at unearthing those fragments of unknown, primordial masonry which my expedition set out
to investigate.
Assuming that I was sane and awake, my experience on that night was such as has befallen no man
before. It was, moreover, a frightful confirmation of all I had sought to dismiss as myth and dream.
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 definite statement--not only for the sake of my own
mental balance, but to warn such others as may read it seriously.
These pages--much in whose earlier parts will be familiar to close readers of the general and
scientific press--are written in the cabin of the ship that is bringing me home. I shall give them to my
son, Professor Wingate Peaslee of MiskatonicUniversity--the only member of my family who stuck
to me after my queer amnesia of long ago, and the man best informed on the inner facts of my case. Of
all living persons, he is least likely to ridicule what I shall tell of that fateful night.
I did not enlighten him orally before sailing, because I think he had better have the revelation in
written form. Reading and re-reading at leisure will leave with him a more convincing picture than
my confused tongue could hope to convey.
He can do anything that he thinks best with this account--showing it, with suitable comment, in any
quarters where it will be likely to accomplish good. It is for the sake of such readers as are
unfamiliar with the earlier phases of my case that I am prefacing the revelation itself with a fairly
ample summary of its background.
My name is Nathaniel Wingate Peaslee, and those who recall the newspaper tales of a generation
back--or the letters and articles in psychological journals six or seven years ago--will know who and
what I am. The press was filled with the details of my strange amnesia in 1908-13, and much was
made of the traditions of horror, madness, and witchcraft which lurked behind the ancient
Massachusetts town then and now forming my place of residence. Yet I would have it known that
there is nothing whatever of the mad or sinister in my heredity and early life. This is a highly
important fact in view of the shadow which fell so suddenly upon me from outside sources.
It may be that centuries of dark brooding had given to crumbling, whisper-haunted Arkham a
peculiar vulnerability as regards such shadows--though even this seems doubtful in the light of
those other cases which I later came to study. But the chief point is that my own ancestry and
background are altogether normal. What came, came from somewhere else--where I even now
hesitate to assert in plain words.
I am the son of Jonathan and Hannah (Wingate) Peaslee, both of wholesome old Haverhill stock. I
was born and reared in Haverhill--at the old homestead in Boardman Street near Golden Hill--and did
not go to Arkham till I entered MiskatonicUniversity as instructor of political economy in 1895.
For thirteen years more my life ran smoothly and happily. I married Alice Keezar of Haverhill in
1896, and my three children, Robert, Wingate and Hannah were born in 1898, 1900, and 1903,
respectively. In 1898 I became an associate professor, and in 1902 a full professor. At no time had I
the least interest in either occultism or abnormal psychology.
It was on Thursday, 14 May 1908, that the queer amnesia came. The thing was quite sudden,
though later I realized that certain brief, glimmering visions of several hours previous--chaotic
visions which disturbed me greatly because they were so unprecedented--must have formed
premonitory symptoms. My head was aching, and I had a singular feeling--altogether new to me--that
some one else was trying to get possession of my thoughts.
The collapse occurred about 10.20 A.M., while I was conducting a class in Political Economy
VI--history and present tendencies of economics--for juniors and a few sophomores. I began to see
strange shapes before my eyes, and to feel that I was in a grotesque room other than the classroom.
My thoughts and speech wandered from my subject, and the students saw that something was
gravely amiss. Then I slumped down, unconscious, in my chair, in a stupor from which no one could
arouse me. Nor did my rightful faculties again look out upon the daylight of our normal world for
five years, four months, and thirteen days.
It is, of course, from others that I have learned what followed. I showed no sign of
consciousness for sixteen and a half hours though removed to my home at 27 Crane Street, and given
the best of medical attention.
At 3 A.M. May 15 my eyes opened and began to speak and my family were thoroughly frightened
by the trend of my expression and language. It was clear that I had no remembrance of my identity and
my past, though for some reason seemed anxious to conceal his lack of knowledge. My eyes glazed
strangely at the persons around me, and the flections of my facial muscles were altogether unfamiliar.
Even my speech seemed awkward and foreign. I used my vocal organs clumsily and gropingly,
and my diction had a curiously stilted quality, as if I had laboriously learned the English language
from books. The pronunciation was barbarously alien, whilst the idiom seemed to include both
scraps of curious archaism and expressions of a wholly incomprehensible cast.
Of the latter, one in particular was very potently--even terrifiedly--recalled by the youngest of
the physicians twenty years afterward. For at that late period such a phrase began to have an actual
currency--first in England and then in the United States--and though of much complexity and
indisputable newness, it reproduced in every least particular the mystifying words of the strange
Arkham patient of 1908.
Physical strength returned at once, although I required an odd amount of re-education in the use
of my hands, legs, and bodily apparatus in general. Because of this and other handicaps inherent in the
mnemonic lapse, I was for some time kept under strict medical care.
When I saw that my attempts to conceal the lapse had failed, I admitted it openly, and became
eager for information of all sorts. Indeed, it seemed to the doctors that I lost interest in my proper
personality as soon as I found the case of amnesia accepted as a natural thing.
They noticed that my chief efforts were to master certain points in history, science, art, language,
and folklore--some of them tremendously abstruse, and some childishly simple--which remained,
very oddly in many cases, outside my consciousness.
At the same time they noticed that I had an inexplicable command of many almost unknown sorts of
knowledge--a command which I seemed to wish to hide rather than display. I would inadvertently
refer, with casual assurance, to specific events in dim ages outside of the range of accepted history-
-passing off such references as a jest when I saw the surprise they created. And I had a way of
speaking of the future which two or three times caused actual fright.
These uncanny flashes soon ceased to appear, though some observers laid their vanishment more
to a certain furtive caution on my part than to any waning of the strange knowledge behind them.
Indeed, I seemed anomalously avid to absorb the speech, customs, and perspectives of the age around
me; as if I were a studious traveller from a far, foreign land.
As soon as permitted, I haunted the college library at all hours; and shortly began to arrange for
those odd travels, and special courses at American and European Universities, which evoked so
much comment during the next few years.
I did not at any time suffer from a lack of learned contacts, for my case had a mild celebrity among
the psychologists of the period. I was lectured upon as a typical example of secondary personality--
even though I seemed to puzzle the lecturers now and then with some bizarre symptoms or some
queer trace of carefully veiled mockery.
Of real friendliness, however, I encountered little. Something in my aspect and speech seemed to
excite vague fears and aversions in every one I met, as if I were a being infinitely removed from all
that is normal and healthful. This idea of a black, hidden horror connected with incalculable gulfs of
some sort of distance was oddly widespread and persistent.
My own family formed no exception. From the moment of my strange waking my wife had
regarded me with extreme horror and loathing, vowing that I was some utter alien usurping the body
of her husband. In 1910 she obtained a legal divorce, nor would she ever consent to see me even
after my return to normality in 1913. These feelings were shared by my elder son and my small
daughter, neither of whom I have ever seen since.
Only my second son, Wingate, seemed able to conquer the terror and repulsion which my change
aroused. He indeed felt that I was a stranger, but though only eight years old held fast to a faith that
my proper self would return. When it did return he sought me out, and the courts gave me his
custody. In succeeding years he helped me with the studies to which I was driven, and today, at
thirty-five, he is a professor of psychology at Miskatonic.
But I do not wonder at the horror caused--for certainly, the mind, voice, and facial expression of
the being that awakened on l5 May 1908, were not those of Nathaniel Wingate Peastee.
I will not attempt to tell much of my life from 1908 to 1913, since readers may glean I the outward
essentials--as I largely had to do--from files of old newspapers and scientific journals.
I was given charge of my funds, and spent them slowly and on the whole wisely, in travel and in
study at various centres of learning. My travels, however, were singular in the extreme, involving
long visits to remote and desolate places.
In 1909 I spent a month in the Himalayas, and in 1911 roused much attention through a camel trip
into the unknown deserts of Arabia. What happened on those journeys I have never been able to learn.
During the summer of l9l2 I chartered a ship and sailed in the Arctic, north of Spitzbergen,
afterward showing signs of disappointment.
Later in that year I spent weeks--alone beyond the limits of previous or subsequent exploration in
the vast limestone cavern systems of western Virginia--black labyrinths so complex that no retracing
of my steps could even be considered.
My sojourns at the universities were marked by abnormally rapid assimilation, as if the secondary
personality had an intelligence enormously superior to my own. I have found, also, that my rate of
reading and solitary study was phenomenal. I could master every detail of a book merely by glancing
over it as fast as I could turn the leaves; while my skill at interpreting complex figures in an instant
was veritably awesome.
At times there appeared almost ugly reports of my power to influence the thoughts and acts of
others, though I seemed to have taken care to minimize displays of this faculty.
Other ugly reports concerned my intimacy with leaders of occultist groups, and scholars
suspected of connection with nameless bands of abhorrent elder-world hierophants. These rumours,
though never proved at the time, were doubtless stimulated by the known tenor of some of my
reading--for the 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 re-opened my long-closed house in Crane
Street. Here I installed a mechanism of the most curious aspect, constructed piecemeal by different
makers of scientific apparatus in Europe and America, and guarded carefully from the sight of any
one intelligent enough to analyse it.
Those who did see it--a workman, a servant, and the new housekeeper--say that it was a queer
mixture of rods, wheels, and mirros, though only about two feet tall, one foot wide, and one foot
thick. The central mirror was circular and convex. All this is borne out by such makers of parts as
can be located.
On the evening of Friday, 26 September, I dismissed the housekeeper and the maid until noon of
the next day. Lights burned in the house till late, and a lean, dark, curiously foreign-looking man
called in an automobile.
It was about one A.M. that the lights were last seen. At 2.15 A.M. a policeman observed the place
in darkness, but the stranger's motor still at the curb. By 4 o'clock the motor was certainly gone.
It was at 6 o'clock that a hesitant, foreign voice on the telephone asked Dr Wilson to call at my
house and bring me out of a peculiar faint. This call--a long-distance one--was later traced to a
public booth in the North Station in Boston, but no sign of the lean foreigner was ever unearthed.
When the doctor reached my house he found me unconscious in the sitting room--in an easy-chair
with a table drawn up before it. On the polished top were scratches showing where some heavy
object had rested. The queer machine was gone, nor was anything afterward heard of it. Undoubtedly
the dark, lean foreigner had taken it away.
In the library grate were abundant ashes, evidently left from the burning of 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 a hypodermic injection it became more regular.
At 11.15 A.M., 27 September, I stirred vigorously, and my hitherto masklike face began to show
signs of expression. Dr Wilson remarked that the expression was not that of my secondary
personality, but seemed much like that of my normal self. About 11.30 I muttered some very curious
syllables--syllables which seemed unrelated to any human speech. I appeared, too, to struggle
against something. Then, just afternoon--the housekeeper and the maid having meanwhile returned--I
began to mutter in English.
"--of the orthodox economists of that period, Jevons typifies the prevailing trend toward
scientific correlation. His attempt to link the commercial cycle of prosperity and depression with the
physical cycle of the solar spots forms perhaps the apex of--"
Nathaniel Wingate Peaslee had come back--a spirit in whose time scale it was still Thursday
morning in 1908, with the economics class gazing up at the battered desk on the platform.
II
My reabsorption into normal life was a painful and difficult process. The loss of over five years
creates more complications than can be imagined, and in my case there were countless matters to be
adjusted.
What I heard of my actions since 1908 astonished and disturbed me, but I tried to view the matter
as philosophically as I could. At last, regaining custody of my second son, Wingate, I settled down
with him in the Crane Street house and endeavoured to resume my teaching--my old professorship
having been kindly offered me by the college.
I began work with the February, 1914, term, and kept at it just a year. By that time I realized how
badly my experience had shaken me. Though perfectly sane--I hoped--and with no flaw in my
original personality, I had not the nervous energy of the old days. Vague dreams and queer ideas
continually haunted me, and when the outbreak of the World War turned my mind to history I found
myself thinking of periods and events in the oddest possible fashion.
My conception of time, my ability to distinguish between consecutiveness and simultaneousness--
seemed subtly disordered so that I formed chimerical notions about living in one age and casting
one's mind all over 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. Certainly the impressions were taking an annoying shape--giving me the persistent notion that
my amnesia had formed some unholy sort of exchange; that the secondary personality had indeed had
had suffered displacement.
Thus I was driven to vague and fright speculations concerning the whereabouts of my true self
during the years that another had held my body. The curious knowledge and strange conduct of my
body's late tenant troubled me more and more as I learned further details from persons, papers, and
magazines.
Queernesses that had baffled others seemed to harmonize terribly with some background of black
knowledge which festered in the chasms of my subconscious. I began to search feverishly for every
scrap of information bearing on the studies and travels of that other one during the dark years.
Not all of my troubles were as semi-abstract as this. There were the dreams--and these seemed to
grow in vividness and concreteness. Knowing how most would regard them, I seldom mentioned them
to anyone but my son or certain trusted psychologists, but eventually I commenced a scientific study
of other cases in order to see how typical or nontypical such visions might be among amnesia
victims.
My results, aided by psychologists, historians, anthropologists, and mental specialists of wide
experience, and by a study that included all records of split personalities from the days of daemonic-
possession legends to the medically realistic present, at first bothered me more than they consoled
me.
I soon found that my dreams had, indeed, no counterpart in the overwhelming bulk of true amnesia
cases. There remained, however, a tiny residue of accounts which for years baffled and shocked me
with their parallelism to my own experience. Some of them were bits of ancient folklore; others
were case histories in the annals of medicine; one or two were anecdotes obscurely buried in
standard histories.
It thus appeared that, while my special kind of affliction was prodigiously rare, instances of it had
occurred at long intervals ever since the beginning of men's annals. Some centuries might contain
one, two, or three cases, others none--or at least none whose record survived.
The essence was always the same--a person of keen thoughtfulness seized a strange secondary
life and leading for a greater or lesser period an utterly alien existence typified at first by vocal and
bodily awkwardness, and later by a wholesale acquisition of scientific, historic, artistic, and
anthropologic knowledge; an acquisition carried on with feverish zest and with a wholly abnormal
absorptive power. Then a sudden return of rightful consciousness, intermittently plagued ever after
with vague unplaceable dreams suggesting fragments of some hideous memory elaborately blotted
out.
And the close resemblance of those nightmares to my own--even in some of the smallest
particulars--left no doubt in my mind of their significantly typical nature. One or two of the cases had
an added ring of faint, blasphemous familiarity, as if I had heard of them before through some cosmic
channel too morbid and frightful to contemplate. In three instances there was specific mention of such
an unknown machine as had been in my house before the second change.
Another thing that worried me during my investigation was the somewhat greater frequency of
cases where a brief, elusive 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 unhuman horrors.
There had been at least three such cases during the past half century--one only fifteen years
before. Had something been groping blindly through time from some unsuspected abyss in Nature?
Were these faint cases monstrous, sinister experiments of a kind and authorship 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 savor of madness, and at times I believed I was indeed going mad. Was
there a special type of delusion afflicting those who had suffered lapses of memory? Conceivably,
the efforts of the subconscious mind to fill up a perplexing blank with pseudo-memories might give
rise to strange imaginative vagaries.
This indeed--though an alternative folklore theory finally seemed to me more plausible--was the
belief of many of the alienists who helped me in my search for parallel cases, and who shared my
puzzlement at the exact resemblances sometimes discovered.
They did not call the condition true insanity, but classed it rather among neurotic disorders. My
course in trying to track down and analyze it, instead of 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 megathic type, with lines of convex-topped blocks fitting the concave-
bottomed courses which rested upon them.
There were no chairs, but the tops of the vast pedestals were littered with books, papers, and
what seemed to be writing materials--oddly figured jars of a purplish metal, and rods with stained
tips. Tall as the pedestals were, I seemed at times able to view them from above. On some of them
were great globes of luminous crystal serving as lamps, and inexplicable machines formed of
vitreous tubes and metal rods.
The windows were glazed, and latticed with stout-looking bars. Though I dared not approach and
peer out them, I could see from where I was 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 in 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 200 feet wide. They differed greatly in aspect, but few were less than 500 feet square or
a thousand feet high. Many seemed so limitless that they must have had a frontage of several thousand
feet, while some shot up to mountainous altitudes in the grey, steamy heavens.
They seemed to be mainly of stone or concrete, and most of them embodied the oddly curvilinear
type of masonry noticeable in the building that held me. Roofs were flat and garden-covered, and
tended to have scalloped parapets. Sometimes there were terraces and higher levels, and wide,
cleared spaces amidst the gardens. The great roads held hints of motion, but in the earlier visions I
could not resolve this impression into details.
In certain places I beheld enormous dark cylindrical towers which climbed far above any of the
other structures. These appeared to be of a totally unique nature and shewed signs of prodigious age
and dilapidation. They were built of a bizarre type of square-cut basalt masonry, and tapered slightly
toward their rounded tops. Nowhere in any of them could the least traces of windows or other
apertures save huge doors be found. I noticed also some lower 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 unrecognizable, blooming in geometrical beds and at large
among the greenery.
In a few of the terrace and roof-top gardens were larger and more blossoms of most offensive
contours and seeming to suggest artificial breeding. Fungi of inconceivable size, outlines, and
colours speckled the scene in patterns bespeaking some unknown but well-established horticultural
tradition. In the larger gardens on the ground there seemed to be some attempt to preserve the
irregularities of Nature, but on the roofs there was more selectiveness, and more evidences of the
topiary art.
The 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 recognize, I
felt I must be in the earth's southern hemisphere, near the Tropic of Capricorn.
The far horizon was always steamy and indistinct, but I could see that great jungles of unknown
tree-ferns, calamites, lepidodendra, and sigillaria lay outside the city, their fantastic frondage waving
mockingly in the shifting vapours. Now and then there would be suggestions of motion in the sky, but
these my early visions never resolved.
By the autumn of 1914 I began to have infrequent dreams of strange floatings over the city and
through the regions around it. I saw interminable roads through forests of fearsome growths with
mottled, fluted, and banded trunks, and past other cities as strange as the one which persistently
haunted me.
I saw monstrous constructions of black or iridescent tone in glades and clearings where perpetual
twilight reigned, and traversed long causeways over swamps so dark that I could tell but little of
their moist, towering vegetation.
Once I saw an area of countless miles strewn with age-blasted basaltic ruins whose architecture
had been like that of the few windowless, round-topped towers in the haunting city.
And once I saw the sea--a boundless, steamy expanse beyond the colossal stone piers of an
enormous town of domes and arches. Great shapeless 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, and sense of a loathsome exchange with my secondary
personality of 1908-13, and, considerably later, the inexplicable loathing of my own person.
As certain definite details began to enter the dreams, their horror increased a thousandfold--until
by October, 1915, 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 savored of madness and blasphemy. Worst of all, my own pseudo-memory was aroused to
milder dreams and hints of coming revelations. And yet most doctors deemed my course, on 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 unhuman.
These markings were mostly in the respective languages of the various books, all of which the
writer seemed to know with equal, though obviously academic, facility. One note appended to von
Junzt's Unaussprechlichen Kulten, however, was alarmingly otherwise. It consisted of certain
curvilinear hieroglyphs in the same ink as that of the German corrections, but following no
recognized human pattern. And these hieroglyphs were closely and unmistakably 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 Hindu tales involving stupefying gulfs of time and forming part of the lore
of modern theosopists.
Primal myth and modern delusion joined in their assumption that mankind is only one--perhaps the
least--of the highly evolved and dominant races of this planet's long and largely unknown career.
Things of inconceivable shape, they implied, had reared towers to the sky and delved into every
secret of Nature before the first amphibian forbear of man had crawled out of the hot sea 300 million
years ago.
Some had come down from the stars; a few were as old as the cosmos itself, others had arisen
swiftly from terrene germs as far behind the first germs of our life-cycle as those germs are behind
ourselves. Spans of thousands of millions of years, and linkages to other galaxies and universes,
were freely spoken of. Indeed, there was no such thing as time in its humanly accepted sense.
But most of the tales and impressions concerned a relatively late race, of a queer and intricate
shape, resembling no life-form known to science, which had lived till only fifty million years before
the advent of man. This, they indicated, was the greatest race of all because it alone had conquered
the secret of time.
It had learned all things that ever were known or ever would be known on the earth, through the
power of its keener minds to project themselves into the past and future, even through gulfs of
millions of years, and study the lore of every age. From the accomplishments of this race arose all
legends of prophets, including those in human mythology.
In its vast libraries were volumes of texts and pictures holding the whole of earth's annals--
histories and descriptions of every species that had ever been or that ever would be, with full
records of their arts, their achievements, their languages, and their psychologies.
With this aeon-embracing knowledge, the Great Race chose from every era and life-form such
thoughts, arts, and processes as might suit its own nature and situation. Knowledge of the past,
secured through a kind of mind-casting outside the recognized senses, was harder to glean than
knowledge of the future.
In the latter case the course was easier and more material. With suitable mechanical aid a mind
would project itself forward in time, feeling its dim, extra-sensory way till it approached the desired
period. Then, after preliminary trials, it would seize on the best discoverable representative of the
highest of that period's life-forms. It would enter the organism's brain and set up therein its own
vibrations, while the displaced mind would strike back to the period of the displacer, remaining in the
latter's body till a reverse process was set up.
The projected mind, in the body of the organism of the future, would then pose as a member of
the race whose outward form it wore, learning as quickly as possible all that could be learned of the
chosen age and its massed information and techniques.
Meanwhile the displaced mind, thrown back to the displacer's age and body, would be carefully
guarded. It would be kept from harming the body it occupied, and would be drained of all its
knowledge by trained questioners. Often it could be questioned in its own language, when previous
quests into the future had brought back records of that language.
If the mind came from a body whose language the Great Race could not physically reproduce,
clever machines would be made, on which the alien speech could be played as on a musical
instrument.
The Great Race's members were immense rugose cones ten feet high, and with head and other
organs attached to foot-thick, distensible limbs spreading from the apexes. They spoke by the
clicking or scraping of huge paws or claws attached to the end of two of their four limbs, and walked
by the expansion and contraction of a viscous layer attached to their vast, ten-foot bases.
When the captive mind's amazement and resentment had worn off, and when--assuming that it came
from a body vastly different from the Great Race's--it had lost its horror at its unfamiliar temporary
form, it was permitted to study its new environment and experience a wonder and wisdom
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 boatlike atomic-engined vehicles which traversed
the great roads, and to delve freely into the libraries containing the records of the planet's past and
future.
This reconciled many captive minds to their lot; since none were other than keen, and to such
minds the unveiling of hidden mysteries of earth-closed chapters of inconceivable pasts and dizzying
vortices of future time which include the years ahead of their own natural ages-forms always,
despite the abysmal horrors often unveiled, the supreme experience of life.
Now and then certain captives were permitted to meet other captive minds seized from the future-
-to exchange thoughts with consciousnesses living a hundred or a thousand or a million years before
or after their own ages. And all were urged to write copiously in their own languages of themselves
and their respective periods; such documents to be filed in the great central archives.
It may be added that there was one special type of captive whose privileges were far greater than
those of the majority. These were the dying permanent exiles, whose bodies in the future had been
seized by keen-minded members of the Great Race who, faced with death, sought to escape mental
extinction.
Such melancholy exiles were not as common as might be expected, since the longevity of the
Great Race lessened its love of life--especially among those superior minds capable of projection.
From cases of the permanent projection of elder minds arose many of those lasting changes of
personality noticed in later history--including mankind's.
As for the ordinary cases of exploration--when the displacing mind had learned what it wished in
the future, it would build an apparatus like that which had started its flight and reverse the process of
projection. Once more it would be in its own body in its own age, while the lately captive mind
would return to that body of the future to which it properly belonged.
Only when one or the other of the bodies had died during the exchange was this restoration
impossible. In such cases, of course, the exploring mind had--like those of the death-escapers--to
live out an alien-bodied life in the future; or else the captive mind--like the dying permanent exiles--
had to end its days in the form and past age of the Great Race.
This fate was least horrible when the captive mind was also of the Great Race--a not infrequent
occurrence, since in all its periods that race was intensely concerned with its own future. The
number of dying permanent exiles of the Great Race was very slight--largely because of the
tremendous penalties attached to displacements of future Great Race minds by the moribund.
Through projection, arrangements were made to inflict these penalties on the offending minds in
their new future bodies--and sometimes forced rexchanges were effected.
Complex cases of the displacement of exploring or already captive minds by minds in various
regions of the past had been known and carefully rectified. In every age since the discovery of mind
projection, a minute but well-recognised element of the population consisted of Great Race minds
from past ages, sojourning for a longer or shorter while.
When a captive mind of alien origin was returned to its own body in the future, it was purged by
an intricate mechanical hypnosis of all it had learned in the Great Race's age--this because of certain
troublesome consequences inherent in the general carrying forward of knowledge in large quantities.
The few existing instances of clear transmission had caused, and would cause at known future
times, great disasters. And it was largely in consequence of two cases of this kind--said the old
myths--that mankind had learned what it had concerning the Great Race.
Of all things surviving physically and directly from that aeon-distant world, there remained only
certain ruins of great stones in far places and under the sea, and parts of the text of the frightful
Pnakotic Manuscripts.
Thus the returning mind reached its own age with only the faintest and most fragmentary visions
of what it had undergone since its seizure. All memories that could be eradicated were eradicated, so
that in most cases only a dream-shadowed blank stretched back to the time of the first exchange.
Some minds recalled more than others, and the chance joining of memories had at rare times brought
hints of the forbidden past to future ages.
There probably never was a time when groups or cults did not secretly cherish certain of these
hints. In the Necronomicon the presence of such a cult among human beings was suggested--a cult
that sometimes gave aid to minds voyaging down the aeons from the days of the Great Race.
And, meanwhile, the Great Race itself waxed well-nigh omniscient, and turned to the task of
setting up exchanges with the minds of other planets, and of exploring their pasts and futures. It
sought likewise to fathom the past years and origin of that black, aeon-dead orb in far space whence
its own mental heritage had come--for the mind of the Great Race was older than its bodily form.
The beings of a dying elder world, wise with the ultimate secrets, had looked ahead for a new
world and species wherein they might have long life; and had sent their minds en masse into that
future race best adapted to house them--the cone-shaped beings that peopled our earth a billion years
ago.
Thus the Great Race came to be, while the myriad minds sent backward were left to die in the
horror of strange shapes. Later the race would again face death, yet would live through another
forward migration of its best minds into the bodies of others who had a longer physical span ahead
of them.
Such was the background of intertwined legend and hallucination. When, around 1920, 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 outr dreams which crowded upon me so
thickly and vividly. Such a record, I argued, was of genuine value as a psychological document. The
glimpses still seemed damnably like memories, though I fought off this impression with a goodly
measure of success.
In writing, I treated the phantasmata as things seen; but at all other times I brushed them aside like
any gossamer illusions of the night. I had never mentioned such matters in common conversation;
though reports of them, filtering out as such things will, had aroused sundry rumors regarding my
mental health. It is amusing to reflect that these rumors were confined wholly to laymen, without a
single champion among physicians or psychologists.
Of my visions after 1914 I will here mention only a few, since fuller accounts and records are at
the disposal of the serious student. It is evident that with time the curious inhibitions somewhat
waned, for the scope of my visions vastly increased. They have never, though, become other than
disjointed fragments seemingly without clear motivation.
Within the dreams I seemed gradually to acquire a greater and greater freedom of wandering. I
floated through many strange buildings of stone, going from one to the other along mammoth
underground passages which seemed to form the common avenues of transit. Sometimes I
encountered those gigantic sealed trap-doors in the lowest level, around which such an aura of fear
and forbiddenness clung.
I saw tremendously tessellated pools, and rooms of curious and inexplicable utensils of myriad
sorts. Then there were colossal caverns of intricate machinery whose outlines and purpose were
wholly strange to me, and whose sound manifested itself only after many years of dreaming. I may
here remark that sight and sound are the only senses I have ever exercised in the visionary world.
The real horror began in May, 1915, when I first saw the living things. This was before my
studies had taught me what, in view of the myths and case histories, to expect. As mental barriers
wore down, I beheld great masses of thin vapour in various parts of the building and in the streets
below.
These steadily grew more solid and distinct, till at last I could trace their monstrous outlines with
uncomfortable ease. They seemed to be enormous, iridescent cones, about ten feet high and ten feet
wide at the base, and made up of some ridgy, scaly, semi-elastic matter. From their apexes projected
four flexible, cylindrical members, each a foot thick, and of a ridgy substance like that of the cones
themselves.
These members were sometimes contracted almost to nothing, and sometimes extended to any
distance up to about ten feet. Terminating two of them were enormous claws or nippers. At the end of
a third were four red, trumpetlike appendages. The fourth terminated in an irregular yellowish globe
some two feet in diameter and having three great dark eyes ranged along its central circumference.
Surmounting this head were four slender grey stalks bearing flower-like appendages, whilst from
its nether side dangled eight greenish antennae or tentacles. The great base of the central cone was
fringed with a rubbery, grey substance which moved the whole entity through expansion and
contraction.
Their actions, though harmless, horrified me even more than their appearance--for it is not
wholesome to watch monstrous objects doing what one had known only human beings to do. These
objects moved intelligently about the great rooms, getting books from the shelves and taking them to
the great tables, or vice versa, and sometimes writing diligently with a peculiar rod gripped in the
greenish head tentacles. The huge nippers were used in carrying books and in conversation-speech
consisting of a kind of clicking and scraping.
The objects had no clothing, but wore satchels or knapsacks suspended from the top of the
conical trunk. They commonly carried their head and its supporting member at the level of the cone
top, although it was frequently raised or lowered.
The other three great members tended to rest downward at the sides of the cone, contracted to
about five feet each when not in use. From their rate of reading, writing, and operating their
machines--those on the tables seemed somehow connected with thought--I concluded that their
intelligence was enormously greater than man's.
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.
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 5,000 A.D.; with that of a general of the greatheaded brown people who held South Africa in
50,000 B.C.; with that of a twelfth-century Florentine monk named Bartolomeo Corsi; with that of a
king of Lomar who had ruled that terrible polar land one hundred thousand years before the squat,
yellow Inutos came from the west to engulf it.
I talked with the mind of Nug-Soth, a magician of the dark conquerors of 16,000 A.D.; with that of
a Roman named Titus Sempronius Blaesus, who had been a quaestor in Sulla's time; with that of
Khephnes, an Egyptian of the 14th Dynasty, who told me the hideous secret of Nyarlathotep, with that
of a priest of Atlantis' middle kingdom; with that of a Suffolk gentleman of Cromwell's day, James
Woodville; with that of a court astronomer of pre-Inca Peru; with that of the Australian physicist
Nevil Kingston-Brown, who will die in 2,518 A.D.; with that of an archimage of vanished Yhe in the
Pacific; with that of Theodotides, a Greco-Bactrian official of 200 B.C.; with that of an aged
Frenchman of Louis XIII's time named Pierre-Louis Montagny; with that of Crom-Ya, a Cimmerian
chieftain of 15,000 B.C.; and with so many others that my brain cannot hold the shocking secrets and
dizzying marvels I learned from them.
I awaked each morning in a fever, sometimes frantically trying to verify or discredit such
information as fell within the range of modern human knowledge. Traditional facts took on new and
doubtful aspects, and I marvelled at the dream-fancy which could invent such surprising addenda to
history and science.
I shivered at the mysteries the past may conceal, and trembled at the menaces the future may bring
forth. What was hinted in the speech of post-human entities of the fate of mankind produced such an
effect on me that I will not set it down here.
After man there would be the mighty beetle civilisation, the bodies of whose members the cream
of the Great Race would seize when the monstrous doom overtook the elder world. Later, as the
earth's span closed, the transferred minds would again migrate through time and space--to another
stopping-place in the bodies of the bulbous vegetable entities of Mercury. But there would be races
after them, clinging pathetically to the cold planet and burrowing to its horror-filled core, before the
utter end.
Meanwhile, in my dreams, I wrote endlessly in that history of my own age which I was preparing-
-half voluntarily and half through promises of increased library and travel opportunities--for the
Great Race's central archives. The archives were in a colossal subterranean structure near the city's
center, which I came to know well through frequent labors and consultations. Meant to last as long as
the race, and to withstand the fiercest of earth's convulsions, this titan repository surpassed all other
buildings in the massive, mountain-like firmness of its construction.
The records, written or printed on great sheets of a curiously tenacious cellulose fabric were
bound into books that opened from the top, and were kept in individual cases of a strange, extremely
light, 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, plesiosaurs, and
the like-made familiar through palaeontology. Of birds or mammals there were none that I could
discover.
The ground and swamps were constantly alive with snakes, lizards, and crocodiles while insects
buzzed incessantly among the lush vegetation. And far out at sea, unspied and unknown monsters
spouted mountainous columns of foam into the vaporous sky. Once I was taken under the ocean in a
gigantic submarine vessel with searchlights, and glimpsed some living horrors of awesome
magnitude. I saw also the ruins of incredible sunken cities, and the wealth of crinoid, brachiopod,
coral, and ichthyic life which everywhere abounded.
Of the physiology, psychology, folkways, and detailed history of the Great Race my visions
preserved but little information, and many of the scattered points I here set down were gleaned from
my study of old legends and other cases rather than from my own dreaming.
For in time, of course, my reading and research caught up with and passed the dreams in many
phases, so that certain dream-fragments were explained in advance and formed verifications of what I
had learned. This consolingly established my belief that similar reading and research, accomplished
by my secondary self, had formed the source of the whole terrible fabric of pseudomemories.
The period of my dreams, apparently, was one somewhat less than 150,000,000 years ago, when
the Palaeozoic age was giving place to the Mesozoic. The bodies occupied by the Great Race
represented no surviving--or even scientifically known--line of terrestrial evolution, but were of a
peculiar, closely homogeneous, and highly specialised organic type inclining as much as to the
vegetable as to the animal state.
Cell action was of an unique sort almost precluding fatigue, and wholly eliminating the need of
sleep. Nourishment, assimilated through the red trumpet-like appendages on one of the great flexible
limbs, was always semifluid and in many aspects wholly unlike the food of existing animals.
The beings had but two of the senses which we recognise--sight and hearing, the latter
accomplished through the flower-like appendages on the grey stalks above their heads. Of other and
incomprehensible senses--not, however, well utilizable by alien captive minds inhabiting their
bodies--they possessed many. Their three eyes were so situated as to give them a range of vision
wider than the normal. Their blood was a sort of deep-greenish ichor of great thickness.
They had no sex, but reproduced through seeds or spores which clustered on their bases and
could be developed only under water. Great, shallow tanks were used for the growth of their young-
-which were, however, reared only in small numbers on account of the longevity of individuals--four
or five thousand years being the common life span.
Markedly defective individuals were quickly disposed of as soon as their defects were noticed.
Disease and the approach of death were, in the absence of a sense of touch or of physical pain,
recognised by purely visual symptoms.
The dead were incinerated with dignified ceremonies. Once in a while, as before mentioned, a
keen mind would escape death by forward projection in time; but such cases were not numerous.
When one did occur, the exiled mind from the future was treated with the utmost kindness till the
dissolution of its unfamiliar tenement.
The Great Race seemed to form a single, loosely knit nation or league, with major institutions in
common, though there were four definite divisions. The political and economic system of each unit
was a sort of fascistic socialism, with major resources rationally distributed, and power delegated to
a small governing board elected by the votes of all able to pass certain educational and
psychological tests. Family organisation was not overstressed, though ties among persons of
common descent were recognised, and the young were generally reared by their parents.
Resemblances to human attitudes and institutions were, of course, most marked in those fields
where on the one hand highly abstract elements were concerned, or where on the other hand there
was a dominance of the basic, 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 scant, and was dealt with through highly efficient policing. Punishments
ranged from privilege deprivation and imprisonment to death or major emotion wrenching, and were
never administered without a careful study of the criminal's motivations.
Warfare, largely civil for the last few millennia though sometimes waged against reptilian or
octopodic invaders, or against the winged, star-headed Old Ones who centered in the antarctic, was
infrequent though infinitely devastating. An enormous army, using camera-like weapons which
produced tremendous electrical effects, was kept on hand for purposes seldom mentioned, but
obviously connected with the ceaseless fear of the dark, windowless elder ruins and of the great
sealed trap-doors in the lowest subterranean levels.
This fear of the basalt ruins and trap-doors was largely a matter of unspoken suggestion--or, at
most, of furtive quasi-whispers. Everything specific which bore on it was significantly absent from
such books as were on the common shelves. It was the one subject lying altogether under a taboo
among the Great Race, and seemed to be connected alike with horrible bygone struggles, and with
that future peril which would some day force the race to send its keener minds ahead en masse in
time.
Imperfect and fragmentary as were the other things presented by dreams and legends, this matter
was still more bafflingly shrouded. The vague old myths avoided it--or perhaps all allusions had for
some reason been excised. And in the dreams of myself and others, the hints were peculiarly few.
Members of the Great Race never intentionally referred to the matter, and what could be gleaned
came only from some of the more sharply observant captive minds.
According to these scraps of information, the basis of the fear was a horrible elder race of half-
polypous, utterly alien entities which had come through space from immeasurably distant universes
and had dominated the earth and three other solar planets about 600 million years ago. They were
only partly material--as we understand matter--and their type of consciousness and media of
perception differed widely from those of terrestrial organisms. For example, their senses did not
include that of sight; their mental world being a strange, non-visual pattern of impressions.
They were, however, sufficiently material to use implements of normal matter when in cosmic
areas containing it; and they required housing--albeit of a peculiar kind. Though their senses could
penetrate all material barriers, their substance could not; and certain forms of electrical energy could
wholly destroy them. They had the power of arial motion, despite the absence of wings or any other
visible means of levitation. Their minds were of such texture that no exchange with them could be
effected by the Great Race.
When these things had come to the earth they had built mighty basalt cities of windowless towers,
and had preyed horribly upon the beings they found. Thus it was when the minds of the Great Race
sped across the void from that obscure, trans-galactic world known in the disturbing and debatable
Eltdown Shards as Yith.
The newcomers, with the instruments they created, had found it easy to subdue the predatory
entities and drive them down to those caverns of inner earth which they had already joined to their
abodes and begun to inhabit.
Then they had sealed the entrances and left them to their fate, afterward occupying most of their
great cities and preserving certain important buildings for reasons connected more with superstition
than with indifference, boldness, or scientific and historical zeal.
But as the aeons passed there came vague, evil signs that the elder things were growing strong
and numerous in the inner world. There were sporadic irruptions of a particularly hideous character
in certain small and remote cities of the Great Race, and in some of the deserted elder cities which
the Great Race had not peopled--places where the paths to the gulfs below had not been properly
sealed or guarded.
After that greater precautions were taken, and many of the paths were closed forever--though a
few were left with sealed trap-doors for strategic use in fighting the elder things if ever they broke
forth in unexpected places.
The irruptions of the elder things must have been shocking beyond all description, since they had
permanently coloured the psychology of the Great Race. Such was the fixed mood of horror that the
very aspect of the creatures was left unmentioned. At no time was I able to gain a clear hint of what
they looked like.
There were veiled suggestions of a monstrous plasticity, and of temporary lapses of visibility,
while other fragmentary whispers referred to their control and military use of great winds. Singular
whistling noises, and colossal footprints made up of five circular toe marks, seemed also to be
associated with them.
It was evident that the coming doom so desperately feared by the Great Race--the doom that was
one day to send millions of keen minds across the chasm of time to strange bodies in the safer future-
-had to do with a final successful irruption of the elder beings.
Mental projections down the ages had clearly foretold such a horror, and the Great Race had
resolved that none who could escape should face it. That the foray would be a matter of vengeance,
rather than an attempt to reoccupy the outer world, they knew from the planet's later history--for their
projections shewed the coming and going of subsequent races untroubled by the monstrous entities.
Perhaps these entities had come to prefer earth's inner abysses to the variable, storm-ravaged
surface, since light meant nothing to them. Perhaps, too, they were slowly weakening with the aeons.
Indeed, it was known that they would be quite dead in the time of the post-human beetle race which
the fleeing minds would tenant.
Meanwhile, the Great Race maintained its cautious vigilance, with potent weapons ceaselessly
ready despite the horrified banishing of the subject from common speech and visible records. And
always the shadow of nameless fear hung bout the sealed trap-doors and the dark, windowless elder
towers.
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 St.,
Pilbarra, W. Australia, May 18, 1934.
Prof. N. W Peaslee, c/o Am. Psychological Society, 30 E. 41st St., New York City, U.S.A.
My Dear Sir:
A recent conversation with Dr. E. M. Boyle of Perth, and some papers with your articles which
he has just sent me, make it advisable for me to tell you about certain things I have seen in the Great
Sandy Desert east of our gold field here. It would seem, in view of the peculiar legends about old
cities with huge stonework and strange designs and hieroglyphs which you describe, that I have
come upon something very important.
The blackfellows have always been full of talk about "great stones with marks on them," and seem
to have a terrible fear of such things. They connect them in some way with their common racial
legends about Buddai, the gigantic old man who lies asleep for ages underground with his head on
his arm, and who will some day awake and eat up the world.
There are some very old and half-forgotten tales of enormous underground huts of great stones,
where passages lead down and down, and where horrible things have happened. The blackfellows
claim that once some warriors, fleeing in battle, went down into one and never came back, but that
frightful winds began to blow from the place soon after they went down. However, there usually isn't
much in what these natives say.
But what I have to tell is more than this. Two years ago, when I was prospecting about 500 miles
east in the desert, I came on a lot of queer pieces of dressed stone perhaps 3 X 2 X 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. There were peculiar
curves, just like what the blackfellows had tried to describe. I imagine there must have been thirty or
forty blocks, some nearly buried in the sand, and all within a circle perhaps a quarter of a mile in
diameter.
When I saw some, I looked around closely for more, and made a careful reckoning of the place
with my instruments. I also took pictures of ten or twelve of the most typical blocks, and will enclose
the prints for you to see.
I turned my information and pictures over to the government at Perth, but they have done nothing
about them.
Then I met Dr. Boyle, who had read your articles in the Journal of the American Psychological
Society, and, in time, happened to mention the stones. He was enormously interested, and became
quite excited when I shewed him my snapshots, saying that the stones and the markings were just like
those of the masonry you had dreamed about and seen described in legends.
He meant to write you, but was delayed. Meanwhile, he sent me most of the magazines with your
articles, and I saw at once, from your drawings and descriptions, that my stones are certainly the kind
you mean. You can appreciate this from the enclosed prints. Later on you will hear directly from Dr.
Boyle.
Now I can understand how important all this will be to you. Without question we are faced with
the remains of an unknown civilization older than any dreamed of before, and forming a basis for your
legends.
As a mining engineer, I have some knowledge of geology, and can tell you that these blocks are
so ancient they frighten me. They are mostly sandstone and granite, though one is almost certainly
made of a queer sort of cement or concrete.
They bear evidence of water action, as if this part of the world had been submerged and come up
again after long ages--all since those blocks were made and used. It is a matter of hundreds of
thousands of years--or heaven knows how much more. I don't like to think about it.
In view of your previous diligent work in tracking down the legends and everything connected
with them, I cannot doubt but that you will want to lead an expedition to the desert and make some
archaeological excavations. Both Dr. Boyle and I are prepared to cooperate in such work if you--or
organizations known to you--can furnish the funds.
I can get together a dozen miners for the heavy digging--the blackfellows would be of no use,
for I've found that they have an almost maniacal fear of this particular spot. Boyle and I are saying
nothing to others, for you very obviously ought to have precedence in any discoveries or credit.
The place can be reached from Pilbarra in about four days by motor tractor--which we'd need for
our apparatus. It is somewhat west and south of Warburton's path of 1873, and 100 miles southeast of
JoannaSpring. 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.
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 MiskatonicUniversity was great, and both Mr. Mackenzie and Dr. Boyle
proved invaluable in arranging matters at the Australian end. We were not too specific with the public
about our objects, since the whole matter would have lent itself unpleasantly to sensational and
jocose treatment by the cheaper newspapers. As a result, printed reports were sparing; but enough
appeared to tell of our quest for reported Australian ruins and to chronicle our various preparatory
steps.
Professor William Dyer of the college's geology department--leader of the Miskatonic Antarctic
Expedition Of 1930-31--Ferdinand C. Ashley of the department of ancient history, and Tyler M.
Freeborn of the department of anthropology--together with my son Wingate--accompanied me.
My correspondent, Mackenzie, came to Arkham early in 1935 and assisted in our final
preparations. He proved to be a tremendously competent and affable man of about fifty, admirably
well-read, and deeply familiar with all the conditions of Australian travel.
He had tractors waiting at Pilbarra, and we chartered a tramp steamer sufficiently small to get up
the river to that point. We were prepared to excavate in the most careful and scientific fashion,
sifting every particle of sand, and disturbing nothing which might seem to be in or near its original
situation.
Sailing from Boston aboard the wheezy Lexington on March 28, 1935, we had a leisurely trip
across the Atlantic and Mediterranean, through the Suez Canal, down the Red Sea, and across the
Indian Ocean to our goal. I need not tell how the sight of the low, sandy West Australian coast
depressed me, and how I detested the crude mining town and dreary gold fields where the tractors
were given their last loads.
Dr. Boyle, who met us, proved to be elderly, pleasant, and intelligent--and his knowledge of
psychology led him into many long discussions with my son and me.
Discomfort and expectancy were oddly mingled in most of us when at length our party of
eighteen rattled forth over the arid leagues of sand and rock. On Friday, May 31st, we forded a
branch of the De Grey and entered the realm of utter desolation. A certain positive terror grew on me
as we advanced to this actual site of the elder world behind the legends--a terror, of course, abetted
by the fact that my disturbing dreams and pseudo-memories still beset me with unabated force.
It was on Monday, June 3rd, that we saw the first of the half-buried blocks. I cannot describe the
emotions with which I actually touched--in objective reality--a fragment of Cyclopean masonry in
every respect like the blocks in the walls of my dream-buildings. There was a distinct trace of
carving--and my hands trembled as I recognised part of a curvilinear decorative scheme made hellish
to me through years of tormenting nightmare and baffling research.
A month of digging brought a total of some 1250 blocks in varying stages of wear and
disintegration. Most of these were carven megaliths with curved tops and bottoms. A minority were
smaller, flatter, plain-surfaced, and square or octagonally cut-like those of the floors and pavements
in my dreams--while a few were singularly massive and curved or slanted in such a manner as to
suggest use in vaulting or groining, or as parts of arches or round window casings.
The deeper--and the farther north and east--we dug, the more blocks we found; though we still
failed to discover any trace of arrangement among them. Professor Dyer was appalled at the
measureless age of the fragments, and Freeborn found traces of symbols which fitted darkly into
certain Papuan and Polynesian legends of infinite antiquity. The condition and scattering of the blocks
told mutely of vertiginous cycles of time and geologic upheavals of cosmic savagery.
We had an aroplane with us, and my son Wingate would often go up to different heights and scan
the sand-and-rock waste for signs of dim, large-scale outlines--either differences of level or trails
of scattered blocks. His results were virtually negative; for whenever he would one day think he had
glimpsed some significant trend, he would on his next trip find the impression replaced by another
equally insubstantial--a result of the shifting, wind-blown sand.
One or two of these ephemeral suggestions, though, affected me queerly and disagreeably. They
seemed, after a fashion, to dovetail horribly with something I had dreamed or read, but which I could
no longer remember. There was a terrible familiarity about them--which somehow made me look
furtively and apprehensively over the abominable, sterile terrain toward the north and northeast.
Around the first week in July I developed an unaccountable set of mixed emotions about that
general northeasterly region. There was horror, and there was curiosity--but more than that, there
was a persistent and perplexing illusion of memory.
I tried all sorts of psychological expedients to get these notions out of my head, but met with no
success. Sleeplessness also gained upon me, but I almost welcomed this because of the resultant
shortening of my dream-periods. I acquired the habit of taking long, lone walks in the desert late at
night--usually to the north or northeast, whither the sum of my strange new impulses seemed subtly to
pull me.
Sometimes, on these walks, I would stumble over nearly buried fragments of the ancient masonry.
Though there were fewer visible blocks here than where we had started, I felt sure that there must be
a vast abundance beneath the surface. The ground was less level than at our camp, and the prevailing
high winds now and then piled the sand into fantastic temporary hillocks--exposing low traces of the
elder stones while it covered other traces.
I was queerly anxious to have the excavations extend to this territory, yet at the same time dreaded
what might be revealed. Obviously, I was getting into a rather bad state--all the worse because I
could not account for it.
An indication of my poor nervous health can be gained from my response to an odd discovery
which I made on one of my nocturnal rambles. It was on the evening of July 11th, when the moon
flooded the mysterious hillocks with a curious pallor.
Wandering somewhat beyond my usual limits, I came upon a great stone which seemed to differ
markedly from any we had yet encountered. It was almost wholly covered, but I stooped and cleared
away the sand with my hands, later studying the object carefully and supplementing the moonlight
with my electric torch.
Unlike the other very large rocks, this one was perfectly square-cut, with no convex or concave
surface. It seemed, too, to be of a dark basaltic substance, wholly dissimilar to the granite and
sandstone and occasional concrete of the now familiar fragments.
Suddenly I rose, turned, and ran for the camp at top speed. It was a wholly unconscious and
irrational flight, and only when I was close to my tent did I fully realise why I had run. Then it came
to me. The queer dark stone was something which I had dreamed and read about, and which was
linked with the uttermost horrors of the aeon-old legendry.
It was one of the blocks of that basaltic elder masonry which the fabled Great Race held in such
fear--the tall, windowless ruins left by those brooding, half-material, alien things that festered in
earth's nether abysses and against whose wind-like, invisible forces the trap-doors were sealed and
the sleepless sentinels posted.
I remained awake all night, but by dawn realised how silly I had been to let the shadow of a myth
upset me. Instead of being frightened, I should have had a discoverer's enthusiasm.
The next forenoon I told the others about my find, and Dyer, Freeborn, Boyle, my son, and I set
out to view the anomalous block. Failure, however, confronted us. I had formed no clear idea of the
stone's location, and a late 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 saw me walking
rapidly across the pallid, secret-guarding hillocks toward the northeast.
About 3:30 a.m. a violent wind blew up, waking everyone in camp and felling three of the tents.
The sky was unclouded, and the desert still blazed with that leprous moonlight. As the party saw to
the tents my absence was noted, but in view of my previous walks this circumstance gave no one
alarm. And yet, as many as three men--all Australians--seemed to feel something sinister in the air.
Mackenzie explained to Professor Freeborn that this was a fear picked up from blackfellow
folklore--the natives having woven a curious fabric of malignant myth about the high winds which at
long intervals sweep across the sands under a clear sky. Such winds, it is whispered, blow out of the
great stone huts under the ground, where terrible things have happened--and are never felt except
near places where the big marked stones are scattered. Close to four the gale subsided as suddenly
as it had begun, leaving the sand hills in new and unfamiliar shapes.
It was just past five, with the bloated, fungoid moon sinking in the west, when I staggered into
camp--hatless, tattered, features scratched and ensanguined, and without my electric torch. Most of
the men had returned to bed, but Professor Dyer was smoking a pipe in front of his tent. Seeing my
winded and almost frenzied state, he called Dr. Boyle, and the two of them got me on my cot and made
me comfortable. My son, roused by the stir, soon joined them, and they all tried to force me to lie
still and attempt sleep.
But there was no sleep for me. My psychological state was very extraordinary--different from
anything I had previously suffered. After a time I insisted upon talking--nervously and elaborately
explaining my condition. I told them I had become fatigued, and had lain down in the sand for a nap.
There had, I said, been dreams even more frightful than usual--and when I was awaked by the sudden
high wind my overwrought nerves had snapped. I had fled in panic, frequently falling over half-
buried stones and thus gaining my tattered and bedraggled aspect. I must have slept long--hence the
hours of my absence.
Of anything strange either seen or experienced I hinted absolutely nothing--exercising the
greatest self-control in that respect. But I spoke of a change of mind regarding the whole work of the
expedition, and urged a halt in all digging toward the northeast. My reasoning was patently weak--for
I mentioned a dearth of blocks, a wish not to offend the superstitious miners, a possible shortage of
funds from the college, and other things either untrue or irrelevant. Naturally, no one paid the least
attention to my new wishes--not even my son, whose concern for my health was obvious.
The next day I was up and around the camp, but took no part in the excavations. Seeing that I could
not stop the work, I decided to return home as soon as possible for the sake of my nerves, and made
my son promise to fly me in the plane to Perth--a thousand miles to the southwest--as soon as he had
surveyed the region I wished let alone.
If, I reflected, the thing I had seen was still visible, I might decide to attempt a specific warning
even at the cost of ridicule. It was just conceivable that the miners who knew the local folklore might
back me up. Humouring me, my son made the survey that very afternoon, flying over all the terrain my
walk could possibly have covered. Yet nothing of what I had found remained in sight.
It was the case of the anomalous basalt block all over again--the shifting sand had wiped out
every trace. For an instant I half regretted having lost a certain awesome object in my stark fright--but
now I know that the loss was merciful. I can still believe my whole experience an illusion--
especially if, as I devoutly hope, that hellish abyss is never found.
Wingate took me to Perth on July 20th, though declining to abandon the expedition and return
home. He stayed with me until the 25th, when the steamer for Liverpool sailed. Now, in the cabin of
the Empress, I am pondering long and frantically upon the entire matter, and have decided that my son
at least must be informed. It shall rest with him whether to diffuse the matter more widely.
In order to meet any eventuality I have prepared this summary of my background--as already
known in a scattered way to others--and will now tell as briefly as possible what seemed to happen
during my absence from the camp that hideous night.
Nerves on edge, and whipped into a kind of perverse eagerness by that inexplicable, dread-
mingled, mnemonic urge toward the northeast, I plodded on beneath the evil, burning moon. Here and
there I saw, half shrouded by sand, those primal Cyclopean blocks left from nameless and forgotten
aeons.
The incalculable age and brooding horror of this monstrous waste began to oppress me as never
before, and I could not keep from thinking of my maddening dreams, of the frightful legends which
lay behind them, and of the present fears of natives and miners concerning the desert and its carven
stones.
And yet I plodded on as if to some eldritch rendezvous--more and more assailed by bewildering
fancies, compulsions, and pseudo-memories. I thought of some of the possible contours of the lines
of stones as seen by my son from the air, and wondered why they seemed at once so ominous and so
familiar. Something was fumbling and rattling at the latch of my recollection, while another unknown
force sought to keep the portal barred.
The night was windless, and the pallid sand curved upward and downward like frozen waves of
the sea. I had no goal, but somehow ploughed along as if with fate-bound assurance. My dreams
welled up into the waking world, so that each sand-embedded megalith seemed part of endless rooms
and corridors of pre-human masonry, carved and hieroglyphed with symbols that I knew too well
from years of custom as a captive mind of the Great Race.
At moments I fancied I saw those omniscient, conical horrors moving about at their accustomed
tasks, and I feared to look down lest I find myself one with them in aspect. Yet all the while I saw the
sand-covered blocks as well as the rooms and corridors; the evil, burning moon as well as the lamps
of luminous crystal; the endless desert as well as the waving ferns beyond the windows. I was awake
and dreaming at the same time.
I do not know how long or how far--or indeed, in just what direction--I had walked when I first
spied the heap of blocks bared by the day's wind. It was the largest group in one place that I had seen
so far, and so sharply did it impress me that the visions of fabulous aeons faded suddenly away.
Again there were only the desert and the evil moon and the shards of an unguessed past. I drew
close and paused, and cast the added light of my electric torch over the tumbled pile. A hillock had
blown away, leaving a low, irregularly round mass of megaliths and smaller fragments some forty
feet across and from two to eight feet high.
From the very outset I realized that there was some utterly unprecedented quality about those
stones. Not only was the mere number of them quite without parallel, but something in the sandworn
traces of design arrested me as I scanned them under the mingled beams of the moon and my torch.
Not that any one differed essentially from the earlier specimens we had found. It was something
subtler than that. The impression did not come when I looked at one block alone, but only when I ran
my eye over several almost simultaneously.
Then, at last, the truth dawned upon me. The curvilinear patterns on many of those blocks were
closely related--parts of one vast decorative conception. For the first time in this aeon-shaken waste
I had come upon a mass of masonry in its old position--tumbled and fragmentary, it is true, but none
the less existing in a very definite sense.
Mounting at a low place, I clambered laboriously over the heap; here and there clearing away the
sand with my fingers, and constantly striving to interpret varieties of size, shape, and style, and
relationships of design.
After a while I could vaguely guess at the nature of the bygone structure, and at the designs
which had once stretched over the vast surfaces of the primal masonry. The perfect identity of the
whole with some of my dream-glimpses appalled and unnerved me.
This was once a Cyclopean corridor thirty feet tall, paved with octagonal blocks and solidly
vaulted overhead. There would have been rooms opening off on the right, and at the farther end one
of those strange inclined planes would have wound down to still lower depths.
I started violently as these conceptions occurred to me, for there was more in them than the
blocks themselves had supplied. How did I know that this level should have been far underground?
How did I know that the plane leading upward should have been behind me? How did I know that the
long subterrene passage to the Square of Pillars ought to lie on the left one level above me?
How did I know that the room of machines and the rightward-leading tunnel to the central archives
ought to lie two levels below? How did I know that there would be one of those horrible, metal-
banded trap-doors at the very bottom four levels down? Bewildered by this intrusion from the dream-
world, I found myself shaking and bathed in a cold perspiration.
Then, as a last, intolerable touch, I felt that faint, insidious stream of cool air trickling upward
from a depressed place near the center of the huge heap. Instantly, as once before, my visions faded,
and I saw again only the evil moonlight, the brooding desert, and the spreading tumulus of palaeogean
masonry. Something real and tangible, yet fraught with infinite suggestions of nighted mystery, now
confronted me. For that stream of air could argue but one thing--a hidden gulf of great size beneath
the disordered blocks on the surface.
My first thought was of the sinister blackfellow legends of vast underground huts among the
megaliths where horrors happen and great winds are born. Then thoughts of my own dreams came
back, and I felt dim pseudo-memories tugging at my mind. What manner of place lay below me? What
primal, inconceivable source of age-old myth-cycles and haunting nightmares might I be on the brink
of uncovering?
It was only for a moment that I hesitated, for more than curiosity and scientific zeal was driving
me on and working against my growing fear.
I seemed to move almost automatically, as if in the clutch of some compelling fate. Pocketing my
torch, and struggling with a strength that I had not thought I possessed, I wrenched aside first one
titan fragment of stone and then another, till there welled up a strong draught whose dampness
contrasted oddly with the 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 deserts sands lay
directly upon a floor of some titan structure of earth's youth--how preserved through aeons of
geologic convulsion I could not then and cannot now even attempt to guess.
In retrospect, the barest idea of a sudden, lone descent into such a doubtful abyss--and at a time
when one's whereabouts were unknown to any living soul--seems like the utter apex of insanity.
Perhaps it was--yet that night I embarked without hesitancy upon such a descent.
Again there was manifest that lure and driving of fatality which had all along seemed to direct my
course. With torch flashing intermittently to save the battery, I commenced a mad scramble down the
sinister, Cyclopean incline below the opening--sometimes facing forward as I found good hand- and
foot-holds, and at other times turning to face the heap of megaliths as I clung and fumbled more
precariously.
In two directions beside me distant walls of carven, crumbling masonry loomed dimly under the
direct beams of my torch. Ahead, however, was only unbroken darkness.
I kept no track of time during my downward scramble. So seething with baffling hints and images
was my mind that all objective matters seemed withdrawn into incalculable distances. Physical
sensation was dead, and even fear remained as a wraith-like, inactive gargoyle leering impotently at
me.
Eventually, I reached a level floor strewn with fallen blocks, shapeless fragments of stone, and
sand and detritus of every kind. On either side--perhaps thirty feet apart--rose massive walls
culminating in huge groinings. That they were carved I could just discern, but the nature of the
carvings was beyond my perception.
What held me the most was the vaulting overhead. The beam from my torch could not reach the
roof, but the lower parts of the monstrous arches stood out distinctly. And so perfect was their
identity with what I had seen in countless dreams of the elder world, that I trembled actively for the
first time.
Behind and high above, a faint luminous blur told of the distant moonlit world outside. Some
vague shred of caution warned me that I should not let it out of my sight, lest I have no guide for my
return.
I now advanced toward the wall at my left, where the traces of carving were plainest. The littered
floor was nearly as hard to traverse as the downward heap had been, but I managed to pick my
difficult way.
At one place I heaved aside some blocks and locked away the detritus to see what the pavement
was like, and shuddered at the utter, fateful familiarity of the great octagonal stones whose buckled
surface still held roughly together.
Reaching a convenient distance from the wall, I cast the searchlight slowly and carefully over its
worn remnants of carving. Some bygone influx of water seemed to have acted on the sandstone
surface, while there were curious incrustations which I could not explain.
In places the masonry was very loose and distorted, and I wondered how many aeons more this
primal, hidden edifice could keep its remaining traces of form amidst earth's heavings.
But it was the carvings themselves that excited me most. Despite their time-crumbled state, they
were relatively easy to trace at close range; and the complete, intimate familiarity of every detail
almost stunned my imagination.
That the major attributes of this hoary masonry should be familiar, was not beyond normal
credibility.
Powerfully impressing the weavers of certain myths, they had become embodied in a stream of
cryptic lore which, somehow, coming to my notice during the amnesic period, had evoked vivid
images in my subconscious mind.
But how could I explain the exact and minute fashion in which each line and spiral of these
strange designs tallied with what I had dreamed for more than a score of years? What obscure,
forgotten iconography could have reproduced each subtle shading and nuance which so persistently,
exactly, and unvaryingly besieged my sleeping vision night after night?
For this was no chance or remote resemblance. Definitely and absolutely, the millennially ancient,
aeon-hidden corridor in which I stood was the original of something I knew in sleep as intimately as I
knew my own house in Crane Street, Arkham. True, my dreams shewed the place in its undecayed
prime; but the identity was no less real on that account. I was wholly and horribly oriented.
The particular structure I was in was known to me. Known, too, was its place in that terrible elder
city of dreams. That I could visit unerringly any point in that structure or in that city which had
escaped the changes and devastations of uncounted ages, I realized with hideous and instinctive
certainty. What in heaven's name could all this mean? How had I come to know what I knew? And what
awful reality could lie behind those antique tales of the beings who had dwelt in this labyrinth of
primordial stone?
Words can convey only fractionally the welter of dread and bewilderment which ate at my spirit. I
knew this place. I knew what lay before me, and what had lain overhead before the myriad towering
stories had fallen to dust and debris and the desert. No need now, I thought with a shudder, to keep
that faint blur of moonlight in view.
I was torn betwixt a longing to flee and a feverish mixture of burning curiosity and driving
fatality. What had happened to this monstrous megalopolis of old in the millions of years since the
time of my dreams? Of the subterrene mazes which had underlain the city and linked all the titan
towers, how much had still survived the writhings of earth's crust?
Had I come upon a whole buried world of unholy archaism? Could I still find the house of the
writing master, and the tower where S'gg'ha, the captive mind from the star-headed vegetable
carnivores of Antarctica, had chiselled certain pictures on the blank spaces of the walls?
Would the passage at the second level down, to the hall of the alien minds, be still unchoked and
traversable? In that hall the captive mind of an incredible entity--a half-plastic denizen of the hollow
interior of an unknown trans-Plutonian planet eighteen million years in the future--had kept a certain
thing which it had modelled from clay.
I shut my eyes and put my hand to my head in a vain, pitiful effort to drive these insane dream-
fragments from my consciousness. Then, for the first time, I felt acutely the coolness, motion, and
dampness of the surrounding air. Shuddering, I realized that a vast chain of aeon-dead black gulfs
must indeed be yawning somewhere beyond and below me.
I thought of the frightful chambers and corridors and inclines as I recalled them from my dreams.
Would the way to the central archives still be open? Again that driving fatality tugged insistently at
my brain as I recalled the awesome records that once lay cased in those rectangular vaults of rustless
metal.
There, said the dreams and legends, had reposed the whole history, past and future, of the cosmic
space-time continuum--written by captive minds from every orb and every age in the solar system.
Madness, of course--but had I not now stumbled into a nighted world as mad as I?
I thought of the locked metal shelves, and of the curious knob twistings needed to open each one.
My own came vividly into my consciousness. How often had I gone through that intricate routine of
varied turns and pressures in the terrestrial vertebrate section on the lowest level! Every detail was
fresh and familiar.
If there were such a vault as I had dreamed of, I could open it in a moment. It was then that
madness took me utterly. An instant later, and I was leaping and stumbling over the rocky debris
toward the well-remembered incline to the depths below.
VII
From that point forward my impressions are scarcely to be relied on--indeed, I still possess a
final, desperate hope that they all form parts of some daemonic dream or illusion born of delirium. A
fever raged in my brain, and everything came to me through a kind of haze--sometimes only
intermittently.
The rays of my torch shot feebly into the engulfing blackness, bringing phantasmal flashes of
hideously familiar walls and carvings, all blighted with the decay of ages. In one place a tremendous
mass of vaulting had fallen, so that I had to clamber over a mighty mound of stones reaching almost to
the ragged, grotesquely stalactited roof.
It was all the ultimate apex of nightmare, made worse by the blasphemous tug of pseudo-memory.
One thing only was unfamiliar, and that was my own size in relation to the monstrous masonry. I felt
oppressed by a sense of unwonted smallness, as if the sight of these towering walls from a mere
human body was something wholly new and abnormal. Again and again I looked nervously down at
myself, vaguely disturbed by the human form I possessed.
Onward through the blackness of the abyss I leaped, plunged, and staggered--often falling and
bruising myself, and once nearly shattering my torch. Every stone and corner of that daemonic gulf
was known to me, and at many points I stopped to cast beams of light through choked and crumbling,
yet familiar, archways.
Some rooms had totally collapsed; others were bare, or debris-filled. In a few I saw masses of
metal--some fairly intact, some broken, and some crushed or battered--which I recognised as the
colossal pedestals or tables of my dreams. What they could in truth have been, I dared not guess.
I found the downward incline and began its descent--though after a time halted by a gaping,
ragged chasm whose narrowest point could not be much less than four feet across. Here the
stonework had fallen through, revealing incalculable inky depths beneath.
I knew there were two more cellar levels in this titan edifice, and trembled with fresh panic as I
recalled the metal-clamped trap-door on the lowest one. There could be no guards now--for what
had lurked beneath had long since done its hideous work and sunk into its long decline. By the time of
the posthuman beetle race it would be quite dead. And yet, as I thought of the native legends, I
trembled anew.
It cost me a terrible effort to vault that yawning chasm, since the littered floor prevented a running
start--but madness drove me on. I chose a place close to the left-hand wall--where the rift was least
wide and the landing-spot reasonably clear of dangerous debris--and after one frantic moment
reached the other side in safety.
At last, gaining the lower level, I stumbled on past the archway of the room of machines, within
which were fantastic ruins of metal, half buried beneath fallen vaulting. Everything was where I knew
it would be, and I climbed confidently over the heaps which barred the entrance of a vast transverse
corridor. This, I realised, would take me under the city to the central archives.
Endless ages seemed to unroll as I stumbled, leaped, and crawled along that debris-cluttered
corridor. Now and then I could make out carvings on the 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 stone, but after a short distance
encountered a wholly choked place where the fallen vaulting almost touched the perilously sagging
ceiling. How I managed to wrench and tear aside enough blocks to afford a passage, and how I dared
disturb the tightly packed fragments when the least shift of equilibrium might have brought down all
the tons of superincumbent masonry to crush me to nothingness, I do not know.
It was sheer madness that impelled and guided me--if, indeed, my whole underground adventure
was not--as I hope--a hellish delusion or phase of dreaming. But I did make--or dream that I made--a
passage that I could squirm through. As I wiggled over the mound of debris--my torch, switched
continuously on, thrust deeply in my mouth--I felt myself torn by the fantastic stalactites of the jagged
floor above me.
I was now close to the great underground archival structure which seemed to form my goal.
Sliding and clambering down the farther side of the barrier, and picking my way along the remaining
stretch of corridor with hand-held, intermittently flashing torch, I came at last to a low, circular crypt
with arches--still in a marvelous state of preservation--opening off on every side.
The walls, or such parts of them as lay within reach of my torchlight, were densely hieroglyphed
and chiselled with typical curvilinear symbols--some added since the period of my dreams.
This, I realised, was my fated destination, and I turned at once through a familiar archway on my
left. That I could find a clear passage up and down the incline to all the surviving levels, I had, oddly,
little doubt. This vast, earth-protected pile, housing the annals of all the solar system, had been built
with supernal skill and strength to last as long as that system itself.
Blocks of stupendous size, poised with mathematical genius and bound with cements of
incredible toughness, had combined to form a mass as firm as the planet's rocky core. Here, after
ages more prodigious than I could sanely grasp, its buried bulk stood in all its essential contours, the
vast, dust-drifted floors scarce sprinkled with the litter elsewhere so dominant.
The relatively easy walking from this point onward went curiously to my head. All the frantic
eagerness hitherto frustrated by obstacles now took itself out in a kind of febrile speed, and I
literally raced along the low-roofed, monstrously well-remembered aisles beyond the archway.
I was past being astonished by the familiarity of what I saw. On every hand the great
hieroglyphed metal shelf-doors loomed monstrously; some yet in place, others sprung open, and still
others bent and buckled under bygone geological stresses not quite strong enough to shatter the titan
masonry.
Here and there a dust-covered heap beneath a gaping, empty shelf seemed to indicate where
cases had been shaken down by earth tremors. On occasional pillars were great symbols or letters
proclaiming classes and subclasses of volumes.
Once I paused before an open vault where I saw some of the accustomed metal cases still in
position amidst the omnipresent gritty dust. Reaching up, I dislodged one of the thinner specimens
with some difficulty, and rested it on the floor for inspection. It was titled in the prevailing
curvilinear hieroglyphs, though something in the arrangement of the characters seemed subtly
unusual.
The odd mechanism of the hooked fastener was perfectly well known to me, and I snapped up the
still rustless and workable lid and drew out the book within. The latter, as expected, was some twenty
by fifteen inches in area, and two inches thick; the thin metal covers opening at the top.
Its tough cellulose pages seemed unaffected by the myriad cycles of time they had lived through,
and I studied the queerly pigmented, brush-drawn letters of the text-symbols unlike either the usual
curved hieroglyphs or any alphabet known to human scholarship--with a haunting, half-aroused
memory.
It came to me that this was the language used by a captive mind I had known slightly in my dreams-
-a mind from a large asteroid on which had survived much of the archaic life and lore of the primal
planet whereof it formed a fragment. At the same time I recalled that this level of the archives was
devoted to volumes dealing with the non-terrestrial planets.
As I ceased poring over this incredible document I saw that the light of my torch was beginning
to fail, hence quickly inserted the extra battery I always had with me. Then, armed with the stronger
radiance, I resumed my feverish racing through unending tangles of aisles and corridors--
recognising now and then some familiar shelf, and vaguely annoyed by the acoustic conditions which
made my footfalls echo incongruously in these catacombs.
The very prints of my shoes behind me in the millennially untrodden dust made me shudder. Never
before, if my mad dreams held anything of truth, had human feet pressed upon those immemorial
pavements.
Of the particular goal of my insane racing, my conscious mind held no hint. There was, however,
some force of evil potency pulling at my dazed will and buried recollection, so that I vaguely felt I
was not running at random.
I came to a downward incline and followed it to profounder depths. Floors flashed by me as I
raced, but I did not pause to explore them. In my whirling brain there had begun to beat a certain
rhythm which set my right hand twitching in unison. I wanted to unlock something, and felt that I knew
all the intricate twists and pressures needed to do it. It would be like a modern safe with a
combination lock.
Dream or not, I had once known and still knew. How any dream--or scrap of unconsciously
absorbed legend--could have taught me a detail so minute, so intricate, and so complex, I did not
attempt to explain to myself. I was beyond all coherent thought. For was not this whole experience--
this shocking familiarity with a set of unknown ruins, and this monstrously exact identity of
everything before me with what only dreams and scraps of myth could have suggested--a horror
beyond all reason?
Probably it was my basic conviction then--as it is now during my saner moments--that I was not
awake at all, and that the entire buried city was a fragment of febrile hallucination.
Eventually, I reached the lowest level and struck off to the right of the incline. For some
shadowy reason I 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.
As I drew near it I recalled what thing in that space I feared. It was merely one of the metal-barred
and closely guarded trap-doors. There would be no guards now, and on that account I trembled and
tiptoed as I had done in passing through that black basalt vault where a similar trap-door had yawned.
I felt a current of cool, damp air as I had felt there, and wished that my course led in another
direction. Why I had to take the particular course I was taking, I did not know.
When I came to the space I saw that the trap-door yawned widely open. Ahead, the shelves began
again, and I glimpsed on the floor before one of them a heap very thinly covered with dust, where a
number of cases had recently fallen. At the same moment a fresh wave of panic clutched me, though
for some time I could not discover why.
Heaps of fallen cases were not uncommon, for all through the aeons this lightless labyrinth had
been racked by the heavings of earth and had echoed at intervals of the deafening clatter of toppling
objects. It was only when I was nearly across the space that I realized why I shook so violently.
Not the heap, but something about the dust of the level floor was troubling me. In the light of my
torch it seemed as if that dust were not as even as it ought to be--there were places where it looked
thinner, as if it had been disturbed not many months before. I could not be sure, for even the
apparently thinner places were dusty enough; yet a certain suspicion of regularity in the fancied
unevenness was highly disquieting.
When I brought the torchlight close to one of the queer places I did not like what I saw--for the
illusion of regularity became very great. It was as if there were regular lines of composite
impressions--impressions that went in threes, each slightly over a foot square, and consisting of five
nearly circular three-inch prints, one in advance of the other four.
These possible lines of foot-square impressions appeared to lead in two directions, as if
something had gone somewhere and returned. They were, of course, very faint, and may have been
illusions or accidents; but there was an element of dim, fumbling terror about the way I thought they
ran. For at one end of them was the heap of cases which must have clattered down not long before,
while at the other end was the ominous trap-door with the cool, damp wind, yawning unguarded down
to abysses past imagination.
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 tiptoed racing and was standing still, staring at a row of
maddeningly familiar hieroglyphed shelves. They were in a state of almost perfect preservation, and
only three of the doors in this vicinity had sprung open.
My feelings toward these shelves cannot be described--so utter and insistent was the sense of old
acquaintance. I was looking high up at a row near the top and wholly out of my reach, and wondering
how I could climb to best advantage. An open door four rows from the bottom would help, and the
locks of the closed doors formed possible holds for hands and feet. I would grip the torch between
my teeth, as I had in other places where both hands were needed. Above all I must make no noise.
How to get down what I wished to remove would be difficult, but I could probably hook its
movable fastener in my coat collar and carry it like a knapsack. Again I wondered whether the lock
would be undamaged. That I could repeat each familiar motion I had not the least doubt. But I hoped
the thing would not scrape or creak--and that my hand could work it properly.
Even as I thought these things I had taken the torch in my mouth and begun to climb. The
projecting locks were poor supports; but, as I had expected, the opened shelf helped greatly. I used
both the swinging door and the edge of the aperture itself in my ascent, and managed to avoid any
loud creaking.
Balanced on the upper edge of the door, and leaning far to my right, I could just reach the lock I
sought. My fingers, half numb from climbing, were very clumsy at first; but I soon saw that they were
anatomically adequate. And the memory-rhythm was strong in them.
Out of unknown gulfs of time the intricate, secret motions had somehow reached my brain
correctly in every detail--for after less than five minutes of trying there came a click whose
familiarity was all the more startling because I had not consciously anticipated it. In another instant
the metal door was slowly swinging open with only the faintest grating sound.
Dazedly I looked over the row of greyish case ends thus exposed, and felt a tremendous surge of
some wholly inexplicable emotion. Just within reach of my right hand was a case whose curving
hieroglyphs made me shake with a pang infinitely more complex than one of mere fright. Still
shaking, I managed to dislodge it amidst a shower of gritty flakes, and ease it over toward myself
without any violent noise.
Like the other case I had handled, it was slightly more than twenty by fifteen inches in size, with
curved mathematical designs in low relief. In thickness it just exceeded three inches.
Crudely wedging it between myself and the surface I was climbing, I fumbled with the fastener
and finally got the hook free. Lifting the cover, I shifted the heavy object to my back, and let the hook
catch hold of my collar. Hands now free, I awkwardly clambered down to the dusty floor, and
prepared to inspect my prize.
Kneeling in the gritty dust, I swung the case around and rested it in front of me. My hands shook,
and I dreaded to draw out the book within almost as much as I longed--and felt compelled--to do so. It
had very gradually become clear to me what I ought to find, and this realisation nearly paralysed my
faculties.
If the thing were there--and if I were not 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 temporized and made
excuses to myself. I took the torch from my mouth and shut it off to save the battery. Then, in the
dark, I collected my courage finally lifting the cover without turning on the light. Last of all, I did
indeed flash the torch upon the exposed page--steeling myself in advance to suppress any sound no
matter what I should find.
I looked for an instant, then collapsed. Clenching my teeth, however, I kept silent. I sank wholly to
the floor and put a hand to my forehead amidst the engulfing blackness. What I dreaded and expected
was there. Either I was dreaming, or time and space had become a mockery.
I must be dreaming--but I would test the horror by carrying this thing back and shewing it to my
son if it were indeed a reality. My head swam frightfully, even though there were no visible objects
in the unbroken gloom to swirl about me. Ideas and images of the starkest terror--excited by vistas
which my glimpse had opened up--began to throng in upon me and cloud my senses.
I thought of those possible prints in the dust, and trembled at the sound of my own breathing as I
did so. Once again I flashed on the light and looked at the page as a serpent's victim may look at his
destroyer's eyes and fangs.
Then, with clumsy fingers, in the dark, I closed the book, put it in its container, and snapped the lid
and the curious, hooked fastener. This was what I must carry back to the outer world if it truly
existed--if the whole abyss truly existed--if I, and the world itself, truly existed.
Just when I tottered to my feet and commenced my return I cannot be certain. It comes to me
oddly--as a measure of my sense of separation from the normal world--that I did not even once look
at my watch during those hideous hours 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 repass through the black basalt crypt that was older than the city itself, where
cold draughts welled up from unguarded depths. I thought of that which the Great Race had feared,
and of what might still be lurking--be it ever so weak and dying--down there. I thought of those five-
circle prints and of what my dreams had told me of such prints--and of strange winds and whistling
noises associated with them. And I thought of the tales of the modern blackfellows, wherein the
horror of great winds and nameless subterrene ruins was dwelt upon.
I knew from a carven wall symbol the right floor to enter, and came at last after passing that other
book I had examined--to the great circular space with the branching archways. On my right, and at
once recognisable, was the arch through which I had arrived. This I now entered, conscious that the
rest of my course would be harder because of the tumbled state of the masonry outside the archive
building. My new metal-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. If so, what followed has a grim irony--since, save for the
panic of this thing, the second thing might never have happened.
As it was, my frenzy was absolute and unrelieved. Taking my torch in my hand and clutching
feebly at the case, I leaped and bounded wildly ahead with no idea in my brain beyond a mad desire to
race out of these nightmare ruins to the waking world of desert and moonlight which lay so far
above.
I hardly knew it when I reached the mountain of debris which towered into the vast blackness
beyond the caved-in roof, and bruised and cut myself repeatedly in scrambling up its steep slope of
jagged blocks and fragments.
Then came the great disaster. Just as I blindly crossed the summit, unprepared for the sudden dip
ahead, my feet slipped utterly and I found myself involved in a mangling avalanche of sliding masonry
whose cannon-loud uproar split the black cavern air in a deafening series of earth-shaking
reverberations.
I have no recollection of emerging from this chaos, but a momentary fragment of consciousness
shows me as plunging and tripping and scrambling along the corridor amidst the clangour--case and
torch still with me.
Then, just as I approached that primal basalt crypt I had so dreaded, utter madness came. For as the
echoes of the avalanche died down, there became audible a repetition of that frightful alien whistling
I thought I had heard before. This time there was no doubt about it--and what was worse, it came
from a point not behind but ahead of me.
Probably I shrieked aloud then. I have a dim picture of myself as flying through the hellish basalt
vault of the elder things, and hearing that damnable alien sound piping up from the open, unguarded
door of limitless nether blacknesses. There was a wind, too--not merely a cool, damp draught, but a
violent, purposeful blast belching savagely and frigidly from that abominable gulf whence the
obscene whistling came.
There are memories of leaping and lurching over obstacles of every sort, with that torrent of
wind and shrieking sound growing moment by moment, and seeming to curl and twist purposefully
around me as it struck out wickedly from the spaces behind and beneath.
Though in my rear, that wind had the odd effect of hindering instead of aiding my progress; as if
it acted like a noose or lasso thrown around me. Heedless of the noise I made, I clattered over a great
barrier of blocks and was again in the structure that led to the surface.
I recall glimpsing the archway to the room of machines and almost crying out as I saw the incline
leading down to where one of those blasphemous trap-doors must be yawning two levels below. But
instead of crying out I muttered over and over to myself that this was all a dream from which I must
soon awake. Perhaps I was in camp--perhaps I was at home in Arkham. As these hopes bolstered up
my sanity I began to mount the incline to the higher level.
I knew, of course, that I had the four-foot cleft to re-cross, yet was too racked by other fears to
realise the full horror until I came almost upon it. On my descent, the leap across had been easy--but
could I clear the gap as readily when going uphill, and hampered by fright, exhaustion, the weight of
the metal case, and the anomalous backward tug of that daemon wind? I thought of these things at the
last moment, and thought also of the nameless entities which might be lurking in the black abysses
below the chasm.
My wavering torch was growing feeble, but I could tell by some obscure memory when I neared
the cleft. The chill blasts of wind and the nauseous whistling shrieks behind me were for the moment
like a merciful opiate, dulling my imagination to the horror of the yawning gulf ahead. And then I
became aware of the added blasts and whistling in front of me--tides of abomination surging up
through the cleft itself from depths unimagined and unimaginable.
Now, indeed, the essence of pure nightmare was upon me. Sanity departed--and, ignoring
everything except the animal impulse of flight, I merely struggled and plunged upward over the
incline's debris as if no gulf had existed. Then I saw the chasm's edge, leaped frenziedly with every
ounce of strength I possessed, and was instantly engulfed in a pandaemoniae vortex of loathsome
sound and utter, materially tangible blackness.
This is the end of my experience, so far as I can recall. Any further impressions belong wholly to
the domain of phantasmagoria delirium. Dream, madness, and memory merged wildly together in a
series of fantastic, fragmentary delusions which can have no relation to anything real.
There was a hideous fall through incalculable leagues of viscous, sentient darkness, and a babel
of noises utterly alien to all that we know of the earth and its organic life. Dormant, rudimentary
senses seemed to start into vitality within me, telling of pits and voids peopled by floating horrors
and leading to sunless crags and oceans and teeming cities of windowless, basalt towers upon which
no light ever shone.
Secrets of the primal planet and its immemorial aeons flashed through my brain without the aid of
sight or sound, and there were known to me things which not even the wildest of my former dreams
had ever suggested. And all the while cold fingers of damp vapor clutched and picked at me, and that
eldritch, damnable whistling shrieked fiendishly above all the alternations of babel and silence in the
whirlpools of darkness around.
Afterward there were visions of the Cyclopean city of my dreams--not in ruins, but just as I had
dreamed of it. I was in my conical, non-human body again, and mingled with crowds of the Great
Race and the captive minds who carried books up and down the lofty corridors and vast inclines.
Then, superimposed upon these pictures, were frightful, momentary flashes of a non-vistial
consciousness involving desperate struggles, a writhing free from clutching tentacles of whistling
wind, an insane, bat-like flight through half-solid air, a feverish burrowing through the cyclone-
whipped dark, and a wild stumbling and scrambling over fallen masonry.
Once there was a curious, intrusive flash of half sight--a faint, diffuse suspicion of bluish
radiance far overhead. Then there came a dream of wind--pursued climbing and crawling--of
wriggling into a blaze of sardonic moonlight through a jumble of debris which slid and collapsed
after me amidst a morbid hurricane. It was the evil, monotonous beating of that maddening moonlight
which at last told me of the return of what I had once known as the objective, waking world.
I was clawing prone through the sands of the Australian desert, and around me shrieked such a
tumult of wind as I had never before known on our planet's surface. My clothing was in rags, and my
whole body was a mass of bruises and scratches.
Full consciousness returned very slowly, and at no time could I tell just where delirious dream
left off and true memory began. There had seemed to be a mound of titan blocks, an abyss beneath it, a
monstrous revelation from the past, and a nightmare horror at the end--but how much of this was real?
My flashlight was gone, and likewise any metal case I may have discovered. Had there been such
a case--or any abyss--or any mound? Raising my head, I looked behind me, and saw only the sterile,
undulant sands of the desert.
The daemon wind died down, and the bloated, fungoid moon sank reddeningly in the west. I
lurched to my feet and began to stagger southwestward toward the camp. What in truth had happened
to me? Had I merely collapsed in the desert and dragged a dream-racked body over miles of sand and
buried blocks? If not, how could I bear to live any longer?
For, in this new doubt, all my faith in the myth-born unreality of my visions dissolved once more
into the hellish older doubting. If that abyss was real, then the Great Race was real--and its
blasphemous reachings and seizures in the cosmos-wide vortex of time were no myths or nightmares,
but a terrible, soul-shattering actuality.
Had I, in full, hideous fact, been drawn back to a pre-human world of a hundred and fifty million
years ago in those dark, baffling days of the amnesia? Had my present body been the vehicle of a
frightful alien consciousness from palaeogean gulfs of time?
Had I, as the captive mind of those shambling horrors, indeed known that accursed city of stone in
its primordial heyday, and wriggled down those familiar corridors in the loathsome shape of my
captor? Were those tormenting dreams of more than twenty years the offspring of stark, monstrous
memories?
Had I once veritably talked with minds from reachless corners of time and space, learned the
universe's secrets, past and to come, and written the annals of my own world for the metal cases of
those titan archives? And were those others--those shocking elder things of the mad winds and
daemon pipings--in truth a lingering, lurking menace, waiting and slowly weakening in black abysses
while varied shapes of life drag out their multimillennial courses on the planet's age-racked surface?
I do not know. If that abyss and what I held were real, there is no hope. Then, all too truly, there
lies upon this world of man a mocking and incredible shadow out of time. But, mercifully, there is no
proof that these things are other than fresh phases of my myth-born dreams. I did not bring back the
metal case that would have been a proof, and so far those subterrene corridors have not been found.
If the laws of the universe are kind, they will never be found. But I must tell my son what I saw or
thought I saw, and let him use his judgment as a psychologist in gauging the reality of my experience,
and communicating this account to others.
I have said that the awful truth behind my tortured years of dreaming hinges absolutely upon the
actuality of what I thought I saw in those Cyclopean, buried ruins. It has been hard for me, literally, to
set down that crucial revelation, though no reader can have failed to guess it. Of course, it lay in that
book within the metal case--the case which I pried out of its lair amidst the dust of a million
centuries.
No eye had seen, no hand had touched that book since the advent of man to this planet. And yet,
when I flashed my torch upon it in that frightful abyss, I saw that the queerly pigmented letters on the
brittle, aeon-browned cellulose pages were not indeed any nameless hieroglyphs of earth's youth.
They were, instead, the letters of our familiar alphabet, spelling out the words of the English
language in my own handwriting.

AT THE MOUNTAINS OF MADNESS
I
I am forced into speech because men of science have refused to follow my advice without
knowing why. It is altogether against my will that I tell my reasons for opposing this contemplated
invasion of the antarctic--with its vast fossil hunt and its wholesale boring and melting of the ancient
ice caps. And I am the more reluctant because my warning may be in vain.
Doubt of the real facts, as I must reveal them, is inevitable; yet, if I suppressed what will seem
extravagant and incredible, there would be nothing left. The hitherto withheld photographs, both
ordinary and aerial, will count in my favor, for they are damnably vivid and graphic. Still, they will be
doubted because of the great lengths to which clever fakery can be carried. The ink drawings, of
course, will be jeered at as obvious impostures, notwithstanding a strangeness of technique which art
experts ought to remark and puzzle over.
In the end I must rely on the judgment and standing of the few scientific leaders who have, on the
one hand, sufficient independence of thought to weigh my data on its own hideously convincing
merits or in the light of certain primordial and highly baffling myth cycles; and on the other hand,
sufficient influence to deter the exploring world in general from any rash and over-ambitious
program in the region of those mountains of madness. It is an unfortunate fact that relatively obscure
men like myself and my associates, connected only with a small university, have little chance of
making an impression where matters of a wildly bizarre or highly controversial nature are concerned.
It is further against us that we are not, in the strictest sense, specialists in the fields which came
primarily to be concerned. As a geologist, my object in leading the Miskatonic University Expedition
was wholly that of securing deep-level specimens of rock and soil from various parts of the antarctic
continent, aided by the remarkable drill devised by Professor Frank H. Pabodie of our engineering
department. I had no wish to be a pioneer in any other field than this, but I did hope that the use of this
new mechanical appliance at different points along previously explored paths would bring to light
materials of a sort hitherto unreached by the ordinary methods of collection.
Pabodie's drilling apparatus, as the public already knows from our reports, was unique and radical
in its lightness, portability, and capacity to combine the ordinary artesian drill principle with the
principle of the small circular rock drill in such a way as to cope quickly with strata of varying
hardness. Steel head, jointed rods, gasoline motor, collapsible wooden derrick, dynamiting
paraphernalia, cording, rubbish-removal auger, and sectional piping for bores five inches wide and
up to one thousand feet deep all formed, with needed accessories, no greater load than three seven-
dog sledges could carry. This was made possible by the clever aluminum alloy of which most of the
metal objects were fashioned. Four large Dornier aeroplanes, designed especially for the
tremendous altitude flying necessary on the antarctic plateau and with added fuel-warming and quick-
starting devices worked out by Pabodie, could transport our entire expedition from a base at the edge
of the great ice barrier to various suitable inland points, and from these points a sufficient quota of
dogs would serve us.
We planned to cover as great an area as one antarctic season--or longer, if absolutely necessary--
would permit, operating mostly in the mountain ranges and on the plateau south of Ross Sea; regions
explored in varying degree by Shackleton, Amundsen, Scott, and Byrd. With frequent changes of
camp, made by aeroplane and involving distances great enough to be of geological significance, we
expected to unearth a quite unprecedented amount of material--especially in the pre-Cambrian strata
of which so narrow a range of antarctic specimens had previously been secured. We wished also to
obtain as great as possible a variety of the upper fossiliferous rocks, since the primal life history of
this bleak realm of ice and death is of the highest importance to our knowledge of the earth's past.
That the antarctic continent was once temperate and even tropical, with a teeming vegetable and
animal life of which the lichens, marine fauna, arachnida, and penguins of the northern edge are the
only survivals, is a matter of common information; and we hoped to expand that information in variety,
accuracy, and detail. When a simple boring revealed fossiliferous signs, we would enlarge the
aperture by blasting, in order to get specimens of suitable size and condition.
Our borings, of varying depth according to the promise held out by the upper soil or rock, were
to be confined to exposed, or nearly exposed, land surfaces--these inevitably being slopes and
ridges because of the mile or two-mile thickness of solid ice overlying the lower levels. We could
not afford to waste drilling the depth of any considerable amount of mere glaciation, though Pabodie
had worked out a plan for sinking copper electrodes in thick clusters of borings and melting off
limited areas of ice with current from a gasoline-driven dynamo. It is this plan--which we could not
put into effect except experimentally on an expedition such as ours--that the coming Starkweather-
Moore Expedition proposes to follow, despite the warnings I have issued since our return from the
antarctic.
The public knows of the Miskatonic Expedition through our frequent wireless reports to the
Arkham Advertiser and Associated Press, and through the later articles of Pabodie and myself. We
consisted of four men from the University--Pabodie, Lake of the biology department, Atwood of the
physics department--also a meteorologist--and myself, representing geology and having nominal
command--besides sixteen assistants: seven graduate students from Miskatonic and nine skilled
mechanics. Of these sixteen, twelve were qualified aeroplane pilots, all but two of whom were
competent wireless operators. Eight of them understood navigation with compass and sextant, as did
Pabodie, Atwood, and I. In addition, of course, our two ships--wooden ex-whalers, reinforced for
ice conditions and having auxiliary steam--were fully manned.
The Nathaniel Derby Pickman Foundation, aided by a few special contributions, financed the
expedition; hence our preparations were extremely thorough, despite the absence of great publicity.
The dogs, sledges, machines, camp materials, and unassembled parts of our five planes were
delivered in Boston, and there our ships were loaded. We were marvelously well-equipped for our
specific purposes, and in all matters pertaining to supplies, regimen, transportation, and camp
construction we profited by the excellent example of our many recent and exceptionally brilliant
predecessors. It was the unusual number and fame of these predecessors which made our own
expedition--ample though it was--so little noticed by the world at large.
As the newspapers told, we sailed from BostonHarbor on September 2nd, 1930, taking a leisurely
course down the coast and through the Panama Canal, and stopping at Samoa and Hobart, Tasmania, at
which latter place we took on final supplies. None of our exploring party had ever been in the polar
regions before, hence we all relied greatly on our ship captains--J. B. Douglas, commanding the brig
Arkham, and serving as commander of the sea party, and Georg Thorfinnssen, commanding the barque
Miskatonic--both veteran whalers in antarctic waters.
As we left the inhabited world behind, the sun sank lower and lower in the north, and stayed
longer and longer above the horizon each day. At about 62 South Latitude we sighted our first
icebergs--table-like objects with vertical sides--and just before reaching the antarctic circle, which
we crossed on October 20th with appropriately quaint ceremonies, we were considerably troubled
with field ice. The falling temperature bothered me considerably after our long voyage through the
tropics, but I tried to brace up for the worse rigors to come. On many occasions the curious
atmospheric effects enchanted me vastly; these including a strikingly vivid mirage--the first I had
ever seen--in which distant bergs became the battlements of unimaginable cosmic castles.
Pushing through the ice, which was fortunately neither extensive nor thickly packed, we regained
open water at South Latitude 67, East Longitude 175 On the morning of October 26th a strong land
blink appeared on the south, and before noon we all felt a thrill of excitement at beholding a vast,
lofty, and snow-clad mountain chain which opened out and covered the whole vista ahead. At last we
had encountered an outpost of the great unknown continent and its cryptic world of frozen death.
These peaks were obviously the Admiralty Range discovered by Ross, and it would now be our task
to round Cape Adare and sail down the east coast of Victoria Land to our contemplated base on the
shore of McMurdo Sound, at the foot of the volcano Erebus in South Latitude 77 9'.
The last lap of the voyage was vivid and fancy-stirring. Great barren peaks of mystery loomed up
constantly against the west as the low northern sun of noon or the still lower horizon-grazing
southern sun of midnight poured its hazy reddish rays over the white snow, bluish ice and water
lanes, and black bits of exposed granite slope. Through the desolate summits swept ranging,
intermittent gusts of the terrible antarctic wind; whose cadences sometimes held vague suggestions
of a wild and half-sentient musical piping, with notes extending over a wide range, and which for
some subconscious mnemonic reason seemed to me disquieting and even dimly terrible. Something
about the scene reminded me of the strange and disturbing Asian paintings of Nicholas Roerich, and
of the still stranger and more disturbing descriptions of the evilly fabled plateau of Leng which
occur in the dreaded Necronomicon of the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred. I was rather sorry, later on,
that I had ever looked into that monstrous book at the college library.
On the 7th of November, sight of the westward range having been temporarily lost, we passed
Franklin Island; and the next day descried the cones of Mts. Erebus and Terror on Ross Island ahead,
with the long line of the Parry Mountains beyond. There now stretched off to the east the low, white
line of the great ice barrier, rising perpendicularly to a height of two hundred feet like the rocky
cliffs of Quebec, and marking the end of southward navigation. In the afternoon we entered McMurdo
Sound and stood off the coast in the lee of smoking Mt. Erebus. The scoriac peak towered up some
twelve thousand, seven hundred feet against the eastern sky, like a Japanese print of the sacred
Fujiyama, while beyond it rose the white, ghostlike height of Mt. Terror, ten thousand, nine hundred
feet in altitude, and now extinct as a volcano.
Puffs of smoke from Erebus came intermittently, and one of the graduate assistants--a brilliant
young fellow named Danforth--pointed out what looked like lava on the snowy slope, remarking that
this mountain, discovered in 1840, had undoubtedly been the source of Poe's image when he wrote
seven years later:
--the lavas 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 RossIsland shortly after midnight on the
morning of the 9th, carrying a line of cable from each of the ships and preparing to unload supplies
by means of a breeches-buoy arrangement. Our sensations on first treading Antarctic soil were
poignant and complex, even though at this particular point the Scott and Shackleton expeditions had
preceded us. Our camp on the frozen shore below the volcano's slope was only a provisional one,
headquarters being kept aboard the Arkham. We landed all our drilling apparatus, dogs, sledges,
tents, provisions, gasoline tanks, experimental ice-melting outfit, cameras, both ordinary and aerial,
aeroplane parts, and other accessories, including three small portable wireless outfits--besides those
in the planes--capable of communicating with the Arkham's large outfit from any part of the antarctic
continent that we would be likely to visit. The ship's outfit, communicating with the outside world,
was to convey press reports to the Arkham Advertiser's powerful wireless station on Kingsport
Head, Massachusetts. We hoped to complete our work during a single antarctic summer; but if this
proved impossible, we would winter on the Arkham, sending the Miskatonic north before the
freezing of the ice for another summer's supplies.
I need not repeat what the newspapers have already published about our early work: of our ascent
of Mt. Erebus; our successful mineral borings at several points on Ross Island and the singular speed
with which Pabodie's apparatus accomplished them, even through solid rock layers; our provisional
test of the small ice-melting equipment; our perilous ascent of the great barrier with sledges and
supplies; and our final assembling of five huge aeroplanes at the camp atop the barrier. The health of
our land party--twenty men and fifty-five Alaskan sledge dogs--was remarkable, though of course we
had so far encountered no really destructive temperatures or windstorms. For the most part, the
thermometer varied between zero and 20 or 25 above, and our experience with New England
winters had accustomed us to rigors of this sort. The barrier camp was semi-permanent, and destined
to be a storage cache for gasoline, provisions, dynamite, and other supplies.
Only four of our planes were needed to carry the actual exploring material, the fifth being left
with a pilot and two men from the ships at the storage cache to form a means of reaching us from the
Arkham in case all our exploring planes were lost. Later, when not using all the other planes for
moving apparatus, we would employ one or two in a shuttle transportation service between this cache
and another permanent base on the great plateau from six hundred to seven hundred miles southward,
beyond Beardmore Glacier. Despite the almost unanimous accounts of appalling winds and tempests
that pour down from the plateau, we determined to dispense with intermediate bases, taking our
chances in the interest of economy and probable efficiency.
Wireless reports have spoken of the breathtaking, four-hour, nonstop flight of our squadron on
November 21st over the lofty shelf ice, with vast peaks rising on the west, and the unfathomed
silences echoing to the sound of our engines. Wind troubled us only moderately, and our radio
compasses helped us through the one opaque fog we encountered. When the vast rise loomed ahead,
between Latitudes 83 and 84, we knew we had reached Beardmore Glacier, the largest valley
glacier in the world, and that the frozen sea was now giving place to a frowning and mountainous
coast line. At last we were truly entering the white, aeon-dead world of the ultimate south. Even as
we realized it we saw the peak of Mt. Nansen in the eastern distance, towering up to its height of
almost fifteen thousand feet.
The successful establishment of the southern base above the glacier in Latitude 86 7', East
Longitude 174 23', and the phenomenally rapid and effective borings and blastings made at various
points reached by our sledge trips and short aeroplane flights, are matters of history; as is the
arduous and triumphant ascent of Mt. Nansen by Pabodie and two of the graduate students--Gedney
and Carroll--on December 13-15. We were some eight thousand, five hundred feet above sea-level,
and when experimental drillings revealed solid ground only twelve feet down through the snow and
ice at certain points, we made considerable use of the small melting apparatus and sunk bores and
performed dynamiting at many places where no previous explorer had ever thought of securing
mineral specimens. The pre-Cambrian granites and beacon sandstones thus obtained confirmed our
belief that this plateau was homogeneous, with the great bulk of the continent to the west, but
somewhat different from the parts lying eastward below South America--which we then thought to
form a separate and smaller continent divided from the larger one by a frozen junction of Ross and
Weddell Seas, though Byrd has since disproved the hypothesis.
In certain of the sandstones, dynamited and chiseled after boring revealed their nature, we found
some highly interesting fossil markings and fragments; notably ferns, seaweeds, trilobites, crinoids,
and such mollusks as linguellae and gastropods--all of which seemed of real significance in
connection with the region's primordial history. There was also a queer triangular, striated marking,
about a foot in greatest diameter, which Lake pieced together from three fragments of slate brought
up from a deep-blasted aperture. These fragments came from a point to the westward, near the Queen
Alexandra Range; and Lake, as a biologist, seemed to find their curious marking unusually puzzling
and provocative, though to my geological eye it looked not unlike some of the ripple effects
reasonably common in the sedimentary rocks. Since slate is no more than a metamorphic formation
into which a sedimentary stratum is pressed, and since the pressure itself produces odd distorting
effects on any markings which may exist, I saw no reason for extreme wonder over the striated
depression.
On January 6th, 1931, Lake, Pabodie, Danforth, the other six students, and myself flew directly
over the south pole in two of the great planes, being forced down once by a sudden high wind,
which, fortunately, did not develop into a typical storm. This was, as the papers have stated, one of
several observation flights, during others of which we tried to discern new topographical features in
areas unreached by previous explorers. Our early flights were disappointing in this latter respect,
though they afforded us some magnificent examples of the richly fantastic and deceptive mirages of
the polar regions, of which our sea voyage had given us some brief foretastes. Distant mountains
floated in the sky as enchanted cities, and often the whole white world would dissolve into a gold,
silver, and scarlet land of Dunsanian dreams and adventurous expectancy under the magic of the low
midnight sun. On cloudy days we had considerable trouble in flying owing to the tendency of snowy
earth and sky to merge into one mystical opalescent void with no visible horizon to mark the junction
of the two.
At length we resolved to carry out our original plan of flying five hundred miles eastward with
all four exploring planes and establishing a fresh sub-base at a point which would probably be on the
smaller continental division, as we mistakenly conceived it. Geological specimens obtained there
would be desirable for purposes of comparison. Our health so far had remained excellent--lime
juice well offsetting the steady diet of tinned and salted food, and temperatures generally above zero
enabling us to do without our thickest furs. It was now midsummer, and with haste and care we might
be able to conclude work by March and avoid a tedious wintering through the long antarctic night.
Several savage windstorms had burst upon us from the west, but we had escaped damage through the
skill of Atwood in devising rudimentary aeroplane shelters and windbreaks of heavy snow blocks,
and reinforcing the principal camp buildings with snow. Our good luck and efficiency had indeed
been almost uncanny.
The outside world knew, of course, of our program, and was told also of Lake's strange and
dogged insistence on a westward--or rather, northwestward--prospecting trip before our radical
shift to the new base. It seems that he had pondered a great deal, and with alarmingly radical daring,
over that triangular striated marking in the slate; reading into it certain contradictions in nature and
geological period which whetted his curiosity to the utmost, and made him avid to sink more borings
and blastings in the west-stretching formation to which the exhumed fragments evidently belonged.
He was strangely convinced that the marking was the print of some bulky, unknown, and radically
unclassifiable organism of considerably advanced evolution, notwithstanding that the rock which
bore it was of so vastly ancient a date--Cambrian if not actually pre-Cambrian--as to preclude the
probable existence not only of all highly evolved life, but of any life at all above the unicellular or at
most the trilobite stage. These fragments, with their odd marking, must have been five hundred
million to a thousand million years old.
II
Popular imagination, I judge, responded actively to our wireless bulletins of Lake's start
northwestward into regions never trodden by human foot or penetrated by human imagination, though
we did not mention his wild hopes of revolutionizing the entire sciences of biology and geology.
His preliminary sledging and boring journey of January 11th to 18th with Pabodie and five others--
marred by the loss of two dogs in an upset when crossing one of the great pressure ridges in the ice-
-had brought up more and more of the Archaean slate; and even I was interested by the singular
profusion of evident fossil markings in that unbelievably ancient stratum. These markings, however,
were of very primitive life forms involving no great paradox except that any life forms should occur
in rock as definitely pre-Cambrian as this seemed to be; hence I still failed to see the good sense of
Lake's demand for an interlude in our time-saving program--an interlude requiring the use of all four
planes, many men, and the whole of the expedition's mechanical apparatus. I did not, in the end, veto
the plan, though I decided not to accompany the northwestward party despite Lake's plea for my
geological advice. While they were gone, I would remain at the base with Pabodie and five men and
work out final plans for the eastward 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
shortwave transmitters on the planes; these being simultaneously picked up by our apparatus at the
southern base and by the Arkham at McMurdo Sound, whence they were relayed to the outside world
on wave lengths up to fifty meters. The start was made January 22nd at 4 A.M., and the first wireless
message we received came only two hours later, when Lake spoke of descending and starting a
small-scale ice-melting and bore at a point some three hundred miles away from us. Six hours after
that a second and very excited message told of the frantic, beaver-like work whereby a shallow shaft
had been sunk and blasted, culminating in the discovery of slate fragments with several markings
approximately like the one which had caused the original puzzlement.
Three hours later a brief bulletin announced the resumption of the flight in the teeth of a raw and
piercing gale; and when I dispatched a message of protest against further hazards, Lake replied curtly
that his new specimens made any hazard worth taking. I saw that his excitement had reached the point
of mutiny, and that I could do nothing to check this headlong risk of the whole expedition's success;
but it was appalling to think of his plunging deeper and deeper into that treacherous and sinister white
immensity of tempests and unfathomed mysteries which stretched off for some fifteen hundred miles
to the half-known, half-suspected coast line of Queen Mary and Knox Lands.
Then, in about an hour and a half more, came that doubly excited message from Lake's moving
plane, which almost reversed my sentiments and made me wish I had accompanied the party:
"10:05 P.M. On the wing. After snowstorm, have spied mountain range ahead higher than any
hitherto seen. May equal Himalayas, allowing for height of plateau. Probable Latitude 76 15',
Longitude 113 10' E. Reaches far as can see to right and left. Suspicion of two smoking cones. All
peaks black and bare of snow. Gale blowing off them impedes navigation."
After that Pabodie, the men and I hung breathlessly over the receiver. Thought of this titanic
mountain rampart seven hundred miles away inflamed our deepest sense of adventure; and we
rejoiced that our expedition, if not ourselves personally, had been its discoverers. In half an hour
Lake called us again:
"Moulton's plane forced down on plateau in foothills, but nobody hurt and perhaps can repair.
Shall transfer essentials to other three for return or further moves if necessary, but no more heavy
plane travel needed just now. Mountains surpass anything in imagination. Am going up scouting in
Carroll's plane, with all weight out.
"You can't imagine anything like this. Highest peaks must go over thirty-five thousand feet.
Everest out of the running. Atwood to work out height with theodolite while Carroll and I go up.
Probably wrong about cones, for formations look stratified. Possibly pre-Cambrian slate with other
strata mixed in. Queer skyline effects--regular sections of cubes clinging to highest peaks. Whole
thing marvelous in red-gold light of low sun. Like land of mystery in a dream or gateway to
forbidden world of untrodden wonder. Wish you were here to study."
Though it was technically sleeping time, not one of us listeners thought for a moment of retiring.
It must have been a good deal the same at McMurdo Sound, where the supply cache and the Arkham
were also getting the messages; for Captain Douglas gave out a call congratulating everybody on the
important find, and Sherman, the cache operator, seconded his sentiments. We were sorry, of course,
about the damaged aeroplane, but hoped it could be easily mended. Then, at 11 P.M., came another
call from Lake:
"Up with Carroll over highest foothills. Don't dare try really tall peaks in present weather, but
shall later. Frightful work climbing, and hard going at this altitude, but worth it. Great range fairly
solid, hence can't get any glimpses beyond. Main summits exceed Himalayas, and very queer. Range
looks like pre-Cambrian slate, with plain signs of many other upheaved strata. Was wrong about
volcanism. Goes farther in either direction than we can see. Swept clear of snow above about twenty-
one thousand feet.
"Odd formations on slopes of highest mountains. Great low square blocks with exactly vertical
sides, and rectangular lines of low, vertical ramparts, like the old Asian castles clinging to steep
mountains in Roerich's paintings. Impressive from distance. Flew close to some, and Carroll thought
they were formed of smaller separate pieces, but that is probably weathering. Most edges crumbled
and rounded off as if exposed to storms and climate changes for millions of years.
"Parts, especially upper parts, seem to be of lighter-colored rock than any visible strata on slopes
proper, hence of evidently crystalline origin. Close flying shows many cave mouths, some unusually
regular in outline, square or semicircular. You must come and investigate. Think I saw rampart
squarely on top of one peak. Height seems about thirty thousand to thirty-five thousand feet. Am up
twenty-one thousand, five hundred myself, in devilish, gnawing cold. Wind whistles and pipes
through passes and in and out of caves, but no flying danger so far."
From then on for another half hour Lake kept up a running fire of comment, and expressed his
intention of climbing some of the peaks on foot. I replied that I would join him as soon as he could
send a plane, and that Pabodie and I would work out the best gasoline plan--just where and how to
concentrate our supply in view of the expedition's altered character. Obviously, Lake's boring
operations, as well as his aeroplane activities, would require a great deal for the new base which he
planned to establish at the foot of the mountains; and it was possible that the eastward flight might not
be made, after all, this season. In connection with this business I called Captain Douglas and asked
him to get as much as possible out of the ships and up the barrier with the single dog team we had
left there. A direct route across the unknown region between Lake and McMurdo Sound was what we
really ought to establish.
Lake called me later to say that he had decided to let the camp stay where Moulton's plane had
been forced down, and where repairs had already progressed somewhat. The ice sheet was very thin,
with dark ground here and there visible, and he would sink some borings and blasts at that very point
before making any sledge trips or climbing expeditions. He spoke of the ineffable majesty of the
whole scene, and the queer state of his sensations at being in the lee of vast, silent pinnacles whose
ranks shot up like a wall reaching the sky at the world's rim. Atwood's theodolite observations had
placed the height of the five tallest peaks at from thirty thousand to thirty-four thousand feet. The
windswept nature of the terrain clearly disturbed Lake, for it argued the occasional existence of
prodigious gales, violent beyond anything we had so far encountered. His camp lay a little more than
five miles from where the higher foothills rose abruptly. I could almost trace a note of subconscious
alarm in his words--flashed across a glacial void of seven hundred miles--as he urged that we all
hasten with the matter and get the strange, new region disposed of as soon as possible. He was about
to rest now, after a continuous day's work of almost unparalleled speed, strenuousness, and results.
In the morning I had a three-cornered wireless talk with Lake and Captain Douglas at their widely
separated bases. It was agreed that one of Lake's planes would come to my base for Pabodie, the five
men, and myself, as well as for all the fuel it could carry. The rest of the fuel question, depending on
our decision about an easterly trip, could wait for a few days, since Lake had enough for immediate
camp heat and borings. Eventually the old southern base ought to be restocked, but if we postponed
the easterly trip we would not use it till the next summer, and, meanwhile, Lake must send a plane to
explore a direct route between his new mountains and McMurdo Sound.
Pabodie and I prepared to close our base for a short or long period, as the case might be. If we
wintered in the antarctic we would probably fly straight from Lake's base to the Arkham without
returning to this spot. Some of our conical tents had already been reinforced by blocks of hard snow,
and now we decided to complete the job of making a permanent village. Owing to a very liberal tent
supply, Lake had with him all that his base would need, even after our arrival. I wirelessed that
Pabodie and I would be ready for the northwestward move after one day's work and one night's rest.
Our labors, however, were not very steady after 4 P.M., for about that time Lake began sending in
the most extraordinary and excited messages. His working day had started unpropitiously, since an
aeroplane survey of the nearly-exposed rock surfaces showed an entire absence of those Archaean
and primordial strata for which he was looking, and which formed so great a part of the colossal
peaks that loomed up at a tantalizing distance from the camp. Most of the rocks glimpsed were
apparently Jurassic and Comanchian sandstones and Permian and Triassic schists, with now and then a
glossy black outcropping suggesting a hard and slaty coal. This rather discouraged Lake, whose
plans all hinged on unearthing specimens more than five hundred million years older. It was clear to
him that in order to recover the Archaean slate vein in which he had found the odd markings, he
would have to make a long sledge trip from these foothills to the steep slopes of the gigantic
mountains themselves.
He had resolved, nevertheless, to do some local boring as part of the expedition's general
program; hence he set up the drill and put five men to work with it while the rest finished settling the
camp and repairing the damaged aeroplane. The softest visible rock--a sandstone about a quarter of a
mile from the camp--had been chosen for the first sampling; and the drill made excellent progress
without much supplementary blasting. It was about three hours afterward, following the first really
heavy blast of the operation, that the shouting of the drill crew was heard; and that young Gedney--
the acting foreman--rushed into the camp with the startling news.
They had struck a cave. Early in the boring the sandstone had given place to a vein of Comanchian
limestone, full of minute fossil cephalopods, corals, echini, and spirifera, and with occasional
suggestions of siliceous sponges and marine vertebrate bones--the latter probably of teleosts,
sharks, and ganoids. This, in itself, was important enough, as affording the first vertebrate fossils the
expedition had yet secured; but when shortly afterward the drill head dropped through the stratum
into apparent vacancy, a wholly new and doubly intense wave of excitement spread among the
excavators. A good-sized blast had laid open the subterrene secret; and now, through a jagged
aperture perhaps five feet across and three feet thick, there yawned before the avid searchers a
section of shallow limestone hollowing worn more than fifty million years ago by the trickling
ground waters of a bygone tropic world.
The hollowed layer was not more than seven or eight feet deep but extended off indefinitely in
all directions and had a fresh, slightly moving air which suggested its membership in an extensive
subterranean system. Its roof and floor were abundantly equipped with large stalactites and
stalagmites, some of which met in columnar form: but important above all else was the vast deposit of
shells and bones, which in places nearly choked the passage. Washed down from unknown jungles of
Mesozoic tree ferns and fungi, and forests of Tertiary cycads, fan palms, and primitive angiosperms,
this osseous medley contained representatives of more Cretaceous, Eocene, and other animal species
than the greatest paleontologist could have counted or classified in a year. Mollusks, crustacean
armor, fishes, amphibians, reptiles, birds, and early mammals--great and small, known and unknown.
No wonder Gedney ran back to the camp shouting, and no wonder everyone else dropped work and
rushed headlong through the biting cold to where the tall derrick marked a new-found gateway to
secrets of inner earth and vanished aeons.
When Lake had satisfied the first keen edge of his curiosity, he scribbled a message in his
notebook and had young Moulton run back to the camp to dispatch it by wireless. This was my first
word of the discovery, and it told of the identification of early shells, bones of ganoids and
placoderms, remnants of labyrinthodonts and thecodonts, great mosasaur skull fragments, dinosaur
vertebrae and armor plates, pterodactyl teeth and wing bones, Archaeopteryx debris, Miocene sharks'
teeth, primitive bird skulls, and other bones of archaic mammals such as palaeotheres, Xiphodons,
Eohippi, Oreodons, and titanotheres. There was nothing as recent as a mastodon, elephant, true camel,
deer, or bovine animal; hence Lake concluded that the last deposits had occurred during the
Oligocene Age, and that the hollowed stratum had lain in its present dried, dead, and inaccessible
state for at least thirty million years.
On the other hand, the prevalence of very early life forms was singular in the highest degree.
Though the limestone formation was, on the evidence of such typical imbedded fossils as
ventriculites, positively and unmistakably Comanchian and not a particle earlier, the free fragments in
the hollow space included a surprising proportion from organisms hitherto considered as peculiar to
far older periods--even rudimentary fishes, mollusks, and corals as remote as the 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 three hundred million years ago and that of
only thirty million years ago. How far this continuity had extended beyond the Oligocene Age when
the cavern was closed was of course past all speculation. In any event, the coming of the frightful ice
in the Pleistocene some five hundred thousand years ago--a mere yesterday as compared with the age
of this cavity--must have put an end to any of the primal forms which had locally managed to outlive
their common terms.
Lake was not content to let his first message stand, but had another bulletin written and dispatched
across the snow to the camp before Moulton could get back. After that Moulton stayed at the
wireless in one of the planes, transmitting to me--and to the Arkham for relaying to the outside
world--the frequent postscripts which Lake sent him by a succession of messengers. Those who
followed the newspapers will remember the excitement created among men of science by that
afternoon's reports--reports which have finally led, after all these years, to the organization of that
very Starkweather-Moore Expedition which I am so anxious to dissuade from its purposes. I had
better give the messages literally as Lake sent them, and as our base operator McTighe translated
them from the pencil shorthand:
"Fowler makes discovery of highest importance in sandstone and limestone fragments from
blasts. Several distinct triangular striated prints like those in Archaean slate, proving that source
survived from over six hundred million years ago to Comanchian times without more than moderate
morphological changes and decrease in average size. Comanchian prints apparently more primitive
or decadent, if anything, than older ones. Emphasize importance of discovery in press. Will mean to
biology what Einstein has meant to mathematics and physics. Joins up with my previous work and
amplifies conclusions.
"Appears to indicate, as I suspected, that earth has seen whole cycle or cycles of organic life
before known one that begins with Archaeozoic cells. Was evolved and specialized not later than a
thousand million years ago, when planet was young and recently uninhabitable for any life forms or
normal protoplasmic structure. Question arises when, where, and how development took place."
"Later. Examining certain skeletal fragments of large land and marine saurians and primitive
mammals, find singular local wounds or injuries to bony structure not attributable to any known
predatory or carnivorous animal of any period, of two sorts--straight, penetrant bores, and apparently
hacking incisions. One or two cases of cleanly severed bones. Not many specimens affected. Am
sending to camp for electric torches. Will extend search area underground by hacking away
stalactites."
"Still later. Have found peculiar soapstone fragment about six inches across and an inch and a half
thick, wholly unlike any visible local formation--greenish, but no evidences to place its period. Has
curious smoothness and regularity. Shaped like five-pointed star with tips broken off, and signs of
other cleavage at inward angles and in center of surface. Small, smooth depression in center of
unbroken surface. Arouses much curiosity as to source and weathering. Probably some freak of
water action. Carroll, with magnifier, thinks he can make out additional markings of geologic
significance. Groups of tiny dots in regular patterns. Dogs growing uneasy as we work, and seem to
hate this soapstone. Must see if it has any peculiar odor. Will report again when Mills gets back with
light and we start on underground area."
"10:15 P.M. Important discovery. Orrendorf and Watkins, working underground at 9:45 with light,
found monstrous barrel-shaped fossil of wholly unknown nature; probably vegetable unless
overgrown specimen of unknown marine radiata. Tissue evidently preserved by mineral salts. Tough
as leather, but astonishing flexibility retained in places. Marks of broken-off parts at ends and around
sides. Six feet end to end, three and five-tenths feet central diameter, tapering to one foot at each end.
Like a barrel with five bulging ridges in place of staves. Lateral breakages, as of thinnish stalks, are
at equator in middle of these ridges. In furrows between ridges are curious growths--combs or
wings that fold up and spread out like fans. All greatly damaged but one, which gives almost seven-
foot wing spread. Arrangement reminds one of certain monsters of primal myth, especially fabled
Elder Things in Necronomicon.
"Their wings seem to be membranous, stretched on frame work of glandular tubing. Apparent
minute orifices in frame tubing at wing tips. Ends of body shriveled, giving no clue to interior or to
what has been broken off there. Must dissect when we get back to camp. Can't decide whether
vegetable or animal. Many features obviously of almost incredible primitiveness. Have set all hands
cutting stalactites and looking for further specimens. Additional scarred bones found, but these must
wait. Having trouble with dogs. They can't endure the new specimen, and would probably tear it to
pieces if we didn't keep it at a distance from them."
"11:30 P.M. Attention, Dyer, Pabodie, Douglas. Matter of highest--I might say transcendent--
importance. Arkham must relay to Kingsport Head Station at once. Strange barrel growth is the
Archaean thing that left prints in rocks. Mills, Boudreau, and Fowler discover cluster of thirteen
more at underground point forty feet from aperture. Mixed with curiously rounded and configured
soapstone fragments smaller than one previously found--star-shaped, but no marks of breakage
except at some of the points.
"Of organic specimens, eight apparently perfect, with all appendages. Have brought all to
surface, leading off dogs to distance. They cannot stand the things. Give close attention to
description and repeat back for accuracy Papers must get this right.
"Objects are eight feet long all over. Six-foot, five-ridged barrel torso three and five-tenths feet
central diameter, one foot end diameters. Dark gray, flexible, and infinitely tough. Seven-foot
membranous wings of same color, found folded, spread out of furrows between ridges. Wing
framework tubular or glandular, of lighter gray, with orifices at wing tips. Spread wings have
serrated edge. Around equator, one at central apex of each of the five vertical, stave-like ridges are
five systems of light gray flexible arms or tentacles found tightly folded to torso but expansible to
maximum length of over three feet. Like arms of primitive crinoid. Single stalks three inches
diameter branch after six inches into five substalks, each of which branches after eight inches into
small, tapering tentacles or tendrils, giving each stalk a total of twenty-five tentacles.
"At top of torso blunt, bulbous neck of lighter gray, with gill-like suggestions, holds yellowish
five-pointed starfish-shaped apparent head covered with three-inch wiry cilia of various prismatic
colors.
"Head thick and puffy, about two feet point to point, with three-inch flexible yellowish tubes
projecting from each point. Slit in exact center of top probably breathing aperture. At end of each
tube is spherical expansion where yellowish membrane rolls back on handling to reveal glassy, red-
irised globe, evidently an eye.
"Five slightly longer reddish tubes start from inner angles of starfish-shaped head and end in
saclike swellings of same color which, upon pressure, open to bell-shaped orifices two inches
maximum diameter and lined with sharp, white tooth like projections--probably mouths. All these
tubes, cilia, and points of starfish head, found folded tightly down; tubes and points clinging to
bulbous neck and torso. Flexibility surprising despite vast toughness.
"At bottom of torso, rough but dissimilarly functioning counterparts of head arrangements exist.
Bulbous light-gray pseudo-neck, without gill suggestions, holds greenish five-pointed starfish
arrangement.
"Tough, muscular arms four feet long and tapering from seven inches diameter at base to about
two and five-tenths at point. To each point is attached small end of a greenish five-veined
membranous triangle eight inches long and six wide at farther end. This is the paddle, fin, or
pseudofoot which has made prints in rocks from a thousand million to fifty or sixty million years old.
"From inner angles of starfish arrangement project two-foot reddish tubes tapering from three
inches diameter at base to one at tip. Orifices at tips. All these parts infinitely tough and leathery, but
extremely flexible. Four-foot arms with paddles undoubtedly used for locomotion of some sort,
marine or otherwise. When moved, display suggestions of exaggerated muscularity. As found, all
these projections tightly folded over pseudoneck and end of torso, corresponding to projections at
other end.
"Cannot yet assign positively to animal or vegetable kingdom, but odds now favor animal.
Probably represents incredibly advanced evolution of radiata without loss of certain primitive
features. Echinoderm resemblances unmistakable despite local contradictory evidences.
"Wing structure puzzles in view of probable marine habitat, but may have use in water navigation.
Symmetry is curiously vegetablelike, suggesting vegetable's essential up-and-down structure rather
than animal's fore-and-aft structure. Fabulously early date of evolution, preceding even simplest
Archaean protozoa hitherto known, baffles all conjecture as to origin.
"Complete specimens have such uncanny resemblance to certain creatures of primal myth that
suggestion of ancient existence outside antarctic becomes inevitable. Dyer and Pabodie have read
Necronomicon and seen Clark Ashton Smith's nightmare paintings based on text, and will understand
when I speak of Elder Things supposed to have created all earth life as jest or mistake. Students have
always thought conception formed from morbid imaginative treatment of very ancient tropical radiata.
Also like prehistoric folklore things Wilmarth has spoken of--Cthulhu cult appendages, etc.
"Vast field of study opened. Deposits probably of late Cretaceous or early Eocene period,
judging from associated specimens. Massive stalagmites deposited above them. Hard work hewing
out, but toughness prevented damage. State of preservation miraculous, evidently owing to limestone
action. No more found so far, but will resume search later. Job now to get fourteen huge specimens
to camp without dogs, which bark furiously and can't be trusted near them.
"With nine men--three left to guard the dogs--we ought to manage the three sledges fairly well,
though wind is bad. Must establish plane communication with McMurdo Sound and begin shipping
material. But I've got to dissect one of these things before we take any rest. Wish I had a real
laboratory here. Dyer better kick himself for having tried to stop my westward trip. First the world's
greatest mountains, and then this. If this last isn't the high spot of the expedition, I don't know what is.
We're made scientifically. Congrats, Pabodie, on the drill that opened up the cave. Now will Arkham
please repeat description?"
The sensations of Pabodie and myself at receipt of this report were almost beyond description,
nor were our companions much behind us in enthusiasm. McTighe, who had hastily translated a few
high spots as they came from the droning receiving set, wrote out the entire message from his
shorthand version as soon as Lake's operator signed off. All appreciated the epoch-making
significance of the discovery, and I sent Lake congratulations as soon as the Arkham's operator had
repeated back the descriptive parts as requested; and my example was followed by Sherman from his
station at the McMurdo Sound supply cache, as well as by Captain Douglas of the Arkham. Later, as
head of the expedition, I added some remarks to be relayed through the Arkham to the outside world.
Of course, rest was an absurd thought amidst this excitement; and my only wish was to get to Lake's
camp as quickly as I could. It disappointed me when he sent word that a rising mountain gale made
early aerial travel impossible.
But within an hour and a half interest again rose to banish disappointment. Lake, sending more
messages, told of the completely successful transportation of the fourteen great specimens to the
camp. It had been a hard pull, for the things were surprisingly heavy; but nine men had accomplished
it very neatly. Now some of the party were hurriedly building a snow corral at a safe distance from
the camp, to which the dogs could be brought for greater convenience in feeding. The specimens
were laid out on the hard snow near the camp, save for one on which Lake was making crude attempts
at dissection.
This dissection seemed to be a greater task than had been expected, for, despite the heat of a
gasoline stove in the newly raised laboratory tent, the deceptively flexible tissues of the chosen
specimen--a powerful and intact one--lost nothing of their more than leathery toughness. Lake was
puzzled as to how he might make the requisite incisions without violence destructive enough to upset
all the structural niceties he was looking for. He had, it is true, seven more perfect specimens; but
these were too few to use up recklessly unless the cave might later yield an unlimited supply.
Accordingly he removed the specimen and dragged in one which, though having remnants of the
starfish arrangements at both ends, was badly crushed and partly disrupted along one of the great
torso furrows.
Results, quickly reported over the wireless, were baffling and provocative indeed. Nothing like
delicacy or accuracy was possible with instruments hardly able to cut the anomalous tissue, but the
little that was achieved left us all awed and bewildered. Existing biology would have to be wholly
revised, for this thing was no product of any cell growth science knows about. There had been
scarcely any mineral replacement, and despite an age of perhaps forty million years, the internal
organs were wholly intact. The leathery, undeteriorative, and almost indestructible quality was an
inherent attribute of the thing's form of organization, and pertained to some paleogean cycle of
invertebrate evolution utterly beyond our powers of speculation. At first all that Lake found was dry,
but as the heated tent produced its thawing effect, organic moisture of pungent and offensive odor
was encountered toward the thing's uninjured side. It was not blood, but a thick, dark-green fluid
apparently answering the same purpose. By the time Lake reached this stage, all thirty-seven dogs
had been brought to the still uncompleted corral near the camp, and even at that distance set up a
savage barking and show of restlessness at the acrid, diffusive smell.
Far from helping to place the strange entity, this provisional dissection merely deepened its
mystery. All guesses about its external members had been correct, and on the evidence of these one
could hardly hesitate to call the thing animal; but internal inspection brought up so many vegetable
evidences that Lake was left hopelessly at sea. It had digestion and circulation, and eliminated waste
matter through the reddish tubes of its starfish-shaped base. Cursorily, one would say that its
respiration apparatus handled oxygen rather than carbon dioxide, and there were odd evidences of
air-storage chambers and methods of shifting respiration from the external orifice to at least two
other fully developed breathing systems--gills and pores. Clearly, it was amphibian, and probably
adapted to long airless hibernation periods as well. Vocal organs seemed present in connection with
the main respiratory system, but they presented anomalies beyond immediate solution. Articulate
speech, in the sense of syllable utterance, seemed barely conceivable, but musical piping notes
covering a wide range were highly probable. The muscular system was almost prematurely
developed.
The nervous system was so complex and highly developed as to leave Lake aghast. Though
excessively primitive and archaic in some respects, the thing had a set of ganglial centers and
connectives arguing the very extremes of specialized development. Its five-lobed brain was
surprisingly advanced, and there were signs of a sensory equipment, served in part through the wiry
cilia of the head, involving factors alien to any other terrestrial organism. Probably it has more than
five senses, so that its habits could not be predicted from any existing analogy. It must, Lake thought,
have been a creature of keen sensitiveness and delicately differentiated functions in its primal world-
-much like the ants and bees of today. It reproduced like the vegetable cryptogams, especially the
Pteridophyta, having spore cases at the tips of the wings and evidently developing from a thallus or
prothallus.
But to give it a name at this stage was mere folly. It looked like a radiate, but was clearly
something more. It was partly vegetable, but had three-fourths of the essentials of animal structure.
That it was marine in origin, its symmetrical contour and certain other attributes clearly indicated; yet
one could not be exact as to the limit of its later adaptations. The wings, after all, held a persistent
suggestion of the aerial. How it could have undergone its tremendously complex evolution on a new-
born earth in time to leave prints in Archaean rocks was so far beyond conception as to make Lake
whimsically recall the primal myths about Great Old Ones who filtered down from the stars and
concocted earth life as a joke or mistake; and the wild tales of cosmic hill things from outside told by
a folklorist colleague in Miskatonic's English department.
Naturally, he considered the possibility of the pre-Cambrian prints having been made by a less
evolved ancestor of the present specimens, but quickly rejected this too-facile theory upon
considering the advanced structural qualities of the older fossils. If anything, the later contours
showed decadence rather than higher evolution. The size of the pseudofeet had decreased, and the
whole morphology seemed coarsened and simplified. Moreover, the nerves and organs just examined
held singular suggestions of retrogression from forms still more complex. Atrophied and vestigial
parts were surprisingly prevalent. Altogether, little could be said to have been solved; and Lake fell
back on mythology for a provisional name--jocosely dubbing his finds "The Elder Ones."
At about 2:30 A.M., having decided to postpone further work and get a little rest, he covered the
dissected organism with a tarpaulin, emerged from the laboratory tent, and studied the intact
specimens with renewed interest. The ceaseless antarctic sun had begun to limber up their tissues a
trifle, so that the head points and tubes of two or three showed signs of unfolding; but Lake did not
believe there was any danger of immediate decomposition in the almost subzero air. He did,
however, move all the undissected specimens close together and throw a spare tent over them in
order to keep off the direct solar rays. That would also help to keep their possible scent away from
the dogs, whose hostile unrest was really becoming a problem, even at their substantial distance and
behind the higher and higher snow walls which an increased quota of the men were hastening to raise
around their quarters. He had to weight down the corners of the tent cloth with heavy blocks of snow
to hold it in place amidst the rising gale, for the titan mountains seemed about to deliver some gravely
severe blasts. Early apprehensions about sudden antarctic winds were revived, and under Atwood's
supervision precautions were taken to bank the tents, new dog corral, and crude aeroplane shelters
with snow on the mountainward side. These latter shelters, begun with hard snow blocks during odd
moments, were by no means as high as they should have been; and Lake finally detached all hands
from other tasks to work on them.
It was after four when Lake at last prepared to sign off and advised us all to share the rest period
his outfit would take when the shelter walls were a little higher. He held some friendly chat with
Pabodie over the ether, and repeated his praise of the really marvelous drills that had helped him
make his discovery. Atwood also sent greetings and praises. I gave Lake a warm word of
congratulations, owning up that he was right about the western trip, and we all agreed to get in touch
by wireless at ten in the morning. If the gale was then over, Lake would send a plane for the party at
my base. Just before retiring I dispatched a final message to the Arkham with instructions about
toning down the day's news for the outside world, since the full details seemed radical enough to
rouse a wave of incredulity until further substantiated.
III
None of us, I imagine, slept very heavily or continuously that morning. Both the excitement of
Lake's discovery and the mounting fury of the wind were against such a thing. So savage was the
blast, even where we were, that we could not help wondering how much worse it was at Lake's camp,
directly under the vast unknown peaks that bred and delivered it. McTighe was awake at ten o'clock
and tried to get Lake on the wireless, as agreed, but some electrical condition in the disturbed air to
the westward seemed to prevent communication. We did, however, get the Arkham, and Douglas told
me that he had likewise been vainly trying to reach Lake. He had not known about the wind, for very
little was blowing at McMurdo Sound, despite its persistent rage where we were.
Throughout the day we all listened anxiously and tried to get Lake at intervals, but invariably
without results. About noon a positive frenzy of wind stampeded out of the west, causing us to fear
for the safety of our camp; but it eventually died down, with only a moderate relapse at 2 P.M. After
three o'clock it was very quiet, and we redoubled our efforts to get Lake. Reflecting that he had four
planes, each provided with an excellent short-wave outfit, we could not imagine any ordinary
accident capable of crippling all his wireless equipment at once. Nevertheless the stony silence
continued, and when we thought of the delirious force the wind must have had in his locality we
could not help making the more direful conjectures.
By six o'clock our fears had become intense and definite, and after a wireless consultation with
Douglas and Thorfinnssen I resolved to take steps toward investigation. The fifth aeroplane, which
we had left at the McMurdo Sound supply cache with Sherman and two sailors, was in good shape
and ready for instant use, and it seemed that the very emergency for which it had been saved was now
upon us. I got Sherman by wireless and ordered him to join me with the plane and the two sailors at
the southern base as quickly as possible, the air conditions being apparently highly favorable. We
then talked over the personnel of the coming investigation party, and decided that we would include
all hands, together with the sledge and dogs which I had kept with me. Even so great a load would not
be too much for one of the huge planes built to our special orders for heavy machinery
transportation. At intervals I still tried to reach Lake with the wireless, but all to no purpose.
Sherman, with the sailors Gunnarsson and Larsen, took off at 7:30, and reported a quiet flight from
several points on the wing. They arrived at our base at midnight, and all hands at once discussed the
next move. It was risky business sailing over the antarctic in a single aeroplane without any line of
bases, but no one drew back from what seemed like the plainest necessity. We turned in at two
o'clock for a brief rest after some preliminary loading of the plane, but were up again in four hours
to finish the loading and packing.
At 7:15 A.M., January 25th, we started flying northwestward under McTighe's pilotage with ten
men, seven dogs, a sledge, a fuel and food supply, and other items including the plane's wireless
outfit. The atmosphere was clear, fairly quiet, and relatively mild in temperature, and we anticipated
very little trouble in reaching the latitude and longitude designated by Lake as the site of his camp.
Our apprehensions were over what we might find, or fail to find, at the end of our journey, for
silence continued to answer all calls dispatched to the camp.
Every incident of that four-and-a-half-hour flight is burned into my recollection because of its
crucial position in my life. It marked my loss, at the age of fifty-four, of all that peace and balance
which the normal mind possesses through its accustomed conception of external nature and nature's
laws. Thenceforward the ten of us--but the student Danforth and myself above all others--were to
face a hideously amplified world of lurking horrors which nothing can erase from our emotions, and
which we would refrain from sharing with mankind in general if we could. The newspapers have
printed the bulletins we sent from the moving plane, telling of our nonstop course, our two battles
with treacherous upper-air gales, our glimpse of the broken surface where Lake had sunk his mid-
journey shaft three days before, and our sight of a group of those strange fluffy snow cylinders
noted by Amundsen and Byrd as rolling in the wind across the endless leagues of frozen plateau.
There came a point, though, when our sensations could not be conveyed in any words the press
would understand, and a latter point when we had to adopt an actual rule of strict censorship.
The sailor Larsen was first to spy the jagged line of witchlike cones and pinnacles ahead, and his
shouts sent everyone to the windows of the great cabined plane. Despite our speed, they were very
slow in gaining prominence; hence we knew that they must be infinitely far off, and visible only
because of their abnormal height. Little by little, however, they rose grimly into the western sky;
allowing us to distinguish various bare, bleak, blackish summits, and to catch the curious sense of
fantasy which they inspired as seen in the reddish antarctic light against the provocative background
of iridescent ice-dust clouds. In the whole spectacle there was a persistent, pervasive hint of
stupendous secrecy and potential revelation. It was as if these stark, nightmare spires marked the
pylons of a frightful gateway into forbidden spheres of dream, and complex gulfs of remote time,
space, and ultra-dimensionality. I could not help feeling that they were evil things--mountains of
madness whose farther slopes looked out over some accursed ultimate abyss. That seething, half-
luminous cloud background held ineffable suggestions of a vague, ethereal beyondness far more than
terrestrially spatial, and gave appalling reminders of the utter remoteness, separateness, desolation,
and aeon-long death of this untrodden and unfathomed austral world.
It was young Danforth who drew our notice to the curious regularities of the higher mountain
skyline--regularities like clinging fragments of perfect cubes, which Lake had mentioned in his
messages, and which indeed justified his comparison with the dreamlike suggestions of primordial
temple ruins, on cloudy Asian mountaintops so subtly and strangely painted by Roerich. There was
indeed something hauntingly Roerich-like about this whole unearthly continent of mountainous
mystery. I had felt it in October when we first caught sight of Victoria Land, and I felt it afresh now. I
felt, too, another wave of uneasy consciousness of Archaean mythical resemblances; of how
disturbingly this lethal realm corresponded to the evilly famed plateau of Leng in the primal writings.
Mythologists have placed Leng in Central Asia; but the racial memory of man--or of his
predecessors--is long, and it may well be that certain tales have come down from lands and mountains
and temples of horror earlier than Asia and earlier than any human world we know. A few daring
mystics have hinted at a pre-Pleistocene origin for the fragmentary Pnakotic Manuscripts, and have
suggested that the devotees of Tsathoggua were as alien to mankind as Tsathoggua itself. Leng,
wherever in space or time it might brood, was not a region I would care to be in or near, nor did I
relish the proximity of a world that had ever bred such ambiguous and Archaean monstrosities as
those Lake had just mentioned. At the moment I felt sorry that I had ever read the abhorred
Necronomicon, or talked so much with that unpleasantly erudite folklorist Wilmarth at the university.
This mood undoubtedly served to aggravate my reaction to the bizarre mirage which burst upon
us from the increasingly opalescent zenith as we drew near the mountains and began to make out the
cumulative undulations of the foothills. I had seen dozens of polar mirages during the preceding
weeks, some of them quite as uncanny and fantastically vivid as the present example; but this one had
a wholly novel and obscure quality of menacing symbolism, and I shuddered as the seething labyrinth
of fabulous walls and towers and minarets loomed out of the troubled ice vapors above our heads.
The effect was that of a Cyclopean city of no architecture known to man or to human imagination,
with vast aggregations of night-black masonry embodying monstrous perversions of geometrical
laws. There were truncated cones, sometimes terraced or fluted, surmounted by tall cylindrical shafts
here and there bulbously enlarged and often capped with tiers of thinnish scalloped disks; and strange
beetling, table-like constructions suggesting piles of multitudinous rectangular slabs or circular
plates or five-pointed stars with each one overlapping the one beneath. There were composite cones
and pyramids either alone or surmounting cylinders or cubes or flatter truncated cones and pyramids,
and occasional needle-like spires in curious clusters of five. All of these febrile structures seemed
knit together by tubular bridges crossing from one to the other at various dizzy heights, and the
implied scale of the whole was terrifying and oppressive in its sheer gigantism. The general type of
mirage was not unlike some of the wilder forms observed and drawn by the arctic whaler Scoresby in
1820, but at this time and place, with those dark, unknown mountain peaks soaring stupendously ahead,
that anomalous elder-world discovery in our minds, and the pall of probable disaster enveloping the
greater part of our expedition, we all seemed to find in it a taint of latent malignity and infinitely evil
portent.
I was glad when the mirage began to break up, though in the process the various nightmare turrets
and cones assumed distorted, temporary forms of even vaster hideousness. As the whole illusion
dissolved to churning opalescence we began to look earthward again, and saw that our journey's end
was not far off. The unknown mountains ahead rose dizzily up like a fearsome rampart of giants, their
curious regularities showing with startling clearness even without a field glass. We were over the
lowest foothills now, and could see amidst the snow, ice, and bare patches of their main plateau a
couple of darkish spots which we took to be Lake's camp and boring. The higher foothills shot up
between five and six miles away, forming a range almost distinct from the terrifying line of more than
Himalayan peaks beyond them. At length Ropes--the student who had relieved McTighe at the
controls--began to head downward toward the left-hand dark spot whose size marked it as the camp.
As he did so, McTighe sent out the last uncensored wireless message the world was to receive from
our expedition.
Everyone, of course, has read the brief and unsatisfying bulletins of the rest of our antarctic
sojourn. Some hours after our landing we sent a guarded report of the tragedy we found, and
reluctantly announced the wiping out of the whole Lake party by the frightful wind of the preceding
day, or of the night before that. Eleven known dead, young Gedney missing. People pardoned our
hazy lack of details through realization of the shock the sad event must have caused us, and believed
us when we explained that the mangling action of the wind had rendered all eleven bodies unsuitable
for transportation outside. Indeed, I flatter myself that even in the midst of our distress, utter
bewilderment, and soul-clutching horror, we scarcely went beyond the truth in any specific instance.
The tremendous significance lies in what we dared not tell; what I would not tell now but for the need
of warning others off from nameless terrors.
It is a fact that the wind had brought dreadful havoc. Whether all could have lived through it, even
without the other thing, is gravely open to doubt. The storm, with its fury of madly driven ice
particles, must have been beyond anything our expedition had encountered before. One aeroplane
shelter-wall, it seems, had been left in a far too flimsy and inadequate state--was nearly pulverized--
and the derrick at the distant boring was entirely shaken to pieces. The exposed metal of the
grounded planes and drilling machinery was bruised into a high polish, and two of the small tents
were flattened despite their snow banking. Wooden surfaces left out in the blaster were pitted and
denuded of paint, and all signs of tracks in the snow were completely obliterated. It is also true that
we found none of the Archaean biological objects in a condition to take outside as a whole. We did
gather some minerals from a vast, tumbled pile, including several of the greenish soapstone
fragments whose odd five-pointed rounding and faint patterns of grouped dots caused so many
doubtful comparisons; and some fossil bones, among which were the most typical of the curiously
injured specimens.
None of the dogs survived, their hurriedly built snow inclosure near the camp being almost
wholly destroyed. The wind may have done that, though the greater breakage on the side next the
camp, which was not the windward one, suggests an outward leap or break of the frantic beasts
themselves. All three sledges were gone, and we have tried to explain that the wind may have blown
them off into the unknown. The drill and ice-melting machinery at the boring were too badly damaged
to warrant salvage, so we used them to choke up that subtly disturbing gateway to the past which
Lake had blasted. We likewise left at the camp the two most shaken up of the planes; since our
surviving party had only four real pilots--Sherman, Danforth, McTighe, and Ropes--in all, with
Danforth in a poor nervous shape to navigate. We brought back all the books, scientific equipment,
and other incidentals we could find, though much was rather unaccountably blown away. Spare tents
and furs were either missing or badly out of condition.
It was approximately 4 P.M., after wide plane cruising had forced us to give Gedney up for lost,
that we sent our guarded message to the Arkham for relaying; and I think we did well to keep it as
calm and noncommittal as we succeeded in doing. The most we said about agitation concerned our
dogs, whose frantic uneasiness near the biological specimens was to be expected from poor Lake's
accounts. We did not mention, I think, their display of the same uneasiness when sniffing around the
queer greenish soapstones and certain other objects in the disordered region-objects including
scientific instruments, aeroplanes, and machinery, both at the camp and at the boring, whose parts had
been loosened, moved, or otherwise tampered with by winds that must have harbored singular
curiosity and investigativeness.
About the fourteen biological specimens, we were pardonably indefinite. We said that the only
ones we discovered were damaged, but that enough was left of them to prove Lake's description
wholly and impressively accurate. It was hard work keeping our personal emotions out of this matter-
-and we did not mention numbers or say exactly how we had found those which we did find. We had
by that time agreed not to transmit anything suggesting madness on the part of Lake's men, and it
surely looked like madness to find six imperfect monstrosities carefully buried upright in nine-foot
snow graves under five-pointed mounds punched over with groups of dots in patterns exactly those
on the queer greenish soapstones dug up from Mesozoic or Tertiary times. The eight perfect
specimens mentioned by Lake seemed to have been completely blown away.
We were careful, too, about the public's general peace of mind; hence Danforth and I said little
about that frightful trip over the mountains the next day. It was the fact that only a radically lightened
plane could possibly cross a range of such height, which mercifully limited that scouting tour to the
two of us. On our return at one A.M., Danforth was close to hysterics, but kept an admirably stiff
upper lip. It took no persuasion to make him promise not to show our sketches and the other things we
brought away in our pockets, not to say anything more to the others than what we had agreed to relay
outside, and to hide our camera films for private development later on; so that part of my present
story will be as new to Pabodie, McTighe, Ropes, Sherman, and the rest as it will be to the world in
general. Indeed, Danforth is closer mouthed than I: for he saw, or thinks he saw, one thing he will not
tell even me.
As all know, our report included a tale of a hard ascent--a confirmation of Lake's opinion that the
great peaks are of Archaean slate and other very primal crumpled strata unchanged since at least
middle Comanchian times; a conventional comment on the regularity of the clinging cube and rampart
formations; a decision that the cave mouths indicate dissolved calcaerous veins; a conjecture that
certain slopes and passes would permit of the scaling and crossing of the entire range by seasoned
mountaineers; and a remark that the mysterious other side holds a lofty and immense superplateau as
ancient and unchanging as the mountains themselves--twenty thousand feet in elevation, with
grotesque rock formations protruding through a thin glacial layer and with low gradual foothills
between the general plateau surface and the sheer precipices of the highest peaks.
This body of data is in every respect true so far as it goes, and it completely satisfied the men at
the camp. We laid our absence of sixteen hours--a longer time than our announced flying, landing,
reconnoitering, and rock-collecting program called for--to a long mythical spell of adverse wind
conditions, and told truly of our landing on the farther foothills. Fortunately our tale sounded
realistic and prosaic enough not to tempt any of the others into emulating our flight. Had any tried to
do that, I would have used every ounce of my persuasion to stop them--and I do not know what
Danforth would have done. While we were gone, Pabodie, Sherman, Ropes, McTighe, and
Williamson had worked like beavers over Lake's two best planes, fitting them again for use despite
the altogether unaccountable juggling of their operative mechanism.
We decided to load all the planes the next morning and start back for our old base as soon as
possible. Even though indirect, that was the safest way to work toward McMurdo Sound; for a
straightline flight across the most utterly unknown stretches of the aeon-dead continent would
involve many additional hazards. Further exploration was hardly feasible in view of our tragic
decimation and the ruin of our drilling machinery. The doubts and horrors around us--which we did
not reveal--made us wish only to escape from this austral world of desolation and brooding madness
as swiftly as we could.
As the public knows, our return to the world was accomplished without further disasters. All
planes reached the old base on the evening of the next day--January 27th--after a swift nonstop flight;
and on the 28th we made McMurdo Sound in two laps, the one pause being very brief, and occasioned
by a faulty rudder in the furious wind over the ice shelf after we had cleared the great plateau. In five
days more, the Arkham and Miskatonic, with all hands and equipment on board, were shaking clear of
the thickening field ice and working up Ross Sea with the mocking mountains of Victoria Land
looming westward against a troubled antarctic sky and twisting the wind's wails into a wide-ranged
musical piping which chilled my soul to the quick. Less than a fortnight later we left the last hint of
polar land behind us and thanked heaven that we were clear of a haunted, accursed realm where life
and death, space and time, have made black and blasphemous alliances, in the unknown epochs since
matter first writhed and swam on the planet's scarce-cooled crust.
Since our return we have all constantly worked to discourage antarctic exploration, and have kept
certain doubts and guesses to ourselves with splendid unity and faithfulness. Even young Danforth,
with his nervous breakdown, has not flinched or babbled to his doctors--indeed, as I have said, there
is one thing he thinks he alone saw which he will not tell even me, though I think it would help his
psychological state if he would consent to do so. It might explain and relieve much, though perhaps
the thing was no more than the delusive aftermath of an earlier shock. That is the impression I gather
after those rare, irresponsible moments when he whispers disjointed things to me--things which he
repudiates vehemently as soon as he gets a grip on himself again.
It will be hard work deterring others from the great white south, and some of our efforts may
directly harm our cause by drawing inquiring notice. We might have known from the first that human
curiosity is undying, and that the results we announced would be enough to spur others ahead on the
same age-long pursuit of the unknown. Lake's reports of those biological monstrosities had aroused
naturalists and paleontologists to the highest pitch, though we were sensible enough not to show the
detached parts we had taken from the actual buried specimens, or our photographs of those
specimens as they were found. We also refrained from showing the more puzzling of the scarred
bones and greenish soapstones; while Danforth and I have closely guarded the pictures we took or
drew on the superplateau across the range, and the crumpled things we smoothed, studied in terror,
and brought away in our pockets.
But now that Starkweather-Moore party is organizing, and with a thoroughness far beyond
anything our outfit attempted. If not dissuaded, they will get to the innermost nucleus of the antarctic
and melt and bore till they bring up that which we know may end the world. So I must break through
all reticences at last--even about that ultimate, nameless thing beyond the mountains of madness.
IV
It is only with vast hesitancy and repugnance that I let my mind go back to Lake's camp and what
we really found there--and to that other thing beyond the mountains of madness. I am constantly
tempted to shirk the details, and to let hints stand for actual facts and ineluctable deductions. I hope I
have said enough already to let me glide briefly over the rest; the rest, that is, of the horror at the
camp. I have told of the wind-ravaged terrain, the damaged shelters, the disarranged machinery, the
varied uneasiness of our dogs, the missing sledges and other items, the deaths of men and dogs, the
absence of Gedney, and the six insanely buried biological specimens, strangely sound in texture for
all their structural injuries, from a world forty million years dead. I do not recall whether I mentioned
that upon checking up the canine bodies we found one dog missing. We did not think much about that
till later--indeed, only Danforth and I have thought of it at all.
The principal things I have been keeping back relate to the bodies, and to certain subtle points
which may or may not lend a hideous and incredible kind of rationale to the apparent chaos. At the
time, I tried to keep the men's minds off those points; for it was so much simpler--so much more
normal--to lay everything to an outbreak of madness on the part of some of Lake's party. From the
look of things, that demon mountain wind must have been enough to drive any man mad in the midst of
this center of all earthly mystery and desolation.
The crowning abnormality, of course, was the condition of the bodies--men and dogs alike. They
had all been in some terrible kind of conflict, and were torn and mangled in fiendish and altogether
inexplicable ways. Death, so far as we could judge, had in each case come from strangulation or
laceration. The dogs had evidently started the trouble, for the state of their ill-built corral bore
witness to its forcible breakage from within. It had been set some distance from the camp because of
the hatred of the animals for those hellish Archaean organisms, but the precaution seemed to have
been taken in vain. When left alone in that monstrous wind, behind flimsy walls of insufficient height,
they must have stampeded--whether from the wind itself, or from some subtle, increasing odor
emitted by the nightmare specimens, one could not say.
But whatever had happened, it was hideous and revolting enough. Perhaps I had better put
squeamishness aside and tell the worst at last--though with a categorical statement of opinion, based
on the first-hand observations and most rigid deductions of both Danforth and myself, that the then
missing Gedney was in no way responsible for the loathsome horrors we found. I have said that the
bodies were frightfully mangled. Now I must add that some were incised and subtracted from in the
most curious, cold-blooded, and inhuman fashion. It was the same with dogs and men. All the
healthier, fatter bodies, quadrupedal or bipedal, had had their most solid masses of tissue cut out and
removed, as by a careful butcher; and around them was a strange sprinkling of salt--taken from the
ravaged provision chests on the planes--which conjured up the most horrible associations. The thing
had occurred in one of the crude aeroplane shelters from which the plane had been dragged out, and
subsequent winds had effaced all tracks which could have supplied any plausible theory. Scattered
bits of clothing, roughly slashed from the human incision subjects, hinted no clues. It is useless to
bring up the half impression of certain faint snow prints in one shielded corner of the ruined
inclosure--because that impression did not concern human prints at all, but was clearly mixed up with
all the talk of fossil prints which poor Lake had been giving throughout the preceding weeks. One
had to be careful of one's imagination in the lee of those overshadowing mountains of madness.
As I have indicated, Gedney and one dog turned out to be missing in the end. When we came on
that terrible shelter we had missed two dogs and two men; but the fairly unharmed dissecting tent,
which we entered after investigating the monstrous graves, had something to reveal. It was not as
Lake had left it, for the covered parts of the primal monstrosity had been removed from the
improvised table. Indeed, we had already realized that one of the six imperfect and insanely buried
things we had found--the one with the trace of a peculiarly hateful odor--must represent the
collected sections of the entity which Lake had tried to analyze. On and around that laboratory table
were strewn other things, and it did not take long for us to guess that those things were the carefully
though oddly and inexpertly dissected parts of one man and one dog. I shall spare the feelings of
survivors by omitting mention of the man's identity. Lake's anatomical instruments were missing, but
there were evidences of their careful cleansing. The gasoline stove was also gone, though around it
we found a curious litter of matches. We buried the human parts beside the other ten men; and the
canine parts with the other thirty-five dogs. Concerning the bizarre smudges on the laboratory table,
and on the jumble of roughly handled illustrated books scattered near it, we were much too
bewildered to speculate.
This formed the worst of the camp horror, but other things were equally perplexing. The
disappearance of Gedney, the one dog, the eight uninjured biological specimens, the three sledges,
and certain instruments, illustrated technical and scientific books, writing materials, electric torches
and batteries, food and fuel, heating apparatus, spare tents, fur suits, and the like, was utterly beyond
sane conjecture; as were likewise the spatter-fringed ink blots on certain pieces of paper, and the
evidences of curious alien fumbling and experimentation around the planes and all other mechanical
devices both at the camp and at the boring. The dogs seemed to abhor this oddly disordered
machinery. Then, too, there was the upsetting of the larder, the disappearance of certain staples, and
the jarringly comical heap of tin cans pried open in the most unlikely ways and at the most unlikely
places. The profusion of scattered matches, intact, broken, or spent, formed another minor enigma--as
did the two or three tent cloths and fur suits which we found lying about with peculiar and
unorthodox slashings conceivably due to clumsy efforts at unimaginable adaptations. The
maltreatment of the human and canine bodies, and the crazy burial of the damaged Archaean
specimens, were all of a piece with this apparent disintegrative madness. In view of just such an
eventuality as the present one, we carefully photographed all the main evidences of insane disorder
at the camp; and shall use the prints to buttress our pleas against the departure of the proposed
Starkweather-Moore Expedition.
Our first act after finding the bodies in the shelter was to photograph and open the row of insane
graves with the five-pointed snow mounds. We could not help noticing the resemblance of these
monstrous mounds, with their clusters of grouped dots, to poor Lake's descriptions of the strange
greenish soapstones; and when we came on some of the soapstones themselves in the great mineral
pile, we found the likeness very close indeed. The whole general formation, it must be made clear,
seemed abominably suggestive of the starfish head of the Archaean entities; and we agreed that the
suggestion must have worked potently upon the sensitized minds of Lake's overwrought party.
For madness--centering in Gedney as the only possible surviving agent--was the explanation
spontaneously adopted by everybody so far as spoken utterance was concerned; though I will not be
so naive as to deny that each of us may have harbored wild guesses which sanity forbade him to
formulate completely. Sherman, Pabodie, and McTighe made an exhaustive aeroplane cruise over all
the surrounding territory in the afternoon, sweeping the horizon with field glasses in quest of
Gedney and of the various missing things; but nothing came to light. The party reported that the titan
barrier range extended endlessly to right and left alike, without any diminution in height or essential
structure. On some of the peaks, though, the regular cube and rampart formations were bolder and
plainer, having doubly fantastic similitudes to Roerich-painted Asian hill ruins. The distribution of
cryptical cave mouths on the black snow-denuded summits seemed roughly even as far as the range
could be traced.
In spite of all the prevailing horrors, we were left with enough sheer scientific zeal and
adventurousness to wonder about the unknown realm beyond those mysterious mountains. As our
guarded messages stated, we rested at midnight after our day of terror and bafflement--but not
without a tentative plan for one or more range-crossing altitude flights in a lightened plane with
aerial camera and geologist's outfit, beginning the following morning. It was decided that Danforth
and I try it first, and we awaked at 7 A.M. intending an early flight; however, heavy winds--mentioned
in our brief bulletin to the outside world--delayed our start till nearly nine o'clock.
I have already repeated the noncommittal story we told the men at camp--and relayed outside--
after our return sixteen hours later. It is now my terrible duty to amplify this account by filling in the
merciful blanks with hints of what we really saw in the hidden transmontane world--hints of the
revelations which have finally driven Danforth to a nervous collapse. I wish he would add a really
frank word about the thing which he thinks he alone saw--even though it was probably a nervous
delusion--and which was perhaps the last straw that put him where he is; but he is firm against that.
All I can do is to repeat his later disjointed whispers about what set him shrieking as the plane soared
back through the wind-tortured mountain pass after that real and tangible shock which I shared. This
will form my last word. If the plain signs of surviving elder horrors in what I disclose be not enough
to keep others from meddling with the inner antarctic--or at least from prying too deeply beneath the
surface of that ultimate waste of forbidden secrets and inhuman, aeon-cursed desolation--the
responsibility for unnamable and perhaps immeasurable evils will not be mine.
Danforth and I, studying the notes made by Pabodie in his afternoon flight and checking up with a
sextant, had calculated that the lowest available pass in the range lay somewhat to the right of us,
within sight of camp, and about twenty-three thousand or twenty-four thousand feet above sea level.
For this point, then, we first headed in the lightened plane as we embarked on our flight of discovery.
The camp itself, on foothills which sprang from a high continental plateau, was some twelve
thousand feet in altitude; hence the actual height increase necessary was not so vast as it might seem.
Nevertheless we were acutely conscious of the rarefied air and intense cold as we rose; for, on
account of visibility conditions, we had to leave the cabin windows open. We were dressed, of
course, in our heaviest furs.
As we drew near the forbidding peaks, dark and sinister above the line of crevasse-riven snow
and interstitial glaciers, we noticed more and more the curiously regular formations clinging to the
slopes; and thought again of the strange Asian paintings of Nicholas Roerich. The ancient and wind-
weathered rock strata fully verified all of Lake's bulletins, and proved that these pinnacles had been
towering up in exactly the same way since a surprisingly early time in earth's history--perhaps over
fifty million years. How much higher they had once been, it was futile to guess; but everything about
this strange region pointed to obscure atmospheric influences unfavorable to change, and calculated
to retard the usual climatic processes of rock disintegration.
But it was the mountainside tangle of regular cubes, ramparts, and cave mouths which fascinated
and disturbed us most. I studied them with a field glass and took aerial photographs while Danforth
drove; and at times I relieved him at the controls--though my aviation knowledge was purely an
amateur's--in order to let him use the binoculars. We could easily see that much of the material of the
things was a lightish Archaean quartzite, unlike any formation visible over broad areas of the general
surface; and that their regularity was extreme and uncanny to an extent which poor Lake had scarcely
hinted.
As he had said, their edges were crumbled and rounded from untold aeons of savage weathering;
but their preternatural solidity and tough material had saved them from obliteration. Many parts,
especially those closest to the slopes, seemed identical in substance with the surrounding rock
surface. The whole arrangement looked like the ruins of Macchu Picchu in the Andes, or the primal
foundation walls of Kish as dug up by the Oxford Field Museum Expedition in 1929; and both
Danforth and I obtained that occasional impression of separate Cyclopean blocks which Lake had
attributed to his flight-companion Carroll. How to account for such things in this place was frankly
beyond me, and I felt queerly humbled as a geologist. Igneous formations often have strange
regularities--like the famous Giants' Causeway in Ireland--but this stupendous range, despite Lake's
original suspicion of smoking cones, was above all else nonvolcanic in evident structure.
The curious cave mouths, near which the odd formations seemed most abundant, presented
another albeit a lesser puzzle because of their regularity of outline. They were, as Lake's bulletin
had said, often approximately square or semicircular; as if the natural orifices had been shaped to
greater symmetry by some magic hand. Their numerousness and wide distribution were remarkable,
and suggested that the whole region was honeycombed with tunnels dissolved out of limestone strata.
Such glimpses as we secured did not extend far within the caverns, but we saw that they were
apparently clear of stalactites and stalagmites. Outside, those parts of the mountain slopes adjoining
the apertures seemed invariably smooth and regular; and Danforth thought that the slight cracks and
pittings of the weathering tended toward unusual patterns. Filled as he was with the horrors and
strangenesses discovered at the camp, he hinted that the pittings vaguely resembled those baffling
groups of dots sprinkled over the primeval greenish soapstones, so hideously duplicated on the
madly conceived snow mounds above those six buried monstrosities.
We had risen gradually in flying over the higher foothills and along toward the relatively low
pass we had selected. As we advanced we occasionally looked down at the snow and ice of the land
route, wondering whether we could have attempted the trip with the simpler equipment of earlier
days. Somewhat to our surprise we saw that the terrain was far from difficult as such things go; and
that despite the crevasses and other bad spots it would not have been likely to deter the sledges of a
Scott, a Shackleton, or an Amundsen. Some of the glaciers appeared to lead up to wind-bared passes
with unusual continuity, and upon reaching our chosen pass we found that its case formed no
exception.
Our sensations of tense expectancy as we prepared to round the crest and peer out over an
untrodden world can hardly be described on paper; even though we had no cause to think the regions
beyond the range essentially different from those already seen and traversed. The touch of evil
mystery in these barrier mountains, and in the beckoning sea of opalescent sky glimpsed betwixt their
summits, was a highly subtle and attenuated matter not to be explained in literal words. Rather was it
an affair of vague psychological symbolism and aesthetic association--a thing mixed up with exotic
poetry and paintings, and with archaic myths lurking in shunned and forbidden volumes. Even the
wind's burden held a peculiar strain of conscious malignity; and for a second it seemed that the
composite sound included a bizarre musical whistling or piping over a wide range as the blast swept
in and out of the omnipresent and resonant cave mouths. There was a cloudy note of reminiscent
repulsion in this sound, as complex and unplaceable as any of the other dark impressions.
We were now, after a slow ascent, at a height of twenty-three thousand, five hundred and seventy
feet according to the aneroid; and had left the region of clinging snow definitely below us. Up here
were only dark, bare rock slopes and the start of rough-ribbed glaciers--but with those provocative
cubes, ramparts, and echoing cave mouths to add a portent of the unnatural, the fantastic, and the
dreamlike. Looking along the line of high peaks, I thought I could see the one mentioned by poor
Lake, with a rampart exactly on top. It seemed to be half lost in a queer antarctic haze--such a haze,
perhaps, as had been responsible for Lake's early notion of volcanism. The pass loomed directly
before us, smooth and windswept between its jagged and malignly frowning pylons. Beyond it was a
sky fretted with swirling vapors and lighted by the low polar sun--the sky of that mysterious farther
realm upon which we felt no human eye had ever gazed.
A few more feet of altitude and we would behold that realm. Danforth and I, unable to speak
except in shouts amidst the howling, piping wind that raced through the pass and added to the noise of
the unmuffled engines, exchanged eloquent glances. And then, having gained those last few feet, we
did indeed stare across the momentous divide and over the unsampled secrets of an elder and utterly
alien earth.
V
I think that both of us simultaneously cried out in mixed awe, wonder, terror, and disbelief in our
own senses as we finally cleared the pass and saw what lay beyond. Of course, we must have had
some natural theory in the back of our heads to steady our faculties for the moment. Probably we
thought of such things as the grotesquely weathered stones of the Garden of the Gods in Colorado,
or the fantastically symmetrical wind-carved rocks of the Arizona desert. Perhaps we even half
thought the sight a mirage like that we had seen the morning before on first approaching those
mountains of madness. We must have had some such normal notions to fall back upon as our eyes
swept that limitless, tempest-scarred plateau and grasped the almost endless labyrinth of colossal,
regular, and geometrically eurythmic stone masses which reared their crumbled and pitted crests
above a glacial sheet not more than forty or fifty feet deep at its thickest, and in places obviously
thinner.
The effect of the monstrous sight was indescribable, for some fiendish violation of known
natural law seemed certain at the outset. Here, on a hellishly ancient table-land fully twenty thousand
feet high, and in a climate deadly to habitation since a prehuman age not less than five hundred
thousand years ago, there stretched nearly to the vision's limit a tangle of orderly stone which only
the desperation of mental self-defense could possibly attribute to any but conscious and artificial
cause. We had previously dismissed, so far as serious thought was concerned, any theory that the
cubes and ramparts of the mountainsides were other than natural in origin. How could they be
otherwise, when man himself could scarcely have been differentiated from the great apes at the time
when this region succumbed to the present unbroken reign of glacial death?
Yet now the sway of reason seemed irrefutably shaken, for this Cyclopean maze of squared,
curved, and angled blocks had features which cut off all comfortable refuge. It was, very clearly, the
blasphemous city of the mirage in stark, objective, and ineluctable reality. That damnable portent had
had a material basis after all--there had been some horizontal stratum of ice dust in the upper air, and
this shocking stone survival had projected its image across the mountains according to the simple
laws of reflection, Of course, the phantom had been twisted and exaggerated, and had contained
things which the real source did not contain; yet now, as we saw that real source, we thought it even
more hideous and menacing than its distant image.
Only the incredible, unhuman massiveness of these vast stone towers and ramparts had saved the
frightful things from utter annihilation in the hundreds of thousands--perhaps millions--of years it had
brooded there amidst the blasts of a bleak upland. "Corona Mundi--Roof of the World--" All sorts of
fantastic phrases sprang to our lips as we looked dizzily down at the unbelievable spectacle. I
thought again of the eldritch primal myths that had so persistently haunted me since my first sight of
this dead antarctic world--of the demoniac plateau of Leng, of the Mi-Go, or abominable Snow Men
of the Himalayas, of the Pnakotic Manuscripts with their prehuman implications, of the Cthulhu cult,
of the Necronomicon, and of the Hyperborean legends of formless Tsathoggua and the worse than
formless star spawn associated with that semientity.
For boundless miles in every direction the thing stretched off with very little thinning; indeed, as
our eyes followed it to the right and left along the base of the low, gradual foothills which separated
it from the actual mountain rim, we decided that we could see no thinning at all except for an
interruption at the left of the pass through which we had come. We had merely struck, at random, a
limited part of something of incalculable extent. The foothills were more sparsely sprinkled with
grotesque stone structures, linking the terrible city to the already familiar cubes and ramparts which
evidently formed its mountain outposts. These latter, as well as the queer cave mouths, were as thick
on the inner as on the outer sides of the mountains.
The nameless stone labyrinth consisted, for the most part, of walls from ten to one hundred and
fifty feet in ice-clear height, and of a thickness varying from five to ten feet. It was composed mostly
of prodigious blocks of dark primordial slate, schist, and sandstone--blocks in many cases as large as
4 x 6 x 8 feet--though in several places it seemed to be carved out of a solid, uneven bed rock of
pre-Cambrian slate. The buildings were far from equal in size, there being innumerable honeycomb
arrangements of enormous extent as well as smaller separate structures. The general shape of these
things tended to be conical, pyramidal, or terraced; though there were many perfect cylinders,
perfect cubes, clusters of cubes, and other rectangular forms, and a peculiar sprinkling of angled
edifices whose five-pointed ground plan roughly suggested modern fortifications. The builders had
made constant and expert use of the principle of the arch, and domes had probably existed in the city's
heyday.
The whole tangle was monstrously weathered, and the glacial surface from which the towers
projected was strewn with fallen blocks and immemorial debris. Where the glaciation was transparent
we could see the lower parts of the gigantic piles, and we noticed the ice-preserved stone bridges
which connected the different towers at varying distances above the ground. On the exposed walls
we could detect the scarred places where other and higher bridges of the same sort had existed.
Closer inspection revealed countless largish windows; some of which were closed with shutters of
a petrified material originally wood, though most gaped open in a sinister and menacing fashion.
Many of the ruins, of course, were roofless, and with uneven though wind-rounded upper edges;
whilst others, of a more sharply conical or pyramidal model or else protected by higher surrounding
structures, preserved intact outlines despite the omnipresent crumbling and pitting. With the field
glass we could barely make out what seemed to be sculptural decorations in horizontal bands--
decorations including those curious groups of dots whose presence on the ancient soapstones now
assumed a vastly larger significance.
In many places the buildings were totally ruined and the ice sheet deeply riven from various
geologic causes. In other places the stonework was worn down to the very level of the glaciation.
One broad swath, extending from the plateau's interior, to a cleft in the foothills about a mile to the
left of the pass we had traversed, was wholly free from buildings. It probably represented, we
concluded, the course of some great river which in Tertiary times--millions of years ago--had
poured through the city and into some prodigious subterranean abyss of the great barrier range.
Certainly, this was above all a region of caves, gulfs, and underground secrets beyond human
penetration.
Looking back to our sensations, and recalling our dazedness at viewing this monstrous survival
from aeons we had thought prehuman, I can only wonder that we preserved the semblance of
equilibrium, which we did. Of course, we knew that something--chronology, scientific theory, or
our own consciousness--was woefully awry; yet we kept enough poise to guide the plane, observe
many things quite minutely, and take a careful series of photographs which may yet serve both us and
the world in good stead. In my case, ingrained scientific habit may have helped; for above all my
bewilderment and sense of menace, there burned a dominant curiosity to fathom more of this age-old
secret--to know what sort of beings had built and lived in this incalculably gigantic place, and what
relation to the general world of its time or of other times so unique a concentration of life could
have had.
For this place could be no ordinary city. It must have formed the primary nucleus and center of
some archaic and unbelievable chapter of earth's history whose outward ramifications, recalled only
dimly in the most obscure and distorted myths, had vanished utterly amidst the chaos of terrene
convulsions long before any human race we know had shambled out of apedom. Here sprawled a
Palaeogaean megalopolis compared with which the fabled Atlantis and Lemuria, Commoriom and
Uzuldaroum, and Olathoc in the land of Lomar, are recent things of today--not even of yesterday; a
megalopolis ranking with such whispered prehuman blasphemies as Valusia, R'lyeh, 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 showed no major change in the
labyrinth of rock and masonry that clawed up corpselike through the eternal ice. There were, though,
some highly absorbing diversifications; such as the carvings on the canyon where that broad river
had once pierced the foothills and approached its sinking place in the great range. The headlands at
the stream's entrance had been boldly carved into Cyclopean pylons; and something about the ridgy,
barrel-shaped designs stirred up oddly vague, hateful, and confusing semi-remembrances in both
Danforth and me.
We also came upon several star-shaped open spaces, evidently public squares, and noted various
undulations in the terrain. Where a sharp hill rose, it was generally hollowed out into some sort of
rambling-stone edifice; but there were at least two exceptions. Of these latter, one was too badly
weathered to disclose what had been on the jutting eminence, while the other still bore a fantastic
conical monument carved out of the solid rock and roughly resembling such things as the well-known
Snake Tomb in the ancient valley of Petra.
Flying inland from the mountains, we discovered that the city was not of infinite width, even
though its length along the foothills seemed endless. After about thirty miles the grotesque stone
buildings began to thin out, and in ten more miles we came to an unbroken waste virtually without
signs of sentient artifice. The course of the river beyond the city seemed marked by a broad,
depressed line, while the land assumed a somewhat greater ruggedness, seeming to slope slightly
upward as it receded in the mist-hazed west.
So far we had made no landing, yet to leave the plateau without an attempt at entering some of the
monstrous structures would have been inconceivable. Accordingly, we decided to find a smooth
place on the foothills near our navigable pass, there grounding the plane and preparing to do some
exploration on foot. Though these gradual slopes were partly covered with a scattering of ruins, low
flying soon disclosed an ampler number of possible landing places. Selecting that nearest to the pass,
since our flight would be across the great range and back to camp, we succeeded about 12:30 P.M. in
effecting a landing on a smooth, hard snow field wholly devoid of obstacles and well adapted to a
swift and favorable take-off later on.
It did not seem necessary to protect the plane with a snow banking for so brief a time and in so
comfortable an absence of high winds at this level; hence we merely saw that the landing skis were
safely lodged, and that the vital parts of the mechanism were guarded against the cold. For our foot
journey we discarded the heaviest of our flying furs, and took with us a small outfit consisting of
pocket compass, hand camera, light provisions, voluminous notebooks and paper, geologist's hammer
and chisel, specimen bags, coil of climbing rope, and powerful electric torches with extra batteries;
this equipment having been carried in the plane on the chance that we might be able to effect a
landing, take ground pictures, make drawings and topographical sketches, and obtain rock specimens
from some bare slope, outcropping, or mountain cave. Fortunately we had a supply of extra paper to
tear up, place in a spare specimen bag, and use on the ancient principle of hare and hounds for
marking our course in any interior mazes we might be able to penetrate. This had been brought in
case we found some cave system with air quiet enough to allow such a rapid and easy method in
place of the usual rock-chipping method of trail blazing.
Walking cautiously downhill over the crusted snow toward the stupendous stone labyrinth that
loomed against the opalescent west, we felt almost as keen a sense of imminent marvels as we had
felt on approaching the unfathomed mountain pass four hours previously. True, we had become
visually familiar with the incredible secret concealed by the barrier peaks; yet the prospect of
actually entering primordial walls reared by conscious beings perhaps millions of years ago--before
any known race of men could have existed--was none the less awesome and potentially terrible in its
implications of cosmic abnormality. Though the thinness of the air at this prodigious altitude made
exertion somewhat more difficult than usual, both Danforth and I found ourselves bearing up very
well, and felt equal to almost any task which might fall to our lot. It took only a few steps to bring us
to a shapeless ruin worn level with the snow, while ten or fifteen rods farther on there was a huge,
roofless rampart still complete in its gigantic five-pointed outline and rising to an irregular height of
ten or eleven feet. For this latter we headed; and when at last we were actually able to touch its
weathered Cyclopean blocks, we felt that we had established an unprecedented and almost
blasphemous link with forgotten aeons normally closed to our species.
This rampart, shaped like a star and perhaps three hundred feet from point to point, was built of
Jurassic sandstone blocks of irregular size, averaging 6 x 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 mortar-less Cyclopean
masonry with complete bewilderment. We wished that Pabodie were present, for his engineering
knowledge might have helped us guess how such titanic blocks could have been handled in that
unbelievably remote age when the city and its outskirts were built up.
The half-mile walk downhill to the actual city, with the upper wind shrieking vainly and savagely
through the skyward peaks in the background, was something of which the smallest details will
always remain engraved on my mind. Only in fantastic nightmares could any human beings but
Danforth and me conceive such optical effects. Between us and the churning vapors of the west lay
that monstrous tangle of dark stone towers, its outre and incredible forms impressing us afresh at
every new angle of vision. It was a mirage in solid stone, and were it not for the photographs, I
would still doubt that such a thing could be. The general type of masonry was identical with that of
the rampart we had examined; but the extravagant shapes which this masonry took in its urban
manifestations were past all description.
Even the pictures illustrate only one or two phases of its endless variety, preternatural
massiveness, and utterly alien exoticism. There were geometrical forms for which an Euclid would
scarcely find a name--cones of all degrees of irregularity and truncation, terraces of every sort of
provocative disproportion, shafts with odd bulbous enlargements, broken columns in curious groups,
and five-pointed or five-ridged arrangements of mad grotesqueness. As we drew nearer we could
see beneath certain transparent parts of the ice sheet, and detect some of the tubular stone bridges that
connected the crazily sprinkled structures at various heights. Of orderly streets there seemed to be
none, the only broad open swath being a mile to the left, where the ancient river had doubtless
flowed through the town into the mountains.
Our field glasses showed the external, horizontal bands of nearly effaced sculptures and dot
groups to be very prevalent, and we could half imagine what the city must once have looked like--
even though most of the roofs and tower tops had necessarily perished. As a whole, it had been a
complex tangle of twisted lanes and alleys, all of them deep canyons, and some little better than
tunnels because of the overhanging masonry or overarching bridges. Now, outspread below us, it
loomed like a dream fantasy against a westward mist through whose northern end the low, reddish
antarctic sun of early afternoon was struggling to shine; and when, for a moment, that sun encountered
a denser obstruction and plunged the scene into temporary shadow, the effect was subtly menacing in
a way I can never hope to depict. Even the faint howling and piping of the unfelt wind in the great
mountain passes behind us took on a wilder note of purposeful malignity. The last stage of our
descent to the town was unusually steep and abrupt, and a rock outcropping at the edge where the
grade changed led us to think that an artificial terrace had once existed there. Under the glaciation,
we believed, there must be a flight of steps or its equivalent.
When at last we plunged into the town itself, clambering over fallen masonry and shrinking from
the oppressive nearness and dwarfing height of omnipresent crumbling and pitted walls, our
sensations again became such that I marvel at the amount of self-control we retained. Danforth was
frankly jumpy, and began making some offensively irrelevant speculations about the horror at the
camp--which I resented all the more because I could not help sharing certain conclusions forced
upon us by many features of this morbid survival from nightmare antiquity. The speculations worked
on his imagination, too; for in one place--where a debris-littered alley turned a sharp corner--he
insisted that he saw faint traces of ground markings which he did not like; whilst elsewhere he
stopped to listen to a subtle, imaginary sound from some undefined point--a muffled musical piping,
he said, not unlike that of the wind in the mountain caves, yet somehow disturbingly different. The
ceaseless five-pointedness of the surrounding architecture and of the few distinguishable mural
arabesques had a dimly sinister suggestiveness we could not escape, and gave us a touch of terrible
subconscious certainty concerning the primal entities which had reared and dwelt in this unhallowed
place.
Nevertheless, our scientific and adventurous souls were not wholly dead, and we mechanically
carried out our program of chipping specimens from all the different rock types represented in the
masonry. We wished a rather full set in order to draw better conclusions regarding the age of the
place. Nothing in the great outer walls seemed to date from later than the Jurassic and Comanchian
periods, nor was any piece of stone in the entire place of a greater recency than the Pliocene Age. In
stark certainty, we were wandering amidst a death which had reigned at least five hundred thousand
years, and in all probability even longer.
As we proceeded through this maze of stone-shadowed twilight we stopped at all available
apertures to study interiors and investigate entrance possibilities. Some were above our reach, whilst
others led only into ice-choked ruins as unroofed and barren as the rampart on the hill. One, though
spacious and inviting, opened on a seemingly bottomless abyss without visible means of descent.
Now and then we had a chance to study the petrified wood of a surviving shutter, and were impressed
by the fabulous antiquity implied in the still discernible grain. These things had come from Mesozoic
gymnosperms and conifers--especially Cretaceous cycads--and from fan palms and early
angiosperms of plainly Tertiary date. Nothing definitely later than the Pliocene could be discovered.
In the placing of these shutters--whose edges showed the former presence of queer and long-
vanished hinges--usage seemed to be varied--some being on the outer and some on the inner side of
the deep embrasures. They seemed to have become wedged in place, thus surviving the rusting of
their former and probably metallic fixtures and fastenings.
After a time we came across a row of windows--in the bulges of a colossal five-edged cone of
undamaged apex--which led into a vast, well-preserved room with stone flooring; but these were too
high in the room to permit descent without a rope. We had a rope with us, but did not wish to bother
with this twenty-foot drop unless obliged to--especially in this thin plateau air where great demands
were made upon the heart action. This enormous room was probably a hall or concourse of some
sort, and our electric torches showed bold, distinct, and potentially startling sculptures arranged
round the walls in broad, horizontal bands separated by equally broad strips of conventional
arabesques. We took careful note of this spot, planning to enter here unless a more easily gained
interior were encountered.
Finally, though, we did encounter exactly the opening we wished; an archway about six feet wide
and ten feet high, marking the former end of an aerial bridge which had spanned an alley about five
feet above the present level of glaciation. These archways, of course, were flush with upper-story
floors, and in this case one of the floors still existed. The building thus accessible was a series of
rectangular terraces on our left facing westward. That across the alley, where the other archway
yawned, was a decrepit cylinder with no windows and with a curious bulge about ten feet above the
aperture. It was totally dark inside, and the archway seemed to open on a well of illimitable
emptiness.
Heaped debris made the entrance to the vast left-hand building doubly easy, yet for a moment we
hesitated before taking advantage of the long-wished chance. For though we had penetrated into this
tangle of archaic mystery, it required fresh resolution to carry us actually inside a complete and
surviving building of a fabulous elder world whose nature was becoming more and more hideously
plain to us. In the end, however, we made the plunge, and scrambled up over the rubble into the
gaping embrasure. The floor beyond was of great slate slabs, and seemed to form the outlet of a
long, high corridor with sculptured walls.
Observing the many inner archways which led off from it, and realizing the probable complexity
of the nest of apartments within, we decided that we must begin our system of hare-and-hound trail
blazing. Hitherto our compasses, together with frequent glimpses of the vast mountain range between
the towers in our rear, had been enough to prevent our losing our way; but from now on, the artificial
substitute would be necessary. Accordingly we reduced our extra paper to shreds of suitable size,
placed these in a bag to be carried by Danforth, and prepared to use them as economically as safety
would allow. This method would probably gain us immunity from straying, since there did not appear
to be any strong air currents inside the primordial masonry. If such should develop, or if our paper
supply should give out, we could of course fall back on the more secure though more tedious and
retarding method of rock chipping.
Just how extensive a territory we had opened up, it was impossible to guess without a trial. The
close and frequent connection of the different buildings made it likely that we might cross from one
to another on bridges underneath the ice, except where impeded by local collapses and geologic
rifts, for very little glaciation seemed to have entered the massive constructions. Almost all the areas
of transparent ice had revealed the submerged windows as tightly shuttered, as if the town had been
left in that uniform state until the glacial sheet came to crystallize the lower part for all succeeding
time. Indeed, one gained a curious impression that this place had been 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 connection with this
place.
VI
It would be cumbrous to give a detailed, consecutive account of our wanderings inside that
cavernous, aeon-dead honeycomb of primal masonry--that monstrous lair of elder secrets which now
echoed for the first time, after uncounted epochs, to the tread of human feet. This is especially true
because so much of the horrible drama and revelation came from a mere study of the omnipresent
mural carvings. Our flashlight photographs of those carvings will do much toward proving the truth
of what we are now disclosing, and it is lamentable that we had not a larger film supply with us. As it
was, we made crude notebook sketches of certain salient features after all our films were used up.
The building which we had entered was one of great size and elaborateness, and gave us an
impressive notion of the architecture of that nameless geologic past. The inner partitions were less
massive than the outer walls, but on the lower levels were excellently preserved. Labyrinthine
complexity, involving curiously irregular difference in floor levels, characterized the entire
arrangement; and we should certainly have been lost at the very outset but for the trail of torn paper
left behind us. We decided to explore the more decrepit upper parts first of all, hence climbed aloft
in the maze for a distance of some one hundred feet, to where the topmost tier of chambers yawned
snowily and ruinously open to the polar sky. Ascent was effected over the steep, transversely ribbed
stone ramps or inclined planes which everywhere served in lieu of stairs. The rooms we
encountered were of all imaginable shapes and proportions, ranging from five-pointed stars to
triangles and perfect cubes. It might be safe to say that their general average was about 30 x 30 feet
in floor area, and 20 feet in height, though many larger apartments existed. After thoroughly
examining the upper regions and the glacial level, we descended, story by story, into the submerged
part, where indeed we soon saw we were in a continuous maze of connected chambers and passages
probably leading over unlimited areas outside this particular building. The Cyclopean massiveness
and gigantism of everything about us became curiously oppressive; and there was something vaguely
but deeply unhuman in all the contours, dimensions, proportions, decorations, and constructional
nuances of the blasphemously archaic stonework. We soon realized, from what the carvings
revealed, that this monstrous city was many million years old.
We cannot yet explain the engineering principles used in the anomalous balancing and adjustment
of the vast rock masses, though the function of the arch was clearly much relied on. The rooms we
visited were wholly bare of all portable contents, a circumstance which sustained our belief in the
city's deliberate desertion. The prime decorative feature was the almost universal system of mural
sculpture, which tended to run in continuous horizontal bands three feet wide and arranged from floor
to ceiling in alternation with bands of equal width given over to geometrical arabesques. There were
exceptions to this rule of arrangement, but its preponderance was overwhelming. Often, however, a
series of smooth 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 civilized mastery, though utterly alien in every detail to any known art tradition of the
human race. In delicacy of execution no sculpture I have ever seen could approach it. The minutest
details of elaborate vegetation, or of animal life, were rendered with astonishing vividness despite
the bold scale of the carvings; whilst the conventional designs were marvels of skillful intricacy.
The arabesques displayed a profound use of mathematical principles, and were made up of obscurely
symmetrical curves and angles based on the quantity of five. The pictorial bands followed a highly
formalized tradition, and involved a peculiar treatment of perspective, but had an artistic force that
moved us profoundly, notwithstanding the intervening gulf of vast geologic periods. Their method
of design hinged on a singular juxtaposition of the cross section with the two-dimensional silhouette,
and embodied an analytical psychology beyond that of any known race of antiquity. It is useless to try
to compare this art with any represented in our museums. Those who see our photographs will
probably find its closest analogue in certain grotesque conceptions of the most daring futurists.
The arabesque tracery consisted altogether of depressed lines, whose depth on unweathered
walls varied from one to two inches. When cartouches with dot groups appeared--evidently as
inscriptions in some unknown and primordial language and alphabet--the depression of the smooth
surface was perhaps an inch and a half, and of the dots perhaps a half inch more. The pictorial bands
were in countersunk low relief, their background being depressed about two inches from the original
wall surface. In some specimens marks of a former coloration could be detected, though for the most
part the untold aeons had disintegrated and banished any pigments which may have been applied. The
more one studied the marvelous technique, the more one admired the things. Beneath their strict
conventionalization one could grasp the minute and accurate observation and graphic skill of the
artists; and indeed, the very conventions themselves served to symbolize and accentuate the real
essence or vital differentiation of every object delineated. We felt, too, that besides these
recognizable excellences there were others lurking beyond the reach of our perceptions. Certain
touches here and there gave vague hints of latent symbols and stimuli which another mental and
emotional background, and a fuller or different sensory equipment, might have made of profound and
poignant significance to us.
The subject matter of the sculptures obviously came from the life of the vanished epoch of their
creation, and contained a large proportion of evident history. It is this abnormal historic-mindedness
of the primal race--a chance circumstance operating, through coincidence, miraculously in our
favor--which made the carvings so awesomely informative to us, and which caused us to place their
photography and transcription above all other considerations. In certain rooms the dominant
arrangement was varied by the presence of maps, astronomical charts, and other scientific designs of
an enlarged scale--these things giving a naive and terrible corroboration to what we gathered from
the pictorial friezes and dadoes. In hinting at what the whole revealed, I can only hope that my
account will not arouse a curiosity greater than sane caution on the part of those who believe me at
all. It would be tragic if any were to be allured to that realm of death and horror by the very warning
meant to discourage them.
Interrupting these sculptured walls were high windows and massive twelve-foot doorways; both
now and then retaining the petrified wooden planks--elaborately carved and polished--of the actual
shutters and doors. All metal fixtures had long ago vanished, but some of the doors remained in place
and had to be forced aside as we progressed from room to room. Window frames with odd
transparent panes--mostly elliptical--survived here and there, though in no considerable quantity.
There were also frequent niches of great magnitude, generally empty, but once in a while containing
some bizarre object carved from green soapstone which was either broken or perhaps held too
inferior to warrant removal. Other apertures were undoubtedly connected with bygone mechanical
facilities--heating, lighting, and the like--of a sort suggested in many of the carvings. Ceilings tended
to be plain, but had sometimes been inlaid with green soapstone or other tiles, mostly fallen now.
Floors were also paved with such tiles, though plain stonework predominated.
As I have said, all furniture and other movables were absent; but the sculptures gave a clear idea
of the strange devices which had once filled these tomblike, echoing rooms. Above the glacial sheet
the floors were generally thick with detritus, litter, and debris, but farther down this condition
decreased. In some of the lower chambers and corridors there was little more than gritty dust or
ancient incrustations, while occasional areas had an uncanny air of newly swept immaculateness. Of
course, where rifts or collapses had occurred, the lower levels were as littered as the upper ones. A
central court--as in other structures we had seen from the air--saved the inner regions from total
darkness; so that we seldom had to use our electric torches in the upper rooms except when studying
sculptured details. Below the ice cap, however, the twilight deepened; and in many parts of the
tangled ground level there was an approach to absolute blackness.
To form even a rudimentary idea of our thoughts and feelings as we penetrated this aeon-silent
maze of unhuman masonry, one must correlate a hopelessly bewildering chaos of fugitive moods,
memories, and impressions. The sheer appalling antiquity and lethal desolation of the place were
enough to overwhelm almost any sensitive person, but added to these elements were the recent
unexplained horror at the camp, and the revelations all too soon effected by the terrible mural
sculptures around us. The moment we came upon a perfect section of carving, where no ambiguity of
interpretation could exist, it took only a brief study to give us the hideous truth--a truth which it
would be naive to claim Danforth and I had not independently suspected before, though we had
carefully refrained from even hinting it to each other. There could now be no further merciful doubt
about the nature of the beings which had built and inhabited this monstrous dead city millions of years
ago, when man's ancestors were primitive archaic mammals, and vast dinosaurs roamed the tropical
steppes of Europe and Asia.
We had previously clung to a desperate alternative and insisted--each to himself--that the
omnipresence of the five-pointed motifs meant only some cultural or religious exaltation of the
Archaean natural object which had so patently embodied the quality of five-pointedness; as the
decorative motifs of Minoan Crete exalted the sacred bull, those of Egypt the scarabaeus, those of
Rome the wolf and the eagle, and those of various savage tribes some chosen totem animal. But this
lone refuge was now stripped from us, and we were forced to face definitely the reason-shaking
realization which the reader of these pages has doubtless long ago anticipated. I can scarcely bear to
write it down in black and white even now, but perhaps that will not be necessary.
The things once rearing and dwelling in this frightful masonry in the age of dinosaurs were not
indeed dinosaurs, but far worse. Mere dinosaurs were new and almost brainless objects--but the
builders of the city were wise and old, and had left certain traces in rocks even then laid down well
nigh a thousand million years--rocks laid down before the true life of earth had advanced beyond
plastic groups of cells--rocks laid down before the true life of earth had existed at all. They were
the makers and enslavers of that life, and above all doubt the originals of the fiendish elder myths
which things like the Pnakotic Manuscripts and the Necronomicon affrightedly hint about. They were
the great "Old Ones" that had filtered down from the stars when earth was young--the beings whose
substance an alien evolution had shaped, and whose powers were such as this planet had never bred.
And to think that only the day before, Danforth and I had actually looked upon fragments of their
millennially fossilized substance, and that poor Lake and his party had seen their complete outlines. It
is of course impossible for me to relate in proper order the stages by which we picked up what we
know of that monstrous chapter of prehuman life. After the first shock of the certain revelation, we
had to pause a while to recuperate, and it was fully three o'clock before we got started on our actual
tour of systematic research. The sculptures in the building we entered were of relatively late date--
perhaps two million years ago--as checked up by geological, biological, and astronomical features--
and embodied an art which would be called decadent in comparison with that of specimens we found
in older buildings after crossing bridges under the glacial sheet. One edifice hewn from the solid
rock seemed to go back forty or possibly even fifty million years--to the lower Eocene or upper
Cretaceous--and contained bas reliefs of an artistry surpassing anything else, with one tremendous
exception, that we encountered. That was, we have since agreed, the oldest domestic structure we
traversed.
Were it not for the support of those flashlights soon to be made public, I would refrain from
telling what I found and inferred, lest I be confined as a madman. Of course, the infinitely early parts
of the patchwork tale--representing the preterrestrial life of the star-headed beings on other planets,
in other galaxies, and in other universes--can readily be interpreted as the fantastic mythology of
those beings themselves; yet such parts sometimes involved designs and diagrams so uncannily close
to the latest findings of mathematics and astrophysics that I scarcely know what to think. Let others
judge when they see the photographs I shall publish.
Naturally, no one set of carvings which we encountered told more than a fraction of any
connected story, nor did we even begin to come upon the various stages of that story in their proper
order. Some of the vast rooms were independent units so far as their designs were concerned, whilst
in other cases a continuous chronicle would be carried through a series of rooms and corridors. The
best of the maps and diagrams were on the walls of a frightful abyss below even the ancient ground
level--a cavern perhaps two hundred feet square and sixty feet high, which had almost undoubtedly
been an educational center of some sort. There were many provoking repetitions of the same material
in different rooms and buildings, since certain chapters of experience, and certain summaries or
phases of racial history, had evidently been favorites with different decorators or dwellers.
Sometimes, though, variant versions of the same theme proved useful in settling debatable points and
filling up gaps.
I still wonder that we deduced so much in the short time at our disposal. Of course, we even now
have only the barest outline--and much of that was obtained later on from a study of the photographs
and sketches we made. It may be the effect of this later study--the revived memories and vague
impressions acting in conjunction with his general sensitiveness and with that final supposed horror-
glimpse whose essence he will not reveal even to me--which has been the immediate source of
Danforth's present breakdown. But it had to be; for we could not issue our warning intelligently
without the fullest possible information, and the issuance of that warning is a prime necessity. Certain
lingering influences in that unknown antarctic world of disordered time and alien natural law make it
imperative that further exploration be discouraged.
VII
The full story, so far as deciphered, will eventually appear in an official bulletin of Miskatonic
University. Here I shall sketch only the salient highlights in a formless, rambling way. Myth or
otherwise, the sculptures told of the coming of those star-headed things to the nascent, lifeless earth
out of cosmic space--their coming, and the coming of many other alien entities such as at certain
times embark upon spatial pioneering. They seemed able to traverse the interstellar ether on their vast
membranous wings--thus oddly confirming some curious hill folklore long ago told me by an
antiquarian colleague. They had lived under the sea a good deal, building fantastic cities and fighting
terrific battles with nameless adversaries by means of intricate devices employing unknown
principles of energy. Evidently their scientific and mechanical knowledge far surpassed man's today,
though they made use of its more widespread and elaborate forms only when obliged to. Some of the
sculptures suggested that they had passed through a stage of mechanized life on other planets, but
had receded upon finding its effects emotionally unsatisfying. Their preternatural toughness of
organization and simplicity of natural wants made them peculiarly able to live on a high plane without
the more specialized fruits of artificial manufacture, and even without garments, except for
occasional protection against the elements.
It was under the sea, at first for food and later for other purposes, that they first created earth
life--using available substances according to long-known methods. The more elaborate experiments
came after the annihilation of various cosmic enemies. They had done the same thing on other
planets, having manufactured not only necessary foods, but certain multicellular protoplasmic masses
capable of molding their tissues into all sorts of temporary organs under hypnotic influence and
thereby forming ideal slaves to perform the heavy work of the community. These viscous masses
were without doubt what Abdul Alhazred whispered about as the "Shoggoths" in his frightful
Necronomicon, though even that mad Arab had not hinted that any existed on earth except in the
dreams of those who had chewed a certain alkaloidal herb. When the star-headed Old Ones on this
planet had synthesized their simple food forms and bred a good supply of Shoggoths, they allowed
other cell groups to develop into other forms of animal and vegetable life for sundry purposes,
extirpating any whose presence became troublesome.
With the aid of the Shoggoths, whose expansions could be made to lift prodigious weights, the
small, low cities under the sea grew to vast and imposing labyrinths of stone not unlike those which
later rose on land. Indeed, the highly adaptable Old Ones had lived much on land in other parts of the
universe, and probably retained many traditions of land construction. As we studied the architecture
of all these sculptured palaeogean cities, including that whose aeon-dead corridors we were even
then traversing, we were impressed by a curious coincidence which we have not yet tried to explain,
even to ourselves. The tops of the buildings, which in the actual city around us had, of course, been
weathered into shapeless ruins ages ago, were clearly displayed in the bas-reliefs, and showed vast
clusters of needle-like spires, delicate finials on certain cone and pyramid apexes, and tiers of thin,
horizontal scalloped disks capping cylindrical shafts. This was exactly what we had seen in that
monstrous and portentous mirage, cast by a dead city whence such skyline features had been absent
for thousands and tens of thousands of years, which loomed on our ignorant eyes across the
unfathomed mountains of madness as we first approached poor Lake's ill-fated camp.
Of the life of the Old Ones, both under the sea and after part of them migrated to land, volumes
could be written. Those in shallow water had continued the fullest use of the eyes at the ends of their
five main head tentacles, and had practiced the arts of sculpture and of writing in quite the usual way-
-the writing accomplished with a stylus on waterproof waxen surfaces. Those lower down in the
ocean depths, though they used a curious phosphorescent organism to furnish light, pieced out their
vision with obscure special senses operating through the prismatic cilia on their heads--senses
which rendered all the Old Ones partly independent of light in emergencies. Their forms of
sculpture and writing had changed curiously during the descent, embodying certain apparently
chemical coating processes--probably to secure phosphorescence--which the 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 pseudofeet. Occasionally they
accomplished long swoops with the auxiliary use of two or more sets of their fanlike folding wings.
On land they locally used the pseudofeet, but now and then flew to great heights or over long
distances with their wings. The many slender tentacles into which the crinoid arms branched were
infinitely delicate, flexible, strong, and accurate in muscular-nervous coordination--ensuring the
utmost skill and dexterity in all artistic and other manual operations.
The toughness of the things was almost incredible. Even the terrific pressure of the deepest sea
bottoms appeared powerless to harm them. Very few seemed to die at all except by violence, and
their burial places were very limited. The fact that they covered their vertically inhumed dead with
five-pointed inscribed mounds set up thoughts in Danforth and me which made a fresh pause and
recuperation necessary after the sculptures revealed it. The beings multiplied by means of spores--
like vegetable pteridophytes, as Lake had suspected--but, owing to their prodigious toughness and
longevity, and consequent lack of replacement needs, they did not encourage the large-scale
development of new prothallia except when they had new regions to colonize. The young matured
swiftly, and received an education evidently beyond any standard we can imagine. The prevailing
intellectual and aesthetic life was highly evolved, and produced a tenaciously enduring set of
customs and institutions which I shall describe more fully in my coming monograph. These varied
slightly according to sea or land residence, but had the same foundations and essentials.
Though able, like vegetables, to derive nourishment from inorganic substances, they vastly
preferred organic and especially animal food. They ate uncooked marine life under the sea, but
cooked their viands on land. They hunted game and raised meat herds--slaughtering with sharp
weapons whose odd marks on certain fossil bones our expedition had noted. They resisted all
ordinary temperatures marvelously, and in their natural state could live in water down to freezing.
When the great chill of the Pleistocene drew on, however--nearly a million years ago--the land
dwellers had to resort to special measures, including artificial heating--until at last the deadly cold
appears to have driven them back into the sea. For their prehistoric flights through cosmic space,
legend said, they absorbed certain chemicals and became almost independent of eating, breathing, or
heat conditions--but by the time of the great cold they had lost track of the method. In any case they
could not have prolonged the artificial state indefinitely without harm.
Being nonpairing and semivegetable in structure, the Old Ones had no biological basis for the
family phase of mammal life, but seemed to organize large households on the principles of
comfortable space-utility and--as we deduced from the pictured occupations and diversions of co-
dwellers--congenial mental association. In furnishing their homes they kept everything in the center
of the huge rooms, leaving all the wall spaces free for decorative treatment. Lighting, in the case of
the land inhabitants, was accomplished by a device probably electro-chemical in nature. Both on land
and under water they used curious tables, chairs and couches like cylindrical frames--for they rested
and slept upright with folded-down tentacles--and racks for hinged sets of dotted surfaces forming
their books.
Government was evidently complex and probably socialistic, though no certainties in this regard
could be deduced from the sculptures we saw. There was extensive commerce, both local and
between different cities--certain small, flat counters, five-pointed and inscribed, serving as money.
Probably the smaller of the various greenish soapstones found by our expedition were pieces of
such currency. Though the culture was mainly urban, some agriculture and much stock raising
existed. Mining and a limited amount of manufacturing were also practiced. Travel was very frequent,
but permanent migration seemed relatively rare except for the vast colonizing movements by which
the race expanded. For personal locomotion no external aid was used, since in land, air, and water
movement alike the Old Ones seemed to possess excessively vast capacities for speed. Loads,
however, were drawn by beasts of burden--Shoggoths under the sea, and a curious variety of
primitive vertebrates in the later years of land existence.
These vertebrates, as well as an infinity of other life forms--animal and vegetable, marine,
terrestrial, and aerial--were the products of unguided evolution acting on life cells made by the Old
Ones, but escaping beyond their radius of attention. They had been suffered to develop unchecked
because they had not come in conflict with the dominant beings. Bothersome forms, of course, were
mechanically exterminated. It interested us to see in some of the very last and most decadent
sculptures a shambling, primitive mammal, used sometimes for food and sometimes as an amusing
buffoon by the land dwellers, whose vaguely simian and human foreshadowings were unmistakable.
In the building of land cities the huge stone blocks of the high towers were generally lifted by vast-
winged pterodactyls of a species heretofore unknown to paleontology.
The persistence with which the Old Ones survived various geologic changes and convulsions of
the earth's crust was little short of miraculous. Though few or none of their first cities seem to have
remained beyond the Archaean Age, there was no interruption in their civilization or in the
transmission of their records. Their original place of advent to the planet was the Antarctic Ocean,
and it is likely that they came not long after the matter forming the moon was wrenched from the
neighboring South Pacific. According to one of the sculptured maps the whole globe was then under
water, with stone cities scattered farther and farther from the antarctic as aeons passed. Another map
shows a vast bulk of dry land around the south pole, where it is evident that some of the beings made
experimental settlements, though their main centers were transferred to the nearest sea bottom. Later
maps, which display the land mass as cracking and drifting, and sending certain detached parts
northward, uphold in a striking way the theories of continental drift lately advanced by Taylor,
Wegener, and Joly.
With the upheaval of new land in the South Pacific tremendous events began. Some of the marine
cities were hopelessly shattered, yet that was not the worst misfortune. Another race--a land race of
beings shaped like octopi and probably corresponding to fabulous prehuman spawn of Cthulhu--soon
began filtering down from cosmic infinity and precipitated a--monstrous war which for a time drove
the Old Ones wholly back to the sea--a colossal blow in view of the increasing land settlements.
Later peace was made, and the new lands were given to the Cthulhu spawn whilst the Old Ones held
the sea and the older lands. New land cities were founded--the greatest of them in the antarctic, for
this region of first arrival was sacred. From then on, as before, the antarctic remained the center of
the Old Ones' civilization, and all the cities built there by the Cthulhu spawn were blotted out. Then
suddenly the lands of the Pacific sank again, taking with them the frightful stone city of R'lyeh and all
the cosmic octopi, so that the Old Ones were again supreme on the planet except for one shadowy
fear about which they did not like to speak. At a rather later age their cities dotted all the land and
water areas of the globe--hence the recommendation in my coming monograph that some
archaeologist make systematic borings with Pabodie's type of apparatus in certain widely separated
regions.
The steady trend down the ages was from water to land--a movement encouraged by the rise of
new land masses, though the ocean was never wholly deserted. Another cause of the landward
movement was the new difficulty in breeding and managing the Shoggoths upon which successful sea
life depended. With the march of time, as the sculptures sadly confessed, the art of creating new life
from inorganic matter had been lost, so that the Old Ones had to depend on the molding of forms
already in existence. On land the great reptiles proved highly tractable; but the Shoggoths of the sea,
reproducing by fission and acquiring a dangerous degree of accidental intelligence, presented for a
time a formidable problem.
They had always been controlled through the hypnotic suggestions of the Old Ones, and had
modeled their tough plasticity into various useful temporary limbs and organs; but now their self-
modeling powers were sometimes exercised independently, and in various imitative forms implanted
by past suggestion. They had, it seems, developed a semistable brain whose separate and
occasionally stubborn volition echoed the will of the Old Ones without always obeying it.
Sculptured images of these Shoggoths filled Danforth and me with horror and loathing. They were
normally shapeless entities composed of a viscous jelly which looked like an agglutination of
bubbles, and each averaged about fifteen feet in diameter when a sphere. They had, however, a
constantly shifting shape and volume--throwing out temporary developments or forming apparent
organs of sight, hearing, and speech in imitation of their masters, either spontaneously or according
to suggestion.
They seem to have become peculiarly intractable toward the middle of the Permian Age, perhaps
one hundred and fifty million years ago, when a veritable war of resubjugation was waged upon them
by the marine Old Ones. Pictures of this war, and of the headless, slime-coated fashion in which the
Shoggoths typically left their slain victims, held a marvelously fearsome quality despite the
intervening abyss of untold ages. The Old Ones had used curious weapons of molecular and atomic
disturbances against the rebel entities, and in the end had achieved a complete victory. Thereafter the
sculptures showed a period in which Shoggoths were tamed and broken by armed Old Ones as the
wild horses of the American west were tamed by cowboys. Though during the rebellion the
Shoggoths had shown an ability to live out of water, this transition was not encouraged--since their
usefulness on land would hardly have been commensurate with the trouble of their management.
During the Jurassic Age the Old Ones met fresh adversity in the form of a new invasion from
outer space--this time by half-fungous, half-crustacean creatures--creatures undoubtedly the same as
those figuring in certain whispered hill legends of the north, and remembered in the Himalayas as the
Mi-Go, or Abominable Snow Men. To fight these beings the Old Ones attempted, for the first time
since their terrene advent, to sally forth again into the planetary ether; but, despite all traditional
preparations, found it no longer possible to leave the earth's atmosphere. Whatever the old secret of
interstellar travel had been, it was now definitely lost to the race. In the end the Mi-Go drove the Old
Ones out of all the northern lands, though they were powerless to disturb those in the sea. Little by
little the slow retreat of the elder race to their original antarctic habitat was beginning.
It was curious to note from the pictured battles that both the Cthulhu spawn and the Mi-Go seem
to have been composed of matter more widely different from that which we know than was the
substance of the Old Ones. They were able to undergo transformations and reintegrations impossible
for their adversaries, and seem therefore to have originally come from even remoter gulfs of the
cosmic space. The Old Ones, but for their abnormal toughness and peculiar vital properties, were
strictly material, and must have had their absolute origin within the known space-time continuum--
whereas the first sources of the other beings can only be guessed at with bated breath. All this, of
course, assuming that the non-terrestrial linkages and the anomalies ascribed to the invading foes are
not pure mythology. Conceivably, the Old Ones might have invented a cosmic framework to account
for their occasional defeats, since historical interest and pride obviously formed their chief
psychological element. It is significant that their annals failed to mention many advanced and potent
races of beings whose mighty cultures and towering cities figure persistently in certain obscure
legends.
The changing state of the world through long geologic ages appeared with startling vividness in
many of the sculptured maps and scenes. In certain cases existing science will require revision,
while in other cases its bold deductions are magnificently confirmed. As I have said, the hypothesis
of Taylor, Wegener, and Joly that all the continents are fragments of an original antarctic land mass
which cracked from centrifugal force and drifted apart over a technically viscous lower surface--an
hypothesis suggested by such things as the complementary outlines of Africa and South America, and
the way the great mountain chains are rolled and shoved up--receives striking support from this
uncanny source.
Maps evidently showing the Carboniferous world of an hundred million or more years ago
displayed significant rifts and chasms destined later to separate Africa from the once continuous
realms of Europe (then the Valusia of primal legend), Asia, the Americas, and the antarctic continent.
Other charts--and most significantly one in connection with the founding fifty million years ago of
the vast dead city around us--showed all the present continents well differentiated. And in the latest
discoverable specimen--dating perhaps from the Pliocene Age--the approximate world of today
appeared quite clearly despite the linkage of Alaska with Siberia, of North America with Europe
through Greenland, and of South America with the antarctic continent through Graham Land. In the
Carboniferous map the whole globe-ocean floor and rifted land mass alike--bore symbols of the Old
Ones' vast stone cities, but in the later charts the gradual recession toward the antarctic became very
plain. The final Pliocene specimen showed no land cities except on the antarctic continent and the tip
of South America, nor any ocean cities north of the fiftieth parallel of South Latitude. Knowledge
and interest in the northern world, save for a study of coast lines probably made during long
exploration flights on those fanlike membranous wings, had evidently declined to zero among the Old
Ones.
Destruction of cities through the upthrust of mountains, the centrifugal rending of continents, the
seismic convulsions of land or sea bottom, and other natural causes, was a matter of common record;
and it was curious to observe how fewer and fewer replacements were made as the ages wore on.
The vast dead megalopolis that yawned around us seemed to be the last general center of the race--
built early in the Cretaceous Age after a titanic earth buckling had obliterated a still vaster
predecessor not far distant. It appeared that this general region was the most sacred spot of all,
where reputedly the first Old Ones had settled on a primal sea bottom. In the new city--many of
whose features we could recognize in the sculptures, but which stretched fully a hundred miles
along the mountain range in each direction beyond the farthest limits of our aerial survey--there were
reputed to be preserved certain sacred stones forming part of the first sea-bottom city, which thrust
up to light after long epochs in the course of the general crumbling of strata.
VIII
Naturally, Danforth and I studied with especial interest and a peculiarly personal sense of awe
everything pertaining to the immediate district in which we were. Of this local material there was
naturally a vast abundance; and on the tangled ground level of the city we were lucky enough to find a
house of very late date whose walls, though somewhat damaged by a neighboring rift, contained
sculptures of decadent workmanship carrying the story of the region much beyond the period of the
Pliocene map whence we derived our last general glimpse of the prehuman world. This was the last
place we examined in detail, since what we found there gave us a fresh immediate objective.
Certainly, we were in one of the strangest, weirdest, and most terrible of all the corners of earth's
globe. Of all existing lands, it was infinitely the most ancient. The conviction grew upon us that this
hideous upland must indeed be the fabled nightmare plateau of Leng which even the mad author of the
Necronomicon was reluctant to discuss. The great mountain chain was tremendously long--starting as
a low range at Luitpold Land on the east coast of Weddell Sea and virtually crossing the entire
continent. That really high part stretched in a mighty arc from about Latitude 82, E. Longitude 60 to
Latitude 70, E. Longitude 115, with its concave side toward our camp and its seaward end in the
region of that long, ice-locked coast whose hills were glimpsed by Wilkes and Mawson at the
antarctic circle.
Yet even more monstrous exaggerations of nature seemed disturbingly close at hand. I have said
that these peaks are higher than the Himalayas, but the sculptures forbid me to say that they are earth's
highest. That grim honor is beyond doubt reserved for something which half the sculptures hesitated
to record at all, whilst others approached it with obvious repugnance and trepidation. It seems that
there was one part of the ancient land--the first part that ever rose from the waters after the earth had
flung off the moon and the Old Ones had seeped down, from the stars--which had come to be shunned
as vaguely and namelessly evil. Cities built there had crumbled before their time, and had been found
suddenly deserted. Then when the first great earth buckling had convulsed the region in the
Comanchian Age, a frightful line of peaks had shot suddenly up amidst the most appalling din and
chaos--and earth had received her loftiest and most terrible mountains.
If the scale of the carvings was correct, these abhorred things must have been much over forty
thousand feet high--radically vaster than even the shocking mountains of madness we had crossed.
They extended, it appeared, from about Latitude 77, E. Longitude 70 to Latitude 70, E. Longitude
100--less than three hundred miles away from the dead city, so that we would have spied their
dreaded summits in the dim western distance had it not been for that vague, opalescent haze. Their
northern end must likewise be visible from the long antarctic circle coast line at Queen Mary Land.
Some of the Old Ones, in the decadent days, had made strange prayers to those mountains--but
none ever went near them or dared to guess what lay beyond. No human eye had ever seen them, and
as I studied the emotions conveyed in the carvings, I prayed that none ever might. There are
protecting hills along the coast beyond them--Queen Mary and Kaiser Wilhelm Lands--and I thank
Heaven no one has been able to land and climb those hills. I am not as sceptical about old tales and
fears as I used to be, and I do not laugh now at the prehuman sculptor's notion that lightning paused
meaningfully now and then at each of the brooding crests, and that an unexplained glow shone from
one of those terrible pinnacles all through the long polar night. There may be a very real and very
monstrous meaning in the old Pnakotic whispers about Kadath in the Cold Waste.
But the terrain close at hand was hardly less strange, even if less namelessly accursed. Soon after
the founding of the city the great mountain range became the seat of the principal temples, and many
carvings showed what grotesque and fantastic towers had pierced the sky where now we saw only
the curiously clinging cubes and ramparts. In the course of ages the caves had appeared, and had
been shaped into adjuncts of the temples. With the advance of still later epochs, all the limestone
veins of the region were hollowed out by ground waters, so that the mountains, the foothills, and the
plains below them were a veritable network of connected caverns and galleries. Many graphic
sculptures told of explorations deep underground, and of the final discovery of the Stygian sunless
sea that lurked at earth's bowels.
This vast nighted gulf had undoubtedly been worn by the great river which flowed down from the
nameless and horrible westward mountains, and which had formerly turned at the base of the Old
Ones' range and flowed beside that chain into the Indian Ocean between Budd and Totten Lands on
Wilkes's coast line. Little by little it had eaten away the limestone hill base at its turning, till at last its
sapping currents reached the caverns of the ground waters and joined with them in digging a deeper
abyss. Finally its whole bulk emptied into the hollow hills and left the old bed toward the ocean dry.
Much of the later city as we now found it had been built over that former bed. The Old Ones,
understanding what had happened, and exercising their always keen artistic sense, had carved into
ornate pylons those headlands of the foothills where the great stream began its descent into eternal
darkness.
This river, once crossed by scores of noble stone bridges, was plainly the one whose extinct
course we had seen in our aeroplane survey. Its position in different carvings of the city helped us to
orient ourselves to the scene as it had been at various stages of the region's age-long, aeon-dead
history, so that we were able to sketch a hasty but careful map of the salient features--squares,
important buildings, and the like--for guidance in further explorations. We could soon reconstruct in
fancy the whole stupendous thing as it was a million or ten million or fifty million years ago, for the
sculptures told us exactly what the buildings and mountains and squares and suburbs and landscape
setting and luxuriant Tertiary vegetation had looked like. It must have had a marvelous and mystic
beauty, and as I thought of it, I almost forgot the clammy sense of sinister oppression with which the
city's inhuman age and massiveness and deadness and remoteness and glacial twilight had choked and
weighed on my spirit. Yet according to certain carvings, the denizens of that city had themselves
known the clutch of oppressive terror; for there was a somber and recurrent type of scene in which
the Old Ones were shown in the act of recoiling affrightedly from some object--never allowed to
appear in the design--found in the great river and indicated as having been washed down through
waving, vine-draped cycad forests from those horrible westward mountains.
It was only in the one late-built house with the decadent carvings that we obtained any
foreshadowing of the final calamity leading to the city's desertion. Undoubtedly there must have been
many sculptures of the same age elsewhere, even allowing for the slackened energies and aspirations
of a stressful and uncertain period; indeed, very certain evidence of the existence of others came to
us shortly afterward. But this was the first and only set we directly encountered. We meant to look
farther later on; but as I have said, immediate conditions dictated another present objective. There
would, though, have been a limit--for after all hope of a long future occupancy of the place had
perished among the Old Ones, there could not but have been a complete cessation of mural
decoration. The ultimate blow, of course, was the coming of the great cold which once held most of
the earth in thrall, and which has never departed from the ill-fated poles--the great cold that, at the
world's other extremity, put an end to the fabled lands of Lomar and Hyperborea.
Just when this tendency began in the antarctic, it would be hard to say in terms of exact years.
Nowadays we set the beginning of the general glacial periods at a distance of about five hundred
thousand years from the present, but at the poles the terrible scourge must have commenced much
earlier. All quantitative estimates are partly guesswork, but it is quite likely that the decadent
sculptures were made considerably less than a million years ago, and that the actual desertion of the
city was complete long before the conventional opening of the Pleistocene--five hundred thousand
years ago--as reckoned in terms of the earth's whole surface.
In the decadent sculptures there were signs of thinner vegetation everywhere, and of a decreased
country life on the part of the Old Ones. Heating devices were shown in the houses, and winter
travelers were represented as muffled in protective fabrics. Then we saw a series of cartouches--the
continuous band arrangement being frequently interrupted in these late carvings--depicting a
constantly growing migration to the nearest refuges of greater warmth--some fleeing to cities under
the sea off the far-away coast, and some clambering down through networks of limestone caverns in
the hollow hills to the neighboring black abyss of subterrene waters.
In the end it seems to have been the neighboring abyss which received the greatest colonization.
This was partly due, no doubt, to the traditional sacredness of this special region, but may have been
more conclusively determined by the opportunities it gave for continuing the use of the great temples
on the honeycombed mountains, and for retaining the vast land city as a place of summer residence
and base of communication with various mines. The linkage of old and new abodes was made more
effective by means of several gradings and improvements along the connecting routes, including the
chiseling of numerous direct tunnels from the ancient metropolis to the black abyss--sharply down-
pointing tunnels whose mouths we carefully drew, according to our most thoughtful estimates, on the
guide map we were compiling. It was obvious that at least two of these tunnels lay within a
reasonable exploring distance of where we were--both being on the mountainward edge of the city,
one less than a quarter of a mile toward the ancient river course, and the other perhaps twice that
distance in the opposite direction.
The abyss, it seems, had shelving shores of dry land at certain places, but the Old Ones built their
new city under water--no doubt because of its greater certainty of uniform warmth. The depth of the
hidden sea appears to have been very great, so that the earth's internal heat could ensure its
habitability for an indefinite period. The beings seemed to have had no trouble in adapting
themselves to part-time--and eventually, of course, whole-time--residence under water, since they
had never allowed their gill systems to atrophy. There were many sculptures which showed how
they had always frequently visited their submarine kinsfolk elsewhere, and how they had habitually
bathed on the deep bottom of their great river. The darkness of inner earth could likewise have been
no deterrent to a race accustomed to long antarctic nights.
Decadent though their style undoubtedly was, these latest carvings had a truly epic quality where
they told of the building of the new city in the cavern sea. The Old Ones had gone about it
scientifically--quarrying insoluble rocks from the heart of the honeycombed mountains, and
employing expert workers from the nearest submarine city to perform the construction according to
the best methods. These workers brought with them all that was necessary to establish the new
venture--Shoggoth tissue from which to breed stone lifters and subsequent beasts of burden for the
cavern city, and other protoplasmic matter to mold into phosphorescent organisms for lighting
purposes.
At last a mighty metropolis rose on the bottom of that Stygian sea, its architecture much like that
of the city above, and its workmanship displaying relatively little decadence because of the precise
mathematical element inherent in building operations. The newly bred Shoggoths grew to enormous
size and singular intelligence, and were represented as taking and executing orders with marvelous
quickness. They seemed to converse with the Old Ones by mimicking their voices--a sort of musical
piping over a wide range, if poor Lake's dissection had indicated aright--and to work more from
spoken commands than from hypnotic suggestions as in earlier times. They were, however, kept in
admirable control. The phosphorescent organisms supplied light With vast effectiveness, and
doubtless atoned for the loss of the familiar polar auroras of the outer-world night.
Art and decoration were pursued, though of course with a certain decadence. The Old Ones
seemed to realize this falling off themselves, and in many cases anticipated the policy of Constantine
the Great by transplanting especially fine blocks of ancient carving from their land city, just as the
emperor, in a similar age of decline, stripped Greece and Asia of their finest art to give his new
Byzantine capital greater splendors than its own people could create. That the transfer of sculptured
blocks had not been more extensive was doubtless owing to the fact that the land city was not at first
wholly abandoned. By the time total abandonment did occur--and it surely must have occurred before
the polar Pleistocene was far advanced--the Old Ones had perhaps become satisfied with their
decadent art--or had ceased to recognize the superior merit of the older carvings. At any rate, the
aeon-silent ruins around us had certainly undergone no wholesale sculptural denudation, though all
the best separate statues, like other movables, had been taken away.
The decadent cartouches and dadoes telling this story were, as I have said, the latest we could
find in our limited search. They left us with a picture of the Old Ones shuttling back and forth betwixt
the land city in summer and the sea-cavern city in winter, and sometimes trading with the sea-bottom
cities off the antarctic coast. By this time the ultimate doom of the land city must have been
recognized, for the sculptures showed many signs of the cold's malign encroachments. Vegetation
was declining, and the terrible snows of the winter no longer melted completely even in midsummer.
The 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 shows no trace of
their presence. Had the frightful Mi-Go been still a menace in the outer land world of the north?
Could one be sure of what might or might not linger, even to this day, in the lightless and unplumbed
abysses of earth's deepest waters? Those things had seemingly been able to withstand any amount of
pressure--and men of the sea have fished up curious objects at times. And has the killer-whale theory
really explained the savage and mysterious scars on antarctic seals noticed a generation ago by
Borchgrevingk?
The specimens found by poor Lake did not enter into these guesses, for their geologic setting
proved them to have lived at what must have been a very early date in the land city's history. They
were, according to their location, certainly not less than thirty million years old, and we reflected that
in their day the sea-cavern city, and indeed the cavern itself, had had no existence. They would have
remembered an older scene, with lush Tertiary vegetation everywhere, a younger land city of
flourishing arts around them, and a great river sweeping northward along the base of the mighty
mountains toward a far-away tropic ocean.
And yet we could not help thinking about these specimens--especially about the eight perfect
ones that were missing from Lake's hideously ravaged camp. There was something abnormal about
that whole business--the strange things we had tried so hard to lay to somebody's madness--those
frightful graves--the amount and nature of the missing material--Gedney--the unearthly toughness of
those archaic monstrosities, and the queer vital freaks the sculptures now showed the race to have--
Danforth and I had seen a good deal in the last few hours, and were prepared to believe and keep
silent about many appalling and incredible secrets of primal nature.
IX
I have said that our study of the decadent sculptures brought about a change in our immediate
objective. This, of course, had to do with the chiseled avenues to the black inner world, of whose
existence we had not known before, but which we were now eager to find and traverse. From the
evident scale of the carvings we deduced that a steeply descending walk of about a mile through
either of the neighboring tunnels would bring us to the brink of the dizzy, sunless cliffs about the
great abyss; down whose sides paths, improved by the Old Ones, led to the rocky shore of the hidden
and nighted ocean. To behold this fabulous gulf in stark reality was a lure which seemed impossible
of resistance once we knew of the thing--yet we realized we must begin the quest at once if we
expected to include it in our present trip.
It was now 8 P.M., and we did not have enough battery replacements to let our torches burn on
forever. We had done so much studying and copying below the glacial level that our battery supply
had had at least five hours of nearly continuous use, and despite the special dry cell formula, would
obviously be good for only about four more--though by keeping one torch unused, except for
especially interesting or difficult places, we might manage to eke out a safe margin beyond that. It
would not do to be without a light in these Cyclopean catacombs, hence in order to make the abyss
trip we must give up all further mural deciphering. Of course we intended to revisit the place for
days and perhaps weeks of intensive study and photography--curiosity having long ago got the better
of horror--but just now we must hasten.
Our supply of trail-blazing paper was far from unlimited, and we were reluctant to sacrifice spare
notebooks or sketching paper to augment it, but we did let one large notebook go. If worse came to
worst we could resort to rock chipping--and of course it would be possible, even in case of really
lost direction, to work up to full daylight by one channel or another if granted sufficient time for
plentiful trial and error. So at last we set off eagerly in the indicated direction of the nearest tunnel.
According to the carvings from which we had made our map, the desired tunnel mouth could not
be much more than a quarter of a mile from where we stood; the intervening space showing solid-
looking buildings quite likely to be penetrable still at a sub-glacial level. The opening itself would
be in the basement--on the angle nearest the foothills--of a vast five-pointed structure of evidently
public and perhaps ceremonial nature, which we tried to identify from our aerial survey of the ruins.
No such structure came to our minds as we recalled our flight, hence we concluded that its upper
parts had been greatly damaged, or that it had been totally shattered in an ice rift we had noticed. In
the latter case the tunnel would probably turn out to be choked, so that we would have to try the next
nearest one--the one less than a mile to the north. The intervening river course prevented our trying
any of the more southern tunnels on this trip; and indeed, if both of the neighboring ones were choked
it was doubtful whether our batteries would warrant an attempt on the next northerly one--about a mile
beyond our second choice.
As we threaded our dim way through the labyrinth with the aid of map and compass--traversing
rooms and corridors in every stage of ruin or preservation, clambering up ramps, crossing upper
floors and bridges and clambering down again, encountering choked doorways and piles of debris,
hastening now and then along finely preserved and uncannily immaculate stretches, taking false leads
and retracing our way (in such cases removing the blind paper trail we had left), and once in a while
striking the bottom of an open shaft through which daylight poured or trickled down--we were
repeatedly tantalized by the sculptured walls along our route. Many must have told tales of immense
historical importance, and only the prospect of later visits reconciled us to the need of passing them
by. As it was, we slowed down once in a while and turned on our second torch. If we had had more
films, we would certainly have paused briefly to photograph certain bas-reliefs, but time-consuming
hand-copying was clearly out of the question.
I come now once more to a place where the temptation to hesitate, or to hint rather than state, is
very strong. It is necessary, however, to reveal the rest in order to justify my course in discouraging
further exploration. We had wormed our way very close to the computed site of the tunnel's mouth--
having crossed a second-story bridge to what seemed plainly the tip of a pointed wall, and descended
to a ruinous corridor especially rich in decadently elaborate and apparently ritualistic sculptures of
late workmanship--when, shortly before 8:30 P.M., Danforth's keen young nostrils gave us the first
hint of something unusual. If we had had a dog with us, I suppose we would have been warned
before. At first we could not precisely say what was wrong with the formerly crystal-pure air, but
after a few seconds our memories reacted only too definitely. Let me try to state the thing without
flinching. There was an odor--and that odor was vaguely, subtly, and unmistakably akin to what had
nauseated us upon opening the insane grave of the horror poor Lake had dissected.
Of course the revelation was not as clearly cut at the time as it sounds now. There were several
conceivable explanations, and we did a good deal of indecisive whispering. Most important of all,
we did not retreat without further investigation; for having come this far, we were loath to be balked
by anything short of certain disaster. Anyway, what we must have suspected was altogether too wild
to believe. Such things did not happen in any normal world. It was probably sheer irrational instinct
which made us dim our single torch--tempted no longer by the decadent and sinister sculptures that
leered menacingly from the oppressive walls--and which softened our progress to a cautious
tiptoeing and crawling over the increasingly littered floor and heaps of debris.
Danforth's eyes as well as nose proved better than mine, for it was likewise he who first noticed
the queer aspect of the debris after we had passed many half-choked arches leading to chambers and
corridors on the ground level. It did not look quite as it ought after countless thousands of years of
desertion, and when we cautiously turned on more light we saw that a kind of swath seemed to have
been lately tracked through it. The irregular nature of the litter precluded any definite marks, but in
the smoother places there were suggestions of the dragging of heavy objects. Once we thought
there was a hint of parallel tracks as if of runners. This was what made us pause again.
It was during that pause that we caught--simultaneously this time--the other odor ahead.
Paradoxically, it was both a less frightful and more frightful odor--less frightful intrinsically, but
infinitely appalling in this place under the known circumstances--unless, of course, Gedney--for the
odor was the plain and familiar one of common petrol--every-day gasoline.
Our motivation after that is something I will leave to psychologists. We knew now that some
terrible extension of the camp horrors must have crawled into this nighted burial place of the aeons,
hence could not doubt any longer the existence of nameless conditions--present or at least recent just
ahead. Yet in the end we did let sheer burning curiosity--or anxiety--or autohypnotism--or vague
thoughts of responsibility toward Gedney--or what not--drive us on. Danforth whispered again of the
print he thought he had seen at the alley turning in the ruins above; and of the faint musical piping--
potentially of tremendous significance in the light of Lake's dissection report, despite its close
resemblance to the cave-mouth echoes of the windy peaks--which he thought he had shortly
afterward half heard from unknown depths below. I, in my turn, whispered of how the camp was left--
of what had disappeared, and of how the madness of a lone survivor might have conceived the
inconceivable--a wild trip across the monstrous mountains and a descent into the unknown, primal
masonry.
But we could not convince each other, or even ourselves, of anything definite. We had turned off
all light as we stood still, and vaguely noticed that a trace of deeply filtered upper day kept the
blackness from being absolute. Having automatically begun to move ahead, we guided ourselves by
occasional flashes from our torch. The disturbed debris formed an impression we could not shake
off, and the smell of gasoline grew stronger. More and more ruin met our eyes and hampered our
feet, until very soon we saw that the forward way was about to cease. We had been all too correct in
our pessimistic guess about that rift glimpsed from the air. Our tunnel quest was a blind one, and we
were not even going to be able to reach the basement out of which the abyssward aperture opened.
The torch, flashing over the grotesquely carved walls of the blocked corridor in which we
stood, showed several doorways in various states of obstruction; and from one of them the gasoline
odor--quite submerging that other hint of odor--came with especial distinctness. As we looked more
steadily, we saw that beyond a doubt there had been a slight and recent clearing away of debris from
that particular opening. Whatever the lurking horror might be, we believed the direct avenue toward
it was now plainly manifest. I do not think anyone will wonder that we waited an appreciable time
before making any further motion.
And yet, when we did venture inside that black arch, our first impression was one of anticlimax.
For amidst the littered expanse of that sculptured crypt--a perfect cube with sides of about twenty
feet--there remained no recent object of instantly discernible size; so that we looked instinctively,
though in vain, for a farther doorway. In another moment, however, Danforth's sharp vision had
descried a place where the floor debris had been disturbed; and we turned on both torches full
strength. Though what we saw in that light was actually simple and trifling, I am none the less
reluctant to tell of it because of what it implied. It was a rough leveling of the debris, upon which
several small objects lay carelessly scattered, and at one corner of which a considerable amount of
gasoline must have been spilled lately enough to leave a strong odor even at this extreme
superplateau altitude. In other words, it could not be other than a sort of camp--a camp made by
questing beings who, like us, had been turned back by the unexpectedly choked way to the abyss.
Let me be plain. The scattered objects were, so far as substance was concerned, all from Lake's
camp; and consisted of tin cans as queerly opened as those we had seen at that ravaged place, many
spent matches, three illustrated books more or less curiously smudged, an empty ink bottle with its
pictorial and instructional carton, a broken fountain pen, some oddly snipped fragments of fur and tent
cloth, a used electric battery with circular of directions, a folder that came with our type of tent
heater, and a sprinkling of crumpled papers. It was all bad enough but when we smoothed out the
papers and looked at what was on them, we felt we had come to the worst. We had found certain
inexplicably blotted papers at the camp which might have prepared us, yet the effect of the sight
down there in the prehuman vaults of a nightmare city was almost too much to bear.
A mad Gedney might have made the groups of dots in imitation of those found on the greenish
soapstones, just as the dots on those insane five-pointed grave mounds might have been made; and he
might conceivably have prepared rough, hasty sketches--varying in their accuracy or lack of it--
which outlined the neighboring parts of the city and traced the way from a circularly represented
place outside our previous route--a place we identified as a great cylindrical tower in the carvings
and as a vast circular gulf glimpsed in our aerial survey--to the present five-pointed structure and the
tunnel mouth therein.
He might, I repeat, have prepared such sketches; for those before us were quite obviously
compiled, as our own had been, from late sculptures somewhere in the glacial labyrinth, though not
from the ones which we had seen and used. But what the art-blind bungler could never have done was
to execute those sketches in a strange and assured technique perhaps superior, despite haste and
carelessness, to any of the decadent carvings from which they were taken--the characteristic and
unmistakable technique of the Old Ones themselves in the dead city's heyday.
There are those who will say Danforth and I were utterly mad not to flee for our lives after that;
since our conclusions were now--notwithstanding their wildness--completely fixed, and of a nature I
need not even mention to those who have read my account as far as this. Perhaps we were mad--for
have I not said those horrible peaks were mountains of madness? But I think I can detect something of
the same spirit--albeit in a less extreme form--in the men who stalk deadly beasts through African
jungles to photograph them or study their habits. Half paralyzed with terror though we were, there
was nevertheless fanned within us a blazing flame of awe and curiosity which triumphed in the end.
Of course we did not mean to face that--or those--which we knew had been there, but we felt that
they must be gone by now. They would by this time have found the other neighboring entrance to the
abyss, and have passed within, to whatever night-black fragments of the past might await them in the
ultimate gulf--the ultimate gulf they had never seen. Or if that entrance, too, was blocked, they would
have gone on to the north seeking another. They were, we remembered, partly independent of light.
Looking back to that moment, I can scarcely recall just what precise form our new emotions took-
-just what change of immediate objective it was that so sharpened our sense of expectancy. We
certainly did not mean to face what we feared--yet I will not deny that we may have had a lurking,
unconscious wish to spy certain things from some hidden vantage point. Probably we had not given
up our zeal to glimpse the abyss itself, though there was interposed a new goal in the form of that
great circular place shown on the crumpled sketches we had found. We had at once recognized it as a
monstrous cylindrical tower figuring in the very earliest carvings, but appearing only as a prodigious
round aperture from above. Something about the impressiveness of its rendering, even in these hasty
diagrams, made us think that its subglacial levels must still form a feature of peculiar importance.
Perhaps it embodied architectural marvels as yet unencountered by us. It was certainly of incredible
age according to the sculptures in which it figured--being indeed among the first things built in the
city. Its carvings, if preserved, could not but be highly significant. Moreover, it might form a good
present link with the upper world--a shorter route than the one we were so carefully blazing, and
probably that by which those others had descended.
At any rate, the thing we did was to study the terrible sketches--which quite perfectly confirmed
our own--and start back over the indicated course to the circular place; the course which our
nameless predecessors must have traversed twice before us. The other neighboring gate to the abyss
would lie beyond that. I need not speak of our journey--during which we continued to leave an
economical trail of paper--for it was precisely the same in kind as that by which we had reached the
cul-de-sac; except that it tended to adhere more closely to the ground level and even descend to
basement corridors. Every now and then we could trace certain disturbing marks in the debris or litter
underfoot; and after we had passed outside the radius of the gasoline scent, we were again faintly
conscious--spasmodically--of that more hideous and more persistent scent. After the way had
branched from our former course, we sometimes gave the rays of our single torch a furtive sweep
along the walls; noting in almost every case the well-nigh omnipresent sculptures, which indeed
seem to have formed a main aesthetic outlet for the Old Ones.
About 9:30 P.M., while traversing a long, vaulted corridor whose increasingly glaciated floor
seemed somewhat below the ground level and whose roof grew lower as we advanced, we began to
see strong daylight ahead and were able to turn off our torch. It appeared that we were coming to the
vast circular place, and that our distance from the upper air could not be very great. The corridor
ended in an arch surprisingly low for these megalithic ruins, but we could see much through it even
before we emerged. Beyond there stretched a prodigious round space--fully two hundred feet in
diameter--strewn with debris and containing many choked archways corresponding to the one we
were about to cross. The walls were--in available spaces--boldly sculptured into a spiral band of
heroic proportions; and displayed, despite the destructive weathering caused by the openness of the
spot, an artistic splendor far beyond anything we had encountered before. The littered floor was
quite heavily glaciated, and we fancied that the true bottom lay at a considerably lower depth.
But the salient object of the place was the titanic stone ramp which, eluding the archways by a
sharp turn outward into the open floor, wound spirally up the stupendous cylindrical wall like an
inside counterpart of those once climbing outside the monstrous towers or ziggurats of antique
Babylon. Only the rapidity of our flight, and the perspective which confounded the descent with the
tower's inner wall, had prevented our noticing this feature from the air, and thus caused us to seek
another avenue to the subglacial level. Pabodie might have been able to tell what sort of engineering
held it in place, but Danforth and I could merely admire and marvel. We could see mighty stone
corbels and pillars here and there, but what we saw seemed inadequate to the function performed.
The thing was excellently preserved up to the present top of the tower--a highly remarkable
circumstance in view of its exposure--and its shelter had done much to protect the bizarre and
disturbing cosmic sculptures on the walls.
As we stepped out into the awesome half daylight of this monstrous cylinder bottom--fifty
million years old, and without doubt the most primally ancient structure ever to meet our eyes--we
saw that the ramp-traversed sides stretched dizzily up to a height of fully sixty feet. This, we
recalled from our aerial survey, meant an outside glaciation of some forty feet; since the yawning
gulf we had seen from the plane had been at the top of an approximately twenty-foot mound of
crumbled masonry, somewhat sheltered for three-fourths of its circumference by the massive
curving walls of a line of higher ruins. According to the sculptures, the original tower had stood in
the center of an immense circular plaza, and had been perhaps five hundred or six hundred feet high,
with tiers of horizontal disks near the top, and a row of needlelike spires along the upper rim. Most
of the masonry had obviously toppled outward rather than inward--a fortunate happening, since
otherwise the ramp might have been shattered and the whole interior choked. As it was, the ramp
showed sad battering; whilst the choking was such that all the archways at the bottom seemed to have
been recently cleared.
It took us only a moment to conclude that this was indeed the route by which those others had
descended, and that this would be the logical route for our own ascent despite the long trail of paper
we had left elsewhere. The tower's mouth was no farther from the foothills and our waiting plane
than was the great terraced building we had entered, and any further subglacial exploration we might
make on this trip would 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 care to prevent further
damage. They were the bodies of young Gedney and the missing dog.
X
Many people will probably judge us callous as well as mad for thinking about the northward
tunnel and the abyss so soon after our somber discovery, and I am not prepared to say that we would
have immediately revived such thoughts but for a specific circumstance which broke in upon us and
set up a whole new train of speculations. We had replaced the tarpaulin over poor Gedney and were
standing in a kind of mute bewilderment when the sounds finally reached our consciousness--the first
sounds we had heard since descending out of the open where the mountain wind whined faintly from
its unearthly heights. Well-known and mundane though they were, their presence in this remote world
of death was more unexpected and unnerving than any grotesque or fabulous tones could possibly
have been--since they gave a fresh upsetting to all our notions of cosmic harmony.
Had it been some trace of that bizarre musical piping over a wide range which Lake's dissection
report had led us to expect in those others--and which, indeed, our overwrought fancies had been
reading into every wind howl we had heard 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 utterly and irrevocably void of
every vestige of normal life. What we heard was not the fabulous note of any buried blasphemy of
elder earth from whose supernal toughness an age-denied polar sun had evoked a monstrous
response. Instead, it was a thing so mockingly normal and so unerringly familiarized by our sea days
off Victoria Land and our camp days at McMurdo Sound that we shuddered to think of it here, where
such things ought not to be. To be brief--it was simply the raucous squawking of a penguin.
The muffled sound floated from subglacial recesses nearly opposite to the corridor whence we
had come--regions manifestly in the direction of that other tunnel to the vast abyss. The presence of a
living water bird in such a direction--in a world whose surface was one of age-long and uniform
lifelessness--could lead to only one conclusion; hence our first thought was to verify the objective
reality of the sound. It was, indeed, repeated, and seemed at times to come from more than one throat.
Seeking its source, we entered an archway from which much debris had been cleared; resuming our
trail blazing--with an added paper supply taken with curious repugnance from one of the tarpaulin
bundles on the sledges--when we left daylight behind.
As the glaciated floor gave place to a litter of detritus, we plainly discerned some curious,
dragging tracks; and once Danforth found a distinct print of a sort whose description would be only
too superfluous. The course indicated by the penguin cries was precisely what our map and compass
prescribed as an approach to the more northerly tunnel mouth, and we were glad to find that a
bridgeless thoroughfare on the ground and basement levels seemed open. The tunnel, according to
the chart, ought to start from the basement of a large pyramidal structure which we seemed vaguely
to recall from our aerial survey as remarkably well-preserved. Along our path the single torch
showed a customary profusion of carvings, but we did not pause to examine any of these.
Suddenly a bulky white shape loomed up ahead of us, and we flashed on the second torch. It is
odd how wholly this new quest had turned our minds from earlier fears of what might lurk near.
Those other ones, having left their supplies in the great circular place, must have planned to return
after their scouting trip toward or into the abyss; yet we had now discarded all caution concerning
them as completely as if they had never existed. This white, waddling thing was fully six feet high,
yet we seemed to realize at once that it was not one of those others. They were larger and dark, and,
according to the sculptures, their motion over land surfaces was a swift, assured matter despite the
queerness of their sea-born tentacle equipment. But to say that the white thing did not profoundly
frighten us would be vain. We were indeed clutched for an instant by primitive dread almost sharper
than the worst of our reasoned fears regarding those others. Then came a flash of anticlimax as the
white shape sidled into a lateral archway to our left to join two others of its kind which had
summoned it in raucous tones. For it was only a penguin--albeit of a huge, unknown species larger
than the greatest of the known king penguins, and monstrous in its combined albinism and virtual
eyelessness.
When we had followed the thing into the archway and turned both our torches on the indifferent
and unheeding group of three, we saw that they were all eyeless albinos of the same unknown and
gigantic species. Their size reminded us of some of the archaic penguins depicted in the Old Ones'
sculptures, and it did not take us long to conclude that they were descended from the same stock--
undoubtedly surviving through a retreat to some warmer inner region whose perpetual blackness had
destroyed their pigmentation and atrophied their eyes to mere useless slits. That their present habitat
was the vast abyss we sought, was not for a moment to be doubted; and this evidence of the gulf's
continued warmth and habitability filled us with the most curious and subtly perturbing fancies.
We wondered, too, what had caused these three birds to venture out of their usual domain. The
state and silence of the great dead city made it clear that it had at no time been an habitual seasonal
rookery, whilst the manifest indifference of the trio to our presence made it seem odd that any
passing party of those others should have startled them. Was it possible that those others had taken
some aggressive action or tried to increase their meat supply? We doubted whether that pungent odor
which the dogs had hated could cause an equal antipathy in these penguins, since their ancestors had
obviously lived on excellent terms with the Old Ones--an amicable relationship which must have
survived in the abyss below as long as any of the Old Ones remained. Regretting--in a flare-up of the
old spirit of pure science--that we could not photograph these anomalous creatures, we shortly left
them to their squawking and pushed on toward the abyss whose openness was now so positively
proved to us, and whose exact direction occasional penguin tracks made clear.
Not long afterward a steep descent in a long, low, doorless, and peculiarly sculptureless
corridor led us to believe that we were approaching the tunnel mouth at last. We had passed two
more penguins, and heard others immediately ahead. Then the corridor ended in a prodigious open
space which made us gasp involuntarily--a perfect inverted hemisphere, obviously deep
underground; fully a hundred feet in diameter and fifty feet high, with low archways opening around
all parts of the circumference but one, and that one yawning cavernously 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 chiseled jambs and lintel. From that cryptical mouth we fancied a
current of slightly warmer air, and perhaps even a suspicion of vapor proceeded; and we wondered
what living entities other than penguins the limitless void below, and the contiguous honeycombings
of the land and the titan mountains, might conceal. We wondered, too, whether the trace of
mountaintop smoke at first suspected by poor Lake, as well as the odd haze we had ourselves
perceived around the rampart-crowned peak, might not be caused by the tortuous-channeled rising of
some such vapor from the unfathomed regions of earth's core.
Entering the tunnel, we saw that its outline was--at least at the start--about fifteen feet each way--
sides, floor, and arched roof composed of the usual megalithic masonry. The sides were sparsely
decorated with cartouches of conventional designs in a late, decadent style; and all the construction
and carving were marvelously well-preserved. The floor was quite clear, except for a slight detritus
bearing outgoing penguin tracks and the inward tracks of these others. The farther one advanced, the
warmer it became; so that we were soon unbuttoning our heavy garments. We wondered whether
there were any actually igneous manifestations below, and whether the waters of that sunless sea
were hot. 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 shown 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 vapor as at the mouth,
but this was doubtless due to the lack of contrasting cooler air. The temperature was rapidly
ascending, and we were not surprised to come upon a careless heap of material shudderingly familiar
to us. It was composed of furs and tent cloth taken from Lake's camp, and we did not pause to study
the bizarre forms into which the fabrics had been slashed. Slightly beyond this point we noticed a
decided increase in the size and number of the side galleries, and concluded that the densely
honeycombed region beneath the higher foothills must now have been reached. The nameless scent
was now curiously mixed with another and scarcely less offensive odor--of what nature we could
not guess, though we thought of decaying organisms and perhaps unknown subterranean fungi. Then
came a startling expansion of the tunnel for which the carvings had not prepared us--a broadening and
rising into a lofty, natural-looking elliptical cavern with a level floor, some seventy-five feet long
and fifty broad, and with many immense side passages leading away into cryptical darkness.
Though this cavern was natural in appearance, an inspection with both torches suggested that it
had been formed by the artificial destruction of several walls between adjacent 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 fetor which had supplemented the nameless scent was excessively
pungent here; so much so that it destroyed all trace of the other. Something about this whole place,
with its polished and almost glistening floor, struck us as more vaguely baffling and horrible than any
of the monstrous things we had previously encountered.
The regularity of the passage immediately ahead, as well as the larger proportion of penguin-
droppings there, prevented all confusion as to the right course amidst this plethora of equally great
cave mouths. Nevertheless we resolved to resume our paper trailblazing if any further complexity
should develop; for dust tracks, of course, could no longer be expected. Upon resuming our direct
progress we cast a beam of torchlight over the tunnel walls--and stopped short in amazement at the
supremely radical change which had come over the carvings in this part of the passage. We realized,
of course, the great decadence of the Old Ones' sculpture at the time of the tunneling, and had indeed
noticed the inferior workmanship of the arabesques in the stretches behind us. But now, in this
deeper section beyond the cavern, there was a sudden difference wholly transcending explanation--a
difference in basic nature as well as in mere quality, and involving so profound and calamitous a
degradation of skill that nothing in the hitherto observed rate of decline could have led one to expect
it.
This new and degenerate work was coarse, bold, and wholly lacking in delicacy of detail. It was
countersunk with exaggerated depth in bands following the same general line as the sparse
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
seemingly more like a parody than a perpetuation of that tradition. We could not get it out of our
minds that some subtly but profoundly alien element had been added to the aesthetic feeling behind
the technique--an alien element, Danforth guessed, that was responsible for the laborious
substitution. It was like, yet disturbingly unlike, what we had come to recognize as the Old Ones' art;
and I was persistently reminded of such hybrid things as the ungainly Palmyrene sculptures fashioned
in the Roman manner. That others had recently noticed this belt of carving was hinted by the presence
of a used flashlight battery on the floor in front of one of the most characteristic cartouches.
Since we could not afford to spend any considerable time in study, we resumed our advance after
a cursory look; though frequently casting beams over the walls to see if any further decorative
changes developed. Nothing of the sort was perceived, though the carvings were in places rather
sparse because of the numerous mouths of smooth-floored lateral tunnels. We saw and heard fewer
penguins, but thought we caught a vague suspicion of an infinitely distant chorus of them somewhere
deep within the earth. The new and inexplicable odor was abominably strong, and we could detect
scarcely a sign of that other nameless scent. Puffs of visible vapor ahead bespoke increasing
contrasts in temperature, and the relative nearness of the sunless sea cliffs of the great abyss. Then,
quite unexpectedly, we saw certain obstructions on the polished floor ahead--obstructions which
were quite definitely not penguins--and turned on our second torch after making sure that the objects
were quite stationary.
XI
Still another time have I come to a place where it is very difficult to proceed. I ought to be
hardened by this stage; but there are some experiences and intimations which scar too deeply to
permit of healing, and leave only such an added sensitiveness that memory reinspires all the original
horror. We saw, as I have said, certain obstructions on the polished floor ahead; and I may add that
our nostrils were assailed almost simultaneously by a very curious intensification of the strange
prevailing fetor, now quite plainly mixed with the nameless stench of those others which had gone
before. The light of the second torch left no doubt of what the obstructions were, and we dared
approach them only because we could see, even from a distance, that they were quite as past all
harming power as had been the six similar specimens unearthed from the monstrous star-mounded
graves at poor Lake's camp.
They were, indeed, as lacking in completeness as most of those we had unearthed--though it
grew plain from the thick, dark green pool gathering around them that their incompleteness was of
infinitely greater recency. There seemed to be only four of them, whereas Lake's bulletins would
have suggested no less than eight as forming the group which had preceded us. To find them in this
state was wholly unexpected, and we wondered what sort of monstrous struggle had occurred down
here in the dark.
Penguins, attacked in a body, retaliate savagely with their beaks, and our ears now made certain
the existence of a rookery far beyond. Had those others disturbed such a place and aroused
murderous pursuit? The obstructions did not suggest it, for penguins' beaks against the tough tissues
Lake had dissected could hardly account for the terrible damage our approaching glance was
beginning to make out. Besides, the huge blind birds we had seen appeared to be singularly peaceful.
Had there, then, been a struggle among those others, and were the absent four responsible? If so,
where were they? Were they close at hand and likely to form an immediate menace to us? We glanced
anxiously at some of the smooth-floored lateral passages as we continued our slow and frankly
reluctant approach. Whatever the conflict was, it had clearly been that which had frightened the
penguins into their unaccustomed wandering. It must, then, have arisen near that faintly heard rookery
in the incalculable gulf beyond, since there were no signs that any birds had normally dwelt here.
Perhaps, we reflected, there had been a hideous running fight, with the weaker party seeking to get
back to the cached sledges when their pursuers finished them. One could picture the demoniac fray
between namelessly monstrous entities as it surged out of the black abyss with great clouds of frantic
penguins squawking and scurrying ahead.
I say that we approached those sprawling and incomplete obstructions slowly and reluctantly.
Would to Heaven we had never approached them at all, but had run back at top speed out of that
blasphemous tunnel with the greasily smooth floors and the degenerate murals aping and mocking the
things they had superseded--run back, before we had seen what we did see, and before our minds
were burned with something which will never let us breathe easily again!
Both of our torches were turned on the prostrate objects, so that we soon realized the dominant
factor in their incompleteness. Mauled, compressed, twisted, and ruptured as they were, their chief
common injury was total decapitation. From each one the tentacled starfish head had been removed;
and as we drew near we saw that the manner of removal looked more like some hellish tearing or
suction than like any ordinary form of cleavage. Their noisome dark-green ichor formed a large,
spreading pool; but its stench was half overshadowed by the newer and stranger stench, here more
pungent than at any other point along our route. Only when we had come very close to the sprawling
obstructions could we trace that second, unexplainable fetor to any immediate source--and the instant
we did so Danforth, remembering certain very vivid sculptures of the Old Ones' history in the
Permian Age one hundred and fifty million years ago, gave vent to a nerve-tortured cry which
echoed hysterically through that vaulted and archaic passage with the evil, palimpsest carvings.
I came only just short of echoing his cry myself; for I had seen those primal sculptures, too, and
had shudderingly admired the way the nameless artist had suggested that hideous slime coating found
on certain incomplete and prostrate Old Ones--those whom the frightful Shoggoths had
characteristically slain and sucked to a ghastly headlessness in the great war of resubjugation. They
were infamous, nightmare sculptures even when telling of age-old, bygone things; for Shoggoths and
their work ought not to be seen by human beings or portrayed by any beings. The mad author of the
Necronomicon had nervously tried to swear that none had been bred on this planet, and that only
drugged dreamers had even conceived them. Formless protoplasm able to mock and reflect all forms
and organs and processes--viscous agglutinations of bubbling cells--rubbery fifteen-foot spheroids
infinitely plastic and ductile--slaves of suggestion, builders of cities--more and more sullen, more
and more intelligent, more and more amphibious, more and more imitative! Great God! What madness
made even those blasphemous Old Ones willing to use and carve such things?
And now, when Danforth and I saw the freshly glistening and reflectively iridescent black slime
which clung thickly to those headless bodies and stank obscenely with that new, unknown odor
whose cause only a diseased fancy could envisage--clung to those bodies and sparkled less
voluminously on a smooth part of the accursedly resculptured wall in a series of grouped dots--we
understood the quality of cosmic fear to its uttermost depths. It was not fear of those four missing
others--for all too well did we suspect they would do no harm again. Poor devils! 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 dig up in that hideously dead or sleeping polar waste--and this was their tragic
homecoming. They had not been even savages--for what indeed had they done? That awful
awakening in the cold of an unknown epoch--perhaps an attack by the furry, frantically barking
quadrupeds, and a dazed defense against them and the equally frantic white simians with the queer
wrappings and paraphernalia...poor Lake, poor Gedney... and poor Old Ones! Scientists to the last--
what had they done that we would not have done in their place? God, what intelligence and
persistence! What a facing of the incredible, just as those carven kinsmen and forbears had faced
things only a little less incredible! Radiates, vegetables, monstrosities, star spawn--whatever they
had been, they were men!
They had crossed the icy peaks on whose templed slopes they had once worshipped and roamed
among the tree ferns. They had found their dead city brooding under its curse, and had read its carven
latter days as we had done. They had tried to reach their living fellows in fabled depths of blackness
they had never seen--and what had they found? All this flashed in unison through the thoughts of
Danforth and me as we looked from those headless, slime-coated shapes to the loathsome palimpsest
sculptures and the diabolical dot groups of fresh slime on the wall beside them--looked and
understood what must have triumphed and survived down there in the Cyclopean water city of that
nighted, penguin-fringed abyss, whence even now a sinister curling mist had begun to belch pallidly
as if in answer to Danforth's hysterical scream.
The shock of recognizing that monstrous slime and headlessness had frozen us into mute,
motionless statues, and it is only through later conversations that we have learned of the complete
identity of our thoughts at that moment. It seemed aeons that we stood there, but actually it could not
have been more than ten or fifteen seconds. That hateful, pallid mist curled forward as if veritably
driven by some remoter advancing bulk--and then came a sound which upset much of what we had just
decided, and in so doing broke the spell and enabled us to run like mad past squawking, confused
penguins over our former trail back to the city, along ice-sunken megalithic corridors to the great
open circle, and up that archaic spiral ramp in a frenzied, automatic plunge for the sane outer air and
light of day.
The new sound, as I have intimated, upset much that we had decided; because it was what poor
Lake's dissection had led us to attribute to those we had judged dead. It was, Danforth later told me,
precisely what he had caught in infinitely muffled form when at that spot beyond the alley corner
above the glacial level; and it certainly had a shocking resemblance to the wind pipings we had both
heard around the lofty mountain caves. At the risk of seeming puerile I will add another thing, too, if
only because of the surprising way Danforth's impressions chimed with mine. Of course common
reading is what prepared us both to make the interpretation, though Danforth has hinted at queer
notions about unsuspected and forbidden sources to which Poe may have had access when writing
his Arthur Gordon Pym a century ago. It will be remembered that in that fantastic tale there is a word
of unknown but terrible and prodigious significance connected with the antarctic and screamed
eternally by the gigantic spectrally snowy birds of that malign region's core. "Tekeli-li! Tekeli-li!"
That, I may admit, is exactly what we thought we heard conveyed by that sudden sound behind the
advancing white mist--that insidious musical piping over a singularly wide range.
We were in full flight before three notes or syllables had been uttered, though we knew that the
swiftness of the Old Ones would enable any scream-roused and pursuing survivor of the slaughter to
overtake us in a moment if it really wished to do so. We had a vague hope, however, that
nonaggressive conduct and a display of kindred reason might cause such a being to spare us in case
of capture, if only from scientific curiosity. 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 fetid,
unglimpsed mountain of slime-spewing protoplasm whose race had conquered the abyss and sent land
pioneers to recarve and squirm through the burrows of the hills--we could form no guess; and it cost
us a genuine pang to leave this probably crippled Old One--perhaps a lone survivor--to the peril of
recapture and a nameless fate.
Thank Heaven we did not slacken our run. The curling mist had thickened again, and was driving
ahead with increased speed; whilst the straying penguins in our rear were squawking and screaming
and displaying signs of a panic really surprising in view of their relatively minor confusion when we
had passed them. Once more came that sinister, wide-ranged piping--"Tekeli-li! Tekeli-li!" We had
been wrong. The thing was not wounded, but had merely paused on encountering the bodies of its
fallen kindred and the hellish slime inscription above them. We could never know what that demon
message was--but those burials at Lake's camp had shown how much importance the beings attached
to their dead. Our recklessly used torch now revealed ahead of us the large open cavern where
various ways converged, and we were glad to be leaving those morbid palimpsest sculptures--almost
felt even when scarcely seen--behind. Another thought which the advent of the cave inspired was the
possibility of losing our pursuer at this bewildering focus of large galleries. There were several of
the blind albino penguins in the open space, and it seemed clear that their fear of the oncoming entity
was extreme to the point of unaccountability. If at that point we dimmed our torch to the very lowest
limit of traveling need, keeping it strictly in front of us, the frightened squawking motions of the huge
birds in the mist might muffle our footfalls, screen our true course, and somehow set up a false lead.
Amidst the churning, spiraling fog, the littered and unglistening floor of the main tunnel beyond this
point, as differing from the other morbidly polished burrows, could hardly form a highly
distinguishing feature; even, so far as we could conjecture, for those indicated special senses which
made the Old Ones partly, though imperfectly, independent of light in emergencies. In fact, we were
somewhat apprehensive lest we go astray ourselves in our haste. For we had, of course, decided to
keep straight on toward the dead city; since the consequences of loss in those unknown foothill
honeycombings would be unthinkable.
The fact that we survived and emerged is sufficient proof that the thing did take a wrong gallery
whilst we providentially hit on the right one. The penguins alone could not have saved us, but in
conjunction with the mist they seem to have done so. Only a benign fate kept the curling vapors thick
enough at the right moment, for they were constantly shifting and threatening to vanish. Indeed, they
did lift for a second just before we emerged from the nauseously resculptured tunnel into the cave;
so that we actually caught one first and only half glimpse of the oncoming entity as we cast a final,
desperately fearful glance backward before dimming the torch and mixing with the penguins in the
hope of dodging pursuit. If the fate which screened us was benign, that which gave us the half
glimpse was infinitely the opposite; for to that flash of semivision can be traced a full half of the
horror which has ever since haunted us.
Our exact motive in looking back again was perhaps no more than the immemorial instinct of the
pursued to gauge the nature and course of its pursuer; or perhaps it was an automatic attempt to
answer a subconscious question raised by one of our senses. In the midst of our flight, with all our
faculties centered on the problem of escape, we were in no condition to observe and analyze details;
yet even so, our latent brain cells must have wondered at the message brought them by our nostrils.
Afterward we realized what it was that our retreat from the fetid slime coating on those headless
obstructions, and the coincident approach of the pursuing entity, had not brought us the exchange of
stenches which logic called for. In the neighborhood of the prostrate things that new and lately
unexplainable fetor had been wholly dominant; but by this time it ought to have largely given place to
the nameless stench associated with those others. This it had not done--for instead, the newer and
less bearable smell was now virtually undiluted, and growing more and more poisonously insistent
each second.
So we glanced back simultaneously, it would appear; though no doubt the incipient motion of one
prompted the imitation of the other. As we did so we flashed both torches full strength at the
momentarily thinned mist; either from sheer primitive anxiety to see all we could, or in a less
primitive but equally unconscious effort to dazzle the entity before we dimmed our light and dodged
among the penguins of the labyrinth center ahead. Unhappy act! Not Orpheus himself, or Lot's wife,
paid much more dearly for a backward glance. And again came that shocking, wide-ranged piping--
"Tekeli-li! Tekeli-li!"
I might as well be frank--even if I cannot bear to be quite direct--in stating what we saw; though at
the time we felt that it was not to be admitted even to each other. The words reaching the reader can
never even suggest the awfulness of the sight itself. It crippled our consciousness so completely that
I wonder we had the residual sense to dim our torches as planned, and to strike the right tunnel toward
the dead city. Instinct alone must have carried us through--perhaps better than reason could have
done; though if that was what saved us, we paid a high price. Of reason we certainly had little
enough left.
Danforth was totally unstrung, and the first thing I remember of the rest of the journey was
hearing him lightheadedly chant an hysterical formula in which I alone of mankind could have found
anything but insane irrelevance. It reverberated in falsetto echoes among the squawks of the
penguins; reverberated through the vaultings ahead, and--thank God--through the now empty
vaultings behind. He could not have begun it at once--else we would not have been alive and blindly
racing. I shudder to think of what a shade of difference in his nervous reactions might have brought.
"South Station Under--Washington Under--Park Street Under--Kendall --Central--Harvard--" The
poor fellow was chanting the familiar stations of the Boston-Cambridge tunnel that burrowed through
our peaceful native soil thousands of miles away in New England, yet to me the ritual had neither
irrelevance nor home feeling. It had only horror, because I knew unerringly the monstrous, nefandous
analogy that had suggested it. We had expected, upon looking back, to see a terrible and incredible
moving entity if the mists were thin enough; but of that entity we had formed a clear idea. What we
did see--for the mists were indeed all too malignly thinned--was something altogether different, and
immeasurably more hideous and detestable. It was the utter, objective embodiment of the fantastic
novelist's "thing that should not be"; and its nearest comprehensible analogue is a vast, onrushing
subway train as one sees it from a station platform--the great black front looming colossally out of
infinite subterranean distance, constellated with strangely colored lights and filling the prodigious
burrow as a piston fills a cylinder.
But we were not on a station platform. We were on the track ahead as the nightmare, plastic
column of fetid black iridescence oozed tightly onward through its fifteen-foot sinus, gathering
unholy speed and driving before it a spiral, rethickening cloud of the pallid abyss-vapor. It was a
terrible, indescribable thing vaster than any subway train--a shapeless congeries of protoplasmic
bubbles, faintly self-luminous, and with myriads of temporary eyes forming and un-forming as
pustules of greenish light all over the tunnel-filling front that bore down upon us, crushing the frantic
penguins and slithering over the glistening floor that it and its kind had swept so evilly free of all
litter. Still came that eldritch, mocking cry--"Tekeli-li! Tekeli-li!" and at last we remembered that the
demoniac Shoggoths--given life, thought, and plastic organ patterns solely by the Old Ones, and
having no language save that which the dot groups expressed--had likewise no voice save the
imitated accents of their bygone masters.
XII
Danforth and I have recollections of emerging into the great sculptured hemisphere and of
threading our back trail through the Cyclopean rooms and corridors of the dead city; yet these are
purely dream fragments involving no memory of volition, details, or physical exertion. It was as if
we floated in a nebulous world or dimension without time, causation, or orientation. The gray half-
daylight of the vast circular space sobered us somewhat; but we did not go near those cached
sledges or look again at poor Gedney and the dog. They have a strange and titanic mausoleum, and I
hope the end of this planet will find them still undisturbed.
It was while struggling up the colossal spiral incline that we first felt the terrible fatigue and
short breath which our race through the thin plateau air had produced; but not even fear of collapse
could make us pause before reaching the normal outer realm of sun and sky. There was something
vaguely appropriate about our departure from those buried epochs; for as we wound our panting way
up the sixty-foot cylinder of primal masonry, we glimpsed beside us a continuous procession of
heroic sculptures in the dead race's early and undecayed technique--a farewell from the Old Ones,
written fifty million years ago.
Finally scrambling out at the top, we found ourselves on a great mound of tumbled blocks, with
the curved walls of higher stonework rising westward, and the brooding peaks of the great mountains
showing beyond the more crumbled structures toward the east. The low antarctic sun of midnight
peered redly from the southern horizon through rifts in the jagged ruins, and the terrible age and
deadness of the nightmare city seemed all the starker by contrast with such relatively known and
accustomed things as the features of the polar landscape. The sky above was a churning and
opalescent mass of tenuous ice-vapors, and the cold clutched at our vitals. Wearily resting the outfit-
bags to which we had instinctively clung throughout our desperate flight, we rebuttoned our heavy
garments for the stumbling climb down the mound and the walk through the aeon-old stone maze to
the foothills where our aeroplane waited. Of what had set us fleeing from that darkness of earth's
secret and archaic gulfs we said nothing at all.
In less than a quarter of an hour we had found the steep grade to the foothills--the probable
ancient terrace--by which we had descended, and could see the dark bulk of our great plane amidst
the sparse ruins on the rising slope ahead. Halfway uphill toward our goal we paused for a
momentary breathing spell, and turned to look again at the fantastic tangle of incredible stone shapes
below us--once more outlined mystically against an unknown west. As we did so we saw that the sky
beyond had lost its morning haziness; the restless ice-vapors having moved up to the zenith, where
their mocking outlines seemed on the point of settling into some bizarre pattern which they feared to
make quite definite or conclusive.
There now lay revealed on the ultimate white horizon behind the grotesque city a dim, elfin line
of pinnacled violet whose needle-pointed heights loomed dreamlike against the beckoning rose
color of the western sky. Up toward this shimmering rim sloped the ancient table-land, the depressed
course of the bygone river traversing it as an irregular ribbon of shadow. For a second we gasped in
admiration of the scene's unearthly cosmic beauty, and then vague horror began to creep into our
souls. For this far violet line could be nothing else than the terrible mountains of the forbidden land--
highest of earth's peaks and focus of earth's evil; harborers of nameless horrors and Archaean
secrets; shunned and prayed to by those who feared to carve their meaning; untrodden by any living
thing on earth, but visited by the sinister lightnings and sending strange beams across the plains in the
polar night--beyond doubt the unknown archetype of that dreaded Kadath in the Cold Waste beyond
abhorrent Leng, whereof primal legends hint evasively.
If the sculptured maps and pictures in that prehuman city had told truly, these cryptic violet
mountains could not be much less than three hundred miles away; yet none the less sharply did their
dim elfin essence appear above that remote and snowy rim, like the serrated edge of a monstrous
alien planet about to rise into unaccustomed heavens. Their height, then, must have been tremendous
beyond all comparison--carrying them up into tenuous atmospheric strata peopled only by such
gaseous wraiths as rash flyers have barely lived to whisper of after unexplainable falls. Looking at
them, I thought nervously of certain sculptured hints of what the great bygone river had washed down
into the city from their accursed slopes--and wondered how much sense and how much folly had lain
in the fears of those Old Ones who carved them so reticently. I recalled how their northerly end must
come near the coast at Queen Mary Land, where even at that moment Sir Douglas Mawson's
expedition was doubtless working less than a thousand miles away; and hoped that no evil fate would
give Sir Douglas and his men a glimpse of what might lie beyond the protecting coastal range. Such
thoughts formed a measure of my overwrought condition at the time--and Danforth seemed to be even
worse.
Yet long before we had passed the great star-shaped ruin and reached our plane, our fears had
become transferred to the lesser but vast-enough range whose recrossing lay ahead of us. From
these foothills the black, ruin-crusted slopes reared up starkly and hideously against the east, again
reminding us of those strange Asian paintings of Nicholas Roerich; and when we thought of the
frightful amorphous entities that might have pushed their fetidly squirming way even to the topmost
hollow pinnacles, we could not face without panic the prospect of again sailing by those suggestive
skyward cave mouths where the wind made sounds like an evil musical piping over a wide range. To
make matters worse, we saw distinct traces of local mist around several of the summits--as poor Lake
must have done when he made that early mistake about volcanism--and thought shiveringly of that
kindred mist from which we had just escaped; of that, and of the blasphemous, horror-fostering abyss
whence all such vapors came.
All was well with the plane, and we clumsily hauled on our heavy flying furs. Danforth got the
engine started without trouble, and we made a very smooth take-off over the nightmare city. Below
us the primal Cyclopean masonry spread out as it had done when first we saw it, and we began rising
and turning to test the wind for our crossing through the pass. At a very high level there must have
been great disturbance, since the ice-dust clouds of the zenith were doing all sorts of fantastic
things; but at twenty-four thousand feet, the height we needed for the pass, we found navigation quite
practicable. As we drew close to the jutting peaks the wind's strange piping again became manifest,
and I could see Danforth's hands trembling at the controls. Rank amateur that I was, I thought at that
moment that I might be a better navigator than he in effecting the dangerous crossing between
pinnacles; and when I made motions to change seats and take over his duties he did not protest. I tried
to keep all my skill and self-possession about me, and stared at the sector of reddish farther sky
betwixt the walls of the pass--resolutely refusing to pay attention to the puffs of mountain-top vapor,
and wishing that I had wax-stopped ears like Ulysses' men off the Siren's coast to keep that disturbing
windpiping from my consciousness.
But Danforth, released from his piloting and keyed up to a dangerous nervous pitch, could not
keep quiet. I felt him turning and wriggling about as he looked back at the terrible receding city,
ahead at the cave-riddled, cube-barnacled peaks, sidewise at the bleak sea of snowy, rampart-strewn
foothills, and upward at the seething, grotesquely clouded sky. It was then, just as I was trying to
steer safely through the pass, that his mad shrieking brought us so close to disaster by shattering my
tight hold on myself and causing me to fumble helplessly with the controls for a moment. A second
afterward my resolution triumphed and we made the crossing safely--yet I am afraid that Danforth
will never be the same again.
I have said that Danforth refused to tell me what final horror made him scream out so insanely--a
horror which, I feel sadly sure, is mainly responsible for his present breakdown. We had snatches of
shouted conversation above the wind's piping and the engine's buzzing as we reached the safe side of
the range and swooped slowly down toward the camp, but that had mostly to do with the pledges of
secrecy we had made as we prepared to leave the nightmare city. Certain things, we had agreed,
were not for people to know and discuss lightly--and I would not speak of them now but for the need
of heading off that Starkweather-Moore Expedition, and others, at any cost. It is absolutely
necessary, for the peace and safety of mankind, that some of earth's dark, dead corners and unplumbed
depths be let alone; lest sleeping abnormalities wake to resurgent life, and blasphemously surviving
nightmares squirm and splash out of their black lairs to newer and wider conquests.
All that Danforth has ever hinted is that the final horror was a mirage. It was not, he declares,
anything connected with the cubes and caves of those echoing, vaporous, wormily-honeycombed
mountains of madness which we crossed; but a single fantastic, demoniac glimpse, among the
churning zenith clouds, of what lay back of those other violet westward mountains which the Old
Ones had shunned and feared. It is very probable that the thing was a sheer delusion born of the
previous stresses we had passed through, and of the actual though unrecognized mirage of the dead
transmontane city experienced near Lake's camp the day before; but it was so real to Danforth that he
suffers from it still.
He has on rare occasions whispered disjointed and irresponsible things about "The black pit,"
"the carven rim," "the protoShoggoths," "the windowless solids with five dimensions," "the
nameless cylinder," "the elder Pharos," "Yog-Sothoth," "the primal white jelly," "the color out of
space," "the wings," "the eyes in darkness," "the moon-ladder," "the original, the eternal, the
undying," and other bizarre conceptions; but when he is fully himself he repudiates all this and
attributes it to his curious and macabre reading of earlier years. Danforth, indeed, is known to be
among the few who have ever dared go completely through that worm-riddled copy of the
Necronomicon kept under lock and key in the college library.
The higher sky, as we crossed the range, was surely vaporous and disturbed enough; and
although I did not see the zenith, I can well imagine that its swirls of ice dust may have taken strange
forms. Imagination, knowing how vividly distant scenes can sometimes be reflected, refracted, and
magnified by such layers of restless cloud, might easily have supplied the rest--and, of course,
Danforth did not hint any of these specific horrors till after his memory had had a chance to draw on
his bygone reading. He could never have seen so much in one instantaneous glance.
At the time, his shrieks were confined to the repetition of a single, mad word of all too obvious
source: "Tekeli-li! Tekeli-li!"

THE CASE OF CHARLES DEXTER WARD
The essential Saltes of Animals may be so prepared and preserved, that an ingenious Man may
have the whole Ark of Noah in his own Studie, and raise the fine Shape of an Animal out of its Ashes
at his Pleasure; and by the lyke Method from the essential Saltes of humane Dust, a Philosopher may,
without any criminal Necromancy, call up the Shape of any dead Ancestour from the Dust whereinto
his Bodie has been incinerated.
--Borellus
CONTENTS I. A Result and a Prologue II. An Antecedent and a Horror III. A Search and an
Evocation IV. A Mutation and a Madness V. A Nightmare and a Cataclysm
I. A Result and a Prologue
1
From a private hospital for the insane near Providence, Rhode Island, there recently disappeared
an exceedingly singular person. He bore the name of Charles Dexter Ward, and was placed under
restraint most reluctantly by the grieving father who had watched his aberration grow from a mere
eccentricity to a dark mania involving both a possibility of murderous tendencies and a profound and
peculiar change in the apparent contents of his mind. Doctors confess themselves quite baffled by his
case, since it presented oddities of a general physiological as well as psychological character.
In the first place, the patient seemed oddly older than his twenty-six years would warrant. Mental
disturbance, it is true, will age one rapidly; but the face of this young man had taken on a subtle cast
which only the very aged normally acquire. In the second place, his organic processes shewed a
certain queerness of proportion which nothing in medical experience can parallel. Respiration and
heart action had a baffling lack of symmetry; the voice was lost, so that no sounds above a whisper
were possible; digestion was incredibly prolonged and minimised, and neural reactions to standard
stimuli bore no relation at all to anything heretofore recorded, either normal or pathological. The
skin had a morbid chill and dryness, and the cellular structure of the tissue seemed exaggeratedly
coarse and loosely knit. Even a large olive birthmark on the right hip had disappeared, whilst there
had formed on the chest a very peculiar mole or blackish spot of which no trace existed before. In
general, all physicians agree that in Ward the processes of metabolism had become retarded to a
degree beyond precedent.
Psychologically, too, Charles Ward was unique. His madness held no affinity to any sort
recorded in even the latest and most exhaustive of treatises, and was conjoined to a mental force
which would have made him a genius or a leader had it not been twisted into strange and grotesque
forms. Dr. Willett, who was Ward's family physician, affirms that the patient's gross mental capacity,
as gauged by his response to matters outside the sphere of his insanity, had actually increased since
the seizure. Ward, it is true, was always a scholar and an antiquarian; but even his most brilliant early
work did not shew the prodigious grasp and insight displayed during his last examinations by the
alienists. It was, indeed, a difficult matter to obtain a legal commitment to the hospital, so powerful
and lucid did the youth's mind seem; and only on the evidence of others, and on the strength of many
abnormal gaps in his stock of information as distinguished from his intelligence, was he finally
placed in confinement. To the very moment of his vanishment he was an omnivorous reader and as
great a conversationalist as his poor voice permitted; and shrewd observers, failing to foresee his
escape, freely predicted that he would not be long in gaining his discharge from custody.
Only Dr. Willett, who brought Charles Ward into the world and had watched his growth of body
and mind ever since, seemed frightened at the thought of his future freedom. He had had a terrible
experience and had made a terrible discovery which he dared not reveal to his sceptical colleagues.
Willett, indeed, presents a minor mystery all his own in his connexion with the case. He was the last
to see the patient before his flight, and emerged from that final conversation in a state of mixed
horror and relief which several recalled when Ward's escape became known three hours later. That
escape itself is one of the unsolved wonders of Dr. Waite's hospital. A window open above a sheer
drop of sixty feet could hardly explain it, yet after that talk with Willett the youth was undeniably
gone. Willett himself has no public explanations to offer, though he seems strangely easier in mind
than before the escape. Many, indeed, feel that he would like to say more if he thought any
considerable number would believe him. He had found Ward in his room, but shortly after his
departure the attendants knocked in vain. When they opened the door the patient was not there, and all
they found was the open window with a chill April breeze blowing in a cloud of fine bluish-grey
dust that almost choked them. True, the dogs howled some time before; but that was while Willett
was still present, and they had caught nothing and shewn no disturbance later on. Ward's father was
told at once over the telephone, but he seemed more saddened than surprised. By the time Dr. Waite
called in person, Dr. Willett had been talking with him, and both disavowed any knowledge or
complicity in the escape. Only from certain closely confidential friends of Willett and the senior
Ward have any clues been gained, and even these are too wildly fantastic for general credence. The
one fact which remains is that up to the present time no trace of the missing madman has been
unearthed.
Charles Ward was an antiquarian from infancy, no doubt gaining his taste from the venerable town
around him, and from the relics of the past which filled every corner of his parents' old mansion in
Prospect Street on the crest of the hill. With the years his devotion to ancient things increased; so
that history, genealogy, and the study of colonial architecture, furniture, and craftsmanship at length
crowded everything else from his sphere of interests. These tastes are important to remember in
considering his madness; for although they do not form its absolute nucleus, they play a prominent
part in its superficial form. The gaps of information which the alienists noticed were all related to
modern matters, and were invariably offset by a correspondingly excessive though outwardly
concealed knowledge of bygone matters as brought out by adroit questioning; so that one would have
fancied the patient literally transferred to a former age through some obscure sort of auto-hypnosis.
The odd thing was that Ward seemed no longer interested in the antiquities he knew so well. He had,
it appears, lost his regard for them through sheer familiarity; and all his final efforts were obviously
bent toward mastering those common facts of the modern world which had been so totally and
unmistakably expunged from his brain. That this wholesale deletion had occurred, he did his best to
hide; but it was clear to all who watched him that his whole programme of reading and conversation
was determined by a frantic wish to imbibe such knowledge of his own life and of the ordinary
practical and cultural background of the twentieth century as ought to have been his by virtue of his
birth in 1902 and his education in the schools of our own time. Alienists are now wondering how, in
view of his vitally impaired range of data, the escaped patient manages to cope with the complicated
world of today; the dominant opinion being that he is "lying low" in some humble and unexacting
position till his stock of modern information can be brought up to the normal.
The beginning of Ward's madness is a matter of dispute among alienists. Dr. Lyman, the eminent
Boston authority, places it in 1919 or 1920, during the boy's last year at the Moses Brown School,
when he suddenly turned from the study of the past to the study of the occult, and refused to qualify
for college on the ground that he had individual researches of much greater importance to make.
This is certainly borne out by Ward's altered habits at the time, especially by his continual search
through town records and among old burying-grounds for a certain grave dug in 1771; the grave of
an ancestor named Joseph Curwen, some of whose papers he professed to have found behind the
panelling of a very old house in Olney Court, on Stampers' Hill, which Curwen was known to have
built and occupied. It is, broadly speaking, undeniable that the winter of 1919-20 saw a great change
in Ward; whereby he abruptly stopped his general antiquarian pursuits and embarked on a desperate
delving into occult subjects both at home and abroad, varied only by this strangely persistent search
for his forefather's grave.
From this opinion, however, Dr. Willett substantially dissents; basing his verdict on his close and
continuous knowledge of the patient, and on certain frightful investigations and discoveries which he
made toward the last. Those investigations and discoveries have left their mark upon him; so that his
voice trembles when he tells them, and his hand trembles when he tries to write of them. Willett
admits that the change of 1919-20 would ordinarily appear to mark the beginning of a progressive
decadence which culminated in the horrible and uncanny alienation of 1928; but believes from
personal observation that a finer distinction must be made. Granting freely that the boy was always
ill-balanced temperamentally, and prone to be unduly susceptible and enthusiastic in his responses to
phenomena around him, he refuses to concede that the early alteration marked the actual passage from
sanity to madness; crediting instead Ward's own statement that he had discovered or rediscovered
something whose effect on human though was likely to be marvellous and profound. The true
madness, he is certain, came with a later change; after the Curwen portrait and the ancient papers had
been unearthed; after a trip to strange foreign places had been made, and some terrible invocations
chanted under strange and secret circumstances; after certain answers to these invocations had been
plainly indicated, and a frantic letter penned under agonising and inexplicable conditions; after the
wave of vampirism and the ominous Pawtuxet gossip; and after the patient's memory commenced to
exclude contemporary images whilst his physical aspect underwent the subtle modification so many
subsequently noticed.
It was only about this time, Willett points out with much acuteness, that the nightmare qualities
became indubitably linked with Ward; and the doctor feels shudderingly sure that enough solid
evidence exists to sustain the youth's claim regarding his crucial discovery. In the first place, two
workmen of high intelligence saw Joseph Curwen's ancient papers found. Secondly, the boy once
shewed Dr. Willett those papers and a page of the Curwen diary, and each of the documents had
every appearance of genuineness. The hole where Ward claimed to have found them was long a
visible reality, and Willett had a very convincing final glimpse of them in surroundings which can
scarcely be believed and can never perhaps be proved. Then there were the mysteries and
coincidences of the Orne and Hutchinson letters, and the problem of the Curwen penmanship and of
what the detectives brought to light about Dr. Allen; these things, and the terrible message in
mediaeval minuscules found in Willett's pocket when he gained consciousness after his shocking
experience.
And most conclusive of all, there are the two hideous results which the doctor obtained from a
certain pair of formulae during his final investigations; results which virtually proved the authenticity
of the papers and of their monstrous implications at the same time that those papers were borne
forever from human knowledge.
2
One must look back at Charles Ward's earlier life as at something belonging as much to the past
as the antiquities he loved so keenly. In the autumn of 1918, and with a considerable show of zest in
the military training of the period, he had begun his junior year at the MosesBrownSchool, which
lies very near his home. The old main building, erected in 1819, had always charmed his youthful
antiquarian sense; and the spacious park in which the academy is set appealed to his sharp eye for
landscape. His social activities were few; and his hours were spent mainly at home, in rambling
walks, in his classes and drills, and in pursuit of antiquarian and genealogical data at the City Hall, the
State House, the Public Library, the Athenaeum, the Historical Society, the John Carter Brown and
John Hay Libraries of Brown University, and the newly opened Shepley Library in Benefit Street.
One may picture him yet as he was in those days; tall, slim, and blond, with studious eyes and a slight
stoop, dressed somewhat carelessly, and giving a dominant impression of harmless awkwardness
rather than attractiveness.
His walks were always adventures in antiquity, during which he managed to recapture from the
myriad relics of a glamorous old city a vivid and connected picture of the centuries before. His
home was a great Georgian mansion atop the well-nigh precipitous hill that rises just east of the
river; and from the rear windows of its rambling wings he could look dizzily out over all the
clustered spires, domes, roofs, and skyscraper summits of the lower town to the purple hills of the
countryside beyond. Here he was born, and from the lovely classic porch of the double-bayed brick
facade his nurse had first wheeled him in his carriage; past the little white farmhouse of two hundred
years before that the town had long ago overtaken, and on toward the stately colleges along the
shady, sumptuous street, whose old square brick mansions and smaller wooden houses with narrow,
heavy-columned Doric porches dreamed solid and exclusive amidst their generous yards and
gardens.
He had been wheeled, too, along sleepy Congdon Street, one tier lower down on the steep hill,
and with all its eastern homes on high terraces. The small wooden houses averaged a greater age
here, for it was up this hill that the growing town had climbed; and in these rides he had imbibed
something of the colour of a quaint colonial village. The nurse used to stop and sit on the benches of
Prospect Terrace to chat with policemen; and one of the child's first memories was of the great
westward sea of hazy roofs and domes and steeples and far hills which he saw one winter afternoon
from that great railed embankment, all violet and mystic against a fevered, apocalyptic sunset of reds
and golds and purples and curious greens. The vast marble dome of the State House stood out in
massive silhouette, its crowning statue haloed fantastically by a break in one of the tinted stratus
clouds that barred the flaming sky.
When he was larger his famous walks began; first with his impatiently dragged nurse, and then
alone in dreamy meditation. Farther and farther down that almost perpendicular hill he would venture,
each time reaching older and quainter levels of the ancient city. He would hesitate gingerly down
vertical Jenckes Street with its bank walls and colonial gables to the shady Benefit Street corner,
where before him was a wooden antique with an Ionic-pilastered pair of doorways, and beside him a
prehistoric gambrel-roofer with a bit of primal farmyard remaining, and the great Judge Durfee
house with its fallen vestiges of Georgian grandeur. It was getting to be a slum here; but the titan
elms cast a restoring shadow over the place, and the boy used to stroll south past the long lines of
the pre-Revolutionary homes with their great central chimneys and classic portals. On the eastern
side they were set high over basements with railed double flights of stone steps, and the young
Charles could picture them as they were when the street was new, and red heels and periwigs set off
the painted pediments whose signs of wear were now becoming so visible.
Westward the hill dropped almost as steeply as above, down to the old "Town Street" that the
founders had laid out at the river's edge in 1636. Here ran innumerable little lanes with leaning,
huddled houses of immense antiquity; and fascinated though he was, it was long before he dared to
thread their archaic verticality for fear they would turn out a dream or a gateway to unknown terrors.
He found it much less formidable to continue along Benefit Street past the iron fence of St. John's
hidden churchyard and the rear of the 1761 Colony House and the mouldering bulk of the Golden
Ball Inn where Washington stopped. At Meeting Street--the successive Gaol Lane and King Street of
other periods--he would look upward to the east and see the arched flight of steps to which the
highway had to resort in climbing the slope, and downward to the west, glimpsing the old brick
colonial schoolhouse that smiles across the road at the ancient Sign of Shakespeare's Head where
the Providence Gazette and Country-Journal was printed before the Revolution. Then came the
exquisite First Baptist Church of 1775, luxurious with its matchless Gibbs steeple, and the Georgian
roofs and cupolas hovering by. Here and to the southward the neighbourhood became better,
flowering at last into a marvellous group of early mansions; but still the little ancient lanes led off
down the precipice to the west, spectral in their many-gabled archaism and dipping to a riot of
iridescent decay where the wicked old water-front recalls its proud East India days amidst polyglot
vice and squalor, rotting wharves, and blear-eyed ship-chandleries, with such surviving alley names
as Packet, Bullion, Gold, Silver, Coin, Doubloon, Sovereign, Guilder, Dollar, Dime, and Cent.
Sometimes, as he grew taller and more adventurous, young Ward would venture down into this
maelstrom of tottering houses, broken transoms, tumbling steps, twisted balustrades, swarthy faces,
and nameless odours; winding from South Main to South Water, searching out the docks where the
bay and sound steamers still touched, and returning northward at this lower level past the steep-
roofed 1816 warehouses and the broad square at the Great Bridge, where the 1773 Market House
still stands firm on its ancient arches. In that square he would pause to drink in the bewildering beauty
of the old town as it rises on its eastward bluff, decked with its two Georgian spires and crowned by
the vast new Christian Science dome as London is crowned by St. Paul's. He like mostly to reach this
point in the late afternoon, when the slanting sunlight touches the Market House and the ancient hill
roofs and belfries with gold, and throws magic around the dreaming wharves where Providence
Indiamen used to ride at anchor. After a long look he would grow almost dizzy with a poet's love for
the sight, and then he would scale the slope homeward in the dusk past the old white church and up
the narrow precipitous ways where yellow gleams would begin to peep out in small-paned windows
and through fanlights set high over double flights of steps with curious wrought-iron railings.
At other times, and in later years, he would seek for vivid contrasts; spending half a walk in the
crumbling colonial regions northwest of his home, where the hill drops to the lower eminence of
Stampers' Hill with its ghetto and negro quarter clustering round the place where the Boston stage
coach used to start before the Revolution, and the other half in the gracious southerly realm about
George, Benevolent, Power, and Williams Streets, where the old slope holds unchanged the fine
estates and bits of walled garden and steep green lane in which so many fragrant memories linger.
These rambles, together with the diligent studies which accompanied them, certainly account for a
large amount of the antiquarian lore which at last crowded the modern world from Charles Ward's
mind; and illustrate the mental soil upon which fell, in that fateful winter of 1919-20, the seeds that
came to such strange and terrible fruition.
Dr. Willett is certain that, up to this ill-omened winter of first change, Charles Ward's
antiquarianism was free from every trace of the morbid. Graveyards held for him no particular
attraction beyond their quaintness and historic value, and of anything like violence or savage instinct
he was utterly devoid. Then, by insidious degrees, there appeared to develop a curious sequel to one
of his genealogical triumphs of the year before; when he had discovered among his maternal
ancestors a certain very long-lived man named Joseph Curwen, who had come from Salem in March
of 1692, and about whom a whispered series of highly peculiar and disquieting stories clustered.
Ward's great-great-grandfather Welcome Potter had in 1785 married a certain 'Ann Tillinghast,
daughter of Mrs. Eliza, daughter to Capt. James Tillinghast,' of whose paternity the family had
preserved no trace. Late in 1918, whilst examining a volume of original town records in manuscript,
the young genealogist encountered an entry describing a legal change of name, by which in 1772 a
Mrs. Eliza Curwen, widow of Joseph Curwen, resumed, along with her seven-year-old daughter
Ann, her maiden name of Tillinghast; on the ground 'that her Husband's name was become a public
Reproach by Reason of what was knowne after his Decease; the which confirming an antient common
Rumour, tho' not to be credited by a loyall Wife till so proven as to be wholely past Doubting.'
This entry came to light upon the accidental separation of two leaves which had been carefully
pasted together and treated as one by a laboured revision of the page numbers.
It was at once clear to Charles Ward that he had indeed discovered a hitherto unknown great-
great-great-grandfather. The discovery doubly excited him because he had already heard vague
reports and seen scattered allusions relating to this person; about whom there remained so few
publicly available records, aside from those becoming public only in modern times, that it almost
seemed as if a conspiracy had existed to blot him from memory. What did appear, moreover, was of
such a singular and provocative nature that one could not fail to imagine curiously what it was that the
colonial recorders were so anxious to conceal and forget; or to suspect that the deletion had reasons
all too valid.
Before this, Ward had been content to let his romancing about old Joseph Curwen remain in the
idle stage; but having discovered his own relationship to this apparently "hushed-up" character, he
proceeded to hunt out as systematically as possible whatever he might find concerning him. In this
excited quest he eventually succeeded beyond his highest expectations; for old letters, diaries, and
sheaves of unpublished memoirs in cobwebbed Providence garrets and elsewhere yielded many
illuminating passages which their writers had not thought it worth their while to destroy. One
important sidelight came from a point as remote as New York, where some Rhode Island colonial
correspondence was stored in the Museum at Fraunces' Tavern. The really crucial thing, though, and
what in Dr. Willett's opinion formed the definite source of Ward's undoing, was the matter found in
August 1919 behind the panelling of the crumbling house in Olney Court. It was that, beyond a doubt,
which opened up those black vistas whose end was deeper than the pit.
II. An Antecedent and a Horror
1
Joseph Curwen, as revealed by the rambling legends embodied in what Ward heard and unearthed,
was a very astonishing, enigmatic, and obscurely horrible individual. He had fled from Salem to
Providence--that universal haven of the odd, the free, and the dissenting--at the beginning of the great
witchcraft panic; being in fear of accusation because of his solitary ways and queer chemical or
alchemical experiments. He was a colourless-looking man of about thirty, and was soon found
qualified to become a freeman of Providence; thereafter buying a home lot just north of Gregory
Dexter's at about the foot of Olney Street. His house was built on Stampers' Hill west of the Town
Street, in what later became Olney Court; and in 1761 he replaced this with a larger one, on the same
site, which is still standing.
Now the first odd thing about Joseph Curwen was that he did not seem to grow much older than
he had been on his arrival. He engaged in shipping enterprises, purchased wharfage near Mile-End
Cove, helped rebuild the Great Bridge in 1713, and in 1723 was one of the founders of the
Congregational Church on the hill; but always did he retain his nondescript aspect of a man not
greatly over thirty or thirty-five. As decades mounted up, this singular quality began to excite wide
notice; but Curwen always explained it by saying that he came of hardy forefathers, and practised a
simplicity of living which did not wear him our. How such simplicity could be reconciled with the
inexplicable comings and goings of the secretive merchant, and with the queer gleaming of his
windows at all hours of night, was not very clear to the townsfolk; and they were prone to assign
other reasons for his continued youth and longevity. It was held, for the most part, that Curwen's
incessant mixings and boilings of chemicals had much to do with his condition. Gossip spoke of the
strange substances he brought from London and the Indies on his ships or purchased in Newport,
Boston, and New York; and when old Dr. Jabez Bowen came from Rehoboth and opened his
apothecary shop across the Great Bridge at the Sign of the Unicorn and Mortar, there was ceaseless
talk of the drugs, acids, and metals that the taciturn recluse incessantly bought or ordered from him.
Acting on the assumption that Curwen possessed a wondrous and secret medical skill, many sufferers
of various sorts applied to him for aid; but though he appeared to encourage their belief in a non-
committal way, and always gave them odd-coloured potions in response to their requests, it was
observed that his ministrations to others seldom proved of benefit. At length, when over fifty years
had passed since the stranger's advent, and without producing more than five years' apparent change
in his face and physique, the people began to whisper more darkly; and to meet more than half way
that desire for isolation which he had always shewn.
Private letters and diaries of the period reveal, too, a multitude of other reasons why Joseph
Curwen was marvelled at, feared, and finally shunned like a plague. His passion for graveyards, in
which he was glimpsed at all hours, and under all conditions, was notorious; though no one had
witnessed any deed on his part which could actually be termed ghoulish. On the Pawtuxet Road he
had a farm, at which he generally lived during the summer, and to which he would frequently be seen
riding at various odd times of the day or night. Here his only visible servants, farmers, and caretakers
were a sullen pair of aged Narragansett Indians; the husband dumb and curiously scarred, and the
wife of a very repulsive cast of countenance, probably due to a mixture of negro blood. In the lean-to
of this house was the laboratory where most of the chemical experiments were conducted. Curious
porters and teamers who delivered bottles, bags, or boxes at the small rear door would exchange
accounts of the fantastic flasks, crucibles, alembics, and furnaces they saw in the low shelved room;
and prophesied in whispers that the close-mouthed "chymist"--by which they meant alchemist--would
not be long in finding the Philosopher's Stone. The nearest neighbours to this farm--the Fenners, a
quarter of a mile away--had still queerer things to tell of certain sounds which they insisted came
from the Curwen place in the night. There were cries, they said, and sustained howlings; and they did
not like the large numbers of livestock which thronged the pastures, for no such amount was needed
to keep a lone old man and a very few servants in meat, milk, and wool. The identity of the stock
seemed to change from week to week as new droves were purchased from the Kingstown farmers.
Then, too, there was something very obnoxious about a certain great stone outbuilding with only
high narrow slits for windows.
GreatBridge idlers likewise had much to say of Curwen's town house in Olney Court; not so
much the fine new one built in 1761, when the man must have been nearly a century old, but the first
low gambrel-roofed one with the windowless attic and shingled sides, whose timbers he took the
peculiar precaution of burning after its demolition. Here there was less mystery, it is true; but the
hours at which lights were seen, the secretiveness of the two swarthy foreigners who comprised the
only menservants, the hideous indistinct mumbling of the incredibly aged French housekeeper, the
large amounts of food seen to enter a door within which only four persons lived, and the quality of
certain voices often heard in muffled conversation at highly unseasonable times, all combined with
what was known of the Pawtuxet farm to give the place a bad name.
In choicer circles, too, the Curwen home was by no means undiscussed; for as the newcomer had
gradually worked into the church and trading life of the town, he had naturally made acquaintances of
the better sort, whose company and conversation he was well fitted by education to enjoy. His birth
was known to be good, since the Curwens or Corwins of Salem needed no introduction in New
England. It developed that Joseph Curwen had travelled much in very early life, living for a time in
England and making at least two voyages to the Orient; and his speech, when he deigned to use it, was
that of a learned and cultivated Englishman. But for some reason or other Curwen did not care for
society. Whilst never actually rebuffing a visitor, he always reared such a wall of reserve that few
could think of anything to say to him which would not sound inane.
There seemed to lurk in his bearing some cryptic, sardonic arrogance, as if he had come to find
all human beings dull through having moved among stranger and more potent entities. When Dr.
Checkley the famous wit came from Boston in 1738 to be rector of King's Church, he did not neglect
calling on one of whom he soon heard so much; but left in a very short while because of some
sinister undercurrent he detected in his host's discourse. Charles Ward told his father, when they
discussed Curwen one winter evening, that he would give much to learn what the mysterious old man
had said to the sprightly cleric, but that all diarists agree concerning Dr. Checkley's reluctance to
repeat anything he had heard. The good man had been hideously shocked, and could never recall
Joseph Curwen without a visible loss of the gay urbanity for which he was famed.
More definite, however, was the reason why another man of taste and breeding avoided the
haughty hermit. In 1746 Mr. John Merritt, an elderly English gentleman of literary and scientific
leanings, came from Newport to the town which was so rapidly overtaking it in standing, and built a
fine country seat on the Neck in what is now the heart of the best residence section. He lived in
considerable style and comfort, keeping the first coach and liveried servants in town, and taking great
pride in his telescope, his microscope, and his well-chosen library of English and Latin books.
Hearing of Curwen as the owner of the best library in Providence, Mr. Merritt early paid him a call,
and was more cordially received than most other callers at the house had been. His admiration for his
host's ample shelves, which besides the Greek, Latin, and English classics were equipped with a
remarkable battery of philosophical, mathematical, and scientific works including Paracelsus,
Agricola, Van Helmont, Sylvius, Glauber, Boyle, Boerhaave, Becher, and Stahl, led Curwen to
suggest a visit to the farmhouse and laboratory whither he had never invited anyone before; and the
two drove out at once in Mr. Merritt's coach.
Mr. Merritt always confessed to seeing nothing really horrible at the farmhouse, but maintained
that the titles of the books in the special library of thaumaturgical, alchemical, and theological
subjects which Curwen kept in a front room were alone sufficient to inspire him with a lasting
loathing. Perhaps, however, the facial expression of the owner in exhibiting them contributed much
of the prejudice. This bizarre collection, besides a host of standard works which Mr. Merritt was not
too alarmed to envy, embraced nearly all the cabbalists, daemonologists, and magicians known to man;
and was a treasure-house of lore in the doubtful realms of alchemy and astrology. Hermes
Trismegistus in Mesnard's edition, the Turba Philosophorum, Geber's Liber Investigationis, and
Artephius's Key of Wisdom all were there; with the cabbalistic Zohar, Peter Jammy's set of Albertus
Magnus, Raymond Lully's Ars Magna et Ultima in Zetsner's edition, Roger Bacon's Thesaurus
Chemicus, Fludd's Clavis Alchimiae, and Trithemius's De Lapide Philosophico crowding them
close. Mediaeval Jews and Arabs were represented in profusion, and Mr. Merritt turned pale when,
upon taking down a fine volume conspicuously labelled as the Qanoon-e-Islam, he found it was in
truth the forbidden Necronomicon of the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred, of which he had heard such
monstrous things whispered some years previously after the exposure of nameless rites at the
strange little fishing village of Kingsport, in the province of the Massachussetts-Bay.
But oddly enough, the worthy gentleman owned himself most impalpably disquieted by a mere
minor detail. On the huge mahogany table there lay face downwards a badly worn copy of Borellus,
bearing many cryptical marginalia and interlineations in Curwen's hand. The book was open at about
its middle, and one paragraph displayed such thick and tremulous pen-strokes beneath the lines of
mystic black-letter that the visitor could not resist scanning it through. Whether it was the nature of
the passage underscored, or the feverish heaviness of the strokes which formed the underscoring, he
could not tell; but something in that combination affected him very badly and very peculiarly. He
recalled it to the end of his days, writing it down from memory in his diary and once trying to recite it
to his close friend Dr. Checkley till he saw how greatly it disturbed the urbane rector. It read:
'The essential Saltes of Animals may be so prepared and preserved, that an ingenious Man may
have the whole Ark of Noah in his own Studie, and raise the fine Shape of an Animal out of its Ashes
at his Pleasure; and by the lyke Method from the essential Saltes of humane Dust, a Philosopher may,
without any criminal Necromancy, call up the Shape of any dead Ancestour from the Dust whereinto
his Bodie has been incinerated.'
It was near the docks along the southerly part of the Town Street, however, that the worst things
were muttered about Joseph Curwen. Sailors are superstitious folk; and the seasoned salts who
manned the infinite rum, slave, and molasses sloops, the rakish privateers, and the great brigs of the
Browns, Crawfords, and Tillinghasts, all made strange furtive signs of protection when they saw the
slim, deceptively young-looking figure with its yellow hair and slight stoop entering the Curwen
warehouse in Doubloon Street or talking with captains and supercargoes on the long quay where the
Curwen ships rode restlessly. Curwen's own clerks and captains hated and feared him, and all his
sailors were mongrel riff-raff from Martinique, St. Eustatius, Havana, or Port Royal. It was, in a way,
the frequency with which these sailors were replaced which inspired the acutest and most tangible
part of the fear in which the old man was held. A crew would be turned loose in the town on shore
leave, some of its members perhaps charged with this errand or that; and when reassembled it would
be almost sure to lack one or more men. That many of the errands had concerned the farm of Pawtuxet
Road, and that few of the sailors had ever been seen to return from that place, was not forgotten; so
that in time it became exceedingly difficult for Curwen to keep his oddly assorted hands. Almost
invariably several would desert soon after hearing the gossip of the Providence wharves, and their
replacement in the West Indies became an increasingly great problem to the merchant.
By 1760 Joseph Curwen was virtually an outcast, suspected of vague horrors and daemoniac
alliances which seemed all the more menacing because they could not be named, understood, or even
proved to exist. The last straw may have come from the affair of the missing soldiers in 1758, for in
March and April of that year two Royal regiments on their way to New France were quartered in
Providence, and depleted by an inexplicable process far beyond the average rate of desertion.
Rumour dwelt on the frequency with which Curwen was wont to be seen talking with the red-coated
strangers; and as several of them began to be missed, people thought of the odd conditions among his
own seamen. What would have happened if the regiments had not been ordered on, no one can tell.
Meanwhile the merchant's worldly affairs were prospering. He had a virtual monopoly of the
town's trade in saltpetre, black pepper, and cinnamon, and easily led any other one shipping
establishment save the Browns in his importation of brassware, indigo, cotton, woollens, salt,
rigging, iron, paper, and English goods of every kind. Such shopkeepers as James Green, at the Sign
of the Elephant in Cheapside, the Russells, at the Sign of the Golden Eagle across the Bridge, or
Clark and Nightingale at the Frying-Pan and Fish near New Coffee-House, depended almost wholly
upon him for their stock; and his arrangements with the local distillers, the Narragansett dairymen and
horse-breeders, and the Newport candle-makers, made him one of the prime exporters of the Colony.
Ostracised though he was, he did not lack for civic spirit of a sort. When the Colony House
burned down, he subscribed handsomely to the lotteries by which the new brick one--still standing at
the head of its parade in the old main street--was built in 1761. In that same year, too, he helped
rebuild the Great Bridge after the October gale. He replaced many of the books of the public library
consumed in the Colony House fire, and bought heavily in the lottery that gave the muddy Market
Parade and deep-rutted Town Street their pavement of great round stones with a brick footwalk or
"causey" in the middle. About this time, also, he built the plain but excellent new house whose
doorway is still such a triumph of carving. When the Whitefield adherents broke off from Dr.
Cotton's hill church in 1743 and founded Deacon Snow's church across the Bridge, Curwen had gone
with them; though his zeal and attendance soon abated. Now, however, he cultivated piety once more;
as if to dispel the shadow which had thrown him into isolation and would soon begin to wreck his
business fortunes if not sharply checked.
2
The sight of this strange, pallid man, hardly middle-aged in aspect yet certainly not less than a full
century old, seeking at last to emerge from a cloud of fright and detestation too vague to pin down or
analyse, was at once a pathetic, a dramatic, and a contemptible thing. Such is the power of wealth and
of surface gestures, however, that there came indeed a slight abatement in the visible aversion
displayed toward him; especially after the rapid disappearances of his sailors abruptly ceased. He
must likewise have begun to practice an extreme care and secrecy in his graveyard expeditions, for
he was never again caught at such wanderings; whilst the rumours of uncanny sounds and manoeuvres
at his Pawtuxet farm diminished in proportion. His rate of food consumption and cattle replacement
remained abnormally high; but not until modern times, when Charles Ward examined a set of his
accounts and invoices in the Shepley Library, did it occur to any person--save one embittered youth,
perhaps--to make dark comparisons between the large number of Guinea blacks he imported until
1766, and the disturbingly small number for whom he could produce bona fide bills of sale either to
slave-dealers at the Great Bridge or to the planters of the Narragansett Country. Certainly, the
cunning and ingenuity of this abhorred character were uncannily profound, once the necessity for
their exercise had become impressed upon him.
But of course the effect of all this belated mending was necessarily slight. Curwen continued to
be avoided and distrusted, as indeed the one fact of his continued air of youth at a great age would
have been enough to warrant; and he could see that in the end his fortunes would be likely to suffer.
His elaborate studies and experiments, whatever they may have been, apparently required a heavy
income for their maintenance; and since a change of environment would deprive him of the trading
advantages he had gained, it would not have profited him to begin anew in a different region just then.
Judgement demanded that he patch up his relations with the townsfolk of Providence, so that his
presence might no longer be a signal for hushed conversation, transparent excuses or errands
elsewhere, and a general atmosphere of constraint and uneasiness. His clerks, being now reduced to
the shiftless and impecunious residue whom no one else would employ, were giving him much
worry; and he held to his sea-captains and mates only by shrewdness in gaining some kind of
ascendancy over them--a mortgage, a promissory note, or a bit of information very pertinent to their
welfare. In many cases, diarists have recorded with some awe, Curwen shewed almost the power of
a wizard in unearthing family secrets for questionable use. During the final five years of his life it
seemed as though only direct talks with the long-dead could possibly have furnished some of the
data which he had so glibly at his tongue's end.
About this time the crafty scholar hit upon a last desperate expedient to regain his footing in the
community. Hitherto a complete hermit, he now determined to contract an advantageous marriage;
securing as a bride some lady whose unquestioned position would make all ostracism of his home
impossible. It may be that he also had deeper reasons for wishing an alliance; reasons so far outside
the known cosmic sphere that only papers found a century and a half after his death caused anyone to
suspect them; but of this nothing certain can ever be learned. Naturally he was aware of the horror
and indignation with which any ordinary courtship of his would be received, hence he looked about
for some likely candidate upon whose parents he might exert a suitable pressure. Such candidates, he
found, were not at all easy to discover; since he had very particular requirements in the way of
beauty, accomplishments, and social security. At length his survey narrowed down to the household
of one of his best and oldest ship-captains, a widower of high birth and unblemished standing named
Dutee Tillinghast, whose only daughter Eliza seemed dowered with every conceivable advantage
save prospects as an heiress. Capt. Tillinghast was completely under the domination of Curwen; and
consented, after a terrible interview in his cupolaed house on Power's Lane hill, to sanction the
blasphemous alliance.
Eliza Tillinghast was at that time eighteen years of age, and had been reared as gently as the
reduced circumstances of her father permitted. She had attended Stephen Jackson's school opposite
the Court-House Parade; and had been diligently instructed by her mother, before the latter's death of
smallpox in 1757, in all the arts and refinements of domestic life. A sampler of hers, worked in 1753
at the age of nine, may still be found in the rooms of the Rhode Island Historical Society. After her
mother's death she had kept the house, aided only by one old black woman. Her arguments with her
father concerning the proposed Curwen marriage must have been painful indeed; but of these we
have no record. Certain it is that her engagement to young Ezra Weeden, second mate of the
Crawford packet Enterprise, was dutifully broken off, and that her union with Joseph Curwen took
place on the seventh of March, 1763, in the Baptist church, in the presence of the most distinguished
assemblages which the town could boast; the ceremony being performed by the younger Samuel
Winsor. The Gazette mentioned the event very briefly, and in most surviving copies the item in
question seems to be cut or torn out. Ward found a single intact copy after much search in the
archives of a private collector of note, observing with amusement the meaningless urbanity of the
language:
'Monday evening last, Mr. Joseph Curwen, of this Town, Merchant, was married to Miss Eliza
Tillinghast, Daughter of Capt. Dutee Tillinghast, a young Lady who has real Merit, added to a
beautiful Person, to grace the connubial State and perpetuate its Felicity.'
The collection of Durfee-Arnold letters, discovered by Charles Ward shortly before his first
reputed madness in the private collection of Melville F. Peters, Esq., of George St., and covering
this and a somewhat antecedent period, throws vivid light on the outrage done to public sentiment by
this ill-assorted match. The social influence of the Tillinghasts, however, was not to be denied; and
once more Joseph Curwen found his house frequented by persons whom he could never otherwise
have induced to cross his threshold. His acceptance was by no means complete, and his bride was
socially the sufferer through her forced venture; but at all events the wall of utter ostracism was
somewhat torn down. In his treatment of his wife the strange bridegroom astonished both her and the
community by displaying an extreme graciousness and consideration. The new house in Olney Court
was now wholly free from disturbing manifestations, and although Curwen was much absent at the
Pawtuxet farm which his wife never visited, he seemed more like a normal citizen than at any other
time in his long years of residence. Only one person remained in open enmity with him, this being the
youthful ship's officer whose engagement to Eliza Tillinghast had been so abruptly broken. Ezra
Weeden had frankly vowed vengeance; and though of a quiet and ordinarily mild disposition, was
now gaining a hate-bred, dogged purpose which boded no good to the usurping husband.
On the seventh of May, 1765, Curwen's only child Ann was born; and was christened by the Rev.
John Graves of King's Church, of which both husband and wife had become communicants shortly
after their marriage, in order to compromise between their respective Congregational and Baptist
affiliations. The record of this birth, as well as that of the marriage two years before, was stricken
from most copies of the church and town annals where it ought to appear; and Charles Ward located
both with the greatest difficulty after his discovery of the widow's change of name had apprised him
of his own relationship, and engendered the feverish interest which culminated in his madness. The
birth entry, indeed, was found very curiously through correspondence with the heirs of the loyalist
Dr. Graves, who had taken with him a duplicate set of records when he left his pastorate at the
outbreak of the Revolution. Ward had tried this source because he knew that his great-great-
grandmother Ann Tillinghast Potter had been an Episcopalian.
Shortly after the birth of his daughter, an event he seemed to welcome with a fervour greatly out
of keeping with his usual coldness, Curwen resolved to sit for a portrait. This he had painted by a
very gifted Scotsman named Cosmo Alexander, then a resident of Newport, and since famous as the
early teacher of Gilbert Stuart. The likeness was said to have been executed on a wall-panel of the
library of the house in Olney Court, but neither of the two old diaries mentioning it gave any hint of
its ultimate disposition. At this period the erratic scholar shewed signs of unusual abstraction, and
spent as much time as he possibly could at his farm on the Pawtuxet Road. He seemed, as was stated,
in a condition of suppressed excitement or suspense; as if expecting some phenomenal thing or on the
brink of some strange discovery. Chemistry or alchemy would appear to have played a great part, for
he took from his house to the farm the greater number of his volumes on that subject.
His affectation of civic interest did not diminish, and he lost no opportunities for helping such
leaders as Stephen Hopkins, Joseph Brown, and Benjamin West in their efforts to raise the cultural
tone of the town, which was then much below the level of Newport in its patronage of the liberal
arts. He had helped Daniel Jenckes found his bookshop in 1763, and was thereafter his best customer;
extending aid likewise to the struggling Gazette that appeared each Wednesday at the Sign of
Shakespeare's Head. In politics he ardently supported Governor Hopkins against the Ward party
whose prime strength was in Newport, and his really eloquent speech at Hacher's Hall in 1765
against the setting off of North Providence as a separate town with a pro-Ward vote in the General
Assembly did more than any other thing to wear down the prejudice against him. But Ezra Weeden,
who watched him closely, sneered cynically at all this outward activity; and freely swore it was no
more than a mask for some nameless traffick with the blackest gulfs of Tartarus. The revengeful
youth began a systematic study of the man and his doings whenever he was in port; spending hours at
night by the wharves with a dory in readiness when he saw lights in the Curwen warehouses, and
following the small boat which would sometimes steal quietly off and down the bay. He also kept as
close a watch as possible on the Pawtuxet farm, and was once severely bitten by the dogs the old
Indian couple loosed upon him.
3
In 1766 came the final change in Joseph Curwen. It was very sudden, and gained wide notice
amongst the curious townsfolk; for the air of suspense and expectancy dropped like an old cloak,
giving instant place to an ill-concealed exaltation of perfect triumph. Curwen seemed to have
difficulty in restraining himself from public harangues on what he had found or learned or made; but
apparently the need of secrecy was greater than the longing to share his rejoicing, for no explanation
was ever offered by him. It was after this transition, which appears to have come early in July, that
the sinister scholar began to astonish people by his possession of information which only their long-
dead ancestors would seem to be able to impart.
But Curwen's feverish secret activities by no means ceased with this change. On the contrary,
they tended rather to increase; so that more and more of his shipping business was handled by the
captains whom he now bound to him by ties of fear as potent as those of bankruptcy had been. He
altogether abandoned the slave trade, alleging that its profits were constantly decreasing. Every
possible moment was spent at the Pawtuxet farm; although there were rumours now and then of his
presence in places which, though not actually near graveyards, were yet so situated in relation to
graveyards that thoughtful people wondered just how thorough the old merchant's change of habits
really was. Ezra Weeden, though his periods of espionage were necessarily brief and intermittent on
account of his sea voyaging, had a vindictive persistence which the bulk of the practical townsfolk
and farmers lacked; and subjected Curwen's affairs to a scrutiny such as they had never had before.
Many of the odd manoeuvres of the strange merchant's vessels had been taken for granted on
account of the unrest of the times, when every colonist seemed determined to resist the provisions of
the Sugar Act which hampered a prominent traffick. Smuggling and evasion were the rule in
Narragansett Bay, and nocturnal landings of illicit cargoes were continuous commonplaces. But
Weeden, night after night following the lighters or small sloops which he saw steal off from the
Curwen warehouses at the Town Street docks, soon felt assured that it was not merely His Majesty's
armed ships which the sinister skulker was anxious to avoid. Prior to the change in 1766 these boats
had for the most part contained chained negroes, who were carried down and across the bay and
landed at an obscure point on the shore just north of Pawtuxet; being afterward driven up the bluff and
across country to the Curwen farm, where they were locked in that enormous stone outbuilding
which had only five high narrow slits for windows. After that change, however, the whole
programme was altered. Importation of slaves ceased at once, and for a time Curwen abandoned his
midnight sailings. Then, about the spring of 1767, a new policy appeared. Once more the lighters
grew wont to put out from the black, silent docks, and this time they would go down the bay some
distance, perhaps as far as Namquit Point, where they would meet and receive cargo from strange
ships of considerable size and widely varied appearance. Curwen's sailors would then deposit this
cargo at the usual point on the shore, and transport it overland to the farm; locking it in the same
cryptical stone building which had formerly received the negroes. The cargo consisted almost
wholly of boxes and cases, of which a large proportion were oblong and heavy and disturbingly
suggestive of coffins.
Weeden always watched the farm with unremitting assiduity; visiting it each night for long
periods, and seldom letting a week go by without a sight except when the ground bore a footprint-
revealing snow. Even then he would often walk as close as possible in the travelled road or on the
ice of the neighbouring river to see what tracks others might have left. Finding his own vigils
interrupted by nautical duties, he hired a tavern companion named Eleazar Smith to continue the
survey during his absence; and between them the two could have set in motion some extraordinary
rumours. That they did not do so was only because they knew the effect of publicity would be to
warn their quarry and make further progress impossible. Instead, they wished to learn something
definite before taking any action. What they did learn must have been startling indeed, and Charles
Ward spoke many times to his parents of his regret at Weeden's later burning of his notebooks. All
that can be told of their discoveries is what Eleazar Smith jotted down in a non too coherent diary,
and what other diarists and letter-writers have timidly repeated from the statements which they finally
made--and according to which the farm was only the outer shell of some vast and revolting menace,
of a scope and depth too profound and intangible for more than shadowy comprehension.
It is gathered that Weeden and Smith became early convinced that a great series of tunnels and
catacombs, inhabited by a very sizeable staff of persons besides the old Indian and his wife, underlay
the farm. The house was an old peaked relic of the middle seventeenth century with enormous stack
chimney and diamond-paned lattice windows, the laboratory being in a lean-to toward the north,
where the roof came nearly to the ground. This building stood clear of any other; yet judging by the
different voices heard at odd times within, it must have been accessible through secret passages
beneath. These voices, before 1766, were mere mumblings and negro whisperings and frenzied
screams, coupled with curious chants or invocations. After that date, however, they assumed a very
singular and terrible cast as they ran the gamut betwixt dronings of dull acquiescence and explosions
of frantic pain or fury, rumblings of conversations and whines of entreaty, pantings of eagerness and
shouts of protest. They appeared to be in different languages, all known to Curwen, whose rasping
accents were frequently distinguishable in reply, reproof, or threatening. Sometimes it seemed that
several persons must be in the house; Curwen, certain captives, and the guards of those captives.
There were voices of a sort that neither Weeden nor Smith had ever heard before despite their wide
knowledge of foreign parts, and many that they did seem to place as belonging to this or that
nationality. The nature of the conversations seemed always a kind of catechism, as if Curwen were
extorting some sort of information from terrified or rebellious prisoners.
Weeden had many verbatim reports of overheard scraps in his notebook, for English, French, and
Spanish, which he knew, were frequently used; but of these nothing has survived. He did, however,
say that besides a few ghoulish dialogues in which the past affairs of Providence families were
concerned, most of the questions and answers he could understand were historical or scientific;
occasionally pertaining to very remote places and ages. Once, for example, an alternately raging and
sullen figure was questioned in French about the Black Prince's massacre at Limoges in 1370, as if
there were some hidden reason which he ought to know. Curwen asked the prisoner--if prisoner he
were--whether the order to slay was given because of the Sign of the Goat found on the altar in the
ancient Roman crypt beneath the Cathedral, or whether the Dark Man of the Haute Vienne had spoken
the Three Words. Failing to obtain replies, the inquisitor had seemingly resorted to extreme means;
for there was a terrific shriek followed by silence and muttering and a bumping sound.
None of these colloquies was ever ocularly witnessed, since the windows were always heavily
draped. Once, though, during a discourse in an unknown tongue, a shadow was seen on the curtain
which startled Weeden exceedingly; reminding him of one of the puppets in a show he had seen in
the autumn of 1764 in Hacher's Hall, when a man from Germantown, Pennsylvania, had given a clever
mechanical spectacle advertised as
'A View of the Famous City of Jerusalem, in which are represented Jerusalem, the Temple of
Solomon, his Royal Throne, the noted Towers, and Hills, likewise the Suffering of Our Saviour
from the Garden of Gethsemane to the Cross on the Hill of Golgotha; an artful piece of Statuary,
Worthy to be seen by the Curious.'
It was on this occasion that the listener, who had crept close to the window of the front room
whence the speaking proceeded, gave a start which roused the old Indian pair and caused them to
loose the dogs on him. After that no more conversations were ever heard in the house, and Weeden
and Smith concluded that Curwen had transferred his field of action to regions below.
That such regions in truth existed, seemed amply clear from many things. Faint cries and groans
unmistakably came up now and then from what appeared to be the solid earth in places far from any
structure; whilst hidden in the bushes along the river-bank in the rear, where the high ground sloped
steeply down to the valley of the Pawtuxet, there was found an arched oaken door in a frame of heavy
masonry, which was obviously an entrance to caverns within the hill. When or how these catacombs
could have been constructed, Weeden was unable to say; but he frequently pointed out how easily the
place might have been reached by bands of unseen workmen from the river. Joseph Curwen put his
mongrel seamen to diverse uses indeed! During the heavy spring rains of 1769 the two watchers kept
a sharp eye on the steep river-bank to see if any subterrene secrets might be washed to light, and
were rewarded by the sight of a profusion of both human and animal bones in places where deep
gullies had been worn in the banks. Naturally there might be many explanations of such things in the
rear of a stock farm, and a locality where old Indian bury-grounds were common, but Weeden and
Smith drew their own inferences.
It was in January 1770, whilst Weeden and Smith were still debating vainly on what, if anything, to
think or do about the whole bewildering business, that the incident of the Fortaleza occurred.
Exasperated by the burning of the revenue sloop Liberty at Newport during the previous summer, the
customs fleet under Admiral Wallace had adopted an increased vigilance concerning strange vessels;
and on this occasion His Majesty's armed schooner Cygnet, under Capt. Charles Leslie, captured
after a short pursuit one early morning the scow Fortaleza of Barcelona, Spain, under Capt. Manuel
Arruda, bound according to its log from Grand Cairo, Egypt, to Providence. When searched for
contraband material, this ship revealed the astonishing fact that its cargo consisted exclusively of
Egyptian mummies, consigned to "Sailor A. B. C.", who would come to remove his goods in a
lighter just off Namquit Point and whose identity Capt. Arruda felt himself in honour bound not to
reveal. The Vice-Admiralty at Newport, at a loss what to do in view of the non-contraband nature of
the cargo on the one hand and of the unlawful secrecy of the entry on the other hand, compromised on
Collector Robinson's recommendation by freeing the ship but forbidding it a port in Rhode Island
waters. There were later rumours of its having been seen in Boston Harbour, though it never openly
entered the Port of Boston.
This extraordinary incident did not fail of wide remark in Providence, and there were not many
who doubted the existence of some connexion between the cargo of mummies and the sinister Joseph
Curwen. His exotic studies and his curious chemical importations being common knowledge, and his
fondness for graveyards being common suspicion; it did not take much imagination to link him with a
freakish importation which could not conceivably have been destined for anyone else in the town. As
if conscious of this natural belief, Curwen took care to speak casually on several occasions of the
chemical value of the balsams found in mummies; thinking perhaps that he might make the affair seem
less unnatural, yet stopping just short of admitting his participation. Weeden and Smith, of course, felt
no doubt whatsoever of the significance of the thing; and indulged in the wildest theories concerning
Curwen and his monstrous labours.
The following spring, like that of the year before, had heavy rains; and the watchers kept careful
track of the river-bank behind the Curwen farm. Large sections were washed away, and a certain
number of bones discovered; but no glimpse was afforded of any actual subterranean chambers or
burrows. Something was rumoured, however, at the village of Pawtuxet about a mile below, where
the river flows in falls over a rocky terrace to join the placed landlocked cove. There, where quaint
old cottages climbed the hill from the rustic bridge, and fishing-smacks lay anchored at their sleepy
docks, a vague report went round of things that were floating down the river and flashing into sight
for a minute as they went over the falls. Of course the Pawtuxet in a long river which winds through
many settled regions abounding in graveyards, and of course the spring rains had been very heavy;
but the fisherfolk about the bridge did not like the wild way that one of the things stared as it shot
down to the still waters below, or the way that another half cried out although its condition had
greatly departed from that of objects which normally cried out. That rumour sent Smith--for Weeden
was just then at sea--in haste to the river-bank behind the farm; where surely enough there remained
the evidence of an extensive cave-in. There was, however, no trace of a passage into the steep bank;
for the miniature avalanche had left behind a solid wall of mixed earth and shrubbery from aloft.
Smith went to the extent of some experimental digging, but was deterred by lack of success--or
perhaps by fear of possible success. It is interesting to speculate on what the persistent and
revengeful Weeden would have done had he been ashore at the time.
4
By the autumn of 1770 Weeden decided that the time was ripe to tell others of his discoveries;
for he had a large number of facts to link together, and a second eye-witness to refute the possible
charge that jealousy and vindictiveness had spurred his fancy. As his first confidant he selected Capt.
James Mathewson of the Enterprise, who on the one hand knew him well enough not to doubt his
veracity, and on the other hand was sufficiently influential in the town to be heard in turn with respect.
The colloquy took place in an upper room of Sabin's Tavern near the docks, with Smith present to
corroborate virtually every statement; and it could be seen that Capt. Mathewson was tremendously
impressed. Like nearly everyone else in the town, he had had black suspicions of his own anent
Joseph Curwen; hence it needed only this confirmation and enlargement of data to convince him
absolutely. At the end of the conference he was very grave, and enjoined strict silence upon the two
younger men. He would, he said, transmit the information separately to some ten or so of the most
learned and prominent citizens of Providence; ascertaining their views and following whatever
advice they might have to offer. Secrecy would probably be essential in any case, for this was no
matter that the town constables or militia could cope with; and above all else the excitable crowd
must be kept in ignorance, lest there be enacted in these already troublous times a repetition of that
frightful Salem panic of less than a century before which had first brought Curwen hither.
The right persons to tell, he believed, would be Dr. Benjamin West, whose pamphlet on the late
transit of Venus proved him a scholar and keen thinker; Rev. James Manning, President of the
College which had just moved up from Warren and was temporarily housed in the new King Street
schoolhouse awaiting the completion of its building on the hill above Presbyterian-Lane; ex-
Governor Stephen Hopkins, who had been a member of the Philosophical Society at Newport, and
was a man of very broad perceptions; John Carter, publisher of the Gazette; all four of the Brown
brothers, John, Joseph, Nicholas, and Moses, who formed the recognised local magnates, and of
whom Joseph was an amateur scientist of parts; old Dr. Jabez Bowen, whose erudition was
considerable, and who had much first-hand knowledge of Curwen's odd purchases; and Capt.
Abraham Whipple, a privateersman of phenomenal boldness and energy who could be counted on to
lead in any active measures needed. These men, if favourable, might eventually be brought together
for collective deliberation; and with them would rest the responsibility of deciding whether or not to
inform the Governor of the Colony, Joseph Wanton of Newport, before taking action.
The mission of Capt. Mathewson prospered beyond his highest expectations; for whilst he found
one or two of the chosen confidants somewhat sceptical of the possible ghastly side of Weeden's
tale, there was not one who did not think it necessary to take some sort of secret and cordinated
action. Curwen, it was clear, formed a vague potential menace to the welfare of the town and Colony;
and must be eliminated at any cost. Late in December 1770 a group of eminent townsmen met at the
home of Stephen Hopkins and debated tentative measures. Weeden's notes, which he had given to
Capt. Mathewson, were carefully read; and he and Smith were summoned to give testimony anent
details. Something very like fear seized the whole assemblage before the meeting was over, though
there ran through that fear a grim determination which Capt. Whipple's bluff and resonant profanity
best expressed. They would not notify the Governor, because a more than legal course seemed
necessary. With hidden powers of uncertain extent apparently at his disposal, Curwen was not a man
who could safely be warned to leave town. Nameless reprisals might ensue, and even if the sinister
creature complied, the removal would be no more than the shifting of an unclean burden to another
place. The times were lawless, and men who had flouted the King's revenue forces for years were
not the ones to balk at sterner things when duty impelled. Curwen must be surprised at his Pawtuxet
farm by a large raiding-party of seasoned privateersmen and given one decisive chance to explain
himself. If he proved a madman, amusing himself with shrieks and imaginary conversations in
different voices, he would be properly confined. If something graver appeared, and if the
underground horrors indeed turned out to be real, he and all with him must die. It could be done
quietly, and even the widow and her father need not be told how it came about.
While these serious steps were under discussion there occurred in the town an incident so
terrible and inexplicable that for a time little else was mentioned for miles around. In the middle of a
moon-light January night with heavy snow underfoot there resounded over the river and up the hill a
shocking series of cries which brought sleepy heads to every window; and people around
Weybosset Point saw a great white thing plunging frantically along the badly cleared space in front
of the Turk's Head. There was a baying of dogs in the distance, but this subsided as soon as the
clamour of the awakened town became audible. Parties of men with lanterns and muskets hurried out
to see what was happening, but nothing rewarded their search. The next morning, however, a giant,
muscular body, stark naked, was found on the jams of ice around the southern piers of the Great
Bridge, where the Long Dock stretched out beside Abbott's distil-house, and the identity of this
object became a theme for endless speculation and whispering. It was not so much the younger as the
older folk who whispered, for only in the patriarchs did that rigid face with horror-bulging eyes
strike any chord of memory. They, shaking as they did so, exchanged furtive murmurs of wonder and
fear; for in those stiff, hideous features lay a resemblance so marvellous as to be almost an identity--
and that identity was with a man who had died full fifty years before.
Ezra Weeden was present at the finding; and remembering the baying of the night before, set out
along Weybosset Street and across Muddy Dock Bridge whence the sound had come. He had a
curious expectancy, and was not surprised when, reaching the edge of the settled district where the
street merged into the Pawtuxet Road, he came upon some very curious tracks in the snow. The naked
giant had been pursued by dogs and many booted men, and the returning tracks of the hounds and their
masters could be easily traced. They had given up the chase upon coming too near the town. Weeden
smiled grimly, and as a perfunctory detail traced the footprints back to their source. It was the
Pawtuxet farm of Joseph Curwen, as he well knew it would be; and he would have given much had
the yard been less confusingly trampled. As it was, he dared not seem too interested in full daylight.
Dr. Bowen, to whom Weeden went at once with his report, performed an autopsy on the strange
corpse, and discovered peculiarities which baffled him utterly. The digestive tracts of the huge man
seemed never to have been in use, whilst the whole skin had a coarse, loosely knit texture impossible
to account for. Impressed by what the old men whispered of this body's likeness to the long-dead
blacksmith Daniel Green, whose great-grandson Aaron Hoppin was a supercargo in Curwen's
employ, Weeden asked casual questions till he found where Green was buried. That night a party of
ten visited the old North Burying Ground opposite Herrenden's Lane and opened a grave. They found
it vacant, precisely as they had expected.
Meanwhile arrangements had been made with the post riders to intercept Joseph Curwen's mail,
and shortly before the incident of the naked body there was found a letter from one Jedediah Orne of
Salem which made the coperating citizens think deeply. Parts of it, copied and preserved in the
private archives of the Smith family where Charles Ward found it, ran as follows.
I delight that you continue in ye Gett'g at Olde Matters in your Way, and doe not think better was
done at Mr. Hutchinson's in Salem-Village. Certainely, there was Noth'g but ye liveliest Awfulness
in that which H. rais'd upp from What he cou'd gather onlie a part of. What you sente, did not Worke,
whether because of Any Thing miss'g, or because ye Wordes were not Righte from my Speak'g or yr
Copy'g. I alone am at a Loss. I have not ye Chymicall art to followe Borellus, and owne my Self
confounded by ye VII. Booke of ye Necronomicon that you recommende. But I wou'd have you
Observe what was told to us aboute tak'g Care whom to calle upp, for you are Sensible what Mr.
Mather writ in ye Magnalia of--, and can judge how truely that Horrendous thing is reported. I say to
you againe, doe not call up Any that you can not put downe; by the Which I meane, Any that can in
Turne call up Somewhat against you, whereby your Powerfullest Devices may not be of use. Ask of
the Lesser, lest the Greater shal not wish to Answer, and shal commande more than you. I was
frighted when I read of your know'g what Ben Zariatnatmik hadde in his ebony Boxe, for I was
conscious who must have tolde you. And againe I ask that you shalle write me as Jedediah and not
Simon. In this Community a Man may not live too long, and you knowe my Plan by which I came back
as my Son. I am desirous you will Acquaint me with what ye Black Man learnt from Sylvanus
Cocidius in ye Vault, under ye Roman Wall, and will be oblig'd for ye lend'g of ye MS. you speak of.
Another and unsigned letter from Philadelphia provoked equal thought, especially for the
following passage:
I will observe what you say respecting the sending of Accounts only by yr Vessels, but can not
always be certain when to expect them. In the Matter spoke of, I require onlie one more thing; but
wish to be sure I apprehend you exactly. You inform me, that no Part must be missing if the finest
Effects are to be had, but you can not but know how hard it is to be sure. It seems a great Hazard and
Burthen to take away the whole Box, and in Town (i.e. St. Peter's, St. Paul's, St. Mary's or
ChristChurch) it can scarce be done at all. But I know what Imperfections were in the one I rais'd up
October last, and how many live Specimens you were forc'd to imploy before you hit upon the right
Mode in the year 1766; so will be guided by you in all Matters. I am impatient for yr Brig, and inquire
daily at Mr. Biddle's Wharf.
A third suspicious letter was in an unknown tongue and even an unknown alphabet. In the Smith
diary found by Charles Ward a single oft-repeated combination of characters is clumsily copied; and
authorities at Brown University have pronounced the alphabet Amharic or Abyssinian, although they
do not recognise the word. None of these epistles was ever delivered to Curwen, though the
disappearance of Jedediah Orne from Salem as recorded shortly afterward shewed that the
Providence men took certain quiet steps. The Pennsylvania Historical Society also has some curious
letters received by Dr. Shippen regarding the presence of an unwholesome character in Philadelphia.
But more decisive steps were in the air, and it is in the secret assemblages of sworn and tested
sailors and faithful old privateersmen in the Brown warehouses by night that we must look for the
main fruits of Weeden's disclosures. Slowly and surely a plan of campaign was under development
which would leave no trace of Joseph Curwen's noxious mysteries.
Curwen, despite all precautions, apparently felt that something was in the wind; for he was now
remarked to wear an unusually worried look. His coach was seen at all hours in the town and on the
Pawtuxet Road, and he dropped little by little the air of forced geniality with which he had latterly
sought to combat the town's prejudice. The nearest neighbours to his farm, the Fenners, one night
remarked a great shaft of light shooting into the sky from some aperture in the roof of that cryptical
stone building with the high, excessively narrow windows; an event which they quickly
communicated to John Brown in Providence. Mr. Brown had become the executive leader of the
select group bent on Curwen's extirpation, and had informed the Fenners that some action was about
to be taken. This he deemed needful because of the impossibility of their not witnessing the final
raid; and he explained his course by saying that Curwen was known to be a spy of the customs
officers at Newport, against whom the hand of every Providence skipper, merchant, and farmer was
openly or clandestinely raised. Whether the ruse was wholly believed by neighbours who had seen
so many queer things is not certain; but at any rate the Fenners were willing to connect any evil with a
man of such queer ways. To them Mr. Brown had entrusted the duty of watching the Curwen
farmhouse, and of regularly reporting every incident which took place there.
5
The probability that Curwen was on guard and attempting unusual things, as suggested by the odd
shaft of light, precipitated at last the action so carefully devised by the band of serious citizens.
According to the Smith diary a company of about 100 men met at 10 p.m. on Friday, April 12th, 1771,
in the great room of Thurston's Tavern at the Sign of the Golden Lion on Weybosset Point across the
Bridge. Of the guiding group of prominent men in addition to the leader John Brown there were
present Dr. Bowen, with his case of surgical instruments, President Manning without the great
periwig (the largest in the Colonies) for which he was noted, Governor Hopkins, wrapped in his dark
cloak and accompanied by his seafaring brother Esek, whom he had initiated at the last moment with
the permission of the rest, John Carter, Capt. Mathewson, and Capt. Whipple, who was to lead the
actual raiding party. These chiefs conferred apart in a rear chamber, after which Capt. Whipple
emerged to the great room and gave the gathered seamen their last oaths and instructions. Eleazar
Smith was with the leaders as they sat in the rear apartment awaiting the arrival of Ezra Weeden,
whose duty was to keep track of Curwen and report the departure of his coach for the farm.
About 10:30 a heavy rumble was heard on the Great Bridge, followed by the sound of a coach in
the street outside; and at that hour there was no need of waiting for Weeden in order to know that the
doomed man had set out for his last night of unhallowed wizardry. A moment later, as the receding
coach clattered faintly over the MuddyDockBridge, Weeden appeared; and the raiders fell silently
into military order in the street, shouldering the firelocks, fowling-pieces, or whaling harpoons
which they had with them. Weeden and Smith were with the party, and of the deliberating citizens
there were present for active service Capt. Whipple, the leader, Capt. Esek Hopkins, John Carter,
President Manning, Capt. Mathewson, and Dr. Bowen; together with Moses Brown, who had come up
at the eleventh hour though absent from the preliminary session in the tavern. All these freemen and
their hundred sailors began the long march without delay, grim and a trifle apprehensive as they left
the Muddy Dock behind and mounted the gentle rise of Broad Street toward the Pawtuxet Road. Just
beyond Elder Snow's church some of the men turned back to take a parting look at Providence lying
outspread under the early spring stars. Steeples and gables rose dark and shapely, and salt breezes
swept up gently from the cove north of the Bridge. Vega was climbing above the great hill across
the water, whose crest of trees was broken by the roof-line of the unfinished College edifice. At the
foot of that hill, and along the narrow mounting lanes of its side, the old town dreamed; Old
Providence, for whose safety and sanity so monstrous and colossal a blasphemy was about to be
wiped out.
An hour and a quarter later the raiders arrived, as previously agreed, at the Fenner farmhouse;
where they heard a final report on their intended victim. He had reached his farm over half an hour
before, and the strange light had soon afterward shot once more into the sky, but there were no lights
in any visible windows. This was always the case of late. Even as this news was given another great
glare arose toward the south, and the party realised that they had indeed come close to the scene of
awesome and unnatural wonders. Capt. Whipple now ordered his force to separate into three
divisions; one of twenty men under Eleazar Smith to strike across to the shore and guard the landing-
place against possible reinforcements for Curwen until summoned by a messenger for desperate
service, a second of twenty men under Capt. Esek Hopkins to steal down into the river valley behind
the Curwen farm and demolish with axes or gunpowder the oaken door in the high, steep bank, and the
third to close in on the house and adjacent buildings themselves. Of this division one third was to be
led by Capt. Mathewson to the cryptical stone edifice with high narrow windows, another third to
follow Capt. Whipple himself to the main farmhouse, and the remaining third to preserve a circle
around the whole group of buildings until summoned by a final emergency signal.
The river party would break down the hillside door at the sound of a single whistle-blast, then
wait and capture anything which might issue from the regions within. At the sound of two whistle-
blasts it would advance through the aperture to oppose the enemy or join the rest of the raiding
contingent. The party at the stone building would accept these respective signals in an analogous
manner; forcing an entrance at the first, and at the second descending whatever passage into the
ground might be discovered, and joining the general or focal warfare expected to take place within
the caverns. A third or emergency signal of three blasts would summon the immediate reserve from
its general guard duty; its twenty men dividing equally and entering the unknown depths through both
farmhouse and stone building. Capt. Whipple's belief in the existence of catacombs was absolute, and
he took no alternative into consideration when making his plans. He had with him a whistle of great
power and shrillness, and did not fear any upsetting or misunderstanding of signals. The final reserve
at the landing, of course, was nearly out of the whistle's range; hence would require a special
messenger if needed for help. Moses Brown and John Carter went with Capt. Hopkins to the river-
bank, while President Manning was detailed with Capt. Mathewson to the stone building. Dr. Bowen,
with Ezra Weeden, remained in Capt. Whipple's party which was to storm the farmhouse itself. The
attack was to begin as soon as a messenger from Capt. Hopkins had joined Capt. Whipple to notify
him of the river party's readiness. The leader would then deliver the loud single blast, and the
various advance parties would commence their simultaneous attack on three points. Shortly before 1
a.m. the three divisions left the Fenner farmhouse; one to guard the landing, another to seek the river
valley and the hillside door, and the third to subdivide and attend to the actual buildings of the
Curwen farm.
Eleazar Smith, who accompanied the shore-guarding party, records in his diary an uneventful
march and a long wait on the bluff by the bay; broken once by what seemed to be the distant sound of
the signal whistle and again by a peculiar muffled blend of roaring and crying and a powder blast
which seemed to come from the same direction. Later on one man thought he caught some distant
gunshots, and still later Smith himself felt the throb of titanic and thunderous words resounding in
upper air. It was just before dawn that a single haggard messenger with wild eyes and a hideous
unknown odour about his clothing appeared and told the detachment to disperse quietly to their homes
and never again think or speak of the night's doings or of him who had been Joseph Curwen.
Something about the bearing of the messenger carried a conviction which his mere words could
never have conveyed; for though he was a seaman well known to many of them, there was something
obscurely lost or gained in his soul which set him for evermore apart. It was the same later on when
they met other old companions who had gone into that zone of horror. Most of them had lost or
gained something imponderable and indescribable. They had seen or heard or felt something which
was not for human creatures, and could not forget it. From them there was never any gossip, for to
even the commonest of mortal instincts there are terrible boundaries. And from that single messenger
the party at the shore caught a nameless awe which almost sealed their own lips. Very few are the
rumours which ever came from any of them, and Eleazar Smith's diary is the only written record
which has survived from that whole expedition which set forth from the Sign of the Golden Lion
under the stars.
Charles Ward, however, discovered another vague sidelight in some Fenner correspondence
which he found in New London, where he knew another branch of the family had lived. It seems that
the Fenners, from whose house the doomed farm was distantly visible, had watched the departing
columns of raiders; and had heard very clearly the angry barking of the Curwen dogs, followed by
the first shrill blast which precipitated the attack. This blast had been followed by a repetition of the
great shaft of light from the stone building, and in another moment, after a quick sounding of the
second signal ordering a general invasion, there had come a subdued prattle of musketry followed by
a horrible roaring cry which the correspondent Luke Fenner had represented in his epistle by the
characters 'Waaaahrrrrr-R'waaahrrr.'
This cry, however, had possessed a quality which no mere writing could convey, and the
correspondent mentions that his mother fainted completely at the sound. It was later repeated less
loudly, and further but more muffled evidences of gunfire ensued; together with a loud explosion of
powder from the direction of the river. About an hour afterward all the dogs began to bark
frightfully, and there were vague ground rumblings so marked that the candlesticks tottered on the
mantelpiece. A strong smell of sulphur was noted; and Luke Fenner's father declared that he heard the
third or emergency whistle signal, though the others failed to detect it. Muffled musketry sounded
again, followed by a deep scream less piercing but even more horrible than those which had
preceded it; a kind of throaty, nastily plastic cough or gurgle whose quality as a scream must have
come more from its continuity and psychological import than from its actual acoustic value.
Then the flaming thing burst into sight at a point where the Curwen farm ought to lie, and the
human cries of desperate and frightened men were heard. Muskets flashed and cracked, and the
flaming thing fell to the ground. A second flaming thing appeared, and a shriek of human origin was
plainly distinguished. Fenner wrote that he could even gather a few words belched in frenzy:
Almighty, protect thy lamb! Then there were more shots, and the second flaming thing fell. After that
came silence for about three-quarters of an hour; at the end of which time little Arthur Fenner, Luke's
brother, exclaimed that he saw "a red fog" going up to the stars from the accursed farm in the
distance. No one but the child can testify to this, but Luke admits the significant coincidence implied
by the panic of almost convulsive fright which at the same moment arched the backs and stiffened the
fur of the three cats then within the room.
Five minutes later a chill wind blew up, and the air became suffused with an intolerable stench
that only the strong freshness of the sea could have prevented its being notice by the shore party or
by any wakeful souls in the Pawtuxet village. This stench was nothing which any of the Fenners had
ever encountered before, and produced a kind of clutching, amorphous fear beyond that of the tomb
or the charnel-house. Close upon it came the awful voice which no hapless hearer will ever be able
to forget. It thundered out of the sky like a doom, and windows rattled as its echoes died away. It was
deep and musical; powerful as a bass organ, but evil as the forbidden books of the Arabs. What it
said no man can tell, for it spoke in an unknown tongue, but this is the writing Luke Fenner set down to
portray the daemoniac intonations: 'DEESMEES JESHET BONE DOSEFE DUVEMA
ENITEMOSS.' Not till the year 1919 did any soul link this crude transcript with anything else in
mortal knowledge, but Charles Ward paled as he recognised what Mirandola had denounced in
shudders as the ultimate horror among black magic's incantations.
An unmistakable human shout or deep chorused scream seemed to answer this malign wonder
from the Curwen farm, after which the unknown stench grew complex with an added odour equally
intolerable. A wailing distinctly different from the scream now burst out, and was protracted ululantly
in rising and falling paroxysms. At times it became almost articulate, though no auditor could trace
any definite words; and at one point it seemed to verge toward the confines of diabolic and hysterical
laughter. Then a yell of utter, ultimate fright and stark madness wrenched from scores of human
throats--a yell which came strong and clear despite the depth from which it must have burst; after
which darkness and silence ruled all things. Spirals of acrid smoke ascended to blot out the stars,
though no flames appeared and no buildings were observed to be gone or injured on the following
day.
Toward dawn two frightened messengers with monstrous and unplaceable odours saturating their
clothing knocked at the Fenner door and requested a keg of rum, for which they paid very well
indeed. One of them told the family that the affair of Joseph Curwen was over, and that the events of
the night were not to be mentioned again. Arrogant as the order seemed, the aspect of him who gave
it took away all resentment and lent it a fearsome authority; so that only these furtive letters of Luke
Fenner, which he urged his Connecticut relative to destroy, remain to tell what was seen and heard.
The non-compliance of that relative, whereby the letters were saved after all, has alone kept the
matter from a merciful oblivion. Charles Ward had one detail to add as a result of a long canvass of
Pawtuxet residents for ancestral traditions. Old Charles Slocum of that village said that there was
known to his grandfather a queer rumour concerning a charred, distorted body found in the fields a
week after the death of Joseph Curwen was announced. What kept the talk alive was the notion that
this body, so far as could be seen in its burnt and twisted condition, was neither thoroughly human nor
wholly allied to any animal which Pawtuxet folk had ever seen or read about.
6
Not one man who participated in that terrible raid could ever be induced to say a word concerning
it, and every fragment of the vague data which survives comes from those outside the final fighting
party. There is something frightful in the care with which these actual raiders destroyed each scrap
which bore the least allusion to the matter. Eight sailors had been killed, but although their bodies
were not produced their families were satisfied with the statement that a clash with customs officers
had occurred. The same statement also covered the numerous cases of wounds, all of which were
extensively bandaged and treated only by Dr. Jabez Bowen, who had accompanied the party. Hardest
to explain was the nameless odour clinging to all the raiders, a thing which was discussed for weeks.
Of the citizen leaders, Capt. Whipple and Moses Brown were most severely hurt, and letters of their
wives testify the bewilderment which their reticence and close guarding of their bandages produced.
Psychologically every participant was aged, sobered, and shaken. It is fortunate that they were all
strong men of action and simple, orthodox religionists, for with more subtle introspectiveness and
mental complexity they would have fared ill indeed. President Manning was the most disturbed; but
even he outgrew the darkest shadow, and smothered memories in prayers. Every man of those leaders
had a stirring part to play in later years, and it is perhaps fortunate that this is so. Little more than a
twelvemonth afterward Capt. Whipple led the mob who burnt the revenue ship Gaspee, and in this
bold act we may trace one step in the blotting out of unwholesome images.
There was delivered to the widow of Joseph Curwen a sealed leaden coffin of curious design,
obviously found ready on the spot when needed, in which she was told her husband's body lay. He
had, it was explained, been killed in a customs battle about which it was not politic to give details.
More than this no tongue ever uttered of Joseph Curwen's end, and Charles Ward had only a single
hint wherewith to construct a theory. This hint was the merest thread--a shaky underscoring of a
passage in Jedediah Orne's confiscated letter to Curwen, as partly copied in Ezra Weeden's
handwriting. The copy was found in the possession of Smith's descendants; and we are left to decide
whether Weeden gave it to his companion after the end, as a mute clue to the abnormality which had
occurred, or whether, as is more probable, Smith had it before, and added the underscoring himself
from what he had managed to extract from his friend by shrewd guessing and adroit cross-
questioning. The underlined passage is merely this:
I say to you againe, doe not call up Any that you can not put downe; by the Which I meane, Any
that can in Turne call up Somewhat against you, whereby your Powerfullest Devices may not be of
use. Ask of the Lesser, lest the Greater shal not wish to Answer, and shal commande more than you.
In the light of this passage, and reflecting on what last unmentionable allies a beaten man might try
to summon in his direst extremity, Charles Ward may well have wondered whether any citizen of
Providence killed Joseph Curwen.
The deliberate effacement of every memory of the dead man from Providence life and annals was
vastly aided by the influence of the raiding leaders. They had not at first meant to be so thorough, and
had allowed the widow and her father and child to remain in ignorance of the true conditions; but
Capt. Tillinghast was an astute man, and soon uncovered enough rumours to whet his horror and
cause him to demand that the daughter and granddaughter change their name, burn the library and all
remaining papers, and chisel the inscription from the slate slab above Joseph Curwen's grave. He
knew Capt. Whipple well, and probably extracted more hints from that bluff mariner and anyone else
ever gained repecting the end of the accursed sorcerer.
From that time on the obliteration of Curwen's memory became increasingly rigid, extending at
last by common consent even to the town records and files of the Gazette. It can be compared in spirit
only to the hush that lay on Oscar Wilde's name for a decade after his disgrace, and in extent only to
the fate of that sinful King of Runazar in Lord Dunsany's tale, whom the Gods decided must not only
cease to be, but must cease ever to have been.
Mrs. Tillinghast, as the widow became known after 1772, sold the house in Olney Court and
resided with her father in Power's Lane till her death in 1817. The farm at Pawtuxet, shunned by
every living soul, remained to moulder through the years; and seemed to decay with unaccountable
rapidity. By 1780 only the stone and brickwork were standing, and by 1800 even these had fallen to
shapeless heaps. None ventured to pierce the tangled shrubbery on the river-bank behind which the
hillside door may have lain, nor did any try to frame a definite image of the scenes amidst which
Joseph Curwen departed from the horrors he had wrought.
Only robust old Capt. Whipple was heard by alert listeners to mutter once in a while to himself,
"Pox on that----, but he had no business to laugh while he screamed. 'Twas as though the damn'd----
had some'at up his sleeve. For half a crown I'd burn his----home."
III. A Search and an Evocation
1
Charles Ward, as we have seen, first learned in 1918 of his descent from Joseph Curwen. That he
at once took an intense interest in everything pertaining to the bygone mystery is not to be wondered
at; for every vague rumour that he had heard of Curwen now became something vital to himself, in
whom flowed Curwen's blood. No spirited and imaginative genealogist could have done otherwise
than begin forthwith an avid and systematic collection of Curwen data.
In his first delvings there was not the slightest attempt at secrecy; so that even Dr. Lyman
hesitates to date the youth's madness from any period before the close of 1919. He talked freely with
his family--though his mother was not particularly pleased to own an ancestor like Curwen--and with
the officials of the various museums and libraries he visited. In applying to private families for
records thought to be in their possession he made no concealment of his object, and shared the
somewhat amused scepticism with which the accounts of the old diarists and letter-writers were
regarded. He often expressed a keen wonder as to what really had taken place a century and a half
before at the Pawtuxet farmhouse whose site he vainly tried to find, and what Joseph Curwen really
had been.
When he came across the Smith diary and archives and encountered the letter from Jedediah Orne
he decided to visit Salem and look up Curwen's early activities and connexions there, which he did
during the Easter vacation of 1919. At the Essex Institute, which was well known to him from former
sojourns in the glamorous old town of crumbling Puritan gables and clustered gambrel roofs, he was
very kindly received, and unearthed there a considerable amount of Curwen data. He found that his
ancestor was born in Salem-Village, now Danvers, seven miles from town, on the eighteenth of
February (O.S.) 1662-3; and that he had run away to sea at the age of fifteen, not appearing again for
nine years, when he returned with the speech, dress, and manners of a native Englishman and settled in
Salem proper. At that time he had little to do with his family, but spent most of his hours with the
curious books he had brought from Europe, and the strange chemicals which came for him on ships
from England, France, and Holland. Certain trips of his into the country were the objects of much
local inquisitiveness, and were whisperingly associated with vague rumours of fires on the hills at
night.
Curwen's only close friends had been one Edward Hutchinson of Salem-Village and one Simon
Orne of Salem. With these men he was often seen in conference about the Common, and visits among
them were by no means infrequent. Hutchinson had a house well out toward the woods, and it was not
altogether liked by sensitive people because of the sounds heard there at night. He was said to
entertain strange visitors, and the lights seen from his windows were not always of the same colour.
The knowledge he displayed concerning long-dead persons and long-forgotten events was
considered distinctly unwholesome, and he disappeared about the time the witchcraft panic began,
never to be heard from again. At that time Joseph Curwen also departed, but his settlement in
Providence was soon learned of. Simon Orne lived in Salem until 1720, when his failure to grow
visibly old began to excite attention. He thereafter disappeared, though thirty years later his precise
counterpart and self-styled son turned up to claim his property. The claim was allowed on the
strength of documents in Simon Orne's known hand, and Jedediah Orne continued to dwell in Salem
till 1771, when certain letters from Providence citizens to the Rev. Thomas Barnard and others
brought about his quiet removal to parts unknown.
Certain documents by and about all of the strange characters were available at the Essex Institute,
the Court House, and the Registry of Deeds, and included both harmless commonplaces such as land
titles and bills of sale, and furtive fragments of a more provocative nature. There were four or five
unmistakable allusions to them on the witchcraft trial records; as when one Hepzibah Lawson swore
on July 10, 1692, at the Court of Oyer and Terminer under Judge Hathorne, that: 'fortie Witches and
the Blacke Man were wont to meete in the Woodes behind Mr. Hutchinson's house', and one Amity
How declared at a session of August 8th before Judge Gedney that: 'Mr. G. B. (Rev. George
Burroughs) on that Nighte putt ye Divell his Marke upon Bridget S., Jonathan A., Simon O.,
Deliverance W., Joseph C., Susan P., Mehitable C., and Deborah B.'
Then there was a catalogue of Hutchinson's uncanny library as found after his disappearance, and
an unfinished manuscript in his handwriting, couched in a cipher none could read. Ward had a
photostatic copy of this manuscript made, and began to work casually on the cipher as soon as it was
delivered to him. After the following August his labours on the cipher became intense and feverish,
and there is reason to believe from his speech and conduct that he hit upon the key before October or
November. He never stated, though, whether or not he had succeeded.
But of greatest immediate interest was the Orne material. It took Ward only a short time to prove
from identity of penmanship a thing he had already considered established from the text of the letter
to Curwen; namely, that Simon Orne and his supposed son were one and the same person. As Orne
had said to his correspondent, it was hardly safe to live too long in Salem, hence he resorted to a
thirty-year sojourn abroad, and did not return to claim his lands except as a representative of a new
generation. Orne had apparently been careful to destroy most of his correspondence, but the citizens
who took action in 1771 found and preserved a few letters and papers which excited their wonder.
There were cryptic formulae and diagrams in his and other hands which Ward now either copied
with care or had photographed, and one extremely mysterious letter in a chirography that the
searcher recognised from items in the Registry of Deeds as positively Joseph Curwen's.
This Curwen letter, though undated as to the year, was evidently not the one in answer to which
Orne had written the confiscated missive; and from internal evidence Ward placed it not much later
than 1750. It may not be amiss to give the text in full, as a sample of the style of one whose history
was so dark and terrible. The recipient is addressed as "Simon", but a line (whether drawn by Curwen
or Orne Ward could not tell) is run through the word.
Providence, 1. May
Brother:-
My honour'd Antient Friende, due Respects and earnest Wishes to Him whom we serue for yr
eternall Power. I am just come upon That which you ought to knowe, concern'g the Matter of the
Laste Extremitie and what to doe regard'g yt. I am not dispos'd to followe you in go'g Away on acct.
of my Yeares, for Prouidence hath not ye Sharpeness of ye Bay in hunt'g oute uncommon Things and
bringinge to Tryall. I am ty'd up in Shippes and Goodes, and cou'd not doe as you did, besides the
Whiche my Farme at Patuxet hath under it What you Knowe, and wou'd not waite for my com'g Backe
as an Other.
But I am unreadie for harde Fortunes, as I haue tolde you, and haue longe work'd upon ye Way of
get'g Backe after ye Laste. I laste Night strucke on ye Wordes that bringe up YOGGE-SOTHOTHE,
and sawe for ye first Time that Face spoke of by Ibn Schacabao in ye----. And IT said, that ye III
Psalme in ye Liber-Damnatus holdes ye Clauicle. With Sunne in V House, Saturne in Trine, drawe ye
Pentagram of Fire, and saye ye ninth Uerse thrice. This Uerse repeate eache Roodemas and Hallow's
Eue; and ye Thing will breede in ye Outside Spheres.
And of ye Seede of Olde shal One be borne who shal looke Backe, tho' know'g not what he
seekes.
Yett will this auaile Nothing if there be no Heir, and if the Saltes, or the Way to make the Saltes,
bee not Readie for his Hande; and here I will owne, I haue not taken needed Stepps nor founde Much.
Ye Process is plaguy harde to come neare; and it used up such a Store of Specimens, I am harde putte
to it to get Enough, notwithstand'g the Sailors I haue from ye Indies. Ye People aboute are become
curious, but I can stande them off. Ye Gentry are worse that the Populace, be'g more Circumstantiall
in their Accts. and more belieu'd in what they tell. That Parson and Mr. Merritt haue talk'd Some, I am
fearfull, but no Thing soe far is Dangerous. Ye Chymical Substances are easie of get'g, there be'g II.
goode Chymists in Towne, Dr. Bowen and Sam: Carew. I am foll'g oute what Borellus saith, and haue
Helpe in Abdool Al-Hazred his VII. Booke. Whateuer I gette, you shal haue. And in ye meane while,
do not neglect to make use of ye Wordes I haue here giuen. I haue them Righte, but if you Desire to
see HIM, imploy the Writings on ye Piece of---that I am putt'g in this Packet. Saye ye Uerses euery
Roodmas and Hallow's Eue; and if ye Line runn out not, one shal bee in yeares to come that shal
looke backe and use what Saltes or Stuff for Saltes you shal leaue him. Job XIV. XIV.
I rejoice you are again at Salem, and hope I may see you not longe hence. I haue a goode Stallion,
and am think'g of get'g a Coach, there be'g one (Mr. Merritt's) in Prouidence already, tho' ye Roades
are bad. If you are dispos'd to Trauel, doe not pass me bye. From Boston take ye Post Rd. thro'
Dedham, Wrentham, and Attleborough, goode Tauerns be'g at all these Townes. Stop at Mr. Balcom's
in Wrentham, where ye Beddes are finer than Mr. Hatch's, but eate at ye other House for their Cooke
is better. Turne into Prou. by Patucket Falls, and ye Rd. past Mr. Sayles's Tauern. My House opp. Mr.
Epenetus Olney's Tauern off ye Towne Street, Ist on ye N. side of Olney's Court. Distance from
Boston Stone abt. XLIV Miles.
Sir, I am ye olde and true Friend and Serut. in Almonsin-Metraton.
Josephus C.
To Mr. Simon Orne, William's-Lane, in Salem.
This letter, oddly enough, was what first gave Ward the exact location of Curwen's Providence
home; for none of the records encountered up to that time had been at all specific. The discovery
was doubly striking because it indicated as the newer Curwen house, built in 1761 on the site of the
old, a dilapidated building still standing in Olney Court and well known to Ward in his antiquarian
rambles over Stampers' Hill. The place was indeed only a few squares from his own home on the
great hill's higher ground, and was now the abode of a negro family much esteemed for occasional
washing, housecleaning, and furnace-tending services. To find, in distant Salem, such sudden proof
of the significance of this familiar rookery in his own family history, was a highly impressive thing
to Ward; and he resolved to explore the place immediately upon his return. The more mystical phases
of the letter, which he took to be some extravagant kind of symbolism, frankly baffled him; though he
noted with a thrill of curiousity that the Biblical passage referred to--Job 14,14--was the familiar
verse, 'If a man die, shall he live again? All the days of my appointed time will I wait, until my change
come.'
2
Young Ward came home in a state of pleasant excitement, and spent the following Saturday in a
long and exhaustive study of the house in Olney Court. The place, now crumbling with age, had
never been a mansion; but was a modest two-and-a-half story wooden town house of the familiar
Providence colonial type, with plain peaked roof, large central chimney, and artistically carved
doorway with rayed fanlight, triangular pediment, and trim Doric pilasters. It had suffered but little
alteration externally, and Ward felt he was gazing on something very close to the sinister matters of
his quest.
The present negro inhabitants were known to him, and he was very courteously shewn about the
interior by old Asa and his stout wife Hannah. Here there was more change than the outside
indicated, and Ward saw with regret that fully half of the fine scroll-and-urn overmantels and shell-
carved cupboard linings were gone, whilst most of the fine wainscotting and bolection moulding was
marked, hacked, and gouged, or covered up altogether with cheap wall-paper. In general, the survey
did not yield as much as Ward had somehow expected; but it was at least exciting to stand within the
ancestral walls which had housed such a man of horror as Joseph Curwen. He saw with a thrill that a
monogram had been very carefully effaced from the ancient brass knocker.
From then until after the close of school Ward spent his time on the photostatic copy of the
Hutchinson cipher and the accumulation of local Curwen data. The former still proved unyielding;
but of the latter he obtained so much, and so many clues to similar data elsewhere, that he was ready
by July to make a trip to New London and New York to consult old letters whose presence in those
places was indicated. This trip was very fruitful, for it brought him the Fenner letters with their
terrible description of the Pawtuxet farmhouse raid, and the Nightingale-Talbot letters in which he
learned of the portrait painted on a panel of the Curwen library. This matter of the portrait interested
him particularly, since he would have given much to know just what Joseph Curwen looked like; and
he decided to make a second search of the house in Olney Court to see if there might not be some
trace of the ancient features beneath peeling coats of later paint or layers of mouldy wall-paper.
Early in August that search took place, and Ward went carefully over the walls of every room
sizeable enough to have been by any possibility the library of the evil builder. He paid especial
attention to the large panels of such overmantels as still remained; and was keenly excited after about
an hour, when on a broad area above the fireplace in a spacious ground-floor room he became
certain that the surface brought out by the peeling of several coats of paint was sensibly darker than
any ordinary interior paint or the wood beneath it was likely to have been. A few more careful tests
with a thin knife, and he knew that he had come upon an oil portrait of great extent. With truly
scholarly restraint the youth did not risk the damage which an immediate attempt to uncover the
hidden picture with the knife might have been, but just retired from the scene of his discovery to
enlist expert help. In three days he returned with an artist of long experience, Mr. Walter C. Dwight,
whose studio is near the foot of College Hill; and that accomplished restorer of paintings set to
work at once with proper methods and chemical substances. Old Asa and his wife were duly excited
over their strange visitors, and were properly reimbursed for this invasion of their domestic hearth.
As day by the day the work of restoration progressed, Charles Ward looked on with growing
interest at the lines and shades gradually unveiled after their long oblivion. Dwight had begun at the
bottom; hence since the picture was a three-quarter-length one, the face did not come out for some
time. It was meanwhile seen that the subject was a spare, well-shaped man with dark-blue coat,
embroidered waistcoat, black satin small-clothes, and white silk stockings, seated in a carved chair
against the background of a window with wharves and ships beyond. When the head came out it was
observed to bear a neat Albemarle wig, and to possess a thin, calm, undistinguished face which
seemed somehow familiar to both Ward and the artist. Only at the very last, though, did the restorer
and his client begin to grasp with astonishment at the details of that lean, pallid visage, and to
recognise with a touch of awe the dramatic trick which heredity had played. For it took the final bath
of oil and the final stroke of the delicate scraper to bring out fully the expression which centuries
had hidden; and to confront the bewildered Charles Dexter Ward, dweller in the past, with his own
living features in the countenance of his horrible great-great-great-grandfather.
Ward brought his parents to see the marvel he had uncovered, and his father at once determined to
purchase the picture despite its execution on stationary panelling. The resemblance to the boy,
despite an appearance of rather great age, was marvellous; and it could be seen that through some
trick of atavism the physical contours of Joseph Curwen had found precise duplication after a
century and a half. Mrs. Ward's resemblance to her ancestor was not at all marked, though she could
recall relatives who had some of the facial characteristics shared by her son and by the bygone
Curwen. She did not relish the discovery, and told her husband that he had better burn the picture
instead of bringing it home. There was, she averred, something unwholesome about it; not only
intrinsically, but in its very resemblance to Charles. Mr. Ward, however, was a practical man of
power and affairs--a cotton manufacturer with extensive mills at Riverpoint in the Pawtuxet Valley--
and not one to listen to feminine scruples. The picture impressed him mightily with its likeness to his
son, and he believed the boy deserved it as a present. In this opinion, it is needless to say, Charles
most heartily concurred; and a few days later Mr. Ward located the owner of the house--a small
rodent-featured person with a guttural accent--and obtained the whole mantel and overmantel bearing
the picture at a curtly fixed price which cut short the impending torrent of unctuous haggling.
It now remained to take off the panelling and remove it to the Ward home, where provisions were
made for its thorough restoration and installation with an electric mock-fireplace in Charles's third-
floor study or library. To Charles was left the task of superintending this removal, and on the twenty-
eighth of August he accompanied two expert workmen from the Crooker decorating firm to the
house in Olney Court, where the mantel and portrait-bearing overmantel were detached with great
care and precision for transportation in the company's motor truck. There was left a space of exposed
brickwork marking the chimney's course, and in this young Ward observed a cubical recess about a
foot square, which must have lain directly behind the head of the portrait. Curious as to what such a
space might mean or contain, the youth approached and looked within; finding beneath the deep
coatings of dust and soot some loose yellowed papers, a crude, thick copybook, and a few
mouldering textile shreds which may have formed the ribbon binding the rest together. Blowing
away the bulk of the dirt and cinders, he took up the book and looked at the bold inscription on its
cover. It was in a hand which he had learned to recognise at the Essex Institute, and proclaimed the
volume as the 'Journall and Notes of Jos: Curwen, Gent. of Prouidence-Plantations, Late of Salem.'
Excited beyond measure by his discovery, Ward shewed the book to the two curious workmen
beside him. Their testimony is absolute as to the nature and genuineness of the finding, and Dr.
Willett relies on them to help establish his theory that the youth was not mad when he began his major
eccentricities. All the other papers were likewise in Curwen's handwriting, and one of them seemed
especially portentous because of its inscription: 'To Him Who Shal Come After, & How He May
Gett Beyonde Time & Ye Spheres.'
Another was in a cipher; the same, Ward hoped, as the Hutchinson cipher which had hitherto
baffled him. A third, and here the searcher rejoiced, seemed to be a key to the cipher; whilst the
fourth and fifth were addressed respectively to: 'Edw: Hutchinson, Armiger' and 'Jedediah Orne,
esq.', 'or Their Heir or Heirs, or Those Represent'g Them.' The sixth and last was inscribed: 'Joseph
Curwen his Life and Travells Bet'n ye yeares 1678 and 1687: Of Whither He Voyag'd, Where He
Stay'd, Whom He Sawe, and What He Learnt.'
3
We have now reached the point from which the more academic school of alienists date Charles
Ward's madness. Upon his discovery the youth had looked immediately at a few of the inner pages of
the book and manuscripts, and had evidently seen something which impressed him tremendously.
Indeed, in shewing the titles to the workmen, he appeared to guard the text itself with peculiar care,
and to labour under a perturbation for which even the antiquarian and genealogical significance of the
find could hardly account. Upon returning home he broke the news with an almost embarrassed air, as
if he wished to convey an idea of its supreme importance without having to exhibit the evidence
itself. He did not even shew the titles to his parents, but simply told them that he had found some
documents in Joseph Curwen's handwriting, 'mostly in cipher', which would have to be studied very
carefully before yielding up their true meaning. It is unlikely that he would have shewn what he did
to the workmen, had it not been for their unconcealed curiousity. As it was he doubtless wished to
avoid any display of peculiar reticence which would increase their discussion of the matter.
That night Charles Ward sat up in his room reading the new-found book and papers, and when day
came he did not desist. His meals, on his urgent request when his mother called to see what was
amiss, were sent up to him; and in the afternoon he appeared only briefly when the men came to install
the Curwen picture and mantelpiece in his study. The next night he slept in snatches in his clothes,
meanwhile wrestling feverishly with the unravelling of the cipher manuscript. In the morning his
mother saw that he was at work on the photostatic copy of the Hutchinson cipher, which he had
frequently shewn her before; but in response to her query he said that the Curwen key could not be
applied to it. That afternoon he abandoned his work and watched the men fascinatedly as they finished
their installation of the picture with its woodwork above a cleverly realistic electric log, setting the
mock-fireplace and overmantel a little out from the north wall as if a chimney existed, and boxing in
the sides with panelling to match the room's. The front panel holding the picture was sawn and hinged
to allow cupboard space behind it. After the workmen went he moved his work into the study and sat
down before it with his eyes half on the cipher and half on the portrait which stared back at him like a
year-adding and century-recalling mirror.
His parents, subsequently recalling his conduct at this period, give interesting details anent the
policy of concealment which he practised. Before servants he seldom hid any paper which he might
by studying, since he rightly assumed that Curwen's intricate and archaic chirography would be too
much for them. With his parents, however, he was more circumspect; and unless the manuscript in
question were a cipher, or a mere mass of cryptic symbols and unknown ideographs (as that entitled
'To Him Who Shal Come After, etc.' seemed to be), he would cover it with some convenient paper
until his caller had departed. At night he kept the papers under lock and key in an antique cabinet of
his, where he also placed them whenever he left the room. He soon resumed fairly regular hours and
habits, except that his long walks and other outside interests seemed to cease. The opening of
school, where he now began his senior year, seemed a great bore to him; and he frequently asserted
his determination never to bother with college. He had, he said, important special investigations to
make, which would provide him with more avenues toward knowledge and the humanities than any
university which the world could boast.
Naturally, only one who had always been more or less studious, eccentric, and solitary could
have pursued this course for many days without attracting notice. Ward, however, was
constitutionally a scholar and a hermit; hence his parents were less surprised than regretful at the
close confinement and secrecy he adopted. At the same time, both his father and mother thought it
odd that he would shew them no scrap of his treasure-trove, nor give any connected account of such
data as he had deciphered. This reticence he explained away as due to a wish to wait until he might
announce some connected revelation, but as the weeks passed without further disclosures there
began to grow up between the youth and his family a kind of constraint; intensified in his mother's
case by her manifest disapproval of all Curwen delvings.
During October Ward began visiting the libraries again, but no longer for the antiquarian matter
of his former days. Witchcraft and magic, occultism and daemonology, were what he sought now;
and when Providence sources proved unfruitful he would take the train for Boston and tap the wealth
of the great library in Copley Square, the Widener Library at Harvard, or the Zion Research Library
in Brookline, where certain rare works on Biblical subjects are available. He bought extensively, and
fitted up a whole additional set of shelves in his study for newly acquired works on uncanny subjects;
while during the Christmas holidays he made a round of out-of-town trips including one to Salem to
consult certain records at the Essex Institute.
About the middle of January, 1920, there entered Ward's bearing an element of triumph which he
did not explain, and he was no more found at work upon the Hutchinson cipher. Instead, he
inaugurated a dual policy of chemical research and record-scanning; fitting up for the one a
laboratory in the unused attic of the house, and for the latter haunting all the sources of vital statistics
in Providence. Local dealers in drugs and scientific supplies, later questioned, gave astonishingly
queer and meaningless catalogues of the substances and instruments he purchased; but clerks at the
State House, the City Hall, and the various libraries agree as to the definite object of his second
interest. He was searching intensely and feverishly for the grave of Joseph Curwen, from whose
slate slab an older generation had so wisely blotted the name.
Little by little there grew upon the Ward family the conviction that something was wrong. Charles
had had freaks and changes of minor interests before, but this growing secrecy and absorption in
strange pursuits was unlike even him. His school work was the merest pretence; and although he
failed in no test, it could be seen that the older application had all vanished. He had other
concernments now; and when not in his new laboratory with a score of obsolete alchemical books,
could be found either poring over old burial records down town or glued to his volumes of occult
lore in his study, where the startlingly--one almost fancied increasingly--similar features of Joseph
Curwen stared blandly at him from the great overmantel on the north wall.
Late in March Ward added to his archive-searching a ghoulish series of rambles about the
various ancient cemeteries of the city. The cause appeared later, when it was learned from City Hall
clerks that he had probably found an important clue. His quest had suddenly shifted from the grave of
Joseph Curwen to that of one Naphthali Field; and this shift was explained when, upon going over the
files that he had been over, the investigators actually found a fragmentary record of Curwen's burial
which had escaped the general obliteration, and which stated that the curious leaden coffin had been
interred '10 ft. S. and 5 ft. W. of Naphthali Field's grave in y-.' The lack of a specified burying-
ground in the surviving entry greatly complicated the search, and Naphthali Field's grave seemed as
elusive as that of Curwen; but here no systematic effacement had existed, and one might reasonably
be expected to stumble on the stone itself even if its record had perished. Hence the rambles--from
which St. John's (the former King's) Churchyard and the ancient Congregational burying-ground in
the midst of Swan Point Cemetery were excluded, since other statistics had shewn that the only
Naphthali Field (obiit 1729) whose grave could have been meant had been a Baptist.
4
It was toward May when Dr. Willett, at the request of the senior Ward, and fortified with all the
Curwen data which the family had gleaned from Charles in his non-secretive days, talked with the
young man. The interview was of little value or conclusiveness, for Willett felt at every moment that
Charles was thorough master of himself and in touch with matters of real importance; but it at least
force the secretive youth to offer some rational explanation of his recent demeanour. Of a pallid,
impassive type not easily shewing embarrassment, Ward seemed quite ready to discuss his pursuits,
though not to reveal their object. He stated that the papers of his ancestor had contained some
remarkable secrets of early scientific knowledge, for the most part in cipher, of an apparent scope
comparable only to the discoveries of Friar Bacon and perhaps surpassing even those. They were,
however, meaningless except when correlated with a body of learning now wholly obsolete; so that
their immediate presentation to a world equipped only with modern science would rob them of all
impressiveness and dramatic significance. To take their vivid place in the history of human thought
they must first be correlated by one familiar with the background out of which they evolved, and to
this task of correlation Ward was now devoting himself. He was seeking to acquire as fast as
possible those neglected arts of old which a true interpreter of the Curwen data must possess, and
hoped in time to made a full announcement and presentation of the utmost interest to mankind and to the
world of thought. Not even Einstein, he declared, could more profoundly revolutionise the current
conception of things.
As to his graveyard search, whose object he freely admitted, but the details of whose progress
he did not relate, he said he had reason to think that Joseph Curwen's mutilated headstone bore certain
mystic symbols--carved from directions in his will and ignorantly spared by those who had effaced
the name--which were absolutely essential to the final solution of his cryptic system. Curwen, he
believed, had wish to guard his secret with care; and had consequently distributed the data in an
exceedingly curious fashion. When Dr. Willett asked to see the mystic documents, Ward displayed
much reluctance and tried to put him off with such things as photostatic copies of the Hutchinson
cipher and Orne formulae and diagrams; but finally shewed him the exteriors of some of the real
Curwen finds--the 'Journall and Notes', the cipher (title in cipher also), and the formula-filled
message 'To Him Who Shal Come After'--and let him glance inside such as were in obscure
characters.
He also opened the diary at a page carefully selected for its innocuousness and gave Willett a
glimpse of Curwen's connected handwriting in English. The doctor noted very closely the crabbed
and complicated letters, and the general aura of the seventeenth century which clung round both
penmanship and style despite the writer's survival into the eighteenth century, and became quickly
certain that the document was genuine. The text itself was relatively trivial, and Willett recalled only
a fragment:
'Wedn. 16 Octr. 1754. My Sloope the Wakeful this Day putt in from London with XX newe Men
pick'd up in ye Indies, Spaniards from Martineco and 2 Dutch Men from Surinam. Ye Dutch Men are
like to Desert from have'g hearde Somewhat ill of these Ventures, but I will see to ye Inducing of
them to Staye. For Mr. Knight Dexter of ye Bay and Book 120 Pieces Camblets, 100 Pieces Assrtd.
Cambleteens, 20 Pieces blue Duffles, 100 Pieces Shalloons, 50 Pieces Calamancoes, 300 Pieces
each, Shendsoy and Humhums. For Mr. Green at ye Elephant 50 Gallon Cyttles, 20 Warm'g Pannes, 15
Bake Cyttles, 10 pr. Smoke'g Tonges. For Mr. Perrigo 1 Sett of Awles. For Mr. Nightingale 50
Reames prime Foolscap. Say'd ye SABAOTH thrice last Nighte but None appear'd. I must heare
more from Mr. H. in Transylvania, tho' it is Harde reach'g him and exceeding strange he can not give
me the Use of What he hath so well us'd these hundred Yeares. Simon hath not writ these V. Weekes,
but I expecte soon hear'g from Him.'
When upon reaching this point Dr. Willett turned the leaf he was quickly checked by Ward, who
almost snatched the book from his grasp. All that the doctor had a chance to see on the newly opened
page was a brief pair of sentences; but these, strangely enough, lingered tenacious in his memory.
They ran: 'Ye Verse from Liber-Damnatus be'g spoke V Roodmasses and IV Hallows-Eves, I am
Hopeful ye Thing is breed'g Outside ye Spheres. It will drawe One who is to Come, if I can make
sure he shal Bee, and he shal think on Past Thinges and look back thro' all ye Yeares, against ye
Which I must have ready ye Saltes or That to make 'em with.'
Willett saw no more, but somehow this small glimpse gave a new and vague terror to the painted
features of Joseph Curwen which stared blandly down from the overmantel. Even after that he
entertained the odd fancy--which his medical skill of course assured him was only a fancy--that the
eyes of the portrait had a sort of wish, if not an actual tendency, to follow young Charles Ward as he
move about the room. He stopped before leaving to study the picture closely, marvelling at its
resemblance to Charles and memorising every minute detail of the cryptical, colourless face, even
down to a slight scar or pit in the smooth brow above the right eye. Cosmo Alexander, he decided,
was a painter worthy of the Scotland that produced Raeburn, and a teacher worthy of his illustrious
pupil Gilbert Stuart.
Assured by the doctor that Charles's mental health was in no danger, but that on the other hand he
was engaged in researches which might prove of real importance, the Wards were more lenient than
they might otherwise have been when during the following June the youth made positive his refusal
to attend college. He had, he declared, studies of much more vital importance to pursue; and intimated
a wish to go abroad the following year in order to avail himself of certain sources of data not
existing in America. The senior Ward, while denying this latter wish as absurd for a boy of only
eighteen, acquiesced regarding the university; so that after a none too brilliant graduation from the
Moses Brown School there ensued for Charles a three-year period of intensive occult study and
graveyard searching. He became recognised as an eccentric, and dropped even more completely
from the sight of his family's friends than he had been before; keeping close to his work and only
occasionally making trips to other cities to consult obscure records. Once he went south to talk to a
strange mulatto who dwelt in a swamp and about whom a newspaper hand printed a curious article.
Again he sought a small village in the Adirondacks whence reports of certain odd ceremonial
practices had come. But still his parents forbade him the trip to the Old World which he desired.
Coming of age in April, 1923, and having previously inherited a small competence from his
maternal grandfather, Ward determined at last to take the European trip hitherto denied him. Of his
proposed itinerary he would say nothing save that the needs of his studies would carry him to many
places, but he promised to write his parents fully and faithfully. When they saw he could not be
dissuaded, they ceased all opposition and helped as best they could; so that in June the young man
sailed for Liverpool with the farewell blessings of his father and mother, who accompanied him to
Boston and waved him out of sight from the White Star pier in Charlestown. Letters soon told of his
safe arrival, and of his securing good quarters in Great Russell Street, London; where he proposed
to stay, shunning all family friends, till he had exhausted the resources of the British Museum in a
certain direction. Of his daily life he wrote by little, for there was little to write. Study and
experiment consumed all his time, and he mentioned a laboratory which he had established in one of
his rooms. That he said nothing of antiquarian rambles in the glamorous old city with its luring
skyline of ancient domes and steeples and its tangles of roads and alleys whose mystic convolutions
and sudden vistas alternately beckon and surprise, was taken by his parents as a good index of the
degree to which his new interests had engrossed his mind.
In June, 1924, a brief note told of his departure for Paris, to which he had before made one or
two flying trips for material in the Bibliothque Nationale. For three months thereafter he sent only
postal cards, giving an address in the Rue St. Jacques and referring to a special search among rare
manuscripts in the library of an unnamed private collector. He avoided acquaintances, and no tourists
brought back reports of having seen him. Then came a silence, and in October the Wards received a
picture card from Prague, Czecho-Slovakia, stating that Charles was in that ancient town for the
purpose of conferring with a certain very aged man supposed to be the last living possessor of some
very curious mediaeval information. He gave an address in the Neustadt, and announced no move till
the following January; when he dropped several cards from Vienna telling of his passage through
that city on the way toward a more easterly region whither one of his correspondents and fellow-
delvers into the occult had invited him.
The next card was from Klausenburg in Transylvania, and told of Ward's progress toward his
destination. He was going to visit a Baron Ferenczy, whose estate lay in the mountains east of Rakus;
and was to be addressed at Rakus in the care of that nobleman. Another card from Rakus a week later,
saying that his host's carriage had met him and that he was leaving the village for the mountains, was
his last message for a considerable time; indeed, he did reply to his parents' frequent letters until
May, when he wrote to discourage the plan of his mother for a meeting in London, Paris, or Rome
during the summer, when the elder Wards were planning to travel to Europe. His researches, he said,
were such that he could not leave his present quarters; while the situation of Baron Ferenczy's castle
did not favour visits. It was on a crag in the dark wooded mountains, and the region was so shunned
by the country folk that normal people could not help feeling ill at ease. Moreover, the Baron was not
a person likely to appeal to correct and conservative New England gentlefolk. His aspect and
manners had idiosyncrasies, and his age was so great as to be disquieting. It would be better, Charles
said, if his parents would wait for his return to Providence; which could scarcely be far distant.
That return did not, however, take place until May 1926, when after a few heralding cards the
young wanderer quietly slipped into New York on the Homeric and traversed the long miles to
Providence by motor-coach, eagerly drinking in the green rolling hills, and fragrant, blossoming
orchards, and the white steepled towns of vernal Connecticut; his first taste of ancient New England
in nearly four years. When the coach crossed the Pawcatuck and entered Rhode Island amidst the
faery goldenness of a late spring afternoon his heart beat with quickened force, and the entry to
Providence along Reservoir and Elmwood Avenues was a breathless and wonderful thing despite the
depths of forbidden lore to which he had delved. At the high square where Broad, Weybosset, and
Empire Streets join, he saw before and below him in the fire of sunset the pleasant, remembered
houses and domes and steeples of the old town; and his head swam curiously as the vehicle rolled
down to the terminal behind the Biltmore, bringing into view the great dome and soft, roof-pierced
greenery of the ancient hill across the river, and the tall colonial spire of the First Baptist Church
limned pink in the magic evening against the fresh springtime verdure of its precipitous background.
Old Providence! It was this place and the mysterious forces of its long, continuous history which
had brought him into being, and which had drawn him back toward marvels and secrets whose
boundaries no prophet might fix. Here lay the arcana, wondrous or dreadful as the case may be, for
which all his years of travel and application had been preparing him. A taxicab whirled him through
Post Office Square with its glimpse of the river, the old Market House, and the head of the bay, and
up the steep curved slope of Waterman Street to Prospect, where the vast gleaming dome and sunset-
flushed Ionic columns of the Christian Science Church beckoned northward. Then eight squares past
the fine old estates his childish eyes had known, and the quaint brick sidewalks so often trodden by
his youthful feet. And at last the little white overtaken farmhouse on the right, on the left the classic
Adam porch and stately facade of the great brick house where he was born. It was twilight, and
Charles Dexter Ward had come home.
5
A school of alienists slightly less academic than Dr. Lyman's assign to Ward's European trip the
beginning of his true madness. Admitting that he was sane when he started, they believe that his
conduct upon returning implies a disastrous change. But even to this claim Dr. Willett refuses to
concede. There was, he insists, something later; and the queerness of the youth at this stage he
attributes to the practice of rituals learned abroad--odd enough things, to be sure, but by no means
implying mental aberration on the part of their celebrant. Ward himself, though visibly aged and
hardened, was still normal in his general reactions; and in several talks with Dr. Willett displayed a
balance which no madman--even an incipient one--could feign continuously for long. What elicited
the notion of insanity at this period were the sounds heard at all hours from Ward's attic laboratory, in
which he kept himself most of the time. There were chantings and repetitions, and thunderous
declamations in uncanny rhythms; and although these sounds were always in Ward's own voice, there
was something in the quality of that voice, and in the accents of the formulae it pronounced, which
could not by chill the blood of every hearer. It was noticed that Nig, the venerable and beloved black
cat of the household, bristled and arched his back perceptibly when certain of the tones were heard.
The odours occasionally wafted from the laboratory were likewise exceedingly strange.
Sometimes they were very noxious, but more often they were aromatic, with a haunting, elusive
quality which seemed to have the power of inducing fantastic images. People who smelled them had
a tendency to glimpse momentary mirages of enormous vistas, with strange hills or endless avenues
of sphinxes and hippogriffs stretching off into infinite distance. Ward did not resume his old-time
rambles, but applied himself diligently to the strange books he had brought home, and to equally
strange delvings within his quarters; explaining that European sources had greatly enlarged the
possibilities of his work, and promising great revelations in the years to come. His older aspect
increased to a startling degree his resemblance to the Curwen portrait in his library; and Dr. Willett
would often pause by the latter after a call, marvelling at the virtual identity, and reflecting that only
the small pit above the picture's right eye now remained to differentiate the long-dead wizard from
the living youth. These calls of Willett's, undertaken at the request of the senior Wards, were curious
affairs. Ward at no time repulsed the doctor, but the latter saw that he could never reach the young
man's inner psychology. Frequently he noted peculiar things about; little wax images of grotesque
design on the shelves or tables, and the half-erased remnants of circles, triangles, and pentagrams in
chalk or charcoal on the cleared central space of the large room. And always in the night those
rhythms and incantations thundered, till it became very difficult to keep servants or suppress furtive
talk of Charles's madness.
In January, 1927, a peculiar incident occurred. One night about midnight, as Charles was chanting
a ritual whose weird cadence echoed unpleasantly through the house below, there came a sudden
gust of chill wind from the bay, and a faint, obscure trembling of the earth which everyone in the
neighbourhood noted. At the same time the cat exhibited phenomenal traces of fright, while dogs
bayed for as much as a mile around. This was the prelude to a sharp thunderstorm, anomalous for the
season, which brought with it such a crash that Mr. and Mrs. Ward believed the house had been
struck. They rushed upstairs to see what damage had been done, but Charles met them at the door to
the attic; pale, resolute, and portentous, with an almost fearsome combination of triumph and
seriousness on his face. He assured them that the house had not really been struck, and that the storm
would soon be over. They paused, and looking through a window saw that he was indeed right; for
the lightning flashed farther and farther off, whilst the trees ceased to bend in the strange frigid gust
from the water. The thunder sank to a sort of dull mumbling chuckle and finally died away. Stars came
out, and the stamp of triumph on Charles Ward's face crystallised into a very singular expression.
For two months or more after this incident Ward was less confined than usual to his laboratory.
He exhibited a curious interest in the weather, and made odd inquires about the date of the spring
thawing of the ground. One night late in March he left the house after midnight, and did not return till
almost morning; when his mother, being wakeful, heard a rumbling motor draw up to the carriage
entrance. Muffled oaths could be distinguished, and Mrs. Ward, rising and going to the window, saw
four dark figures removing a long, heavy box from a truck at Charles's direction and carrying it
within by the side door. She heard laboured breathing and ponderous footfalls on the stairs, and
finally a dull thumping in the attic; after which the footfalls descended again, and the four reappeared
outside and drove off in their truck.
The next day Charles resumed his strict attic seclusion, drawing down the dark shades of his
laboratory windows and appearing to be working on some metal substance. He would open the door
to no one, and steadfastly refused all proffered food. About noon a wrenching sound followed by a
terrible cry and a fall were heard, but when Mrs. Ward rapped at the door her son at length answered
faintly, and told her that nothing had gone amiss. The hideous and indescribable stench now welling
out was absolutely harmless and unfortunately necessary. Solitude was the one prime essential, and
he would appear later for dinner. That afternoon, after the conclusion of some odd hissing sounds
which came from behind the locked portal, he did finally appear; wearing an extremely haggard
aspect and forbidding anyone to enter the laboratory upon any pretext. This, indeed, proved the
beginning of a new policy of secrecy; for never afterward was any other person permitted to visit
either the mysterious garret workroom or the adjacent storeroom which he cleaned out, furnished
roughly, and added to his inviolable private domain as a sleeping apartment. Here he lived, with
books brought up from his library beneath, till the time he purchased the Pawtuxet bungalow and
moved to it all his scientific effects.
In the evening Charles secured the paper before the rest of the family and damaged part of it
through an apparent accident. Later on Dr. Willett, having fixed the date from statements by various
members of the household, looked up an intact copy at the Journal office and found that in the
destroyed section the following small item had occurred:
Nocturnal Diggers Surprised in North Burial Ground
Robert Hart, night watchman at the North Burial Ground, this morning discovered a party of
several men with a motor truck in the oldest part of the cemetery, but apparently frightened them off
before they had accomplished whatever their object may have been.
The discovery took place at about four o'clock, when Hart's attention was attracted by the sound
of a motor outside his shelter. Investigating, he saw a large truck on the main drive several rods
away; but could not reach it before the noise of his feet on the gravel had revealed his approach. The
men hastily placed a large box in the truck and drove away toward the street before they could be
overtaken; and since no known grave was disturbed, Hart believes that this box was an object which
they wished to bury.
The diggers must have been at work for a long while before detection, for Hart found an
enormous hold dug at a considerable distance back from the roadway in the lot of Amasa Field,
where most of the old stones have long ago disappeared. The hole, a place as large and deep as a
grave, was empty; and did not coincide with any interment mentioned in the cemetery records.
Sergt. Riley of the Second Station viewed the spot and gave the opinion that the hole was dug by
bootleggers rather gruesomely and ingeniously seeking a safe cache for liquor in a place not likely
to be disturbed. In reply to questions Hart said he though the escaping truck had headed up
Rochambeau Avenue, though he could not be sure.
During the next few days Charles Ward was seldom seen by his family. Having added sleeping
quarters to his attic realm, he kept closely to himself there, ordering food brought to the door and not
taking it in until after the servant had gone away. The droning of monotonous formulae and the
chanting of bizarre rhythms recurred at intervals, while at other times occasional listeners could
detect the sound of tinkling glass, hissing chemicals, running water, or roaring gas flames. Odours of
the most unplaceable quality, wholly unlike any before noted, hung at times around the door; and the
air of tension observable in the young recluse whenever he did venture briefly forth was such as to
excite the keenest speculation. Once he made a hasty trip to the Athenaeum for a book he required,
and again he hired a messenger to fetch him a highly obscure volume from Boston. Suspense was
written portentously over the whole situation, and both the family and Dr. Willett confessed
themselves wholly at a loss what to do or think about it.
6
Then on the fifteenth of April a strange development occurred. While nothing appeared to grow
different in kind, there was certainly a very terrible difference in degree; and Dr. Willett somehow
attaches great significance to the change. The day was Good Friday, a circumstance of which the
servants made much, but which others quite naturally dismiss as an irrelevant coincidence. Late in the
afternoon young Ward began repeating a certain formula in a singularly loud voice, at the same time
burning some substance so pungent that its fumes escaped over the entire house. The formula was so
plainly audible in the hall outside the locked door that Mrs. Ward could not help memorising it as she
waited and listened anxiously, and later on she was able to write it down at Dr. Willett's request. It ran
as follows, and experts have told Dr. Willett that its very close analogue can be found in the mystic
writings of "Eliphas Levi", that cryptic soul who crept through a crack in the forbidden door and
glimpsed the frightful vistas of the void beyond:
'Per Adonai Eloim, Adonai Jehova, Adonai Sabaoth, Metraton On Agla Mathon, verbum
pythonicum, mysterium salamandrae, conventus sylvorum, antra gnomorum, daemonia Coeli Gad,
Almonsin, Gibor, Jehosua, Evam, Zariatnatmik, veni, veni, veni.'
This had been going on for two hours without change or intermission when over all the
neighbourhood a pandaemoniac howling of dogs set in. The extent of this howling can be judged
from the space it received in the papers the next day, but to those in the Ward household it was
overshadowed by the odour which instantly followed it; a hideous, all-pervasive odour which none
of them had ever smelt before or have ever smelt since. In the midst of this mephitic flood there
came a very perceptible flash like that of lightning, which would have been blinding and impressive
but for the daylight around; and then was heard the voice that no listener can ever forget because of
its thunderous remoteness, its incredible depth, and its eldritch dissimilarity to Charles Ward's voice.
It shook the house, and was clearly heard by at least two neighbours above the howling of the dogs.
Mrs. Ward, who had been listening in despair outside her son's locked laboratory, shivered as she
recognised its hellish imports; for Charles had told of its evil fame in dark books, and of the manner
in which it had thundered, according to the Fenner letter, above the doomed Pawtuxet farmhouse on
the night of Joseph Curwen's annihilation. There was no mistaking that nightmare phrase, for Charles
had described it too vividly in the old days when he had talked frankly of his Curwen investigations.
And yet it was only this fragment of an archaic and forgotten language: 'DIES MIES JESCHET
BOENE DOESEF DOUVEMA ENITEMAUS.'
Close upon this thundering there came a momentary darkening of the daylight, though sunset was
still an hour distant, and then a puff of added odour different from the first but equally unknown and
intolerable. Charles was chanting again now and his mother could hear syllables that sounded like 'Yi
nash Yog Sothoth he lgeb throdog'--ending in a 'Yah!' whose maniacal force mounted in an ear-
splitting crescendo. A second later all previous memories were effaced by the wailing scream which
burst out with frantic explosiveness and gradually changed form to a paroxysm of diabolic and
hysterical laughter. Mrs. Ward, with the mingled fear and blind courage of maternity, advanced and
knocked affrightedly at the concealing panels, but obtained no sign of recognition. She knocked
again, but paused nervelessly as a second shriek arose, this one unmistakably in the familiar voice of
her son, and sounding concurrently with the still bursting cachinnations of that other voice. Presently
she fainted, although she is still unable to recall the precise and immediate cause. Memory
sometimes makes merciful deletions.
Mr. Ward returned from the business section at about quarter past six; and not finding his wife
downstairs, was told by the frightened servants that she was probably watching at Charles's door,
from which the sounds had been far stranger than ever before. Mounting the stairs at once, he saw
Mrs. Ward stretched out at full length on the floor of the corridor outside the laboratory; and
realising that she had fainted, hastened to fetch a glass of water from a set bowl in a neighbouring
alcove. Dashing the cold fluid in her face, he was heartened to observe an immediate response on
her part, and was watching the bewildered opening of her eyes when a chill shot through him and
threatened to reduce him to the very state from which she was emerging. For the seemingly silent
laboratory was not as silent as it had appeared to be, but held the murmurs of a tense, muffled
conversation in tones too low for comprehension, yet of a quality profoundly disturbing to the soul.
It was not, of course, new for Charles to mutter formulae; but this muttering was definitely
different. It was so palpably a dialogue, or imitation of a dialogue, with the regular alteration of
inflections suggesting question and answer, statement and response. One voice was undisguisedly
that of Charles, but the other had a depth and hollowness which the youth's best powers of
ceremonial mimicry had scarcely approached before. There was something hideous, blasphemous,
and abnormal about it, and but for a cry from his recovering wife which cleared his mind by arousing
his protective instincts it is not likely that Theodore Howland Ward could have maintained for nearly
a year more his old boast that he had never fainted. As it was, he seized his wife in his arms and bore
her quickly downstairs before she could notice the voices which had so horribly disturbed him.
Even so, however, he was not quick enough to escape catching something himself which caused him
to stagger dangerously with his burden. For Mrs. Ward's cry had evidently been heard by others than
he, and there had come in response to it from behind the locked door the first distinguishable words
which that masked and terrible colloquy had yielded. They were merely an excited caution in
Charles's own voice, but somehow their implications held a nameless fright for the father who
overheard them. The phrase was just this: 'Sshh!--write!'
Mr. and Mrs. Ward conferred at some length after dinner, and the former resolved to have a firm
and serious talk with Charles that very night. No matter how important the object, such conduct could
no longer be permitted; for these latest developments transcended every limit of sanity and formed a
menace to the order and nervous well-being of the entire household. The youth must indeed have
taken complete leave of his senses, since only downright madness could have prompted the wild
screams and imaginary conversations in assumed voices which the present day had brought forth. All
this must be stopped, or Mrs. Ward would be made ill and the keeping of servants become an
impossibility.
Mr. Ward rose at the close of the meal and started upstairs for Charles's laboratory. On the third
floor, however, he paused at the sounds which he heard proceeding from the now disused library of
his son. Books were apparently being flung about and papers wildly rustled, and upon stepping to the
door Mr. Ward beheld the youth within, excitedly assembling a vast armful of literary matter of every
size and shape. Charles's aspect was very drawn and haggard, and he dropped his entire load with a
start at the sound of his father's voice. At the elder man's command he sat down, and for some time
listened to the admonitions he had so long deserved. There was no scene. At the end of the lecture he
agreed that his father was right, and that his noises, mutterings, incantations, and chemical odours
were indeed inexcusable nuisances. He agreed to a policy of great quiet, though insisting on a
prolongation of his extreme privacy. Much of his future work, he said, was in any case purely book
research; and he could obtain quarters elsewhere for any such vocal rituals as might be necessary at
a later stage. For the fright and fainting of his mother he expressed the keenest contrition, and
explained that the conversation later heard was part of an elaborate symbolism designed to create a
certain mental atmosphere. His use of abstruse technical terms somewhat bewildered Mr. Ward, but
the parting impression was one of undeniable sanity and poise despite a mysterious tension of the
utmost gravity. The interview was really quite inconclusive, and as Charles picked up his armful and
left the room Mr. Ward hardly knew what to make of the entire business. It was as mysterious as the
death of poor old Nig, whose stiffening form had been found an hour before in the basement, with
staring eyes and fear-distorted mouth.
Driven by some vague detective instinct, the bewildered parent now glanced curiously at the
vacant shelves to see what his son had taken up to the attic. The youth's library was plainly and
rigidly classified, so that one might tell at a glance the books or at least the kind of books which had
been withdrawn. On this occasion Mr. Ward was astonished to find that nothing of the occult or the
antiquarian, beyond what had been previously removed, was missing. These new withdrawals were
all modern items; histories, scientific treatises, geographies, manuals of literature, philosophic
works, and certain contemporary newspapers and magazines. It was a very curious shift from Charles
Ward's recent run of reading, and the father paused in a growing vortex of perplexity and an
engulfing sense of strangeness. The strangeness was a very poignant sensation, and almost clawed at
his chest as he strove to see just what was wrong around him. Something was indeed wrong, and
tangibly as well as spiritually so. Ever since he had been in this room he had known that something
was amiss, and at last it dawned upon him what it was.
On the north wall rose still the ancient carved overmantel from the house in Olney Court, but to
the cracked and precariously restored oils of the large Curwen portrait disaster had come. Time and
unequal heating had done their work at last, and at some time since the room's last cleaning the worst
had happened. Peeling clear of the wood, curling tighter and tighter, and finally crumbling into small
bits with what must have been malignly silent suddenness, the portrait of Joseph Curwen had resigned
forever its staring surveillance of the youth it so strangely resembled, and now lay scattered on the
floor as a thin coating of fine blue-grey dust.
IV. A Mutation and a Madness
1
In the week following that memorable Good Friday Charles Ward was seen more often than usual,
and was continually carrying books between his library and the attic laboratory. His actions were
quiet and rational, but he had a furtive, hunted look which his mother did not like, and developed an
incredibly ravenous appetite as gauged by his demands upon the cook. Dr. Willett had been told of
those Friday noises and happenings, and on the following Tuesday had a long conversation with the
youth in the library where the picture stared no more. The interview was, as always, inconclusive;
but Willett is still ready to swear that the youth was sane and himself at the time. He held out
promises of an early revelation, and spoke of the need of securing a laboratory elsewhere. At the
loss of the portrait he grieved singularly little considering his first enthusiasm over it, but seemed to
find something of positive humour in its sudden crumbling.
About the second week Charles began to be absent from the house for long periods, and one day
when good old black Hannah came to help with the spring cleaning she mentioned his frequent visits
to the old house in Olney Court, where he would come with a large valise and perform curious
delvings in the cellar. He was always very liberal to her and to old Asa, but seemed more worried
than he used to be; which grieved her very much, since she had watched him grow up from birth.
Another report of his doings came from Pawtuxet, where some friends of the family saw him at a
distance a surprising number of times. He seemed to haunt the resort and canoe-house of Rhodes-on-
the-Pawtuxet, and subsequent inquiries by Dr. Willett at that place brought out the fact that his
purpose was always to secure access to the rather hedged-in river-bank, along which he would walk
toward the north, usually not reappearing for a very long while.
Late in May came a momentary revival of ritualistic sounds in the attic laboratory which brought a
stern reproof from Mr. Ward and a somewhat distracted promise of amendment from Charles. It
occurred one morning, and seemed to form a resumption of the imaginary conversation noted on that
turbulent Good Friday. The youth was arguing or remonstrating hotly with himself, for there
suddenly burst forth a perfectly distinguishable series of clashing shouts in differentiated tones like
alternate demands and denials which caused Mrs. Ward to run upstairs and listen at the door. She
could hear no more than a fragment whose only plain words were 'must have it red for three months',
and upon her knocking all sounds ceased at once. When Charles was later questioned by his father he
said that there were certain conflicts of spheres of consciousness which only great skill could
avoid, but which he would try to transfer to other realms.
About the middle of June a queer nocturnal incident occurred. In the early evening there had been
some noise and thumping in the laboratory upstairs, and Mr. Ward was on the point of investigating
when it suddenly quieted down. That midnight, after the family had retired, the butler was
nightlocking the front door when according to his statement Charles appeared somewhat blunderingly
and uncertainly at the foot of the stairs with a large suitcase and made signs that he wished egress.
The youth spoke no word, but the worthy Yorkshireman caught one sight of his fevered eyes and
trembled causelessly. He opened the door and young Ward went out, but in the morning he presented
his resignation to Mrs. Ward. There was, he said, something unholy in the glance Charles had fixed
on him. It was no way for a young gentleman to look at an honest person, and he could not possibly
stay another night. Mrs. Ward allowed the man to depart, but she did not value his statement highly.
To fancy Charles in a savage state that night was quite ridiculous, for as long as she had remained
awake she had heard faint sounds from the laboratory above; sounds as if of sobbing and pacing, and
of a sighing which told only of despair's profoundest depths. Mrs. Ward had grown used to listening
for sounds in the night, for the mystery of her son was fast driving all else from her mind.
The next evening, much as on another evening nearly three months before, Charles Ward seized
the newspaper very early and accidentally lost the main section. This matter was not recalled till
later, when Dr. Willett began checking up loose ends and searching out missing links here and there.
In the Journal office he found the section which Charles had lost, and marked two items as of
possible significance. They were as follows:
More Cemetery Delving
It was this morning discovered by Robert Hart, night watchman at the North Burial Ground, that
ghouls were again at work in the ancient portion of the cemetery. The grave of Ezra Weeden, who
was born in 1740 and died in 1824 according to his uprooted and savagely splintered slate headstone,
was found excavated and rifled, the work being evidently done with a spade stolen from an adjacent
tool-shed.
Whatever the contents may have been after more than a century of burial, all was gone except a
few slivers of decayed wood. There were no wheel tracks, but the police have measured a single set
of footprints which they found in the vicinity, and which indicate the boots of a man of refinement.
Hart is inclined to link this incident with the digging discovered last March, when a party in a
motor truck were frightened away after making a deep excavation; but Sergt. Riley of the Second
Station discounts this theory and points to vital differences in the two cases. In March the digging had
been in a spot where no grave was known; but this time a well-marked and cared-for grave had been
rifled with every evidence of deliberate purpose, and with a conscious malignity expressed in the
splintering of the slab which had been intact up to the day before.
Members of the Weeden family, notified of the happening, expressed their astonishment and
regret; and were wholly unable to think of any enemy who would care to violate the grave of their
ancestor. Hazard Weeden of 598 Angell Street recalls a family legend according to which Ezra
Weeden was involved in some very peculiar circumstances, not dishonourable to himself, shortly
before the Revolution; but of any modern feud or mystery he is frankly ignorant. Inspector
Cunningham has been assigned to the case, and hopes to uncover some valuable clues in the near
future.
Dogs Noisy in Pawtuxet
Residents of Pawtuxet were aroused about 3 a.m. today by a phenomenal baying of dogs which
seemed to centre near the river just north of Rhodes-on-the-Pawtuxet. The volume and quality of the
howling were unusually odd, according to most who heard it; and Fred Lemdin, night watchman at
Rhodes, declares it was mixed with something very like the shrieks of a man in mortal terror and
agony. A sharp and very brief thunderstorm, which seemed to strike somewhere near the bank of the
river, put an end to the disturbance. Strange and unpleasant odours, probably from the oil tanks along
the bay, are popularly linked with this incident; and may have had their share in exciting the dogs.
The aspect of Charles now became very haggard and hunted, and all agreed in retrospect that he
may have wished at this period to make some statement or confession from which sheer terror
withheld him. The morbid listening of his mother in the night brought out the fact that he made
frequent sallies abroad under cover of darkness, and most of the more academic alienists unite at
present in charging him with the revolting cases of vampirism which the press so sensationally
reported about this time, but which have not yet been definitely traced to any known perpetrator.
These cases, too recent and celebrated to need detailed mention, involved victims of every age and
type and seemed to cluster around two distinct localities; the residential hill and the North End, near
the Ward home, and the suburban districts across the Cranston line near Pawtuxet. Both late
wayfarers and sleepers with open windows were attacked, and those who lived to tell the tale spoke
unanimously of a lean, lithe, leaping monster with burning eyes which fastened its teeth in the throat
or upper arm and feasted ravenously.
Dr. Willett, who refuses to date the madness of Charles Ward as far back as even this, is cautious
in attempting to explain these horrors. He has, he declares, certain theories of his own; and limits his
positive statements to a peculiar kind of negation: 'I will not,' he says, 'state who or what I believe
perpetrated these attacks and murders, but I will declare that Charles Ward was innocent of them. I
have reason to be sure he was ignorant of the taste of blood, as indeed his continued anaemic decline
and increasing pallor prove better than any verbal argument. Ward meddled with terrible things, but
he has paid for it, and he was never a monster or a villain. As for now--I don't like to think. A change
came, and I'm content to believe that the old Charles Ward died with it. His soul did, anyhow, for that
mad flesh that vanished from Waite's hospital had another.'
Willett speaks with authority, for he was often at the Ward home attending Mrs. Ward, whose
nerves had begun to snap under the strain. Her nocturnal listening had bred some morbid
hallucinations which she confided to the doctor with hesitancy, and which he ridiculed in talking to
her, although they made him ponder deeply when alone. These delusions always concerned the faint
sounds which she fancied she heard in the attic laboratory and bedroom, and emphasised the
occurrence of muffled sighs and sobbings at the most impossible times. Early in July Willett ordered
Mrs. Ward to Atlantic City for an indefinite recuperative sojourn, and cautioned both Mr. Ward and
the haggard and elusive Charles to write her only cheering letters. It is probably to this enforced and
reluctant escape that she owes her life and continued sanity.
2
Not long after his mother's departure, Charles Ward began negotiating for the Pawtuxet
bungalow. It was a squalid little wooden edifice with a concrete garage, perched high on the
sparsely settled bank of the river slightly above Rhodes, but for some odd reason the youth would
have nothing else. He gave the real-estate agencies no peace till one of them secured it for him at an
exorbitant price from a somewhat reluctant owner, and as soon as it was vacant he took possession
under cover of darkness,, transporting in a great closed van the entire contents of his attic laboratory,
including the books both weird and modern which he had borrowed from his study. He had this van
loaded in the black small hours, and his father recalls only a drowsy realisation of stifled oaths and
stamping feet on the night the goods were taken away. After that Charles moved back to his own old
quarters on the third floor, and never haunted the attic again.
To the Pawtuxet bungalow Charles transferred all the secrecy with which he had surrounded his
attic realm, save that he now appeared to have two sharers of his mysteries; a villainous-looking
Portuguese half-caste from the South Main St. waterfront who acted as a servant, and a thin, scholarly
stranger with dark glasses and a stubbly full beard of dyed aspect whose status was evidently that of
a colleague. Neighbours vainly tried to engage these odd persons in conversation. The mulatto
Gomes spoke very little English, and the bearded man, who gave his name as Dr. Allen, voluntarily
followed his example. Ward himself tried to be more affable, but succeeded only in provoking
curiousity with his rambling accounts of chemical research. Before long queer tales began to
circulate regarding the all-night burning of lights; and somewhat later, after this burning had suddenly
ceased, there rose still queerer tales of disproportionate orders of meat from the butcher's and of the
muffled shouting, declamation, rhythmic chanting, and screaming supposed to come from some very
deep cellar below the place. Most distinctly the new and strange household was bitterly disliked by
the honest bourgeoisie of the vicinity, and it is not remarkable that dark hints were advanced
connecting the hated establishment with the current epidemic of vampiristic attacks and murders;
especially since the radius of that plague seemed now confined wholly to Pawtuxet and the adjacent
streets of Edgewood.
Ward spent most of his time at the bungalow, but slept occasionally at home and was still
reckoned a dweller beneath his father's roof. Twice he was absent from the city on week-long trips,
whose destinations have not yet been discovered. He grew steadily paler and more emaciated even
than before, and lacked some of his former assurance when repeating to Dr. Willett his old, old story
of vital research and future revelations. Willett often waylaid him at his father's house, for the elder
Ward was deeply worried and perplexed, and wished his son to get as much sound oversight as
could be managed in the case of so secretive and independent an adult. The doctor still insists that the
youth was sane even as late as this, and adduces many a conversation to prove his point.
About September the vampirism declined, but in the following January almost became involved in
serious trouble. For some time the nocturnal arrival and departure of motor trucks at the Pawtuxet
bungalow had been commented upon, and at this juncture an unforeseen hitch exposed the nature of at
least one item of their contents. In a lonely spot near Hope Valley had occurred one of the frequent
sordid waylaying of trucks by "hi-jackers" in quest of liquor shipments, but this time the robbers had
been destined to receive the greater shock. For the long cases they seized proved upon opening to
contain some exceedingly gruesome things; so gruesome, in fact, that the matter could not be kept
quiet amongst the denizens of the underworld. The thieves had hastily buried what they discovered,
but when the State Police got wind of the matter a careful search was made. A recently arrived
vagrant, under promise of immunity from prosecution on any additional charge, at last consented to
guide a party of troopers to the spot; and there was found in that hasty cache a very hideous and
shameful thing. It would not be well for the national--or even the international--sense of decorum if
the public were ever to know what was uncovered by that awestruck party. There was no mistaking it,
even by those far from studious officers; and telegrams to Washington ensued with feverish rapidity.
The cases were addressed to Charles Ward at his Pawtuxet bungalow, and State and Federal
officials at once paid him a very forceful and serious call. They found him pallid and worried with
his two odd companions, and received from him what seemed to be a valid explanation and evidence
of innocence. He had needed certain anatomical specimens as part of a programme of research
whose depth and genuineness anyone who had known him in the last decade could prove, and had
ordered the required kind and number from agencies which he had thought as reasonably legitimate
as such things can be. Of the identity of the specimens he had known absolutely nothing, and was
properly shocked when the inspectors hinted at the monstrous effect on public sentiment and national
dignity which a knowledge of the matter would produce. In this statement he was firmly sustained by
his bearded colleague Dr. Allen, whose oddly hollow voice carried even more conviction than his
own nervous tones; so that in the end the officials took no action, but carefully set down the New
York name and address which Ward gave them a basis for a search which came to nothing. It is only
fair to add that the specimens were quickly and quietly restored to their proper places, and that the
general public will never know of their blasphemous disturbance.
On February 9, 1928, Dr. Willett received a letter from Charles Ward which he considers of
extraordinary importance, and about which he has frequently quarrelled with Dr. Lyman. Lyman
believes that this note contains positive proof of a well-developed case of dementia praecox, but
Willett on the other hand regards it as the last perfectly sane utterance of the hapless youth. He calls
especial attention to the normal character of the penmanship; which though shewing traces of
shattered nerves, is nevertheless distinctly Ward's own. The text in full is as follows:
100 Prospect St. Providence, R.I., February 8, 1928.
Dear Dr. Willett:-
I feel that at last the time has come for me to make the disclosures which I have so long promised
you, and for which you have pressed me so often. The patience you have shewn in waiting, and the
confidence you have shewn in my mind and integrity, are things I shall never cease to appreciate.
And now that I am ready to speak, I must own with humiliation that no triumph such as I dreamed of
can ever be mine. Instead of triumph I have found terror, and my talk with you will not be a boast of
victory but a plea for help and advice in saving both myself and the world from a horror beyond all
human conception or calculation. You recall what those Fenner letters said of the old raiding party at
Pawtuxet. That must all be done again, and quickly. Upon us depends more than can be put into words-
-all civilisation, all natural law, perhaps even the fate of the solar system and the universe. I have
brought to light a monstrous abnormality, but I did it for the sake of knowledge. Now for the sake of
all life and Nature you must help me thrust it back into the dark again.
I have left that Pawtuxet place forever, and we must extirpate everything existing there, alive or
dead. I shall not go there again, and you must not believe it if you ever hear that I am there. I will tell
you why I say this when I see you. I have come home for good, and wish you would call on me at the
very first moment that you can spare five or six hours continuously to hear what I have to say. It will
take that long--and believe me when I tell you that you never had a more genuine professional duty
than this. My life and reason are the very least things which hang in the balance.
I dare not tell my father, for he could not grasp the whole thing. But I have told him of my danger,
and he has four men from a detective agency watching the house. I don't know how much good they
can do, for they have against them forces which even you could scarcely envisage or acknowledge.
So come quickly if you wish to see me alive and hear how you may help to save the cosmos from
stark hell.
Any time will do--I shall not be out of the house. Don't telephone ahead, for there is no telling
who or what may try to intercept you. And let us pray to whatever gods there be that nothing may
prevent this meeting.
In utmost gravity and desperation,
Charles Dexter Ward.
P.S. Shoot Dr. Allen on sight and dissolve his body in acid. Don't burn it.
Dr. Willett received this note about 10:30 a.m., and immediately arranged to spare the whole late
afternoon and evening for the momentous talk, letting it extend on into the night as long as might be
necessary. He planned to arrive about four o'clock, and through all the intervening hours was so
engulfed in every sort of wild speculation that most of his tasks were very mechanically performed.
Maniacal as the letter would have sounded to a stranger, Willett had seen too much of Charles Ward's
oddities to dismiss it as sheer raving. That something very subtle, ancient, and horrible was hovering
about he felt quite sure, and the reference to Dr. Allen could almost be comprehended in view of
what Pawtuxet gossip said of Ward's enigmatical colleague. Willett had never seen the man, but had
heard much of his aspect and bearing, and could not but wonder what sort of eyes those much-
discussed dark glasses might conceal.
Promptly at four Dr. Willett presented himself at the Ward residence, but found to his annoyance
that Charles had not adhered to his determination to remain indoors. The guards were there, but said
that the young man seemed to have lost part of his timidity. He had that morning done much apparently
frightened arguing and protesting over the telephone, one of the detectives said, replying to some
unknown voice with phrases such as 'I am very tired and must rest a while', 'I can't receive anyone for
some time', 'you'll have to excuse me', 'Please postpone decisive action till we can arrange some sort
of compromise', or 'I am very sorry, but I must take a complete vacation from everything; I'll talk with
you later.' Then, apparently gaining boldness through meditation, he had slipped out so quietly that no
one had seen him depart or knew that he had gone until he returned about one o'clock and entered the
house without a word. He had gone upstairs, where a bit of his fear must have surged back; for he
was heard to cry out in a highly terrified fashion upon entering his library, afterward trailing off into
a kind of choking gasp. When, however, the butler had gone to inquire what the trouble was, he had
appeared at the door with a great show of boldness, and had silently gestured the man away in a
manner that terrified him unaccountably. Then he had evidently done some rearranging of his shelves,
for a great clattering and thumping and creaking ensued; after which he had reappeared and left at
once. Willett inquired whether or not any message had been left, but was told that there was none.
The butler seemed queerly disturbed about something in Charles's appearance and manner, and asked
solicitously if there was much hope for a cure of his disordered nerves.
For almost two hours Dr. Willett waited vainly in Charles Ward's library, watching the dusty
shelves with their wide gaps where books had been removed, and smiling grimly at the panelled
overmantel on the north wall, whence a year before the suave features of old Joseph Curwen had
looked mildly down. After a time the shadows began to gather, and the sunset cheer gave place to a
vague growing terror which flew shadow-like before the night. Mr. Ward finally arrived, and
shewed much surprise and anger at his son's absence after all the pains which had been taken to guard
him. He had not known of Charles's appointment, and promised to notify Willett when the youth
returned. In bidding the doctor goodnight he expressed his utter perplexity at his son's condition, and
urged his caller to do all he could to restore the boy to normal poise. Willett was glad to escape
from that library, for something frightful and unholy seemed to haunt it; as if the vanished picture had
left behind a legacy of evil. He had never liked that picture; and even now, strong-nerved though he
was, there lurked a quality in its vacant panel which made him feel an urgent need to get out into the
pure air as soon as possible.
3
The next morning Willett received a message from the senior Ward, saying that Charles was still
absent. Mr. Ward mentioned that Dr. Allen had telephoned him to say that Charles would remain at
Pawtuxet for some time, and that he must not be disturbed. This was necessary because Allen himself
was suddenly called away for an indefinite period, leaving the researches in need of Charles's
constant oversight. Charles sent his best wishes, and regretted any bother his abrupt change of plans
might have caused. In listening to this message Mr. Ward heard Dr. Allen's voice for the first time,
and it seemed to excite some vague and elusive memory which could not be actually placed, but
which was disturbing to the point of fearfulness.
Faced by these baffling and contradictory reports, Dr. Willett was frankly at a loss what to do.
The frantic earnestness of Charles's note was not to be denied, yet what could one think of its writer's
immediate violation of his own expressed policy? Young Ward had written that his delvings had
become blasphemous and menacing, that they and his bearded colleague must be extirpated at any
cost, and that he himself would never return to their final scene; yet according to latest advices he
had forgotten all this and was back in the thick of the mystery. Common sense bade one leave the
youth alone with his freakishness, yet some deeper instinct would not permit the impression of that
frenzied letter to subside. Willett read it over again, and could not make its essence sound as empty
and insane as both its bombastic verbiage and its lack of fulfilment would seem to imply. Its terror
was too profound and real, and in conjunction with what the doctor already knew evoked too vivid
hints of monstrosities from beyond time and space to permit of any cynical explanation. There were
nameless horrors abroad; and no matter how little one might be able to get at them, one ought to stand
prepared for any sort of action at any time.
For over a week Dr. Willett pondered on the dilemma which seemed thrust upon him, and became
more and more inclined to pay Charles a call at the Pawtuxet bungalow. No friend of the youth had
ever ventured to storm this forbidden retreat, and even his father knew of its interior only from such
descriptions as he chose to give; but Willett felt that some direct conversation with his patient was
necessary. Mr. Ward had been receiving brief and non-committal typed notes from his son, and said
that Mrs. Ward in her Atlantic City retirement had had no better word. So at length the doctor
resolved to act; and despite a curious sensation inspired by old legends of Joseph Curwen, and by
more recent revelations and warnings from Charles Ward, set boldly out for the bungalow on the
bluff above the river.
Willett had visited the spot before through sheer curiousity, though of course never entering the
house or proclaiming his presence; hence knew exactly the route to take. Driving out Broad Street
one early afternoon toward the end of February in his small motor, he thought oddly of the grim party
which had taken that selfsame road a hundred and fifty-seven years before on a terrible errand which
none might ever comprehend.
The ride through the city's decaying fringe was short, and trim Edgewood and sleepy Pawtuxet
presently spread out ahead. Willett turned to the right down Lockwood Street and drove his car as far
along that rural road as he could, then alighted and walked north to where the bluff towered above
the lovely bends of the river and the sweep of misty downlands beyond. Houses were still few here,
and there was no mistaking the isolated bungalow with its concrete garage on a high point of land at
his left. Stepping briskly up the neglected gravel walk he rapped at the door with a firm hand, and
spoke without a tremor to the evil Portuguese mulatto who opened it to the width of a crack.
He must, he said, see Charles Ward at once on vitally important business. No excuse would be
accepted, and a repulse would mean only a full report of the matter to the elder Ward. The mulatto
still hesitated, and pushed against the door when Willett attempted to open it; but the doctor merely
raised his voice and renewed his demands. Then there came from the dark interior a husky whisper
which somehow chilled the hearer through and through though he did not know why he feared it. 'Let
him in, Tony,' it said, 'we may as well talk now as ever.' But disturbing as was the whisper, the
greater fear was that which immediately followed. The floor creaked and the speaker hove in sight--
and the owner of those strange and resonant tones was seen to be no other than Charles Dexter Ward.
The minuteness with which Dr. Willett recalled and recorded his conversation of that afternoon
is due to the importance he assigns to this particular period. For at last he concedes a vital change in
Charles Dexter Ward's mentality, and believes that the youth now spoke from a brain hopelessly alien
to the brain whose growth he had watched for six and twenty years. Controversy with Dr. Lyman has
compelled him to be very specific, and he definitely dates the madness of Charles Ward from the
time the typewritten notes began to reach his parents. Those notes are not in Ward's normal style; not
even in the style of that last frantic letter to Willett. Instead, they are strange and archaic, as if the
snapping of the writer's mind had released a flood of tendencies and impressions picked up
unconsciously through boyhood antiquarianism. There is an obvious effort to be modern, but the
spirit and occasionally the language are those of the past.
The past, too, was evident in Ward's every tone and gesture as he received the doctor in that
shadowy bungalow. He bowed, motioned Willett to a seat, and began to speak abruptly in that strange
whisper which he sought to explain at the very outset.
'I am grown phthisical,' he began, 'from this cursed river air. You must excuse my speech. I
suppose you are come from my father to see what ails me, and I hope you will say nothing to alarm
him.'
Willett was studying these scraping tones with extreme care, but studying even more closely the
face of the speaker. Something, he felt, was wrong; and he thought of what the family had told him
about the fright of that Yorkshire butler one night. He wished it were not so dark, but did not request
that the blind be opened. Instead, he merely asked Ward why he had so belied the frantic note of little
more than a week before.
'I was coming to that,' the host replied. 'You must know, I am in a very bad state of nerves, and do
and say queer things I cannot account for. As I have told you often, I am on the edge of great matters;
and the bigness of them has a way of making me light-headed. Any man might well be frighted of
what I have found, but I am not to be put off for long. I was a dunce to have that guard and stick at
home; for having gone this far, my place is here. I am not well spoke of by prying neighbours, and
perhaps I was led by weakness to believe myself what they say of me. There is no evil to any in what
I do, so long as I do it rightly. Have the goodness to wait six months, and I'll shew you what will pay
your patience well.
'You may as well know I have a way of learning old matters from things surer than books, and I'll
leave you to judge the importance of what I can give to history, philosophy, and the arts by reason of
the doors I have access to. My ancestor had all this when those witless peeping Toms came and
murdered him. I now have it again, or am coming very imperfectly to have a part of it. This time
nothing must happen, and least of all through any idiot fears of my own. Pray forget all I writ you,
Sir, and have no fear of this place or any in it. Dr. Allen is a man of fine parts, and I own him an
apology for anything ill I have said of him. I wish I had no need to spare him, but there were things
he had to do elsewhere. His zeal is equal to mine in all those matters, and I suppose that when I
feared the work I feared him too as my greatest helper in it.'
Ward paused, and the doctor hardly knew what to say or think. He felt almost foolish in the face
of this calm repudiation of the letter; and yet there clung to him the fact that while the present
discourse was strange and alien and indubitably mad, the note itself had been tragic in its naturalness
and likeness to the Charles Ward he knew. Willett now tried to turn the talk on early matters, and
recall to the youth some past events which would restore a familiar mood; but in this process he
obtained only the most grotesque results. It was the same with all the alienists later on. Important
sections of Charles Ward's store of mental images, mainly those touching modern times and his own
personal life, had been unaccountably expunged; whilst all the massed antiquarianism of his youth had
welled up from some profound subconsciousness to engulf the contemporary and the individual. The
youth's intimate knowledge of elder things was abnormal and unholy, and he tried his best to hide it.
When Willett would mention some favourite object of his boyhood archaistic studies he often shed
by pure accident such a light as no normal mortal could conceivably be expected to possess, and the
doctor shuddered as the glib allusion glided by.
It was not wholesome to know so much about the way the fat sheriff's wig fell off as he leaned
over at the play in Mr. Douglass's Histrionick Academy in King Street on the eleventh of February,
1762, which fell on a Thursday; or about how the actors cut the text of Steele's Conscious Lover so
badly that one was almost glad the Baptist-ridden legislature closed the theatre a fortnight later. That
Thomas Sabin's Boston coach was "damn'd uncomfortable" old letters may well have told; but what
healthy antiquarian could recall how the creaking of Epenetus Olney's new signboard (the gaudy
crown he set up after he took to calling his tavern the Crown Coffee House) was exactly like the
first few notes of the new jazz piece all the radios in Pawtuxet were playing?
Ward, however, would not be quizzed long in this vein. Modern and personal topics he waved
aside quite summarily, whilst regarding antique affairs he soon shewed the plainest boredom. What
he wished clearly enough was only to satisfy his visitor enough to make him depart without the
intention of returning. To this end he offered to shew Willett the entire house, and at once proceeded
to lead the doctor through every room from cellar to attic. Willett looked sharply, but noted that the
visible books were far too few and trivial to have ever filled the wide gaps on Ward's shelves at
home, and that the meagre so-called "laboratory" was the flimsiest sort of a blind. Clearly, there
were a library and a laboratory elsewhere; but just where, it was impossible to say. Essentially
defeated in his quest for something he could not name, Willett returned to town before evening and
told the senior Ward everything which had occurred. They agreed that the youth must be definitely
out of his mind, but decided that nothing drastic need be done just then. Above all, Mrs. Ward must be
kept in as complete an ignorance as her son's own strange typed notes would permit.
Mr. Ward now determined to call in person upon his son, making it wholly a surprise visit. Dr.
Willett took him in his car one evening, guiding him to within sight of the bungalow and waiting
patiently for his return. The session was a long one, and the father emerged in a very saddened and
perplexed state. His reception had developed much like Willett's, save that Charles had been an
excessively long time in appearing after the visitor had forced his way into the hall and sent the
Portuguese away with an imperative demand; and in the bearing of the altered son there was no trace
of filial affection. The lights had been dim, yet even so the youth had complained that they dazzled
him outrageously. He had not spoken out loud at all, averring that his throat was in very poor
condition; but in his hoarse whisper there was a quality so vaguely disturbing that Mr. Ward could
not banish it from his mind.
Now definitely leagued together to do all they could toward the youth's mental salvation, Mr.
Ward and Dr. Willett set about collecting every scrap of data which the case might afford. Pawtuxet
gossip was the first item they studied, and this was relatively easy to glean since both had friends in
that region. Dr. Willett obtained the most rumours because people talked more frankly to him than to a
parent of the central figure, and from all he heard he could tell that young Ward's life had become
indeed a strange one. Common tongues would not dissociate his household from the vampirism of the
previous summer, while the nocturnal comings and goings of the motor trucks provided their share
of dark speculations. Local tradesmen spoke of the queerness of the orders brought them by the evil-
looking mulatto, and in particular of the inordinate amounts of meat and fresh blood secured from the
two butcher shops in the immediate neighbourhood. For a household of only three, these quantities
were quite absurd.
Then there was the matter of the sounds beneath the earth. Reports of these things were harder to
pin down, but all the vague hints tallied in certain basic essentials. Noises of a ritual nature positively
existed, and at times when the bungalow was dark. They might, of course, have come from the known
cellar; but rumour insisted that there were deeper and more spreading crypts. Recalling the ancient
tales of Joseph Curwen's catacombs, and assuming for granted that the present bungalow had been
selected because of its situation on the old Curwen site as revealed in one or another of the
documents found behind the picture, Willett and Mr. Ward gave this phase of the gossip much
attention; and searched many times without success for the door in the river-bank which old
manuscripts mentioned. As to popular opinions of the bungalow's various inhabitants, it was soon
plain that the Brava Portuguese was loathed, the bearded and spectacled Dr. Allen feared, and the
pallid young scholar disliked to a profound degree. During the last week or two Ward had obviously
changed much, abandoning his attempts at affability and speaking only in hoarse but oddly repellent
whispers on the few occasions that he ventured forth.
Such were the shreds and fragments gathered here and there; and over these Mr. Ward and Dr.
Willett held many long and serious conferences. They strove to exercise deduction, induction, and
constructive imagination to their utmost extent; and to correlate every known fact of Charles's later
life, including the frantic letter which the doctor now shewed the father, with the meagre
documentary evidence available concerning old Joseph Curwen. They would have given much for a
glimpse of the papers Charles had found, for very clearly the key to the youth's madness lay in what
he had learned of the ancient wizard and his doings.
4
And yet, after all, it was from no step of Mr. Ward's or Dr. Willett's that the next move in this
singular case proceeded. The father and the physician, rebuffed and confused by a shadow too
shapeless and intangible to combat, had rested uneasily on their oars while the typed notes of young
Ward to his parents grew fewer and fewer. Then came the first of the month with its customary
financial adjustments, and the clerks at certain banks began a peculiar shaking of heads and
telephoning from one to the other. Officials who knew Charles Ward by sight went down to the
bungalow to ask why every cheque of his appearing at this juncture was a clumsy forgery, and were
reassured less than they ought to have been when the youth hoarsely explained that his hand had
lately been so much affected by a nervous shock as to make normal writing impossible. He could, he
said, form no written characters at all except with great difficulty; and could prove it by the fact that
he had been forced to type all his recent letters, even those to his father and mother, who would bear
out the assertion.
What made the investigators pause in confusion was not this circumstance alone, for that was
nothing unprecedented or fundamentally suspicious, nor even the Pawtuxet gossip, of which one or
two of them had caught echoes. It was the muddled discourse of the young man which nonplussed
them, implying as it did a virtually total loss of memory concerning important monetary matters which
he had had at his fingertips only a month or two before. Something was wrong; for despite the
apparent coherence and rationality of his speech, there could be no normal reason for this ill-
concealed blankness on vital points. Moreover, although none of these men knew Ward well, they
could not help observing the change in his language and manner. They had heard he was an
antiquarian, but even the most hopeless antiquarians do not make daily use of obsolete phraseology
and gestures. Altogether, this combination of hoarseness, palsied hands, bad memory, and altered
speech and bearing must represent some disturbance or malady of genuine gravity, which no doubt
formed the basis of the prevailing odd rumours; and after their departure the party of officials
decided that a talk with the senior Ward was imperative.
So on the sixth of March, 1928, there was a long and serious conference in Mr. Ward's office,
after which the utterly bewildered father summoned Dr. Willett in a kind of helpless resignation.
Willett looked over the strained and awkward signatures of the cheque, and compared them in his
mind with the penmanship of that last frantic note. Certainly, the change was radical and profound, and
yet there was something damnably familiar about the new writing. It had crabbed and archaic
tendencies of a very curious sort, and seemed to result from a type of stroke utterly different from
that which the youth had always used. It was strange--but where had he seen it before? On the whole,
it was obvious that Charles was insane. Of that there could be no doubt. And since it appeared
unlikely that he could handle his property or continue to deal with the outside world much longer,
something must quickly be done toward his oversight and possible cure. It was then that the alienists
were called in, Drs. Peck and Waite of Providence and Dr. Lyman of Boston, to whom Mr. Ward and
Dr. Willett gave the most exhaustive possible history of the case, and who conferred at length in the
now unused library of their young patient, examining what books and papers of his were left in order
to gain some further notion of his habitual mental cast. After scanning this material and examining the
ominous note to Willett they all agreed that Charles Ward's studies had been enough to unseat or at
least to warp any ordinary intellect, and wished most heartily that they could see his more intimate
volumes and documents; but this latter they knew they could do, if at all, only after a scene at the
bungalow itself. Willett now reviewed the whole case with febrile energy; it being at this time that
he obtained the statements of the workmen who had seen Charles find the Curwen documents, and that
he collated the incidents of the destroyed newspaper items, looking up the latter at the Journal office.
On Thursday, the eighth of March, Drs. Willett, Peck, Lyman, and Waite, accompanied by Mr.
Ward, paid the youth their momentous call; making no concealment of their object and questioning the
now acknowledged patient with extreme minuteness. Charles, although he was inordinately long in
answering the summons and was still redolent of strange and noxious laboratory odours when he did
finally make his agitated appearance, proved a far from recalcitrant subject; and admitted freely that
his memory and balance had suffered somewhat from close application to abstruse studies. He
offered no resistance when his removal to other quarters was insisted upon; and seemed, indeed, to
display a high degree of intelligence as apart from mere memory. His conduct would have sent his
interviewers away in bafflement had not the persistently archaic trend of his speech and unmistakable
replacement of modern by ancient ideas in his consciousness marked him out as one definitely
removed from the normal. Of his work he would say no more to the group of doctors than he had
formerly said to his family and to Dr. Willett, and his frantic note of the previous month he dismissed
as mere nerves and hysteria. He insisted that this shadowy bungalow possessed no library or
laboratory beyond the visible ones, and waxed abstruse in explaining the absence from the house of
such odours as now saturated all his clothing. Neighbourhood gossip he attributed to nothing more
than the cheap inventiveness of baffled curiousity. Of the whereabouts of Dr. Allen he said he did
not feel at liberty to speak definitely, but assured his inquisitors that the bearded and spectacled man
would return when needed. In paying off the stolid Brava who resisted all questioning by the visitors,
and in closing the bungalow which still seemed to hold such nighted secrets, Ward shewed no signs
of nervousness save a barely noticed tendency to pause as though listening for something very faint.
He was apparently animated by a calmly philosophic resignation, as if he removal were the merest
transient incident which would cause the least trouble if facilitated and disposed of once and for all.
It was clear that he trusted to his obviously unimpaired keenness of absolute mentality to overcome
all the embarrassments into which his twisted memory, his lost voice and handwriting, and his
secretive and eccentric behaviour had led him. His mother, it was agreed, was not to be told of the
change; his father supplying typed notes in his name. Ward was taken to the restfully and
picturesquely situated private hospital maintained by Dr. Waite on Conanicut Island in the bay, and
subjected to the closest scrutiny and questioning by all the physicians connected with the case. It was
then that the physical oddities were noticed; the slackened metabolism, the altered skin, and the
disproportionate neural reactions. Dr. Willett was the most perturbed of the various examiners, for
he had attended Ward all his life and could appreciate with terrible keenness the extent of his
physical disorganisation. Even the familiar olive mark on his hip was gone, while on his chest was a
great black mole or cicatrice which had never been there before, and which made Willett wonder
whether the youth had ever submitted to any of the witch markings reputed to be inflicted at certain
unwholesome nocturnal meetings in wild and lonely places. The doctor could not keep his mind off a
certain transcribed witch-trial record from Salem which Charles had shewn him in the old non-
secretive days, and which read: 'Mr. G. B. on that Nighte putt ye Divell his Marke upon Bridget S.,
Jonathan A., Simon O., Deliverance W., Joseph C., Susan P., Mehitable C., and Deborah B.' Ward's
face, too, troubled him horribly, till at length he suddenly discovered why he was horrified. For
above the young man's right eye was something which he had never previously noticed--a small scar
or pit precisely like that in the crumbled painting of old Joseph Curwen, and perhaps attesting some
hideous ritualistic inoculation to which both had submitted at a certain stage of their occult careers.
While Ward himself was puzzling all the doctors at the hospital a very strict watch was kept on
all mail addressed either to him or to Dr. Allen, which Mr. Ward had ordered delivered at the family
home. Willett had predicted that very little would be found, since any communications of a vital
nature would probably have been exchanged by messenger; but in the latter part of March there did
come a letter from Prague for Dr. Allen which gave both the doctor and the father deep thought. It
was in a very crabbed and archaic hand; and though clearly not the effort of a foreigner, shewed
almost as singular a departure from modern English as the speech of young Ward himself. It read:
Kleinstrasse 11, Altstadt, Prague, 11th Feby. 1928.
Brother in Almonsin-Metraton:-
I this day receiv'd yr mention of what came up from the Saltes I sent you. It was wrong, and
meanes clearly that ye Headstones had been chang'd when Barnabas gott me the Specimen. It is often
so, as you must be sensible of from the Thing you gott from ye Kings Chapell ground in 1769 and
what H. gott from Olde Bury'g Point in 1690, that was like to ende him. I gott such a Thing in Aegypt
75 yeares gone, from the which came that Scar ye Boy saw on me here in 1924. As I told you longe
ago, do not calle up That which you can not put downe; either from dead Saltes or out of ye Spheres
beyond. Have ye Wordes for laying at all times readie, and stopp not to be sure when there is any
Doubte of Whom you have. Stones are all chang'd now in Nine groundes out of 10. You are never
sure till you question. I this day heard from H., who has had Trouble with the Soldiers. He is like to
be sorry Transylvania is pass't from Hungary to Roumania, and wou'd change his Seat if the Castel
weren't so fulle of What we Knowe. But of this he hath doubtless writ you. In my next Send'g there
will be Somewhat from a Hill tomb from ye East that will delight you greatly. Meanwhile forget not I
am desirous of B. F. if you can possibly get him for me. You know G. in Philada. better than I. Have
him upp firste if you will, but doe not use him soe hard he will be Difficult, for I must speake to him
in ye End.
Yogg-Sothoth Neblod Zin Simon O.
To Mr. J. C. in Providence.
Mr. Ward and Dr. Willett paused in utter chaos before this apparent bit of unrelieved insanity.
Only by degrees did they absorb what it seemed to imply. So the absent Dr. Allen, and not Charles
Ward, had come to be the leading spirit at Pawtuxet? That must explain the wild reference and
denunciation in the youth's last frantic letter. And what of this addressing of the bearded and
spectacled stranger as "Mr. J. C."? There was no escaping the inference, but there are limits to
possible monstrosity. Who was "Simon O."; the old man Ward had visited in Prague four years
previously? Perhaps, but in the centuries behind there had been another Simon O.--Simon Orne, alias
Jedediah, of Salem, who vanished in 1771, and whose peculiar handwriting Dr. Willett now
unmistakably recognised from the photostatic copies of the Orne formulae which Charles had once
shown him. What horrors and mysteries, what contradictions and contraventions of Nature, had come
back after a century and a half to harass Old Providence with her clustered spires and domes?
The father and the old physician, virtually at a loss what to do or think, went to see Charles at the
hospital and questioned him as delicately as they could about Dr. Allen, about the Prague visit, and
about what he had learned of Simon or Jedediah Orne of Salem. To all these enquiries the youth was
politely non-committal, merely barking in his hoarse whisper that he had found Dr. Allen to have a
remarkable spiritual rapport with certain souls from the past, and that any correspondent the bearded
man might have in Prague would probably be similarly gifted. When they left, Mr. Ward and Dr.
Willett realised to their chagrin that they had really been the ones under catechism; and that without
imparting anything vital himself, the confined youth had adroitly pumped them of everything the
Prague letter had contained.
Drs. Peck, Waite, and Lyman were not inclined to attach much importance to the strange
correspondence of young Ward's companion; for they knew the tendency of kindred eccentrics and
monomaniacs to band together, and believed that Charles or Allen had merely unearthed an
expatriated counterpart--perhaps one who had seen Orne's handwriting and copied it in an attempt to
pose as the bygone character's reincarnation. Allen himself was perhaps a similar case, and may have
persuaded the youth into accepting him as an avatar of the long-dead Curwen. Such things had been
known before, and on the same basis the hard-headed doctors disposed of Willett's growing disquiet
about Charles Ward's present handwriting, as studied from unpremeditated specimens obtained by
various ruses. Willett thought he had placed its odd familiarity at last, and that what it vaguely
resembled was the bygone penmanship of old Joseph Curwen himself; but this the other physicians
regarded as a phase of imitativeness only to be expected in a mania of this sort, and refused to grant it
any importance either favourable or unfavourable. Recognising this prosaic attitude in his
colleagues, Willett advised Mr. Ward to keep to himself the letter which arrived for Dr. Allen on the
second of April from Rakus, Transylvania, in a handwriting so intensely and fundamentally like that of
the Hutchinson cipher that both father and physician paused in awe before breaking the seal. This
read as follows:
Castle Ferenczy 7 March 1928.
Dear C.:--
Hadd a Squad of 20 Militia up to talk about what the Country Folk say. Must digg deeper and have
less Hearde. These Roumanians plague me damnably, being officious and particular where you cou'd
buy a Magyar off with a Drinke and Food.
Last monthe M. got me ye Sarcophagus of ye Five Sphinxes from ye Acropolis where He whome
I call'd up say'd it wou'd be, and I have hadde 3 Talkes with What was therein inhum'd. It will go to S.
O. in Prague directly, and thence to you. It is stubborn but you know ye Way with Such.
You shew Wisdom in having lesse about than Before; for there was no Neede to keep the Guards
in Shape and eat'g off their Heads, and it made Much to be founde in Case of Trouble, as you too
welle knowe. You can now move and worke elsewhere with no Kill'g Trouble if needful, tho' I hope
no Thing will soon force you to so Bothersome a Course.
I rejoice that you traffick not so much with Those Outside; for there was ever a Mortall Peril in
it, and you are sensible what it did when you ask'd Protection of One not dispos'd to give it.
You excel me in gett'g ye Formulae so another may saye them with Success, but Borellus fancy'd
it wou'd be so if just ye right Wordes were hadd. Does ye Boy use 'em often? I regret that he growes
squeamish, as I fear'd he wou'd when I hadde him here nigh 15 Monthes, but am sensible you knowe
how to deal with him. You can't saye him down with ye Formula, for that will Worke only upon such
as ye other Formula hath call'd up from Saltes; but you still have strong Handes and Knife and Pistol,
and Graves are not harde to digg, nor Acids loth to burne.
O. sayes you have promis'd him B. F. I must have him after. B. goes to you soone, and may he
give you what you wishe of that Darke Thing belowe Memphis. Imploy care in what you calle up,
and beware of ye Boy.
It will be ripe in a yeare's time to have up ye Legions from Underneath, and then there are no
Boundes to what shal be oures. Have Confidence in what I saye, for you knowe O. and I have hadd
these 150 yeares more than you to consulte these Matters in.
Nephreu--Ka nai Hadoth Edw. H.
For J Curwen, Esq. Providence.
But if Willett and Mr. Ward refrained from shewing this letter to the alienists, they did not refrain
from acting upon it themselves. No amount of learned sophistry could controvert the fact that the
strangely bearded and spectacled Dr. Allen, of whom Charles's frantic letter had spoken as such a
monstrous menace, was in close and sinister correspondence with two inexplicable creatures whom
Ward had visited in his travels and who plainly claimed to be survivals or avatars of Curwen's old
Salem colleagues; that he was regarding himself as the reincarnation of Joseph Curwen, and that he
entertained--or was at least advised to entertain--murderous designs against a "boy" who could
scarcely be other than Charles Ward. There was organised horror afoot; and no matter who had
started it, the missing Allen was by this time at the bottom of it. Therefore, thanking heaven that
Charles was now safe in the hospital, Mr. Ward lost no time in engaging detectives to learn all they
could of the cryptic, bearded doctor; finding whence he had come and what Pawtuxet knew of him,
and if possible discovering his present whereabouts. Supplying the men with one of the bungalow
keys which Charles yielded up, he urged them to explore Allen's vacant room which had been
identified when the patient's belongings had been packed; obtaining what clues they could from any
effects he might have left about. Mr. Ward talked with the detectives in his son's old library, and they
felt a marked relief when they left it at last; for there seemed to hover about the place a vague aura of
evil. Perhaps it was what they had heard of the infamous old wizard whose picture had once stared
from the panelled overmantel, and perhaps it was something different and irrelevant; but in any case
they all half sensed an intangible miasma which centred in that carven vestige of an older dwelling
and which at times almost rose to the intensity of a material emanation.
V. A Nightmare and a Cataclysm
1
And now swiftly followed that hideous experience which has left its indelible mark of fear on the
soul of Marinus Bicknell Willett, and has added a decade to the visible age of one whose youth was
even then far behind. Dr. Willett had conferred at length with Mr. Ward, and had come to an
agreement with him on several points which both felt the alienists would ridicule. There was, they
conceded, a terrible movement alive in the world, whose direct connexion with a necromancy even
older than the Salem witchcraft could not be doubted. That at least two living men--and one other of
whom they dared not think--were in absolute possession of minds or personalities which had
functioned as early as 1690 or before was likewise almost unassailably proved even in the face of all
known natural laws. What these horrible creatures--and Charles Ward as well--were doing or trying
to do seemed fairly clear from their letters and from every bit of light both old and new which had
filtered in upon the case. They were robbing the tombs of all the ages, including those of the world's
wisest and greatest men, in the hope of recovering from the bygone ashes some vestige of the
consciousness and lore which had once animated and informed them.
A hideous traffic was going on among these nightmare ghouls, whereby illustrious bones were
bartered with the calm calculativeness of schoolboys swapping books; and from what was extorted
from this centuried dust there was anticipated a power and a wisdom beyond anything which the
cosmos had ever seen concentred in one man or group. They had found unholy ways to keep their
brains alive, either in the same body or different bodies; and had evidently achieved a way of tapping
the consciousness of the dead whom they gathered together. There had, it seems, been some truth in
chimerical old Borellus when he wrote of preparing from even the most antique remains certain
"Essential Saltes" from which the shade of a long-dead living thing might be raised up. There was a
formula for evoking such a shade, and another for putting it down; and it had now been so perfected
that it could be taught successfully. One must be careful about evocations, for the markers of old
graves are not always accurate.
Willett and Mr. Ward shivered as they passed from conclusion to conclusion. Things--presences
or voices of some sort--could be drawn down from unknown places as well as from the grave, and in
this process also one must be careful. Joseph Curwen had indubitably evoked many forbidden things,
and as for Charles--what might one think of him? What forces "outside the spheres" had reached him
from Joseph Curwen's day and turned his mind on forgotten things? He had been led to find certain
directions, and he had used them. He had talked with the man of horror in Prague and stayed long with
the creature in the mountains of Transylvania. And he must have found the grave of Joseph Curwen at
last. That newspaper item and what his mother had heard in the night were too significant to overlook.
Then he had summoned something, and it must have come. That mighty voice aloft on Good Friday,
and those different tones in the locked attic laboratory. What were they like, with their depth and
hollowness? Was there not here some awful foreshadowing of the dreaded stranger Dr. Allen with
his spectral bass? Yes, that was what Mr. Ward had felt with vague horror in his single talk with the
man--if man it were--over the telephone!
What hellish consciousness or voice, what morbid shade or presence, had come to answer
Charles Ward's secret rites behind that locked door? Those voices heard in argument--"must have it
red for three months"--Good God! Was not that just before the vampirism broke out? The rifling of
Ezra Weeden's ancient grave, and the cries later at Pawtuxet--whose mind had planned the vengeance
and rediscovered the shunned seat of elder blasphemies? And then the bungalow and the bearded
stranger, and the gossip, and the fear. The final madness of Charles neither father nor doctor could
attempt to explain, but they did feel sure that the mind of Joseph Curwen had come to earth again and
was following its ancient morbidities. Was daemoniac possession in truth a possibility? Allen had
something to do with it, and the detectives must find out more about one whose existence menaced
the young man's life. In the meantime, since the existence of some vast crypt beneath the bungalow
seemed virtually beyond dispute, some effort must be made to find it. Willett and Mr. Ward,
conscious of the sceptical attitude of the alienists, resolved during their final conference to
undertake a joint secret exploration of unparalleled thoroughness; and agreed to meet at the bungalow
on the following morning with valises and with certain tools and accessories suited to architectural
search and underground exploration.
The morning of April 6th dawned clear, and both explorers were at the bungalow by ten o'clock.
Mr. Ward had the key, and an entry and cursory survey were made. From the disordered condition of
Dr. Allen's room it was obvious that the detectives had been there before, and the later searchers
hoped that they had found some clue which might prove of value. Of course the main business lay in
the cellar; so thither they descended without much delay, again making the circuit which each had
vainly made before in the presence of the mad young owner. For a time everything seemed baffling,
each inch of the earthen floor and stone walls having so solid and innocuous an aspect that the
thought of a yawning aperture was scarcely to be entertained. Willett reflected that since the original
cellar was dug without knowledge of any catacombs beneath, the beginning of the passage would
represent the strictly modern delving of young Ward and his associates, where they had probed for
the ancient vaults whose rumour could have reached them by no wholesome means.
The doctor tried to put himself in Charles's place to see how a delver would be likely to start, but
could not gain much inspiration from this method. Then he decided on elimination as a policy, and
went carefully over the whole subterranean surface both vertical and horizontal, trying to account for
every inch separately. He was soon substantially narrowed down, and at last had nothing left but the
small platform before the washtubs, which he tried once before in vain. Now experimenting in every
possible way, and exerting a double strength, he finally found that the top did indeed turn and slide
horizontally on a corner pivot. Beneath it lay a trim concrete surface with an iron manhole, to which
Mr. Ward at once rushed with excited zeal. The cover was not hard to lift, and the father had quite
removed it when Willett noticed the queerness of his aspect. He was swaying and nodding dizzily,
and in the gust of noxious air which swept up from the black pit beneath the doctor soon recognised
ample cause.
In a moment Dr. Willett had his fainting companion on the floor above and was reviving him with
cold water. Mr. Ward responded feebly, but it could be seen that the mephitic blast from the crypt had
in some way gravely sickened him. Wishing to take no chances, Willett hastened out to Broad Street
for a taxicab and had soon dispatched the sufferer home despite his weak-voiced protests; after
which he produced an electric torch, covered his nostrils with a band of sterile gauze, and
descended once more to peer into the new-found depths. The foul air had now slightly abated, and
Willett was able to send a beam of light down the Stygian hold. For about ten feet, he saw, it was a
sheer cylindrical drop with concrete walls and an iron ladder; after which the hole appeared to strike
a flight of old stone steps which must originally have emerged to earth somewhat southwest of the
present building.
2
Willett freely admits that for a moment the memory of the old Curwen legends kept him from
climbing down alone into that malodorous gulf. He could not help thinking of what Luke Fenner had
reported on that last monstrous night. Then duty asserted itself and he made the plunge, carrying a
great valise for the removal of whatever papers might prove of supreme importance. Slowly, as
befitted one of his years, he descended the ladder and reached the slimy steps below. This was
ancient masonry, his torch told him; and upon the dripping walls he saw the unwholesome moss of
centuries. Down, down, ran the steps; not spirally, but in three abrupt turns; and with such narrowness
that two men could have passed only with difficulty. He had counted about thirty when a sound
reached him very faintly; and after that he did not feel disposed to count any more.
It was a godless sound; one of those low-keyed, insidious outrages of Nature which are not
meant to be. To call it a dull wail, a doom-dragged whine, or a hopeless howl of chorused anguish
and stricken flesh without mind would be to miss its quintessential loathsomeness and soul-sickening
overtones. Was it for this that Ward had seemed to listen on that day he was removed? It was the most
shocking thing that Willett had ever heard, and it continued from no determinate point as the doctor
reached the bottom of the steps and cast his torchlight around on lofty corridor walls surmounted by
Cyclopean vaulting and pierced by numberless black archways. The hall in which he stood was
perhaps fourteen feet high in the middle of the vaulting and ten or twelve feet broad. Its pavement
was of large chipped flagstone, and its walls and roof were of dressed masonry. Its length he could
not imagine, for it stretched ahead indefinitely into the blackness. Of the archways, some had doors
of the old six-panelled colonial type, whilst others had none.
Overcoming the dread induced by the smell and the howling, Willett began to explore these
archways one by one; finding beyond them rooms with groined stone ceilings, each of medium size
and apparently of bizarre uses. Most of them had fireplaces, the upper courses of whose chimneys
would have formed an interesting study in engineering. Never before or since had he seen such
instruments or suggestions of instruments as here loomed up on every hand through the burying dust
and cobwebs of a century and a half, in many cases evidently shattered as if by the ancient raiders.
For many of the chambers seemed wholly untrodden by modern feet, and must have represented the
earliest and most obsolete phases of Joseph Curwen's experimentation. Finally there came a room of
obvious modernity, or at least of recent occupancy. There were oil heaters, bookshelves and tables,
chairs and cabinets, and a desk piled high with papers of varying antiquity and contemporaneousness.
Candlesticks and oil lamps stood about in several places; and finding a match-safe handy, Willett
lighted such as were ready for use.
In the fuller gleam it appeared that this apartment was nothing less than the latest study or library
of Charles Ward. Of the books the doctor had seen many before, and a good part of the furniture had
plainly come from the Prospect Street mansion. Here and there was a piece well known to Willett,
and the sense of familiarity became so great that he half forgot the noisomness and the wailing, both
of which were plainer here than they had been at the foot of the steps. His first duty, as planned long
ahead, was to find and seize any papers which might seem of vital importance; especially those
portentous documents found by Charles so long ago behind the picture in Olney Court. As he search
he perceived how stupendous a task the final unravelling would be; for file on file was stuffed with
papers in curious hands and bearing curious designs, so that months or even years might be needed
for a thorough deciphering and editing. Once he found three large packets of letters with Prague and
Rakus postmarks, and in writing clearly recognisable as Orne's and Hutchinson's; all of which he took
with him as part of the bundle to be removed in his valise.
At last, in a locked mahogany cabinet once gracing the Ward home, Willett found the batch of old
Curwen papers; recognising them from the reluctant glimpse Charles had granted him so many years
ago. The youth had evidently kept them together very much as they had been when first he found
them, since all the titles recalled by the workmen were present except the papers addressed to Orne
and Hutchinson, and the cipher with its key. Willett placed the entire lot in his valise and continued
his examination of the files. Since young Ward's immediate condition was the greatest matter at stake,
the closest searching was done among the most obviously recent matter; and in this abundance of
contemporary manuscript one very baffling oddity was noted. The oddity was the slight amount in
Charles's normal writing, which indeed included nothing more recent than two months before. On the
other hand, there were literally reams of symbols and formulae, historical notes and philosophical
comment, in a crabbed penmanship absolutely identical with the ancient script of Joseph Curwen,
though of undeniably modern dating. Plainly, a part of the latter-day programme had been a sedulous
imitation of the old wizard's writing, which Charles seemed to have carried to a marvellous state of
perfection. Of any third hand which might have been Allen's there was not a trace. If he had indeed
come to be the leader, he must have forced young Ward to act as his amanuensis.
In this new material one mystic formula, or rather pair of formulae, recurred so often that Willett
had it by heart before he had half finished his quest. It consisted of two parallel columns, the left-
hand one surmounted by the archaic symbol called "Dragon's Head" and used in almanacs to indicate
the ascending node, and the right-hand one headed by a corresponding sign of "Dragon's Tail" or
descending node. The appearance of the whole was something like this, and almost unconsciously
the doctor realised that the second half was no more than the first written syllabically backward with
the exception of the final monosyllables and of the odd name Yog-Sothoth, which he had come to
recognise under various spellings from other things he had seen in connexion with this horrible
matter. The formulae were as follows--exactly so, as Willett is abundantly able to testify--and the
first one struck an odd note of uncomfortable latent memory in his brain, which he recognised later
when reviewing the events of that horrible Good Friday of the previous year.
Y'AI 'NG'NGAH, YOG-SOTHOTH H'EE-L'GEB F'AI THRODOG UAAAH
OGTHROD AI'F GEB'L-EE'H YOG-SOTHOTH 'NGAH'NG AI'Y ZHRO
So haunting were these formulae, and so frequently did he come upon them, that before the doctor
knew it he was repeating them under his breath. Eventually, however, he felt he had secured all the
papers he could digest to advantage for the present; hence resolved to examine no more till he could
bring the sceptical alienists en masse for an ampler and more systematic raid. He had still to find the
hidden laboratory, so leaving his valise in the lighted room he emerged again into the black noisome
corridor whose vaulting echoed ceaseless with that dull and hideous whine.
The next few rooms he tried were all abandoned, or filled only with crumbling boxes and
ominous-looking leaden coffins; but impressed him deeply with the magnitude of Joseph Curwen's
original operations. He thought of the slaves and seamen who had disappeared, of the graves which
had been violated in every part of the world, and of what that final raiding party must have seen; and
then he decided it was better not to think any more. Once a great stone staircase mounted at his right,
and he deduced that this must have reached to one of the Curwen outbuildings--perhaps the famous
stone edifice with the high slit-like windows--provided the steps he had descended had led from the
steep-roofed farmhouse. Suddenly the walls seemed to fall away ahead, and the stench and the
wailing grew stronger. Willett saw that he had come upon a vast open space, so great that his
torchlight would not carry across it; and as he advanced he encountered occasional stout pillars
supporting the arches of the roof.
After a time he reached a circle of pillars grouped like the monoliths of Stonehenge, with a large
carved altar on a base of three steps in the centre; and so curious were the carvings on that altar that
he approached to study them with his electric light. But when he saw what they were he shrank away
shuddering, and did not stop to investigate the dark stains which discoloured the upper surface and
had spread down the sides in occasional thin lines. Instead, he found the distant wall and traced it as it
swept round in a gigantic circle perforated by occasional black doorways and indented by a myriad
of shallow cells with iron gratings and wrist and ankle bonds on chains fastened to the stone of the
concave rear masonry. These cells were empty, but still the horrible odour and the dismal moaning
continued, more insistent now than ever, and seemingly varied at time by a sort of slippery thumping.
3
From that frightful smell and that uncanny noise Willett's attention could no longer be diverted.
Both were plainer and more hideous in the great pillared hall than anywhere else, and carried a vague
impression of being far below, even in this dark nether world of subterrene mystery. Before trying
any of the black archways for steps leading further down, the doctor cast his beam of light about the
stone-flagged floor. It was very loosely paved, and at irregular intervals there would occur a slab
curiously pierced by small holes in no definite arrangement, while at one point there lay a very long
ladder carelessly flung down. To this ladder, singularly enough, appeared to cling a particularly
large amount of the frightful odour which encompassed everything. As he walked slowly about it
suddenly occurred to Willett that both the noise and the odour seemed strongest above the oddly
pierced slabs, as if they might be crude trap-doors leading down to some still deeper region of
horror. Kneeling by one, he worked at it with his hands, and found that with extreme difficulty he
could budge it. At his touch the moaning beneath ascended to a louder key, and only with vast
trepidation did he persevere in the lifting of the heavy stone. A stench unnameable now rose up from
below, and the doctor's head reeled dizzily as he laid back the slab and turned his torch upon the
exposed square yard of gaping blackness.
If he had expected a flight of steps to some wide gulf of ultimate abomination, Willett was
destined to be disappointed; for amidst that foetor and cracked whining he discerned only the brick-
faced top of a cylindrical well perhaps a yard and a half in diameter and devoid of any ladder or other
means of descent. As the light shone down, the wailing changed suddenly to a series of horrible
yelps; in conjunction with which there came again that sound of blind, futile scrambling and slippery
thumping. The explorer trembled, unwilling even to imagine what noxious thing might be lurking in
that abyss, but in a moment mustered up the courage to peer over the rough-hewn brink; lying at full
length and holding the torch downward at arm's length to see what might lie below. For a second he
could distinguish nothing but the slimy, moss-grown brick walls sinking illimitably into that half-
tangible miasma of murk and foulness and anguished frenzy; and then he saw that something dark was
leaping clumsily and frantically up and down at the bottom of the narrow shaft, which must have been
from twenty to twenty-five feet below the stone floor where he lay. The torch shook in his hand, but
he looked again to see what manner of living creature might be immured there in the darkness of that
unnatural well; left starving by young Ward through all the long month since the doctors had taken
him away, and clearly only one of a vast number prisoned in the kindred wells whose pierced stone
covers so thickly studded the floor of the great vaulted cavern. Whatever the things were, they could
not lie down in their cramped spaces; but must have crouched and whined and waited and feebly
leaped all those hideous weeks since their master had abandoned them unheeded.
But Marinus Bicknell Willett was sorry that he looked again; for surgeon and veteran of the
dissecting-room though he was, he has not been the same since. It is hard to explain just how a single
sight of a tangible object with measurable dimensions could so shake and change a man; and we may
only say that there is about certain outlines and entities a power of symbolism and suggestion which
acts frightfully on a sensitive thinker's perspective and whispers terrible hints of obscure cosmic
relationships and unnameable realities behind the protective illusions of common vision. In that
second look Willett saw such an outline or entity, for during the next few instants he was undoubtedly
as stark raving mad as any inmate of Dr. Waite's private hospital. He dropped the electric torch from
a hand drained of muscular power or nervous cordination, nor heeded the sound of crunching teeth
which told of its fate at the bottom of the pit. He screamed and screamed and screamed in a voice
whose falsetto panic no acquaintance of his would ever have recognised; and though he could not
rise to his feet he crawled and rolled desperately away from the damp pavement where dozens of
Tartarean wells poured forth their exhausted whining and yelping to answer his own insane cries. He
tore his hands on the rough, loose stones, and many times bruised his head against the frequent
pillars, but still he kept on. Then at last he slowly came to himself in the utter blackness and stench,
and stopped his ears against the droning wail into which the burst of yelping had subsided. He was
drenched with perspiration and without means of producing a light; stricken and unnerved in the
abysmal blackness and horror, and crushed with a memory he never could efface. Beneath him dozens
of those things still lived, and from one of those shafts the cover was removed. He knew that what he
had seen could never climb up the slippery walls, yet shuddered at the thought that some obscure
foot-hold might exist.
What the thing was, he would never tell. It was like some of the carvings on the hellish altar, but
it was alive. Nature had never made it in this form, for it was too palpably unfinished. The
deficiencies were of the most surprising sort, and the abnormalities of proportion could not be
described. Willett consents only to say that this type of thing must have represented entities which
Ward called up from imperfect salts, and which he kept for servile or ritualistic purposes. If it had
not had a certain significance, its image would not have been carved on that damnable stone. It was not
the worst thing depicted on that stone--but Willett never opened the other pits. At the time, the first
connected idea in his mind was an idle paragraph from some of the old Curwen data he had digested
long before; a phrase used by Simon or Jedediah Orne in that portentous confiscated letter to the
bygone sorcerer:
'Certainely, there was Noth'g but ye liveliest Awfulness in that which H. rais'd upp from What he
cou'd gather onlie a part of.'
Then, horribly supplementing rather than displacing this image, there came a recollection of
those ancient lingering rumours anent the burned, twisted thing found in the fields a week after the
Curwen raid. Charles Ward had once told the doctor what old Slocum said of that object; that it was
neither thoroughly human, nor wholly allied to any animal which Pawtuxet folk had ever seen or read
about.
These words hummed in the doctor's mind as he rocked to and fro, squatting on the nitrous stone
floor. He tried to drive them out, and repeated the Lord's Prayer to himself; eventually trailing off
into a mnemonic hodge-podge like the modernistic Waste Land of Mr. T. S. Eliot, and finally
reverting to the oft-repeated dual formula he had lately found in Ward's underground library: 'Y'ai
'ng'ngah, Yog-Sothoth' and so on till the final underlined Zhro.
It seemed to soothe him, and he staggered to his feet after a time; lamenting bitterly his fright-lost
torch and looking wildly about for any gleam of light in the clutching inkiness of the chilly air. Think
he would not; but he strained his eyes in every direction for some faint glint or reflection of the
bright illumination he had left in the library. After a while he thought he detected a suspicion of a
glow infinitely far away, and toward this he crawled in agonised caution on hands and knees amidst
the stench and howling, always feeling ahead lest he collide with the numerous great pillars or
stumble into the abominable pit he had uncovered.
Once his shaking fingers touched something which he knew must be the steps leading to the
hellish altar, and from this spot he recoiled in loathing. At another time he encountered the pierced
slab he had removed, and here his caution became almost pitiful. But he did not come upon the dread
aperture after all, nor did anything issue from that aperture to detain him. What had been down there
made no sound nor stir. Evidently its crunching of the fallen electric torch had not been good for it.
Each time Willett's fingers felt a perforated slab he trembled. His passage over it would sometimes
increase the groaning below, but generally it would produce no effect at all, since he moved very
noiselessly. Several times during his progress the glow ahead diminished perceptibly, and he
realised that the various candles and lamps he had left must be expiring one by one. The thought of
being lost in utter darkness without matches amidst this underground world of nightmare labyrinths
impelled him to rise to his feet and run, which he could safely do now that he had passed the open pit;
for he knew that once the light failed, his only hope of rescue and survival would lie in whatever
relief party Mr. Ward might send after missing him for a sufficient period. Presently, however, he
emerged from the open space into the narrower corridor and definitely located the glow as coming
from a door on his right. In a moment he had reached it and was standing once more in young Ward's
secret library, trembling with relief, and watching the sputterings of that last lamp which had brought
him to safety.
4
In another moment he was hastily filling the burned-out lamps from an oil supply he had
previously noticed, and when the room was bright again he looked about to see if he might find a
lantern for further exploration. For racked though he was with horror, his sense of grim purpose was
still uppermost; and he was firmly determined to leave no stone unturned in his search for the hideous
facts behind Charles Ward's bizarre madness. Failing to find a lantern, he chose the smallest of the
lamps to carry; also filling his pockets with candles and matches, and taking with him a gallon can of
oil, which he proposed to keep for reserve use in whatever hidden laboratory he might uncover
beyond the terrible open space with its unclean altar and nameless covered wells. To traverse that
space again would require his utmost fortitude, but he knew it must be done. Fortunately neither the
frightful altar nor the opened shaft was near the vast cell-indented wall which bounded the cavern
area, and whose black mysterious archways would form the next goals of a logical search.
So Willett went back to that great pillared hall of stench and anguished howling; turning down his
lamp to avoid any distant glimpse of the hellish altar, or of the uncovered pit with the pierced stone
slab beside it. Most of the black doorways led merely to small chambers, some vacant and some
evidently used as storerooms; and in several of the latter he saw some very curious accumulations of
various objects. One was packed with rotting and dust-draped bales of spare clothing, and the
explorer thrilled when he saw that it was unmistakably the clothing of a century and a half before. In
another room he found numerous odds and ends of modern clothing, as if gradual provisions were
being made to equip a large body of men. But what he disliked most of all were the huge copper vats
which occasionally appeared; these, and the sinister incrustations upon them. He liked them even less
than the weirdly figured leaden bowls whose rims retained such obnoxious deposits and around
which clung repellent odours perceptible above even the general noisomness of the crypt. When he
had completed about half the entire circuit of the wall he found another corridor like that from which
he had come, and out of which many doors opened. This he proceeded to investigate; and after
entering three rooms of medium size and of no significant contents, he came at last to a large oblong
apartment whose business-like tanks and tables, furnaces and modern instruments, occasional books
and endless shelves of jars and bottles proclaimed it indeed the long-sought laboratory of Charles
Ward--and no doubt of old Joseph Curwen before him.
After lighting the three lamps which he found filled and ready, Dr. Willett examined the place and
all the appurtenances with the keenest interest; noting from the relative quantities of various reagents
on the shelves that young Ward's dominant concern must have been with some branch of organic
chemistry. On the whole, little could be learned from the scientific ensemble, which included a
gruesome-looking dissecting-table; so that the room was really rather a disappointment. Among the
books was a tattered old copy of Borellus in black-letter, and it was weirdly interesting to note that
Ward had underlined the same passage whose marking had so perturbed good Mr. Merritt in
Curwen's farmhouse more than a century and half before. That old copy, of course, must have
perished along with the rest of Curwen's occult library in the final raid. Three archways opened off
the laboratory, and these the doctor proceeded to sample in turn. From his cursory survey he saw that
two led merely to small storerooms; but these he canvassed with care, remarking the piles of coffins
in various stages of damage and shuddering violently at two or three of the few coffin-plates he
could decipher. There was much clothing also stored in these rooms, and several new and tightly
nailed boxes which he did not stop to investigate. Most interesting of all, perhaps, were some odd
bits which he judged to be fragments of old Joseph Curwen's laboratory appliances. These had
suffered damage at the hands of the raiders, but were still partly recognisable as the chemical
paraphernalia of the Georgian period.
The third archway led to a very sizeable chamber entirely lined with shelves and having in the
centre a table bearing two lamps. These lamps Willett lighted, and in their brilliant glow studied the
endless shelving which surrounded him. Some of the upper levels were wholly vacant, but most of
the space was filled with small odd-looking leaden jars of two general types; one tall and without
handles like a Grecian lekythos or oil-jug, and the other with a single handle and proportioned like a
Phaleron jug. All had metal stoppers, and were covered with peculiar-looking symbols moulded in
low relief. In a moment the doctor noticed that these jugs were classified with great rigidity; all the
lekythoi being on one side of the room with a large wooden sign reading 'Custodes' above them, and
all the Phalerons on the other, correspondingly labelled with a sign reading 'Materia'.
Each of the jars of jugs, except some on the upper shelves that turned out to be vacant, bore a
cardboard tag with a number apparently referring to a catalogue; and Willett resolved to look for the
latter presently. For the moment, however, he was more interested in the nature of the array as a
whole, and experimentally opened several of the lekythoi and Phalerons at random with a view to a
rough generalisation. The result was invariable. Both types of jar contained a small quantity of a
single kind of substance; a fine dusty powder of very light weight and of many shades of dull, neutral
colour. To the colours which formed the only point of variation there was no apparent method of
disposal; and no distinction between what occurred in the lekythoi and what occurred in the
Phalerons. A bluish-grey powder might be by the side of a pinkish-white one, and any one in a
Phaleron might have its exact counterpart in a lekythos. The most individual feature about the
powders was their non-adhesiveness. Willett would pour one into his hand, and upon returning it to
its jug would find that no residue whatever remained on his palm.
The meaning of the two signs puzzled him, and he wondered why this battery of chemicals was
separated so radically from those in glass jars on the shelves of the laboratory proper. "Custodes",
"Materia"; that was the Latin for "Guards" and "Materials", respectively--and then there came a flash
of memory as to where he had seen that word "Guards" before in connexion with this dreadful
mystery. It was, of course, in the recent letter to Dr. Allen purporting to be from old Edwin
Hutchinson; and the phrase had read: 'There was no Neede to keep the Guards in Shape and eat'g off
their Heads, and it made Much to be founde in Case of Trouble, as you too welle knowe.' What did
this signify? But wait--was there not still another reference to "guards" in this matter which he had
failed wholly to recall when reading the Hutchinson letter? Back in the old non-secretive days Ward
had told him of the Eleazar Smith diary recording the spying of Smith and Weeden on the Curwen
farm, and in that dreadful chronicle there had been a mention of conversations overheard before the
old wizard betook himself wholly beneath the earth. There had been, Smith and Weeden insisted,
terrible colloquies wherein figured Curwen, certain captives of his, and the guards of those
captives. Those guards, according to Hutchinson or his avatar, had "eaten their heads off", so that
now Dr. Allen did not keep them in shape. And if not in shape, how save as the "salts" to which it
appears this wizard band was engaged in reducing as many human bodies or skeletons as they could?
So that was what these lekythoi contained; the monstrous fruit of unhallowed rites and deeds,
presumably won or cowed to such submission as to help, when called up by some hellish incantation,
in the defence of their blasphemous master or the questioning of those who were not so willing?
Willett shuddered at the thought of what he had been pouring in and out of his hands, and for a
moment felt an impulse to flee in panic from that cavern of hideous shelves with their silent and
perhaps watching sentinels. Then he thought of the "Materia"--in the myriad Phaleron jugs on the
other side of the room. Salts too--and if not the salts of "guards", then the salts of what? God! Could
it be possible that here lay the mortal relics of half the titan thinkers of all the ages; snatched by
supreme ghouls from crypts where the world thought them safe, and subject to the beck and call of
madmen who sought to drain their knowledge for some still wilder end whose ultimate effect would
concern, as poor Charles had hinted in his frantic note, "all civilisation, all natural law, perhaps even
the fate of the solar system and the universe"? And Marinus Bicknell Willett had sifted their dust
through his hands!
Then he noticed a small door at the further end of the room, and calmed himself enough to
approach it and examine the crude sign chiselled above. It was only a symbol, but it filled him with
vague spiritual dread; for a morbid, dreaming friend of his had once drawn it on paper and told him a
few of the things it means in the dark abyss of sleep. It was the sign of Koth, that dreamers see fixed
above the archway of a certain black tower standing alone in twilight--and Willett did not like what
his friend Randolph Carter had said of its powers. But a moment later he forgot the sign as he
recognised a new acrid odour in the stench-filled air. This was a chemical rather than animal smell,
and came clearly from the room beyond the door. And it was, unmistakably, the same odour which
had saturated Charles Ward's clothing on the day the doctors had taken him away. So it was here that
the youth had been interrupted by the final summons? He was wiser that old Joseph Curwen, for he
had not resisted. Willett, boldly determined to penetrate every wonder and nightmare this nether realm
might contain, seized the small lamp and crossed the threshold. A wave of nameless fright rolled out
to meet him, but he yielded to no whim and deferred to no intuition. There was nothing alive here to
harm him, and he would not be stayed in his piercing of the eldritch cloud which engulfed his patient.
The room beyond the door was of medium size, and had no furniture save a table, a single chair,
and two groups of curious machines with clamps and wheels, which Willett recognised after a
moment as mediaeval instruments of torture. On one side of the door stood a rack of savage whips,
above which were some shelves bearing empty rows of shallow pedestalled cups of lead shaped
like Grecian kylikes. On the other side was the table; with a powerful Argand lamp, a pad and pencil,
and two of the stoppered lekythoi from the shelves outside set down at irregular places as if
temporarily or in haste. Willett lighted the lamp and looked carefully at the pad, to see what notes
Ward might have been jotting down when interrupted; but found nothing more intelligible than the
following disjointed fragments in that crabbed Curwen chirography, which shed no light on the case
as a whole:
'B. dy'd not. Escap'd into walls and founde Place below.' 'Sawe olde V. saye ye Sabaoth and learnt
yee Way.' 'Rais'd Yog-Sothoth thrice and was ye nexte Day deliver'd.' 'F. soughte to wipe out all
know'g howe to raise Those from Outside.'
As the strong Argand blaze lit up the entire chamber the doctor saw that the wall opposite the
door, between the two groups of torturing appliances in the corners, was covered with pegs from
which hung a set of shapeless-looking robes of a rather dismal yellowish-white. But far more
interesting were the two vacant walls, both of which were thickly covered with mystic symbols and
formulae roughly chiselled in the smooth dressed stone. The damp floor also bore marks of carving;
and with but little difficulty Willett deciphered a huge pentagram in the centre, with a plain circle
about three feet wide half way between this and each corner. In one of these four circles, near where
a yellowish robe had been flung carelessly down, there stood a shallow kylix of the sort found on
the shelves above the whip-rack; and just outside the periphery was one of the Phaleron jugs from
the shelves in the other room, its tag numbered 118. This was unstoppered, and proved upon
inspection to be empty; but the explorer saw with a shiver that the kylix was not. Within its shallow
area, and saved from scattering only by the absence of wind in this sequestered cavern, lay a small
amount of a dry, dull-greenish efflorescent powder which must have belonged in the jug; and Willett
almost reeled at the implications that came sweeping over him as he correlated little by little the
several elements and antecedents of the scene. The whips and the instruments of torture, the dust or
salts from the jug of "Materia", the two lekythoi from the "Custodes" shelf, the robes, the formulae
on the walls, the notes on the pad, the hints from letters and legends, and the thousand glimpses,
doubts, and suppositions which had come to torment the friends and parents of Charles Ward--all
these engulfed the doctor in a tidal wave of horror as he looked at that dry greenish powder
outspread in the pedestalled leaden kylix on the floor.
With an effort, however, Willett pulled himself together and began studying the formulae
chiselled on the walls. From the stained and incrusted letters it was obvious that they were carved in
Joseph Curwen's time, and their text was such as to be vaguely familiar to one who had read much
Curwen material or delved extensively into the history of magic. One the doctor clearly recognised
as what Mrs. Ward heard her son chanting on that ominous Good Friday a year before, and what an
authority had told him was a very terrible invocation addressed to secret gods outside the normal
spheres. It was not spelled here exactly as Mrs. Ward had set it down from memory, nor yet as the
authority had shewn it to him in the forbidden pages of "Eliphas Levi"; but its identity was
unmistakable, and such words as Sabaoth, Metraton, Almousin, and Zariatnatmik sent a shudder of
fright through the search who had seen and felt so much of cosmic abomination just around the
corner.
This was on the left-hand wall as one entered the room. The right-hand wall was no less thickly
inscribed, and Willett felt a start of recognition when he came up the pair of formulae so frequently
occurring in the recent notes in the library. They were, roughly speaking, the same; with the ancient
symbols of "Dragon's Head" and "Dragon's Tail" heading them as in Ward's scribblings. But the
spelling differed quite widely from that of the modern versions, as if old Curwen had had a different
way of recording sound, or as if later study had evolved more powerful and perfected variants of the
invocations in question. The doctor tried to reconcile the chiselled version with the one which still
ran persistently in his head, and found it hard to do. Where the script he had memorised began "Y'ai
'ng'ngah, Yog-Sothoth", this epigraph started out as "Aye, engengah, Yogge-Sothotha"; which to his
mind would seriously interfere with the syllabification of the second word.
Ground as the later text was into his consciousness, the discrepancy disturbed him; and he found
himself chanting the first of the formulae aloud in an effort to square the sound he conceived with the
letters he found carved. Weird and menacing in that abyss of antique blasphemy rang his voice; its
accents keyed to a droning sing-song either through the spell of the past and the unknown, or through
the hellish example of that dull, godless wail from the pits whose inhuman cadences rose and fell
rhythmically in the distance through the stench and the darkness.
Y'AI 'NG'NGAH, YOG-SOTHOTH H'EE-L'GEB F'AI THRODOG UAAAH!
But what was this cold wind which had sprung into life at the very outset of the chant? The lamps
were sputtering woefully, and the gloom grew so dense that the letters on the wall nearly faded from
sight. There was smoke, too, and an acrid odour which quite drowned out the stench from the far-
away wells; an odour like that he had smelt before, yet infinitely stronger and more pungent. He
turned from the inscriptions to face the room with its bizarre contents, and saw that the kylix on the
floor, in which the ominous efflorescent powder had lain, was giving forth a cloud of thick,
greenish-black vapour of surprising volume and opacity. That powder--Great God! it had come from
the shelf of "Materia"--what was it doing now, and what had started it? The formula he had been
chanting--the first of the pair--Dragon's Head, ascending node--Blessed Saviour, could it be ...
The doctor reeled, and through his head raced wildly disjointed scraps from all he had seen,
heard, and read of the frightful case of Joseph Curwen and Charles Dexter Ward. "I say to you
againe, doe not call up Any that you can not put downe...Have ye Wordes for laying at all times
readie, and stopp not to be sure when there is any Doubte of Whom you have...3 Talkes with What
was therein inhum'd ..." Mercy of Heaven, what is that shape behind the parting smoke?
5
Marinus Bicknell Willett has not hope that any part of his tale will be believed except by certain
sympathetic friends, hence he has made no attempt to tell it beyond his most intimate circle. Only a
few outsiders have ever heard it repeated, and of these the majority laugh and remark that the doctor
surely is getting old. He has been advised to take a long vacation and to shun future cases dealing
with mental disturbance. But Mr. Ward knows that the veteran physician speaks only a horrible truth.
Did not he himself see the noisome aperture in the bungalow cellar? Did not Willett send him home
overcome and ill at eleven o'clock that portentous morning? Did he not telephone the doctor in vain
that evening, and again the next day, and had he not driven to the bungalow itself on that following
noon, finding his friend unconscious but unharmed on one of the beds upstairs? Willett had been
breathing stertorously, and opened his eyes slowly when Mr. Ward gave him some brandy fetched
from the car. Then he shuddered and screamed, crying out, 'That beard...those eyes...God, who are
you?' A very strange thing to say to a trim, blue-eyed, clean-shaven gentleman whom he had known
from the latter's boyhood.
In the bright noon sunlight the bungalow was unchanged since the previous morning. Willett's
clothing bore no disarrangement beyond certain smudges and worn places at the knees, and only a
faint acrid odour reminded Mr. Ward of what he had smelt on his son that day he was taken to the
hospital. The doctor's flashlight was missing, but his valise was safely there, as empty as when he
had brought it. Before indulging in any explanations, and obviously with great moral effort, Willett
staggered dizzily down to the cellar and tried the fateful platform before the tubs. It was unyielding.
Crossing to where he had left his yet unused tool satchel the day before, he obtained a chisel and
began to pry up the stubborn planks one by one. Underneath the smooth concrete was still visible, but
of any opening or perforation there was no longer a trace. Nothing yawned this time to sicken the
mystified father who had followed the doctor downstairs; only the smooth concrete underneath the
planks--no noisome well, no world of subterrene horrors, no secret library, no Curwen papers, no
nightmare pits of stench and howling, no laboratory or shelves or chiselled formulae, no...Dr. Willett
turned pale, and clutched at the younger man. 'Yesterday,' he asked softly, 'did you see it here...and
smell it?' And when Mr. Ward, himself transfixed with dread and wonder, found strength to nod an
affirmative, the physician gave a sound half a sigh and half a gasp, and nodded in turn. 'Then I will tell
you', he said.
So for an hour, in the sunniest room they could find upstairs, the physician whispered his
frightful tale to the wondering father. There was nothing to relate beyond the looming up of that form
when the greenish-black vapour from the kylix parted, and Willett was too tired to ask himself what
had really occurred. There were futile, bewildered head-shakings from both men, and once Mr.
Ward ventured a hushed suggestion, 'Do you suppose it would be of any use to dig?' The doctor was
silent, for it seemed hardly fitting for any human brain to answer when powers of unknown spheres
had so vitally encroached on this side of the Great Abyss. Again Mr. Ward asked, 'But where did it
go? It brought you here, you know, and it sealed up the hole somehow.' And Willett again let silence
answer for him.
But after all, this was not the final phase of the matter. Reaching for his handkerchief before
rising to leave, Dr. Willett's fingers closed upon a piece of paper in his pocket which had not been
there before, and which was companioned by the candles and matches he had seized in the vanished
vault. It was a common sheet, torn obviously from the cheap pad in that fabulous room of horror
somewhere underground, and the writing upon it was that of an ordinary lead pencil--doubtless the
one which had lain beside the pad. It was folded very carelessly, and beyond the faint acrid scent of
the cryptic chamber bore no print or mark of any world but this. But in the text itself it did indeed reek
with wonder; for here was no script of any wholesome age, but the laboured strokes of mediaeval
darkness, scarcely legible to the laymen who now strained over it, yet having combinations of
symbols which seemed vaguely familiar. The briefly scrawled message was this, and its mystery lent
purpose to the shaken pair, who forthwith walked steadily out to the Ward car and gave orders to be
driven first to a quiet dining place and then to the John Hay Library on the hill.
At the library it was easy to find good manuals of palaeography, and over these the two men
puzzled till the lights of evening shone out from the great chandelier. In the end they found what was
needed. The letters were indeed no fantastic invention, but the normal script of a very dark period.
They were the pointed Saxon minuscules of the eighth or ninth century A.D., and brought with them
memories of an uncouth time when under a fresh Christian veneer ancient faiths and ancient rites
stirred stealthily, and the pale moon of Britain looked sometimes on strange deeds in the Roman ruins
of Caerleon and Hexham, and by the towers along Hadrian's crumbling wall. The words were in such
Latin as a barbarous age might remember--'Corvinus necandus est. Cadaver aq(ua) forti
dissolvendum, nec aliq(ui)d retinendum. Tace ut potes.'--which may roughly be translated, "Curwen
must be killed. The body must be dissolved in aqua fortis, nor must anything be retained. Keep
silence as best you are able."
Willett and Mr. Ward were mute and baffled. They had met the unknown, and found that they
lacked emotions to respond to it as they vaguely believed they ought. With Willett, especially, the
capacity for receiving fresh impressions of awe was well-nigh exhausted; and both men sat still and
helpless till the closing of the library forced them to leave. Then they drove listlessly to the Ward
mansion in Prospect Street, and talked to no purpose into the night. The doctor rested toward
morning, but did not go home. And he was still there Sunday noon when a telephone message came
from the detectives who had been assigned to look up Dr. Allen.
Mr. Ward, who was pacing nervously about in a dressing-gown, answered the call in person; and
told the men to come up early the next day when he heard their report was almost ready. Both Willett
and he were glad that this phase of the matter was taking form, for whatever the origin of the strange
minuscule message, it seemed certain the "Curwen" who must be destroyed could be no other than
the bearded and spectacled stranger. Charles had feared this man, and had said in the frantic note that
he must be killed and dissolved in acid. Allen, moreover, had been receiving letters from the strange
wizards in Europe under the name of Curwen, and palpably regarded himself as an avatar of the
bygone necromancer. And now from a fresh and unknown source had come a message saying that
"Curwen" must be killed and dissolved in acid. The linkage was too unmistakable to be factitious; and
besides, was not Allen planning to murder young Ward upon the advice of the creature called
Hutchinson? Of course, the letter they had seen had never reached the bearded stranger; but from its
text they could see that Allen had already formed plans for dealing with the youth if he grew too
"squeamish". Without doubt, Allen must be apprehended; and even if the most drastic directions were
not carried out, he must be placed where he could inflict no harm upon Charles Ward.
That afternoon, hoping against hope to extract some gleam of information anent the inmost
mysteries from the only available one capable of giving it, the father and the doctor went down the
bay and called on young Charles at the hospital. Simply and gravely Willett told him all he had found,
and noticed how pale he turned as each description made certain the truth of the discovery. The
physician employed as much dramatic effect as he could, and watched for a wincing on Charles's part
when he approached the matter of the covered pits and the nameless hybrids within. But Ward did not
wince. Willett paused, and his voice grew indignant as he spoke of how the things were starving. He
taxed the youth with shocking inhumanity, and shivered when only a sardonic laugh came in reply.
For Charles, having dropped as useless his pretence that the crypt did not exist, seemed to see some
ghastly jest in this affair; and chucked hoarsely at something which amused him. Then he whispered,
in accents doubly terrible because of the cracked voice he used, 'Damn 'em, they do eat, but they don't
need to! That's the rare part! A month, you say, without food? Lud, Sir, you be modest! D'ye know,
that was the joke on poor old Whipple with his virtuous bluster! Kill everything off, would he? Why,
damme, he was half-deaf with noise from Outside and never saw or heard aught from the wells! He
never dreamed they were there at all! Devil take ye, those cursed things have been howling down
there ever since Curwen was done for a hundred and fifty-seven years gone!'
But no more than this could Willett get from the youth. Horrified, yet almost convinced against
his will, he went on with his tale in the hope that some incident might startle his auditor out of the
mad composure he maintained. Looking at the youth's face, the doctor could not but feel a kind of
terror at the changes which recent months had wrought. Truly, the boy had drawn down nameless
horrors from the skies. When the room with the formulae and the greenish dust was mentioned,
Charles shewed his first sign of animation. A quizzical look overspread his face as he heard what
Willett had read on the pad, and he ventured the mild statement that those notes were old ones, of no
possible significance to anyone not deeply initiated in the history of magic. But, he added, 'had you
but known the words to bring up that which I had out in the cup, you had not been here to tell me this.
'Twas Number 118, and I conceive you would have shook had you looked it up in my list in t'other
room. 'Twas never raised by me, but I meant to have it up that day you came to invite me hither.'
Then Willett told of the formula he had spoken and of the greenish-black smoke which had arisen;
and as he did so he saw true fear dawn for the first time on Charles Ward's face. 'It came, and you be
here alive?' As Ward croaked the words his voice seemed almost to burst free of its trammels and
sink to cavernous abysses of uncanny resonance. Willett, gifted with a flash of inspiration, believed
he saw the situation, and wove into his reply a caution from a letter he remembered. 'No. 118, you
say? But don't forget that stones are all changed now in nine grounds out of ten. You are never sure
till you question!' And then, without warning, he drew forth the minuscule message and flashed it
before the patient's eyes. He could have wished no stronger result, for Charles Ward fainted
forthwith.
All this conversation, of course, had been conducted with the greatest secrecy lest the resident
alienists accuse the father and the physician of encouraging a madman in his delusions. Unaided, too,
Dr. Willett and Mr. Ward picked up the stricken youth and placed him on the couch. In reviving, the
patient mumbled many times of some word which he must get to Orne and Hutchinson at once; so
when his consciousness seemed fully back the doctor told him that of those strange creatures at least
one was his bitter enemy, and had given Dr. Allen advice for his assassination. This revelation
produced no visible effect, and before it was made the visitors could see that their host had already
the look of a hunted man. After that he would converse no more, so Willett and the father departed
presently; leaving behind a caution against the bearded Allen, to which the youth only replied that this
individual was very safely taken care of, and could do no one any harm even if he wished. This was
said with an almost evil chuckle very painful to hear. They did not worry about any communications
Charles might indite to that monstrous pair in Europe, since they knew that the hospital authorities
seized all outgoing mail for censorship and would pass no wild or outr-looking missive.
There is, however, a curious sequel to the matter of Orne and Hutchinson, if such indeed the
exiled wizards were. Moved by some vague presentiment amidst the horrors of that period, Willett
arranged with an international press-cutting bureau for accounts of notable current crimes and
accidents in Prague and in eastern Transylvania; and after six months believed that he had found two
very significant things amongst the multifarious items he received and had translated. One was the
total wrecking of a house by night in the oldest quarter of Prague, and the disappearance of the evil
old man called Josef Nadek, who had dwelt in it alone ever since anyone could remember. The other
was a titan explosion in the Transylvanian mountains east of Rakus, and the utter extirpation with all
its inmates of the ill-regarded Castle Ferenczy, whose master was so badly spoken of by peasants and
soldiery alike that he would shortly have been summoned to Bucharest for serious questioning had
not this incident cut off a career already so long as to antedate all common memory. Willett maintains
that the hand which wrote those minuscules was able to wield stronger weapons as well; and that
while Curwen was left to him to dispose of, the writer felt able to find and deal with Orne and
Hutchinson itself. Of what their fate may have been the doctor strives sedulously not to think.
6
The following morning Dr. Willett hastened to the Ward home to be present when the detectives
arrived. Allen's destruction or imprisonment--or Curwen's if one might regard the tacit claim to
reincarnation as valid--he felt must be accomplished at any cost, and he communicated this conviction
to Mr. Ward as they sat waiting for the men to come. They were downstairs this time, for the upper
parts of the house were beginning to be shunned because of a particular nauseousness which hung
indefinitely about; a nauseousness which the older servants connected with some curse left by the
vanished Curwen portrait.
At nine o'clock the three detectives presented themselves and immediately delivered all that they
had to say. They had not, regrettably enough, located the Brava Tony Gomes as they had wished, nor
had they found the least trace of Dr. Allen's source or present whereabouts; but they had managed to
unearth a considerable number of local impressions and facts concerning the reticent stranger. Allen
had struck Pawtuxet people as a vaguely unnatural being, and there was a universal belief that his
thick sandy beard was either dyed or false--a belief conclusively upheld by the finding of such a
false beard, together with a pair of dark glasses, in his room at the fateful bungalow. His voice, Mr.
Ward could well testify from his one telephone conversation, had a depth and hollowness that could
not be forgotten; and his glanced seemed malign even through his smoked and horn-rimmed glasses.
One shopkeeper, in the course of negotiations, had seen a specimen of his handwriting and declared
it was very queer and crabbed; this being confirmed by pencilled notes of no clear meaning found in
his room and identified by the merchant. In connexion with the vampirism rumours of the preceding
summer, a majority of the gossips believed that Allen rather than Ward was the actual vampire.
Statements were also obtained from the officials who had visited the bungalow after the unpleasant
incident of the motor truck robbery. They had felt less of the sinister in Dr. Allen, but had
recognised him as the dominant figure in the queer shadowy cottage. The place had been too dark for
them to observe him clearly, but they would know him again if they saw him. His beard had looked
odd, and they thought he had some slight scar above his dark spectacled right eye. As for the
detectives' search of Allen's room, it yielded nothing definite save the beard and glasses, and several
pencilled notes in a crabbed writing which Willett at once saw was identical with that shared by the
old Curwen manuscripts and by the voluminous recent notes of young Ward found in the vanished
catacombs of horror.
Dr. Willett and Mr. Ward caught something of a profound, subtle, and insidious cosmic fear from
this data as it was gradually unfolded, and almost trembled in following up the vague, mad thought
which had simultaneously reached their minds. The false beard and glasses--the crabbed Curwen
penmanship--the old portrait and its tiny scar--and the altered youth in the hospital with such a scar--
that deep, hollow voice on the telephone--was it not of this that Mr. Ward was reminded when his son
barked forth those pitiable tones to which he now claimed to be reduced? Who had ever seen
Charles and Allen together? Yes, the officials had once, but who later on? Was it not when Allen left
that Charles suddenly lost his growing fright and began to live wholly at the bungalow? Curwen--
Allen--Ward--in what blasphemous and abominable fusion had two ages and two persons become
involved? That damnable resemblance of the picture to Charles--had it not used to stare and stare, and
follow the boy around the room with its eyes? Why, too, did both Allen and Charles copy Joseph
Curwen's handwriting, even when alone and off guard? And then the frightful work of those people--
the lost crypt of horrors that had aged the doctor overnight; the starving monsters in the noisome pits;
the awful formula which had yielded such nameless results; the message in minuscules found in
Willett's pocket; the papers and the letters and all the talk of graves and "salts" and discoveries--
whither did everything lead? In the end Mr. Ward did the most sensible thing. Steeling himself against
any realisation of why he did it, he gave the detectives an article to be shewn to such Pawtuxet
shopkeepers as had seen the portentous Dr. Allen. That article was a photograph of his luckless son,
on which he now carefully drew in ink the pair of heavy glasses and the black pointed beard which
the men had brought from Allen's room.
For two hours he waited with the doctor in the oppressive house where fear and miasma were
slowly gathering as the empty panel in the upstairs library leered and leered and leered. Then the men
returned. Yes. The altered photograph was a very passable likeness of Dr. Allen. Mr. Ward turned
pale, and Willett wiped a suddenly dampened brow with his handkerchief. Allen--Ward--Curwen--it
was becoming too hideous for coherent thought. What had the boy called out of the void, and what
had it done to him? What, really, had happened from first to last? Who was this Allen who sought to
kill Charles as too "squeamish", and why had his destined victim said in the postscript to that frantic
letter that he must be so completely obliterated in acid? Why, too, had the minuscule message, of
whose origin no one dared think, said that "Curwen" must be likewise obliterated? What was the
change, and when had the final stage occurred? That day when his frantic note was received--he had
been nervous all the morning, then there was an alteration. He had slipped out unseen and swaggered
boldly in past the men hired to guard him. That was the time, when he was out. But no--had he not
cried out in terror as he entered his study--this very room? What had he found there? Or wait--what
had found him? That simulacrum which brushed boldly in without having been seen to go--was that an
alien shadow and a horror forcing itself upon a trembling figure which had never gone out at all?
Had not the butler spoken of queer noises?
Willett rang for the man and asked him some low-toned questions. It had, surely enough, been a
bad business. There had been noises--a cry, a gasp, a choking, and a sort of clattering or creaking or
thumping, or all of these. And Mr. Charles was not the same when he stalked out without a word. The
butler shivered as he spoke, and sniffed at the heavy air that blew down from some open window
upstairs. Terror had settled definitely upon the house, and only the business-like detectives failed to
imbibe a full measure of it. Even they were restless, for this case had held vague elements in the
background which pleased them not at all. Dr. Willett was thinking deeply and rapidly, and his
thoughts were terrible ones. Now and then he would almost break into muttering as he ran over in his
head a new, appalling, and increasingly conclusive chain of nightmare happenings.
Then Mr. Ward made a sign that the conference was over, and everyone save him and the doctor
left the room. It was noon now, but shadows as of coming night seemed to engulf the phantom-
haunted mansion. Willett began talking very seriously to his host, and urged that he leave a great deal
of the future investigation to him. There would be, he predicted, certain obnoxious elements which a
friend could bear better than a relative. As family physician he must have a free hand, and the first
thing he required was a period alone and undisturbed in the abandoned library upstairs, where the
ancient overmantel had gathered about itself an aura of noisome horror more intense than when
Joseph Curwen's features themselves glanced slyly down from the painted panel.
Mr. Ward, dazed by the flood of grotesque morbidities and unthinkably maddening suggestions
that poured in upon him from every side, could only acquiesce; and half an hour later the doctor was
locked in the shunned room with the panelling from Olney Court. The father, listening outside, heard
fumbling sounds of moving and rummaging as the moments passed; and finally a wrench and a creak,
as if a tight cupboard door were being opened. Then there was a muffled cry, a kind of snorting
choke, and a hasty slamming of whatever had been opened. Almost at once the key rattled and Willett
appeared in the hall, haggard and ghastly, and demanding wood for the real fireplace on the south
wall of the room. The furnace was not enough, he said; and the electric log had little practical use.
Longing yet not daring to ask questions, Mr. Ward gave the requisite orders and a man brought some
stout pine logs, shuddering as he entered the tainted air of the library to place them in the grate.
Willett meanwhile had gone up to the dismantled laboratory and brought down a few odds and ends
not included in the moving of the July before. They were in a covered basket, and Mr. Ward never
saw what they were.
Then the doctor locked himself in the library once more, and by the clouds of smoke which
rolled down past the windows from the chimney it was known that he had lighted the fire. Later, after
a great rustling of newspapers, that odd wrench and creaking were heard again; followed by a
thumping which none of the eavesdroppers liked. Thereafter two suppressed cries of Willett's were
heard, and hard upon these came a swishing rustle of indefinable hatefulness. Finally the smoke that
the wind beat down from the chimney grew very dark and acrid, and everyone wished that the weather
had spared them this choking and venomous inundation of peculiar fumes. Mr. Ward's head reeled,
and the servants all clustered together in a knot to watch the horrible black smoke swoop down. After
an age of waiting the vapours seemed to lighted, and half-formless sounds of scraping, sweeping,
and other minor operations were heard behind the bolted door. And at last, after the slamming of
some cupboard within, Willett made his appearance--sad, pale, and haggard, and bearing the cloth-
draped basket he had taken from the upstairs laboratory. He had left the window open, and into that
once accursed room was pouring a wealth of pure, wholesome air to mix with a queer new smell of
disinfectants. The ancient overmantel still lingered; but it seemed robbed of malignity now, and rose
as calm and stately in its white panelling as if it had never borne the picture of Joseph Curwen. Night
was coming on, yet this time its shadows held no latent fright, but only a gentle melancholy. Of what
he had done the doctor would never speak. To Mr. Ward he said, 'I can answer no questions, but I
will say that there are different kinds of magic. I have made a great purgation, and those in this house
will sleep the better for it.'
7
That Dr. Willett's "purgation" had been an ordeal almost as nerve-racking in its way as his
hideous wandering in the vanished crypt is shewn by the fact that the elderly physician gave out
completely as soon as he reached home that evening. For three days he rested constantly in his room,
though servants later muttered something about having heard him after midnight on Wednesday, when
the outer door softly opened and closed with phenomenal softness. Servants' imaginations,
fortunately, are limited, else comment might have been excited by an item in Thursday's Evening
Bulletin which ran as follows:
North End Ghouls Again Active
After a lull of ten months since the dastardly vandalism in the Weeden lot at the North Burial
Ground, a nocturnal prowler was glimpsed early this morning in the same cemetery by Robert Hart,
the night watchman. Happening to glance for a moment from his shelter at about 2 a.m., Hart observed
the glow of a lantern or pocket torch not far to the northwest, and upon opening the door detected the
figure of a man with a trowel very plainly silhouetted against a nearby electric light. At once starting
in pursuit, he saw the figure dart hurriedly toward the main entrance, gaining the street and losing
himself among the shadows before approach or capture was possible.
Like the first of the ghouls active during the past year, this intruder had done no real damage
before detection. A vacant part of the Ward lot shewed signs of a little superficial digging, but
nothing even nearly the size of a grave had been attempted, and no previous grave had been disturbed.
Hart, who cannot describe the prowler except as a small man probably having a full beard,
inclines to the view that all three of the digging incidents have a common source; but police from the
Second Station think otherwise on account of the savage nature of the second incident, where an
ancient coffin was removed and its headstone violently shattered.
The first of the incidents, in which it is thought an attempt to bury something was frustrated,
occurred a year ago last March, and has been attributed to bootleggers seeking a cache. It is
possible, says Sergt. Riley, that this third affair is of similar nature. Officers at the Second Station
are taking especial pains to capture the gang of miscreants responsible for these repeated outrages.
All day Thursday Dr. Willett rested as if recuperating from something past or nerving himself for
something to come. In the evening he wrote a note to Mr. Ward, which was delivered the next
morning and which caused the half-dazed parent to ponder long and deeply. Mr. Ward had not been
able to go down to business since the shock of Monday with its baffling reports and its sinister
"purgation", but he found something calming about the doctor's letter in spite of the despair it seemed
to promise and the fresh mysteries it seemed to evoke.
10 Barnes St., Providence, R. I.
April 12, 1928.
Dear Theodore:-
I feel that I must say a word to you before doing what I am going to do tomorrow. It will
conclude the terrible business we have been going through (for I feel that no spade is ever likely to
reach that monstrous place we know of), but I'm afraid it won't set your mind at rest unless I expressly
assure you how very conclusive it is.
You have known me ever since you were a small boy, so I think you will not distrust me when I
hint that some matters are best left undecided and unexplored. It is better that you attempt no further
speculation as to Charles's case, and almost imperative that you tell his mother nothing more than she
already suspects. When I call on you tomorrow Charles will have escaped. That is all which need
remain in anyone's mind. He was mad, and he escaped. You can tell his mother gently and gradually
about the mad part when you stop sending the typed notes in his name. I'd advise you to join her in
Atlantic City and take a rest yourself. God knows you need one after this shock, as I do myself. I am
going South for a while to calm down and brace up.
So don't ask me any questions when I call. It may be that something will go wrong, but I'll tell you
if it does. I don't think it will. There will be nothing more to worry about, for Charles will be very,
very safe. He is now--safer than you dream. You need hold no fears about Allen, and who or what he
is. He forms as much a part of the past as Joseph Curwen's picture, and when I ring your doorbell
you may feel certain that there is no such person. And what wrote that minuscule message will never
trouble you or yours.
But you must steel yourself to melancholy, and prepare your wife to do the same. I must tell you
frankly that Charles's escape will not mean his restoration to you. He has been afflicted with a
peculiar disease, as you must realise from the subtle physical as well as mental changes in him, and
you must not hope to see him again. Have only this consolation--that he was never a fiend or even
truly a madman, but only an eager, studious, and curious boy whose love of mystery and of the past
was his undoing. He stumbled on things no mortal ought ever to know, and reached back through the
years as no one ever should reach; and something came out of those years to engulf him.
And now comes the matter in which I must ask you to trust me most of all. For there will be,
indeed, no uncertainty about Charles's fate. In about a year, say, you can if you wish devise a suitable
account of the end; for the boy will be no more. You can put up a stone in your lot at the North Burial
Ground exactly ten feet west of your father's and facing the same way, and that will mark the true
resting-place of your son. Nor need you fear that it will mark any abnormality or changeling. The
ashes in that grave will be those of your own unaltered bone and sinew--of the real Charles Dexter
Ward whose mind you watched from infancy--the real Charles with the olive-mark on his hip and
without the black witch-mark on his chest or the pit on his forehead. The Charles who never did
actual evil, and who will have paid with his life for his "squeamishness".
That is all. Charles will have escaped, and a year from now you can put up his stone. Do not
question me tomorrow. And believe that the honour of your ancient family remains untainted now, as
it has been at all times in the past.
With profoundest sympathy, and exhortations to fortitude, calmness, and resignation, I am ever
Sincerely your friend, Marinus B. Willett.
So on the morning of Friday, April 13, 1928, Marinus Bicknell Willett visited the room of
Charles Dexter Ward at Dr. Waite's private hospital on Conanicut Island. The youth, though making
no attempt to evade his caller, was in a sullen mood; and seemed disinclined to open the conversation
which Willett obviously desired. The doctor's discovery of the crypt and his monstrous experience
therein had of course created a new source of embarrassment, so that both hesitated perceptibly after
the interchange of a few strained formalities. Then a new element of constraint crept in, as Ward
seemed to read behind the doctor's mask-like face a terrible purpose which had never been there
before. The patient quailed, conscious that since the last visit there had been a change whereby the
solicitous family physician had given place to the ruthless and implacable avenger.
Ward actually turned pale, and the doctor was the first to speak. 'More,' he said, 'has been found
out, and I must warn you fairly that a reckoning is due.'
'Digging again, and coming upon more poor starving pets?' was the ironic reply. It was evident
that the youth meant to shew bravado to the last.
'No,' Willett slowly rejoined, 'this time I did not have to dig. We have had men looking up Dr.
Allen, and they found the false beard and spectacles in the bungalow.'
'Excellent,' commented the disquieted host in an effort to be wittily insulting, 'and I trust they
proved more becoming than the beard and glasses you now have on!'
'They would become you very well,' came the even and studied response, 'as indeed they seem to
have done.'
As Willett said this, it almost seemed as though a cloud passed over the sun; though there was no
change in the shadows on the floor. Then Ward ventured:
'And is this what asks so hotly for a reckoning? Suppose a man does find it now and then useful to
be twofold?'
'No', said Willett gravely, 'again you are wrong. It is no business of mine if any man seeks duality;
provided he has any right to exist at all, and provided he does not destroy what called him out of
space.'
Ward now started violently. 'Well, Sir, what have ye found, and what d'ye want of me?'
The doctor let a little time elapse before replying, as if choosing his words for an effective
answer.
'I have found', he finally intoned, 'something in a cupboard behind an ancient overmantel where a
picture once was, and I have burned it and buried the ashes where the grave of Charles Dexter Ward
ought to be.'
The madman choked and sprang from the chair in which he had been sitting:
'Damn ye, who did ye tell--and who'll believe it was he after these two full months, with me
alive? What d'ye mean to do?'
Willett, though a small man, actually took on a kind of judicial majesty as he calmed the patient
with a gesture.
'I have told no one. This is no common case--it is a madness out of time and a horror from beyond
the spheres which no police or lawyers or courts or alienists could ever fathom or grapple with.
Thank God some chance has left inside me the spark of imagination, that I might not go astray in
thinking out this thing. You cannot deceive me, Joseph Curwen, for I know that your accursed magic
is true!
'I know how you wove the spell that brooded outside the years and fastened on your double and
descendant; I know how you drew him into the past and got him to raise you up from your detestable
grave; I know how he kept you hidden in his laboratory while you studied modern things and roved
abroad as a vampire by night, and how you later shewed yourself in beard and glasses that no one
might wonder at your godless likeness to him; I know what you resolved to do when he balked at
your monstrous rifling of the world's tombs, and at what you planned afterward , and I know how you
did it.
'You left off your beard and glasses and fooled the guards around the house. They thought it was
he who went in, and they thought it was he who came out when you had strangled and hidden him. But
you hadn't reckoned on the different contents of two minds. You were a fool, Joseph Curwen, to
fancy that a mere visual identity would be enough. Why didn't you think of the speech and the voice
and the handwriting? It hasn't worked, you see, after all. You know better than I who or what wrote
that message in minuscules, but I will warn you it was not written in vain. There are abominations and
blasphemies which must be stamped out, and I believe that the writer of those words will attend to
Orne and Hutchinson. One of those creatures wrote you once, "do not call up any that you can not put
down". You were undone once before, perhaps in that very way, and it may be that your own evil
magic will undo you all again. Curwen, a man can't tamper with Nature beyond certain limits, and
every horror you have woven will rise up to wipe you out.'
But here the doctor was cut short by a convulsive cry from the creature before him. Hopelessly
at bay, weaponless, and knowing that any show of physical violence would bring a score of attendants
to the doctor's rescue, Joseph Curwen had recourse to his one ancient ally, and began a series of
cabbalistic motions with his forefingers as his deep, hollow voice, now unconcealed by feigned
hoarseness, bellowed out the opening words of a terrible formula.
'PER ADONAI ELOIM, ADONAI JEHOVA, ADONAI SABAOTH, METRATON ...'
But Willett was too quick for him. Even as the dogs in the yard outside began to howl, and even
as a chill wind sprang suddenly up from the bay, the doctor commenced the solemn and measured
intonation of that which he had meant all along to recite. An eye for an eye--magic for magic--let the
outcome shew how well the lesson of the abyss had been learned! So in a clear voice Marinus
Bicknell Willett began the second of that pair of formulae whose first had raised the writer of those
minuscules--the cryptic invocation whose heading was the Dragon's Tail, sign of the descending
node--
OGTHROD AI'F GEB'L-EE'H YOG-SOTHOTH 'NGAH'NG AI'Y ZHRO!
At the very first word from Willett's mouth the previously commenced formula of the patient
stopped short. Unable to speak, the monster made wild motions with his arms until they too were
arrested. When the awful name of Yog-Sothoth was uttered, the hideous change began. It was not
merely a dissolution, but rather a transformation or recapitulation; and Willett shut his eyes lest he
faint before the rest of the incantation could be pronounced.
But he did not faint, and that man of unholy centuries and forbidden secrets never troubled the
world again. The madness out of time had subsided, and the case of Charles Dexter Ward was
closed. Opening his eyes before staggering out of that room of horror, Dr. Willett saw that what he
had kept in memory had not been kept amiss. There had, as he had predicted, been no need for acids.
For like his accursed picture a year before, Joseph Curwen now lay scattered on the floor as a thin
coating of fine bluish-grey dust.

AZATHOTH
When age fell upon the world, and wonder went out of the minds of men; when grey cities reared
to smoky skies tall towers grim and ugly, in whose shadow none might dream of the sun or of
Spring's flowering meads; when learning stripped the Earth of her mantle of beauty and poets sang no
more of twisted phantoms seen with bleared and inward looking eyes; when these things had come to
pass, and childish hopes had gone forever, there was a man who traveled out of life on a quest into
spaces whither the world's dreams had fled.
Of the name and abode of this man little is written, for they were of the waking world only; yet it
is said that both were obscure. It is enough to say that he dwelt in a city of high walls where sterile
twilight reigned, that he toiled all day among shadow and turmoil, coming home at evening to a room
whose one window opened not to open fields and groves but on to a dim court where other windows
stared in dull despair. From that casement one might see only walls and windows, except sometimes
when one leaned so far out and peered at the small stars that passed. And because mere walls and
windows must soon drive a man to madness who dreams and reads much, the dweller in that room
used night after night to lean out and peer aloft to glimpse some fragment of things beyond the
waking world and the tall cities. After years he began to call the slow sailing stars by name, and to
follow them in fancy when they glided regretfully out of sight; till at length his vision opened to
many secret vistas whose existance no common eye suspected. And one night a mighty gulf was
bridged, and the dream haunted skies swelled down to the lonely watcher's window to merge with the
close air of his room and to make him a part of their fabulous wonder.
There came to that room wild streams of violet midnight glittering with dust of gold, vortices of
dust and fire, swirling out of the ultimate spaces and heavy perfumes from beyond the worlds. Opiate
oceans poured there, litten by suns that the eye may never behold and having in their whirlpools
strange dolphins and sea-nymphs of unrememberable depths. Noiseless infinity eddied around the
dreamer and wafted him away without touching the body that leaned stiffly from the lonely window;
and for days not counted in men's calendars the tides of far spheres that bore him gently to join the
course of other cycles that tenderly left him sleeping on a green sunrise shore, a green shore
fragrant with lotus blossoms and starred by red camalotes...

BEYOND THE WALL OF SLEEP
I have often wondered if the majority of mankind ever pause to reflect upon the occasionally
titanic significance of dreams, and of the obscure world to which they belong. Whilst the greater
number of our nocturnal visions are perhaps no more than faint and fantastic reflections of our waking
experiences--Freud to the contrary with his puerile symbolism--there are still a certain remainder
whose immundane and ethereal character permit of no ordinary interpretation, and whose vaguely
exciting and disquieting effect suggests possible minute glimpses into a sphere of mental existence
no less important than physical life, yet separated from that life by an all but impassable barrier. From
my experience I cannot doubt but that man, when lost to terrestrial consciousness, is indeed
sojourning in another and uncorporeal life of far different nature from the life we know, and of which
only the slightest and most indistinct memories linger after waking. From those blurred and
fragmentary memories we may infer much, yet prove little. We may guess that in dreams life, matter,
and vitality, as the earth knows such things, are not necessarily constant; and that time and space do not
exist as our waking selves comprehend them. Sometimes I believe that this less material life is our
truer life, and that our vain presence on the terraqueous globe is itself the secondary or merely
virtual phenomenon.
It was from a youthful revery filled with speculations of this sort that I arose one afternoon in the
winter of 1900-01, when to the state psychopathic institution in which I served as an interne was
brought the man whose case has ever since haunted me so unceasingly. His name, as given on the
records, was Joe Slater, or Slaader, and his appearance was that of the typical denizen of the Catskill
Mountain region; one of those strange, repellent scions of a primitive Colonial peasant stock whose
isolation for nearly three centuries in the hilly fastnesses of a little-traveled countryside has caused
them to sink to a kind of barbaric degeneracy, rather than advance with their more fortunately placed
brethren of the thickly settled districts. Among these odd folk, who correspond exactly to the
decadent element of "white trash" in the South, law and morals are non-existent; and their general
mental status is probably below that of any other section of native American people.
Joe Slater, who came to the institution in the vigilant custody of four state policemen, and who
was described as a highly dangerous character, certainly presented no evidence of his perilous
disposition when I first beheld him. Though well above the middle stature, and of somewhat brawny
frame, he was given an absurd appearance of harmless stupidity by the pale, sleepy blueness of his
small watery eyes, the scantiness of his neglected and never-shaven growth of yellow beard, and the
listless drooping of his heavy nether lip. His age was unknown, since among his kind neither family
records nor permanent family ties exist; but from the baldness of his head in front, and from the
decayed condition of his teeth, the head surgeon wrote him down as a man of about forty.
From the medical and court documents we learned all that could be gathered of his case: this man,
a vagabond, hunter and trapper, had always been strange in the eyes of his primitive associates. He
had habitually slept at night beyond the ordinary time, and upon waking would often talk of unknown
things in a manner so bizarre as to inspire fear even in the hearts of an unimaginative populace. Not
that his form of language was at all unusual, for he never spoke save in the debased patois of his
environment; but the tone and tenor of his utterances were of such mysterious wildness, that none
might listen without apprehension. He himself was generally as terrified and baffled as his auditors,
and within an hour after awakening would forget all that he had said, or at least all that had caused him
to say what he did; relapsing into a bovine, half-amiable normality like that of the other hill-dwellers.
As Slater grew older, it appeared, his matutinal aberrations had gradually increased in frequency
and violence; till about a month before his arrival at the institution had occurred the shocking tragedy
which caused his arrest by the authorities. One day near noon, after a profound sleep begun in a
whiskey debauch at about five of the previous afternoon, the man had roused himself most suddenly,
with ululations so horrible and unearthly that they brought several neighbors to his cabin--a filthy sty
where he dwelt with a family as indescribable as himself. Rushing out into the snow, he had flung his
arms aloft and commenced a series of leaps directly upward in the air; the while shouting his
determination to reach some "big, big cabin with brightness in the roof and walls and floor and the
loud queer music far away". As two men of moderate size sought to restrain him, he had struggled
with maniacal force and fury, screaming of his desire and need to find and kill a certain "thing that
shines and shakes and laughs". At length, after temporarily felling one of his detainers with a sudden
blow, he had flung himself upon the other in a demoniac ecstasy of blood-thirstiness, shrieking
fiendishly that he would "jump high in the air and burn his way through anything that stopped him".
Family and neighbors had now fled in a panic, and when the more courageous of them returned,
Slater was gone, leaving behind an unrecognizable pulp-like thing that had been a living man but an
hour before. None of the mountaineers had dared to pursue him, and it is likely that they would have
welcomed his death from the cold; but when several mornings later they heard his screams from a
distant ravine they realized that he had somehow managed to survive, and that his removal in one way
or another would be necessary. Then had followed an armed searching-party, whose purpose
(whatever it may have been originally) became that of a sheriff's posse after one of the seldom
popular state troopers had by accident observed, then questioned, and finally joined the seekers.
On the third day Slater was found unconscious in the hollow of a tree, and taken to the nearest jail,
where alienists from Albany examined him as soon as his senses returned. To them he told a simple
story. He had, he said, gone to sleep one afternoon about sundown after drinking much liquor. He had
awakened to find himself standing bloody-handed in the snow before his cabin, the mangled corpse
of his neighbor Peter Slader at his feet. Horrified, he had taken to the woods in a vague effort to
escape from the scene of what must have been his crime. Beyond these things he seemed to know
nothing, nor could the expert questioning of his interrogators bring out a single additional fact.
That night Slater slept quietly, and the next morning he awakened with no singular feature save a
certain alteration of expression. Doctor Barnard, who had been watching the patient, thought he
noticed in the pale blue eyes a certain gleam of peculiar quality, and in the flaccid lips an all but
imperceptible tightening, as if of intelligent determination. But when questioned, Slater relapsed into
the habitual vacancy of the mountaineer, and only reiterated what he had said on the preceding day.
On the third morning occurred the first of the man's mental attacks. After some show of
uneasiness in sleep, he burst forth into a frenzy so powerful that the combined efforts of four men
were needed to bind him in a straightjacket. The alienists listened with keen attention to his words,
since their curiosity had been aroused to a high pitch by the suggestive yet mostly conflicting and
incoherent stories of his family and neighbors. Slater raved for upward of fifteen minutes, babbling
in his backwoods dialect of green edifices of light, oceans of space, strange music, and shadowy
mountains and valleys. But most of all did he dwell upon some mysterious blazing entity that shook
and laughed and mocked at him. This vast, vague personality seemed to have done him a terrible
wrong, and to kill it in triumphant revenge was his paramount desire. In order to reach it, he said, he
would soar through abysses of emptiness, burning every obstacle that stood in his way. Thus ran his
discourse, until with the greatest suddenness he ceased. The fire of madness died from his eyes, and
in dull wonder he looked at his questioners and asked why he was bound. Dr. Barnard unbuckled the
leather harness and did not restore it till night, when he succeeded in persuading Slater to don it of
his own volition, for his own good. The man had now admitted that he sometimes talked queerly,
though he knew not why.
Within a week two more attacks appeared, but from them the doctors learned little. On the source
of Slater's visions they speculated at length, for since he could neither read nor write, and had
apparently never heard a legend or fairy-tale, his gorgeous imagery was quite inexplicable. That it
could not come from any known myth or romance was made especially clear by the fact that the
unfortunate lunatic expressed himself only in his own simple manner. He raved of things he did not
understand and could not interpret; things which he claimed to have experienced, but which he could
not have learned through any normal or connected narration. The alienists soon agreed that abnormal
dreams were the foundation of the trouble; dreams whose vividness could for a time completely
dominate the waking mind of this basically inferior man. With due formality Slater was tried for
murder, acquitted on the ground of insanity, and committed to the institution wherein I held so humble
a post.
I have said that I am a constant speculator concerning dream-life, and from this you may judge of
the eagerness with which I applied myself to the study of the new patient as soon as I had fully
ascertained the facts of his case. He seemed to sense a certain friendliness in me, born no doubt of
the interest I could not conceal, and the gentle manner in which I questioned him. Not that he ever
recognized me during his attacks, when I hung breathlessly upon his chaotic but cosmic word-
pictures; but he knew me in his quiet hours, when he would sit by his barred window weaving baskets
of straw and willow, and perhaps pining for the mountain freedom he could never again enjoy. His
family never called to see him; probably it had found another temporary head, after the manner of
decadent mountain folk.
By degrees I commenced to feel an overwhelming wonder at the mad and fantastic conceptions of
Joe Slater. The man himself was pitiably inferior in mentality and language alike; but his glowing,
titanic visions, though described in a barbarous disjointed jargon, were assuredly things which only a
superior or even exceptional brain could conceive. How, I often asked myself, could the stolid
imagination of a Catskill degenerate conjure up sights whose very possession argued a lurking spark
of genius? How could any backwoods dullard have gained so much as an idea of those glittering
realms of supernal radiance and space about which Slater ranted in his furious delirium? More and
more I inclined to the belief that in the pitiful personality who cringed before me lay the disordered
nucleus of something beyond my comprehension; something infinitely beyond the comprehension of
my more experienced but less imaginative medical and scientific colleagues.
And yet I could extract nothing definite from the man. The sum of all my investigation was, that in
a kind of semi-corporeal dream-life Slater wandered or floated through resplendent and prodigious
valleys, meadows, gardens, cities, and palaces of light, in a region unbounded and unknown to man;
that there he was no peasant or degenerate, but a creature of importance and vivid life, moving
proudly and dominantly, and checked only by a certain deadly enemy, who seemed to be a being of
visible yet ethereal structure, and who did not appear to be of human shape, since Slater never
referred to it as a man, or as aught save a thing. This thing had done Slater some hideous but unnamed
wrong, which the maniac (if maniac he were) yearned to avenge.
From the manner in which Slater alluded to their dealings, I judged that he and the luminous thing
had met on equal terms; that in his dream existence the man was himself a luminous thing of the same
race as his enemy. This impression was sustained by his frequent references to flying through space
and burning all that impeded his progress. Yet these conceptions were formulated in rustic words
wholly inadequate to convey them, a circumstance which drove me to the conclusion that if a dream
world indeed existed, oral language was not its medium for the transmission of thought. Could it be
that the dream soul inhabiting this inferior body was desperately struggling to speak things which the
simple and halting tongue of dullness could not utter? Could it be that I was face to face with
intellectual emanations which would explain the mystery if I could but learn to discover and read
them? I did not tell the older physicians of these things, for middle age is skeptical, cynical, and
disinclined to accept new ideas. Besides, the head of the institution had but lately warned me in his
paternal way that I was overworking; that my mind needed a rest.
It had long been my belief that human thought consists basically of atomic or molecular motion,
convertible into ether waves or radiant energy like heat, light and electricity. This belief had early
led me to contemplate the possibility of telepathy or mental communication by means of suitable
apparatus, and I had in my college days prepared a set of transmitting and receiving instruments
somewhat similar to the cumbrous devices employed in wireless telegraphy at that crude, pre--radio
period. These I had tested with a fellow-student, but achieving no result, had soon packed them away
with other scientific odds and ends for possible future use.
Now, in my intense desire to probe into the dream-life of Joe Slater, I sought these instruments
again, and spent several days in repairing them for action. When they were complete once more I
missed no opportunity for their trial. At each outburst of Slater's violence, I would fit the transmitter
to his forehead and the receiver to my own, constantly making delicate adjustments for various
hypothetical wave--lengths of intellectual energy. I had but little notion of how the thought-
impressions would, if successfully conveyed, arouse an intelligent response in my brain, but I felt
certain that I could detect and interpret them. Accordingly I continued my experiments, though
informing no one of their nature.
It was on the twenty-first of February, 1901, that the thing occurred. As I look back across the
years I realize how unreal it seems, and sometimes wonder if old Doctor Fenton was not right when
he charged it all to my excited imagination. I recall that he listened with great kindness and patience
when I told him, but afterward gave me a nerve--powder and arranged for the half-year's vacation on
which I departed the next week.
That fateful night I was wildly agitated and perturbed, for despite the excellent care he had
received, Joe Slater was unmistakably dying. Perhaps it was his mountain freedom that he missed, or
perhaps the turmoil in his brain had grown too acute for his rather sluggish physique; but at all events
the flame of vitality flickered low in the decadent body. He was drowsy near the end, and as darkness
fell he dropped off into a troubled sleep.
I did not strap on the straightjacket as was customary when he slept, since I saw that he was too
feeble to be dangerous, even if he woke in mental disorder once more before passing away. But I did
place upon his head and mine the two ends of my cosmic "radio", hoping against hope for a first and
last message from the dream world in the brief time remaining. In the cell with us was one nurse, a
mediocre fellow who did not understand the purpose of the apparatus, or think to inquire into my
course. As the hours wore on I saw his head droop awkwardly in sleep, but I did not disturb him. I
myself, lulled by the rhythmical breathing of the healthy and the dying man, must have nodded a little
later.
The sound of weird lyric melody was what aroused me. Chords, vibrations, and harmonic
ecstasies echoed passionately on every hand, while on my ravished sight burst the stupendous
spectacle of ultimate beauty. Walls, columns, and architraves of living fire blazed effulgently around
the spot where I seemed to float in air, extending upward to an infinitely high vaulted dome of
indescribable splendor. Blending with this display of palatial magnificence, or rather, supplanting it
at times in kaleidoscopic rotation, were glimpses of wide plains and graceful valleys, high mountains
and inviting grottoes, covered with every lovely attribute of scenery which my delighted eyes could
conceive of, yet formed wholly of some glowing, ethereal plastic entity, which in consistency
partook as much of spirit as of matter. As I gazed, I perceived that my own brain held the key to these
enchanting metamorphoses; for each vista which appeared to me was the one my changing mind most
wished to behold. Amidst this elysian realm I dwelt not as a stranger, for each sight and sound was
familiar to me; just as it had been for uncounted eons of eternity before, and would be for like
eternities to come.
Then the resplendent aura of my brother of light drew near and held colloquy with me, soul to
soul, with silent and perfect interchange of thought. The hour was one of approaching triumph, for
was not my fellow-being escaping at last from a degrading periodic bondage; escaping forever, and
preparing to follow the accursed oppressor even unto the uttermost fields of ether, that upon it might
be wrought a flaming cosmic vengeance which would shake the spheres? We floated thus for a little
time, when I perceived a slight blurring and fading of the objects around us, as though some force
were recalling me to earth--where I least wished to go. The form near me seemed to feel a change
also, for it gradually brought its discourse toward a conclusion, and itself prepared to quit the scene,
fading from my sight at a rate somewhat less rapid than that of the other objects. A few more thoughts
were exchanged, and I knew that the luminous one and I were being recalled to bondage, though for
my brother of light it would be the last time. The sorry planet shell being well-nigh spent, in less than
an hour my fellow would be free to pursue the oppressor along the Milky Way and past the hither
stars to the very confines of infinity.
A well-defined shock separates my final impression of the fading scene of light from my sudden
and somewhat shamefaced awakening and straightening up in my chair as I saw the dying figure on the
couch move hesitantly. Joe Slater was indeed awaking, though probably for the last time. As I looked
more closely, I saw that in the sallow cheeks shone spots of color which had never before been
present. The lips, too, seemed unusual, being tightly compressed, as if by the force of a stronger
character than had been Slater's. The whole face finally began to grow tense, and the head turned
restlessly with closed eyes.
I did not rouse the sleeping nurse, but readjusted the slightly disarranged headband of my
telepathic "radio", intent to catch any parting message the dreamer might have to deliver. All at once
the head turned sharply in my direction and the eyes fell open, causing me to stare in blank amazement
at what I beheld. The man who had been Joe Slater, the Catskill decadent, was gazing at me with a
pair of luminous, expanding eyes whose blue seemed subtly to have deepened. Neither mania nor
degeneracy was visible in that gaze, and I felt beyond a doubt that I was viewing a face behind which
lay an active mind of high order.
At this juncture my brain became aware of a steady external influence operating upon it. I closed
my eyes to concentrate my thoughts more profoundly and was rewarded by the positive knowledge
that my long--sought mental message had come at last. Each transmitted idea formed rapidly in my mind,
and though no actual language was employed, my habitual association of conception and expression
was so great that I seemed to be receiving the message in ordinary English.
"Joe Slater is dead," came the soul-petrifying voice of an agency from beyond the wall of sleep.
My opened eyes sought the couch of pain in curious horror, but the blue eyes were still calmly
gazing, and the countenance was still intelligently animated. "He is better dead, for he was unfit to
bear the active intellect of cosmic entity. His gross body could not undergo the needed adjustments
between ethereal life and planet life. He was too much an animal, too little a man; yet it is through his
deficiency that you have come to discover me, for the cosmic and planet souls rightly should never
meet. He has been my torment and diurnal prison for forty-two of your terrestrial years.
"I am an entity like that which you yourself become in the freedom of dreamless sleep. I am your
brother of light, and have floated with you in the effulgent valleys. It is not permitted me to tell your
waking earth-self of your real self, but we are all roamers of vast spaces and travelers in many ages.
Next year I may be dwelling in the Egypt which you call ancient, or in the cruel empire of Tsan Chan
which is to come three thousand years hence. You and I have drifted to the worlds that reel about the
red Arcturus, and dwelt in the bodies of the insect-philosophers that crawl proudly over the fourth
moon of Jupiter. How little does the earth self know life and its extent! How little, indeed, ought it to
know for its own tranquility!
"Of the oppressor I cannot speak. You on earth have unwittingly felt its distant presence--you
who without knowing idly gave the blinking beacon the name of Algol, the Demon-Star. It is to meet
and conquer the oppressor that I have vainly striven for eons, held back by bodily encumbrances.
Tonight I go as a Nemesis bearing just and blazingly cataclysmic vengeance. Watch me in the sky
close by the Demon-Star.
"I cannot speak longer, for the body of Joe Slater grows cold and rigid, and the coarse brains are
ceasing to vibrate as I wish. You have been my only friend on this planet--the only soul to sense and
seek for me within the repellent form which lies on this couch. We shall meet again--perhaps in the
shining mists of Orion's Sword, perhaps on a bleak plateau in prehistoric Asia, perhaps in
unremembered dreams tonight, perhaps in some other form an eon hence, when the solar system shall
have been swept away."
At this point the thought-waves abruptly ceased, the pale eyes of the dreamer--or can I say dead
man?--commenced to glaze fishily. In a half-stupor I crossed over to the couch and felt of his wrist,
but found it cold, stiff, and pulseless. The sallow cheeks paled again, and the thick lips fell open,
disclosing the repulsively rotten fangs of the degenerate Joe Slater. I shivered, pulled a blanket over
the hideous face, and awakened the nurse. Then I left the cell and went silently to my room. I had an
instant and unaccountable craving for a sleep whose dreams I should not remember.
The climax? What plain tale of science can boast of such a rhetorical effect? I have merely set
down certain things appealing to me as facts, allowing you to construe them as you will. As I have
already admitted, my superior, old Doctor Fenton, denies the reality of everything I have related. He
vows that I was broken down with nervous strain, and badly in need of a long vacation on full pay
which he so generously gave me. He assures me on his professional honor that Joe Slater was but a
low-grade paranoiac, whose fantastic notions must have come from the crude hereditary folk-tales
which circulated in even the most decadent of communities. All this he tells me--yet I cannot forget
what I saw in the sky on the night after Slater died. Lest you think me a biased witness, another pen
must add this final testimony, which may perhaps supply the climax you expect. I will quote the
following account of the star Nova Persei verbatim from the pages of that eminent astronomical
authority, Professor Garrett P. Serviss:
"On February 22, 1901, a marvelous new star was discovered by Doctor Anderson of Edinburgh,
not very far from Algol. No star had been visible at that point before. Within twenty-four hours the
stranger had become so bright that it outshone Capella. In a week or two it had visibly faded, and in
the course of a few months it was hardly discernible with the naked eye."

CELEPHAIS
In a dream Kuranes saw the city in the valley, and the seacoast beyond, and the snowy peak
overlooking the sea, and the gaily painted galleys that sail out of the harbour toward distant regions
where the sea meets the sky. In a dream it was also that he came by his name of Kuranes, for when
awake he was called by another name.
Perhaps it was natural for him to dream a new name; for he was the last of his family, and alone
among the indifferent millions of London, so there were not many to speak to him and to remind him
who he had been. His money and lands were gone, and he did not care for the ways of the people
about him, but preferred to dream and write of his dreams. What he wrote was laughed at by those to
whom he showed it, so that after a time he kept his writings to himself, and finally ceased to write.
The more he withdrew from the world about him, the more wonderful became his dreams; and it
would have been quite futile to try to describe them on paper. Kuranes was not modern, and did not
think like others who wrote. Whilst they strove to strip from life its embroidered robes of myth and
to show in naked ugliness the foul thing that is reality, Kuranes sought for beauty alone. When truth
and experience failed to reveal it, he sought it in fancy and illusion, and found it on his very doorstep,
amid the nebulous memories of childhood tales and dreams.
There are not many persons who know what wonders are opened to them in the stories and visions
of their youth; for when as children we listen and dream, we think but half-formed thoughts, and when
as men we try to remember, we are dulled and prosaic with the poison of life. But some of us awake
in the night with strange phantasms of enchanted hills and gardens, of fountains that sing in the sun, of
golden cliffs overhanging murmuring seas, of plains that stretch down to sleeping cities of bronze
and stone, and of shadowy companies of heroes that ride caparisoned white horses along the edges
of thick forests; and then we know that we have looked back through the ivory gates into that world
of wonder which was ours before we were wise and unhappy.
Kuranes came very suddenly upon his old world of childhood. He had been dreaming of the
house where he had been born; the great stone house covered with ivy, where thirteen generations of
his ancestors had lived, and where he had hoped to die. It was moonlight, and he had stolen out into
the fragrant summer night, through the gardens, down the terraces, past the great oaks of the park, and
along the long white road to the village. The village seemed very old, eaten away at the edge like the
moon which had commenced to wane, and Kuranes wondered whether the peaked roofs of the small
houses hid sleep or death. In the streets were spears of long grass, and the window-panes on either
side broken or filmily staring. Kuranes had not lingered, but had plodded on as though summoned
toward some goal. He dared not disobey the summons for fear it might prove an illusion like the
urges and aspirations of waking life, which do not lead to any goal. Then he had been drawn down a
lane that led off from the village street toward the channel cliffs, and had come to the end of things to
the precipice and the abyss where all the village and all the world fell abruptly into the unechoing
emptiness of infinity, and where even the sky ahead was empty and unlit by the crumbling moon and
the peering stars. Faith had urged him on, over the precipice and into the gulf, where he had floated
down, down, down; past dark, shapeless, undreamed dreams, faintly glowing spheres that may have
been partly dreamed dreams, and laughing winged things that seemed to mock the dreamers of all the
worlds. Then a rift seemed to open in the darkness before him, and he saw the city of the valley,
glistening radiantly far, far below, with a background of sea and sky, and a snowcapped mountain near
the shore.
Kuranes had awakened the very moment he beheld the city, yet he knew from his brief glance that
it was none other than Celephais, in the Valley of Ooth-Nargai beyond the Tanarian Hills where his
spirit had dwelt all the eternity of an hour one summer afternoon very long ago, when he had slipt
away from his nurse and let the warm sea-breeze lull him to sleep as he watched the clouds from the
cliff near the village. He had protested then, when they had found him, waked him, and carried him
home, for just as he was aroused he had been about to sail in a golden galley for those alluring
regions where the sea meets the sky. And now he was equally resentful of awaking, for he had found
his fabulous city after forty weary years.
But three nights afterward Kuranes came again to Celephais. As before, he dreamed first of the
village that was asleep or dead, and of the abyss down which one must float silently; then the rift
appeared again, and he beheld the glittering minarets of the city, and saw the graceful galleys riding
at anchor in the blue harbour, and watched the gingko trees of Mount Aran swaying in the sea-breeze.
But this time he was not snatched away, and like a winged being settled gradually over a grassy
hillside til finally his feet rested gently on the turf. He had indeed come back to the Valley of Ooth-
Nargai and the splendid city of Celephais.
Down the hill amid scented grasses and brilliant flowers walked Kuranes, over the bubbling
Naraxa on the small wooden bridge where he had carved his name so many years ago, and through
the whispering grove to the great stone bridge by the city gate. All was as of old, nor were the
marble walls discoloured, nor the polished bronze statues upon them tarnished. And Kuranes saw that
he need not tremble lest the things he knew be vanished; for even the sentries on the ramparts were
the same, and still as young as he remembered them. When he entered the city, past the bronze gates
and over the onyx pavements, the merchants and camel-drivers greeted him as if he had never been
away; and it was the same at the turquoise temple of Nath-Horthath, where the orchid-wreathed
priests told him that there is no time in Ooth--Nargai, but only perpetual youth. Then Kuranes walked
through the Street of Pillars to the seaward wall, where gathered the traders and sailors, and strange
men from the regions where the sea meets the sky. There he stayed long, gazing out over the bright
harbour where the ripples sparkled beneath an unknown sun, and where rode lightly the galleys from
far places over the water. And he gazed also upon MountAran rising regally from the shore, its
lower slopes green with swaying trees and its white summit touching the sky.
More than ever Kuranes wished to sail in a galley to the far places of which he had heard so
many strange tales, and he sought again the captain who had agreed to carry him so long ago. He
found the man, Athib, sitting on the same chest of spice he had sat upon before, and Athib seemed not
to realize that any time had passed. Then the two rowed to a galley in the harbour, and giving orders
to the oarmen, commenced to sail out into the billowy CerenarianSea that leads to the sky. For several
days they glided undulatingly over the water, till finally they came to the horizon, where the sea
meets the sky. Here the galley paused not at all, but floated easily in the blue of the sky among fleecy
clouds tinted with rose. And far beneath the keel Kuranes could see strange lands and rivers and
cities of surpassing beauty, spread indolently in the sunshine which seemed never to lessen or
disappear. At length Athib told him that their journey was near its end, and that they would soon enter
the harbour of Serannian, the pink marble city of the clouds, which is built on that ethereal coast
where the west wind flows into the sky; but as the highest of the city's carven towers came into sight
there was a sound somewhere in space, and Kuranes awaked in his London garret.
For many months after that Kuranes sought the marvellous city of Celephais and its sky-bound
galleys in vain; and though his dreams carried him to many gorgeous and unheard-of places, no one
whom he met could tell him how to find Ooth-Nargai beyond the Tanarian Hills. One night he went
flying over dark mountains where there were faint, lone campfires at great distances apart, and
strange, shaggy herds with tinkling bells on the leaders, and in the wildest part of this hilly country,
so remote that few men could ever have seen it, he found a hideously ancient wall or causeway of
stone zigzagging along the ridges and valleys; too gigantic ever to have risen by human hands, and of
such a length that neither end of it could be seen. Beyond that wall in the grey dawn he came to a land
of quaint gardens and cherry trees, and when the sun rose he beheld such beauty of red and white
flowers, green foliage and lawns, white paths, diamond brooks, blue lakelets, carven bridges, and
red-roofed pagodas, that he for a moment forgot Celephais in sheer delight. But he remembered it
again when he walked down a white path toward a red-roofed pagoda, and would have questioned the
people of this land about it, had he not found that there were no people there, but only birds and bees
and butterflies. On another night Kuranes walked up a damp stone spiral stairway endlessly, and came
to a tower window overlooking a mighty plain and river lit by the full moon; and in the silent city that
spread away from the river bank he thought he beheld some feature or arrangement which he had
known before. He would have descended and asked the way to Ooth-Nargai had not a fearsome
aurora sputtered up from some remote place beyond the horizon, showing the ruin and antiquity of the
city, and the stagnation of the reedy river, and the death lying upon that land, as it had lain since King
Kynaratholis came home from his conquests to find the vengeance of the gods.
So Kuranes sought fruitlessly for the marvellous city of Celephais and its galleys that sail to
Serannian in the sky, meanwhile seeing many wonders and once barely escaping from the high-priest
not to be described, which wears a yellow silken mask over its face and dwells all alone in a
prehistoric stone monastery in the cold desert plateau of Leng. In time he grew so impatient of the
bleak intervals of day that he began buying drugs in order to increase his periods of sleep. Hasheesh
helped a great deal, and once sent him to a part of space where form does not exist, but where
glowing gases study the secrets of existence. And a violet-coloured gas told him that this part of
space was outside what he had called infinity. The gas had not heard of planets and organisms
before, but identified Kuranes merely as one from the infinity where matter, energy, and gravitation
exist. Kuranes was now very anxious to return to minaret-studded Celephais, and increased his doses
of drugs; but eventually he had no more money left, and could buy no drugs. Then one summer day he
was turned out of his garret, and wandered aimlessly through the streets, drifting over a bridge to a
place where the houses grew thinner and thinner. And it was there that fulfillment came, and he met
the cortege of knights come from Celephais to bear him thither forever.
Handsome knights they were, astride roan horses and clad in shining armour with tabards of
cloth-of-gold curiously emblazoned. So numerous were they, that Kuranes almost mistook them for
an army, but they were sent in his honour; since it was he who had created Ooth-Nargai in his dreams,
on which account he was now to be appointed its chief god for evermore. Then they gave Kuranes a
horse and placed him at the head of the cavalcade, and all rode majestically through the downs of
Surrey and onward toward the region where Kuranes and his ancestors were born. It was very
strange, but as the riders went on they seemed to gallop back through time; for whenever they passed
through a village in the twilight they saw only such houses and villagers as Chaucer or men before
him might have seen, and sometimes they saw knights on horseback with small companies of
retainers. When it grew dark they travelled more swiftly, till soon they were flying uncannily as if in
the air. In the dim dawn they came upon the village which Kuranes had seen alive in his childhood,
and asleep or dead in his dreams. It was alive now, and early villagers curtsied as the horsemen
clattered down the street and turned off into the lane that ends in the abyss of dreams. Kuranes had
previously entered that abyss only at night, and wondered what it would look like by day; so he
watched anxiously as the column approached its brink. Just as they galloped up the rising ground to
the precipice a golden glare came somewhere out of the west and hid all the landscape in effulgent
draperies. The abyss was a seething chaos of roseate and cerulean splendour, and invisible voices
sang exultantly as the knightly entourage plunged over the edge and floated gracefully down past
glittering clouds and silvery coruscations. Endlessly down the horsemen floated, their chargers
pawing the aether as if galloping over golden sands; and then the luminous vapours spread apart to
reveal a greater brightness, the brightness of the city Celephais, and the sea coast beyond, and the
snowy peak overlooking the sea, and the gaily painted galleys that sail out of the harbour toward
distant regions where the sea meets the sky.
And Kuranes reigned thereafter over Ooth-Nargai and all the neighboring regions of dream, and
held his court alternately in Celephais and in the cloud-fashioned Serannian. He reigns there still, and
will reign happily for ever, though below the cliffs at Innsmouth the channel tides played mockingly
with the body of a tramp who had stumbled through the half-deserted village at dawn; played
mockingly, and cast it upon the rocks by ivy-covered Trevor Towers, where a notably fat and
especially offensive millionaire brewer enjoys the purchased atmosphere of extinct nobility.

COOL AIR
You ask me to explain why I am afraid of a draught of cool air; why I shiver more than others
upon entering a cold room, and seem nauseated and repelled when the chill of evening creeps
through the heat of a mild autumn day. There are those who say I respond to cold as others do to a
bad odour, and I am the last to deny the impression. What I will do is to relate the most horrible
circumstance I ever encountered, and leave it to you to judge whether or not this forms a suitable
explanation of my peculiarity.
It is a mistake to fancy that horror is associated inextricably with darkness, silence, and solitude. I
found it in the glare of mid-afternoon, in the clangour of a metropolis, and in the teeming midst of a
shabby and commonplace rooming-house with a prosaic landlady and two stalwart men by my side. In
the spring of 1923 I had secured some dreary and unprofitable magazine work in the city of New
York; and being unable to pay any substantial rent, began drifting from one cheap boarding
establishment to another in search of a room which might combine the qualities of decent cleanliness,
endurable furnishings, and very reasonable price. It soon developed that I had only a choice between
different evils, but after a time I came upon a house in West Fourteenth Street which disgusted me
much less than the others I had sampled.
The place was a four-story mansion of brownstone, dating apparently from the late forties, and
fitted with woodwork and marble whose stained and sullied splendour argued a descent from high
levels of tasteful opulence. In the rooms, large and lofty, and decorated with impossible paper and
ridiculously ornate stucco cornices, there lingered a depressing mustiness and hint of obscure
cookery; but the floors were clean, the linen tolerably regular, and the hot water not too often cold or
turned off, so that I came to regard it as at least a bearable place to hibernate till one might really live
again. The landlady, a slatternly, almost bearded Spanish woman named Herrero, did not annoy me
with gossip or with criticisms of the late-burning electric light in my third-floor front hall room; and
my fellow-lodgers were as quiet and uncommunicative as one might desire, being mostly Spaniards a
little above the coarsest and crudest grade. Only the din of street cars in the thoroughfare below
proved a serious annoyance.
I had been there about three weeks when the first odd incident occurred. One evening at about
eight I heard a spattering on the floor and became suddenly aware that I had been smelling the pungent
odour of ammonia for some time. Looking about, I saw that the ceiling was wet and dripping; the
soaking apparently proceeding from a corner on the side toward the street. Anxious to stop the matter
at its source, I hastened to the basement to tell the landlady; and was assured by her that the trouble
would quickly be set right.
"Doctair Muoz," she cried as she rushed upstairs ahead of me, "he have speel hees chemicals.
He ees too seeck for doctair heemself--seecker and seecker all the time--but he weel not have no
othair for help. He ees vairy queer in hees seeckness--all day he take funnee--smelling baths, and he
cannot get excite or warm. All hees own housework he do--hees leetle room are full of bottles and
machines, and he do not work as doctair. But he was great once--my fathair in Barcelona have hear of
heem--and only joost now he feex a arm of the plumber that get hurt of sudden. He nevair go out,
only on roof, and my boy Esteban he breeng heem hees food and laundry and mediceens and
chemicals. My Gawd, the sal-ammoniac that man use for keep heem cool!"
Mrs. Herrero disappeared up the staircase to the fourth floor, and I returned to my room. The
ammonia ceased to drip, and as I cleaned up what had spilled and opened the window for air, I heard
the landlady's heavy footsteps above me. Dr. Muoz I had never heard, save for certain sounds as of
some gasoline-driven mechanism; since his step was soft and gentle. I wondered for a moment what
the strange affliction of this man might be, and whether his obstinate refusal of outside aid were not
the result of a rather baseless eccentricity. There is, I reflected tritely, an infinite deal of pathos in
the state of an eminent person who has come down in the world.
I might never have known Dr. Muoz had it not been for the heart attack that suddenly seized me
one forenoon as I sat writing in my room. Physicians had told me of the danger of those spells, and I
knew there was no time to be lost; so remembering what the landlady had said about the invalid's help
of the injured workman, I dragged myself upstairs and knocked feebly at the door above mine. My
knock was answered in good English by a curious voice some distance to the right, asking my name
and business; and these things being stated, there came an opening of the door next to the one I had
sought.
A rush of cool air greeted me; and though the day was one of the hottest of late June, I shivered
as I crossed the threshold into a large apartment whose rich and tasteful decoration surprised me in
this nest of squalor and seediness. A folding couch now filled its diurnal role of sofa, and the
mahogany furniture, sumptuous hangings, old paintings, and mellow bookshelves all bespoke a
gentleman's study rather than a boarding-house bedroom. I now saw that the hall room above mine--
the "leetle room" of bottles and machines which Mrs. Herrero had mentioned was merely the
laboratory of the doctor; and that his main living quarters lay in the spacious adjoining room whose
convenient alcoves and large contiguous bathroom permitted him to hide all dressers and obtrusively
utilitarian devices. Dr. Muoz, most certainly, was a man of birth, cultivation, and discrimination.
The figure before me was short but exquisitely proportioned, and clad in somewhat formal dress
of perfect cut and fit. A high-bred face of masterful though not arrogant expression was adorned by a
short iron--grey full beard, and an old-fashioned pince-nez shielded the full, dark eyes and
surmounted an aquiline nose which gave a Moorish touch to a physiognomy otherwise dominantly
Celtiberian. Thick, well-trimmed hair that argued the punctual calls of a barber was parted gracefully
above a high forehead; and the whole picture was one of striking intelligence and superior blood and
breeding.
Nevertheless, as I saw Dr. Muoz in that blast of cool air, I felt a repugnance which nothing in his
aspect could justify. Only his lividly inclined complexion and coldness of touch could have afforded
a physical basis for this feeling, and even these things should have been excusable considering the
man's known invalidism. It might, too, have been the singular cold that alienated me; for such
chilliness was abnormal on so hot a day, and the abnormal always excites aversion, distrust, and fear.
But repugnance was soon forgotten in admiration, for the strange physician's extreme skill at once
became manifest despite the ice-coldness and shakiness of his bloodless-looking hands. He clearly
understood my needs at a glance, and ministered to them with a master's deftness; the while reassuring
me in a finely modulated though oddly hollow and timbreless voice that he was the bitterest of sworn
enemies to death, and had sunk his fortune and lost all his friends in a lifetime of bizarre experiment
devoted to its bafflement and extirpation. Something of the benevolent fanatic seemed to reside in
him, and he rambled on almost garrulously as he sounded my chest and mixed a suitable draught of
drugs fetched from the smaller laboratory room. Evidently he found the society of a well-born man a
rare novelty in this dingy environment, and was moved to unaccustomed speech as memories of better
days surged over him.
His voice, if queer, was at least soothing; and I could not even perceive that he breathed as the
fluent sentences rolled urbanely out. He sought to distract my mind from my own seizure by speaking
of his theories and experiments; and I remember his tactfully consoling me about my weak heart by
insisting that will and consciousness are stronger than organic life itself, so that if a bodily frame be
but originally healthy and carefully preserved, it may through a scientific enhancement of these
qualities retain a kind of nervous animation despite the most serious impairments, defects, or even
absences in the battery of specific organs. He might, he half jestingly said, some day teach me to
live--or at least to possess some kind of conscious existence--without any heart at all! For his part,
he was afflicted with a complication of maladies requiring a very exact regimen which included
constant cold. Any marked rise in temperature might, if prolonged, affect him fatally; and the frigidity
of his habitation--some 55 or 56 degrees Fahrenheit--was maintained by an absorption system of
ammonia cooling, the gasoline engine of whose pumps I had often heard in my own room below.
Relieved of my seizure in a marvellously short while, I left the shivery place a disciple and
devotee of the gifted recluse. After that I paid him frequent overcoated calls; listening while he told
of secret researches and almost ghastly results, and trembling a bit when I examined the
unconventional and astonishingly ancient volumes on his shelves. I was eventually, I may add, almost
cured of my disease for all time by his skillful ministrations. It seems that he did not scorn the
incantations of the mediaevalists, since he believed these cryptic formulae to contain rare
psychological stimuli which might conceivably have singular effects on the substance of a nervous
system from which organic pulsations had fled. I was touched by his account of the aged Dr. Torres
o f Valencia, who had shared his earlier experiments and nursed him through the great illness of
eighteen years before, whence his present disorders proceeded. No sooner had the venerable
practitioner saved his colleague than he himself succumbed to the grim enemy he had fought.
Perhaps the strain had been too great; for Dr. Muoz made it whisperingly clear--though not in
detail--that the methods of healing had been most extraordinary, involving scenes and processes not
welcomed by elderly and conservative Galens.
As the weeks passed, I observed with regret that my new friend was indeed slowly but
unmistakably losing ground physically, as Mrs. Herrero had suggested. The livid aspect of his
countenance was intensified, his voice became more hollow and indistinct, his muscular motions
were less perfectly coordinated, and his mind and will displayed less resilience and initiative. Of this
sad change he seemed by no means unaware, and little by little his expression and conversation both
took on a gruesome irony which restored in me something of the subtle repulsion I had originally
felt.
He developed strange caprices, acquiring a fondness for exotic spices and Egyptian incense till
his room smelled like a vault of a sepulchred Pharaoh in the Valley of Kings. At the same time his
demands for cold air increased, and with my aid he amplified the ammonia piping of his room and
modified the pumps and feed of his refrigerating machine till he could keep the temperature as low
as 34 degrees or 40 degrees, and finally even 28 degrees; the bathroom and laboratory, of course,
being less chilled, in order that water might not freeze, and that chemical processes might not be
impeded. The tenant adjoining him complained of the icy air from around the connecting door, so I
helped him fit heavy hangings to obviate the difficulty. A kind of growing horror, of outre and
morbid cast, seemed to possess him. He talked of death incessantly, but laughed hollowly when such
things as burial or funeral arrangements were gently suggested.
All in all, he became a disconcerting and even gruesome companion; yet in my gratitude for his
healing I could not well abandon him to the strangers around him, and was careful to dust his room
and attend to his needs each day, muffled in a heavy ulster which I bought especially for the purpose.
I likewise did much of his shopping, and gasped in bafflement at some of the chemicals he ordered
from druggists and laboratory supply houses.
An increasing and unexplained atmosphere of panic seemed to rise around his apartment. The
whole house, as I have said, had a musty odour; but the smell in his room was worse--and in spite of
all the spices and incense, and the pungent chemicals of the now incessant baths which he insisted on
taking unaided. I perceived that it must be connected with his ailment, and shuddered when I reflected
on what that ailment might be. Mrs. Herrero crossed herself when she looked at him, and gave him up
unreservedly to me; not even letting her son Esteban continue to run errands for him. When I
suggested other physicians, the sufferer would fly into as much of a rage as he seemed to dare to
entertain. He evidently feared the physical effect of violent emotion, yet his will and driving force
waxed rather than waned, and he refused to be confined to his bed. The lassitude of his earlier ill
days gave place to a return of his fiery purpose, so that he seemed about to hurl defiance at the
death-daemon even as that ancient enemy seized him. The pretence of eating, always curiously like a
formality with him, he virtually abandoned; and mental power alone appeared to keep him from total
collapse.
He acquired a habit of writing long documents of some sort, which he carefully sealed and filled
with injunctions that I transmit them after his death to certain persons whom he named--for the most
part lettered East Indians, but including a once celebrated French physician now generally thought
dead, and about whom the most inconceivable things had been whispered. As it happened, I burned all
these papers undelivered and unopened. His aspect and voice became utterly frightful, and his
presence almost unbearable. One September day an unexpected glimpse of him induced an epileptic
fit in a man who had come to repair his electric desk lamp; a fit for which he prescribed effectively
whilst keeping himself well out of sight. That man, oddly enough, had been through the terrors of the
Great War without having incurred any fright so thorough.
Then, in the middle of October, the horror of horrors came with stupefying suddenness. One
night about eleven the pump of the refrigerating machine broke down, so that within three hours the
process of ammonia cooling became impossible. Dr. Muoz summoned me by thumping on the floor,
and I worked desperately to repair the injury while my host cursed in a tone whose lifeless, rattling
hollowness surpassed description. My amateur efforts, however, proved of no use; and when I had
brought in a mechanic from a neighbouring all-night garage, we learned that nothing could be done
till morning, when a new piston would have to be obtained. The moribund hermit's rage and fear,
swelling to grotesque proportions, seemed likely to shatter what remained of his failing physique,
and once a spasm caused him to clap his hands to his eyes and rush into the bathroom. He groped his
way out with face tightly bandaged, and I never saw his eyes again.
The frigidity of the apartment was now sensibly diminishing, and at about 5 a.m. the doctor retired
to the bathroom, commanding me to keep him supplied with all the ice I could obtain at all-night drug
stores and cafeterias. As I would return from my sometimes discouraging trips and lay my spoils
before the closed bathroom door, I could hear a restless splashing within, and a thick voice croaking
out the order for "More--more!" At length a warm day broke, and the shops opened one by one. I
asked Esteban either to help with the ice-fetching whilst I obtained the pump piston, or to order the
piston while I continued with the ice; but instructed by his mother, he absolutely refused.
Finally I hired a seedy-looking loafer whom I encountered on the corner of Eighth Avenue to
keep the patient supplied with ice from a little shop where I introduced him, and applied myself
diligently to the task of finding a pump piston and engaging workmen competent to install it. The task
seemed interminable, and I raged almost as violently as the hermit when I saw the hours slipping by in
a breathless, foodless round of vain telephoning, and a hectic quest from place to place, hither and
thither by subway and surface car. About noon I encountered a suitable supply house far downtown,
and at approximately 1:30 p.m. arrived at my boarding-place with the necessary paraphernalia and two
sturdy and intelligent mechanics. I had done all I could, and hoped I was in time.
Black terror, however, had preceded me. The house was in utter turmoil, and above the chatter of
awed voices I heard a man praying in a deep basso. Fiendish things were in the air, and lodgers told
over the beads of their rosaries as they caught the odour from beneath the doctor's closed door. The
lounger I had hired, it seems, had fled screaming and mad-eyed not long after his second delivery of
ice; perhaps as a result of excessive curiosity. He could not, of course, have locked the door behind
him; yet it was now fastened, presumably from the inside. There was no sound within save a nameless
sort of slow, thick dripping.
Briefly consulting with Mrs. Herrero and the workmen despite a fear that gnawed my inmost soul,
I advised the breaking down of the door; but the landlady found a way to turn the key from the outside
with some wire device. We had previously opened the doors of all the other rooms on that hall, and
flung all the windows to the very top. Now, noses protected by handkerchiefs, we tremblingly
invaded the accursed south room which blazed with the warm sun of early afternoon.
A kind of dark, slimy trail led from the open bathroom door to the hall door, and thence to the
desk, where a terrible little pool had accumulated. Something was scrawled there in pencil in an
awful, blind hand on a piece of paper hideously smeared as though by the very claws that traced the
hurried last words. Then the trail led to the couch and ended unutterably.
What was, or had been, on the couch I cannot and dare not say here. But this is what I shiveringly
puzzled out on the stickily smeared paper before I drew a match and burned it to a crisp; what I
puzzled out in terror as the landlady and two mechanics rushed frantically from that hellish place to
babble their incoherent stories at the nearest police station. The nauseous words seemed well-nigh
incredible in that yellow sunlight, with the clatter of cars and motor trucks ascending clamorously
from crowded Fourteenth Street, yet I confess that I believed them then. Whether I believe them now
I honestly do not know. There are things about which it is better not to speculate, and all that I can say
is that I hate the smell of ammonia, and grow faint at a draught of unusually cool air.
"The end," ran that noisome scrawl, "is here. No more ice--the man looked and ran away. Warmer
every minute, and the tissues can't last. I fancy you know what I said about the will and the nerves and
the preserved body after the organs ceased to work. It was good theory, but couldn't keep up
indefinitely. There was a gradual deterioration I had not foreseen. Dr. Torres knew, but the shock
killed him. He couldn't stand what he had to do--he had to get me in a strange, dark place when he
minded my letter and nursed me back. And the organs never would work again. It had to be done my
way--preservation--for you see I died that time eighteen years ago."

DAGON
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 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 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 soard high
enough to illuminate. 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 Dor. 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 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 enthnologist, 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 the 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 find me. God, that hand! The window! The window!

EX OBLIVIONE
When the last days were upon me, and the ugly trifles of existence began to drive me to madness
like the small drops of water that torturers let fall ceaselessly upon one spot of their victims body, I
loved the irradiate refuge of sleep. In my dreams I found a little of the beauty I had vainly sought in
life, and wandered through old gardens and enchanted woods.
Once when the wind was soft and scented I heard the south calling, and sailed endlessly and
languorously under strange stars.
Once when the gentle rain fell I glided in a barge down a sunless stream under the earth till I
reached another world of purple twilight, iridescent arbours, and undying roses.
And once I walked through a golden valley that led to shadowy groves and ruins, and ended in a
mighty wall green with antique vines, and pierced by a little gate of bronze.
Many times I walked through that valley, and longer and longer would I pause in the spectral half-
light where the giant trees squirmed and twisted grotesquely, and the grey ground stretched damply
from trunk to trunk, sometimes disclosing the mould-stained stones of buried temples. And always the
goal of my fancies was the mighty vine-grown wall with the little gate of bronze therein.
After awhile, as the days of waking became less and less bearable from their greyness and
sameness, I would often drift in opiate peace through the valley and the shadowy groves, and wonder
how I might seize them for my eternal dwelling-place, so that I need no more crawl back to a dull
world stript of interest and new colours. And as I looked upon the little gate in the mighty wall, I felt
that beyond it lay a dream-country from which, once it was entered, there would be no return.
So each night in sleep I strove to find the hidden latch of the gate in the ivied antique wall, though
it was exceedingly well hidden. And I would tell myself that the realm beyond the wall was not more
lasting merely, but more lovely and radiant as well.
Then one night in the dream-city of Zakarion I found a yellowed papyrus filled with the thoughts
of dream-sages who dwelt of old in that city, and who were too wise ever to be born in the waking
world. Therein were written many things concerning the world of dream, and among them was lore of
a golden valley and a sacred grove with temples, and a high wall pierced by a little bronze gate.
When I saw this lore, I knew that it touched on the scenes I had haunted, and I therefore read long in
the yellowed papyrus.
Some of the dream-sages wrote gorgeously of the wonders beyond the irrepassable gate, but
others told of horror and disappointment. I knew not which to believe, yet longed more and more to
cross forever into the unknown land; for doubt and secrecy are the lure of lures, and no new horror
can be more terrible than the daily torture of the commonplace. So when I learned of the drug which
would unlock the gate and drive me through, I resolved to take it when next I awaked.
Last night I swallowed the drug and floated dreamily into the golden valley and the shadowy
groves; and when I came this time to the antique wall, I saw that the small gate of bronze was ajar.
From beyond came a glow that weirdly lit the giant twisted trees and the tops of the buried temples,
and I drifted on songfully, expectant of the glories of the land from whence I should never return.
But as the gate swung wider and the sorcery of the drug and the dream pushed me through, I knew
that all sights and glories were at an end; for in that new realm was neither land nor sea, but only the
white void of unpeopled and illimitable space. So, happier than I had ever dared hope to be, I
dissolved again into that native infinity of crystal oblivion from which the daemon Life had called me
for one brief and desolate hour.

FACTS CONCERNING THE LATE ARTHUR JERMYN AND HIS
FAMILY
I
Life is a hideous thing, and from the background behind what we know of it peer daemoniacal
hints of truth which make it sometimes a thousandfold more hideous. Science, already oppressive
with its shocking revelations, will perhaps be the ultimate exterminator of our human species--if
separate species we be--for its reserve of unguessed horrors could never be borne by mortal brains
if loosed upon the world. If we knew what we are, we should do as Sir Arthur Jermyn did; and Arthur
Jermyn soaked himself in oil and set fire to his clothing one night. No one placed the charred
fragments in an urn or set a memorial to him who had been; for certain papers and a certain boxed
object were found which made men wish to forget. Some who knew him do not admit that he ever
existed.
Arthur Jermyn went out on the moor and burned himself after seeing the boxed object which had
come from Africa. It was this object, and not his peculiar personal appearance, which made him end
his life. Many would have disliked to live if possessed of the peculiar features of Arthur Jermyn, but
he had been a poet and scholar and had not minded. Learning was in his blood, for his great-
grandfather, Sir Robert Jermyn, Bt., had been an anthropologist of note, whilst his great--great-great-
grandfather, Sir Wade Jermyn, was one of the earliest explorers of the Congo region, and had written
eruditely of its tribes, animals, and supposed antiquities. Indeed, old Sir Wade had possessed an
intellectual zeal amounting almost to a mania; his bizarre conjectures on a prehistoric white
Congolese civilisation earning him much ridicule when his book, Observation on the Several Parts
of Africa, was published. In 1765 this fearless explorer had been placed in a madhouse at
Huntingdon.
Madness was in all the Jermyns, and people were glad there were not many of them. The line put
forth no branches, and Arthur was the last of it. If he had not been, one can not say what he would
have done when the object came. The Jermyns never seemed to look quite right--something was
amiss, though Arthur was the worst, and the old family portraits in Jermyn House showed fine faces
enough before Sir Wade's time. Certainly, the madness began with Sir Wade, whose wild stories of
Africa were at once the delight and terror of his few friends. It showed in his collection of trophies
and specimens, which were not such as a normal man would accumulate and preserve, and appeared
strikingly in the Oriental seclusion in which he kept his wife. The latter, he had said, was the
daughter of a Portuguese trader whom he had met in Africa; and did not like English ways. She, with
an infant son born in Africa, had accompanied him back from the second and longest of his trips, and
had gone with him on the third and last, never returning. No one had ever seen her closely, not even
the servants; for her disposition had been violent and singular. During her brief stay at Jermyn House
she occupied a remote wing, and was waited on by her husband alone. Sir Wade was, indeed, most
peculiar in his solicitude for his family; for when he returned to Africa he would permit no one to
care for his young son save a loathsome black woman from Guinea. Upon coming back, after the
death of Lady Jermyn, he himself assumed complete care of the boy.
But it was the talk of Sir Wade, especially when in his cups, which chiefly led his friends to
deem him mad. In a rational age like the eighteenth century it was unwise for a man of learning to talk
about wild sights and strange scenes under a Congo moon; of the gigantic walls and pillars of a
forgotten city, crumbling and vine-grown, and of damp, silent, stone steps leading interminably down
into the darkness of abysmal treasure-vaults and inconceivable catacombs. Especially was it unwise
to rave of the living things that might haunt such a place; of creatures half of the jungle and half of
the impiously aged city--fabulous creatures which even a Pliny might describe with scepticism;
things that might have sprung up after the great apes had overrun the dying city with the walls and the
pillars, the vaults and the weird carvings. Yet after he came home for the last time Sir Wade would
speak of such matters with a shudderingly uncanny zest, mostly after his third glass at the Knight's
Head; boasting of what he had found in the jungle and of how he had dwelt among terrible ruins
known only to him. And finally he had spoken of the living things in such a manner that he was taken to
the madhouse. He had shown little regret when shut into the barred room at Huntingdon, for his mind
moved curiously. Ever since his son had commenced to grow out of infancy, he had liked his home
less and less, till at last he had seemed to dread it. The Knight's Head had been his headquarters, and
when he was confined he expressed some vague gratitude as if for protection. Three years later he
died.
Wade Jermyn's son Philip was a highly peculiar person. Despite a strong physical resemblance to
his father, his appearance and conduct were in many particulars so coarse that he was universally
shunned. Though he did not inherit the madness which was feared by some, he was densely stupid
and given to brief periods of uncontrollable violence. In frame he was small, but intensely powerful,
and was of incredible agility. Twelve years after succeeding to his title he married the daughter of
his gamekeeper, a person said to be of gypsy extraction, but before his son was born joined the navy
as a common sailor, completing the general disgust which his habits and misalliance had begun. After
the close of the American war he was heard of as sailor on a merchantman in the African trade,
having a kind of reputation for feats of strength and climbing, but finally disappearing one night as his
ship lay off the Congo coast.
In the son of Sir Philip Jermyn the now accepted family peculiarity took a strange and fatal turn.
Tall and fairly handsome, with a sort of weird Eastern grace despite certain slight oddities of
proportion, Robert Jermyn began life as a scholar and investigator. It was he who first studied
scientifically the vast collection of relics which his mad grandfather had brought from Africa, and
who made the family name as celebrated in ethnology as in exploration. In 1815 Sir Robert married a
daughter of the seventh Viscount Brightholme and was subsequently blessed with three children, the
eldest and youngest of whom were never publicly seen on account of deformities in mind and body.
Saddened by these family misfortunes, the scientist sought relief in work, and made two long
expeditions in the interior of Africa. In 1849 his second son, Nevil, a singularly repellent person
who seemed to combine the surliness of Philip Jermyn with the hauteur of the Brightholmes, ran
away with a vulgar dancer, but was pardoned upon his return in the following year. He came back to
Jermyn House a widower with an infant son, Alfred, who was one day to be the father of Arthur
Jermyn.
Friends said that it was this series of griefs which unhinged the mind of Sir Robert Jermyn, yet it
was probably merely a bit of African folklore which caused the disaster. The elderly scholar had
been collecting legends of the Onga tribes near the field of his grandfather's and his own
explorations, hoping in some way to account for Sir Wade's wild tales of a lost city peopled by
strange hybrid creatures. A certain consistency in the strange papers of his ancestor suggested that
the madman's imagination might have been stimulated by native myths. On October 19, 1852, the
explorer Samuel Seaton called at Jermyn House with a manuscript of notes collected among the
Ongas, believing that certain legends of a gray city of white apes ruled by a white god might prove
valuable to the ethnologist. In his conversation he probably supplied many additional details; the
nature of which will never be known, since a hideous series of tragedies suddenly burst into being.
When Sir Robert Jermyn emerged from his library he left behind the strangled corpse of the
explorer, and before he could be restrained, had put an end to all three of his children; the two who
were never seen, and the son who had run away. Nevil Jermyn died in the successful defence of his
own two-year-old son, who had apparently been included in the old man's madly murderous scheme.
Sir Robert himself, after repeated attempts at suicide and a stubborn refusal to utter an articulate
sound, died of apoplexy in the second year of his confinement.
Sir Alfred Jermyn was a baronet before his fourth birthday, but his tastes never matched his title.
At twenty he had joined a band of music-hall performers, and at thirty-six had deserted his wife and
child to travel with an itinerant American circus. His end was very revolting. Among the animals in
the exhibition with which he travelled was a huge bull gorilla of lighter colour than the average; a
surprisingly tractable beast of much popularity with the performers. With this gorilla Alfred Jermyn
was singularly fascinated, and on many occasions the two would eye each other for long periods
through the intervening bars. Eventually Jermyn asked and obtained permission to train the animal,
astonishing audiences and fellow performers alike with his success. One morning in Chicago, as the
gorilla and Alfred Jermyn were rehearsing an exceedingly clever boxing match, the former
delivered a blow of more than the usual force, hurting both the body and the dignity of the amateur
trainer. Of what followed, members of "The Greatest Show On Earth" do not like to speak. They did
not expect to hear Sir Alfred Jermyn emit a shrill, inhuman scream, or to see him seize his clumsy
antagonist with both hands, dash it to the floor of the cage, and bite fiendishly at its hairy throat. The
gorilla was off its guard, but not for long, and before anything could be done by the regular trainer,
the body which had belonged to a baronet was past recognition.
II
Arthur Jermyn was the son of Sir Alfred Jermyn and a music-hall singer of unknown origin. When
the husband and father deserted his family, the mother took the child to Jermyn House; where there
was none left to object to her presence. She was not without notions of what a nobleman's dignity
should be, and saw to it that her son received the best education which limited money could provide.
The family resources were now sadly slender, and Jermyn House had fallen into woeful disrepair,
but young Arthur loved the old edifice and all its contents. He was not like any other Jermyn who had
ever lived, for he was a poet and a dreamer. Some of the neighbouring families who had heard tales
of old Sir Wade Jermyn's unseen Portuguese wife declared that her Latin blood must be showing
itself; but most persons merely sneered at his sensitiveness to beauty, attributing it to his music--hall
mother, who was socially unrecognised. The poetic delicacy of Arthur Jermyn was the more
remarkable because of his uncouth personal appearance. Most of the Jermyns had possessed a subtly
odd and repellent cast, but Arthur's case was very striking. It is hard to say just what he resembled,
but his expression, his facial angle, and the length of his arms gave a thrill of repulsion to those who
met him for the first time.
It was the mind and character of Arthur Jermyn which atoned for his aspect. Gifted and learned,
he took highest honours at Oxford and seemed likely to redeem the intellectual fame of his family.
Though of poetic rather than scientific temperament, he planned to continue the work of his
forefathers in African ethnology and antiquities, utilising the truly wonderful though strange
collection of Sir Wade. With his fanciful mind he thought often of the prehistoric civilisation in
which the mad explorer had so implicitly believed, and would weave tale after tale about the silent
jungle city mentioned in the latter's wilder notes and paragraphs. For the nebulous utterances
concerning a nameless, unsuspected race of jungle hybrids he had a peculiar feeling of mingled
terror and attraction, speculating on the possible basis of such a fancy, and seeking to obtain light
among the more recent data gleaned by his great-grandfather and Samuel Seaton amongst the Ongas.
In 1911, after the death of his mother, Sir Arthur Jermyn determined to pursue his investigations
to the utmost extent. Selling a portion of his estate to obtain the requisite money, he outfitted an
expedition and sailed for the Congo. Arranging with the Belgian authorities for a party of guides, he
spent a year in the Onga and Kahn country, finding data beyond the highest of his expectations.
Among the Kaliris was an aged chief called Mwanu, who possessed not only a highly retentive
memory, but a singular degree of intelligence and interest in old legends. This ancient confirmed
every tale which Jermyn had heard, adding his own account of the stone city and the white apes as it
had been told to him.
According to Mwanu, the gray city and the hybrid creatures were no more, having been
annihilated by the warlike N'bangus many years ago. This tribe, after destroying most of the edifices
and killing the live beings, had carried off the stuffed goddess which had been the object of their
quest; the white ape-goddess which the strange beings worshipped, and which was held by Congo
tradition to be the form of one who had reigned as a princess among these beings. Just what the white
apelike creatures could have been, Mwanu had no idea, but he thought they were the builders of the
ruined city. Jermyn could form no conjecture, but by close questioning obtained a very picturesque
legend of the stuffed goddess.
The ape-princess, it was said, became the consort of a great white god who had come out of the
West. For a long time they had reigned over the city together, but when they had a son, all three went
away. Later the god and princess had returned, and upon the death of the princess her divine husband
had mummified the body and enshrined it in a vast house of stone, where it was worshipped. Then he
departed alone. The legend here seemed to present three variants. According to one story, nothing
further happened save that the stuffed goddess became a symbol of supremacy for whatever tribe
might possess it. It was for this reason that the N'bangus carried it off. A second story told of a god's
return and death at the feet of his enshrined wife. A third told of the return of the son, grown to
manhood--or apehood or godhood, as the case might be--yet unconscious of his identity. Surely the
imaginative blacks had made the most of whatever events might lie behind the extravagant legendry.
Of the reality of the jungle city described by old Sir Wade, Arthur Jermyn had no further doubt;
and was hardly astonished when early in 1912 he came upon what was left of it. Its size must have
been exaggerated, yet the stones lying about proved that it was no mere Negro village. Unfortunately
no carvings could be found, and the small size of the expedition prevented operations toward
clearing the one visible passageway that seemed to lead down into the system of vaults which Sir
Wade had mentioned. The white apes and the stuffed goddess were discussed with all the native
chiefs of the region, but it remained for a European to improve on the data offered by old Mwanu. M.
Verhaeren, Belgian agent at a trading-post on the Congo, believed that he could not only locate but
obtain the stuffed goddess, of which he had vaguely heard; since the once mighty N'bangus were
now the submissive servants of King Albert's government, and with but little persuasion could be
induced to part with the gruesome deity they had carried off. When Jermyn sailed for England,
therefore, it was with the exultant probability that he would within a few months receive a priceless
ethnological relic confirming the wildest of his great--great-great-grandfather's narratives--that is,
the wildest which he had ever heard. Countrymen near Jermyn House had perhaps heard wilder tales
handed down from ancestors who had listened to Sir Wade around the tables of the Knight's Head.
Arthur Jermyn waited very patiently for the expected box from M. Verhaeren, meanwhile
studying with increased diligence the manuscripts left by his mad ancestor. He began to feel closely
akin to Sir Wade, and to seek relics of the latter's personal life in England as well as of his African
exploits. Oral accounts of the mysterious and secluded wife had been numerous, but no tangible relic
of her stay at Jermyn House remained. Jermyn wondered what circumstance had prompted or
permitted such an effacement, and decided that the husband's insanity was the prime cause. His great-
great-great-grandmother, he recalled, was said to have been the daughter of a Portuguese trader in
Africa. No doubt her practical heritage and superficial knowledge of the Dark Continent had caused
her to flout Sir Wade's tales of the interior, a thing which such a man would not be likely to forgive.
She had died in Africa, perhaps dragged thither by a husband determined to prove what he had told.
But as Jermyn indulged in these reflections he could not but smile at their futility, a century and a half
after the death of both his strange progenitors.
In June, 1913, a letter arrived from M. Verhaeren, telling of the finding of the stuffed goddess. It
was, the Belgian averred, a most extraordinary object; an object quite beyond the power of a layman
to classify. Whether it was human or simian only a scientist could determine, and the process of
determination would be greatly hampered by its imperfect condition. Time and the Congo climate are
not kind to mummies; especially when their preparation is as amateurish as seemed to be the case
here. Around the creature's neck had been found a golden chain bearing an empty locket on which
were armorial designs; no doubt some hapless traveller's keepsake, taken by the N'bangus and hung
upon the goddess as a charm. In commenting on the contour of the mummy's face, M. Verhaeren
suggested a whimsical comparison; or rather, expressed a humorous wonder just how it would strike
his corespondent, but was too much interested scientifically to waste many words in levity. The
stuffed goddess, he wrote, would arrive duly packed about a month after receipt of the letter.
The boxed object was delivered at Jermyn House on the afternoon of August 3, 1913, being
conveyed immediately to the large chamber which housed the collection of African specimens as
arranged by Sir Robert and Arthur. What ensued can best be gathered from the tales of servants and
from things and papers later examined. Of the various tales, that of aged Soames, the family butler, is
most ample and coherent. According to this trustworthy man, Sir Arthur Jermyn dismissed everyone
from the room before opening the box, though the instant sound of hammer and chisel showed that he
did not delay the operation. Nothing was heard for some time; just how long Soames cannot exactly
estimate, but it was certainly less than a quarter of an hour later that the horrible scream, undoubtedly
in Jermyn's voice, was heard. Immediately afterward Jermyn emerged from the room, rushing
frantically toward the front of the house as if pursued by some hideous enemy. The expression on
his face, a face ghastly enough in repose, was beyond description. When near the front door he
seemed to think of something, and turned back in his flight, finally disappearing down the stairs to the
cellar. The servants were utterly dumbfounded, and watched at the head of the stairs, but their master
did not return. A smell of oil was all that came up from the regions below. After dark a rattling was
heard at the door leading from the cellar into the courtyard; and a stable-boy saw Arthur Jermyn,
glistening from head to foot with oil and redolent of that fluid, steal furtively out and vanish on the
black moor surrounding the house. Then, in an exaltation of supreme horror, everyone saw the end. A
spark appeared on the moor, a flame arose, and a pillar of human fire reached to the heavens. The
house of Jermyn no longer existed.
The reason why Arthur Jermyn's charred fragments were not collected and buried lies in what
was found afterward, principally the thing in the box. The stuffed goddess was a nauseous sight,
withered and eaten away, but it was clearly a mummified white ape of some unknown species, less
hairy than any recorded variety, and infinitely nearer mankind--quite shockingly so. Detailed
description would be rather unpleasant, but two salient particulars must be told, for they fit in
revoltingly with certain notes of Sir Wade Jermyn's African expeditions and with the Congolese
legends of the white god and the ape-princess. The two particulars in question are these: the arms on
the golden locket about the creature's neck were the Jermyn arms, and the jocose suggestion of M.
Verhaeren about certain resemblance as connected with the shrivelled face applied with vivid,
ghastly, and unnatural horror to none other than the sensitive Arthur Jermyn, great-great-great-
grandson of Sir Wade Jermyn and an unknown wife. Members of the Royal Anthropological Institute
burned the thing and threw the locket into a well, and some of them do not admit that Arthur Jermyn
ever existed.

FROM BEYOND
That Crawford Tillinghast should ever have studied science and philosophy was a mistake.
These things should be left to the frigid and impersonal investigator for they offer two equally
tragic alternatives to the man of feeling and action; despair, if he fail in his quest, and terrors
unutterable and unimaginable if he succeed. Tillinghast had once been the prey of failure, solitary
and melancholy; but now I knew, with nauseating fears of my own, that he was the prey of success. I
had indeed warned him ten weeks before, when he burst forth with his tale of what he felt himself
about to discover. He had been flushed and excited then, talking in a high and unnatural, though
always pedantic, voice.
"What do we know," he had said, "of the world and the universe about us? Our means of
receiving impressions are absurdly few, and our notions of surrounding objects infinitely narrow.
We see things only as we are constructed to see them, and can gain no idea of their absolute nature.
With five feeble senses we pretend to comprehend the boundlessly complex cosmos, yet other
beings with wider, stronger, or different range of senses might not only see very differently the
things we see, but might see and study whole worlds of matter, energy, and life which lie close at
hand yet can never be detected with the senses we have. I have always believed that such strange,
inaccessible worlds exist at our very elbows, and now I believe I have found a way to break dawn the
barriers. I am not joking. Within twenty-four hours that machine near the table will generate waves
acting on unrecognized sense organs that exist in us as atrophied or rudimentary vestiges. Those
waves will open up to us many vistas unknown to man and several unknown to anything we consider
organic life. We shall see that at which dogs howl in the dark, and that at which cats prick up their
ears after midnight. We shall see these things, and other things which no breathing creature has yet
seen. We shall overleap time, space, and dimensions, and without bodily motion peer to the bottom of
creation."
When Tillinghast said these things I remonstrated, for I knew him well enough to be frightened
rather than amused; but he was a fanatic, and drove me from the house. Now he was no less a fanatic,
but his desire to speak had conquered his resentment, and he had written me imperatively in a hand I
could scarcely recognize. As I entered the abode of the friend so suddenly metamorphosed to a
shivering gargoyle, I became infected with the terror which seemed stalking in all the shadows. The
words and beliefs expressed ten weeks before seemed bodied forth in the darkness beyond the small
circle of candle light, and I sickened at the hollow, altered voice of my host. I wished the servants
were about, and did not like it when he said they had all left three days previously. It seemed strange
that old Gregory, at least, should desert his master without telling as tried a friend as I. It was he who
had given me all the information I had of Tillinghast after I was repulsed in rage.
Yet I soon subordinated all my fears to my growing curiosity and fascination. Just what Crawford
Tillinghast now wished of me I could only guess, but that he had some stupendous secret or
discovery to impart, I could not doubt. Before I had protested at his unnatural pryings into the
unthinkable; now that he had evidently succeeded to some degree I almost shared his spirit, terrible
though the cost of victory appeared. Up through the dark emptiness of the house I followed the
bobbing candle in the hand of this shaking parody on man. The electricity seemed to be turned off,
and when I asked my guide he said it was for a definite reason.
"It would be too much...I would not dare," he continued to mutter. I especially noted his new habit
of muttering, for it was not like him to talk to himself. We entered the laboratory in the attic, and I
observed that detestable electrical machine, glowing with a sickly, sinister violet luminosity. It was
connected with a powerful chemical battery, but seemed to be receiving no current; for I recalled that
in its experimental stage it had sputtered and purred when in action. In reply to my question
Tillinghast mumbled that this permanent glow was not electrical in any sense that I could understand.
He now seated me near the machine, so that it was on my right, and turned a switch somewhere
below the crowning cluster of glass bulbs. The usual sputtering began, turned to a whine, and
terminated in a drone so soft as to suggest a return to silence. Meanwhile the luminosity increased,
waned again, then assumed a pale, outr colour or blend of colours which I could neither place nor
describe. Tillinghast had been watching me, and noted my puzzled expression.
"Do you know what that is?" he whispered, "That is ultra-violet."He chuckled oddly at my
surprise. "You thought ultra-violet was invisible, and so it is--but you can see that and many other
invisible things now.
"Listen to me! The waves from that thing are waking a thousand sleeping senses in us; senses
which we inherit from aeons of evolution from the state of detached electrons to the state of organic
humanity. I have seen the truth, and I intend to show it to you. Do you wonder how it will seem? I will
tell you."Here Tillinghast seated himself directly opposite me, blowing out his candle and staring
hideously into my eyes. "Your existing sense-organs--ears first, I think--will pick up many of the
impressions, for they are closely connected with the dormant organs. Then there will be others. You
have heard of the pineal gland? I laugh at the shallow endocrinologist, fellow-dupe and fellow-
parvenu of the Freudian. That gland is the great sense organ of organs--I have found out. It is like
sight in the end, and transmits visual pictures to the brain. If you are normal, that is the way you ought
to get most of it...I mean get most of the evidence from beyond."
I looked about the immense attic room with the sloping south wall, dimly lit by rays which the
every day eye cannot see. The far corners were all shadows and the whole place took on a hazy
unreality which obscured its nature and invited the imagination to symbolism and phantasm. During the
interval that Tillinghast was long silent I fancied myself in some vast incredible temple of long-dead
gods; some vague edifice of innumerable black stone columns reaching up from a floor of damp
slabs to a cloudy height beyond the range of my vision. The picture was very vivid for a while, but
gradually gave way to a more horrible conception; that of utter, absolute solitude in infinite,
sightless, soundless space. There seemed to be a void, and nothing more, and I felt a childish fear
which prompted me to draw from my hip pocket the revolver I carried after dark since the night I was
held up in East Providence. Then from the farthermost regions of remoteness, the sound softly
glided into existence. It was infinitely faint, subtly vibrant, and unmistakably musical, but held a
quality of surpassing wildness which made its impact feel like a delicate torture of my whole body. I
felt sensations like those one feels when accidentally scratching ground glass. Simultaneously there
developed something like a cold draught, which apparently swept past me from the direction of the
distant sound. As I waited breathlessly I perceived that both sound and wind were increasing; the
effect being to give me an odd notion of myself as tied to a pair of rails in the path of a gigantic
approaching locomotive. I began to speak to Tillinghast, and as I did so all the unusual impressions
abruptly vanished. I saw only the man, the glowing machines, and the dim apartment. Tillinghast was
grinning repulsively at the revolver which I had almost unconsciously drawn, but from his
expression I was sure he had seen and heard as much as I, if not a great deal more. I whispered what I
had experienced and he bade me to remain as quiet and receptive as possible.
"Don't move," he cautioned, "for in these rays we are able to be seen as well as to see. I told you
the servants left, but I didn't tell you how. It was that thick-witted house-keeper--she turned on the
lights downstairs after I had warned her not to, and the wires picked up sympathetic vibrations. It must
have been frightful--I could hear the screams up here in spite of all I was seeing and hearing from
another direction, and later it was rather awful to find those empty heaps of clothes around the house.
Mrs. Updike's clothes were close to the front hall switch--that's how I know she did it. It got them
all. But so long as we don't move we're fairly safe. Remember we're dealing with a hideous world in
which we are practically helpless...Keep still!"
The combined shock of the revelation and of the abrupt command gave me a kind of paralysis, and
in my terror my mind again opened to the impressions coming from what Tillinghast called
"beyond."I was now in a vortex of sound and motion, with confused pictures before my eyes. I saw
the blurred outlines of the room, but from some point in space there seemed to be pouring a seething
column of unrecognizable shapes or clouds, penetrating the solid roof at a point ahead and to the
right of me. Then I glimpsed the temple-like effect again, but this time the pillars reached up into an
aerial ocean of light, which sent down one blinding beam along the path of the cloudy column I had
seen before. After that the scene was almost wholly kaleidoscopic, and in the jumble of sights,
sounds, and unidentified sense-impressions I felt that I was about to dissolve or in some way lose the
solid form. One definite flash I shall always remember. I seemed for an instant to behold a patch of
strange night sky filled with shining, revolving spheres, and as it receded I saw that the glowing suns
formed a constellation or galaxy of settled shape; this shape being the distorted face of Crawford
Tillinghast. At another time I felt the huge animate things brushing past me and occasionally walking
or drifting through my supposedly solid body, and thought I saw Tillinghast look at them as though
his better trained senses could catch them visually. I recalled what he had said of the pineal gland,
and wondered what he saw with this preternatural eye.
Suddenly I myself became possessed of a kind of augmented sight. Over and above the luminous
and shadowy chaos arose a picture which, though vague, held the elements of consistency and
permanence. It was indeed somewhat familiar, for the unusual part was superimposed upon the usual
terrestrial scene much as a cinema view may be thrown upon the painted curtain of a theater. I saw the
attic laboratory, the electrical machine, and the unsightly form of Tillinghast opposite me; but of all
the space unoccupied by familiar objects not one particle was vacant. Indescribable shapes both alive
and otherwise were mixed in disgusting disarray, and close to every known thing were whole worlds
of alien, unknown entities. It likewise seemed that all the known things entered into the composition
of other unknown things and vice versa. Foremost among the living objects were inky, jellyfish
monstrosities which flabbily quivered in harmony with the vibrations from the machine. They were
present in loathsome profusion, and I saw to my horror that they overlapped; that they were semi-
fluid and capable of passing through one another and through what we know as solids. These things
were never still, but seemed ever floating about with some malignant purpose. Sometimes they
appeared to devour one another, the attacker launching itself at its victim and instantaneously
obliterating the latter from sight. Shudderingly I felt that I knew what had obliterated the unfortunate
servants, and could not exclude the thing from my mind as I strove to observe other properties of the
newly visible world that lies unseen around us. But Tillinghast had been watching me and was
speaking.
"You see them? You see them? You see the things that float and flop about you and through you
every moment of your life? You see the creatures that form what men call the pure air and the blue
sky? Have I not succeeded in breaking down the barrier; have I not shown you worlds that no other
living men have seen?" I heard his scream through the horrible chaos, and looked at the wild face
thrust so offensively close to mine. His eyes were pits of flame, and they glared at me with what I
now saw was overwhelming hatred. The machine droned detestably.
"You think those floundering things wiped out the servants? Fool, they are harmless! But the
servants are gone, aren't they? You tried to stop me; you discouraged me when I needed every drop
of encouragement I could get; you were afraid of the cosmic truth, you damned coward, but now I've
got you! What swept up the servants? What made them scream so loud?...Don't know, eh! You'll know
soon enough. Look at me--listen to what I say--do you suppose there are really any such things as
time and magnitude? Do you fancy there are such things as form or matter? I tell you, I have struck
depths that your little brain can't picture. I have seen beyond the bounds of infinity and drawn down
demons from the stars...I have harnessed the shadows that stride from world to world to sow death
and madness...Space belongs to me, do you hear? Things are hunting me now--the things that devour
and dissolve--but I know how to elude them. It is you they will get, as they got the servants...Stirring,
dear sir? I told you it was dangerous to move, I have saved you so far by telling you to keep still--
saved you to see more sights and to listen to me. If you had moved, they would have been at you long
ago. Don't worry, they won't hurt you. They didn't hurt the servants--it was the seeing that made the
poor devils scream so. My pets are not pretty, for they come out of places where aesthetic standards
are--very different. Disintegration is quite painless, I assure you--but I want you to see them. I almost
saw them, but I knew how to stop. You are curious? I always knew you were no scientist. Trembling,
eh. Trembling with anxiety to see the ultimate things I have discovered. Why don't you move, then?
Tired? Well, don't worry, my friend, for they are coming...Look, look, curse you, look...it's just over
your left shoulder..."
What remains to be told is very brief, and may be familiar to you from the newspaper accounts.
The police heard a shot in the old Tillinghast house and found us there--Tillinghast dead and me
unconscious. They arrested me because the revolver was in my hand, but released me in three hours,
after they found it was apoplexy which had finished Tillinghast and saw that my shot had been
directed at the noxious machine which now lay hopelessly shattered on the laboratory floor. I did not
tell very much of what I had seen, for I feared the coroner would be skeptical; but from the evasive
outline I did give, the doctor told me that I had undoubtedly been hypnotized by the vindictive and
homicidal madman.
I wish I could believe that doctor. It would help my shaky nerves if I could dismiss what I now
have to think of the air and the sky about and above me. I never feel alone or comfortable, and a
hideous sense of pursuit sometimes comes chillingly on me when I am weary. What prevents me from
believing the doctor is one simple fact--that the police never found the bodies of those servants
whom they say Crawford Tillinghast murdered.

HE
I saw him on a sleepless night when I was walking desperately to save my soul and my vision. My
coming to New York had been a mistake; for whereas I had looked for poignant wonder and
inspiration in the teeming labyrinths of ancient streets that twist endlessly from forgotten courts and
squares and waterfronts to courts and squares and waterfronts equally forgotten, and in the Cyclopean
modern towers and pinnacles that rise blackly Babylonian under waning moons, I had found instead
only a sense of horror and oppression which threatened to master, paralyze, and annihilate me.
The disillusion had been gradual. Coming for the first time upon the town, I had seen it in the
sunset from a bridge, majestic above its waters, its incredible peaks and pyramids rising flowerlike
and delicate from pools of violet mist to play with the flaming clouds and the first stars of evening.
Then it had lighted up window by window above the shimmering tides where lanterns nodded and
glided and deep horns bayed weird harmonies, and had itself become a starry firmament of dream,
redolent of faery music, and one with the marvels of Carcassonne and Samarcand and El Dorado and
all glorious and half- fabulous cities. Shortly afterward I was taken through those antique ways so
dear to my fancy--narrow, curving alleys and passages where rows of red Georgian brick blinked
with small-paned dormers above pillared doorways that had looked on gilded sedans and paneled
coaches--and in the first flush of realization of these long-wished things I thought I had indeed
achieved such treasures as would make me in time a poet.
But success and happiness were not to be. Garish daylight showed only squalor and alienage and
the noxious elephantiasis of climbing, spreading stone where the moon had hinted of loveliness and
elder magic; and the throngs of people that seethed through the flume-like streets were squat,
swarthy strangers with hardened faces and narrow eyes, shrewd strangers without dreams and
without kinship to the scenes about them, who could never mean aught to a blue-eyed man of the old
folk, with the love of fair green lanes and white New England village steeples in his heart.
So instead of the poems I had hoped for, there came only a shuddering blackness and ineffable
loneliness; and I saw at last a fearful truth which no one had ever dared to breathe before--the
unwhisperable secret of secrets--the fact that this city of stone and stridor is not a sentient
perpetuation of Old New York as London is of Old London and Paris of Old Paris, but that it is in fact
quite dead, its sprawling body imperfectly embalmed and infested with queer animate things which
have nothing to do with it as it was in life. Upon making this discovery I ceased to sleep comfortably;
though something of resigned tranquillity came back as I gradually formed the habit of keeping off
the streets by day and venturing abroad only at night, when darkness calls forth what little of the past
still hovers wraith-like about, and old white doorways remember the stalwart forms that once passed
through them. With this mode of relief I even wrote a few poems, and still refrained from going
home to my people lest I seem to crawl back ignobly in defeat.
Then, on a sleepless night's walk, I met the man. It was in a grotesque hidden courtyard of the
Greenwich section, for there in my ignorance I had settled, having heard of the place as the natural
home of poets and artists. The archaic lanes and houses and unexpected bits of square and court had
indeed delighted me, and when I found the poets and artists to be loud-voiced pretenders whose
quaintness is tinsel and whose lives are a denial of all that pure beauty which is poetry and art, I
stayed on for love of these venerable things. I fancied them as they were in their prime, when
Greenwich was a placid village not yet engulfed by the town; and in the hours before dawn, when all
the revellers had slunk away, I used to wander alone among their cryptical windings and brood upon
the curious arcana which generations must have deposited there. This kept my soul alive, and gave
me a few of those dreams and visions for which the poet far within me cried out.
The man came upon me at about two one cloudy August morning, as I was threading a series of
detached courtyards; now accessible only through the unlighted hallways of intervening buildings,
but once forming parts of a continuous network of picturesque alleys. I had heard of them by vague
rumor, and realized that they could not be upon any map of today; but the fact that they were forgotten
only endeared them to me, so that I had sought them with twice my usual eagerness. Now that I had
found them, my eagerness was again redoubled; for something in their arrangement dimly hinted that
they might be only a few of many such, with dark, dumb counterparts wedged obscurely betwixt high
blank walls and deserted rear tenements, or lurking lamplessly behind archways unbetrayed by hordes
of the foreign-speaking or guarded by furtive and uncommunicative artists whose practises do not
invite publicity or the light of day.
He spoke to me without invitation, noting my mood and glances as I studied certain knockered
doorways above iron-railed steps, the pallid glow of traceried transoms feebly lighting my face. His
own face was in shadow, and he wore a wide-brimmed hat which somehow blended perfectly with
the out-of-date cloak he affected; but I was subtly disquieted even before he addressed me. His form
was very slight; thin almost to cadaverousness; and his voice proved phenomenally soft and hollow,
though not particularly deep. He had, he said, noticed me several times at my wanderings; and
inferred that I resembled him in loving the vestiges of former years. Would I not like the guidance of
one long practised in these explorations, and possessed of local information profoundly deeper than
any which an obvious newcomer could possibly have gained?
As he spoke, I caught a glimpse of his face in the yellow beam from a solitary attic window. It
was a noble, even a handsome elderly countenance; and bore the marks of a lineage and refinement
unusual for the age and place. Yet some quality about it disturbed me almost as much as its features
pleased me--perhaps it was too white, or too expressionless, or too much out of keeping with the
locality, to make me feel easy or comfortable. Nevertheless I followed him; for in those dreary days
my quest for antique beauty and mystery was all that I had to keep my soul alive, and I reckoned it a
rare favor of Fate to fall in with one whose kindred seekings seemed to have penetrated so much
farther than mine.
Something in the night constrained the cloaked man to silence and for a long hour he led me
forward without needless words; making only the briefest of comments concerning ancient names and
dates and changes, and directing my progress very largely by gestures as we squeezed through
interstices, tiptoed through corridors clambered over brick walls, and once crawled on hands and
knees through a low, arched passage of stone whose immense length and tortuous twistings effaced
at last every hint of geographical location I had managed to preserve. The things we saw were very
old and marvelous, or at least they seemed so in the few straggling rays of light by which I viewed
them, and I shall never forget the tottering Ionic columns and fluted pilasters and urn-headed iron
fenceposts and flaring-linteled windows and decorative fanlights that appeared to grow quainter and
stranger the deeper we advanced into this inexhaustible maze of unknown antiquity.
We met no person, and as time passed the lighted windows became fewer and fewer. The
streetlights we first encountered had been of oil, and of the ancient lozenge pattern. Later I noticed
some with candles; and at last, after traversing a horrible unlighted court where my guide had to lead
with his gloved hand through total blackness to a narrow wooded gate in a high wall, we came upon a
fragment of alley lit only by lanterns in front of every seventh house--unbelievably Colonial tin
lanterns with conical tops and holes punched in the sides. This alley led steeply uphill--more steeply
than I thought possible in this part of New York--and the upper end was blocked squarely by the ivy-
clad wall of a private estate, beyond which I could see a pale cupola, and the tops of trees waving
against a vague lightness in the sky. In this wall was a small, low-arched gate of nail-studded black
oak, which the man proceeded to unlock with a ponderous key. Leading me within, he steered a
course in utter blackness over what seemed to be a gravel path, and finally up a flight of stone steps
to the door of the house, which he unlocked and opened for me.
We entered, and as we did so I grew faint from a reek of infinite mustiness which welled out to
meet us, and which must have been the fruit of unwholesome centuries of decay. My host appeared
not to notice this, and in courtesy I kept silent as he piloted me up a curving stairway, across a hall,
and into a room whose door I heard him lock behind us. Then I saw him pull the curtains of the three
small-paned windows that barely showed themselves against the lightening sky; after which he
crossed to the mantel, struck flint and steel, lighted two candles of a candelabrum of twelve sconces,
and made a gesture enjoining soft-toned speech.
In this feeble radiance I saw that we were in a spacious, well-furnished and paneled library dating
from the first quarter of the Eighteenth Century, with splendid doorway pediments, a delightful Doric
cornice, and a magnificently carved overmantel with scroll-and-urn top. Above the crowded
bookshelves at intervals along the walls were well-wrought family portraits; all tarnished to an
enigmatical dimness, and bearing an unmistakable likeness to the man who now motioned me to a chair
beside the graceful Chippendale table. Before seating himself across the table from me, my host
paused for a moment as if in embarrassment; then, tardily removing his gloves, wide-brimmed hat, and
cloak, stood theatrically revealed in full mid-Georgian costume from queued hair and neck ruffles to
knee-breeches, silk hose, and the buckled shoes I had not previously noticed. Now slowly sinking
into a lyre-back chair, he commenced to eye me intently.
Without his hat he took on an aspect of extreme age which was scarcely visible before, and I
wondered if this unperceived mark of singular longevity were not one of the sources of my disquiet.
When he spoke at length, his soft, hollow, and carefully muffled voice not infrequently quavered; and
now and then I had great difficulty in following him as I listened with a thrill of amazement and half-
disavowed alarm which grew each instant.
"You behold, Sir," my host began, "a man of very eccentrical habits for whose costume no
apology need be offered to one with your wit and inclinations. Reflecting upon better times, I have
not scrupled to ascertain their ways, and adopt their dress and manners; an indulgence which offends
none if practised without ostentation. It hath been my good fortune to retain the rural seat of my
ancestors, swallowed though it was by two towns, first Greenwich, which built up hither after 1800,
then New York, which joined on near 1830. There were many reasons for the close keeping of this
place in my family, and I have not been remiss in discharging such obligations. The squire who
succeeded to it in 1768 studied sartain arts and made sartain discoveries, all connected with
influences residing in this particular plot of ground, and eminently desarving of the strongest
guarding. Some curious effects of these arts and discoveries I now purpose to show you, under the
strictest secrecy; and I believe I may rely on my judgement of men enough to have no distrust of
either your interest or your fidelity."
He paused, but I could only nod my head. I have said that I was alarmed, yet to my soul nothing
was more deadly than the material daylight world of New York, and whether this man were a
harmless eccentric or a wielder of dangerous arts, I had no choice save to follow him and slake my
sense of wonder on whatever he might have to offer. So I listened.
"To--my ancestor--," he softly continued, "there appeared to reside some very remarkable
qualities in the will of mankind; qualities having a little-suspected dominance not only over the acts
of one's self and of others, but over every variety of force and substance in Nature, and over many
elements and dimensions deemed more universal than Nature herself. May I say that he flouted the
sanctity of things as great as space and time and that he put to strange uses the rites of sartain half-
breed red Indians once encamped upon this hill? These Indians showed choler when the place was
built, and were plaguey pestilent in asking to visit the grounds at the full of the moon. For years they
stole over the wall each month when they could, and by stealth performed sartain acts. Then, in '68,
the new squire catched them at their doings, and stood still at what he saw. Thereafter he bargained
with them and exchanged the free access of his grounds for the exact inwardness of what they did,
larning that their grandfathers got part of their custom from red ancestors and part from an old
Dutchman in the time of the States-General. Arid pox on him, I'm afeared the squire must have sarved
them monstrous bad rum--whether or not by intent--for a week after he larnt the secret he was the
only man living that knew it. You, Sir, are the first outsider to be told there is a secret, and split me if
I'd have risked tampering that much with--the powers--had ye not been so hot after bygone things."
I shuddered as the man grew colloquial--and with the familiar speech of another day. He went on.
"But you must know, Sir, that what--the squire--got from those mongrel savages was but a small
part of the larning he came to have. He had not been at Oxford for nothing, nor talked to no account
with an ancient chymist and astrologer in Paris. He was, in fine, made sensible that all the world is but
the smoke of our intellects; past the bidding of the vulgar, but by the wise to be puffed out and drawn
in like any cloud of prime Virginia tobacco. What we want, we may make about us; and what we don't
want, we may sweep away. I won't say that all this is wholly true in body, but 'tis sufficient true to
furnish a very pretty spectacle now and then. You, I conceive, would be tickled by a better sight of
sartain other years than your fancy affords you; so be pleased to hold back any fright at what I design
to show. Come to the window and be quiet."
My host now took my hand to draw me to one of the two windows on the long side of the
malodorous room, and at the first touch of his ungloved fingers I turned cold. His flesh, though dry
and firm, was of the quality of ice; and I almost shrank away from his pulling. But again I thought of
the emptiness and horror of reality, and boldly prepared to follow whithersoever I might be led.
Once at the window, the man drew apart the yellow silk curtains and directed my stare into the
blackness outside. For a moment I saw nothing save a myriad of tiny dancing lights, far, far before
me. Then, as if in response to an insidious motion of my host's hand, a flash of heat-lightning played
over the scene, and I looked out upon a sea of luxuriant foliage--foliage unpolluted, and not the sea
of roofs to be expected by any normal mind. On my right the Hudson glittered wickedly, and in the
distance ahead I saw the unhealthy shimmer of a vast salt marsh constellated with nervous fireflies.
The flash died, and an evil smile illumined the waxy face of the aged necromancer.
"That was before my time--before the new squire's time. Pray let us try again."
I was faint, even fainter than the hateful modernity of that accursed city had made me.
"Good God!" I whispered, "can you do that for any time?" And as he nodded, and bared the black
stumps of what had once been yellow fangs, I clutched at the curtains to prevent myself from falling.
But he steadied me with that terrible, ice-cold claw, and once more made his insidious gesture.
Again the lightning flashed--but this time upon a scene not wholly strange. It was Greenwich, the
Greenwich that used to be, with here and there a roof or row of houses as we see it now, yet with
lovely green lanes and fields and bits of grassy common. The marsh still glittered beyond, but in the
farther distance I saw the steeples of what was then all of New York; Trinity and St. Paul's and the
BrickChurch dominating their sisters, and a faint haze of wood smoke hovering over the whole. I
breathed hard, hut not so much from the sight itself as from the possibilities my imagination
terrifiedly conjured up.
"Can you--dare you--go far?" I spoke with awe and I think he shared it for a second, but the evil
grin returned.
"Far? What I have seen would blast ye to a mad statue of stone! Back, back--forward, forward--
look, ye puling lackwit!"
And as he snarled the phrase under his breath he gestured anew bringing to the sky a flash more
blinding than either which had come before. For full three seconds I could glimpse that pandemoniac
sight, and in those seconds I saw a vista which will ever afterward torment me in dreams. I saw the
heavens verminous with strange flying things, and beneath them a hellish black city of giant stone
terraces with impious pyramids flung savagely to the moon, and devil-lights burning from
unnumbered windows. And swarming loathsomely on aerial galleries I saw the yellow, squint-eyed
people of that city, robed horribly in orange and red, and dancing insanely to the pounding of fevered
kettle-drums, the clatter of obscene crotala, and the maniacal moaning of muted horns whose
ceaseless dirges rose and fell undulantly like the wave of an unhallowed ocean of bitumen.
I saw this vista, I say, and heard as with the mind's ear the blasphemous domdaniel of cacophony
which companioned it. It was the shrieking fulfilment of all the horror which that corpse-city had
ever stirred in my soul, and forgetting every injunction to silence I screamed and screamed and
screamed as my nerves gave way and the walls quivered about me.
Then, as the flash subsided, I saw that my host was trembling too; a look of shocking fear half-
blotting from his face the serpent distortion of rage which my screams had excited. He tottered,
clutched at the curtains as I had done before, and wriggled his head wildly, like a hunted animal. God
knows he had cause, for as the echoes of my screaming died away there came another sound so
hellishly suggestive that only numbed emotion kept me sane and conscious. It was the steady, stealthy
creaking of the stairs beyond the locked door, as with the ascent of a barefoot or skin-shod horde;
and at last the cautious, purposeful rattling of the brass latch that glowed in the feeble candlelight.
The old man clawed and spat at me through the moldy air, and barked things in his throat as he swayed
with the yellow curtain he clutched.
"The full moon--damn ye--ye...ye yelping dog--ye called 'em, and they've come for me!
Moccasined feet--dead men--Gad sink ye, ye red devils, but I poisoned no rum o' yours--han't I kept
your pox-rotted magic safe--ye swilled yourselves sick, curse ye, and yet must needs blame the
squire--let go, you! Unhand that latch--I've naught for ye here--"
At this point three slow and very deliberate raps shook the panels of the door, and a white foam
gathered at the mouth of the frantic magician. His fright, turning to steely despair, left room for a
resurgence of his rage against me; and he staggered a step toward the table on whose edge I was
steadying myself. The curtains, still clutched in his right hand as his left clawed out at me, grew taut
and finally crashed down from their lofty fastenings; admitting to the room a flood of that full
moonlight which the brightening of the sky had presaged. In those greenish beams the candles paled,
and a new semblance of decay spread over the musk-reeking room with its wormy paneling, sagging
floor, battered mantel, rickety furniture, and ragged draperies. It spread over the old man, too,
whether from the same source or because of his fear and vehemence, and I saw him shrivel and
blacken as he lurched near and strove to rend me with vulturine talons. Only his eyes stayed whole,
and they glared with a propulsive, dilated incandescence which grew as the face around them charred
and dwindled.
The rapping was now repeated with greater insistence, and this time bore a hint of metal. The
black thing facing me had become only a head with eyes, impotently trying to wriggle across the
sinking floor in my direction, and occasionally emitting feeble little spits of immortal malice. Now
swift and splintering blows assailed the sickly panels, and I saw the gleam of a tomahawk as it cleft
the rending wood. I did not move, for I could not; but watched dazedly as the door fell in pieces to
admit a colossal, shapeless influx of inky substance starred with shining, malevolent eyes. It poured
thickly, like a flood of oil bursting a rotten bulkhead, overturned a chair as it spread, and finally
flowed under the table and across the room to where the blackened head with the eyes still glared at
me. Around that head it closed, totally swallowing it up, and in another moment it had begun to
recede; bearing away its invisible burden without touching me, and flowing again out that black
doorway and down the unseen stairs, which creaked as before, though in reverse order.
Then the floor gave way at last, and I slid gaspingly down into the nighted chamber below,
choking with cobwebs and half-swooning with terror. The green moon, shining through broken
windows, showed me the hall door half open; and as I rose from the plaster-strewn floor and twisted
myself free from the sagged ceiling, I saw sweep past it an awful torrent of blackness, with scores
of baleful eyes glowing in it. It was seeking the door to the cellar, and when it found it, vanished
therein. I now felt the floor of this lower room giving as that of the upper chamber had done, and
once a crashing above had been followed by the fall past the west window of some thing which must
have been the cupola. Now liberated for the instant from the wreckage, I rushed through the hall to
the front door and finding myself unable to open it, seized a chair and broke a window, climbing
frenziedly out upon the unkempt lawn where moon light danced over yard-high grass and weeds. The
wall was high and all the gates were locked but moving a pile of boxes in a corner I managed to gain
the top and cling to the great stone urn set there.
About me in my exhaustion I could see only strange walls and windows and old gambrel roofs.
The steep street of my approach was nowhere visible, and the little I did see succumbed rapidly to a
mist that rolled in from the river despite the glaring moonlight. Suddenly the urn to which I clung
began to tremble, as if sharing my own lethal dizziness; and in another instant my body was plunging
downward to I knew not what fate.
The man who found me said that I must have crawled a long way despite my broken bones, for a
trail of blood stretched off as far as he dared look. The gathering rain soon effaced this link with the
scene of my ordeal, and reports could state no more than that I had appeared from a place unknown, at
the entrance to a little black court off Perry Street.
I never sought to return to those tenebrous labyrinths, nor would I direct any sane man thither if I
could. Of who or what that ancient creature was, I have no idea; but I repeat that the city is dead and
full of unsuspected horrors. Whither he has gone, I do not know; but I have gone home to the pure
New England lanes up which fragrant sea-winds sweep at evening.

HERBERT WEST: REANIMATOR
To be dead, to be truly dead, must be glorious. There are far worse things awaiting man than death. --
Count Dracula
Contents
Part I: From the Dark
Part II: The Plague-Daemon
Part III: Six Shots by Moonlight
Part IV: The Scream of the Dead
Part V: The Horror From the Shadows
Part VI: The Tomb-Legions
Part I: From the Dark
First published in February 1922, "Home Brew" Vol. 1, No. 1, pp. 19--25.
Of Herbert West, who was my friend in college and in after life, I can speak only with extreme
terror. This terror is not due altogether to the sinister manner of his recent disappearance, but was
engendered by the whole nature of his life-work, and first gained its acute form more than seventeen
years ago, when we were in the third year of our course at the Miskatonic University Medical
School in Arkham. While he was with me, the wonder and diabolism of his experiments fascinated me
utterly, and I was his closest companion. Now that he is gone and the spell is broken, the actual fear
is greater. Memories and possibilities are ever more hideous than realities.
The first horrible incident of our acquaintance was the greatest shock I ever experienced, and it
is only with reluctance that I repeat it. As I have said, it happened when we were in the medical
school where West had already made himself notorious through his wild theories on the nature of
death and the possibility of overcoming it artificially. His views, which were widely ridiculed by
the faculty and by his fellow-students, hinged on the essentially mechanistic nature of life; and
concerned means for operating the organic machinery of mankind by calculated chemical action after
the failure of natural processes. In his experiments with various animating solutions, he had killed
and treated immense numbers of rabbits, guinea-pigs, cats, dogs, and monkeys, till he had become the
prime nuisance of the college. Several times he had actually obtained signs of life in animals
supposedly dead; in many cases violent signs but he soon saw that the perfection of his process, if
indeed possible, would necessarily involve a lifetime of research. It likewise became clear that,
since the same solution never worked alike on different organic species, he would require human
subjects for further and more specialised progress. It was here that he first came into conflict with
the college authorities, and was debarred from future experiments by no less a dignitary than the dean
of the medical school himself--the learned and benevolent Dr. Allan Halsey, whose work in behalf
of the stricken is recalled by every old resident of Arkham.
I had always been exceptionally tolerant of West's pursuits, and we frequently discussed his
theories, whose ramifications and corollaries were almost infinite. Holding with Haeckel that all life
is a chemical and physical process, and that the so-called "soul" is a myth, my friend believed that
artificial reanimation of the dead can depend only on the condition of the tissues; and that unless
actual decomposition has set in, a corpse fully equipped with organs may with suitable measures be
set going again in the peculiar fashion known as life. That the psychic or intellectual life might be
impaired by the slight deterioration of sensitive brain-cells which even a short period of death
would be apt to cause, West fully realised. It had at first been his hope to find a reagent which would
restore vitality before the actual advent of death, and only repeated failures on animals had shewn him
that the natural and artificial life-motions were incompatible. He then sought extreme freshness in his
specimens, injecting his solutions into the blood immediately after the extinction of life. It was this
circumstance which made the professors so carelessly sceptical, for they felt that true death had not
occurred in any case. They did not stop to view the matter closely and reasoningly.
It was not long after the faculty had interdicted his work that West confided to me his resolution
to get fresh human bodies in some manner, and continue in secret the experiments he could no longer
perform openly. To hear him discussing ways and means was rather ghastly, for at the college we
had never procured anatomical specimens ourselves. Whenever the morgue proved inadequate, two
local negroes attended to this matter, and they were seldom questioned. West was then a small,
slender, spectacled youth with delicate features, yellow hair, pale blue eyes, and a soft voice, and it
was uncanny to hear him dwelling on the relative merits of Christchurch Cemetery and the potter's
field. We finally decided on the potter's field, because practically every body in Christchurch was
embalmed; a thing of course ruinous to West's researches.
I was by this time his active and enthralled assistant, and helped him make all his decisions, not
only concerning the source of bodies but concerning a suitable place for our loathsome work. It was
I who thought of the deserted Chapman farmhouse beyond Meadow Hill, where we fitted up on the
ground floor an operating room and a laboratory, each with dark curtains to conceal our midnight
doings. The place was far from any road, and in sight of no other house, yet precautions were none
the less necessary; since rumours of strange lights, started by chance nocturnal roamers, would soon
bring disaster on our enterprise. It was agreed to call the whole thing a chemical laboratory if
discovery should occur. Gradually we equipped our sinister haunt of science with materials either
purchased in Boston or quietly borrowed from the college--materials carefully made unrecognisable
save to expert eyes--and provided spades and picks for the many burials we should have to make in
the cellar. At the college we used an incinerator, but the apparatus was too costly for our
unauthorised laboratory. Bodies were always a nuisance--even the small guinea-pig bodies from the
slight clandestine experiments in West's room at the boarding-house.
We followed the local death-notices like ghouls, for our specimens demanded particular
qualities. What we wanted were corpses interred soon after death and without artificial preservation;
preferably free from malforming disease, and certainly with all organs present. Accident victims
were our best hope. Not for many weeks did we hear of anything suitable; though we talked with
morgue and hospital authorities, ostensibly in the college's interest, as often as we could without
exciting suspicion. We found that the college had first choice in every case, so that it might be
necessary to remain in Arkham during the summer, when only the limited summer-school classes
were held. In the end, though, luck favoured us; for one day we heard of an almost ideal case in the
potter's field; a brawny young workman drowned only the morning before in Summer's Pond, and
buried at the town's expense without delay or embalming. That afternoon we found the new grave, and
determined to begin work soon after midnight.
It was a repulsive task that we undertook in the black small hours, even though we lacked at that
time the special horror of graveyards which later experiences brought to us. We carried spades and
oil dark lanterns, for although electric torches were then manufactured, they were not as satisfactory
as the tungsten contrivances of today. The process of unearthing was slow and sordid--it might have
been gruesomely poetical if we had been artists instead of scientists--and we were glad when our
spades struck wood. When the pine box was fully uncovered, West scrambled down and removed the
lid, dragging out and propping up the contents. I reached down and hauled the contents out of the
grave, and then both toiled hard to restore the spot to its former appearance. The affair made us
rather nervous, especially the stiff form and vacant face of our first trophy, but we managed to
remove all traces of our visit. When we had patted down the last shovelful of earth, we put the
specimen in a canvas sack and set out for the old Chapman place beyond Meadow Hill.
On an improvised dissecting-table in the old farmhouse, by the light of a powerful acetylene
lamp, the specimen was not very spectral looking. It had been a sturdy and apparently unimaginative
youth of wholesome plebeian type--large-framed, grey-eyed, and brown-haired--a sound animal
without psychological subtleties, and probably having vital processes of the simplest and healthiest
sort. Now, with the eyes closed, it looked more asleep than dead; though the expert test of my friend
soon left no doubt on that score. We had at last what West had always longed for--a real dead man of
the ideal kind, ready for the solution as prepared according to the most careful calculations and
theories for human use. The tension on our part became very great. We knew that there was scarcely
a chance for anything like complete success, and could not avoid hideous fears at possible grotesque
results of partial animation. Especially were we apprehensive concerning the mind and impulses of
the creature, since in the space following death some of the more delicate cerebral cells might well
have suffered deterioration. I, myself, still held some curious notions about the traditional "soul" of
man, and felt an awe at the secrets that might be told by one returning from the dead. I wondered what
sights this placid youth might have seen in inaccessible spheres, and what he could relate if fully
restored to life. But my wonder was not overwhelming, since for the most part I shared the
materialism of my friend. He was calmer than I as he forced a large quantity of his fluid into a vein of
the body's arm, immediately binding the incision securely.
The waiting was gruesome, but West never faltered. Every now and then he applied his
stethoscope to the specimen, and bore the negative results philosophically. After about three-
quarters of an hour without the least sign of life he disappointedly pronounced the solution
inadequate, but determined to make the most of his opportunity and try one change in the formula
before disposing of his ghastly prize. We had that afternoon dug a grave in the cellar, and would
have to fill it by dawn--for although we had fixed a lock on the house, we wished to shun even the
remotest risk of a ghoulish discovery. Besides, the body would not be even approximately fresh the
next night. So taking the solitary acetylene lamp into the adjacent laboratory, we left our silent guest
on the slab in the dark, and bent every energy to the mixing of a new solution; the weighing and
measuring supervised by West with an almost fanatical care.
The awful event was very sudden, and wholly unexpected. I was pouring something from one
test-tube to another, and West was busy over the alcohol blast-lamp which had to answer for a
Bunsen burner in this gasless edifice, when from the pitch-black room we had left there burst the
most appalling and daemoniac succession of cries that either of us had ever heard. Not more
unutterable could have been the chaos of hellish sound if the pit itself had opened to release the
agony of the damned, for in one inconceivable cacophony was centered all the supernal terror and
unnatural despair of animate nature. Human it could not have been--it is not in man to make such
sounds--and without a thought of our late employment or its possible discovery, both West and I
leaped to the nearest window like stricken animals; overturning tubes, lamp, and retorts, and vaulting
madly into the starred abyss of the rural night. I think we screamed ourselves as we stumbled
frantically toward the town, though as we reached the outskirts we put on a semblance of restraint--
just enough to seem like belated revellers staggering home from a debauch.
We did not separate, but managed to get to West's room, where we whispered with the gas up
until dawn. By then we had calmed ourselves a little with rational theories and plans for investigation,
so that we could sleep through the day--classes being disregarded. But that evening two items in the
paper, wholly unrelated, made it again impossible for us to sleep. The old deserted Chapman house
had inexplicably burned to an amorphous heap of ashes; that we could understand because of the
upset lamp. Also, an attempt had been made to disturb a new grave in the potter's field, as if by futile
and spadeless clawing at the earth. That we could not understand, for we had patted down the mould
very carefully.
And for seventeen years after that West would look frequently over his shoulder, and complain of
fancied footsteps behind him. Now he has disappeared.
Part II: The Plague-Daemon
I shall never forget that hideous summer sixteen years ago, when like a noxious afrite from the
halls of Eblis typhoid stalked leeringly through Arkham. It is by that satanic scourge that most recall
the year, for truly terror brooded with bat-wings over the piles of coffins in the tombs of
Christchurch Cemetery; yet for me there is a greater horror in that time--a horror known to me alone
now that Herbert West has disappeared.
West and I were doing post-graduate work in summer classes at the medical school of Miskatonic
University, and my friend had attained a wide notoriety because of his experiments leading toward the
revivification of the dead. After the scientific slaughter of uncounted small animals the freakish work
had ostensibly stopped by order of our sceptical dean, Dr. Allan Halsey; though West had continued
to perform certain secret tests in his dingy boarding-house room, and had on one terrible and
unforgettable occasion taken a human body from its grave in the potter's field to a deserted
farmhouse beyond Meadow Hill.
I was with him on that odious occasion, and saw him inject into the still veins the elixir which he
thought would to some extent restore life's chemical and physical processes. It had ended horribly--
in a delirium of fear which we gradually came to attribute to our own overwrought nerves--and West
had never afterward been able to shake off a maddening sensation of being haunted and hunted. The
body had not been quite fresh enough; it is obvious that to restore normal mental attributes a body
must be very fresh indeed; and the burning of the old house had prevented us from burying the thing.
It would have been better if we could have known it was underground.
After that experience West had dropped his researches for some time; but as the zeal of the born
scientist slowly returned, he again became importunate with the college faculty, pleading for the use
of the dissecting-room and of fresh human specimens for the work he regarded as so
overwhelmingly important. His pleas, however, were wholly in vain; for the decision of Dr. Halsey
was inflexible, and the other professors all endorsed the verdict of their leader. In the radical theory
of reanimation they saw nothing but the immature vagaries of a youthful enthusiast whose slight form,
yellow hair, spectacled blue eyes, and soft voice gave no hint of the supernormal--almost diabolical-
-power of the cold brain within. I can see him now as he was then--and I shiver. He grew sterner of
face, but never elderly. And now Sefton Asylum has had the mishap and West has vanished.
West clashed disagreeably with Dr. Halsey near the end of our last undergraduate term in a
wordy dispute that did less credit to him than to the kindly dean in point of courtesy. He felt that he
was needlessly and irrationally retarded in a supremely great work; a work which he could of course
conduct to suit himself in later years, but which he wished to begin while still possessed of the
exceptional facilities of the university. That the tradition-bound elders should ignore his singular
results on animals, and persist in their denial of the possibility of reanimation, was inexpressibly
disgusting and almost incomprehensible to a youth of West's logical temperament. Only greater
maturity could help him understand the chronic mental limitations of the "professor-doctor" type--the
product of generations of pathetic Puritanism; kindly, conscientious, and sometimes gentle and
amiable, yet always narrow, intolerant, custom-ridden, and lacking in perspective. Age has more
charity for these incomplete yet high--souled characters, whose worst real vice is timidity, and who
are ultimately punished by general ridicule for their intellectual sins--sins like Ptolemaism,
Calvinism, anti-Darwinism, anti-Nietzscheism, and every sort of Sabbatarianism and sumptuary
legislation. West, young despite his marvellous scientific acquirements, had scant patience with
good Dr. Halsey and his erudite colleagues; and nursed an increasing resentment, coupled with a
desire to prove his theories to these obtuse worthies in some striking and dramatic fashion. Like
most youths, he indulged in elaborate daydreams of revenge, triumph, and final magnanimous
forgiveness.
And then had come the scourge, grinning and lethal, from the nightmare caverns of Tartarus. West
and I had graduated about the time of its beginning, but had remained for additional work at the
summer school, so that we were in Arkham when it broke with full daemoniac fury upon the town.
Though not as yet licenced physicians, we now had our degrees, and were pressed frantically into
public service as the numbers of the stricken grew. The situation was almost past management, and
deaths ensued too frequently for the local undertakers fully to handle. Burials without embalming
were made in rapid succession, and even the Christchurch Cemetery receiving tomb was crammed
with coffins of the unembalmed dead. This circumstance was not without effect on West, who
thought often of the irony of the situation--so many fresh specimens, yet none for his persecuted
researches! We were frightfully overworked, and the terrific mental and nervous strain made my
friend brood morbidly.
But West's gentle enemies were no less harassed with prostrating duties. College had all but
closed, and every doctor of the medical faculty was helping to fight the typhoid plague. Dr. Halsey
in particular had distinguished himself in sacrificing service, applying his extreme skill with whole-
hearted energy to cases which many others shunned because of danger or apparent hopelessness.
Before a month was over the fearless dean had become a popular hero, though he seemed
unconscious of his fame as he struggled to keep from collapsing with physical fatigue and nervous
exhaustion. West could not withhold admiration for the fortitude of his foe, but because of this was
even more determined to prove to him the truth of his amazing doctrines. Taking advantage of the
disorganisation of both college work and municipal health regulations, he managed to get a recently
deceased body smuggled into the university dissecting-room one night, and in my presence injected a
new modification of his solution. The thing actually opened its eyes, but only stared at the ceiling
with a look of soul-petrifying horror before collapsing into an inertness from which nothing could
rouse it. West said it was not fresh enough--the hot summer air does not favour corpses. That time
we were almost caught before we incinerated the thing, and West doubted the advisability of
repeating his daring misuse of the college laboratory.
The peak of the epidemic was reached in August. West and I were almost dead, and Dr. Halsey
did die on the 14th. The students all attended the hasty funeral on the 15th, and bought an impressive
wreath, though the latter was quite overshadowed by the tributes sent by wealthy Arkham citizens and
by the municipality itself. It was almost a public affair, for the dean had surely been a public
benefactor. After the entombment we were all somewhat depressed, and spent the afternoon at the bar
of the Commercial House; where West, though shaken by the death of his chief opponent, chilled the
rest of us with references to his notorious theories. Most of the students went home, or to various
duties, as the evening advanced; but West persuaded me to aid him in "making a night of it."West's
landlady saw us arrive at his room about two in the morning, with a third man between us; and told her
husband that we had all evidently dined and wined rather well.
Apparently this acidulous matron was right; for about 3 a.m. the whole house was aroused by
cries coming from West's room, where when they broke down the door, they found the two of us
unconscious on the blood-stained carpet, beaten, scratched, and mauled, and with the broken remnants
of West's bottles and instruments around us. Only an open window told what had become of our
assailant, and many wondered how he himself had fared after the terrific leap from the second story
to the lawn which he must have made. There were some strange garments in the room, but West upon
regaining consciousness said they did not belong to the stranger, but were specimens collected for
bacteriological analysis in the course of investigations on the transmission of germ diseases. He
ordered them burnt as soon as possible in the capacious fireplace. To the police we both declared
ignorance of our late companion's identity. He was, West nervously said, a congenial stranger whom
we had met at some downtown bar of uncertain location. We had all been rather jovial, and West and I
did not wish to have our pugnacious companion hunted down.
That same night saw the beginning of the second Arkham horror--the horror that to me eclipsed
the plague itself. Christchurch Cemetery was the scene of a terrible killing; a watchman having been
clawed to death in a manner not only too hideous for description, but raising a doubt as to the human
agency of the deed. The victim had been seen alive considerably after midnight--the dawn revealed
the unutterable thing. The manager of a circus at the neighbouring town of Bolton was questioned,
but he swore that no beast had at any time escaped from its cage. Those who found the body noted a
trail of blood leading to the receiving tomb, where a small pool of red lay on the concrete just
outside the gate. A fainter trail led away toward the woods, but it soon gave out.
The next night devils danced on the roofs of Arkham, and unnatural madness howled in the wind.
Through the fevered town had crept a curse which some said was greater than the plague, and which
some whispered was the embodied daemon-soul of the plague itself. Eight houses were entered by a
nameless thing which strewed red death in its wake--in all, seventeen maimed and shapeless remnants
of bodies were left behind by the voiceless, sadistic monster that crept abroad. A few persons had
half seen it in the dark, and said it was white and like a malformed ape or anthropomorphic fiend. It
had not left behind quite all that it had attacked, for sometimes it had been hungry. The number it had
killed was fourteen; three of the bodies had been in stricken homes and had not been alive.
On the third night frantic bands of searchers, led by the police, captured it in a house on Crane
Street near the Miskatonic campus. They had organised the quest with care, keeping in touch by
means of volunteer telephone stations, and when someone in the college district had reported hearing
a scratching at a shuttered window, the net was quickly spread. On account of the general alarm and
precautions, there were only two more victims, and the capture was effected without major
casualties. The thing was finally stopped by a bullet, though not a fatal one, and was rushed to the
local hospital amidst universal excitement and loathing.
For it had been a man. This much was clear despite the nauseous eyes, the voiceless simianism,
and the daemoniac savagery. They dressed its wound and carted it to the asylum at Sefton, where it
beat its head against the walls of a padded cell for sixteen years--until the recent mishap, when it
escaped under circumstances that few like to mention. What had most disgusted the searchers of
Arkham was the thing they noticed when the monster's face was cleaned--the mocking, unbelievable
resemblance to a learned and self-sacrificing martyr who had been entombed but three days before--
the late Dr. Allan Halsey, public benefactor and dean of the medical school of Miskatonic
University.
To the vanished Herbert West and to me the disgust and horror were supreme. I shudder tonight
as I think of it; shudder even more than I did that morning when West muttered through his bandages,
"Damn it, it wasn't quite fresh enough!"
Part III: Six Shots by Moonlight
Published April 1922 in Home Brew Vol. 1, No. 3, p. 21-26.
It is uncommon to fire all six shots of a revolver with great suddenness when one would probably
be sufficient, but many things in the life of Herbert West were uncommon. It is, for instance, not often
that a young physician leaving college is obliged to conceal the principles which guide his selection
of a home and office, yet that was the case with Herbert West. When he and I obtained our degrees at
the medical school of Miskatonic University, and sought to relieve our poverty by setting up as
general practitioners, we took great care not to say that we chose our house because it was fairly
well isolated, and as near as possible to the potter's field.
Reticence such as this is seldom without a cause, nor indeed was ours; for our requirements
were those resulting from a life-work distinctly unpopular. Outwardly we were doctors only, but
beneath the surface were aims of far greater and more terrible moment--for the essence of Herbert
West's existence was a quest amid black and forbidden realms of the unknown, in which he hoped to
uncover the secret of life and restore to perpetual animation the graveyard's cold clay. Such a quest
demands strange materials, among them fresh human bodies; and in order to keep supplied with these
indispensable things one must live quietly and not far from a place of informal interment.
West and I had met in college, and I had been the only one to sympathise with his hideous
experiments. Gradually I had come to be his inseparable assistant, and now that we were out of
college we had to keep together. It was not easy to find a good opening for two doctors in company,
but finally the influence of the university secured us a practice in Bolton--a factory town near
Arkham, the seat of the college. The Bolton Worsted Mills are the largest in the Miskatonic Valley,
and their polyglot employees are never popular as patients with the local physicians. We chose our
house with the greatest care, seizing at last on a rather run-down cottage near the end of Pond Street;
five numbers from the closest neighbour, and separated from the local potter's field by only a stretch
of meadow land, bisected by a narrow neck of the rather dense forest which lies to the north. The
distance was greater than we wished, but we could get no nearer house without going on the other
side of the field, wholly out of the factory district. We were not much displeased, however, since
there were no people between us and our sinister source of supplies. The walk was a trifle long, but
we could haul our silent specimens undisturbed.
Our practice was surprisingly large from the very first--large enough to please most young
doctors, and large enough to prove a bore and a burden to students whose real interest lay elsewhere.
The mill-hands were of somewhat turbulent inclinations; and besides their many natural needs, their
frequent clashes and stabbing affrays gave us plenty to do. But what actually absorbed our minds was
the secret laboratory we had fitted up in the cellar--the laboratory with the long table under the
electric lights, where in the small hours of the morning we often injected West's various solutions
into the veins of the things we dragged from the potter's field. West was experimenting madly to find
something which would start man's vital motions anew after they had been stopped by the thing we
call death, but had encountered the most ghastly obstacles. The solution had to be differently
compounded for different types--what would serve for guinea-pigs would not serve for human
beings, and different human specimens required large modifications.
The bodies had to be exceedingly fresh, or the slight decomposition of brain tissue would render
perfect reanimation impossible. Indeed, the greatest problem was to get them fresh enough--West
had had horrible experiences during his secret college researches with corpses of doubtful vintage.
The results of partial or imperfect animation were much more hideous than were the total failures,
and we both held fearsome recollections of such things. Ever since our first daemoniac session in
the deserted farmhouse on Meadow Hill in Arkham, we had felt a brooding menace; and West, though
a calm, blond, blue-eyed scientific automaton in most respects, often confessed to a shuddering
sensation of stealthy pursuit. He half felt that he was followed--a psychological delusion of shaken
nerves, enhanced by the undeniably disturbing fact that at least one of our reanimated specimens was
still alive--a frightful carnivorous thing in a padded cell at Sefton. Then there was another--our first-
-whose exact fate we had never learned.
We had fair luck with specimens in Bolton--much better than in Arkham. We had not been settled a
week before we got an accident victim on the very night of burial, and made it open its eyes with an
amazingly rational expression before the solution failed. It had lost an arm--if it had been a perfect
body we might have succeeded better. Between then and the next January we secured three more; one
total failure, one case of marked muscular motion, and one rather shivery thing--it rose of itself and
uttered a sound. Then came a period when luck was poor; interments fell off, and those that did occur
were of specimens either too diseased or too maimed for use. We kept track of all the deaths and
their circumstances with systematic care.
One March night, however, we unexpectedly obtained a specimen which did not come from the
potter's field. In Bolton the prevailing spirit of Puritanism had outlawed the sport of boxing--with the
usual result. Surreptitious and ill-conducted bouts among the mill-workers were common, and
occasionally professional talent of low grade was imported. This late winter night there had been
such a match; evidently with disastrous results, since two timorous Poles had come to us with
incoherently whispered entreaties to attend to a very secret and desperate case. We followed them to
an abandoned barn, where the remnants of a crowd of frightened foreigners were watching a silent
black form on the floor.
The match had been between Kid O'Brien--a lubberly and now quaking youth with a most un-
Hibernian hooked nose--and Buck Robinson, "The Harlem Smoke."The negro had been knocked out,
and a moment's examination shewed us that he would permanently remain so. He was a loathsome,
gorilla-like thing, with abnormally long arms which I could not help calling fore legs, and a face that
conjured up thoughts of unspeakable Congo secrets and tom-tom poundings under an eerie moon. The
body must have looked even worse in life--but the world holds many ugly things. Fear was upon the
whole pitiful crowd, for they did not know what the law would exact of them if the affair were not
hushed up; and they were grateful when West, in spite of my involuntary shudders, offered to get rid
of the thing quietly--for a purpose I knew too well.
There was bright moonlight over the snowless landscape, but we dressed the thing and carried it
home between us through the deserted streets and meadows, as we had carried a similar thing one
horrible night in Arkham. We approached the house from the field in the rear, took the specimen in
the back door and down the cellar stairs, and prepared it for the usual experiment. Our fear of the
police was absurdly great, though we had timed our trip to avoid the solitary patrolman of that
section.
The result was wearily anticlimactic. Ghastly as our prize appeared, it was wholly unresponsive
to every solution we injected in its black arm; solutions prepared from experience with white
specimens only. So as the hour grew dangerously near to dawn, we did as we had done with the
others--dragged the thing across the meadows to the neck of the woods near the potter's field, and
buried it there in the best sort of grave the frozen ground would furnish. The grave was not very
deep, but fully as good as that of the previous specimen--the thing which had risen of itself and
uttered a sound. In the light of our dark lanterns we carefully covered it with leaves and dead vines,
fairly certain that the police would never find it in a forest so dim and dense.
The next day I was increasingly apprehensive about the police, for a patient brought rumours of a
suspected fight and death. West had still another source of worry, for he had been called in the
afternoon to a case which ended very threateningly. An Italian woman had become hysterical over her
missing child--a lad of five who had strayed off early in the morning and failed to appear for dinner--
and had developed symptoms highly alarming in view of an always weak heart. It was a very foolish
hysteria, for the boy had often run away before; but Italian peasants are exceedingly superstitious,
and this woman seemed as much harassed by omens as by facts. About seven o'clock in the evening
she had died, and her frantic husband had made a frightful scene in his efforts to kill West, whom he
wildly blamed for not saving her life. Friends had held him when he drew a stiletto, but West
departed amidst his inhuman shrieks, curses and oaths of vengeance. In his latest affliction the fellow
seemed to have forgotten his child, who was still missing as the night advanced. There was some talk
of searching the woods, but most of the family's friends were busy with the dead woman and the
screaming man. Altogether, the nervous strain upon West must have been tremendous. Thoughts of
the police and of the mad Italian both weighed heavily.
We retired about eleven, but I did not sleep well. Bolton had a surprisingly good police force for
so small a town, and I could not help fearing the mess which would ensue if the affair of the night
before were ever tracked down. It might mean the end of all our local work--and perhaps prison for
both West and me. I did not like those rumours of a fight which were floating about. After the clock
had struck three the moon shone in my eyes, but I turned over without rising to pull down the shade.
Then came the steady rattling at the back door.
I lay still and somewhat dazed, but before long heard West's rap on my door. He was clad in
dressing-gown and slippers, and had in his hands a revolver and an electric flashlight. From the
revolver I knew that he was thinking more of the crazed Italian than of the police.
"We'd better both go," he whispered. "It wouldn't do not to answer it anyway, and it may be a
patient--it would be like one of those fools to try the back door."
So we both went down the stairs on tiptoe, with a fear partly justified and partly that which comes
only from the soul of the weird small hours. The rattling continued, growing somewhat louder. When
we reached the door I cautiously unbolted it and threw it open, and as the moon streamed revealingly
down on the form silhouetted there, West did a peculiar thing. Despite the obvious danger of
attracting notice and bringing down on our heads the dreaded police investigation--a thing which
after all was mercifully averted by the relative isolation of our cottage--my friend suddenly,
excitedly, and unnecessarily emptied all six chambers of his revolver into the nocturnal visitor.
For that visitor was neither Italian nor policeman. Looming hideously against the spectral moon
was a gigantic misshapen thing not to be imagined save in nightmares--a glassy-eyed, ink-black
apparition nearly on all fours, covered with bits of mould, leaves, and vines, foul with caked blood,
and having between its glistening teeth a snow--white, terrible, cylindrical object terminating in a tiny
hand.
Part IV: The Scream of the Dead
Published May 1922 in Home Brew Vol. 1, No. 4, p. 53-58.
The scream of a dead man gave to me that acute and added horror of Dr. Herbert West which
harassed the latter years of our companionship. It is natural that such a thing as a dead man's scream
should give horror, for it is obviously, not a pleasing or ordinary occurrence; but I was used to
similar experiences, hence suffered on this occasion only because of a particular circumstance. And,
as I have implied, it was not of the dead man himself that I became afraid.
Herbert West, whose associate and assistant I was, possessed scientific interests far beyond the
usual routine of a village physician. That was why, when establishing his practice in Bolton, he had
chosen an isolated house near the potter's field. Briefly and brutally stated, West's sole absorbing
interest was a secret study of the phenomena of life and its cessation, leading toward the reanimation
of the dead through injections of an excitant solution. For this ghastly experimenting it was necessary
to have a constant supply of very fresh human bodies; very fresh because even the least decay
hopelessly damaged the brain structure, and human because we found that the solution had to be
compounded differently for different types of organisms. Scores of rabbits and guinea-pigs had been
killed and treated, but their trail was a blind one. West had never fully succeeded because he had
never been able to secure a corpse sufficiently fresh. What he wanted were bodies from which
vitality had only just departed; bodies with every cell intact and capable of receiving again the
impulse toward that mode of motion called life. There was hope that this second and artificial life
might be made perpetual by repetitions of the injection, but we had learned that an ordinary natural
life would not respond to the action. To establish the artificial motion, natural life must be extinct--
the specimens must be very fresh, but genuinely dead.
The awesome quest had begun when West and I were students at the
MiskatonicUniversityMedicalSchool in Arkham, vividly conscious for the first time of the
thoroughly mechanical nature of life. That was seven years before, but West looked scarcely a day
older now--he was small, blond, clean-shaven, soft-voiced, and spectacled, with only an occasional
flash of a cold blue eye to tell of the hardening and growing fanaticism of his character under the
pressure of his terrible investigations. Our experiences had often been hideous in the extreme; the
results of defective reanimation, when lumps of graveyard clay had been galvanised into morbid,
unnatural, and brainless motion by various modifications of the vital solution.
One thing had uttered a nerve-shattering scream; another had risen violently, beaten us both to
unconsciousness, and run amuck in a shocking way before it could be placed behind asylum bars; still
another, a loathsome African monstrosity, had clawed out of its shallow grave and done a deed--
West had had to shoot that object. We could not get bodies fresh enough to shew any trace of reason
when reanimated, so had perforce created nameless horrors. It was disturbing to think that one,
perhaps two, of our monsters still lived--that thought haunted us shadowingly, till finally West
disappeared under frightful circumstances. But at the time of the scream in the cellar laboratory of
the isolated Bolton cottage, our fears were subordinate to our anxiety for extremely fresh
specimens. West was more avid than I, so that it almost seemed to me that he looked half-covetously
at any very healthy living physique.
It was in July, 1910, that the bad luck regarding specimens began to turn. I had been on a long visit
to my parents in Illinois, and upon my return found West in a state of singular elation. He had, he told
me excitedly, in all likelihood solved the problem of freshness through an approach from an entirely
new angle--that of artificial preservation. I had known that he was working on a new and highly
unusual embalming compound, and was not surprised that it had turned out well; but until he explained
the details I was rather puzzled as to how such a compound could help in our work, since the
objectionable staleness of the specimens was largely due to delay occurring before we secured
them. This, I now saw, West had clearly recognised; creating his embalming compound for future
rather than immediate use, and trusting to fate to supply again some very recent and unburied corpse,
as it had years before when we obtained the negro killed in the Bolton prize-fight. At last fate had
been kind, so that on this occasion there lay in the secret cellar laboratory a corpse whose decay
could not by any possibility have begun. What would happen on reanimation, and whether we could
hope for a revival of mind and reason, West did not venture to predict. The experiment would be a
landmark in our studies, and he had saved the new body for my return, so that both might share the
spectacle in accustomed fashion.
West told me how he had obtained the specimen. It had been a vigorous man; a well-dressed
stranger just off the train on his way to transact some business with the Bolton Worsted Mills. The
walk through the town had been long, and by the time the traveller paused at our cottage to ask the
way to the factories, his heart had become greatly overtaxed. He had refused a stimulant, and had
suddenly dropped dead only a moment later. The body, as might be expected, seemed to West a
heaven--sent gift. In his brief conversation the stranger had made it clear that he was unknown in
Bolton, and a search of his pockets subsequently revealed him to be one Robert Leavitt of St. Louis,
apparently without a family to make instant inquiries about his disappearance. If this man could not be
restored to life, no one would know of our experiment. We buried our materials in a dense strip of
woods between the house and the potter's field. If, on the other hand, he could be restored, our fame
would be brilliantly and perpetually established. So without delay West had injected into the body's
wrist the compound which would hold it fresh for use after my arrival. The matter of the presumably
weak heart, which to my mind imperilled the success of our experiment, did not appear to trouble
West extensively. He hoped at last to obtain what he had never obtained before--a rekindled spark of
reason and perhaps a normal, living creature.
So on the night of July 18, 1910, Herbert West and I stood in the cellar laboratory and gazed at a
white, silent figure beneath the dazzling arc-light. The embalming compound had worked uncannily
well, for as I stared fascinatedly at the sturdy frame which had lain two weeks without stiffening, I
was moved to seek West's assurance that the thing was really dead. This assurance he gave readily
enough; reminding me that the reanimating solution was never used without careful tests as to life,
since it could have no effect if any of the original vitality were present. As West proceeded to take
preliminary steps, I was impressed by the vast intricacy of the new experiment; an intricacy so vast
that he could trust no hand less delicate than his own. Forbidding me to touch the body, he first
injected a drug in the wrist just beside the place his needle had punctured when injecting the
embalming compound. This, he said, was to neutralise the compound and release the system to a
normal relaxation so that the reanimating solution might freely work when injected. Slightly later,
when a change and a gentle tremor seemed to affect the dead limbs; West stuffed a pillow-like object
violently over the twitching face, not withdrawing it until the corpse appeared quiet and ready for our
attempt at reanimation. The pale enthusiast now applied some last perfunctory tests for absolute
lifelessness, withdrew satisfied, and finally injected into the left arm an accurately measured amount
of the vital elixir, prepared during the afternoon with a greater care than we had used since college
days, when our feats were new and groping. I cannot express the wild, breathless suspense with
which we waited for results on this first really fresh specimen--the first we could reasonably expect
to open its lips in rational speech, perhaps to tell of what it had seen beyond the unfathomable abyss.
West was a materialist, believing in no soul and attributing all the working of consciousness to
bodily phenomena; consequently he looked for no revelation of hideous secrets from gulfs and
caverns beyond death's barrier. I did not wholly disagree with him theoretically, yet held vague
instinctive remnants of the primitive faith of my forefathers; so that I could not help eyeing the
corpse with a certain amount of awe and terrible expectation. Besides--I could not extract from my
memory that hideous, inhuman shriek we heard on the night we tried our first experiment in the
deserted farmhouse at Arkham.
Very little time had elapsed before I saw the attempt was not to be a total failure. A touch of
colour came to cheeks hitherto chalk-white, and spread out under the curiously ample stubble of
sandy beard. West, who had his hand on the pulse of the left wrist, suddenly nodded significantly; and
almost simultaneously a mist appeared on the mirror inclined above the body's mouth. There
followed a few spasmodic muscular motions, and then an audible breathing and visible motion of the
chest. I looked at the closed eyelids, and thought I detected a quivering. Then the lids opened,
shewing eyes which were grey, calm, and alive, but still unintelligent and not even curious.
In a moment of fantastic whim I whispered questions to the reddening ears; questions of other
worlds of which the memory might still be present. Subsequent terror drove them from my mind, but I
think the last one, which I repeated, was: "Where have you been?" I do not yet know whether I was
answered or not, for no sound came from the well--shaped mouth; but I do know that at that moment I
firmly thought the thin lips moved silently, forming syllables which I would have vocalised as "only
now" if that phrase had possessed any sense or relevancy. At that moment, as I say, I was elated with
the conviction that the one great goal had been attained; and that for the first time a reanimated corpse
had uttered distinct words impelled by actual reason. In the next moment there was no doubt about the
triumph; no doubt that the solution had truly accomplished, at least temporarily, its full mission of
restoring rational and articulate life to the dead. But in that triumph there came to me the greatest of
all horrors--not horror of the thing that spoke, but of the deed that I had witnessed and of the man
with whom my professional fortunes were joined.
For that very fresh body, at last writhing into full and terrifying consciousness with eyes dilated
at the memory of its last scene on earth, threw out its frantic hands in a life and death struggle with
the air, and suddenly collapsing into a second and final dissolution from which there could be no
return, screamed out the cry that will ring eternally in my aching brain:
"Help! Keep off, you cursed little tow-head fiend--keep that damned needle away from me!"
Part V: The Horror From the Shadows
Published June 1922 in Home Brew Vol. 1, No. 5, p. 45-50.
Many men have related hideous things, not mentioned in print, which happened on the battlefields
of the Great War. Some of these things have made me faint, others have convulsed me with
devastating nausea, while still others have made me tremble and look behind me in the dark; yet
despite the worst of them I believe I can myself relate the most hideous thing of all--the shocking,
the unnatural, the unbelievable horror from the shadows.
In 1915 I was a physician with the rank of First Lieutenant in a Canadian regiment in Flanders, one
of many Americans to precede the government itself into the gigantic struggle. I had not entered the
army on my own initiative, but rather as a natural result of the enlistment of the man whose
indispensable assistant I was--the celebrated Boston surgical specialist, Dr. Herbert West. Dr. West
had been avid for a chance to serve as surgeon in a great war, and when the chance had come, he
carried me with him almost against my will. There were reasons why I could have been glad to let
the war separate us; reasons why I found the practice of medicine and the companionship of West
more and more irritating; but when he had gone to Ottawa and through a colleague's influence
secured a medical commission as Major, I could not resist the imperious persuasion of one
determined that I should accompany him in my usual capacity.
When I say that Dr. West was avid to serve in battle, I do not mean to imply that he was either
naturally warlike or anxious for the safety of civilisation. Always an ice-cold intellectual machine;
slight, blond, blue-eyed, and spectacled; I think he secretly sneered at my occasional martial
enthusiasms and censures of supine neutrality. There was, however, something he wanted in
embattled Flanders; and in order to secure it had had to assume a military exterior. What he wanted
was not a thing which many persons want, but something connected with the peculiar branch of
medical science which he had chosen quite clandestinely to follow, and in which he had achieved
amazing and occasionally hideous results. It was, in fact, nothing more or less than an abundant supply
of freshly killed men in every stage of dismemberment.
Herbert West needed fresh bodies because his life-work was the reanimation of the dead. This
work was not known to the fashionable clientele who had so swiftly built up his fame after his arrival
in Boston; but was only too well known to me, who had been his closest friend and sole assistant
since the old days in Miskatonic University Medical School at Arkham. It was in those college days
that he had begun his terrible experiments, first on small animals and then on human bodies shockingly
obtained. There was a solution which he injected into the veins of dead things, and if they were fresh
enough they responded in strange ways. He had had much trouble in discovering the proper formula,
for each type of organism was found to need a stimulus especially adapted to it. Terror stalked him
when he reflected on his partial failures; nameless things resulting from imperfect solutions or from
bodies insufficiently fresh. A certain number of these failures had remained alive--one was in an
asylum while others had vanished--and as he thought of conceivable yet virtually impossible
eventualities he often shivered beneath his usual stolidity.
West had soon learned that absolute freshness was the prime requisite for useful specimens, and
had accordingly resorted to frightful and unnatural expedients in body-snatching. In college, and
during our early practice together in the factory town of Bolton, my attitude toward him had been
largely one of fascinated admiration; but as his boldness in methods grew, I began to develop a
gnawing fear. I did not like the way he looked at healthy living bodies; and then there came a
nightmarish session in the cellar laboratory when I learned that a certain specimen had been a living
body when he secured it. That was the first time he had ever been able to revive the quality of
rational thought in a corpse; and his success, obtained at such a loathsome cost, had completely
hardened him.
Of his methods in the intervening five years I dare not speak. I was held to him by sheer force of
fear, and witnessed sights that no human tongue could repeat. Gradually I came to find Herbert West
himself more horrible than anything he did--that was when it dawned on me that his once normal
scientific zeal for prolonging life had subtly degenerated into a mere morbid and ghoulish curiosity
and secret sense of charnel picturesqueness. His interest became a hellish and perverse addiction to
the repellently and fiendishly abnormal; he gloated calmly over artificial monstrosities which would
make most healthy men drop dead from fright and disgust; he became, behind his pallid intellectuality,
a fastidious Baudelaire of physical experiment--a languid Elagabalus of the tombs.
Dangers he met unflinchingly; crimes he committed unmoved. I think the climax came when he had
proved his point that rational life can be restored, and had sought new worlds to conquer by
experimenting on the reanimation of detached parts of bodies. He had wild and original ideas on the
independent vital properties of organic cells and nerve-tissue separated from natural physiological
systems; and achieved some hideous preliminary results in the form of never-dying, artificially
nourished tissue obtained from the nearly hatched eggs of an indescribable tropical reptile. Two
biological points he was exceedingly anxious to settle--first, whether any amount of consciousness
and rational action be possible without the brain, proceeding from the spinal cord and various nerve-
centres; and second, whether any kind of ethereal, intangible relation distinct from the material cells
may exist to link the surgically separated parts of what has previously been a single living organism.
All this research work required a prodigious supply of freshly slaughtered human flesh--and that
was why Herbert West had entered the Great War.
The phantasmal, unmentionable thing occurred one midnight late in March, 1915, in a field
hospital behind the lines of St. Eloi. I wonder even now if it could have been other than a daemoniac
dream of delirium. West had a private laboratory in an east room of the barn-like temporary edifice,
assigned him on his plea that he was devising new and radical methods for the treatment of hitherto
hopeless cases of maiming. There he worked like a butcher in the midst of his gory wares--I could
never get used to the levity with which he handled and classified certain things. At times he actually
did perform marvels of surgery for the soldiers; but his chief delights were of a less public and
philanthropic kind, requiring many explanations of sounds which seemed peculiar even amidst that
babel of the damned. Among these sounds were frequent revolver-shots--surely not uncommon on a
battlefield, but distinctly uncommon in an hospital. Dr. West's reanimated specimens were not meant
for long existence or a large audience. Besides human tissue, West employed much of the reptile
embryo tissue which he had cultivated with such singular results. It was better than human material
for maintaining life in organless fragments, and that was now my friend's chief activity. In a dark
corner of the laboratory, over a queer incubating burner, he kept a large covered vat full of this
reptilian cell-matter; which multiplied and grew puffily and hideously.
On the night of which I speak we had a splendid new specimen--a man at once physically
powerful and of such high mentality that a sensitive nervous system was assured. It was rather ironic,
for he was the officer who had helped West to his commission, and who was now to have been our
associate. Moreover, he had in the past secretly studied the theory of reanimation to some extent
under West. Major Sir Eric Moreland Clapham-Lee, D.S.O., was the greatest surgeon in our division,
and had been hastily assigned to the St. Eloi sector when news of the heavy fighting reached
headquarters. He had come in an aeroplane piloted by the intrepid Lieut. Ronald Hill, only to be shot
down when directly over his destination. The fall had been spectacular and awful; Hill was
unrecognisable afterward, but the wreck yielded up the great surgeon in a nearly decapitated but
otherwise intact condition. West had greedily seized the lifeless thing which had once been his
friend and fellow-scholar; and I shuddered when he finished severing the head, placed it in his
hellish vat of pulpy reptile--tissue to preserve it for future experiments, and proceeded to treat the
decapitated body on the operating table. He injected new blood, joined certain veins, arteries, and
nerves at the headless neck, and closed the ghastly aperture with engrafted skin from an unidentified
specimen which had borne an officer's uniform. I knew what he wanted--to see if this highly
organised body could exhibit, without its head, any of the signs of mental life which had
distinguished Sir Eric Moreland Clapham-Lee. Once a student of reanimation, this silent trunk was
now gruesomely called upon to exemplify it.
I can still see Herbert West under the sinister electric light as he injected his reanimating solution
into the arm of the headless body. The scene I cannot describe--I should faint if I tried it, for there is
madness in a room full of classified charnel things, with blood and lesser human debris almost ankle-
deep on the slimy floor, and with hideous reptilian abnormalities sprouting, bubbling, and baking over
a winking bluish-green spectre of dim flame in a far corner of black shadows.
The specimen, as West repeatedly observed, had a splendid nervous system. Much was expected
of it; and as a few twitching motions began to appear, I could see the feverish interest on West's face.
He was ready, I think, to see proof of his increasingly strong opinion that consciousness, reason, and
personality can exist independently of the brain--that man has no central connective spirit, but is
merely a machine of nervous matter, each section more or less complete in itself. In one triumphant
demonstration West was about to relegate the mystery of life to the category of myth. The body now
twitched more vigorously, and beneath our avid eyes commenced to heave in a frightful way. The
arms stirred disquietingly, the legs drew up, and various muscles contracted in a repulsive kind of
writhing. Then the headless thing threw out its arms in a gesture which was unmistakably one of
desperation--an intelligent desperation apparently sufficient to prove every theory of Herbert West.
Certainly, the nerves were recalling the man's last act in life; the struggle to get free of the falling
aeroplane.
What followed, I shall never positively know. It may have been wholly an hallucination from the
shock caused at that instant by the sudden and complete destruction of the building in a cataclysm of
German shell-fire--who can gainsay it, since West and I were the only proved survivors? West liked
to think that before his recent disappearance, but there were times when he could not; for it was
queer that we both had the same hallucination. The hideous occurrence itself was very simple,
notable only for what it implied.
The body on the table had risen with a blind and terrible groping, and we had heard a sound. I
should not call that sound a voice, for it was too awful. And yet its timbre was not the most awful
thing about it. Neither was its message--it had merely screamed, "Jump, Ronald, for God's sake,
jump!" The awful thing was its source.
For it had come from the large covered vat in that ghoulish corner of crawling black shadows.
Part VI: The Tomb-Legions
Published July 1922 in Home Brew Vol. 1, No. 6, p. 57-62.>
When Dr. Herbert West disappeared a year ago, the Boston police questioned me closely. They
suspected that I was holding something back, and perhaps suspected graver things; but I could not tell
them the truth because they would not have believed it. They knew, indeed, that West had been
connected with activities beyond the credence of ordinary men; for his hideous experiments in the
reanimation of dead bodies had long been too extensive to admit of perfect secrecy; but the final
soul-shattering catastrophe held elements of daemoniac phantasy which make even me doubt the
reality of what I saw.
I was West's closest friend and only confidential assistant. We had met years before, in medical
school, and from the first I had shared his terrible researches. He had slowly tried to perfect a
solution which, injected into the veins of the newly deceased, would restore life; a labour demanding
an abundance of fresh corpses and therefore involving the most unnatural actions. Still more shocking
were the products of some of the experiments--grisly masses of flesh that had been dead, but that
West waked to a blind, brainless, nauseous animation. These were the usual results, for in order to
reawaken the mind it was necessary to have specimens so absolutely fresh that no decay could
possibly affect the delicate brain-cells.
This need for very fresh corpses had been West's moral undoing. They were hard to get, and one
awful day he had secured his specimen while it was still alive and vigorous. A struggle, a needle,
and a powerful alkaloid had transformed it to a very fresh corpse, and the experiment had succeeded
for a brief and memorable moment; but West had emerged with a soul calloused and seared, and a
hardened eye which sometimes glanced with a kind of hideous and calculating appraisal at men of
especially sensitive brain and especially vigorous physique. Toward the last I became acutely afraid
of West, for he began to look at me that way. People did not seem to notice his glances, but they
noticed my fear; and after his disappearance used that as a basis for some absurd suspicions.
West, in reality, was more afraid than I; for his abominable pursuits entailed a life of furtiveness
and dread of every shadow. Partly it was the police he feared; but sometimes his nervousness was
deeper and more nebulous, touching on certain indescribable things into which he had injected a
morbid life, and from which he had not seen that life depart. He usually finished his experiments with
a revolver, but a few times he had not been quick enough. There was that first specimen on whose
rifled grave marks of clawing were later seen. There was also that Arkham professor's body which
had done cannibal things before it had been captured and thrust unidentified into a madhouse cell at
Sefton, where it beat the walls for sixteen years. Most of the other possibly surviving results were
things less easy to speak of--for in later years West's scientific zeal had degenerated to an unhealthy
and fantastic mania, and he had spent his chief skill in vitalising not entire human bodies but isolated
parts of bodies, or parts joined to organic matter other than human. It had become fiendishly
disgusting by the time he disappeared; many of the experiments could not even be hinted at in print.
The Great War, through which both of us served as surgeons, had intensified this side of West.
In saying that West's fear of his specimens was nebulous, I have in mind particularly its complex
nature. Part of it came merely from knowing of the existence of such nameless monsters, while
another part arose from apprehension of the bodily harm they might under certain circumstances do
him. Their disappearance added horror to the situation--of them all, West knew the whereabouts of
only one, the pitiful asylum thing. Then there was a more subtle fear--a very fantastic sensation
resulting from a curious experiment in the Canadian army in 1915. West, in the midst of a severe
battle, had reanimated Major Sir Eric Moreland Clapham-Lee, D.S.O., a fellow-physician who knew
about his experiments and could have duplicated them. The head had been removed, so that the
possibilities of quasi-intelligent life in the trunk might be investigated. Just as the building was
wiped out by a German shell, there had been a success. The trunk had moved intelligently; and,
unbelievable to relate, we were both sickeningly sure that articulate sounds had come from the
detached head as it lay in a shadowy corner of the laboratory. The shell had been merciful, in a way--
but West could never feel as certain as he wished, that we two were the only survivors. He used to
make shuddering conjectures about the possible actions of a headless physician with the power of
reanimating the dead.
West's last quarters were in a venerable house of much elegance, overlooking one of the oldest
burying-grounds in Boston. He had chosen the place for purely symbolic and fantastically aesthetic
reasons, since most of the interments were of the colonial period and therefore of little use to a
scientist seeking very fresh bodies. The laboratory was in a sub-cellar secretly constructed by
imported workmen, and contained a huge incinerator for the quiet and complete disposal of such
bodies, or fragments and synthetic mockeries of bodies, as might remain from the morbid
experiments and unhallowed amusements of the owner. During the excavation of this cellar the
workmen had struck some exceedingly ancient masonry; undoubtedly connected with the old burying-
ground, yet far too deep to correspond with any known sepulchre therein. After a number of
calculations West decided that it represented some secret chamber beneath the tomb of the Averills,
where the last interment had been made in 1768. I was with him when he studied the nitrous, dripping
walls laid bare by the spades and mattocks of the men, and was prepared for the gruesome thrill
which would attend the uncovering of centuried grave-secrets; but for the first time West's new
timidity conquered his natural curiosity, and he betrayed his degenerating fibre by ordering the
masonry left intact and plastered over. Thus it remained till that final hellish night; part of the walls of
the secret laboratory. I speak of West's decadence, but must add that it was a purely mental and
intangible thing. Outwardly he was the same to the last--calm, cold, slight, and yellow-haired, with
spectacled blue eyes and a general aspect of youth which years and fears seemed never to change.
He seemed calm even when he thought of that clawed grave and looked over his shoulder; even
when he thought of the carnivorous thing that gnawed and pawed at Sefton bars.
The end of Herbert West began one evening in our joint study when he was dividing his curious
glance between the newspaper and me. A strange headline item had struck at him from the crumpled
pages, and a nameless titan claw had seemed to reach down through sixteen years. Something
fearsome and incredible had happened at Sefton Asylum fifty miles away, stunning the
neighbourhood and baffling the police. In the small hours of the morning a body of silent men had
entered the grounds, and their leader had aroused the attendants. He was a menacing military figure
who talked without moving his lips and whose voice seemed almost ventriloquially connected with
an immense black case he carried. His expressionless face was handsome to the point of radiant
beauty, but had shocked the superintendent when the hall light fell on it--for it was a wax face with
eyes of painted glass. Some nameless accident had befallen this man. A larger man guided his steps; a
repellent hulk whose bluish face seemed half eaten away by some unknown malady. The speaker had
asked for the custody of the cannibal monster committed from Arkham sixteen years before; and upon
being refused, gave a signal which precipitated a shocking riot. The fiends had beaten, trampled, and
bitten every attendant who did not flee; killing four and finally succeeding in the liberation of the
monster. Those victims who could recall the event without hysteria swore that the creatures had
acted less like men than like unthinkable automata guided by the wax-faced leader. By the time help
could be summoned, every trace of the men and of their mad charge had vanished.
From the hour of reading this item until midnight, West sat almost paralysed. At midnight the
doorbell rang, startling him fearfully. All the servants were asleep in the attic, so I answered the bell.
As I have told the police, there was no wagon in the street, but only a group of strange-looking
figures bearing a large square box which they deposited in the hallway after one of them had grunted
in a highly unnatural voice, "Express--prepaid."They filed out of the house with a jerky tread, and as
I watched them go I had an odd idea that they were turning toward the ancient cemetery on which the
back of the house abutted. When I slammed the door after them West came downstairs and looked at
the box. It was about two feet square, and bore West's correct name and present address. It also bore
the inscription, "From Eric Moreland Clapham-Lee, St. Eloi, Flanders."Six years before, in Flanders,
a shelled hospital had fallen upon the headless reanimated trunk of Dr. Clapham-Lee, and upon the
detached head which--perhaps--had uttered articulate sounds.
West was not even excited now. His condition was more ghastly. Quickly he said, "It's the finish-
-but let's incinerate--this."We carried the thing down to the laboratory--listening. I do not remember
many particulars--you can imagine my state of mind--but it is a vicious lie to say it was Herbert
West's body which I put into the incinerator. We both inserted the whole unopened wooden box,
closed the door, and started the electricity. Nor did any sound come from the box, after all.
It was West who first noticed the falling plaster on that part of the wall where the ancient tomb
masonry had been covered up. I was going to run, but he stopped me. Then I saw a small black
aperture, felt a ghoulish wind of ice, and smelled the charnel bowels of a putrescent earth. There
was no sound, but just then the electric lights went out and I saw outlined against some
phosphorescence of the nether world a horde of silent toiling things which only insanity--or worse--
could create. Their outlines were human, semi-human, fractionally human, and not human at all--the
horde was grotesquely heterogeneous. They were removing the stones quietly, one by one, from the
centuried wall. And then, as the breach became large enough, they came out into the laboratory in
single file; led by a talking thing with a beautiful head made of wax. A sort of mad-eyed monstrosity
behind the leader seized on Herbert West. West did not resist or utter a sound. Then they all sprang at
him and tore him to pieces before my eyes, bearing the fragments away into that subterranean vault of
fabulous abominations. West's head was carried off by the wax-headed leader, who wore a Canadian
officer's uniform. As it disappeared I saw that the blue eyes behind the spectacles were hideously
blazing with their first touch of frantic, visible emotion.
Servants found me unconscious in the morning. West was gone. The incinerator contained only
unidentifiable ashes. Detectives have questioned me, but what can I say? The Sefton tragedy they will
not connect with West; not that, nor the men with the box, whose existence they deny. I told them of
the vault, and they pointed to the unbroken plaster wall and laughed. So I told them no more. They
imply that I am either a madman or a murderer--probably I am mad. But I might not be mad if those
accursed tomb-legions had not been so silent.

HYPNOS
May the merciful gods, if indeed there be such, guard those hours when no power of the will, or
drug that the cunning of man devises, can keep me from the chasm of sleep. Death is merciful, for
there is no return therefrom, but with him who has come back out of the nethermost chambers of
night, haggard and knowing, peace rests nevermore. Fool that I was to plunge with such unsanctioned
frensy into mysteries no man was meant to penetrate; fool or god that he was--my only friend, who
led me and went before me, and who in the end passed into terrors which may yet be mine!
We met, I recall, in a railway station, where he was the center of a crowd of the vulgarly curious.
He was unconscious, having fallen in a kind of convulsion which imparted to his slight black-clad
body a strange rigidity. I think he was then approaching forty years of age, for there were deep lines
in the face, wan and hollow-cheeked, but oval and actually beautiful; and touches of gray in the thick,
waving hair and small full beard which had once been of the deepest raven black. His brow was
white as the marble of Pentelicus, and of a height and breadth almost god-like.
I said to myself, with all the ardor of a sculptor, that this man was a faun's statue out of antique
Hellas, dug from a temple's ruins and brought somehow to life in our stifling age only to feel the
chill and pressure of devastating years. And when he opened his immense, sunken, and wildly
luminous black eyes I knew he would be thenceforth my only friend--the only friend of one who had
never possessed a friend before--for I saw that such eyes must have looked fully upon the grandeur
and the terror of realms beyond normal consciousness and reality; realms which I had cherished in
fancy, but vainly sought. So as I drove the crowd away I told him he must come home with me and be
my teacher and leader in unfathomed mysteries, and he assented without speaking a word. Afterward I
found that his voice was music--the music of deep viols and of crystalline spheres. We talked often
in the night, and in the day, when I chiseled busts of him and carved miniature heads in ivory to
immortalize his different expressions.
Of our studies it is impossible to speak, since they held so slight a connection with anything of
the world as living men conceive it. They were of that vaster and more appalling universe of dim
entity and consciousness which lies deeper than matter, time, and space, and whose existence we
suspect only in certain forms of sleep-those rare dreams beyond dreams which come never to
common men, and but once or twice in the lifetime of imaginative men. The cosmos of our waking
knowledge, born from such an universe as a bubble is born from the pipe of a jester, touches it only
as such a bubble may touch its sardonic source when sucked back by the jester's whim. Men of
learning suspect it little and ignore it mostly. Wise men have interpreted dreams, and the gods have
laughed. One man with Oriental eyes has said that all time and space are relative, and men have
laughed. But even that man with Oriental eyes has done no more than suspect. I had wished and tried
to do more than suspect, and my friend had tried and partly succeeded. Then we both tried together,
and with exotic drugs courted terrible and forbidden dreams in the tower studio chamber of the old
manor-house in hoary Kent.
Among the agonies of these after days is that chief of torments- inarticulateness. What I learned
and saw in those hours of impious exploration can never be told--for want of symbols or suggestions
in any language. I say this because from first to last our discoveries partook only of the nature of
sensations; sensations correlated with no impression which the nervous system of normal humanity is
capable of receiving. They were sensations, yet within them lay unbelievable elements of time and
space--things which at bottom possess no distinct and definite existence. Human utterance can best
convey the general character of our experiences by calling them plungings or soarings; for in every
period of revelation some part of our minds broke boldly away from all that is real and present,
rushing aerially along shocking, unlighted, and fear-haunted abysses, and occasionally tearing
through certain well-marked and typical obstacles describable only as viscous, uncouth clouds of
vapors.
In these black and bodiless flights we were sometimes alone and sometimes together. When we
were together, my friend was always far ahead; I could comprehend his presence despite the absence
of form by a species of pictorial memory whereby his face appeared to me, golden from a strange
light and frightful with its weird beauty, its anomalously youthful cheeks, its burning eyes, its
Olympian brow, and its shadowing hair and growth of beard.
Of the progress of time we kept no record, for time had become to us the merest illusion. I know
only that there must have been something very singular involved, since we came at length to marvel
why we did not grow old. Our discourse was unholy, and always hideously ambitious--no god or
demon could have aspired to discoveries and conquest like those which we planned in whispers. I
shiver as I speak of them, and dare not be explicit; though I will say that my friend once wrote on
paper a wish which he dared not utter with his tongue, and which made me burn the paper and look
affrightedly out of the window at the spangled night sky. I will hint--only hint--that he had designs
which involved the rulership of the visible universe and more; designs whereby the earth and the
stars would move at his command, and the destinies of all living things be his. I affirm--I swear--that I
had no share in these extreme aspirations. Anything my friend may have said or written to the contrary
must be erroneous, for I am no man of strength to risk the unmentionable spheres by which alone one
might achieve success.
There was a night when winds from unknown spaces whirled us irresistibly into limitless vacuum
beyond all thought and entity. Perceptions of the most maddeningly untransmissible sort thronged
upon us; perceptions of infinity which at the time convulsed us with joy, yet which are now partly
lost to my memory and partly incapable of presentation to others. Viscous obstacles were clawed
through in rapid succession, and at length I felt that we had been borne to realms of greater
remoteness than any we had previously known.
My friend was vastly in advance as we plunged into this awesome ocean of virgin aether, and I
could see the sinister exultation on his floating, luminous, too-youthful memory-face. Suddenly that
face became dim and quickly disappeared, and in a brief space I found myself projected against an
obstacle which I could not penetrate. It was like the others, yet incalculably denser; a sticky clammy
mass, if such terms can be applied to analogous qualities in a non-material sphere.
I had, I felt, been halted by a barrier which my friend and leader had successfully passed.
Struggling anew, I came to the end of the drug--dream and opened my physical eyes to the tower
studio in whose opposite corner reclined the pallid and still unconscious form of my fellow dreamer,
weirdly haggard and wildly beautiful as the moon shed gold-green light on his marble features.
Then, after a short interval, the form in the corner stirred; and may pitying heaven keep from my
sight and sound another thing like that which took place before me. I cannot tell you how he shrieked,
or what vistas of unvisitable hells gleamed for a second in black eyes crazed with fright. I can only
say that I fainted, and did not stir till he himself recovered and shook me in his frensy for someone to
keep away the horror and desolation.
That was the end of our voluntary searchings in the caverns of dream. Awed, shaken, and
portentous, my friend who had been beyond the barrier warned me that we must never venture within
those realms again. What he had seen, he dared not tell me; but he said from his wisdom that we must
sleep as little as possible, even if drugs were necessary to keep us awake. That he was right, I soon
learned from the unutterable fear which engulfed me whenever consciousness lapsed.
After each short and inevitable sleep I seemed older, whilst my friend aged with a rapidity almost
shocking. It is hideous to see wrinkles form and hair whiten almost before one's eyes. Our mode of
life was now totally altered. Heretofore a recluse so far as I know-his true name and origin never
having passed his lips--my friend now became frantic in his fear of solitude. At night he would not
be alone, nor would the company of a few persons calm him. His sole relief was obtained in revelry
of the most general and boisterous sort; so that few assemblies of the young and gay were unknown
to us.
Our appearance and age seemed to excite in most cases a ridicule which I keenly resented, but
which my friend considered a lesser evil than solitude. Especially was he afraid to be out of doors
alone when the stars were shining, and if forced to this condition he would often glance furtively at
the sky as if hunted by some monstrous thing therein. He did not always glance at the same place in
the sky-it seemed to be a different place at different times. On spring evenings it would be low in the
northeast. In the summer it would be nearly overhead. In the autumn it would be in the northwest. In
winter it would be in the east, but mostly if in the small hours of morning.
Midwinter evenings seemed least dreadful to him. Only after two years did I connect this fear
with anything in particular; but then I began to see that he must be looking at a special spot on the
celestial vault whose position at different times corresponded to the direction of his glance--a spot
roughly marked by the constellation Corona Borealis.
We now had a studio in London, never separating, but never discussing the days when we had
sought to plumb the mysteries of the unreal world. We were aged and weak from our drugs,
dissipations, and nervous overstrain, and the thinning hair and beard of my friend had become snow-
white. Our freedom from long sleep was surprising, for seldom did we succumb more than an hour
or two at a time to the shadow which had now grown so frightful a menace.
Then came one January of fog and rain, when money ran low and drugs were hard to buy. My
statues and ivory heads were all sold, and I had no means to purchase new materials, or energy to
fashion them even had I possessed them. We suffered terribly, and on a certain night my friend sank
into a deep-breathing sleep from which I could not awaken him. I can recall the scene now--the
desolate, pitch-black garret studio under the eaves with the rain beating down; the ticking of our lone
clock; the fancied ticking of our watches as they rested on the dressing-table; the creaking of some
swaying shutter in a remote part of the house; certain distant city noises muffled by fog and space;
and, worst of all, the deep, steady, sinister breathing of my friend on the couch--a rhythmical
breathing which seemed to measure moments of supernal fear and agony for his spirit as it wandered
in spheres forbidden, unimagined, and hideously remote.
The tension of my vigil became oppressive, and a wild train of trivial impressions and
associations thronged through my almost unhinged mind. I heard a clock strike somewhere--not ours,
for that was not a striking clock--and my morbid fancy found in this a new starting-point for idle
wanderings. Clocks--time--space--infinity-and then my fancy reverted to the locale as I reflected that
even now, beyond the roof and the fog and the rain and the atmosphere, Corona Borealis was rising in
the northeast. Corona Borealis, which my friend had appeared to dread, and whose scintillant
semicircle of stars must even now be glowing unseen through the measureless abysses of aether. All
at once my feverishly sensitive ears seemed to detect a new and wholly distinct component in the soft
medley of drug-magnified sounds--a low and damnably insistent whine from very far away; droning,
clamoring, mocking, calling, from the northeast.
But it was not that distant whine which robbed me of my faculties and set upon my soul such a seal
of fright as may never in life be removed; not that which drew the shrieks and excited the
convulsions which caused lodgers and police to break down the door. It was not what I heard, but
what I saw; for in that dark, locked, shuttered, and curtained room there appeared from the black
northeast corner a shaft of horrible red-gold light--a shaft which bore with it no glow to disperse
the darkness, but which streamed only upon the recumbent head of the troubled sleeper, bringing out
in hideous duplication the luminous and strangely youthful memory-face as I had known it in dreams
of abysmal space and unshackled time, when my friend had pushed behind the barrier to those secret,
innermost and forbidden caverns of nightmare.
And as I looked, I beheld the head rise, the black, liquid, and deep--sunken eyes open in terror,
and the thin, shadowed lips part as if for a scream too frightful to be uttered. There dwelt in that
ghastly and flexible face, as it shone bodiless, luminous, and rejuvenated in the blackness, more of
stark, teeming, brain-shattering fear than all the rest of heaven and earth has ever revealed to me.
No word was spoken amidst the distant sound that grew nearer and nearer, but as I followed the
memory-face's mad stare along that cursed shaft of light to its source, the source whence also the
whining came, I, too, saw for an instant what it saw, and fell with ringing ears in that fit of shrieking
epilepsy which brought the lodgers and the police. Never could I tell, try as I might, what it actually
was that I saw; nor could the still face tell, for although it must have seen more than I did, it will
never speak again. But always I shall guard against the mocking and insatiate Hypnos, lord of sleep,
against the night sky, and against the mad ambitions of knowledge and philosophy.
Just what happened is unknown, for not only was my own mind unseated by the strange and
hideous thing, but others were tainted with a forgetfulness which can mean nothing if not madness.
They have said, I know not for what reason, that I never had a friend; but that art, philosophy, and
insanity had filled all my tragic life. The lodgers and police on that night soothed me, and the doctor
administered something to quiet me, nor did anyone see what a nightmare event had taken place. My
stricken friend moved them to no pity, but what they found on the couch in the studio made them give
me a praise which sickened me, and now a fame which I spurn in despair as I sit for hours, bald, gray-
bearded, shriveled, palsied, drug-crazed, and broken, adoring and praying to the object they found.
For they deny that I sold the last of my statuary, and point with ecstasy at the thing which the
shining shaft of light left cold, petrified, and unvocal. It is all that remains of my friend; the friend
who led me on to madness and wreckage; a godlike head of such marble as only old Hellas could
yield, young with the youth that is outside time, and with beauteous bearded face, curved, smiling
lips, Olympian brow, and dense locks waving and poppy-crowned. They say that that haunting
memory-face is modeled from my own, as it was at twenty--five; but upon the marble base is carven a
single name in the letters of Attica--HYPNOS.

IMPRISONED WITH THE PHARAOHS
Mystery attracts mystery. Ever since the wide appearance of my name as a performer of
unexplained feats, I have encountered strange narratives and events which my calling has led people
to link with my interests and activities. Some of these have been trivial and irrelevant, some deeply
dramatic and absorbing, some productive of weird and perilous experiences and some involving me
in extensive scientific and historical research. Many of these matters I have told and shall continue to
tell very freely; but there is one of which I speak with great reluctance, and which I am now relating
only after a session of grilling persuasion from the publishers of this magazine, who had heard
vague rumors of it from other members of my family.
The hitherto guarded subject pertains to my non-professional visit to Egypt fourteen years ago,
and has been avoided by me for several reasons. For one thing, I am averse to exploiting certain
unmistakably actual facts and conditions obviously unknown to the myriad tourists who throng about
the pyramids and apparently secreted with much diligence by the authorities at Cairo, who cannot be
wholly ignorant of them. For another thing, I dislike to recount an incident in which my own fantastic
imagination must have played so great a part. What I saw--or thought I saw--certainly did not take
place; but is rather to be viewed as a result of my then recent readings in Egyptology, and of the
speculations anent this theme which my environment naturally prompted. These imaginative stimuli,
magnified by the excitement of an actual event terrible enough in itself, undoubtedly gave rise to the
culminating horror of that grotesque night so long past.
In January, 1910, I had finished a professional engagement in England and signed a contract for a
tour of Australian theatres. A liberal time being allowed for the trip, I determined to make the most of
it in the sort of travel which chiefly interests me; so accompanied by my wife I drifted pleasantly
down the Continent and embarked at Marseilles on the P & O Steamer Malwa, bound for Port Said.
From that point I proposed to visit the principal historical localities of lower Egypt before leaving
finally for Australia.
The voyage was an agreeable one, and enlivened by many of the amusing incidents which befall a
magical performer apart from his work. I had intended, for the sake of quiet travel, to keep my name a
secret; but was goaded into betraying myself by a fellow-magician whose anxiety to astound the
passengers with ordinary tricks tempted me to duplicate and exceed his feats in a manner quite
destructive of my incognito. I mention this because of its ultimate effect--an effect I should have
foreseen before unmasking to a shipload of tourists about to scatter throughout the Nile valley. What
it did was to herald my identity wherever I subsequently went, and deprive my wife and me of all the
placid inconspicuousness we had sought. Traveling to seek curiosities, I was often forced to stand
inspection as a sort of curiosity myself!
We had come to Egypt in search of the picturesque and the mystically impressive, but found little
enough when the ship edged up to Port Said and discharged its passengers in small boats. Low dunes
of sand, bobbing buoys in shallow water, and a drearily European small town with nothing of interest
save the great De Lesseps statue, made us anxious to get to something more worth our while. After
some discussion we decided to proceed at once to Cairo and the Pyramids, later going to Alexandria
for the Australian boat and for whatever Greco-Roman sights that ancient metropolis might present.
The railway journey was tolerable enough, and consumed only four hours and a half. We saw
much of the Suez Canal, whose route we followed as far as Ismailiya and later had a taste of Old
Egypt in our glimpse of the restored fresh-water canal of the Middle Empire. Then at last we saw
Cairo glimmering through the growing dusk; a winkling constellation which became a blaze as we
halted at the great Gare Centrale.
But once more disappointment awaited us, for all that we beheld was European save the costumes
and the crowds. A prosaic subway led to a square teeming with carriages, taxicabs, and trolley-cars
and gorgeous with electric lights shining on tall buildings; whilst the very theatre where I was vainly
requested to play and which I later attended as a spectator, had recently been renamed the 'American
Cosmograph'. We stopped at Shepheard's Hotel, reached in a taxi that sped along broad, smartly
built-up streets; and amidst the perfect service of its restaurant, elevators and generally Anglo-
American luxuries the mysterious East and immemorial past seemed very far away.
The next day, however, precipitated us delightfully into the heart of the Arabian Nights
atmosphere; and in the winding ways and exotic skyline of Cairo, the Bagdad of Harun-al-Rashid
seemed to live again. Guided by our Baedeker, we had struck east past the Ezbekiyeh Gardens along
the Mouski in quest of the native quarter, and were soon in the hands of a clamorous cicerone who--
notwithstanding later developments--was assuredly a master at his trade.
Not until afterward did I see that I should have applied at the hotel for a licensed guide. This man,
a shaven, peculiarly hollow-voiced and relatively cleanly fellow who looked like a Pharaoh and
called himself 'Abdul Reis el Drogman' appeared to have much power over others of his kind;
though subsequently the police professed not to know him, and to suggest that reis is merely a name
for any person in authority, whilst 'Drogman' is obviously no more than a clumsy modification of the
word for a leader of tourist parties--dragoman.
Abdul led us among such wonders as we had before only read and dreamed of. Old Cairo is itself
a story-book and a dream--labyrinths of narrow alleys redolent of aromatic secrets; Arabesque
balconies and oriels nearly meeting above the cobbled streets; maelstroms of Oriental traffic with
strange cries, cracking whips, rattling carts, jingling money, and braying donkeys; kaleidoscopes of
polychrome robes, veils, turbans, and tarbushes; water-carriers and dervishes, dogs and cats,
soothsayers and barbers; and over all the whining of blind beggars crouched in alcoves, and the
sonorous chanting of muezzins from minarets limned delicately against a sky of deep, unchanging
blue.
The roofed, quieter bazaars were hardly less alluring. Spice, perfume, incense beads, rugs, silks,
and brass--old Mahmoud Suleiman squats cross-legged amidst his gummy bottles while chattering
youths pulverize mustard in the hollowed-out capital of an ancient classic column--a Roman
Corinthian, perhaps from neighboring Heliopolis, where Augustus stationed one of his three
Egyptian legions. Antiquity begins to mingle with exoticism. And then the mosques and the museum--
we saw them all, and tried not to let our Arabian revel succumb to the darker charm of Pharaonic
Egypt which the museum's priceless treasures offered. That was to be our climax, and for the present
we concentrated on the mediaeval Saracenic glories of the Califs whose magnificent tomb-mosques
form a glittering faery necropolis on the edge of the Arabian Desert.
At length Abdul took us along the Sharia Mohammed Ali to the ancient mosque of Sultan Hassan,
and the tower-flanked Babel-Azab, beyond which climbs the steep-walled pass to the mighty citadel
that Saladin himself built with the stones of forgotten pyramids. It was sunset when we scaled that
cliff, circled the modern mosque of Mohammed Ali, and looked down from the dizzy parapet over
mystic Cairo--mystic Cairo all golden with its carven domes, its ethereal minarets and its flaming
gardens.
Far over the city towered the great Roman dome of the new museum; and beyond it--across the
cryptic yellow Nile that is the mother of eons and dynasties--lurked the menacing sands of the Libyan
Desert, undulant and iridescent and evil with older arcana.
The red sun sank low, bringing the relentless chill of Egyptian dusk; and as it stood poised on the
world's rim like that ancient god of Heliopolis--Re-Harakhte, the Horizon-Sun--we saw silhouetted
against its vermeil holocaust the black outlines of the Pyramids of Gizeh--the palaeogean tombs
there were hoary with a thousand years when Tut-Ankh--Amen mounted his golden throne in distant
Thebes. Then we knew that we were done with Saracen Cairo, and that we must taste the deeper
mysteries of primal Egypt--the black Kem of Re and Amen, Isis and Osiris.
The next morning we visited the Pyramids, riding out in a Victoria across the island of Chizereh
with its massive lebbakh trees, and the smaller English bridge to the western shore. Down the shore
road we drove, between great rows of lebbakhs and past the vast Zoological Gardens to the suburb
of Gizeh, where a new bridge to Cairo proper has since been built. Then, turning inland along the
Sharia-el-Haram, we crossed a region of glassy canals and shabby native villages till before us
loomed the objects of our quest, cleaving the mists of dawn and forming inverted replicas in the
roadside pools. Forty centuries, as Napoleon had told his campaigners there, indeed looked down
upon us.
The road now rose abruptly, till we finally reached our place of transfer between the trolley
station and the Mena House Hotel. Abdul Reis, who capably purchased our Pyramid tickets, seemed
to have an understanding with the crowding, yelling and offensive Bedouins who inhabited a squalid
mud village some distance away and pestiferously assailed every traveler; for he kept them very
decently at bay and secured an excellent pair of camels for us, himself mounting a donkey and
assigning the leadership of our animals to a group of men and boys more expensive than useful. The
area to be traversed was so small that camels were hardly needed, but we did not regret adding to our
experience this troublesome form of desert navigation.
The pyramids stand on a high rock plateau, this group forming next to the northernmost of the
series of regal and aristocratic cemeteries built in the neighborhood of the extinct capital Memphis,
which lay on the same side of the Nile, somewhat south of Gizeh, and which flourished between
3400 and 2000 B.C. The greatest pyramid, which lies nearest the modern road, was built by King
Cheops or Khufu about 2800 B.C., and stands more than 450 feet in perpendicular height. In a line
southwest from this are successively the Second Pyramid, built a generation later by King Khephren,
and though slightly smaller, looking even larger because set on higher ground, and the radically
smaller Third Pyramid of King Mycerinus, built about 2700 B.C. Near the edge of the plateau and
due east of the Second Pyramid, with a face probably altered to form a colossal portrait of Khephren,
its royal restorer, stands the monstrous Sphinx--mute, sardonic, and wise beyond mankind and
memory.
Minor pyramids and the traces of ruined minor pyramids are found in several places, and the
whole plateau is pitted with the tombs of dignitaries of less than royal rank. These latter were
originally marked by mastabas, or stone bench-like structures about the deep burial shafts, as found in
other Memphian cemeteries and exemplified by Perneb's Tomb in the Metropolitan Museum of New
York. At Gizeh, however, all such visible things have been swept away by time and pillage; and only
the rock-hewn shafts, either sand-filled or cleared out by archaeologists, remain to attest their
former existence. Connected with each tomb was a chapel in which priests and relatives offered
food and prayer to the hovering ka or vital principle of the deceased. The small tombs have their
chapels contained in their stone mastabas or superstructures, but the mortuary chapels of the
pyramids, where regal Pharaohs lay, were separate temples, each to the east of its corresponding
pyramid, and connected by a causeway to a massive gate-chapel or propylon at the edge of the rock
plateau.
The gate-chapel leading to the Second Pyramid, nearly buried in the drifting sands, yawns
subterraneously south-east of the Sphinx. Persistent tradition dubs it the 'Temple of the Sphinx'; and it
may perhaps be rightly called such if the Sphinx indeed represents the Second Pyramid's builder
Khephren. There are unpleasant tales of the Sphinx before Khephren--but whatever its elder features
were, the monarch replaced them with his own that men might look at the colossus without fear.
It was in the great gateway-temple that the life-size diorite statue of Khephren now in the Cairo
museum was found; a statue before which I stood in awe when I beheld it. Whether the whole edifice
is now excavated I am not certain, but in 1910 most of it was below ground, with the entrance heavily
barred at night. Germans were in charge of the work, and the war or other things may have stopped
them. I would give much, in view of my experience and of certain Bedouin whisperings discredited
or unknown in Cairo, to know what has developed in connection with a certain well in a transverse
gallery where statues of the Pharaoh were found in curious juxtaposition to the statues of baboons.
The road, as we traversed it on our camels that morning, curved sharply past the wooden police
quarters, post office, drug store and shops on the left, and plunged south and east in a complete bend
that scaled the rock plateau and brought us face to face with the desert under the lee of the Great
Pyramid. Past Cyclopean masonry we rode, rounding the eastern face and looking down ahead into a
valley of minor pyramids beyond which the eternal Nile glistened to the east, and the eternal desert
shimmered to the west. Very close loomed the three major pyramids, the greatest devoid of outer
casing and showing its bulk of great stones, but the others retaining here and there the neatly fitted
covering which had made them smooth and finished in their day.
Presently we descended toward the Sphinx, and sat silent beneath the spell of those terrible
unseeing eyes. On the vast stone breast we faintly discerned the emblem of Re-Harakhte, for whose
image the Sphinx was mistaken in a late dynasty; and though sand covered the tablet between the great
paws, we recalled what Thutmosis IV inscribed thereon, and the dream he had when a prince. It was
then that the smile of the Sphinx vaguely displeased us, and made us wonder about the legends of
subterranean passages beneath the monstrous creature, leading down, down, to depths none might
dare hint at--depths connected with mysteries older than the dynastic Egypt we excavate, and having a
sinister relation to the persistence of abnormal, animal--headed gods in the ancient Nilotic pantheon.
Then, too, it was I asked myself in idle question whose hideous significance was not to appear for
many an hour.
Other tourists now began to overtake us, and we moved on to the sand--choked Temple of the
Sphinx, fifty yards to the southeast, which I have previously mentioned as the great gate of the
causeway to the Second Pyramid's mortuary chapel on the plateau. Most of it was still underground,
and although we dismounted and descended through a modern passageway to its alabaster corridor
and pillared hall, I felt that Abdul and the local German attendant had not shown us all there was to
see.
After this we made the conventional circuit of the pyramid plateau, examining the Second Pyramid
and the peculiar ruins of its mortuary chapel to the east, the Third Pyramid and its miniature southern
satellites and ruined eastern chapel, the rock tombs and the honeycombings of the Fourth and Fifth
dynasties, and the famous Campbell's Tomb whose shadowy shaft sinks precipitously for fifty-three
feet to a sinister sarcophagus which one of our camel drivers divested of the cumbering sand after a
vertiginous descent by rope.
Cries now assailed us from the Great Pyramid, where Bedouins were besieging a party of
tourists with offers of speed in the performance of solitary trips up and down. Seven minutes is said
to be the record for such an ascent and descent, but many lusty sheiks and sons of sheiks assured us
they could cut it to five if given the requisite impetus of liberal baksheesh. They did not get this
impetus, though we did let Abdul take us up, thus obtaining a view of unprecedented magnificence
which included not only remote and glittering Cairo with its crowned citadel background of gold-
violet hills, but all the pyramids of the Memphian district as well, from Abu Roash on the north to the
Dashur on the south. The Sakkara step-pyramid, which marks the evolution of the low mastaba into
the true pyramid, showed clearly and alluringly in the sandy distance. It is close to this transition--
monument that the famed tomb of Perneb was found--more than four hundred miles north of the
Theban rock valley where Tut-Ankh-Amen sleeps. Again I was forced to silence through sheer awe.
The prospect of such antiquity, and the secrets each hoary monument seemed to hold and brood over,
filled me with a reverence and sense of immensity nothing else ever gave me.
Fatigued by our climb, and disgusted with the importunate Bedouins whose actions seemed to
defy every rule of taste, we omitted the arduous detail of entering the cramped interior passages of
any of the pyramids, though we saw several of the hardiest tourists preparing for the suffocating
crawl through Cheops' mightiest memorial. As we dismissed and overpaid our local bodyguard and
drove back to Cairo with Abdul Reis under the afternoon sun, we half regretted the omission we had
made. Such fascinating things were whispered about lower pyramid passages not in the guidebooks;
passages whose entrances had been hastily blocked up and concealed by certain uncommunicative
archaeologists who had found and begun to explore them.
Of course, this whispering was largely baseless on the face of it; but it was curious to reflect
how persistently visitors were forbidden to enter the Pyramids at night, or to visit the lowest
burrows and crypt of the Great Pyramid. Perhaps in the latter case it was the psychological effect
which was feared--the effect on the visitor of feeling himself huddled down beneath a gigantic
world of solid masonry; joined to the life he has known by the merest tube, in which he may only
crawl, and which any accident or evil design might block. The whole subject seemed so weird and
alluring that we resolved to pay the pyramid plateau another visit at the earliest possible opportunity.
For me this opportunity came much earlier than I expected.
That evening, the members of our party feeling some what tired after the strenuous program of
the day, I went alone with Abdul Reis for a walk through the picturesque Arab quarter. Though I had
seen it by day, I wished to study the alleys and bazaars in the dusk, when rich shadows and mellow
gleams of light would add to their glamor and fantastic illusion. The native crowds were thinning, but
were still very noisy and numerous when we came upon a knot of reveling Bedouins in the Suken-
Nahhasin, or bazaar of the coppersmiths. Their apparent leader, an insolent youth with heavy features
and saucily cocked tarbush, took some notice of us, and evidently recognized with no great
friendliness my competent but admittedly supercilious and sneeringly disposed guide.
Perhaps, I thought, he resented that odd reproduction of the Sphinx's half-smile which I had often
remarked with amused irritation; or perhaps he did not like the hollow and sepulchral resonance of
Abdul's voice. At any rate, the exchange of ancestrally opprobrious language became very brisk; and
before long Ali Ziz, as I heard the stranger called when called by no worse name, began to pull
violently at Abdul's robe, an action quickly reciprocated and leading to a spirited scuffle in which
both combatants lost their sacredly cherished headgear and would have reached an even direr
condition had I not intervened and separated them by main force.
My interference, at first seemingly unwelcome on both sides, succeeded at last in effecting a
truce. Sullenly each belligerent composed his wrath and his attire, and with an assumption of dignity
as profound as it was sudden, the two formed a curious pact of honor which I soon learned is a
custom of great antiquity in Cairo--a pact for the settlement of their difference by means of a
nocturnal fist fight atop the Great Pyramid, long after the departure of the last moonlight sightseer.
Each duelist was to assemble a party of seconds, and the affair was to begin at midnight, proceeding
by rounds in the most civilized possible fashion.
In all this planning there was much which excited my interest. The fight itself promised to be
unique and spectacular, while the thought of the scene on that hoary pile overlooking the antediluvian
plateau of Gizeh under the wan moon of the pallid small hours appealed to every fiber of imagination
in me. A request found Abdul exceedingly willing to admit me to his party of seconds; so that all the
rest of the early evening I accompanied him to various dens in the most lawless regions of the town--
mostly northeast of the Ezbekiyeh--where he gathered one by one a select and formidable band of
congenial cutthroats as his pugilistic background.
Shortly after nine our party, mounted on donkeys bearing such royal or tourist-reminiscent names
as 'Rameses,' 'Mark Twain,' 'J. P. Morgan,' and 'Minnehaha,' edged through street labyrinths both
Oriental and Occidental, crossed the muddy and mast-forested Nile by the bridge of the bronze lions,
and cantered philosophically between the lebbakhs on the road to Gizeh. Slightly over two hours
were consumed by the trip, toward the end of which we passed the last of the returning tourists,
saluted the last inbound trolley-car, and were alone with the night and the past and the spectral moon.
Then we saw the vast pyramids at the end of the avenue, ghoulish with a dim atavistical menace
which I had not seemed to notice in the daytime. Even the smallest of them held a hint of the ghastly--
for was it not in this that they had buried Queen Nitocris alive in the Sixth Dynasty; subtle Queen
Nitocris, who once invited all her enemies to a feast in a temple below the Nile, and drowned them
by opening the water-gates? I recalled that the Arabs whisper things about Nitocris, and shun the
Third Pyramid at certain phases of the moon. It must have been over her that Thomas Moore was
brooding when he wrote a thing muttered about by Memphian boatmen: 'The subterranean nymph that
dwells 'Mid sunless gems and glories hid--The lady of the Pyramid!'
Early as we were, Ali Ziz and his party were ahead of us; for we saw their donkeys outlined
against the desert plateau at Kafrel-Haram; toward which squalid Arab settlement, close to the
Sphinx, we had diverged instead of following the regular road to the Mena House, where some of
the sleepy, inefficient police might have observed and halted us. Here, where filthy Bedouins
stabled camels and donkeys in the rock tombs of Khephren's courtiers, we were led up the rocks and
over the sand to the Great Pyramid, up whose time-worn sides the Arabs swarmed eagerly, Abdul
Reis offering me the assistance I did not need.
As most travelers know, the actual apex of this structure has long been worn away, leaving a
reasonably flat platform twelve yards square. On this eery pinnacle a squared circle was formed, and
in a few moments the sardonic desert moon leered down upon a battle which, but for the quality of the
ringside cries, might well have occurred at some minor athletic club in America. As I watched it, I
felt that some of our less-desirable institutions were not lacking; for every blow, feint, and defense
bespoke 'stalling' to my not inexperienced eye. It was quickly over, and despite my misgivings as to
methods I felt a sort of proprietary pride when Abdul Reis was adjudged the winner.
Reconciliation was phenomenally rapid, and amidst the singing, fraternizing and drinking that
followed, I found it difficult to realize that a quarrel had ever occurred. Oddly enough, I myself
seemed to be more a center of notice than the antagonists; and from my smattering of Arabic I judged
that they were discussing my professional performances and escapes from every sort of manacle and
confinement, in a manner which indicated not only a surprising knowledge of me, but a distinct
hostility and skepticism concerning my feats of escape. It gradually dawned on me that the elder
magic of Egypt did not depart without leaving traces, and that fragments of a strange secret lore and
priestly cult-practices have survived surreptitiously amongst the fellaheen to such an extent that the
prowess of a strange hahwi or magician is resented and disputed. I thought of how much my hollow-
voiced guide Abdul Reis looked like an old Egyptian priest or Pharaoh or smiling Sphinx...and
wondered.
Suddenly something happened which in a flash proved the correctness of my reflections and made
me curse the denseness whereby I had accepted this night's events as other than the empty and
malicious 'frame-up' they now showed themselves to be. Without warning, and doubtless in answer to
some subtle sign from Abdul, the entire band of Bedouins precipitated itself upon me; and having
produced heavy ropes, soon had me bound as securely as I was ever bound in the course of my life,
either on the stage or off.
I struggled at first, but soon saw that one man could make no headway against a band of over
twenty sinewy barbarians. My hands were tied behind my back, my knees bent to their fullest extent,
and my wrists and ankles stoutly linked together with unyielding cords. A stifling gag was forced into
my mouth, and a blindfold fastened tightly over my eyes. Then, as Arabs bore me aloft on their
shoulders and began a jouncing descent of the pyramid, I heard the taunts of my late guide Abdul,
who mocked and jeered delightedly in his hollow voice, and assured me that I was soon to have my
'magic-powers' put to a supreme test--which would quickly remove any egotism I might have gained
through triumphing over all the tests offered by America and Europe. Egypt, he reminded me, is very
old, and full of inner mysteries and antique powers not even conceivable to the experts of today,
whose devices had so uniformly failed to entrap me.
How far or in what direction I was carried, I cannot tell; for the circumstances were all against
the formation of any accurate judgment. I know, however, that it could not have been a great distance;
since my bearers at no point hastened beyond a walk, yet kept me aloft a surprisingly short time. It is
this perplexing brevity which makes me feel almost like shuddering whenever I think of Gizeh and its
plateau--for one is oppressed by hints of the closeness to everyday tourist routes of what existed
then and must exist still.
The evil abnormality I speak of did not become manifest at first. Setting me down on a surface
which I recognized as sand rather than rock, my captors passed a rope around my chest and dragged
me a few feet to a ragged opening in the ground, into which they presently lowered me with much
rough handling. For apparent eons I bumped against the stony irregular sides of a narrow hewn well
which I took to be one of the numerous burial-shafts of the plateau until the prodigious, almost
incredible depth of it robbed me of all bases of conjecture.
The horror of the experience deepened with every dragging second. That any descent through
the sheer solid rock could be so vast without reaching the core of the planet itself, or that any rope
made by man could be so long as to dangle me in these unholy and seemingly fathomless profundities
of nether earth, were beliefs of such grotesqueness that it was easier to doubt my agitated senses
than to accept them. Even now I am uncertain, for I know how deceitful the sense of time becomes
when one is removed or distorted. But I am quite sure that I preserved a logical consciousness that
far; that at least I did not add any fullgrown phantoms of imagination to a picture hideous enough in its
reality, and explicable by a type of cerebral illusion vastly short of actual hallucination.
All this was not the cause of my first bit of fainting. The shocking ordeal was cumulative, and the
beginning of the later terrors was a very perceptible increase in my rate of descent. They were
paying out that infinitely long rope very swiftly now, and I scraped cruelly against the rough and
constricted sides of the shaft as I shot madly downward. My clothing was in tatters, and I felt the
trickle of blood all over, even above the mounting and excruciating pain. My nostrils, too, were
assailed by a scarcely definable menace: a creeping odor of damp and staleness curiously unlike
anything I had ever smelled before, and having faint overtones of spice and incense that lent an
element of mockery.
Then the mental cataclysm came. It was horrible--hideous beyond all articulate description
because it was all of the soul, with nothing of detail to describe. It was the ecstasy of nightmare and
the summation of the fiendish. The suddenness of it was apocalyptic and demoniac--one moment I
was plunging agonizingly down that narrow well of million-toothed torture, yet the next moment I
was soaring on bat--wings in the gulfs of hell; swinging free and swooping through illimitable miles
of boundless, musty space; rising dizzily to measureless pinnacles of chilling ether, then diving
gaspingly to sucking nadirs of ravenous, nauseous lower vacua...Thank God for the mercy that shut
out in oblivion those clawing Furies of consciousness which half unhinged my faculties, and tore
harpy-like at my spirit! That one respite, short as it was, gave me the strength and sanity to endure
those still greater sublimations of cosmic panic that lurked and gibbered on the road ahead. II
It was very gradually that I regained my senses after that eldritch flight through stygian space.
The process was infinitely painful, and colored by fantastic dreams in which my bound and gagged
condition found singular embodiment. The precise nature of these dreams was very clear while I was
experiencing them, but became blurred in my recollection almost immediately afterward, and was
soon reduced to the merest outline by the terrible events--real or imaginary--which followed. I
dreamed that I was in the grasp of a great and horrible paw; a yellow, hairy, five-clawed paw which
had reached out of the earth to crush and engulf me. And when I stopped to reflect what the paw was,
it seemed to me that it was Egypt. In the dream I looked back at the events of the preceding weeks, and
saw myself lured and enmeshed little by little, subtly and insidiously, by some hellish ghoul-spirit of
the elder Nile sorcery; some spirit that was in Egypt before ever man was, and that will be when man
is no more.
I saw the horror and unwholesome antiquity of Egypt, and the grisly alliance it has always had
with the tombs and temples of the dead. I saw phantom processions of priests with the heads of bulls,
falcons, cats, and ibises; phantom processions marching interminably through subterraneous
labyrinths and avenues of titanic propylaea beside which a man is as a fly, and offering unnamable
sacrifice to indescribable gods. Stone colossi marched in endless night and drove herds of grinning
androsphinxes down to the shores of illimitable stagnant rivers of pitch. And behind it all I saw the
ineffable malignity of primordial necromancy, black and amorphous, and fumbling greedily after me
in the darkness to choke out the spirit that had dared to mock it by emulation.
In my sleeping brain there took shape a melodrama of sinister hatred and pursuit, and I saw the
black soul of Egypt singling me out and calling me in inaudible whispers; calling and luring me,
leading me on with the glitter and glamor of a Saracenic surface, but ever pulling me down to the
age-mad catacombs and horrors of its dead and abysmal pharaonic heart.
Then the dream faces took on human resemblances, and I saw my guide Abdul Reis in the robes
of a king, with the sneer of the Sphinx on his features. And I knew that those features were the
features of Khephren the Great, who raised the Second Pyramid, carved over the Sphinx's face in the
likeness of his own and built that titanic gateway temple whose myriad corridors the archaeologists
think they have dug out of the cryptical sand and the uninformative rock. And I looked at the long, lean
rigid hand of Khephren; the long, lean, rigid hand as I had seen it on the diorite statue in the Cairo
Museum--the statue they had found in the terrible gateway temple--and wondered that I had not
shrieked when I saw it on Abdul Reis...That hand! It was hideously cold, and it was crushing me; it
was the cold and cramping of the sarcophagus the chill and constriction of unrememberable Egypt...It
was nighted, necropolitan Egypt itself.., that yellow paw.. and they whisper such things of
Khephren...
But at this juncture I began to wake--or at least, to assume a condition less completely that of
sleep than the one just preceding. I recalled the fight atop the pyramid, the treacherous Bedouins and
their attack, my frightful descent by rope through endless rock depths, and my mad swinging and
plunging in a chill void redolent of aromatic putrescence. I perceived that I now lay on a damp rock
floor, and that my bonds were still biting into me with unloosened force. It was very cold, and I
seemed to detect a faint current of noisome air sweeping across me. The cuts and bruises I had
received from the jagged sides of the rock shaft were paining me woefully, their soreness enhanced
to a stinging or burning acuteness by some pungent quality in the faint draft, and the mere act of
rolling over was enough to set my whole frame throbbing with untold agony.
As I turned I felt a tug from above, and concluded that the rope whereby I was lowered still
reached to the surface. Whether or not the Arabs still held it, I had no idea; nor had I any idea how far
within the earth I was. I knew that the darkness around me was wholly or nearly total, since no ray of
moonlight penetrated my blindfold; but I did not trust my senses enough to accept as evidence of
extreme depth the sensation of vast duration which had characterized my descent.
Knowing at least that I was in a space of considerable extent reached from the above surface
directly by an opening in the rock, I doubtfully conjectured that my prison was perhaps the buried
gateway chapel of old Khephren--the Temple of the Sphinx--perhaps some inner corridors which the
guides had not shown me during my morning visit, and from which I might easily escape if I could
find my way to the barred entrance. It would be a labyrinthine wandering, but no worse than others out
of which I had in the past found my way.
The first step was to get free of my bonds, gag, and blindfold; and this I knew would be no great
task, since subtler experts than these Arabs had tried every known species of fetter upon me during
my long and varied career as an exponent of escape, yet had never succeeded in defeating my
methods.
Then it occurred to me that the Arabs might be ready to meet and attack me at the entrance upon
any evidence of my probable escape from the binding cords, as would be furnished by any decided
agitation of the rope which they probably held. This, of course, was taking for granted that my place
of confinement was indeed Khephren's Temple of the Sphinx. The direct opening in the roof,
wherever it might lurk, could not be beyond easy reach of the ordinary modern entrance near the
Sphinx; if in truth it were any great distance at all on the surface, since the total area known to visitors
is not at all enormous. I had not noticed any such opening during my daytime pilgrimage, but knew that
these things are easily overlooked amidst the drifting sands.
Thinking these matters over as I lay bent and bound on the rock floor, I nearly forgot the horrors
of abysmal descent and cavernous swinging which had so lately reduced me to a coma. My present
thought was only to outwit the Arabs, and I accordingly determined to work myself free as quickly as
possible, avoiding any tug on the descending line which might betray an effective or even
problematical attempt at freedom.
This, however, was more easily determined than effected. A few preliminary trials made it clear
that little could be accomplished without considerable motion; and it did not surprise me when, after
one especially energetic struggle, I began to feel the coils of falling rope as they piled up about me
and upon me. Obviously, I thought, the Bedouins had felt my movements and released their end of the
rope; hastening no doubt to the temple's true entrance to lie murderously in wait for me.
The prospect was not pleasing--but I had faced worse in my time without flinching, and would not
flinch now. At present I must first of all free myself of bonds, then trust to ingenuity to escape from
the temple unharmed. It is curious how implicitly I had come to believe myself in the old temple of
Khephren beside the Sphinx, only a short distance below the ground.
That belief was shattered, and every pristine apprehension of preternatural depth and demoniac
mystery revived, by a circumstance which grew in horror and significance even as I formulated my
philosophical plan. I have said that the falling rope was piling up about and upon me. Now I saw that
it was continuing to pile, as no rope of normal length could possibly do. It gained in momentum and
became an avalanche of hemp, accumulating mountainously on the floor and half burying me beneath
its swiftly multiplying coils. Soon I was completely engulfed and gasping for breath as the
increasing convolutions submerged and stifled me.
My senses tottered again, and I vaguely tried to fight off a menace desperate and ineluctable. It
was not merely that I was tortured beyond human endurance--not merely that life and breath seemed to
be crushed slowly out of me--it was the knowledge of what those unnatural lengths of rope implied,
and the consciousness of what unknown and incalculable gulfs of inner earth must at this moment be
surrounding me. My endless descent and swinging flight through goblin space, then, must have been
real, and even now I must be lying helpless in some nameless cavern world toward the core of the
planet. Such a sudden confirmation of ultimate horror was insupportable, and a second time I lapsed
into merciful oblivion.
When I say oblivion, I do not imply that I was free from dreams. On the contrary, my absence from
the conscious world was marked by visions of the most unutterable hideousness. God!...If only I had
not read so much Egyptology before coming to this land which is the fountain of all darkness and
terror! This second spell of fainting filled my sleeping mind anew with shivering realization of the
country and its archaic secrets, and through some damnable chance my dreams turned to the ancient
notions of the dead and their sojournings in soul and body beyond those mysterious tombs which
were more houses than graves. I recalled, in dream-shapes which it is well that I do not remember,
the peculiar and elaborate construction of Egyptian sepulchers; and the exceedingly singular and
terrific doctrines which determined this construction.
All these people thought of was death and the dead. They conceived of a literal resurrection of
the body which made them mummify it with desperate care, and preserve all the vital organs in
canopic jars near the corpse; whilst besides the body they believed in two other elements, the soul,
which after its weighing and approval by Osiris dwelt in the land of the blest, and the obscure and
portentous ka or life-principle which wandered about the upper and lower worlds in a horrible way,
demanding occasional access to the preserved body, consuming the food offerings brought by
priests and pious relatives to the mortuary chapel, and sometimes--as men whispered--taking its body
or the wooden double always buried beside it and stalking noxiously abroad on errands peculiarly
repellent.
For thousands of years those bodies rested gorgeously encased and staring glassily upward
when not visited by the ka, awaiting the day when Osiris should restore both ka and soul, and lead
forth the stiff legions of the dead from the sunken houses of sleep. It was to have been a glorious
rebirth--but not all souls were approved, nor were all tombs inviolate, so that certain grotesque
mistakes and fiendish abnormalities were to be looked for. Even today the Arabs murmur of
unsanctified convocations and unwholesome worship in forgotten nether abysses, which only winged
invisible kas and soulless mummies may visit and return unscathed.
Perhaps the most leeringly blood-congealing legends are those which relate to certain perverse
products of decadent priestcraft--composite mummies made by the artificial union of human trunks
and limbs with the heads of animals in imitation of the elder gods. At all stages of history the sacred
animals were mummified, so that consecrated bulls, cats, ibises, crocodiles and the like might return
some day to greater glory. But only in the decadence did they mix the human and the animal in the
same mummy--only in the decadence, when they did not understand the rights and prerogatives of the
ka and the soul.
What happened to those composite mummies is not told of--at least publicly--and it is certain that
no Egyptologist ever found one. The whispers of Arabs are very wild, and cannot be relied upon.
They even hint that old Khephren--he of the Sphinx, the Second Pyramid and the yawning gateway
temple--lives far underground wedded to the ghoul-queen Nitocris and ruling over the mummies that
are neither of man nor of beast.
It was of these--of Khephren and his consort and his strange armies of the hybrid dead--that I
dreamed, and that is why I am glad the exact dream-shapes have faded from my memory. My most
horrible vision was connected with an idle question I had asked myself the day before when looking
at the great carven riddle of the desert and wondering with what unknown depth the temple close to it
might be secretly connected. That question, so innocent and whimsical then, assumed in my dream a
meaning of frenetic and hysterical madness...what huge and loathsome abnormality was the Sphinx
originally carven to represent?
My second awakening--if awakening it was--is a memory of stark hideousness which nothing else
in my life--save one thing which came after--can parallel; and that life has been full and adventurous
beyond most men's. Remember that I had lost consciousness whilst buried beneath a cascade of
falling rope whose immensity revealed the cataclysmic depth of my present position. Now, as
perception returned, I felt the entire weight gone; and realized upon rolling over that although I was
still tied, gagged and blindfolded, some agency had removed completely the suffocating hempen
landslide which had overwhelmed me. The significance of this condition, of course, came to me only
gradually; but even so I think it would have brought unconsciousness again had I not by this time
reached such a state of emotional exhaustion that no new horror could make much difference. I was
alone...with what?
Before I could torture myself with any new reflection, or make any fresh effort to escape from
my bonds, an additional circumstance became manifest. Pains not formerly felt were racking my arms
and legs, and I seemed coated with a profusion of dried blood beyond anything my former cuts and
abrasions could furnish. My chest, too, seemed pierced by a hundred wounds, as though some
malign, titanic ibis had been pecking at it. Assuredly the agency which had removed the rope was a
hostile one, and had begun to wreak terrible injuries upon me when somehow impelled to desist. Yet
at the same time my sensations were distinctly the reverse of what one might expect. Instead of
sinking into a bottomless pit of despair, I was stirred to a new courage and action; for now I felt that
the evil forces were physical things which a fearless man might encounter on an even basis.
On the strength of this thought I tugged again at my bonds, and used all the art of a lifetime to free
myself as I had so often done amidst the glare of lights and the applause of vast crowds. The familiar
details of my escaping process commenced to engross me, and now that the long rope was gone I
half regained my belief that the supreme horrors were hallucinations after all, and that there had
never been any terrible shaft, measureless abyss or interminable rope. Was I after all in the gateway
temple of Khephren beside the Sphinx, and had the sneaking Arabs stolen in to torture me as I lay
helpless there? At any rate, I must be free. Let me stand up unbound, ungagged, and with eyes open to
catch any glimmer of light which might come trickling from any source, and I could actually delight
in the combat against evil and treacherous foes!
How long I took in shaking off my encumbrances I cannot tell. It must have been longer than in my
exhibition performances, because I was wounded, exhausted, and enervated by the experiences I had
passed through. When I was finally free, and taking deep breaths of a chill, damp, evilly spiced air all
the more horrible when encountered without the screen of gag and blindfold edges, I found that I was
too cramped and fatigued to move at once. There I lay, trying to stretch a frame bent and mangled, for
an indefinite period, and straining my eyes to catch a glimpse of some ray of light which would give
a hint as to my position.
By degrees my strength and flexibility returned, but my eyes beheld nothing. As I staggered to my
feet I peered diligently in every direction, yet met only an ebony blackness as great as that I had
known when blindfolded. I tried my legs, blood-encrusted beneath my shredded trousers, and found
that I could walk; yet could not decide in what direction to go. Obviously I ought not to walk at
random, and perhaps retreat directly from the entrance I sought; so I paused to note the difference of
the cold, fetid, natron-scented air-current which I had never ceased to feel. Accepting the point of its
source as the possible entrance to the abyss, I strove to keep track of this landmark and to walk
consistently toward it.
I had a match-box with me, and even a small electric flashlight; but of course the pockets of my
tossed and tattered clothing were long since emptied of all heavy articles. As I walked cautiously in
the blackness, the draft grew stronger and more offensive, till at length I could regard it as nothing
less than a tangible stream of detestable vapor pouring out of some aperture like the smoke of the
genie from the fisherman's jar in the Eastern tale. The East...Egypt...truly, this dark cradle of
civilization was ever the wellspring of horrors and marvels unspeakable!
The more I reflected on the nature of this cavern wind, the greater my sense of disquiet became;
for although despite its odor I had sought its source as at least an indirect clue to the outer world, I
now saw plainly that this foul emanation could have no admixture or connection whatsoever with the
clean air of the Libyan Desert, but must be essentially a thing vomited from sinister gulfs still lower
down. I had, then, been walking in the wrong direction!
After a moment's reflection I decided not to retrace my steps. Away from the draft I would have
no landmarks, for the roughly level rock floor was devoid of distinctive configurations. If, however,
I followed up the strange current, I would undoubtedly arrive at an aperture of some sort, from
whose gate I could perhaps work round the walls to the opposite side of this Cyclopean and
otherwise unnavigable hall. That I might fail, I well realized. I saw that this was no part of
Khephren's gateway temple which tourists know, and it struck me that this particular hall might be
unknown even to archaeologists, and merely stumbled upon by the inquisitive and malignant Arabs
who had imprisoned me. If so, was there any present gate of escape to the known parts or to the outer
air?
What evidence, indeed, did I now possess that this was the gateway temple at all? For a moment
all my wildest speculations rushed back upon me, 'and I thought of that vivid melange of impressions-
-descent, suspension in space, the rope, my wounds, and the dreams that were frankly dreams. Was
this the end of life for me? Or indeed, would it be merciful if this moment were the end? I could
answer none of my own questions, but merely kept on, till Fate for a third time reduced me to
oblivion.
This time there were no dreams, for the suddenness of the incident shocked me out of all thought
either conscious or subconscious. Tripping on an unexpected descending step at a point where the
offensive draft became strong enough to offer an actual physical resistance, I was precipitated
headlong down a black flight of huge stone stairs into a gulf of hideousness unrelieved.
That I ever breathed again is a tribute to the inherent vitality of the healthy human organism. Often
I look back to that night and feel a touch of actual humor in those repeated lapses of consciousness;
lapses whose succession reminded me at the time of nothing more than the crude cinema melodramas
of that period. Of course, it is possible that the repeated lapses never occurred; and that all the
features of that underground nightmare were merely the dreams of one long coma which began with
the shock of my descent into that abyss and ended with the healing balm of the outer air and of the
rising sun which found me stretched on the sands of Gizeh before the sardonic and dawn--flushed
face of the Great Sphinx.
I prefer to believe this latter explanation as much as I can, hence was glad when the police told
me that the barrier to Krephren's gateway temple had been found unfastened, and that a sizeable rift to
the surface did actually exist in one corner of the still buried part. I was glad, too, when the doctors
pronounced my wounds only those to be expected from my seizure, blindfolding, lowering,
struggling with bonds, falling some distance--perhaps into a depression in the temple's inner gallery-
-dragging myself to the outer barrier and escaping from it, and experiences like that.., a very
soothing diagnosis. And yet I know that there must be more than appears on the surface. That extreme
descent is too vivid a memory to be dismissed--and it is odd that no one has ever been able to find a
man answering the description of my guide, Abdul Reis el Drogman--the tomb-throated guide who
looked and smiled like King Khephren.
I have digressed from my connected narrative--perhaps in the vain hope of evading the telling of
that final incident; that incident which of all is most certainly an hallucination. But I promised to relate
it, and I do not break promises. When I recovered--or seemed to recover--my senses after that fall
down the black stone stairs, I was quite as alone and in darkness as before. The windy stench, bad
enough before, was now fiendish; yet I had acquired enough familiarity by this time to bear it
stoically. Dazedly I began to crawl away from the place whence the putrid wind came, and with my
bleeding hands felt the colossal blocks of a mighty pavement. Once my head struck against a hard
object, and when I felt of it I learned that it was the base of a column--a column of unbelievable
immensity--whose surface was covered with gigantic chiseled hieroglyphics very perceptible to my
touch.
Crawling on, I encountered other titan columns at incomprehensible distances apart; when
suddenly my attention was captured by the realization of something which must have been impinging
on my subconscious hearing long before the conscious sense was aware of it.
From some still lower chasm in earth's bowels were proceeding certain sounds, measured and
definite, and like nothing I had ever heard before. That they were very ancient and distinctly
ceremonial I felt almost intuitively; and much reading in Egyptology led me to associate them with
the flute, the sambuke, the sistrum, and the tympanum. In their rhythmic piping, droning, rattling and
beating I felt an element of terror beyond all the known terrors of earth--a terror peculiarly
dissociated from personal fear, and taking the form of a sort of objective pity for our planet, that it
should hold within its depths such horrors as must lie beyond these aegipanic cacophonies. The
sounds increased in volume, and I felt that they were approaching. Then--and may all the gods of all
pantheons unite to keep the like from my ears again--I began to hear, faintly and afar off, the morbid
and millennial tramping of the marching things.
It was hideous that footfalls so dissimilar should move in such perfect rhythm. The training of
unhallowed thousands of years must lie behind that march of earth's inmost monstrosities...padding,
clicking, walking, stalking, rumbling, lumbering, crawling...and all to the abhorrent discords of those
mocking instruments. And then--God keep the memory of those Arab legends out of my head!--the
mummies without souls...the meeting-place of the wandering kas....the hordes of the devil-cursed
pharaonic dead of forty centuries...the composite mummies led through the uttermost onyx voids by
King Khephren and his ghoul--queen Nitocris..
The tramping drew nearer--Heaven save me from the sound of those feet and paws and hooves
and pads and talons as it commenced to acquire detail! Down limitless reaches of sunless pavement a
spark of light flickered in the malodorous wind and I drew behind the enormous circumference of a
Cyclopic column that I might escape for a while the horror that was stalking million-footed toward
me through gigantic hypostyles of inhuman dread and phobic antiquity. The flickers increased, and
the tramping and dissonant rhythm grew sickeningly loud. In the quivering orange light there stood
faintly forth a scene of such stony awe that I gasped from sheer wonder that conquered even fear and
repulsion. Bases of columns whose middles were higher than human sight, mere bases of things that
must each dwarf the Eiffel Tower to insignificance...hieroglyphics carved by unthinkable hands in
caverns where daylight can be only a remote legend...
I would not look at the marching things. That I desperately resolved as I heard their creaking
joints and nitrous wheezing above the dead music and the dead tramping. It was merciful that they did
not speak...but God! their crazy torches began to cast shadows on the surface of those stupendous
columns. Hippopotami should not have human hands and carry torches...men should not have the
heads of crocodiles...
I tried to turn away, but the shadows and the sounds and the stench were everywhere. Then I
remembered something I used to do in half--conscious nightmares as a boy, and began to repeat to
myself, 'This is a dream! This is a dream!' But it was of no use, and I could only shut my eyes and
pray...at least, that is what I think I did, for one is never sure in visions--and I know this can have been
nothing more. I wondered whether I should ever reach the world again, and at times would furtively
open my eyes to see if I could discern any feature of the place other than the wind of spiced
putrefaction, the topless columns, and the thaumatropically grotesque shadows of abnormal horror.
The sputtering glare of multiplying torches now shone, and unless this hellish place were wholly
without walls, I could not fail to see some boundary or fixed landmark soon. But I had to shut my
eyes again when I realized how many of the things were assembling--and when I glimpsed a certain
object walking solemnly and steadily without any body above the waist.
A fiendish and ululant corpse-gurgle or death-rattle now split the very atmosphere--the charnel
atmosphere poisonous with naftha and bitumen blasts--in one concerted chorus from the ghoulish
legion of hybrid blasphemies. My eyes, perversely shaken open, gazed for an instant upon a sight
which no human creature could even imagine without panic, fear and physical exhaustion. The things
had filed ceremonially in one direction, the direction of the noisome wind, where the light of their
torches showed their bended heads--or the bended heads of such as had heads. They were
worshipping before a great black fetor-belching aperture which reached up almost out of sight, and
which I could see was flanked at right angles by two giant staircases whose ends were far away in
shadow. One of these was indubitably the staircase I had fallen down.
The dimensions of the hole were fully in proportion with those of the columns--an ordinary
house would have been lost in it, and any average public building could easily have been moved in
and out. It was so vast a surface that only by moving the eye could one trace its boundaries...so vast,
so hideously black, and so aromatically stinking. Directly in front of this yawning Polyphemus-door
the things were throwing objects--evidently sacrifices or religious offerings, to judge by their
gestures. Khephren was their leader; sneering King Khephren or the guide Abdul Reis, crowned
with a golden pshent and intoning endless formulae with the hollow voice of the dead. By his side
knelt beautiful Queen Nitocris, whom I saw in profile for a moment, noting that the right half of her
face was eaten away by rats or other ghouls. And I shut my eyes again when I saw what objects were
being thrown as offerings to the fetid aperture or its possible local deity.
It occurred to me that, judging from the elaborateness of this worship, the concealed deity must
be one of considerable importance. Was it Osiris or Isis, Horus or Anubis, or some vast unknown
God of the Dead still more central and supreme? There is a legend that terrible altars and colossi
were reared to an Unknown One before ever the known gods were worshipped...
And now, as I steeled myself to watch the rapt and sepulchral adorations of those nameless things,
a thought of escape flashed upon me. The hall was dim, and the columns heavy with shadow. With
every creature of that nightmare throng absorbed in shocking raptures, it might be barely possible for
me to creep past to the far-away end of one of the staircases and ascend unseen; trusting to Fate and
skill to deliver me from the upper reaches. Where I was, I neither knew nor seriously reflected upon-
-and for a moment it struck me as amusing to plan a serious escape from that which I knew to be a
dream. Was I in some hidden and unsuspected lower realm of Khephren's gateway temple--that temple
which generations have persistently called the Temple of the Sphinx? I could not conjecture, but I
resolved to ascend to life and consciousness if wit and muscle could carry me.
Wriggling flat on my stomach, I began the anxious journey toward the foot of the left-hand
staircase, which seemed the more accessible of the two. I cannot describe the incidents and
sensations of that crawl, but they may be guessed when one reflects on what I had to watch steadily in
that malign, wind-blown torchlight in order to avoid detection. The bottom of the staircase was, as I
have said, far away in shadow, as it had to be to rise without a bend to the dizzy parapeted landing
above the titanic aperture. This placed the last stages of my crawl at some distance from the noisome
herd, though the spectacle chilled me even when quite remote at my right.
At length I succeeded in reaching the steps and began to climb; keeping close to the wall, on
which I observed decorations of the most hideous sort, and relying for safety on the absorbed,
ecstatic interest with which the monstrosities watched the foul-breezed aperture and the impious
objects of nourishment they had flung on the pavement before it. Though the staircase was huge and
steep, fashioned of vast porphyry blocks as if for the feet of a giant, the ascent seemed virtually
interminable. Dread of discovery and the pain which renewed exercise had brought to my wounds
combined to make that upward crawl a thing of agonizing memory. I had intended, on reaching the
landing, to climb immediately onward along whatever upper staircase might mount from there;
stopping for no last look at the carrion abominations that pawed and genuflected some seventy or
eighty feet below--yet a sudden repetition of that thunderous corpse-gurgle and death-rattle chorus,
coming as I had nearly gained the top of the flight and showing by its ceremonial rhythm that it was
not an alarm of my discovery, caused me to pause and peer cautiously over the parapet.
The monstrosities were hailing something which had poked itself out of the nauseous aperture to
seize the hellish fare proffered it. It was something quite ponderous, even as seen from my height;
something yellowish and hairy, and endowed with a sort of nervous motion. It was as large, perhaps,
as a good-sized hippopotamus, but very curiously shaped. It seemed to have no neck, but five
separate shaggy heads springing in a row from a roughly cylindrical trunk; the first very small, the
second good-sized, the third and fourth equal and largest of all, and the fifth rather small, though not
so small as the first.
Out of these heads darted curious rigid tentacles which seized ravenously on the excessively
great quantities of unmentionable food placed before the aperture. Once in a while the thing would
leap up, and occasionally it would retreat into its den in a very odd manner. Its locomotion was so
inexplicable that I stared in fascination, wishing it would emerge farther from the cavernous lair
beneath me.
Then it did emerge...it did emerge, and at the sight I turned and fled into the darkness up the
higher staircase that rose behind me; fled unknowingly up incredible steps and ladders and inclined
planes to which no human sight or logic guided me, and which I must ever relegate to the world of
dreams for want of any confirmation. It must have been a dream, or the dawn would never have found
me breathing on the sands of Gizeh before the sardonic dawn-flushed face of the Great Sphinx.
The Great Sphinx! God!--that idle question I asked myself on that sun--blest morning
before...what huge and loathsome abnormality was the Sphinx originally carven to represent?
Accursed is the sight, be it in dream or not, that revealed to me the supreme horror--the unknown
God of the Dead, which licks its colossal chops in the unsuspected abyss, fed hideous morsels by
soulless absurdities that should not exist. The five-headed monster that emerged...that five-headed
monster as large as a hippopotamus...the five headed monster--and that of which it is the merest
forepaw...
But I survived, and I know it was only a dream.

IN THE VAULT
Birch acquired a limitation and changed his business in 1881, yet never discussed the case when
he could avoid it. Neither did his old physician Dr. Davis, who died years ago. It was generally
stated that the affliction and shock were results of an unlucky slip whereby Birch had locked himself
for nine hours in the receiving tomb of Peck Valley Cemetery, escaping only by crude and disastrous
mechanical means; but while this much was undoubtedly true, there were other and blacker things
which the man used to whisper to me in his drunken delirium toward the last. He confided in me
because I was his doctor, and because he probably felt the need of confiding in someone else after
Davis died. He was a bachelor, wholly without relatives.
Birch, before 1881, had been the village undertaker of PeckValley; and was a very calloused and
primitive specimen even as such specimens go. The practices I heard attributed to him would be
unbelievable today, at least in a city; and even Peck Valley would have shuddered a bit had it known
the easy ethics of its mortuary artist in such debatable matters as the ownership of costly "laying-out"
apparel invisible beneath the casket's lid, and the degree of dignity to be maintained in posing and
adapting the unseen members of lifeless tenants to containers not always calculated with sublimest
accuracy. Most distinctly Birch was lax, insensitive, and professionally undesirable; yet I still think
he was not an evil man. He was merely crass of fibre and function--thoughtless, careless, and
liquorish, as his easily avoidable accident proves, and without that modicum of imagination which
holds the average citizen within certain limits fixed by taste.
Just where to begin Birch's story I can hardly decide, since I am no practiced teller of tales. I
suppose one should start in the cold December of 1880, when the ground froze and the cemetery
delvers found they could dig no more graves till spring. Fortunately the village was small and the
death rate low, so that it was possible to give all of Birch's inanimate charges a temporary haven in
the single antiquated receiving tomb. The undertaker grew doubly lethargic in the bitter weather, and
seemed to outdo even himself in carelessness. Never did he knock together flimsier and ungainlier
caskets, or disregard more flagrantly the needs of the rusty lock on the tomb door which he slammed
open and shut with such nonchalant abandon.
At last the spring thaw came, and graves were laboriously prepared for the nine silent harvests of
the grim reaper which waited in the tomb. Birch, though dreading the bother of removal and
interment, began his task of transference one disagreeable April morning, but ceased before noon
because of a heavy rain that seemed to irritate his horse, after having laid but one mortal tenent to its
permanent rest. That was Darius Peck, the nonagenarian, whose grave was not far from the tomb.
Birch decided that he would begin the next day with little old Matthew Fenner, whose grave was also
near by; but actually postponed the matter for three days, not getting to work till Good Friday, the
15th. Being without superstition, he did not heed the day at all; though ever afterward he refused to
do anything of importance on that fateful sixth day of the week. Certainly, the events of that evening
greatly changed George Birch.
On the afternoon of Friday, April 15th, then, Birch set out for the tomb with horse and wagon to
transfer the body of Matthew Fenner. That he was not perfectly sober, he subsequently admitted;
though he had not then taken to the wholesale drinking by which he later tried to forget certain things.
He was just dizzy and careless enough to annoy his sensitive horse, which as he drew it viciously up
at the tomb neighed and pawed and tossed its head, much as on that former occasion when the rain had
vexed it. The day was clear, but a high wind had sprung up; and Birch was glad to get to shelter as he
unlocked the iron door and entered the side-hill vault. Another might not have relished the damp,
odorous chamber with the eight carelessly placed coffins; but Birch in those days was insensitive,
and was concerned only in getting the right coffin for the right grave. He had not forgotten the
criticism aroused when Hannah Bixby's relatives, wishing to transport her body to the cemetery in the
city whither they had moved, found the casket of Judge Capwell beneath her headstone.
The light was dim, but Birch's sight was good, and he did not get Asaph Sawyer's coffin by
mistake, although it was very similar. He had, indeed, made that coffin for Matthew Fenner; but had
cast it aside at last as too awkward and flimsy, in a fit of curious sentimentality aroused by recalling
how kindly and generous the little old man had been to him during his bankruptcy five years before.
He gave old Matt the very best his skill could produce, but was thrifty enough to save the rejected
specimen, and to use it when Asaph Sawyer died of a malignant fever. Sawyer was not a lovable man,
and many stories were told of his almost inhuman vindictiveness and tenacious memory for wrongs
real or fancied. To him Birch had felt no compunction in assigning the carelessly made coffin which
he now pushed out of the way in his quest for the Fenner casket.
It was just as he had recognised old Matt's coffin that the door slammed to in the wind, leaving
him in a dusk even deeper than before. The narrow transom admitted only the feeblest of rays, and the
overhead ventilation funnel virtually none at all; so that he was reduced to a profane fumbling as he
made his halting way among the long boxes toward the latch. In this funereal twilight he rattled the
rusty handles, pushed at the iron panels, and wondered why the massive portal had grown so suddenly
recalcitrant. In this twilight too, he began to realise the truth and to shout loudly as if his horse
outside could do more than neigh an unsympathetic reply. For the long--neglected latch was
obviously broken, leaving the careless undertaker trapped in the vault, a victim of his own oversight.
The thing must have happened at about three-thirty in the afternoon. Birch, being by temperament
phlegmatic and practical, did not shout long; but proceeded to grope about for some tools which he
recalled seeing in a corner of the tomb. It is doubtful whether he was touched at all by the horror and
exquisite weirdness of his position, but the bald fact of imprisonment so far from the daily paths of
men was enough to exasperate him thoroughly. His day's work was sadly interrupted, and unless
chance presently brought some rambler hither, he might have to remain all night or longer. The pile
of tools soon reached, and a hammer and chisel selected, Birch returned over the coffins to the door.
The air had begun to be exceedingly unwholesome; but to this detail he paid no attention as he toiled,
half by feeling, at the heavy and corroded metal of the latch. He would have given much for a lantern
or bit of candle; but lacking these, bungled semi--sightlessly as best he might.
When he perceived that the latch was hopelessly unyielding, at least to such meagre tools and
under such tenebrous conditions as these, Birch glanced about for other possible points of escape.
The vault had been dug from a hillside, so that the narrow ventilation funnel in the top ran through
several feet of earth, making this direction utterly useless to consider. Over the door, however, the
high, slit-like transom in the brick facade gave promise of possible enlargement to a diligent worker;
hence upon this his eyes long rested as he racked his brains for means to reach it. There was nothing
like a ladder in the tomb, and the coffin niches on the sides and rear--which Birch seldom took the
trouble to use--afforded no ascent to the space above the door. Only the coffins themselves remained
as potential stepping--stones, and as he considered these he speculated on the best mode of
transporting them. Three coffin-heights, he reckoned, would permit him to reach the transom; but he
could do better with four. The boxes were fairly even, and could be piled up like blocks; so he
began to compute how he might most stably use the eight to rear a scalable platform four deep. As he
planned, he could not but wish that the units of his contemplated staircase had been more securely
made. Whether he had imagination enough to wish they were empty, is strongly to be doubted.
Finally he decided to lay a base of three parallel with the wall, to place upon this two layers of
two each, and upon these a single box to serve as the platform. This arrangement could be ascended
with a minimum of awkwardness, and would furnish the desired height. Better still, though, he would
utilise only two boxes of the base to support the superstructure, leaving one free to be piled on top
in case the actual feat of escape required an even greater altitude. And so the prisoner toiled in the
twilight, heaving the unresponsive remnants of mortality with little ceremony as his miniature Tower
of Babel rose course by course. Several of the coffins began to split under the stress of handling,
and he planned to save the stoutly built casket of little Matthew Fenner for the top, in order that his
feet might have as certain a surface as possible. In the semi-gloom he trusted mostly to touch to
select the right one, and indeed came upon it almost by accident, since it tumbled into his hands as if
through some odd volition after he had unwittingly placed it beside another on the third layer.
The tower at length finished, and his aching arms rested by a pause during which he sat on the
bottom step of his grim device, Birch cautiously ascended with his tools and stood abreast of the
narrow transom. The borders of the space were entirely of brick, and there seemed little doubt but
that he could shortly chisel away enough to allow his body to pass. As his hammer blows began to
fall, the horse outside whinnied in a tone which may have been encouraging and to others may have
been mocking. In either case it would have been appropriate; for the unexpected tenacity of the easy-
looking brickwork was surely a sardonic commentary on the vanity of mortal hopes, and the source
of a task whose performance deserved every possible stimulus.
Dusk fell and found Birch still toiling. He worked largely by feeling now, since newly gathered
clouds hid the moon; and though progress was still slow, he felt heartened at the extent of his
encroachments on the top and bottom of the aperture. He could, he was sure, get out by midnight--
though it is characteristic of him that this thought was untinged with eerie implications. Undisturbed
by oppressive reflections on the time, the place, and the company beneath his feet, he philosophically
chipped away the stony brickwork; cursing when a fragment hit him in the face, and laughing when
one struck the increasingly excited horse that pawed near the cypress tree. In time the hole grew so
large that he ventured to try his body in it now and then, shifting about so that the coffins beneath him
rocked and creaked. He would not, he found, have to pile another on his platform to make the proper
height; for the hole was on exactly the right level to use as soon as its size might permit.
It must have been midnight at least when Birch decided he could get through the transom. Tired
and perspiring despite many rests, he descended to the floor and sat a while on the bottom box to
gather strength for the final wriggle and leap to the ground outside. The hungry horse was neighing
repeatedly and almost uncannily, and he vaguely wished it would stop. He was curiously unelated
over his impending escape, and almost dreaded the exertion, for his form had the indolent stoutness
of early middle age. As he remounted the splitting coffins he felt his weight very poignantly;
especially when, upon reaching the topmost one, he heard that aggravated crackle which bespeaks
the wholesale rending of wood. He had, it seems, planned in vain when choosing the stoutest coffin
for the platform; for no sooner was his full bulk again upon it than the rotting lid gave way, jouncing
him two feet down on a surface which even he did not care to imagine. Maddened by the sound, or by
the stench which billowed forth even to the open air, the waiting horse gave a scream that was too
frantic for a neigh, and plunged madly off through the night, the wagon rattling crazily behind it.
Birch, in his ghastly situation, was now too low for an easy scramble out of the enlarged transom;
but gathered his energies for a determined try. Clutching the edges of the aperture, he sought to pull
himself up, when he noticed a queer retardation in the form of an apparent drag on both his ankles. In
another moment he knew fear for the first time that night; for struggle as he would, he could not
shake clear of the unknown grasp which held his feet in relentless captivity. Horrible pains, as of
savage wounds, shot through his calves; and in his mind was a vortex of fright mixed with an
unquenchable materialism that suggested splinters, loose nails, or some other attribute of a breaking
wooden box. Perhaps he screamed. At any rate he kicked and squirmed frantically and automatically
whilst his consciousness was almost eclipsed in a half-swoon.
Instinct guided him in his wriggle through the transom, and in the crawl which followed his
jarring thud on the damp ground. He could not walk, it appeared, and the emerging moon must have
witnessed a horrible sight as he dragged his bleeding ankles toward the cemetery lodge; his fingers
clawing the black mould in brainless haste, and his body responding with that maddening slowness
from which one suffers when chased by the phantoms of nightmare. There was evidently, however,
no pursuer; for he was alone and alive when Armington, the lodge-keeper, answered his feeble
clawing at the door.
Armington helped Birch to the outside of a spare bed and sent his little son Edwin for Dr. Davis.
The afflicted man was fully conscious, but would say nothing of any consequence; merely muttering
such things as "Oh, my ankles!", "Let go!", or "Shut in the tomb". Then the doctor came with his
medicine-case and asked crisp questions, and removed the patient's outer clothing, shoes, and socks.
The wounds--for both ankles were frightfully lacerated about the Achilles' tendons--seemed to
puzzle the old physician greatly, and finally almost to frighten him. His questioning grew more than
medically tense, and his hands shook as he dressed the mangled members; binding them as if he
wished to get the wounds out of sight as quickly as possible.
For an impersonal doctor, Davis' ominous and awestruck cross-examination became very strange
indeed as he sought to drain from the weakened undertaker every least detail of his horrible
experience. He was oddly anxious to know if Birch were sure--absolutely sure--of the identity of
that top coffin of the pile; how he had chosen it, how he had been certain of it as the Fenner coffin in
the dusk, and how he had distinguished it from the inferior duplicate coffin of vicious Asaph
Sawyer. Would the firm Fenner casket have caved in so readily? Davis, an old-time village
practitioner, had of course seen both at the respective funerals, as indeed he had attended both Fenner
and Sawyer in their last illnesses. He had even wondered, at Sawyer's funeral, how the vindictive
farmer had managed to lie straight in a box so closely akin to that of the diminutive Fenner.
After a full two hours Dr. Davis left, urging Birch to insist at all times that his wounds were
caused entirely by loose nails and splintering wood. What else, he added, could ever in any case be
proved or believed? But it would be well to say as little as could be said, and to let no other doctor
treat the wounds. Birch heeded this advice all the rest of his life till he told me his story; and when I
saw the scars--ancient and whitened as they then were--I agreed that he was wise in so doing. He
always remained lame, for the great tendons had been severed; but I think the greatest lameness was in
his soul. His thinking processes, once so phlegmatic and logical, had become ineffaceably scarred;
and it was pitiful to note his response to certain chance allusions such as "Friday", "Tomb", "Coffin",
and words of less obvious concatenation. His frightened horse had gone home, but his frightened
wits never quite did that. He changed his business, but something always preyed upon him. It may
have been just fear, and it may have been fear mixed with a queer belated sort of remorse for bygone
crudities. His drinking, of course, only aggravated what it was meant to alleviate.
When Dr. Davis left Birch that night he had taken a lantern and gone to the old receiving tomb.
The moon was shining on the scattered brick fragments and marred facade, and the latch of the great
door yielded readily to a touch from the outside. Steeled by old ordeals in dissecting rooms, the
doctor entered and looked about, stifling the nausea of mind and body that everything in sight and
smell induced. He cried aloud once, and a little later gave a gasp that was more terrible than a cry.
Then he fled back to the lodge and broke all the rules of his calling by rousing and shaking his
patient, and hurling at him a succession of shuddering whispers that seared into the bewildered ears
like the hissing of vitriol.
"It was Asaph's coffin, Birch, just as I thought! I knew his teeth, with the front ones missing on the
upper jaw--never, for God's sake, show those wounds! The body was pretty badly gone, but if ever I
saw vindictiveness on any face--or former face...You know what a fiend he was for revenge--how he
ruined old Raymond thirty years after their boundary suit, and how he stepped on the puppy that
snapped at him a year ago last August...He was the devil incarnate, Birch, and I believe his eye-for-
an-eye fury could beat old Father Death himself. God, what a rage! I'd hate to have it aimed at me!
"Why did you do it, Birch? He was a scoundrel, and I don't blame you for giving him a cast-aside
coffin, but you always did go too damned far! Well enough to skimp on the thing some way, but you
knew what a little man old Fenner was.
"I'll never get the picture out of my head as long as I live. You kicked hard, for Asaph's coffin
was on the floor. His head was broken in, and everything was tumbled about. I've seen sights before,
but there was one thing too much here. An eye for an eye! Great heavens, Birch, but you got what
you deserved. The skull turned my stomach, but the other was worse--those ankles cut neatly off to
fit Matt Fenner's cast-aside coffin!"

MEDUSA'S COIL
It was a lonely and deserted country, but at last I spied a roof among a clump of trees near the
small river on my right; perhaps a full half-mile from the road, and probably reachable by some path
or drive which I would presently come upon. In the absence of any nearer dwelling, I resolved to try
my luck there; and was glad when the bushes by the roadside revealed the ruin of a carved stone
gateway, covered with dry, dead vines and choked with undergrowth which explained why I had not
been able to trace the path across the fields in my first distant view. I saw that I could not drive the
car in, so I parked it very carefully near the gate--where a thick evergreen would shield it in case of
rain--and got out for the long walk to the house.
Traversing that brush-grown path in the gathering twilight I was conscious of a distinct sense of
foreboding, probably induced by the air of sinister decay hovering about the gate and the former
driveway. From the carvings on the old stone pillars I inferred that this place was once an estate of
manorial dignity; and I could clearly see that the driveway had originally boasted guardian lines of
linden trees, some of which had died, while others had lost their special identity among the wild
scrub growths of the region.
As I ploughed onward, cockleburs and stickers clung to my clothes, and I began to wonder
whether the place could be inhabited after all. Was I tramping on a vain errand? For a moment I was
tempted to go back and try some farm farther along the road, when a view of the house ahead aroused
my curiosity and stimulated my venturesome spirit.
There was something provocatively fascinating in the tree-girt, decrepit pile before me, for it
spoke of the graces and spaciousness of a bygone era and a far more southerly environment. It was a
typical wooden plantation house of the classic, early nineteenth-century pattern, with two and a half
stories and a great Ionic portico whose pillars reached up as far as the attic and supported a
triangular pediment. Its state of decay was extreme and obvious; one of the vast columns having
rotted and fallen to the ground, while the upper piazza or balcony had sagged dangerously low. Other
buildings, I judged, had formerly stood near it.
As I mounted the broad stone steps to the low porch and the carved and fanlighted doorway I felt
distinctly nervous, and started to light a cigarette--desisting when I saw how dry and inflammable
everything about me was. Though now convinced that the house was deserted, I nevertheless
hesitated to violate its dignity without knocking; so tugged at the rusty iron knocker until I could get it
to move, and finally set up a cautious rapping which seemed to make the whole place shake and rattle.
There was no response, yet once more I plied the cumbrous, creaking device--as much to dispel the
sense of unholy silence and solitude as to arouse any possible occupant of the ruin.
Somewhere near the river I heard the mournful note of a dove, and it seemed as if the coursing
water itself were faintly audible. Half in a dream, I seized and rattled the ancient latch, and finally
gave the great six-panelled door a frank trying. It was unlocked, as I could see in a moment; and
though it stuck and grated on its hinges I began to push it open, stepping through it into a vast
shadowy hall as I did so.
But the moment I took this step I regretted it. It was not that a legion of specters confronted me in
that dim and dusty hall with the ghostly Empire furniture; but that I knew all at once that the place was
not deserted at all. There was a creaking on the great curved staircase, and the sound of faltering
footsteps slowly descending. Then I saw a tall, bent figure silhouetted for an instant against the great
Palladian window on the landing.
My first start of terror was soon over, and as the figure descended the final flight I was ready to
greet the householder whose privacy I had invaded. In the semi-darkness I could see him reach in his
pocket for a match. There came a flare as he lighted a small kerosene lamp which stood on a rickety
console table near the foot of the stairs. In the feeble glow was revealed the stooping figure of a
very tall, emaciated old man; disordered as to dress and unshaved as to face, yet for all that with the
bearing and expression of a gentleman.
I did not wait for him to speak, but at once began to explain my presence.
"You'll pardon my coming in like this, but when my knocking didn't raise anybody I concluded that
no one lived here. What I wanted originally was to know the right road to Cape Girardeau--the
shortest road, that is. I wanted to get there before dark, but now, of course--"
As I paused, the man spoke; in exactly the cultivated tone I had expected, and with a mellow
accent as unmistakably Southern as the house he inhabited.
"Rather, you must pardon me for not answering your knock more promptly. I live in a very retired
way, and am not usually expecting visitors. At first I thought you were a mere curiosity-seeker. Then
when you knocked again I started to answer, but I am not well and have to move very slowly. Spinal
neuritis--very troublesome case.
"But as for your getting to town before dark--it's plain you can't do that. The road you are on--for
I suppose you came from the gate--isn't the best or shortest way. What you must do is to take your
first left after you leave the gate--that is, the first real road to your left. There are three or four cart
paths you can ignore, but you can't mistake the real road because of the extra large willow tree on the
right just opposite it. Then when you've turned, keep on past two roads and turn to the right along the
third. After that--"
"Please wait a moment! How can I follow all these clues in pitch darkness, without ever having
been near here before, and with only an indifferent pair of headlights to tell me what is and what isn't
a road? Besides, I think it's going to storm pretty soon, and my car is an open one. It looks as if I were
in a bad fix if I want to get to Cape Girardeau tonight. The fact is, I don't think I'd better try to make it.
I don't like to impose burdens, or anything like that--but in view of the circumstances, do you suppose
you could put me up for the night? I won't be any trouble--no meals or anything. Just let me have a
corner to sleep in till daylight, and I'm all right. I can leave the car in the road where it is--a bit of wet
weather won't hurt it if worst comes to worst."
As I made my sudden request I could see the old man's face lose its former expression of quiet
resignation and take on an odd, surprised look.
"Sleep--here?"
He seemed so astonished at my request that I repeated it.
"Yes, why not? I assure you I won't be any trouble. What else can I do? I'm a stranger hereabouts,
these roads are a labyrinth in the dark, and I'll wager it'll be raining torrents outside of an hour--"
This time it my host's turn to interrupt, and as he did so I could feel a peculiar quality in his deep,
musical voice.
"A stranger--of course you must be, else you wouldn't think of sleeping here, wouldn't think of
coming here at all. People don't come here nowadays."
He paused, and my desire to stay was increased a thousandfold by the sense of mystery his
laconic words seemed to evoke. There was surely something alluringly queer about this place, and
the pervasive musty smell seemed to cloak a thousand secrets. Again I noticed the extreme
decrepitude of everything about me; manifest even in the feeble rays of the single small lamp. I felt
woefully chilly, and saw with regret that no heating was provided, and yet so great was my curiosity
that I still wished most ardently to stay and learn something of the recluse and his dismal abode.
"Let that be as it may," I replied. "I can't help about other people. But I surely would like to have a
spot to stop till daylight. Still--if people don't relish this place, mayn't it be because it's getting so
run-down? Of course I suppose it would a take a fortune to keep such an estate up, but if the burden's
too great why don't you look for smaller quarters? Why try to stick it out here in this way--with all
the hardships and discomforts?"
The man did not seem offended, but answered me very gravely.
"Surely you may stay if you really wish to--you can come to no harm that I know of. But others
claim there are certain peculiarly undesirable influences here. As for me--I stay here because I have
to. There is something I feel it a duty to guard--something that holds me. I wish I had the money and
health and ambition to take decent care of the house and grounds."
With my curiosity still more heightened, I prepared to take my host at his word; and followed him
slowly upstairs when he motioned me to do so. It was very dark now, and a faint pattering outside told
me that the threatened rain had come. I would have been glad of any shelter, but this was doubly
welcome because of the hints of mystery about the place and its master. For an incurable lover of the
grotesque, no more fitting haven could have been provided.
There was a second-floor corner room in less unkempt shape than the rest of the house, and into
this my host led me, setting down his small lamp and lighting a somewhat larger one. From the
cleanliness and contents of the room, and from the books ranged along the walls, I could see that I
had not guessed amiss in thinking the man a gentleman of taste and of breeding. He was a hermit and
eccentric, no doubt, but he still had standards and intellectual interests. As he waved me to a seat I
began a conversation on general topics, and was pleased to find him not at all taciturn. If anything, he
seemed glad of someone to talk to, and did not even attempt to swerve the discussion from personal
topics.
He was, I learned, one Antoine de Russy, of an ancient, powerful, and cultivated line of Louisiana
planters. More than a century ago his grandfather, a younger son, had migrated to southern Missouri
and founded a new estate in the lavish ancestral manner; building this pillared mansion and
surrounding it with all the accessories of a great plantation. There had been, at one time, as many as
200 negroes in the cabins which stood on the flat ground in the rear--ground that the river had now
invaded--and to hear them singing and laughing and playing the banjo at night was to know the fullest
charm of a civilization and social order now sadly extinct. In front of the house, where the great
guardian oaks and willows stood, there had been a lawn like a broad green carpet, always watered
and trimmed and with flagstoned, flower-bordered walks curving through it. "Riverside"--for such
the place was called--had been a lovely and idyllic homestead in its day; and my host could recall it
when many traces of its best period remained.
It was raining hard now, with dense sheets of water beating against the insecure roof, walls, and
windows, and sending in drops through a thousand chinks and crevices. Moisture trickled down to the
floor from unsuspected places, and the mounting wind rattled the rotting, loose-hinged shutters
outside. But I minded none of this, for I saw that a story was coming. Incited to reminiscence, my host
made a move to shew me to sleeping-quarters; but kept on recalling the older, better days. Soon, I
saw, I would receive an inkling of why he lived alone in that ancient place, and why his neighbours
thought it full of undesirable influences. His voice was very musical as he spoke on, and his tale
soon took a turn which left me no chance to grow drowsy.
"Yes--Riverside was built in 1816, and my father was born in 1828. He'd be over a century old
now if he were alive, but he died young--so young I can just barely remember him. In '64 that was--he
was killed in the war, Seventh Louisiana Infantry C.S.A., for he went back to the old home to enlist.
My grandfather was too old to fight, yet he lived on to be ninety-five, and helped my mother bring me
up. A good bringing-up, too--I'll give them credit. We always had strong traditions--high notions of
honor--and my grandfather saw to it that I grew up the way de Russys have grown up, generation
after generation, ever since the Crusades. We weren't quite wiped out financially, but managed to get
on very comfortable after the war. I went to a good school in Louisiana, and later to Princeton. Later
on I was able to get the plantation on a fairly profitable basis--though you see what it's come to now.
"My mother died when I was twenty, and my grandfather two years later. It was rather lonely after
that; and in '85 I married a distant cousin in New Orleans. Things might have been different if she'd
lived, but she died when my son Denis was born. Then I had only Denis. I didn't try marriage again,
but gave all my time to the boy. He was like me--like all the de Russys--darkish and tall and thin, and
with the devil of a temper. I gave him the same training my grandfather had give me, but he didn't need
much training when it came to points of honor. It was in him, I reckon. Never saw such high spirit--all
I could do to keep him from running away to the Spanish War when he was eleven! Romantic young
devil, too--full of high notions--you'd call 'em Victorian, now--no trouble at all to make him let the
nigger wenches alone. I sent him to the same school I'd gone to, and to Princeton, too. He was Class
of 1909.
"In the end he decided to be a doctor, and went a year to the Harvard Medical School. Then he hit
on the idea of keeping to the old French tradition of the family, and argued me into sending him
across to the Sorbonne. I did--and proudly enough, though I knew how lonely I'd be with him so far
off. Would to God I hadn't! I thought he was the safest kind of boy to be in Paris. He had a room in
the Rue St. Jacques--that's near the University in the 'Latin Quarter'--but according to his letters and
his friends he didn't cut up with the gayer dogs at all. The people he knew were mostly young
fellows from home--serious students and artists who thought more of their work than of striking
attitudes and painting the town red.
"But of course there were lots of fellows who were on a sort of dividing line between serious
studies and the devil. The aesthetes--the decadents, you know. Experiments in life and sensation--the
Baudelaire kind of a chap. Naturally Denis ran up against a good many of these, and saw a good deal
of their life. They had all sorts of crazy circles and cults--imitation devil-worship, fake Black
Masses, and the like. Doubt if it did them much harm on the whole--probably most of 'em forgot all
about it in a year or two. One of the deepest in this queer stuff was a fellow Denis had known at
school--for that matter, whose father I'd known myself. Frank Marsh, of New Orleans. Disciple of
Lafcadio Hearn and Gauguin and Van Gogh--regular epitome of the yellow 'nineties. Poor devil--he
had the makings of a great artist, at that.
"Marsh was the oldest friend Denis had in Paris, so as a matter of course they saw a good deal of
each other--to talk over old times at St. Clair academy, and all that. The boy wrote me a good deal
about him, and I didn't see any especial harm when he spoke of the group of mystics Marsh ran with.
It seems there was some cult of prehistoric Egyptian and Carthaginian magic having a rage among the
Bohemian element on the left bank--some nonsensical thing that pretended to reach back to forgotten
sources of hidden truth in lost African civilisations--the great Zimbabwe, the dead Atlantean cities in
the Haggar region of the Sahara--and they had a lot of gibberish concerned with snakes and human
hair. At least, I called it gibberish, then. Denis used to quote Marsh as saying odd things about the
veiled facts behind the legend of Medusa's snaky locks--and behind the later Ptolemaic myth of
Berenice, who offered up her hair to save her husband-brother, and had it set in the sky as the
constellation Coma Berenices.
"I don't think this business made much impression on Denis until the night of the queer ritual at
Marsh's rooms when he met the priestess. Most of the devotees of the cult were young fellows, but
the head of it was a young woman who called herself 'Tanit-Isis'--letting it be known that her real
name--her name in this latest incarnation, as she put it--was Marceline Bedard. She claimed to be the
left-handed daughter of Marquis de Chameaux, and seemed to have been both a petty artist and an
artist's model before adopting this more lucrative magical game. Someone said she had lived for a
time in the West Indies--Martinique, I think--but she was very reticent about herself. Part of her pose
was a great show of austerity and holiness, but I don't think the more experienced students took that
very seriously.
"Denis, though, was far from experienced, and wrote me fully ten pages of slush about the
goddess he had discovered. If I'd only realised his simplicity I might have done something, but I
never thought a puppy infatuation like could mean much. I felt absurdly sure that Denis' touchy
personal honour and family pride would always keep him out of the most serious complications.
"As time went, though, his letters began to make me nervous. He mentioned this Marceline more
and more, and his friends less and less, and began talking about the 'cruel and silly way' they declined
to introduce her to their mothers and sisters. He seems to have asked her no questions about herself,
and I don't doubt but that she filled him full of romantic legendry concerning her origin and divine
revelations and the way people slighted her. At length I could see that Denis was altogether cutting
his own crowd and spending the bulk of his time with his alluring priestess. At her especial request
he never told the old crowd of their continual meetings; so nobody over there tried to break the affair
up.
"I suppose she thought he was fabulously rich; for he had the air of a patrician, and people of a
certain class think all aristocratic Americans are wealthy. In any case, she probably thought this a
rare chance to contract a genuine right-handed alliance with a really eligible young man. By the time
my nervousness burst into open advice, it was too late. The boy had lawfully married her, and wrote
that he was dropping his studies and bringing the woman home to Riverside. He said she had made a
great sacrifice and resigned her leadership of the magical cult, and that henceforward she would be
merely a private gentlewoman--the future mistress of Riverside, and mother of de Russys to come.
"Well, sir, I took it the best way I could. I knew that sophisticated Continentals have different
standards from our old American ones--and anyway, I really knew nothing against the woman. A
charlatan, perhaps, but why necessarily any worse? I suppose I tried to keep as nave as possible
about such things in those days, for the boy's sake. Clearly, there was nothing for a man of sense to
do but let Denis alone so long as his new wife conformed to de Russy ways. Let her have a chance to
prove herself--perhaps she wouldn't hurt the family as much as some might fear. So I didn't raise any
objections or ask any penitence. The thing was done, and I stood ready to welcome the boy back,
whatever he brought with him.
"They got here three weeks after the telegram telling of marriage. Marceline was beautiful--
there was no denying that--and I could see how the boy might very well get foolish about her. She
did have an air of breeding, and I think to this day she must have had some strains of good blood in
her. She was apparently not much over twenty; of medium size, fairly slim, and as graceful as a
tigress in posture and motion. Her complexion was a deep olive--like old ivory--and her eyes were
large and very dark. She had small, classically regular features--though not quite clean-cut enough to
suit my taste--and the most singular braid of jet black hair that I ever saw.
"I didn't wonder that she had dragged the subject of hair into her magical cult, for with that heavy
profusion of it the idea must have occurred to her naturally. Coiled up, it made her look like some
Oriental princess in a drawing of Aubrey Beardsley's. Hanging down her back, it came well below
her knees and shone in the light as if it had possessed some separate, unholy vitality of its own. I
would almost have thought of Medusa or Berenice myself--without having such things suggested to
me--upon seeing and studying that hair.
"Sometimes I thought it moved slightly of itself, and tended to arrange itself in distinct ropes or
strands, but this may have been sheer illusion. She braided it incessantly, and seemed to use some sort
of preparation on it. I got the notion once--a curious, whimsical notion--that it was a living being
which she had to feed in some strange way. All nonsense--but it added to my feeling of constraint
about her and her hair.
"For I can't deny that I failed to like her wholly, no matter how hard I tried. I couldn't tell what the
trouble was, but it was there. Something about her repelled me very subtly, and I could not help
weaving morbid and macabre associations about everything connected with her. Her complexion
called up thoughts of Babylon, Atlantis, Lemuria, and the terrible forgotten dominations of an elder
world; her eyes struck me sometimes as the eyes of some unholy forest creature or animal goddess
too immeasurably ancient to be fully human; and her hair--that dense, exotic, overnourished growth
of oily inkiness--made one shiver as a great black python might have done. There was no doubt but
that she realised my involuntary attitude--though I tried to hide it, and she tried to hide the fact that
she noticed it.
"Yet the boy's infatuation lasted. He positively fawned on her, and overdid all the little gallantries
of daily life to a sickening degree. She appeared to return the feeling, though I could see it took a
conscious effort to make her duplicate his enthusiasms and extravagances. For one thing, I think she
was piqued to learn we weren't as wealthy as she had expected.
"It was a bad business all told. I could see that sad undercurrents were arising. Denis was half-
hypnotised with puppy-love, and began to grow away from me as he felt my shrinking from his wife.
This kind of thing went on for months, and I saw that I was losing my only son--the boy who had
formed the centre of all my thoughts and acts for the past quarter century. I'll own that I felt bitter
about it--what father wouldn't? And yet I could do nothing.
"Marceline seemed to be a good wife enough in those early months, and our friends received her
without any quibbling or questioning. I was always nervous, though, about what some of the young
fellows in Paris might write home to their relatives after the news of the marriage spread around.
Despite the woman's love of secrecy, it couldn't remain hidden forever--indeed, Denis had written a
few of his closest friends, in strict confidence, as soon as he was settled with her at Riverside.
"I got to staying alone in my room more and more, with my failing health as an excuse. It was
about that time that my present spinal neuritis began to develop--which made the excuse a pretty good
one. Denis didn't seem to notice the trouble, or take any interest in me and my habits and affairs; and it
hurt me to see how callous he was getting. I began to get sleepless, and often racked my brain in the
night to try to find out what made my new daughter-in-law so repulsive and even dimly horrible to
me. It surely wasn't her old mystical nonsense, for she had left all the past behind her and never
mentioned it once. She didn't even do any painting, although I understood that she had once dabbled in
art.
"Oddly, the only ones who seemed to share my uneasiness were the servants. The darkies around
the house seemed very sullen in their attitude toward her, and in a few weeks all save the few who
were strongly attached to our family had left. These few--old Scipio and his wife Sarah, the cook
Delilah, and Mary, Scipio's daughter--were as civil as possible; but plainly revealed that their new
mistress commanded their duty rather than their affection. They stayed in their own remote part of the
house as much as possible. McCabe, our white chauffeur, was insolently admiring rather than
hostile; and another exception was a very old Zulu woman, said to have been a sort of leader in her
small cabin as a kind of family pensioner. Old Sophonisba always shewed reverence whenever
Marceline came near her, and one time I saw her kiss the ground where her mistress had walked.
Blacks are superstitious animals, and I wondered whether Marceline had been talking any of her
mystical nonsense to our hands in order to overcome their evident dislike.
"Well, that's how we went on for nearly half a year. Then, in the summer of 1916, things began to
happen. Toward the middle of June Denis got a note from his old friend Frank Marsh, telling of a sort
of nervous breakdown which made him want to take a rest in the country. It was postmarked New
Orleans--for Marsh had gone home from Paris when he felt the collapse coming on--and seemed a
very plain though polite bid for an invitation from us. Marsh, of course, knew that Marceline was
here; and asked very courteously after her. Denis was sorry to hear of his trouble and told him at
once to come along for an indefinite visit.
"Marsh came--and I was shocked to notice how he had changed since I had seen him in his earlier
days. He was a smallish, lightish fellow, with blue eyes and an undecided chin; and now I could see
the effects of drink and I don't know what else in his puffy eyelids, enlarged nose-pores, and heavy
lines around the mouth. I reckon he had taken his dose of decadence pretty seriously, and set out to be
as much of a Rimbaud, Baudelaire, or Lautreamont as he could. And yet he was delightful to talk to--
for like all decadents he was exquisitely sensitive to the color and atmosphere and names of things;
admirably, thoroughly alive, and with whole records of conscious experience in obscure, shadowy
fields of living and feeling which most of us pass over without knowing they exist. Poor young
devil--if only his father had lived longer and taken him in hand! There was great stuff in the boy!
"I was glad of the visit, for I felt it would help to set up a normal atmosphere in the house again.
And that's what it really seemed to do at first; for as I said, Marsh was a delight to have around. He
was as sincere and profound an artist as I ever saw in my life, and I certainly believe that nothing on
earth mattered to him except the perception and expression of beauty. When he saw an exquisite
thing, or was creating one, his eyes would dilate until the light irises were nearly out of sight--
leaving two mystical black pits in that weak, delicate, chalk-like face; black pits opening on strange
worlds which none of us could guess about.
"When he reached here, though, he didn't have many chances to shew this tendency; for he had, as
he told Denis, gone quite stale. It seems he had been very successful as an artist of a bizarre kind--
like Fuseli or Goya or Sime or Clark Ashton Smith--but had suddenly become played out. The world
of ordinary things around him had ceased to hold anything he could recognize as beauty--beauty, that
is, of enough force and poignancy to arouse his creative faculty. He had often been this way before-
-all decadents are--but this time he could not invent any new, strange, or outr sensation or
experience which would supply the needed illusion of fresh beauty or stimulatingly adventurous
expectancy. He was like a Durtal or a des Esseintes at the most jaded point of his curious orbit.
"Marceline was away when Marsh arrived. She hadn't been enthusiastic about his coming, and had
refused to decline an invitation from some of our friends in St. Louis which came about that time for
her and Denis. Denis, of course, stayed to receive his guest; but Marceline had gone on alone. It was
the first time they had ever been separated, and I hoped the interval would help to dispel the daze that
was making such a fool of the boy. Marceline shewed no hurry to get back, but seemed to me to
prolong her absence as much as she could. Denis stood it better than one would have expected from
such a doting husband, and seemed more like his old self as he talked over other days with Marsh and
tried to cheer the listless aesthete up.
"It was Marsh who seemed most impatient to see the woman; perhaps because he thought her
strange beauty, or some phase of the mysticism which had gone into her one-time magical cult, might
help to reawaken his interest in things and give him another start toward artistic creation. That there
was no baser reason, I was absolutely certain from what I knew of Marsh's character. With all his
weaknesses, he was a gentleman--and it had indeed relieved me when I first learned that he wanted to
come here because his willingness to accept Denis' hospitality proved that there was no reason why
he shouldn't.
"When, at last, Marceline did return, I could see that Marsh was tremendously affected. He did
not attempt to make her talk of the bizarre thing which she had so definitely abandoned, but was
unable to hide a powerful admiration which kept his eyes--now dilated in that curious way for the
first time during his visit--riveted to her every moment she was in the room. She, however, seemed
uneasy rather than pleased by his steady scrutiny--that is, she seemed so at first, though this feeling
of hers wore away in a few days, and left the two on a basis of the most cordial and voluble
congeniality. I could see Marsh studying her constantly when he thought no one was watching; and I
wondered how long it would be that only the artist, and not the primitive man, would be aroused by
her mysterious graces.
"Denis naturally felt some irritation at this turn of affairs; though he realised that his guest was a
man of honour and that, as kindred mystics and aesthetes, Marceline and Marsh would naturally have
things and interests to discuss in which a more or less conventional person could have no part. He
didn't hold anything against anybody, but merely regretted that his own imagination was too limited
and traditional to let him talk with Marceline as Marsh talked. At this stage of things I began to see
more of the boy. With his wife otherwise busy, he had time to remember that he had a father--and a
father who was ready to help him in any sort of perplexity or difficulty.
"We often sat together on the veranda watching Marsh and Marceline as they rode up or down the
drive on horseback, or played tennis on the court that used to stretch south of the house. They talked
mostly in French, which Marsh, though he hadn't more than a quarter-portion of French blood,
handled more glibly than either Denis or I could speak it. Marceline's English, always academically
correct, was rapidly improving in accent; but it was plain that she relished dropping back into her
mother-tongue. As we looked at the congenial couple they made, I could see the boy's cheek and
throat muscles tighten--though he wasn't a whit less ideal a host to Marsh, or a whit less considerate
husband to Marceline.
"All this was generally in the afternoon; for Marceline rose very late, had breakfast in bed, and
took an immense amount of time preparing to come downstairs. I never knew of anyone so wrapped up
in cosmetics, beauty exercises, hair-oils, unguents, and everything of that kind. It was in these
morning hours that Denis and Marsh did their real visiting, and exchanged the close confidences
which kept their friendship up despite the strain that jealousy imposed.
"Well, it was in one of those morning talks on the veranda that Marsh made the proposition which
brought on the end. I was laid up with some of my neuritis, but had managed to get downstairs and
stretch out on the front parlour sofa near the long window. Denis and Marsh were just outside; so I
couldn't help hearing all they said. They had been talking about art, and the curious, capricious
elements needed to jolt an artist into producing the real article, when Marsh suddenly swerved from
abstractions to the personal application he must have had in mind from the start.
"'I suppose,' he was saying, 'that nobody can tell just what it is in some scenes or objects that
makes them aesthetic stimuli for certain individuals. Basically, of course, it must have some
reference to each man's background of stored-up mental associations, for no two people have the
same scale of sensitiveness and responses. We decadents are artists for whom all ordinary things
have ceased to have any emotional or imaginative significance, but no one of us responds in the same
way to exactly the same extraordinary. Now take me, for instance.'"
"He paused and resumed.
"'I know, Denny, that I can say these things to you because you such a preternaturally unspoiled
mind--clean, fine, direct, objective, and all that. You won't misunderstand as an oversubtilised, effete
man of the world might.'"
"He paused once more.
"'The fact is, I think I know what's needed to set my imagination working again. I've had a dim idea
of it ever since we were in Paris, but I'm sure now. It's Marceline, old chap--that face and that hair,
and the train of shadowy images they bring up. Not merely visible beauty--though God knows there's
enough of that--but something peculiar and individualised, that can't exactly be explained. Do you
know, in the last few days I've felt the existence of such a stimulus so keenly that I honestly think I
could outdo myself--break into the real masterpiece class if I could get ahold of paint and canvas at
just the time when her face and hair set my fancy stirring and weaving. There's something weird and
other-worldly about it--something joined up with the dim ancient thing Marceline represents. I don't
know how much she's told you about that side of her, but I can assure you there's plenty of it. She has
some marvellous links with the outside.'
"Some change in Denis' expression must have halted the speaker here, for there was a
considerable spell of silence before the words went on. I was utterly taken aback, for I'd expected no
such overt development like this; and I wondered what my son could be thinking. My heart began to
pound violently, and I strained my ears in the frankest of intentional eavesdropping. Then Marsh
resumed.
"'Of course you're jealous--I know how a speech like mine must sound--but I can swear to you
that you needn't be.'
"Denis did not answer, and Marsh went on.
"' To tell the truth, I could never be in love with Marceline--I couldn't even be a cordial friend of
hers in the warmest sense. Why, damn it all, I felt like a hypocrite talking with her these days as I've
been doing.
"'The case simply is, that one of her phase of her half hyponotises me in a certain way--a very
strange, fantastic, and dimly terrible way--just as another phase half hypnotises you in a much more
normal way. I see something in her--or to be psychologically exact, something through her or
beyond her--that you didn't see at all. Something that brings up a vast pageantry of shapes from
forgotten abysses, and makes me want to paint incredible things whose outlines vanish the instant I try
to envisage them clearly. Don't mistake, Denny, your wife is a magnificent being, a splendid focus of
cosmic forces who has a right to be called divine if anything on earth has!'
"I felt a clearing of the situation at this point, for the abstract strangeness of Marsh's statement,
plus the flattery he was now heaping on Marceline, could not fail to disarm and mollify one as fondly
proud of his consort as Denis always was. Marsh evidently caught the change himself, for there was
more confidence in his tone as he continued.
"'I must paint her, Denny--must paint that hair--and you won't regret. There's something more than
mortal about that hair--something more than beautiful--'
"He paused, and I wondered what Denis could be thinking. I wondered, indeed, what I was really
thinking myself. Was Marsh's interest actually that of the artist alone, or was he merely infatuated as
Denis had been? I had thought, in their schooldays, that he had envied my boy; and I dimly felt that it
might be the same now. On the other hand, something in that talk of artistic stimulus had rung
amazingly true; so that the more I pondered, the more I was inclined to take the stuff at face value.
Denis seemed to do so, too, for although I could not catch his low-spoken reply, I could tell by the
effect it produced that it must have been affirmative.
"There was a sound of someone slapping another on the back, and then a grateful speech from
Marsh that I was long to remember.
"'That's great, Denny, and just as I told you, you'll never regret it. In a sense, I'm half doing it for
you. You'll be a different man when you see it. I'll put you back where you used to be--give you a
waking-up and a sort of salvation--but you can't see what I mean as yet. Just remember old friendship,
and don't get the idea that I'm not the same old bird!'
"I rose perplexedly as I saw the two stroll off across the lawn, arm in arm, and smoking in unison.
What could Marsh have meant by his strange and almost ominous reassurance? The more my fears
were quieted in one direction, the more they were aroused in another. Look at it any way I could, it
seemed to be a rather bad business.
"But matters got started just the same. Denis fixed up an attic room with skylights, and Marsh sent
for all sorts of painting equipment. Everyone was rather excited about the new venture, and I was at
least glad that something was on foot to break the brooding tension. Soon the sittings began, and we
all took them quite seriously--for we could see that Marsh regarded them as important artistic events.
Denny and I used to go quietly about the house as though something sacred were occurring, and we
knew that it was sacred as far as Marsh was concerned.
"With Marceline, though, it was a different matter, as I began to see at once. Whatever Marsh's
reactions to the sittings may have been, hers were painfully obvious. Every possible way she
betrayed a frank and commonplace infatuation for the artist, and would repulse Denis' marks of
affection whenever she dared. Oddly, I noticed this more vividly than Denis himself, and tried to
devise some plan for keeping the boy's mind easy until the matter could be straightened out. There
was no use in having him excited about it if it could be helped.
"In the end I decided that Denis had better be away while the disagreeable situation existed. I
could represent his interests well enough at this end, and sooner or later Marsh would finish the
picture and go. My view of Marsh's honour was such that I did not look for any worse developments.
When the matter had blown over, and Marceline had forgotten about her new infatuation, it would be
time enough to have Denis on hand again.
"So I wrote a long letter to my marketing and financial agent in New York, and cooked up a plan to
have the boy summoned there for an indefinite time. I had the agent write him that our affairs
absolutely required one of us to go East, and of course my illness made it clear that I could not be the
one. It was arranged that when Denis got to New York he would find enough plausible matters to
keep him busy as long as I thought he ought to be away.
"The plan worked perfectly, and Denis started for New York without the least suspicion;
Marceline and Marsh going with him in the car to Cape Girardeau, where he caught the afternoon
train to St. Louis. They returned after dark, and as McCabe drove the car back to the stables I could
hear them talking on the veranda--in those same chairs near the long parlour window where Marsh
and Denis had sat when I overheard them talk about the portrait. This time I resolved to do some
intentional eavesdropping, so quietly went down to the front parlour and stretched out on the sofa
near the window.
"At first I could not hear anything but very shortly there came the sound of a chair being shifted,
followed by a short, sharp breath and a sort of inarticulately hurt exclamation from Marceline. Then I
heard Marsh speaking in a strained, almost formal voice.
"'I'd enjoy working tonight if you aren't too tired.'
"Marceline's reply was in the same hurt tone which had marked her exclamation. She used English
as he had done.
"'Oh, Frank, is that really all you care about? Forever working! Can't we just sit out here in this
glorious moonlight?'
"He answered impatiently, his voice shewing a certain contempt beneath the dominant quality of
artistic enthusiasm.
"'Moonlight! Good God, what cheap sentimentality! For a supposedly sophisticated person you
surely do hang on to some of the crudest claptrap that ever escaped from the dime novels! With art at
your elbow, you have to think of the moon--cheap as a spotlight at the varieties! Or perhaps it makes
you think of the Roodmas dance around the stone pillars at Auteiul. Hell, how you used to make those
goggle-eyed yaps stare! But not--I suppose you've dropped all that now. No more Atlantean magic or
hair-snake rites for Madame de Russy! I'm the only one to remember the ld things--the things that
came down through the temples of Tanit and echoed on the ramparts of Zimbabwe. But I won't be
cheated of that remembrance--all that is weaving itself into the thing on my canvas--the thing that is
going to capture wonder and crystallise the secrets of 75,000 years.'
"Marceline interrupted in a voice full of mixed emotions.
"'It's you who are cheaply sentimental now! You know well that the old things had better be let
alone. All of you had better watch out if ever I chant the old rites or try to call up what lies hidden in
Yuggoth, Zimbabwe, and R'lyeh. I thought you had more sense!
"'You lack logic. You want me to be interested in this precious painting of yours, yet you never
let me see what you're doing. Always that black cloth over it! It's of me--I shouldn't think it would
matter if I saw it.'
"Marsh was interrupting this time, his voice curiously hard and strained.
"'No. Not now. You'll see it in due course of time. You say it's of you--yes, it's that, but it's more.
If you knew, you mightn't be so impatient. Poor Denis! My God, it's a shame!'
"My throat was suddenly dry as the words rose to an almost febrile pitch. What could Marsh
mean? Suddenly I saw that he had stopped and was entering the house alone. I heard the front door
slam, and listened as his footsteps ascended the stairs. Outside on the veranda I could still hear
Marceline's heavy, angry breathing. I crept away sick at heart, feeling that there were grave things to
ferret out before I could safely let Denis come back.
"After that evening the tension around the place was even worse than before. Marceline had
always lived on flattery and fawning and the shock of those few blunt words from Marsh was too
much for her temperament. There was no living in the house with her anymore, for with poor Denis
gone she took out her abusiveness on everybody. When she could find no one indoors to quarrel
with she would go out to Sophonisba's cabin and spend hours talking with the queer old Zulu woman.
Aunt Sophy was the only person who would fawn abjectly enough to suit her, and when I tried once
to overhear their conversation I found Marceline whispering about 'elder secrets' and 'unknown
Kadath' while the negress rocked to and fro in her chair, making inarticulate sounds of reverence and
admiration every now and then.
"But nothing could break her dog-like infatuation for Marsh. She would talk bitterly and sullenly
to him, yet was getting more and more obedient to his wishes. It was very convenient for him, since
he now became able to make her pose for the picture whenever he felt like painting. He tried to shew
gratitude for this willingness, but I thought I could detect a kind of contempt or even loathing beneath
his careful politeness. For my part, I frankly hated Marceline! There was no use in calling my attitude
anything as mild as dislike these days. Certainly, I was glad Denis was away. His letters, not nearly
so frequent as I wished, shewed signs of strain and worry.
"As the middle of August went by I gathered from Marsh's remarks that the portrait was nearly
done. His mood seemed increasingly sardonic, though Marceline's temper improved a bit as the
prospect of seeing the thing tickled her vanity. I can still recall the day when Marsh said he'd have
everything finished within a week. Marceline brightened up perceptibly, though not without a
venomous look at me. It seemed as if her coiled hair visibly tightened around her head.
"'I'm to be the first to see it!' she snapped. Then, smiling at Marsh, she said, 'And if I don't like it I
shall slash it to pieces!'
"Marsh's face took on the most curious look I have ever seen it wear as he answered her.
"'I can't vouch for your taste, Marceline, but I swear it will be magnificent! Not that I want to take
much credit--art creates itself--and this thing had to be done. Just wait!'"
"During the next few days I felt a queer sense of foreboding, as if the completion of the picture
meant a kind of catastrophe instead of a relief. Denis, too, had not written me, and my agent in New
York said he was planning some trip to the country. I wondered what the outcome of the whole thing
would be. What a queer mixture of elements--Marsh and Marceline, Denis and I! How would all
these ultimately react on one another? When my fears grew too great I tried to lay them all to my
infirmity, but that explanation never quite satisfied me."
"Well, the thing exploded on Tuesday, the twenty-sixth of August. I had risen at my usual time and
had breakfast, but was not good for much because of the pain in my spine. It had been troubling me
badly of late, and forcing me to take opiates when it got too unbearable; nobody else was downstairs
except the servants, though I could hear Marceline moving about in her room. Marsh slept in the attic
next his studio, and had begun to keep such late hours that he was seldom up till noon. About ten
o'clock the pain got the better of me, so that I took a double dose of my opiate and lay down on the
parlour sofa. The last I heard was Marceline's pacing overhead. Poor creature--if I had known! She
must have been walking before the long mirror admiring herself. That was like her. Vain from start to
finish--revelling in her own beauty, just as she revelled in all the little luxuries Denis was able to
give her.
"I didn't wake up till near sunset, and knew instantly how long I had slept from the golden light and
long shadows outside the long window. Nobody was about, and a sort of unnatural stillness seemed
to be hovering over everything. From afar, though, I thought I could sense a faint howling, wild and
intermittent, whose quality had a slight but baffling familiarity about it. I'm not much for psychic
premonitions, but I was frightfully uneasy from the start. There had been dreams--even worse than
the ones I had been dreaming in the weeks before--and this time they seemed hideously linked to
some black and festering reality. The whole place had a poisonous air. Afterward I reflected that
certain sounds must have filtered through into my unconscious brain during those hours of drugged
sleep. My pain, though, was very much eased; and I rose and walked without difficulty.
"Soon enough I began to see that something was wrong. Marsh and Marceline might have been
riding, but someone ought to have been getting dinner in the kitchen. Instead, there was only silence,
except for that faint, distant howl or wail; and nobody answered when I pulled the old-fashioned bell-
cord to summon Scipio. Then, chancing to look up, I saw the spreading stain on the ceiling--the
bright red stain, that must have come through the floor of Marceline's room.
"In an instant I forgot my crippled back and hurried upstairs to find out the worst. Everything
under the sun raced through my mind as I struggled with the dampness-warped door of that silent
chamber, and most hideous of all was a terrible sense of malign fulfilment and fatal expectedness. I
had, it struck me, known all along that nameless horrors were gathering; that something profoundly
and cosmically evil had gained a foot-hold under my roof from which only blood and tragedy could
result.
"The door gave at last, and I stumbled into the large room beyond--all dim from the branches of
the great trees outside the windows. For a moment I could do nothing but flinch at the faint evil odour
that immediately struck my nostrils. Then, turning on the electric light and glancing around, I
glimpsed a nameless blasphemy on the yellow and blue rug.
"It lay face down in a great pool of dark, thickened blood, and had the gory print of a shod human
foot in the middle of its naked back. Blood was spattered everywhere--on the walls, furniture, and
floor. My knees gave way as I took in the sight, so that I had to stumble to a chair and slump down.
The thing had obviously been a human being, though its identity was not easy to establish at first;
since it was without clothes, and had most of its hair hacked and torn from the scalp in a very crude
way. It was of a deep ivory colour, and I knew that it must have been Marceline. The shoe-print on
the back made the thing seem all the more hellish. I could not even picture the strange, loathsome
tragedy which must have taken place while I slept in the room below. When I raised my hand to wipe
my dripping forehead I saw that my fingers were sticky with blood. I shuddered, then realised that it
must have come from the knob of the door which the unknown murderer had forced shut behind him
as he left. He had taken his weapon with him, it seemed, for no instrument of death was visible here.
"As I studied the floor I saw that a line of sticky footprints like the one on the body led away from
the horror to the door. There was another blood-trail, too, and of a less easily explainable kind; a
broadish, continuous line, as if marking the path of some huge snake. At first I concluded it must be
due to something the murderer had dragged after him. Then, noting the way some of the footprints
seemed to be superimposed on it, I was forced to believe that it could have been there when the
murderer left. But what crawling entity could have been in that room with the victim and her assassin,
leaving before the killer when the deed was done? As I asked myself this question I thought I heard
fresh bursts of that faint, distant wailing.
"Finally, rousing myself from a lethargy of horror, I got on my feet again and began following
the footprints. Who the murderer was, I could not even faintly guess, nor could I try to explain the
absence of the servants. I vaguely felt that I ought to go up to Marsh's attic quarters, but before I had
fully formulated the idea I saw that the bloody trail was indeed taking me there. Was he himself the
murderer? Had he gone mad under the strain of the morbid situation and suddenly run amok?
"In the attic corridor the trail became faint, the prints almost ceasing as they merged with the dark
carpet. I could still, however, discern the strange single path of the entity who had gone first; and this
led straight to the closed door of Marsh's studio, disappearing beneath it at a point about half way
from side to side. Evidently it had crossed the threshold at a time when the door was wide open.
"Sick at heart, I tried the knob and found the door unlocked. Opening it, I paused in the waning
north light to see what fresh nightmare might be awaiting me. There was certainly something human
on the floor, and I reached for the switch to turn on the chandelier.
"But as the light flashed up my gaze left the floor and its horror--that was Marsh, poor devil--to
fix itself frantically and incredulously upon the living thing that cowered and stared in the open
doorway leading to Marsh's bedroom. It was a tousled, wild-eyed thing, crusted with dried blood and
carrying in its hand a wicked machete which had been one of the ornaments of the studio wall. Yet
even in that awful moment I recognised it as one whom I had thought more than a thousand miles
away. It was my own boy Denis--or the maddened wreck which had once been Denis.
"The sight of me seemed to bring back a trifle of sanity--or at least of memory--in the poor boy.
He straightened up and began to toss his head about as if trying to shake free from some enveloping
influence. I could not speak a word, but moved my lips in an effort to get back my voice. My eyes
wandered for a moment to the figure on the floor in front of the heavily draped easel--the figure
toward which the strange blood-trail led, and which seemed to be tangled in the coils of some dark,
ropy object. The shifting of my glance apparently produced some impression in the twisted brain of
the boy, for suddenly he began to mutter in a hoarse whisper whose purport I was soon able to catch.
"'I had to exterminate her--she was the devil--the summit and high-priestess of all evil--the spawn
of the pit--Marsh knew, and tried to warn me. Good old Frank--I didn't kill him, though I was ready to
before I realised. But I went down there and killed her--then that cursed hair--'
"I listened in horror as Denis choked, paused, and began again.
"'You didn't know--her letters got queer and I knew she was in love with Marsh. Then she nearly
stopped writing. He never mentioned her--I felt something was wrong, and thought I ought to come
back and find out. Couldn't tell you--your manner would have given it away. Wanted to surprise them.
Got here about noon today--came in a cab and sent the house-servants all off--let the field hands
alone, for their cabins are all out of earshot. Told McCabe to get me some things in Cape Girardeau
and not bother to come back until tomorrow. Had all the niggers take the old car and let Mary drive
them to Bend Village for a vacation--told 'em we were all going on some sort of outing and wouldn't
need help. Said they'd better stay all night with Uncle Scip's cousin, who keeps that nigger boarding
house.'
"Denis was getting very incoherent now, and I strained my ears to grasp every word. Again I
thought I heard that wild, far-off wail, but the story had first place for the present.
"'Saw you sleeping in the parlour, and took a chance you wouldn't wake up. Then went upstairs on
the quiet to hunt up Marsh and that woman!'
"The boy shuddered as he avoided pronouncing Marceline's name. At the same time I saw his
eyes dilate in unison with a bursting of the distant crying, whose vague familiarity had now become
very great.
"'She was not in her room, so I went up to the studio. Door was shut, and I could hear voices
inside. Didn't knock--just burst in and found her posing for the picture. Nude, but with the hellish hair
all draped around her. And making all sorts of sheep's eyes at Marsh. He had the easel turned half
away from the door, so I couldn't see the picture. Both of them were pretty well jolted when I
shewed up, and Marsh dropped his brush. I was in a rage and told him he'd have to shew me the
portrait, but he got calmer every minute. Told me it wasn't quite done, but would be in a day or two--
said I could see it then--she--hadn't seen it.
"'But that didn't go with me. I stepped up, and he dropped a velvet curtain over the thing before I
could see it. He was ready to fight before letting me see it, but that--that--she--stepped up and sided
with me. Said we ought to see it. Frank got horrible worked up, and gave me a punch when I tried to
get at the curtain. I punched back and seemed to have knocked him out. Then I was almost knocked out
myself by the shriek that--that creature--gave. She'd drawn aside the hangings herself, and caught a
look at what Marsh had been painting. I wheeled around and saw her rushing like mad out of the
room--then I saw the picture.'
"Madness flared up in the boy's eyes again as he got to this place, and I thought for a minute he
was going to spring at me with his machete. But after a pause he partly steadied himself.
"'Oh, God--that thing! Don't ever look at it! Burn it with the hangings around it and throw the
ashes into the river! Marsh knew--and was warning me. He knew what it was--what that woman--that
leopardess, or gorgon, or lamia, or whatever she was--actually represented. He'd tried to hint to me
ever since I met her in his Paris studio, but it couldn't be told in words. I thought they all wronged her
when they whispered horrors about her--she had me hypnotised so that I couldn't believe the plain
facts--but this picture has caught the whole secret--the whole monstrous background!
"'God, but Frank is an artist! That thing is the greatest piece any living soul has produced since
Rembrandt! It's a crime to burn it--but it would be a greater crime to let it exist--just as it would have
been an abhorrent sin to let--that she-daemon--exist any longer. The minute I saw it I understood
what--she--was, and what part she played in the frightful secret that has come down from the days of
Cthulhu and the Elder Ones--the secret that was nearly wiped out when Atlantis sank, but that kept half
alive in hidden traditions and allegorical myths and furtive, midnight cult-practices. For you know she
was the real thing. It wasn't any fake. It would have been merciful if it had been a fake. It was the old,
hideous shadow that philosophers never dared mention--the thing hinted at in the Necronomicon and
symbolised in the Easter Island colossi.
"'She thought we couldn't see through--that the false front would hold till we had bartered away
our immortal souls. And she was half right--she'd have got me in the end. She was only--waiting. But
Frank--good old Frank--was too much for me. He knew what it all meant, and painted it. I don't wonder
she shrieked and ran off when she saw it. It wasn't quite done, but God knows enough was there.
"'Then I knew I'd got to kill her--kill her, and everything connected with her. It was a taint that
wholesome human blood couldn't bear. There was something else, too--but you'll never know that if
you burn the picture without looking. I staggered down to her room with this machete that I got off
the wall here, leaving Frank still knocked out. He was breathing, though, and I knew and thanked
heaven I hadn't killed him.
"'I found her in front of the mirror braiding that accursed hair. She turned on me like a wild beast,
and began spitting out her hatred of Marsh. The fact that she'd been in love with him--and I knew she
had--only made it worse. For a minute I couldn't move, and she came within an ace of completely
hypnotising me. Then I thought of the picture, and the spell broke. She saw the breaking in my eyes,
and must have noticed the machete, too. I never saw anything give such a wild jungle beast look as
she did then. She sprang for me with claws out like a leopard's, but I was too quick. I swung the
machete, and it was all over.'
"Denis had to stop again, and I saw the perspiration running down his forehead through the
spattered blood. But in a moment he hoarsely resumed.
"'I said it was all over--but God! some of it had only just begun! I felt I had fought the legions of
Satan, and put my foot on the back of the thing I had annihilated. Then I saw that blasphemous braid of
coarse black hair begin to twist and squirm of itself.
"'I might have known it. It was all in the old tales. That damnable hair had a life of its own, that
couldn't be ended by killing the creature itself. I knew I'd have to burn it, so I started to hack it off
with the machete. God, but it was devilish work! Tough--like iron wires--but I managed to do it. And
it was loathsome the way the big braid writhed and struggled in my grasp.
"'About the time I had the last strand cut or pulled off I heard that eldritch wailing from behind the
house. You know--it's still going off and on. I don't know what it is, but it must be something
springing from this hellish business. It half seems like something I ought to know but can't quite
place. It got my nerves the first time I heard it, and I dropped the severed braid in my fright. Then, I
got a worse fright--for in another second the braid had turned on me and began to strike venomously
with one of its ends which had knotted itself up like a sort of grotesque head. I struck out with the
machete, and it turned away. Then, when I had my breath again, I saw that the monstrous thing was
crawling along the floor by itself like a great black snake. I couldn't do anything for a while, but
when it vanished through the door I managed to pull myself together and stumble after it. I could
follow the broad, bloody trail, and I saw it led upstairs. It brought me here--and may heaven curse me
if I didn't see it through the doorway, striking at poor dazed Marsh like a maddened rattler as it had
struck at me, finally coiling around him as a python would. He had begun to come to, but that
abominable serpent got him before he was on his feet. I knew that all of the woman's hatred was
behind it, but I hadn't the power to pull it off. I tried, but it was too much for me. Even the machete
was no good--I couldn't swing it freely or it would have slashed Frank to pieces. So I saw those
monstrous coils tighten--saw poor Frank crushed to death before my eyes--and all the time that awful
faint howling came from somewhere beyond the fields.
"'That's all. I pulled the velvet cloth over the picture and hope it'll never be lifted. The thing must
be burnt. I couldn't pry the coils off poor, dead Frank--they cling to him like a leech, and seem to
have lost their motion altogether. It's as if that snaky rope of hair has a kind of perverse fondness for
the man it killed--it's clinging to him--embracing him. You'll have to burn poor Frank with it--but for
God's sake don't forget to see it in ashes. That and the picture. They must both go. The safety of the
world demands that they go.
"Denis might have whispered more, but a fresh burst of distant wailing cut us short. For the first
time we knew what it was, for a westerly veering wind brought articulate words at last. We ought to
have known long before, since sounds much like it had often come from the same source. It was
wrinkled Sophonisba, the ancient Zulu witch-woman who had fawned on Marceline, keening from her
cabin in a way which crowned the horrors of this nightmare tragedy. We could both hear some of the
things she howled, and knew that secret and primordial bonds linked this savage sorceress with that
other inheritor of elder secrets who had just been extirpated. Some of the words she used betrayed
her closeness to daemonic and palaeogean traditions.
"'I! I! Shub-Niggurath! Ya-R'lyeh! N'gagi n'bulu bwana n'lolo! Ya, yo, poor Missy Tanit, poor
Missy Isis! Marse Clooloo, come up outen de water an' git yo chile--she done daid! She done daid!
De hair ain' got no missus no mo', Marse Clooloo. Ol' Sophy, she know! Ol' Sophy, she done got de
black stone outen Big Zimbabwe in ol' Affriky! Ol' Sophy, she done dance in de moonshine roun' de
crocodile-stone befo' de N'bangus cotch her and sell her to de ship folks! No mo' Tanit! No mo' Isis!
No mo' witch-woman to keep de fire a-goin' in de big stone place! Ya, yo! N'gagi n'bulu bwana
n'lolo! I! Shub-Niggurath! She daid! Ol' Sophy know!'
"That wasn't the end of the wailing, but it was all I could pay attention to. The expression on my
boy's face shewed that it had reminded him of something frightful, and the tightening of his hand on
the machete boded no good. I knew he was desperate, and sprang to disarm him before he could do
anything more.
"But I was too late. An old man with a bad spine doesn't count for much physically. There was a
terrible struggle, but he had done for himself before many seconds were over. I'm not sure yet but
that he tried to kill me, too. His last panting words were something about the need of wiping out
everything that had been connected with Marceline, either by blood or marriage."
"I wonder to this day that I didn't go stark mad in that instant--or in the moments and hours
afterward. In front of me was the slain body of my boy--the only human being I had to cherish--and
ten feet away, in front of that shrouded easel, was the body of his best friend, with a nameless coil of
horror wound around it. Below was the scalped corpse of that she-monster, about whom I was half-
ready to believe anything. I was too dazed to analyse the probability of the hair story--and even if I
had not been, that dismal howling coming from Aunt Sophy's cabin would have been enough to quiet
doubt for the nonce.
"If I'd been wise, I'd have done just what poor Denis told me to--burned the picture and the body-
grasping hair at once and without curiosity--but I was too shaken to be wise. I suppose I muttered
foolish things over my boy--and then I remembered that the night was wearing on and that the servants
would be back in the morning. It was plain that a matter like this could never be explained, and I knew
that I must cover things up and invent a story.
"That coil of hair around Marsh was a monstrous thing. As I poked at it with a sword which I took
from the wall I almost thought I felt it tighten its grip on the dead man. I didn't dare touch it--and the
longer I looked at it the more horrible things I noticed about it. One thing gave me a start. I won't
mention it--but it partly explained the need for feeding the hair with queer oils as Marceline had
always done.
"In the end I decided to bury all three bodies in the cellar--with quicklime, which I knew we had
in the storehouse. It was a night of hellish work. I dug three graves--my boy's a long way from the
other two, for I didn't want him to be near either the woman's body or her hair. I was sorry I couldn't
get the coil from around poor Marsh. It was terrible work getting them all down to the cellar. I used
blankets in carting the woman and the poor devil with the coil around him. Then I had to get two
barrels of lime from the storehouse. God must have given me strength, for I not only moved them but
filled all three graves without a hitch.
"Some of the lime I made into whitewash. I had to take a stepladder and fix over the parlour
ceiling where the blood had oozed through. And I burned nearly everything in Marceline's room,
scrubbing the walls and floor and heavy furniture. I washed up the attic studio, too, and the trail and
footprints that led there. And all the time I could hear old Sophy's wailing in the distance. The devil
must have been in that creature to let her voice go on like that. But she always was howling queer
things. That's why the field niggers didn't get scared or curious that night. I locked the studio door
and took the key to my room. Then I burned all my stained clothes in the fireplace. By dawn the whole
house looked quite normal so far as any casual eye could tell. I hadn't dared touch the covered easel,
but meant to attend to that later.
"Well, the servants came back the next day, and I told them all the young folks had gone to St.
Louis. None of the field hands seemed to have seen or heard anything, and old Sophonisba's wailing
had stopped at the instant of sunrise. She was like a sphinx after that, and never let out a word of what
had been on her brooding brain the day and night before.
"Later on I pretended that Denis and Marsh and Marceline had gone back to Paris and had a certain
discreet agency mail me letters from there--letters I had fixed up in forged handwriting. It took a
good deal of deceit and reticence in several things to various friends, and I knew people have
secretly suspected me of holding something back. I had the deaths of Marsh and Denis reported
during the war, and later said Marceline had entered a convent. Fortunately Marsh was an orphan
whose eccentric ways had alienated him from his people in Louisiana. Things might have been
patched up a good deal better for me if I had had the sense to burn the picture, sell the plantation, and
give up trying to manage things with a shaken and overstrained mind. You see what my folly has
brought me to. Failing crops--hands discharged one by one--place falling apart to ruin--and myself a
hermit and a target for dozens of queer countryside stories. Nobody will come around here after dark
anymore--or any other time if it can be helped. That's why I knew you must be a stranger.
"And why do I stay here? I can't wholly tell you that. It's bound up too closely with things at the
very rim of sane reality. It wouldn't have been so, perhaps, if I hadn't looked at the picture. I ought to
have done as poor Denis told me. I honestly meant to burn it when I went up to that locked studio a
week after the horror, but I looked first--and that changed everything.
"No--there's no use telling what I saw. You can, in a way, see for yourself presently; though time
and dampness have done their work. I don't think it can hurt you if you want to take a look, but it was
different with me. I knew too much of what it all meant.
"Denis had been right--it was the greatest triumph of human art since Rembrandt, even though still
unfinished. I grasped that at the start, and knew that poor Marsh had justified his decadent philosophy.
He was to painting what Baudelaire was to poetry--and Marceline was the key that had unlocked his
inmost stronghold of genius.
"The thing almost stunned me when I pulled aside the hangings--stunned me before I half knew
what the whole thing was. You know, it's only partly a portrait. Marsh had been pretty literal when he
hinted that he wasn't painting Marceline alone, but what he saw through her and beyond her.
"Of course she was in it--was the key to it, in a sense--but her figure only formed one point in a
vast composition. She was nude except for that hideous web of hair spun around her, and was half-
seated, half-reclining on a sort of bench or divan, carved in patterns unlike those of any known
decorative tradition. There was a monstrously shaped goblet in one hand, from which was spilling
fluid whose colour I haven't been able to place or classify to this day--I don't know where Marsh
even got the pigments.
"The figure and the divan were in the left-hand foreground of the strangest sort of scene I ever
saw in my life. I think there was a faint suggestion of its all being a kind of emanation from the
woman's brain, yet there was also a directly opposite suggestion--as if she were just an evil image or
hallucination conjured up by the scene itself.
"I can't tell you know whether it's an exterior or an interior--whether those hellish Cyclopean
vaultings are seen from the outside or the inside, or whether they are indeed carven stone and not
merely a morbid fungous arborescence. The geometry of the whole thing is crazy--one gets the
acute and obtuse angles all mixed up.
"And God! The shapes of nightmare that float around in that perpetual daemon twilight! The
blasphemies that lurk and leer and hold a Witches' Sabbat with that woman as a high-priestess! The
black shaggy entities that are not quite goats--the crocodile-headed beast with three legs and a dorsal
row of tentacles--and the flat-nosed Egyptians dancing in a pattern that Egypt's priests knew and
called accursed!
"But the scene wasn't Egypt--it was behind Egypt; behind even Atlantis; behind fabled Mu, and
myth--whispered Lemuria. It was the ultimate fountainhead of all horror on this earth, and the
symbolism shewed only too clearly how integral a part of it Marceline was. I think it must be the
unmentionable R'lyeh, that was not built by any creatures of this planet--the thing Marsh and Denis
used to talk about in the shadows with hushed voices. In the picture it appears that the whole scene is
deep under water--though everybody seems to be breathing freely.
"Well--I couldn't do anything but look and shudder, and finally I saw that Marceline was watching
me craftily out of those monstrous, dilated eyes on the canvas. It was no mere superstition--Marsh
had actually caught something of her horrible vitality in his symphonies of line and color, so that she
still brooded and hated, just as if most of her weren't down in the cellar under quicklime. And it was
worst of all when some of those Hecate-born snaky strands of hair began to lift themselves up from
the surface and grope out into the room toward me.
"Then it was that I knew the last final horror, and realised I was a guardian and a prisoner forever.
she was the thing from which the first dim legends of Medusa and the Gorgons had sprung, and
something in my shaken will had been captured and turned to stone at last. Never again would I be
safe from those coiling snaky strands--the strands in the picture, and those that lay brooding under the
lime near the wine casks. All too late I recalled the tales of the virtual indestructibility, even through
centuries of burial, of the hair of the dead.
"My life since has been nothing but horror and slavery. Always there had lurked the fear of what
broods down in the cellar. In less than a month the niggers began whispering about the great black
snake that crawled around near the wine casks after dark, and about the curious way its trail would
lead to another spot six feet away. Finally I had to move everything to another part of the cellar, for
not a darky could be induced to go near the place where the snake was seen.
"Then the field hands began talking about the black snake that visited old Sophonisba's cabin
every night after midnight. One of them shewed me its trail--and not long afterward I found out that
Aunt Sophy herself had begun to pay strange visits to the cellar of the big house, lingering and
muttering for hours in the very spot where none of the other blacks would go near. God, but I was
glad when that old witch died! I honestly believe she had been a priestess of some ancient and
terrible tradition back in Africa. She must have lived to be almost a hundred and fifty years old.
"Sometimes I think I hear something gliding around the house at night. There will be a queer
noise on the stairs, where the boards are loose, and the latch of my room will rattle as if with an
inward pressure. I always keep my door locked, of course. Then there are certain mornings when I
seem to catch a sickish musty odour in the corridors, and notice a faint, ropy trail through the dust of
the floors. I know I must guard the hair in the picture, for if anything were to happen to it, there are
entities in this house which would take a sure and terrible revenge. I don't even dare to die--for life
and death are all one to those in the clutch of what came out of R'lyeh. Something would be on hand
to punish my neglect. Medusa's coil has got me, and it will always be the same. Never mix up with
secret and ultimate horror, young man, if you value your immortal soul."
As the old man finished his story I saw that the small lamp had long since burned dry, and that the
large one was nearly empty. It must, I knew, be near dawn, and my ears told me that the storm was
over. The tale had held me in a half-daze, and I almost feared to glance at the door lest it reveal an
inward pressure from some unnamable source. It would be hard to say which had the greatest hold on
me--stark horror, incredulity, or a kind of morbid fantastic curiosity. I was wholly beyond speech and
had to wait for my strange host to break the spell.
"Do you want to see--the thing?"
His voice was low and hesitant, and I saw he was tremendously in earnest. Of my various
emotions, curiosity gained the upper hand; and I nodded silently. He rose, lighting a candle on a
nearby table and holding it high before him as he opened the door.
"Come with me--upstairs."
I dreaded to brave those musty corridors again, but fascination downed all my qualms. The boards
creaked beneath our feet, and I trembled once when I thought I saw a faint, rope-like line trace in the
dust near the staircase.
The steps of the attic were noisy and rickety, with several of the treads missing. I was just glad of
the need of looking sharply to my footing, for it gave me an excuse not to glance about. The attic
corridor was pitch-black and heavily cobwebbed, and inch-deep with dust except where a beaten trail
led to a door on the left at the farther end. As I noticed the rotting remains of a thick carpet I thought
of the other feet which had pressed it in bygone decades--of these, and of one thing which did not
have feet.
The old man took me straight to the door at the end of the beaten path, and fumbled a second with
the rusty latch. I was acutely frightened now that I knew the picture was so close, yet dared not
retreat at this stage. In another moment my host was ushering me into the deserted studio.
The candle light was very faint, yet served to shew most of the principal features. I noticed the
low, slanting roof, the huge enlarged dormer, the curios and trophies hung on the wall--and most of
all, the great shrouded easel in the centre of the floor. To that easel de Russy now walked, drawing
aside the dusty velvet hangings on the side turned away from me, and motioning me silently to
approach. It took a good deal of courage to make me obey, especially when I saw how my guide's
eyes dilated in the wavering candle light as he looked at the unveiled canvas. But again curiosity
conquered everything, and I walked around to where de Russy stood. Then I saw the damnable thing.
I did not faint--though no reader can possibly realise the effort it took to keep me from doing so. I
did cry out, but stopped short when I saw the frightened look on the old man's face. as I had expected,
the canvas was warped, mouldy, and scabrous from dampness and neglect; but for all that I could
trace the monstrous hints of evil cosmic outsideness that lurked all through the nameless scene's
morbid content and perverted geometry.
It was as the old man had said--a vaulted, columned hell of mumbled Black Masses and Witches'
Sabbaths--and what perfect completion could have added to it was beyond my power to guess. Decay
had only increased the utter hideousness of its wicked symbolism and diseased suggestion, for the
parts most affected by time were just those parts of the picture which in Nature--or in the extra-
cosmic realm that mocked Nature--would be apt to decay and disintegrate.
The utmost horror of all, of course, was Marceline--and as I saw the bloated, discoloured flesh I
formed the odd fancy that perhaps the figure on the canvas had some obscure, occult linkage with the
figure which lay in quicklime under the cellar floor. Perhaps the lime had preserved the corpse
instead of destroying it--but could it have preserved those black, malign eyes that glared and mocked
at me from their painted hell?
And there was something else about the creature which I could not fail to notice--something
which de Russy had not been able to put into words, but which perhaps had something to do with
Denis' wish to kill all those of his blood who had dwelt under the same roof with her. Whether
Marsh knew, or whether the genius in him painted it without his knowing, none could say. But Denis
and his father could not have known till they saw the picture.
Surpassing all in horror was the streaming black hair--which covered the rotting body, but which
was itself not even slightly decayed. All I had heard of it was amply verified. It was nothing human,
this ropy, sinuous, half-oily, half-crinkly flood of serpent darkness. Vile, independent life
proclaimed itself at every unnatural twist and convolution, and the suggestion of numberless reptilian
heads at the out-turned ends was far too marked to be illusory or accidental.
The blasphemous thing held me like a magnet. I was helpless, and did not wonder at the myth of
the gorgon's glance which turned all beholders to stone. Then I thought I saw a change come over
the thing. The leering features perceptibly moved, so that the rotting jaw fell, allowing the thick,
beast-like lips to disclose a row of pointed yellow fangs. The pupils of the fiendish eyes dilated, and
the eyes themselves seemed to bulge outward. And the hair--that accursed hair! It had begun to rustle
and wave perceptibly, the snake-heads all turning toward de Russy and vibrating as if to strike!
Reason deserted me altogether, and before I knew what I was doing I drew my automatic and sent
a shower of twelve steel-jacketed bullets through the shocking canvas. The whole thing at once fell
to pieces, even the frame toppling from the easel and clattering to the dust-covered floor. But though
this horror was shattered, another had risen before me in the form of de Russy himself, whose
maddened shrieks as he saw the picture vanish were almost as terrible as the picture itself had been.
With a half-articulate scream of "God, now you've done it!" the frantic old man seized me
violently by the arm and commenced to drag me out of the room and down the rickety stairs. He had
dropped the candle in his panic; but dawn was near, and some faint grey light was filtering in through
the dust-covered windows. I tripped and stumbled repeatedly, but never for a moment would my
guide slacken his pace.
"Run!" he shrieked, "run for your life! You don't know what you've done! I never told you the
whole thing! There were things I had to do--the picture talked to me and told me. I had to guard and
keep it--now the worst will happen! She and that hair will come up out of their graves, for God
knows what purpose!
"Hurry, man! For God's sake let's get out of here while there's time. If you have a car take me
along to Cape Girardeau with you. It may well get me in the end, anywhere, but I'll give it a run for its
money. Out of here--quick!"
As we reached the ground floor I became aware of a slow, curious thumping from the rear of the
house, followed by a sound of a door shutting. De Russy had not heard the thumping, but the other
noise caught his ear and drew from him the most terrible shriek that ever sounded in human throat.
"Oh, God--great God--that was the cellar door--she's coming--"
By this time I was desperately wrestling with the rusty latch and sagging hinges of the great front
door--almost as frantic as my host now that I heard the slow, thumping tread approaching from the
unknown rear rooms of the accursed mansion. The night's rain had warped the oaken planks, and the
heavy door stuck and resisted even more strongly than it had when I forced an entrance the evening
before.
Somewhere a plank creaked beneath the foot of whatever was walking, and the sound seemed to
snap the last cord of sanity in the poor old man. With a roar like that of a maddened bull he released
his grip on me and made a plunge to the right, through the open door of a room which I judged had
been a parlour. A second later, just as I got the front door open and was making my own escape, I
heard the tinkling clatter of broken glass and knew he had leapt through a window. And as I bounded
off the sagging porch to commence my mad race down the long, weed-grown drive I thought I could
catch the thud of dead, dogged footsteps which did not follow me, but which kept leadenly on
through the door of the cobwebbed parlour.
I looked backward only twice as I plunged heedlessly through the burrs and briers of that
abandoned drive, past the dying lindens and grotesque scrub-oaks, in the grey pallor of a cloudy
November dawn. The first time was when an acrid smell overtook me, and I thought of the candle de
Russy had dropped in the attic studio. By then I was comfortably near the road, on the high place
from which the roof of the distant house was clearly visible above its encircling trees; and just as I
expected, thick clouds of smoke were billowing out of the attic dormers and curling upward into the
leaden heavens. I thanked the powers of creation that an immemorial curse was about to be purged by
fire and blotted from the earth.
But in the next instant came that second backward look in which I glimpsed two other things--
things that cancelled most of the relief and gave me a supreme shock from which I shall never
recover. I have said that I was on a high part of the drive, from which much of the plantation behind
me was visible. This vista included not only the house and its trees but some of the abandoned and
partly flooded land beside the river, and several bends of the weed-choked drive I had been so
hastily traversing. In both of these latter places I now beheld sights--or suspicions of sights--which I
wish devoutly I could deny.
It was a faint, distant scream which made me turn back again, and as I did so I caught a trace of
motion on the dull grey marshy plain behind the house. At that human figures are very small, yet I
thought the motion resolved itself into two of these--pursuer and pursued. I even thought I saw the
dark-clothed leading figure overtaken, seized, and dragged violently in the direction of the now
burning house.
But I could not watch the outcome, for at once a nearer sight obtruded itself--a suggestion of
motion among the underbrush at a point some distance back along the deserted drive. Unmistakably,
the weeds and bushes and briers were swaying as no wind could sway them; swaying as if some
large, swift serpent were wriggling purposefully along on the ground in pursuit of me.
That was all I could stand. I scrambled along madly for the gate, heedless of torn clothing and
bleeding scratches, and jumped into the roadster parked under the great evergreen tree. It was a
bedraggled, rain-drenched sight; but the works were unharmed and I had no trouble in starting the
thing. I went on blindly in the direction the car was headed for nothing was in my mind but to get away
from that frightful region of nightmares and cacodaemons--to get away as quickly and as far as
gasoline could take me.
About three or four miles along the road a farmer hailed me--a kindly, drawling fellow of middle
age and considerable native intelligence. I was glad to slow down and ask directions, though I knew I
must present a strange enough aspect. The man readily told me the way to Cape Girardeau, and
inquired where I had come from in such a state at such an early hour. Thinking it best to say little, I
merely mentioned that I had been caught in the night's rain and had taken shelter at a nearby farmhouse,
afterward losing my way in the underbrush trying to find my car.
"At a farmhouse, eh? Wonder whose it could'a been. Ain't nothin' standin' this side o' Jim Ferris'
place acrost Barker's Crick, an' that's all o' twenty miles by the rud."
I gave a start, and wondered what fresh mystery this portended. Then I asked my informant if he
had overlooked the large ruined plantation house whose ancient gate bordered the road not far back.
"Funny ye sh'd recolleck that, stranger! Must a ben here afore some time. But that house ain't here
now. Burnt down five or six years ago--and they did tell some queer stories about it."
I shuddered.
"You mean Riverside--ol' man de Russy's place. Queer goin's on there fifteen or twenty years
ago. Ol' man's boy married a gal from abroad, and some folks thought she was a mighty odd sort.
Didn't like the looks of her, then she and the boy went off sudden, and later on the ol' man said he was
kilt in the war. But some o' the niggers hinted queer things. Got around at last that the ol' fellow fell
in love with the gal himself and kilt her and the boy. That place was sure enough haunted by a black
snake, mean that what it may.
"Then five or six years ago the ol' man disappeared and the house burned down. Some do say he
was burnt up in it. It was a mornin' after a rainy night just like this, when lots o' folks heard an awful
yellin' across the fields in old de Russy's voice. When they stopped and looked, they see the house
goin' up in smoke quick as a wink--that place was all like tinder anyhow, rain or no rain. Nobody
never seen the ol' man again, but onct in a while they tell of the ghost of that big black snake glidin'
aroun'.
"What d'ye make of it, anyhow? You seem to hev knowed the place. Didn't ye ever hear tell of the
de Russys? What d'ye reckon was the trouble with that gal young Denis married? She kinder made
everybody shiver and feel hateful, though ye couldn't never tell why."
I was trying to think, but that process was almost beyond me now. The house burned down years
ago? Then where, and under what conditions, had I passed the night? And why did I know what I knew
of these things? Even as I pondered I saw a hair on my coat sleeve--the short, grey hair of an old
man.
In the end I drove on without telling anything. But did I hint that gossip was wronging the poor old
planter who had suffered so much. I made it clear--as if from distant but authentic reports wafted
among friends--that if anyone was to blame for the trouble at Riverside it was the woman, Marceline.
She was not suited to Missouri ways, I said, and it was too bad that Denis had ever married her.
More I did not intimate, for I felt that the de Russys, with their proudly cherished honour and
high, sensitive spirits, would not wish me to say more. They had borne enough, God knows, without
the countryside guessing what a daemon of the pit--what a gorgon of the elder blasphemies--had
come to flaunt their ancient and stainless name.
Nor was it right that the neighbours should know that other horror which my strange host of the
night could not bring himself to tell me--that horror which he must have learned, as I learned it, from
details in the lost masterpiece of poor Frank Marsh.
It would be too hideous if they knew that the one-time heiress of Riverside--the accursed gorgon
or lamia whose hateful crinkly coil of serpent-hair must even now be brooding and twining
vampirically around an artist's skeleton in a lime-packed grave beneath a charred foundation--was
faintly, subtly, yet to the eyes of genius unmistakably the scion of Zimbabwe's most primal
grovellers. No wonder she owned a link with that old witch-woman--for, though in deceitfully slight
proportion, Marceline was a negress.

MEMORY
In the valley of Nis the accursed waning moon shines thinly, tearing a path for its light with
feeble horns through the lethal foliage of a great upas-tree. And within the depths of the valley,
where the light reaches not, move forms not meant to be beheld. Rank is the herbage on each slope,
where evil vines and creeping plants crawl amidst the stones of ruined palaces, twining tightly about
broken columns and strange monoliths, and heaving up marble pavements laid by forgotten hands. And
in trees that grow gigantic in crumbling courtyards leap little apes, while in and out of deep treasure-
vaults writhe poison serpents and scaly things without a name. Vast are the stones which sleep
beneath coverlets of dank moss, and mighty were the walls from which they fell. For all time did
their builders erect them, and in sooth they yet serve nobly, for beneath them the grey toad makes his
habitation.
At the very bottom of the valley lies the river Than, whose waters are slimy and filled with
weeds. From hidden springs it rises, and to subterranean grottoes it flows, so that the Daemon of the
Valley knows not why its waters are red, nor whither they are bound.
The Genie that haunts the moonbeams spake to the Daemon of the Valley, saying, "I am old, and
forget much. Tell me the deeds and aspect and name of them who built these things of Stone."And the
Daemon replied, "I am Memory, and am wise in lore of the past, but I too am old. These beings were
like the waters of the river Than, not to be understood. Their deeds I recall not, for they were but of
the moment. Their aspect I recall dimly, it was like to that of the little apes in the trees. Their name I
recall clearly, for it rhymed with that of the river. These beings of yesterday were called Man."
So the Genie flew back to the thin horned moon, and the Daemon looked intently at a little ape in a
tree that grew in a crumbling courtyard.

NYARLATHOTEP
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; and what was thrown on a screen in the
darkened room prophesied things none but Nyarlathotep dared prophesy, and in the sputter of his
sparks there was taken from men that which had never been taken before yet which 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 drove us
all out, down the dizzy stairs into the damp, hot, deserted midnight streets. I screamed aloud that I was
not afraid; that I never could be afraid; and others screamed with me for solace. We swore to one
another that the city was exactly the same, and still alive; and when the electric lights began to fade
we cursed the company over and over again, and laughed at the queer faces we made.
I believe we felt something coming down from the greenish moon, for when we began to depend
on its light we drifted into curious involuntary marching formations and seemed to know our
destinations though we dared not think of them. Once we looked at the pavement and found the blocks
loose and displaced by grass, with scarce a line of rusted metal to 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 I felt a
chill which was not of the hot autumn; for as we stalked out on the dark moor, we beheld around us
the hellish moon-glitter of evil snows. Trackless, inexplicable snows, swept asunder in one direction
only, where lay a gulf all the blacker for its glittering walls. The column seemed very thin indeed as
it plodded dreamily into the gulf. I lingered behind, for the black rift in the green-litten snow was
frightful, and I thought I had heard the reverberations of a disquieting wail as my companions
vanished; but my power to linger was slight. As if beckoned by those who had gone before, I half-
floated between the titanic snowdrifts, quivering and afraid, into the sightless vortex of the
unimaginable.
Screamingly sentient, dumbly delirious, only the gods that were can tell. A sickened, sensitive
shadow writhing in hands that are not hands, and whirled blindly past ghastly midnights of rotting
creation, corpses of dead worlds with sores that were cities, charnel winds that brush the pallid stars
and make them flicker low. Beyond the worlds vague ghosts of monstrous things; half-seen columns
of unsanctifled temples that rest on nameless rocks beneath space and reach up to dizzy vacua above
the spheres of light and darkness. And through this revolting graveyard of the universe the muffled,
maddening beating of drums, and thin, monotonous whine of blasphemous flutes from inconceivable,
unlighted chambers beyond Time; the detestable pounding and piping whereunto dance slowly,
awkwardly, and absurdly the gigantic, tenebrous ultimate gods--the blind, voiceless, mindless
gargoyles whose soul is Nyarlathotep.

PICKMAN'S MODEL
I know I'm more nervous than I was when you saw me last year, but you don't need to hold a clinic
over it. There's plenty of reason, God knows, and I fancy I'm lucky to be sane at all. Why the third
degree? You didn't use to be so inquisitive.
Well, if you must hear it, I don't know why you shouldn't. Maybe you ought to, anyhow, for you
kept writing me like a grieved parent when you heard I'd begun to cut the Art Club and keep away
from Pickman. Now that he's disappeared I go round to the club once in a while, but my nerves aren't
what they were.
No, I don't know what's become of Pickman, and I don't like to guess. You might have surmised I
had some inside information when I dropped him--and that's why I don't want to think where he's gone.
Let the police find what they can--it won't be much, judging from the fact that they don't know yet of
the old North End place he hired under the name of Peters.
I'm not sure that I could find it again myself--not that I'd ever try, even in broad daylight!
Yes, I do know, or am afraid I know, why he maintained it. I'm coming to that. And I think you'll
understand before I'm through why I don't tell the police. They would ask me to guide them, but I
couldn't go back there even if I knew the way. There was something there--and now I can't use the
subway or (and you may as well have your laugh at this, too) go down into cellars any more.
I should think you'd have known I didn't drop Pickman for the same silly reasons that fussy old
women like Dr. Reid or Joe Minot or Rosworth did. Morbid art doesn't shock me, and when a man has
the genius Pickman had I feel it an honour to know him, no matter what direction his work takes.
Boston never had a greater painter than Richard Upton Pickman. I said it at first and I say it still, and I
never swerved an inch, either, when he showed that 'Ghoul Feeding'. That, you remember, was when
Minot cut him.
You know, it takes profound art and profound insight into Nature to turn out stuff like Pickman's.
Any magazine-cover hack can splash paint around wildly and call it a nightmare or a Witches' Sabbath
or a portrait of the devil, but only a great painter can make such a thing really scare or ring true.
That's because only a real artist knows the actual anatomy of the terrible or the physiology of fear-
the exact sort of lines and proportions that connect up with latent instincts or hereditary memories of
fright, and the proper colour contrasts and lighting effects to stir the dormant sense of strangeness. I
don't have to tell you why a Fuseli really brings a shiver while a cheap ghost-story frontispiece
merely makes us laugh. There's something those fellows catch--beyond life--that they're able to
make us catch for a second. Dor had it. Sime has it. Angarola of Chicago has it. And Pickman had it
as no man ever had it before or--I hope to Heaven--ever will again.
Don't ask me what it is they see. You know, in ordinary art, there's all the difference in the world
between the vital, breathing things drawn from Nature or models and the artificial truck that
commercial small fry reel off in a bare studio by rule. Well, I should say that the really weird artist
has a kind of vision which makes models, or summons up what amounts to actual scenes from the
spectral world he lives in. Anyhow, he manages to turn out results that differ from the pretender's
mince-pie dreams in just about the same way that the life painter's results differ from the concoctions
of a correspondence--school cartoonist. If I had ever seen what Pickman saw--but no! Here, let's
have a drink before we get any deeper. God, I wouldn't be alive if I'd ever seen what that man--if he
was a man--saw !
You recall that Pickman's forte was faces. I don't believe anybody since Goya could put so much
of sheer hell into a set of features or a twist of expression. And before Goya you have to go back to
the mediaeval chaps who did the gargoyles and chimaeras on Notre Dame and Mont Saint-Michel.
They believed all sorts of things--and maybe they saw all sorts of things, too, for the Middle Ages
had some curious phases I remember your asking Pickman yourself once, the year before you went
away, wherever in thunder he got such ideas and visions. Wasn't that a nasty laugh he gave you? It
was partly because of that laugh that Reid dropped him. Reid, you know, had just taken up
comparative pathology, and was full of pompous 'inside stuff' about the biological or evolutionary
significance of this or that mental or physical symptom. He said Pickman repelled him more and more
every day, and almost frightened him towards the last--that the fellow's features and expression were
slowly developing in a way he didn't like; in a way that wasn't human. He had a lot of talk about diet,
and said Pickman must be abnormal and eccentric to the last degree. I suppose you told Reid, if you
and he had any correspondence over it, that he'd let Pickman's paintings get on his nerves or harrow
up his imagination. I know I told him that myself--then.
But keep in mind that I didn't drop Pickman for anything like this. On the contrary, my admiration
for him kept growing; for that 'Ghoul Feeding' was a tremendous achievement. As you know, the club
wouldn't exhibit it, and the Museum of Fine Arts wouldn't accept it as a gift; and I can add that nobody
would buy it, so Pickman had it right in his house till he went. Now his father has it in Salem--you
know Pickman comes of old Salem stock, and had a witch ancestor hanged in 1692.
I got into the habit of calling on Pickman quite often, especially after I began making notes for a
monograph on weird art. Probably it was his work which put the idea into my head, and anyhow, I
found him a mine of data and suggestions when I came to develop it. He showed me all the paintings
and drawings he had about; including some pen-and--ink sketches that would, I verily believe, have
got him kicked out of the club if many of the members had seen them. Before long I was pretty nearly
a devotee, and would listen for hours like a schoolboy to art theories and philosophic speculations
wild enough to qualify him for the Danvers asylum. My hero-worship, coupled with the fact that
people generally were commencing to have less and less to do with him, made him get very
confidential with me; and one evening he hinted that if I were fairly close-mouthed and none too
squeamish, he might show me something rather unusual--something a bit stronger than anything he
had in the house.
'You know,' he said, 'there are things that won't do for Newbury Street--things that are out of
place here, and that can't be conceived here, anyhow. It's my business to catch the overtones of the
soul, and you won't find those in a parvenu set of artificial streets on made land. Back Bay isn't
Boston--it isn't anything yet, because it's had no time to pick up memories and attract local spirits. If
there are any ghosts here, they're the tame ghosts of a salt marsh and a shallow cove; and I want
human ghosts--the ghosts of beings highly organized enough to have looked on hell and known the
meaning of what they saw.
'The place for an artist to live is the North End. If any aesthete were sincere, he'd put up with the
slums for the sake of the massed traditions. God, man! Don't you realize that places like that weren't
merely made, but actually grew? Generation after generation lived and felt and died there, and in days
when people weren't afraid to live and fed and die. Don't you know there was a mill on Copp's Hill in
1632, and that half the present streets were laid out by 1650? I can show you houses that have stood
two centuries and a half and more; houses that have witnessed what would make a modern house
crumble into powder. What do moderns know of life and the forces behind it? You call the Salem
witchcraft a delusion, but I'll wager my four-times--great-grandmother could have told you things.
They hanged her on Gallows Hill, with Cotton Mather looking sanctimoniously on. Mather, damn
him, was afraid somebody might succeed in kicking free of this accursed cage of monotony--I wish
someone had laid a spell on him or sucked his blood in the night!
'I can show you a house he lived in, and I can show you another one he was afraid to enter in spite
of all his fine bold talk. He knew things he didn't dare put into that stupid Magnalia or that puerile
Wonders of the Invisible World. Look here, do you know the whole North End once had a set of
tunnels that kept certain people in touch with each other's houses, and the burying ground, and the
sea? Let them prosecute and persecute above ground--things went on every day that they couldn't
reach, and voices laughed at night that they couldn't place!
'Why, man, out of ten surviving houses built before 1700 and not moved since I'll wager that in
eight I can show you something queer in the cellar. There's hardly a month that you don't read of
workmen finding bricked-up arches and wells leading nowhere in this or that old place as it comes
down--you could see one near Henchman Street from the elevated last year. There were witches and
what their spells summoned; pirates and what they brought in from the sea; smugglers; privateers--
and I tell you, people knew how to live, and how to enlarge the bounds of life, in the old time! This
wasn't the only world a bold and wise man could know--faugh! And to think of today in contrast, with
such pale-pink brains that even a club of supposed artists gets shudders and convulsions if a picture
goes beyond the feelings of a Beacon Street tea-table!
'The only saving grace of the present is that it's too damned stupid to question the past very
closely. What do maps and records and guide--books really tell of the North End? Bah! At a guess
I'll guarantee to lead you to thirty or forty alleys and networks of alleys north of Prince Street that
aren't suspected by ten living beings outside of the foreigners that swarm them. And what do those
Dagoes know of their meaning? No, Thurber, these ancient places are dreaming gorgeously and
over-flowing with wonder and terror and escapes from the commonplace, and yet there's not a living
soul to understand or profit by them. Or rather, there's only one living soul--for I haven't been
digging around in the past for nothing !
'See here, you're interested in this sort of thing. What if I told you that I've got another studio up
there, where I can catch the night--spirit of antique horror and paint things that I couldn't even think of
in Newbury Street? Naturally I don't tell those cursed old maids at the club--with Reid, damn him,
whispering even as it is that I'm a sort of monster bound down the toboggan of reverse evolution.
Yes, Thurber, I decided long ago that one must paint terror as well as beauty from life, so I did some
exploring in places where I had reason to know terror lives.
'I've got a place that I don't believe three living Nordic men besides myself have ever seen. It isn't
so very far from the elevated as distance goes, but it's centuries away as the soul goes. I took it
because of the queer old brick well in the cellar--one of the sort I told you about. The shack's almost
tumbling down so that nobody else would live there, and I'd hate to tell you how little I pay for it.
The windows are boarded up, but I like that all the better, since I don't want daylight for what I do. I
paint in the cellar, where the inspiration is thickest, but I've other rooms furnished on the ground
floor. A Sicilian owns it, and I've hired it under the name of Peters.
'Now, if you're game, I'll take you there tonight. I think you'd enjoy the pictures, for, as I said, I've
let myself go a bit there. It's no vast tour--I sometimes do it on foot, for I don't want to attract attention
with a taxi in such a place. We can take the shuttle at the South Station for Battery Street, and after that
the walk isn't much.'
Well, Eliot, there wasn't much for me to do after that harangue but to keep myself from running
instead of walking for the first vacant cab we could sight. We changed to the elevated at the South
Station, and at about twelve o'clock had climbed down the steps at Battery Street and struck along the
old waterfront past Constitution Wharf. I didn't keep track of the cross streets, and can't tell you yet
which it was we turned up, but I know it wasn't Greenough Lane.
When we did turn, it was to climb through the deserted length of the oldest and dirtiest alley I
ever saw in my life, with crumbling-looking gables, broken small-paned windows, and archaic
chimneys that stood out half-disintegrated against the moonlit sky. I don't believe there were three
houses in sight that hadn't been standing in Cotton Mather's time--certainly I glimpsed at least two
with an overhang, and once I thought I saw a peaked roof-line of the almost forgotten pre--gambrel
type, though antiquarians tell us there are none left in Boston.
From that alley, which had a dim light, we turned to the left into an equally silent and still
narrower alley with no light at all: and in a minute made what I think was an obtuse-angled bend
towards the right in the dark. Not long after this Pickman produced a flashlight and revealed an
antediluvian ten-panelled door that looked damnably worm--eaten. Unlocking it, he ushered me into a
barren hallway with what was once splendid dark-oak panelling--simple, of course, but thrillingly
suggestive of the times of Andros and Phipps and the Witchcraft. Then he took me through a door on
the left, lighted an oil lamp, and told me to make myself at home.
Now, Eliot, I'm what the man in the street would call fairly 'hard--boiled,' but I'll confess that what
I saw on the walls of that room gave me a bad turn. They were his pictures, you know--the ones he
couldn't paint or even show in Newbury Street--and he was right when he said he had 'let himself go.'
Here--have another drink--I need one anyhow!
There's no use in my trying to tell you what they were like, because the awful, the blasphemous
horror, and the unbelievable loathsomeness and moral foetor came from simple touches quite beyond
the power of words to classify. There was none of the exotic technique you see in Sidney Sime,
none of the trans-Saturnian landscapes and lunar fungi that Clark Ashton Smith uses to freeze the
blood. The backgrounds were mostly old churchyards, deep woods, cliffs by the sea, brick tunnels,
ancient panelled rooms, or simple vaults of masonry. Copp's Hill Burying Ground, which could not
be many blocks away from this very house, was a favourite scene.
The madness and monstrosity lay in the figures in the foreground-for Pickman's morbid art was
pre-eminently one of demoniac portraiture. These figures were seldom completely human, but often
approached humanity in varying degree. Most of the bodies, while roughly bipedal, had a forward
slumping, and a vaguely canine cast. The texture of the majority was a kind of unpleasant rubberiness.
Ugh! I can see them now! Their occupations--well, don't ask me to be too precise. They were
usually feeding--I won't say on what. They were sometimes shown in groups in cemeteries or
underground passages, and often appeared to be in battle over their prey--or rather, their treasure-
trove. And what damnable expressiveness Pickman sometimes gave the sightless faces of this charnel
booty! Occasionally the things were shown leaping through open windows at night, or squatting on
the chests of sleepers, worrying at their throats. One canvas showed a ring of them baying about a
hanged witch on Gallows Hill, whose dead face held a close kinship to theirs.
But don't get the idea that it was all this hideous business of theme and setting which struck me
faint. I'm not a three-year-old kid, and I'd seen much like this before. It was the faces, Eliot, those
accursed faces, that leered and slavered out of the canvas with the very breath of life! By God, man, I
verily believe they were alive! That nauseous wizard had waked the fires of hell in pigment, and his
brush had been a nightmare-spawning wand. Give me that decanter, Eliot!
There was one thing called 'The Lesson'--Heaven pity me, that I ever saw it! Listen--can you
fancy a squatting circle of nameless dog-like things in a churchyard teaching a small child how to
feed like themselves? The price of a changeling, I suppose--you know the old myth about how the
weird people leave their spawn in cradles in exchange for the human babes they steal. Pickman was
showing what happens to those stolen babes--how they grow up--and then I began to see a hideous
relationship in the faces of the human and non-human figures. He was, in all his gradations of
morbidity between the frankly non-human and the degradedly human, establishing a sardonic linkage
and evolution. The dog-things were developed from mortals!
And no sooner had I wondered what he made of their own young as left with mankind in the form
of changelings, than my eye caught a picture embodying that very thought. It was that of an ancient
Puritan interior--a heavily beamed room with lattice windows, a settle, and clumsy seventeenth-
century furniture, with the family sitting about while the father read from the Scriptures. Every face
but one showed nobility and reverence, but that one reflected the mockery of the pit. It was that of a
young man in years, and no doubt belonged to a supposed son of that pious father, but in essence it
was the kin of the unclean things. It was their changeling--and in a spirit of supreme irony Pickman
had given the features a very perceptible resemblance to his own.
By this time Pickman had lighted a lamp in an adjoining room and was politely holding open the
door for me; asking me if I would care to see his 'modern studies.' I hadn't been able to give him
much of my opinions--I was too speechless with fright and loathing--but I think he fully understood
and felt highly complimented. And now I want to assure you again, Eliot, that I'm no mollycoddle to
scream at anything which shows a bit of departure from the usual. I'm middle-aged and decently
sophisticated, and I guess you saw enough of me in France to know I'm not easily knocked out.
Remember, too, that I'd just about recovered my wind and gotten used to those frightful pictures
which turned colonial New England into a kind of annex of hell. Well, in spite of all this, that next
room forced a real scream out of me, and I had to clutch at the doorway to keep from keeling over.
The other chamber had shown a pack of ghouls and witches over-running the world of our
forefathers, but this one brought the horror right into our own daily life!
God, how that man could paint! There was a study called 'Subway Accident,' in which a flock of
the vile things were clambering up from some unknown catacomb through a crack in the floor of the
Boston Street subway and attacking a crowd of people on the platform. Another showed a dance on
Copp's Hill among the tombs with the background of today. Then there were any number of cellar
views, with monsters creeping in through holes and rifts in the masonry and grinning as they squatted
behind barrels or furnaces and waited for their first victim to descend the stairs.
One disgusting canvas seemed to depict a vast cross-section of Beacon Hill, with ant-like armies
of the mephitic monsters squeezing themselves through burrows that honeycombed the ground.
Dances in the modern cemeteries were freely pictured, and another conception somehow shocked me
more than all the rest--a scene in an unknown vault, where scores of the beasts crowded about one
who had a well-known Boston guidebook and was evidently reading aloud. All were pointing to a
certain passage, and every face seemed so distorted with epileptic and reverberant laughter that I
almost thought I heard the fiendish echoes. The title of the picture was, 'Holmes, Lowell and
Longfellow Lie Buried in Mount Auburn.'
As I gradually steadied myself and got readjusted to this second room of deviltry and morbidity, I
began to analyse some of the points in my sickening loathing. In the first place, I said to myself, these
things repelled because of the utter inhumanity and callous crudity they showed in Pickman. The
fellow must be a relentless enemy of all mankind to take such glee in the torture of brain and flesh and
the degradation of the mortal tenement. In the second place, they terrified because of their very
greatness. Their art was the art that convinced--when we saw the pictures we saw the demons
themselves and were afraid of them. And the queer part was, that Pickman got none of his power from
the use of selectiveness or bizarrerie. Nothing was blurred, distorted, or conventionalized; outlines
were sharp and lifelike, and details were almost painfully defined. And the faces!
It was not any mere artist's interpretation that we saw; it was pandemonium itself, crystal clear in
stark objectivity. That was it, by Heaven! The man was not a fantaisiste or romanticist at all--he did
not even try to give us the churning, prismatic ephemera of dreams, but coldly and sardonically
reflected some stable, mechanistic, and well-established horror--world which he saw fully,
brilliantly, squarely, and unfalteringly. God knows what that world can have been, or where he ever
glimpsed the blasphemous shapes that loped and trotted and crawled through it; but whatever the
baffling source of his images, one thing was plain. Pickman was in every sense--in conception and in
execution--a thorough, painstaking, and almost scientific realist.
My host was now leading the way down the cellar to his actual studio, and I braced myself for
some hellish efforts among the unfinished canvases. As we reached the bottom of the damp stairs he
fumed his flash-light to a corner of the large open space at hand, revealing the circular brick curb of
what was evidently a great well in the earthen floor. We walked nearer, and I saw that it must be five
feet across, with walls a good foot thick and some six inches above the ground level--solid work of
the seventeenth century, or I was much mistaken. That, Pickman said, was the kind of thing he had
been talking about--an aperture of the network of tunnels that used to undermine the hill. I noticed idly
that it did not seem to be bricked up, and that a heavy disc of wood formed the apparent cover.
Thinking of the things this well must have been connected with if Pickman's wild hints had not been
mere rhetoric, I shivered slightly; then turned to follow him up a step and through a narrow door into
a room of fair size, provided with a wooden floor and furnished as a studio. An acetylene gas outfit
gave the light necessary for work.
The unfinished pictures on easels or propped against the walls were as ghastly as the finished
ones upstairs, and showed the painstaking methods of the artist. Scenes were blocked out with
extreme care, and pencilled guide lines told of the minute exactitude which Pickman used in getting
the right perspective and proportions. The man was great--I say it even now, knowing as much as I
do. A large camera on a table excited my notice, and Pickman told me that he used it in taking scenes
for backgrounds, so that he might paint them from photographs in the studio instead of carting his
oufit around the town for this or that view. He thought a photograph quite as good as an actual scene
or model for sustained work, and declared he employed them regularly.
There was something very disturbing about the nauseous sketches and half-finished monstrosities
that leered round from every side of the room, and when Pickman suddenly unveiled a huge canvas on
the side away from the light I could not for my life keep back a loud scream--the second I had emitted
that night. It echoed and echoed through the dim vaultings of that ancient and nitrous cellar, and I had
to choke back a flood of reaction that threatened to burst out as hysterical laughter. Merciful
Creator! Eliot, but I don't know how much was real and how much was feverish fancy. It doesn't seem
to me that earth can hold a dream like that!
It was a colossal and nameless blasphemy with glaring red eyes, and it held in bony claws a thing
that had been a man, gnawing at the head as a child nibbles at a stick of candy. Its position was a kind
of crouch, and as one looked one felt that at any moment it might drop its present prey and seek a
juicier morsel. But damn it all, it wasn't even the fiendish subject that made it such an immortal
fountain--head of all panic--not that, nor the dog face with its pointed ears, bloodshot eyes, flat nose,
and drooling lips. It wasn't the scaly claws nor the mould-caked body nor the half-hooved feet-none
of these, though any one of them might well have driven an excitable man to madness.
It was the technique, Eliot--the cursed, the impious, the unnatural technique! As I am a living
being, I never elsewhere saw the actual breath of life so fused into a canvas. The monster was there-
-it glared and gnawed and gnawed and glared--and I knew that only a suspension of Nature's laws
could ever let a man paint a thing like that without a model--without some glimpse of the nether world
which no mortal unsold to the Fiend has ever had.
Pinned with a thumb-tack to a vacant part of the canvas was a piece of paper now badly curled up-
-probably, I thought, a photograph from which Pickman meant to paint a background as hideous as the
nightmare it was to enhance. I reached out to uncurl and look at it, when suddenly I saw Pickman start
as if shot. He had been listening with peculiar intensity ever since my shocked scream had waked
unaccustomed echoes in the dark cellar, and now he seemed struck with a fright which, though not
comparable to my own, had in it more of the physical than of the spiritual. He drew a revolver and
motioned me to silence, then stepped out into the main cellar and closed the door behind him.
I think I was paralysed for an instant. Imitating Pickman's listening, I fancied I heard a faint
scurrying sound somewhere, and a series of squeals or beats in a direction I couldn't determine. I
thought of huge rats and shuddered. Then there came a subdued sort of clatter which somehow set
me all in gooseflesh--a furtive, groping kind of clatter, though I can't attempt to convey what I mean
in words. It was like heavy wood falling on stone or brick--wood on brick--what did that make me
think of?
It came again, and louder. There was a vibration as if the wood had fallen farther than it had fallen
before. After that followed a sharp grating noise, a shouted gibberish from Pickman, and the
deafening discharge of all six chambers of a revolver, fired spectacularly as a lion tamer might fire
in the air for effect. A muffled squeal or squawk, and a thud. Then more wood and brick grating, a
pause, and the opening of the door--at which I'll confess I started violently. Pickman reappeared with
his smoking weapon, cursing the bloated rats that infested the ancient well.
'The deuce knows what they eat, Thurber,' he grinned, 'for those archaic tunnels touched
graveyard and witch-den and sea-coast. But whatever it is, they must have run short, for they were
devilish anxious to get out. Your yelling stirred them up, I fancy. Better be cautious in these old
places--our rodent friends are the one drawback, though I sometimes think they're a positive asset by
way of atmosphere and colour.'
Well, Eliot, that was the end of the night's adventure. Pickman had promised to show me the place,
and Heaven knows he had done it. He led me out of that tangle of alleys in another direction, it seems,
for when we sighted a lamp-post we were in a half-familiar street with monotonous rows of mingled
tenement blocks and old houses. Charter Street, it turned out to be, but I was too flustered to notice
just where we hit it. We were too late for the elevated, and walked back downtown through Hanover
Street. I remember that wall. We switched from Tremont up Beacon, and Pickman left me at the corner
of Joy, where I turned off. I never spoke to him again.
Why did I drop him? Don't be impatient. Wait till I ring for coffee. We've had enough of the other
stuff, but I for one need something. No--it wasn't the paintings I saw in that place; though I'll swear
they were enough to get him ostracised in nine-tenths of the homes and clubs of Boston, and I guess
you won't wonder now why I have to steer clear of subways and cellars. It was--something I found in
my coat the next morning. You know, the curled-up paper tacked to the frightful canvas in the cellar;
the thing I thought was a photograph of some scene he meant to use as a background for that monster.
That last scare had come while I was reaching to uncurl it, and it seems I had vacantly crumpled it
into my pocket. But here's the coffee--take it black, Eliot, if you're wise.
Yes, that paper was the reason I dropped Pickman; Richard Upton Pickman, the greatest artist I
have ever known--and the foulest being that ever leaped the bounds of life into the pits of myth and
madness. Eliot--old Reid was right. He wasn't strictly human. Either he was born in strange shadow,
or he'd found a way to unlock the forbidden gate. It's all the same now, for he's gone--back into the
fabulous darkness he loved to haunt. Here, let's have the chandelier going.
Don't ask me to explain or even conjecture about what I burned. Don't ask me, either, what lay
behind that mole-like scrambling Pickman was so keen to pass off as rats. There are secrets, you
know, which might have come down from old Salem times, and Cotton Mather tells even stranger
things. You know how damned lifelike Pickman's paintings were--how we all wondered where he got
those faces.
Well--that paper wasn't a photograph of any background, after all. What it showed was simply the
monstrous being he was painting on that awful canvas. It was the model he was using--and its
background was merely the wall of the cellar studio in minute detail. But by God, Eliot, it was a
photograph from life!

POETRY OF THE GODS
Attired simply, in a low-cut black evening dress, she appeared outwardly a typical product of
modern civilization; but tonight she felt the immeasurable gulf that separated her soul from all her
prosaic surroundings. Was it because of the strange home in which she lived, that abode of coldness
where relations were always strained and the inmates scarcely more than strangers? Was it that, or
was it some greater and less explicable misplacement in time and space, whereby she had been born
too late, too early, or too far away from the haunts of her spirit ever to harmonize with the
unbeautiful things of contemporary reality? To dispel the mood which was engulfing her more and
more deeply each moment, she took a magazine from the table and searched for some healing bit of
poetry. Poetry had always relieved her troubled mind better than anything else, though many things in
the poetry she had seen detracted from the influence. Over parts of even the sublimest verses hung a
chill vapor of sterile ugliness and restraint, like dust on a window-pane through which one views a
magnificent sunset.
Listlessly turning the magazine's pages, as if searching for an elusive treasure, she suddenly
came upon something which dispelled her languor. An observer could have read her thoughts and
told that she had discovered some image or dream which brought her nearer to her unattained goal
than any image or dream she had seen before. It was only a bit of vers libre, that pitiful compromise
of the poet who overleaps prose yet falls short of the divine melody of numbers; but it had in it all
the unstudied music of a bard who lives and feels, who gropes ecstatically for unveiled beauty.
Devoid of regularity, it yet had the harmony of winged, spontaneous words, a harmony missing from
the formal, convention-bound verse she had known. As she read on, her surroundings gradually
faded, and soon there lay about her only the mists of dream, the purple, star-strewn mists beyond time,
where only Gods and dreamers walk.
Amid the mists of dream the reader cried to the rhythmical stars, of her delight at the coming of a
new age of song, a rebirth of Pan. Half closing her eyes, she repeated words whose melody lay
hidden like crystals at the bottom of a stream before dawn, hidden but to gleam effulgently at the birth
of day.
Out of the mists gleamed godlike the torm ot a youth, in winged helmet and sandals, caduceus-
bearing, and of a beauty like to nothing on earth. Before the face of the sleeper he thrice waved the
rod which Apollo had given him in trade for the nine-corded shell of melody, and upon her brow he
placed a wreath of myrtle and roses. Then, adoring, Hermes spoke:
"0 Nymph more fair than the golden-haired sisters of Cyene or the sky--inhabiting Atlantides,
beloved of Aphrodite and blessed of Pallas, thou hast indeed discovered the secret of the Gods,
which lieth in beauty and song. 0 Prophetess more lovely than the Sybil of Cumae when Apollo first
knew her, thou has truly spoken of the new age, for even now on Maenalus, Pan sighs and stretches in
his sleep, wishful to wake and behold about him the little rose-crowned fauns and the antique Satyrs.
In thy yearning hast thou divined what no mortal, saving only a few whom the world rejects,
remembereth: that the Gods were never dead, but only sleeping the sleep and dreaming the dreams of
Gods in lotos-filled Hesperian gardens beyond the golden sunset. And now draweth nigh the time of
their awakening, when coldness and ugliness shall perish, and Zeus sit once more on Olympus.
Already the sea about Paphos trembleth into a foam which only ancient skies have looked on before,
and at night on Helicon the shepherds hear strange murmurings and half-remembered notes. Woods
and fields are tremulous at twilight with the shimmering of white saltant forms, and immemorial
Ocean yields up curious sights beneath thin moons. The Gods are patient, and have slept long, but
neither man nor giant shall defy the Gods forever. In Tartarus the Titans writhe and beneath the fiery
Aetna groan the children of Uranus and Gaea. The day now dawns when man must answer for
centuries of denial, but in sleeping the Gods have grown kind and will not hurl him to the gulf made
for deniers of Gods. Instead will their vengeance smite the darkness, fallacy and ugliness which have
turned the mind of man; and under the sway of bearded Saturnus shall mortals, once more sacrificing
unto him, dwell in beauty and delight. This night shalt thou know the favour of the Gods, and behold
on Parnassus those dreams which the Gods have through ages sent to earth to show that they are not
dead. For poets are the dreams of Gods, and in each and every age someone hath sung unknowingly
the message and the promise from the lotosgardens beyond the sunset."
Then in his arms Hermes bore the dreaming maiden through the skies. Gentle breezes from the
tower of Aiolas wafted them high above warm, scented seas, till suddenly they came upon Zeus,
holding court upon double-headed Parnassus, his golden throne flanked by Apollo and the Muses on
the right hand, and by ivy-wreathed Dionysus and pleasure--flushed Bacchae on the left hand. So
much of splendour Marcia had never seen before, either awake or in dreams, but its radiance did her
no injury, as would have the radiance of lofty Olympus; for in this lesser court the Father of Gods
had tempered his glories for the sight of mortals. Before the laurel-draped mouth of the Corycian
cave sat in a row six noble forms with the aspect of mortals, but the countenances of Gods. These the
dreamer recognized from images of them which she had beheld, and she knew that they were none
else than the divine Maeonides, the avernian Dante, the more than mortal Shakespeare, the chaos-
exploring Milton, the cosmic Goethe and the musalan Keats. These were those messengers whom the
Gods had sent to tell men that Pan had passed not away, but only slept; for it is in poetry that Gods
speak to men. Then spake the Thunderer:
"0 Daughter--for, being one of my endless line, thou art indeed my daughter--behold upon ivory
thrones of honour the august messengers Gods have sent down that in the words and writing of men
there may be still some traces of divine beauty. Other bards have men justly crowned with enduring
laurels, but these hath Apollo crowned, and these have I set in places apart, as mortals who have
spoken the language of the Gods. Long have we dreamed in lotosgardens beyond the West, and
spoken only through our dreams; but the time approaches when our voices shall not be silent. It is a
time of awakening and change. Once more hath Phaeton ridden low, searing the fields and drying the
streams. In Gaul lone nymphs with disordered hair weep beside fountains that are no more, and pine
over rivers turned red with the blood of mortals. Ares and his train have gone forth with the madness
of Gods and have returned Deimos and Phobos glutted with unnatural delight. Tellus moons with
grief, and the faces of men are as the faces of Erinyes, even as when Astraea fled to the skies, and
the waves of our bidding encompassed all the land saving this high peak alone. Amidst this chaos,
prepared to herald his coming yet to conceal his arrival, even now toileth our latest born messenger,
in whose dreams are all the images which other messengers have dreamed before him. He it is that
we have chosen to blend into one glorious whole all the beauty that the world hath known before, and
to write words wherein shall echo all the wisdom and the loveliness of the past. He it is who shall
proclaim our return and sing of the days to come when Fauns and Dryads shall haunt their accustomed
groves in beauty. Guided was our choice by those who now sit before the Corycian grotto on
thrones of ivory, and in whose songs thou shalt hear notes of sublimity by which years hence thou
shalt know the greater messenger when he cometh. Attend their voices as one by one they sing to
thee here. Each note shall thou hear again in the poetry which is to come, the poetry which shall
bring peace and pleasure to thy soul, though search for it through bleak years thou must. Attend with
diligence, for each chord that vibrates away into hiding shall appear again to thee after thou hast
returned to earth, as Alpheus, sinking his waters into the soul of Hellas, appears as the crystal
arethusa in remote Sicilia."
Then arose Homeros, the ancient among bards, who took his lyre and chanted his hymn to
Aphrodite. No word of Greek did Marcia know, yet did the message not fall vainly upon her ears, for
in the cryptic rhythm was that which spake to all mortals and Gods, and needed no interpreter.
So too the songs of Dante and Goethe, whose unknown words dave the ether with melodies easy
to ready and adore. But at last remembered accents resounded before the listener. It was the Swan of
Avon, once a God among men, and still a God among Gods:
Accents still more familiar arose as Milton, blind no more, declaimed immortal harmony:
Last of all came the young voice of Keats, closest of all the messengers to the beauteous faun-
folk:
As the singer ceased, there came a sound in the wind blowing from far Egypt, where at night
Aurora mourns by the Nile for her slain Memnon. To the feet of the Thunderer flew the rosy-
fingered Goddess and, kneeling, cried, "Master, it is time I unlocked the Gates of the East."And
Phoebus, handing his lyre to Calliope, his bride among the Muses, prepared to depart for the
jewelled and column-raised Palace of the Sun, where fretted the steeds already harnessed to the
golden car of Day. So Zeus descended from his cavern throne and placed his hand upon the head of
Marcia, saying:
"Daughter, the dawn is nigh, and it is well that thou shouldst return before the awakening of
mortals to thy home. Weep not at the bleakness of thy life, for the shadow of false faiths will soon be
gone and the Gods shall once more walk among men. Search thou unceasingly for our messenger, for
in him wilt thou find peace and comfort. By his word shall thy steps be guided to happiness, and in
his dreams of beauty shall thy spirit find that which it craveth."As Zeus ceased, the young Hermes
gently seized the maiden and bore her up toward the fading stars, up and westward over unseen seas.
And as she speaks there comes again a vision of Parnassus and the far--off sound of a mighty
voice saying, "By his word shall thy steps be guided to happiness, and in his dreams of beauty shall
thy spirit find all that it craveth."

THE ALCHEMIST
High up, crowning the grassy summit of a swelling mount whose sides are wooded near the base
with the gnarled trees of the primeval forest stands the old chateau of my ancestors. For centuries its
lofty battlements have frowned down upon the wild and rugged countryside about, serving as a home
and stronghold for the proud house whose honored line is older even than the moss-grown castle
walls. These ancient turrets, stained by the storms of generations and crumbling under the slow yet
mighty pressure of time, formed in the ages of feudalism one of the most dreaded and formidable
fortresses in all France. From its machicolated parapets and mounted battlements Barons, Counts, and
even Kings had been defied, yet never had its spacious halls resounded to the footsteps of the
invader.
But since those glorious years, all is changed. A poverty but little above the level of dire want,
together with a pride of name that forbids its alleviation by the pursuits of commercial life, have
prevented the scions of our line from maintaining their estates in pristine splendour; and the falling
stones of the walls, the overgrown vegetation in the parks, the dry and dusty moat, the ill-paved
courtyards, and toppling towers without, as well as the sagging floors, the worm-eaten wainscots,
and the faded tapestries within, all tell a gloomy tale of fallen grandeur. As the ages passed, first one,
then another of the four great turrets were left to ruin, until at last but a single tower housed the sadly
reduced descendants of the once mighty lords of the estate.
It was in one of the vast and gloomy chambers of this remaining tower that I, Antoine, last of the
unhappy and accursed Counts de C-, first saw the light of day, ninety long years ago. Within these
walls and amongst the dark and shadowy forests, the wild ravines and grottos of the hillside below,
were spent the first years of my troubled life. My parents I never knew. My father had been killed at
the age of thirty--two, a month before I was born, by the fall of a stone somehow dislodged from one
of the deserted parapets of the castle. And my mother having died at my birth, my care and education
devolved solely upon one remaining servitor, an old and trusted man of considerable intelligence,
whose name I remember as Pierre. I was an only child and the lack of companionship which this fact
entailed upon me was augmented by the strange care exercised by my aged guardian, in excluding me
from the society of the peasant children whose abodes were scattered here and there upon the plains
that surround the base of the hill. At that time, Pierre said that this restriction was imposed upon me
because my noble birth placed me above association with such plebeian company. Now I know that
its real object was to keep from my ears the idle tales of the dread curse upon our line that were
nightly told and magnified by the simple tenantry as they conversed in hushed accents in the glow of
their cottage hearths.
Thus isolated, and thrown upon my own resources, I spent the hours of my childhood in poring
over the ancient tomes that filled the shadow-haunted library of the chateau, and in roaming without
aim or purpose through the perpetual dust of the spectral wood that clothes the side of the hill near
its foot. It was perhaps an effect of such surroundings that my mind early acquired a shade of
melancholy. Those studies and pursuits which partake of the dark and occult in nature most strongly
claimed my attention.
Of my own race I was permitted to learn singularly little, yet what small knowledge of it I was
able to gain seemed to depress me much. Perhaps it was at first only the manifest reluctance of my
old preceptor to discuss with me my paternal ancestry that gave rise to the terror which I ever felt at
the mention of my great house, yet as I grew out of childhood, I was able to piece together
disconnected fragments of discourse, let slip from the unwilling tongue which had begun to falter in
approaching senility, that had a sort of relation to a certain circumstance which I had always deemed
strange, but which now became dimly terrible. The circumstance to which I allude is the early age at
which all the Counts of my line had met their end. Whilst I had hitherto considered this but a natural
attribute of a family of short-lived men, I afterward pondered long upon these premature deaths, and
began to connect them with the wanderings of the old man, who often spoke of a curse which for
centuries had prevented the lives of the holders of my title from much exceeding the span of thirty-
two years. Upon my twenty-first birthday, the aged Pierre gave to me a family document which he
said had for many generations been handed down from father to son, and continued by each
possessor. Its contents were of the most startling nature, and its perusal confirmed the gravest of my
apprehensions. At this time, my belief in the supernatural was firm and deep-seated, else I should
have dismissed with scorn the incredible narrative unfolded before my eyes.
The paper carried me back to the days of the thirteenth century, when the old castle in which I sat
had been a feared and impregnable fortress. It told of a certain ancient man who had once dwelled on
our estates, a person of no small accomplishments, though little above the rank of peasant, by name,
Michel, usually designated by the surname of Mauvais, the Evil, on account of his sinister reputation.
He had studied beyond the custom of his kind, seeking such things as the Philosopher's Stone or the
Elixir of Eternal Life, and was reputed wise in the terrible secrets of Black Magic and Alchemy.
Michel Mauvais had one son, named Charles, a youth as proficient as himself in the hidden arts, who
had therefore been called Le Sorcier, or the Wizard. This pair, shunned by all honest folk, were
suspected of the most hideous practices. Old Michel was said to have burnt his wife alive as a
sacrifice to the Devil, and the unaccountable disappearance of many small peasant children was laid
at the dreaded door of these two. Yet through the dark natures of the father and son ran one
redeeming ray of humanity; the evil old man loved his offspring with fierce intensity, whilst the
youth had for his parent a more than filial affection.
One night the castle on the hill was thrown into the wildest confusion by the vanishment of young
Godfrey, son to Henri, the Count. A searching party, headed by the frantic father, invaded the cottage
of the sorcerers and there came upon old Michel Mauvais, busy over a huge and violently boiling
cauldron. Without certain cause, in the ungoverned madness of fury and despair, the Count laid hands
on the aged wizard, and ere he released his murderous hold, his victim was no more. Meanwhile,
joyful servants were proclaiming the finding of young Godfrey in a distant and unused chamber of the
great edifice, telling too late that poor Michel had been killed in vain. As the Count and his
associates turned away from the lowly abode of the alchemist, the form of Charles Le Sorcier
appeared through the trees. The excited chatter of the menials standing about told him what had
occurred, yet he seemed at first unmoved at his father's fate. Then, slowly advancing to meet the
Count, he pronounced in dull yet terrible accents the curse that ever afterward haunted the house of
C-.
'May ne'er a noble of thy murd'rous line Survive to reach a greater age than thine!'
spake he, when, suddenly leaping backwards into the black woods, he drew from his tunic a phial
of colourless liquid which he threw into the face of his father's slayer as he disappeared behind the
inky curtain of the night. The Count died without utterance, and was buried the next day, but little
more than two and thirty years from the hour of his birth. No trace of the assassin could be found,
though relentless bands of peasants scoured the neighboring woods and the meadowland around the
hill.
Thus time and the want of a reminder dulled the memory of the curse in the minds of the late
Count's family, so that when Godfrey, innocent cause of the whole tragedy and now bearing the title,
was killed by an arrow whilst hunting at the age of thirty-two, there were no thoughts save those of
grief at his demise. But when, years afterward, the next young Count, Robert by name, was found
dead in a nearby field of no apparent cause, the peasants told in whispers that their seigneur had but
lately passed his thirty-second birthday when surprised by early death. Louis, son to Robert, was
found drowned in the moat at the same fateful age, and thus down through the centuries ran the
ominous chronicle: Henris, Roberts, Antoines, and Armands snatched from happy and virtuous lives
when little below the age of their unfortunate ancestor at his murder.
That I had left at most but eleven years of further existence was made certain to me by the words
which I had read. My life, previously held at small value, now became dearer to me each day, as I
delved deeper and deeper into the mysteries of the hidden world of black magic. Isolated as I was,
modern science had produced no impression upon me, and I laboured as in the Middle Ages, as wrapt
as had been old Michel and young Charles themselves in the acquisition of demonological and
alchemical learning. Yet read as I might, in no manner could I account for the strange curse upon my
line. In unusually rational moments I would even go so far as to seek a natural explanation, attributing
the early deaths of my ancestors to the sinister Charles Le Sorcier and his heirs; yet, having found
upon careful inquiry that there were no known descendants of the alchemist, I would fall back to
occult studies, and once more endeavor to find a spell, that would release my house from its terrible
burden. Upon one thing I was absolutely resolved. I should never wed, for, since no other branch of
my family was in existence, I might thus end the curse with myself.
As I drew near the age of thirty, old Pierre was called to the land beyond. Alone I buried him
beneath the stones of the courtyard about which he had loved to wander in life. Thus was I left to
ponder on myself as the only human creature within the great fortress, and in my utter solitude my
mind began to cease its vain protest against the impending doom, to become almost reconciled to the
fate which so many of my ancestors had met. Much of my time was now occupied in the exploration
of the ruined and abandoned halls and towers of the old chateau, which in youth fear had caused me
to shun, and some of which old Pierre had once told me had not been trodden by human foot for over
four centuries. Strange and awesome were many of the objects I encountered. Furniture, covered by
the dust of ages and crumbling with the rot of long dampness, met my eyes. Cobwebs in a profusion
never before seen by me were spun everywhere, and huge bats flapped their bony and uncanny wings
on all sides of the otherwise untenanted gloom.
Of my exact age, even down to days and hours, I kept a most careful record, for each movement
of the pendulum of the massive clock in the library told off so much of my doomed existence. At
length I approached that time which I had so long viewed with apprehension. Since most of my
ancestors had been seized some little while before they reached the exact age of Count Henri at his
end, I was every moment on the watch for the coming of the unknown death. In what strange form the
curse should overtake me, I knew not; but I was resolved at least that it should not find me a cowardly
or a passive victim. With new vigour I applied myself to my examination of the old chateau and its
contents.
It was upon one of the longest of all my excursions of discovery in the deserted portion of the
castle, less than a week before that fatal hour which I felt must mark the utmost limit of my stay on
earth, beyond which I could have not even the slightest hope of continuing to draw breath that I came
upon the culminating event of my whole life. I had spent the better part of the morning in climbing up
and down half ruined staircases in one of the most dilapidated of the ancient turrets. As the afternoon
progressed, I sought the lower levels, descending into what appeared to be either a mediaeval place
of confinement, or a more recently excavated storehouse for gunpowder. As I slowly traversed the
nitre-encrusted passageway at the foot of the last staircase, the paving became very damp, and soon I
saw by the light of my flickering torch that a blank, water-stained wall impeded my journey. Turning
to retrace my steps, my eye fell upon a small trapdoor with a ring, which lay directly beneath my foot.
Pausing, I succeeded with difficulty in raising it, whereupon there was revealed a black aperture,
exhaling noxious fumes which caused my torch to sputter, and disclosing in the unsteady glare the
top of a flight of stone steps.
As soon as the torch which I lowered into the repellent depths burned freely and steadily, I
commenced my descent. The steps were many, and led to a narrow stone-flagged passage which I
knew must be far underground. This passage proved of great length, and terminated in a massive
oaken door, dripping with the moisture of the place, and stoutly resisting all my attempts to open it.
Ceasing after a time my efforts in this direction, I had proceeded back some distance toward the steps
when there suddenly fell to my experience one of the most profound and maddening shocks capable
of reception by the human mind. Without warning, I heard the heavy door behind me creak slowly
open upon its rusted hinges. My immediate sensations were incapable of analysis. To be confronted
in a place as thoroughly deserted as I had deemed the old castle with evidence of the presence of
man or spirit produced in my brain a horror of the most acute description. When at last I turned and
faced the seat of the sound, my eyes must have started from their orbits at the sight that they beheld.
There in the ancient Gothic doorway stood a human figure. It was that of a man clad in a skull-cap
and long mediaeval tunic of dark colour. His long hair and flowing beard were of a terrible and
intense black hue, and of incredible profusion. His forehead, high beyond the usual dimensions; his
cheeks, deep-sunken and heavily lined with wrinkles; and his hands, long, claw-like, and gnarled,
were of such a deadly marble-like whiteness as I have never elsewhere seen in man. His figure, lean
to the proportions of a skeleton, was strangely bent and almost lost within the voluminous folds of his
peculiar garment. But strangest of all were his eyes, twin caves of abysmal blackness, profound in
expression of understanding, yet inhuman in degree of wickedness. These were now fixed upon me,
piercing my soul with their hatred, and rooting me to the spot whereon I stood.
At last the figure spoke in a rumbling voice that chilled me through with its dull hollowness and
latent malevolence. The language in which the discourse was clothed was that debased form of Latin
in use amongst the more learned men of the Middle Ages, and made familiar to me by my prolonged
researches into the works of the old alchemists and demonologists. The apparition spoke of the
curse which had hovered over my house, told me of my coming end, dwelt on the wrong perpetrated
by my ancestor against old Michel Mauvais, and gloated over the revenge of Charles Le Sorcier. He
told how young Charles has escaped into the night, returning in after years to kill Godfrey the heir
with an arrow just as he approached the age which had been his father's at his assassination; how he
had secretly returned to the estate and established himself, unknown, in the even then deserted
subterranean chamber whose doorway now framed the hideous narrator, how he had seized Robert,
son of Godfrey, in a field, forced poison down his throat, and left him to die at the age of thirty-two,
thus maintaining the foul provisions of his vengeful curse. At this point I was left to imagine the
solution of the greatest mystery of all, how the curse had been fulfilled since that time when Charles
Le Sorcier must in the course of nature have died, for the man digressed into an account of the deep
alchemical studies of the two wizards, father and son, speaking most particularly of the researches of
Charles Le Sorcier concerning the elixir which should grant to him who partook of it eternal life and
youth.
His enthusiasm had seemed for the moment to remove from his terrible eyes the black
malevolence that had first so haunted me, but suddenly the fiendish glare returned and, with a
shocking sound like the hissing of a serpent, the stranger raised a glass phial with the evident intent
of ending my life as had Charles Le Sorcier, six hundred years before, ended that of my ancestor.
Prompted by some preserving instinct of self-defense, I broke through the spell that had hitherto held
me immovable, and flung my now dying torch at the creature who menaced my existence. I heard the
phial break harmlessly against the stones of the passage as the tunic of the strange man caught fire
and lit the horrid scene with a ghastly radiance. The shriek of fright and impotent malice emitted by
the would-be assassin proved too much for my already shaken nerves, and I fell prone upon the slimy
floor in a total faint.
When at last my senses returned, all was frightfully dark, and my mind, remembering what had
occurred, shrank from the idea of beholding any more; yet curiosity over-mastered all. Who, I asked
myself, was this man of evil, and how came he within the castle walls? Why should he seek to avenge
the death of Michel Mauvais, and how had the curse been carried on through all the long centuries
since the time of Charles Le Sorcier? The dread of years was lifted from my shoulder, for I knew
that he whom I had felled was the source of all my danger from the curse; and now that I was free, I
burned with the desire to learn more of the sinister thing which had haunted my line for centuries, and
made of my own youth one long-continued nightmare. Determined upon further exploration, I felt in
my pockets for flint and steel, and lit the unused torch which I had with me.
First of all, new light revealed the distorted and blackened form of the mysterious stranger. The
hideous eyes were now closed. Disliking the sight, I turned away and entered the chamber beyond
the Gothic door. Here I found what seemed much like an alchemist's laboratory. In one corner was an
immense pile of shining yellow metal that sparkled gorgeously in the light of the torch. It may have
been gold, but I did not pause to examine it, for I was strangely affected by that which I had
undergone. At the farther end of the apartment was an opening leading out into one of the many wild
ravines of the dark hillside forest. Filled with wonder, yet now realizing how the man had obtained
access to the chateau, I proceeded to return. I had intended to pass by the remains of the stranger with
averted face but, as I approached the body, I seemed to hear emanating from it a faint sound, as
though life were not yet wholly extinct. Aghast, I turned to examine the charred and shrivelled figure
on the floor.
Then all at once the horrible eyes, blacker even than the seared face in which they were set,
opened wide with an expression which I was unable to interpret. The cracked lips tried to frame
words which I could not well understand. Once I caught the name of Charles Le Sorcier, and again I
fancied that the words 'years' and 'curse' issued from the twisted mouth. Still I was at a loss to gather
the purport of his disconnected speech. At my evident ignorance of his meaning, the pitchy eyes once
more flashed malevolently at me, until, helpless as I saw my opponent to be, I trembled as I watched
him.
Suddenly the wretch, animated with his last burst of strength, raised his piteous head from the
damp and sunken pavement. Then, as I remained, paralyzed with fear, he found his voice and in his
dying breath screamed forth those words which have ever afterward haunted my days and nights.
'Fool!' he shrieked, 'Can you not guess my secret? Have you no brain whereby you may recognize the
will which has through six long centuries fulfilled the dreadful curse upon the house? Have I not
told you of the great elixir of eternal life? Know you not how the secret of Alchemy was solved? I
tell you, it is I! I! I! that have lived for six hundred years to maintain my revenge, for I am Charles Le
Sorcier!'

THE BEAST IN THE CAVE
The horrible conclusion which had been gradually intruding itself upon my confused and
reluctant mind was now an awful certainty. I was lost, completely, hopelessly lost in the vast and
labyrinthine recess of the MammothCave. Turn as I might, in no direction could my straining vision
seize on any object capable of serving as a guidepost to set me on the outward path. That nevermore
should I behold the blessed light of day, or scan the pleasant hills and dales of the beautiful world
outside, my reason could no longer entertain the slightest unbelief. Hope had departed. Yet,
indoctrinated as I was by a life of philosophical study, I derived no small measure of satisfaction
from my unimpassioned demeanour; for although I had frequently read of the wild frenzies into
which were thrown the victims of similar situations, I experienced none of these, but stood quiet as
soon as I clearly realised the loss of my bearings.
Nor did the thought that I had probably wandered beyond the utmost limits of an ordinary search
cause me to abandon my composure even for a moment. If I must die, I reflected, then was this
terrible yet majestic cavern as welcome a sepulchre as that which any churchyard might afford, a
conception which carried with it more of tranquillity than of despair.
Starving would prove my ultimate fate; of this I was certain. Some, I knew, had gone mad under
circumstances such as these, but I felt that this end would not be mine. My disaster was the result of
no fault save my own, since unknown to the guide I had separated myself from the regular party of
sightseers; and, wandering for over an hour in forbidden avenues of the cave, had found myself
unable to retrace the devious windings which I had pursued since forsaking my companions.
Already my torch had begun to expire; soon I would be enveloped by the total and almost
palpable blackness of the bowels of the earth. As I stood in the waning, unsteady light, I idly
wondered over the exact circumstances of my coming end. I remembered the accounts which I had
heard of the colony of consumptives, who, taking their residence in this gigantic grotto to find health
from the apparently salubrious air of the underground world, with its steady, uniform temperature,
pure air, and peaceful quiet, had found, instead, death in strange and ghastly form. I had seen the sad
remains of their ill-made cottages as I passed them by with the party, and had wondered what
unnatural influence a long sojourn in this immense and silent cavern would exert upon one as healthy
and vigorous as I. Now, I grimly told myself, my opportunity for settling this point had arrived,
provided that want of food should not bring me too speedy a departure from this life.
As the last fitful rays of my torch faded into obscurity, I resolved to leave no stone unturned, no
possible means of escape neglected; so, summoning all the powers possessed by my lungs, I set up a
series of loud shoutings, in the vain hope of attracting the attention of the guide by my clamour. Yet,
as I called, I believed in my heart that my cries were to no purpose, and that my voice, magnified and
reflected by the numberless ramparts of the black maze about me, fell upon no ears save my own.
All at once, however, my attention was fixed with a start as I fancied that I heard the sound of soft
approaching steps on the rocky floor of the cavern.
Was my deliverance about to be accomplished so soon? Had, then, all my horrible apprehensions
been for naught, and was the guide, having marked my unwarranted absence from the party, following
my course and seeking me out in this limestone labyrinth? Whilst these joyful queries arose in my
brain, I was on the point of renewing my cries, in order that my discovery might come the sooner,
when in an instant my delight was turned to horror as I listened; for my ever acute ear, now sharpened
in even greater degree by the complete silence of the cave, bore to my benumbed understanding the
unexpected and dreadful knowledge that these footfalls were not like those of any mortal man. In the
unearthly stillness of this subterranean region, the tread of the booted guide would have sounded like
a series of sharp and incisive blows. These impacts were soft, and stealthy, as of the paws of some
feline. Besides, when I listened carefully, I seemed to trace the falls of four instead of two feet.
I was now convinced that I had by my own cries aroused and attracted some wild beast, perhaps a
mountain lion which had accidentally strayed within the cave. Perhaps, I considered, the Almighty
had chosen for me a swifter and more merciful death than that of hunger; yet the instinct of self-
preservation, never wholly dormant, was stirred in my breast, and though escape from the on-coming
peril might but spare me for a sterner and more lingering end, I determined nevertheless to part with
my life at as high a price as I could command. Strange as it may seem, my mind conceived of no intent
on the part of the visitor save that of hostility. Accordingly, I became very quiet, in the hope that the
unknown beast would, in the absence of a guiding sound, lose its direction as had I, and thus pass me
by. But this hope was not destined for realisation, for the strange footfalls steadily advanced, the
animal evidently having obtained my scent, which in an atmosphere so absolutely free from all
distracting influences as is that of the cave, could doubtless be followed at great distance.
Seeing therefore that I must be armed for defense against an uncanny and unseen attack in the dark,
I groped about me the largest of the fragments of rock which were strewn upon all parts of the floor
of the cavern in the vicinity, and grasping one in each hand for immediate use, awaited with
resignation the inevitable result. Meanwhile the hideous pattering of the paws drew near. Certainly,
the conduct of the creature was exceedingly strange. Most of the time, the tread seemed to be that of
a quadruped, walking with a singular lack of unison betwixt hind and fore feet, yet at brief and
infrequent intervals I fancied that but two feet were engaged in the process of locomotion. I
wondered what species of animal was to confront me; it must, I thought, be some unfortunate beast
who had paid for its curiosity to investigate one of the entrances of the fearful grotto with a life--
long confinement in its interminable recesses. It doubtless obtained as food the eyeless fish, bats and
rats of the cave, as well as some of the ordinary fish that are wafted in at every freshet of Green
River, which communicates in some occult manner with the waters of the cave. I occupied my
terrible vigil with grotesque conjectures of what alteration cave life might have wrought in the
physical structure of the beast, remembering the awful appearances ascribed by local tradition to the
consumptives who had died after long residence in the cave. Then I remembered with a start that,
even should I succeed in felling my antagonist, I should never behold its form, as my torch had long
since been extinct, and I was entirely unprovided with matches. The tension on my brain now became
frightful. My disordered fancy conjured up hideous and fearsome shapes from the sinister darkness
that surrounded me, and that actually seemed to press upon my body. Nearer, nearer, the dreadful
footfalls approached. It seemed that I must give vent to a piercing scream, yet had I been sufficiently
irresolute to attempt such a thing, my voice could scarce have responded. I was petrified, rooted to
the spot. I doubted if my right arm would allow me to hurl its missile at the oncoming thing when the
crucial moment should arrive. Now the steady pat, pat, of the steps was close at hand; now very
close. I could hear the laboured breathing of the animal, and terror-struck as I was, I realised that it
must have come from a considerable distance, and was correspondingly fatigued. Suddenly the spell
broke. My right hand, guided by my ever trustworthy sense of hearing, threw with full force the
sharp-angled bit of limestone which it contained, toward that point in the darkness from which
emanated the breathing and pattering, and, wonderful to relate, it nearly reached its goal, for I heard
the thing jump, landing at a distance away, where it seemed to pause.
Having readjusted my aim, I discharged my second missile, this time most effectively, for with a
flood of joy I listened as the creature fell in what sounded like a complete collapse and evidently
remained prone and unmoving. Almost overpowered by the great relief which rushed over me, I
reeled back against the wall. The breathing continued, in heavy, gasping inhalations and expirations,
whence I realised that I had no more than wounded the creature. And now all desire to examine the
thing ceased. At last something allied to groundless, superstitious fear had entered my brain, and I did
not approach the body, nor did I continue to cast stones at it in order to complete the extinction of its
life. Instead, I ran at full speed in what was, as nearly as I could estimate in my frenzied condition, the
direction from which I had come. Suddenly I heard a sound or rather, a regular succession of sounds.
In another instant they had resolved themselves into a series of sharp, metallic clicks. This time there
was no doubt. It was the guide. And then I shouted, yelled, screamed, even shrieked with joy as I
beheld in the vaulted arches above the faint and glimmering effulgence which I knew to be the
reflected light of an approaching torch. I ran to meet the flare, and before I could completely
understand what had occurred, was lying upon the ground at the feet of the guide, embracing his
boots and gibbering, despite my boasted reserve, in a most meaningless and idiotic manner, pouring
out my terrible story, and at the same time overwhelming my auditor with protestations of gratitude.
At length, I awoke to something like my normal consciousness. The guide had noted my absence upon
the arrival of the party at the entrance of the cave, and had, from his own intuitive sense of direction,
proceeded to make a thorough canvass of by-passages just ahead of where he had last spoken to me,
locating my whereabouts after a quest of about four hours.
By the time he had related this to me, I, emboldened by his torch and his company, began to
reflect upon the strange beast which I had wounded but a short distance back in the darkness, and
suggested that we ascertain, by the flashlight's aid, what manner of creature was my victim.
Accordingly I retraced my steps, this time with a courage born of companionship, to the scene of my
terrible experience. Soon we descried a white object upon the floor, an object whiter even than the
gleaming limestone itself. Cautiously advancing, we gave vent to a simultaneous ejaculation of
wonderment, for of all the unnatural monsters either of us had in our lifetimes beheld, this was in
surpassing degree the strangest. It appeared to be an anthropoid ape of large proportions, escaped,
perhaps, from some itinerant menagerie. Its hair was snow-white, a thing due no doubt to the
bleaching action of a long existence within the inky confines of the cave, but it was also surprisingly
thin, being indeed largely absent save on the head, where it was of such length and abundance that it
fell over the shoulders in considerable profusion. The face was turned away from us, as the creature
lay almost directly upon it. The inclination of the limbs was very singular, explaining, however, the
alternation in their use which I had before noted, whereby the beast used sometimes all four, and on
other occasions but two for its progress. From the tips of the fingers or toes, long rat-like claws
extended. The hands or feet were not prehensile, a fact that I ascribed to that long residence in the
cave which, as I before mentioned, seemed evident from the all-pervading and almost unearthly
whiteness so characteristic of the whole anatomy. No tail seemed to be present.
The respiration had now grown very feeble, and the guide had drawn his pistol with the evident
intent of despatching the creature, when a sudden sound emitted by the latter caused the weapon to
fall unused. The sound was of a nature difficult to describe. It was not like the normal note of any
known species of simian, and I wonder if this unnatural quality were not the result of a long continued
and complete silence, broken by the sensations produced by the advent of the light, a thing which the
beast could not have seen since its first entrance into the cave. The sound, which I might feebly
attempt to classify as a kind of deep-tone chattering, was faintly continued.
All at once a fleeting spasm of energy seemed to pass through the frame of the beast. The paws
went through a convulsive motion, and the limbs contracted. With a jerk, the white body rolled over
so that its face was turned in our direction. For a moment I was so struck with horror at the eyes thus
revealed that I noted nothing else. They were black, those eyes, deep jetty black, in hideous contrast
to the snow--white hair and flesh. Like those of other cave denizens, they were deeply sunken in
their orbits, and were entirely destitute of iris. As I looked more closely, I saw that they were set in a
face less prognathous than that of the average ape, and infinitely less hairy. The nose was quite
distinct. As we gazed upon the uncanny sight presented to our vision, the thick lips opened, and
several sounds issued from them, after which the thing relaxed in death.
The guide clutched my coat sleeve and trembled so violently that the light shook fitfully, casting
weird moving shadows on the walls.
I made no motion, but stood rigidly still, my horrified eyes fixed upon the floor ahead.
The fear left, and wonder, awe, compassion, and reverence succeeded in its place, for the sounds
uttered by the stricken figure that lay stretched out on the limestone had told us the awesome truth.
The creature I had killed, the strange beast of the unfathomed cave, was, or had at one time been a
MAN!!!

THE BOOK
My memories are very confused. There is even much doubt as to where they begin; for at times I
feel appalling vistas of years stretching behind me, while at other times it seems as if the present
moment were an isolated point in a grey, formless infinity. I am not even certain how I am
communicating this message. While I know I am speaking, I have a vague impression that some
strange and perhaps terrible mediation will be needed to bear what I say to the points where I wish to
be heard. My identity, too, is bewilderingly cloudy. I seem to have suffered a great shock--perhaps
from some utterly monstrous outgrowth of my cycles of unique, incredible experience.
These cycles of experience, of course, all stem from that worm-riddled book. I remember when I
found it--in a dimly lighted place near the black, oily river where the mists always swirl. That place
was very old, and the ceiling-high shelves full of rotting volumes reached back endlessly through
windowless inner rooms and alcoves. There were, besides, great formless heaps of books on the
floor and in crude bins; and it was in one of these heaps that I found the thing. I never learned its title,
for the early pages were missing; but it fell open toward the end and gave me a glimpse of something
which sent my senses reeling.
There was a formula--a sort of list of things to say and do--which I recognized as something
black and forbidden; something which I had read of before in furtive paragraphs of mixed abhorrence
and fascination penned by those strange ancient delvers into the universe's guarded secrets whose
decaying texts I loved to absorb. It was a key--a guide--to certain gateways and transitions of which
mystics have dreamed and whispered since the race was young, and which lead to freedoms and
discoveries beyond the three dimensions and realms of life and matter that we know. Not for
centuries had any man recalled its vital substance or known where to find it, but this book was very
old indeed. No printing-press, but the hand of some half--crazed monk, had traced these ominous
Latin phrases in uncials of awesome antiquity.
I remember how the old man leered and tittered, and made a curious sign with his hand when I
bore it away. He had refused to take pay for it, and only long afterwards did I guess why. As I
hurried home through those narrow, winding, mist-cloaked waterfront streets I had a frightful
impression of being stealthily followed by softly padding feet. The centuried, tottering houses on
both sides seemed alive with a fresh and morbid malignity--as if some hitherto closed channel of evil
understanding had abruptly been opened. I felt that those walls and over-hanging gables of mildewed
brick and fungoid plaster and timber--with eyelike, diamond-paned windows that leered--could hardly
desist from advancing and crushing me yet I had read only the least fragment of that blasphemous rune
before closing the book and bringing it away.
I remember how I read the book at last--white-faced, and locked in the attic room that I had long
devoted to strange searchings. The great house was very still, for I had not gone up till after
midnight. I think I had a family then--though the details are very uncertain--and I know there were
many servants. Just what the year was I cannot say; for since then I have known many ages and
dimensions, and have had all my notions of time dissolved and refashioned. It was by the light of
candles that I read--I recall the relentless dripping of the wax--and there were chimes that came
every now and then from distant belfries. I seemed to keep track of those chimes with a peculiar
intentness, as if I feared to hear some very remote, intruding note among them.
Then came the first scratching and fumbling at the dormer window that looked out high above the
other roofs of the city. It came as I droned aloud the ninth verse of that primal lay, and I knew amidst
my shudders what it meant. For he who passes the gateways always wins a shadow, and never again
can he be alone. I had evoked--and the book was indeed all I had suspected. That night I passed the
gateway to a vortex of twisted time and vision, and when morning found me in the attic room I saw in
the walls and shelves and fittings that which I had never seen before.
Nor could I ever after see the world as I had known it. Mixed with the present scene was always a
little of the past and a little of the future, and every once-familiar object loomed alien in the new
perspective brought by my widened sight. From then on I walked in a fantastic dream of unknown and
half-known shapes; and with each new gateway crossed, the less plainly could I recognise the things
of the narrow sphere to which I had so long been bound. What I saw about me, none else saw; and I
grew doubly silent and aloof lest I be thought mad. Dogs had a fear of me, for they felt the outside
shadow which never left my side. But still I read more--in hidden, forgotten books and scrolls to
which my new vision led me--and pushed through fresh gateways of space and being and life-
patterns toward the core of the unknown cosmos.
I remember the night I made the five concentric circles of fire on the floor, and stood in the
innermost one chanting that monstrous litany the messenger from Tartary had brought. The walls
melted away, and I was swept by a black wind through gulfs of fathomless grey with the needle-like
pinnacles of unknown mountains miles below me. After a while there was utter blackness, and then the
light of myriad stars forming strange, alien constellations. Finally I saw a green-litten plain far below
me, and discerned on it the twisted towers of a city built in no fashion I had ever known or read or
dreamed of. As I floated closer to that city I saw a great square building of stone in an open space,
and felt a hideous fear clutching at me. I screamed and struggled, and after a blankness was again in
my attic room sprawled flat over the five phosphorescent circles on the floor. In that night's
wandering there was no more of strangeness than in many a former night's wandering; but there was
more of terror because I knew I was closer to those outside gulfs and worlds than I had ever been
before. Thereafter I was more cautious with my incantations, for I had no wish to be cut off from my
body and from the earth in unknown abysses whence I could never return...

THE CATS OF ULTHAR
It is said that in Ulthar, which lies beyond the river Skai, no man may kill a cat; and this I can verily
believe as I gaze upon him who sitteth purring before the fire. For the cat is cryptic, and close to
strange things which men cannot see. He is the soul of antique Aegyptus, and bearer of tales from
forgotten cities in Meroe and Ophir. He is the kin of the jungle's lords, and heir to the secrets of
hoary and sinister Africa. The Sphinx is his cousin, and he speaks her language; but he is more
ancient than the Sphinx, and remembers that which she hath forgotten.
In Ulthar, before ever the burgesses forbade the killing of cats, there dwelt an old cotter and his
wife who delighted to trap and slay the cats of their neighbors. Why they did this I know not; save
that many hate the voice of the cat in the night, and take it ill that cats should run stealthily about yards
and gardens at twilight. But whatever the reason, this old man and woman took pleasure in trapping
and slaying every cat which came near to their hovel; and from some of the sounds heard after dark,
many villagers fancied that the manner of slaying was exceedingly peculiar. But the villagers did not
discuss such things with the old man and his wife; because of the habitual expression on the withered
faces of the two, and because their cottage was so small and so darkly hidden under spreading oaks at
the back of a neglected yard. In truth, much as the owners of cats hated these odd folk, they feared
them more; and instead of berating them as brutal assassins, merely took care that no cherished pet or
mouser should stray toward the remote hovel under the dark trees. When through some unavoidable
oversight a cat was missed, and sounds heard after dark, the loser would lament impotently; or
console himself by thanking Fate that it was not one of his children who had thus vanished. For the
people of Ulthar were simple, and knew not whence it is all cats first came.
One day a caravan of strange wanderers from the South entered the narrow cobbled streets of
Ulthar. Dark wanderers they were, and unlike the other roving folk who passed through the village
twice every year. In the market-place they told fortunes for silver, and bought gay beads from the
merchants. What was the land of these wanderers none could tell; but it was seen that they were given
to strange prayers, and that they had painted on the sides of their wagons strange figures with human
bodies and the heads of cats, hawks, rams and lions. And the leader of the caravan wore a headdress
with two horns and a curious disk betwixt the horns.
There was in this singular caravan a little boy with no father or mother, but only a tiny black kitten
to cherish. The plague had not been kind to him, yet had left him this small furry thing to mitigate his
sorrow; and when one is very young, one can find great relief in the lively antics of a black kitten. So
the boy whom the dark people called Menes smiled more often than he wept as he sat playing with his
graceful kitten on the steps of an oddly painted wagon.
On the third morning of the wanderers' stay in Ulthar, Menes could not find his kitten; and as he
sobbed aloud in the market-place certain villagers told him of the old man and his wife, and of sounds
heard in the night. And when he heard these things his sobbing gave place to meditation, and finally to
prayer. He stretched out his arms toward the sun and prayed in a tongue no villager could understand;
though indeed the villagers did not try very hard to understand, since their attention was mostly taken
up by the sky and the odd shapes the clouds were assuming. It was very peculiar, but as the little boy
uttered his petition there seemed to form overhead the shadowy, nebulous figures of exotic things;
of hybrid creatures crowned with horn-flanked disks. Nature is full of such illusions to impress the
imaginative.
That night the wanderers left Ulthar, and were never seen again. And the householders were
troubled when they noticed that in all the village there was not a cat to be found. From each hearth the
familiar cat had vanished; cats large and small, black, grey, striped, yellow and white. Old Kranon, the
burgomaster, swore that the dark folk had taken the cats away in revenge for the killing of Menes'
kitten; and cursed the caravan and the little boy. But Nith, the lean notary, declared that the old cotter
and his wife were more likely persons to suspect; for their hatred of cats was notorious and
increasingly bold. Still, no one durst complain to the sinister couple; even when little Atal, the
innkeeper's son, vowed that he had at twilight seen all the cats of Ulthar in that accursed yard under
the trees, pacing very slowly and solemnly in a circle around the cottage, two abreast, as if in
performance of some unheard-of rite of beasts. The villagers did not know how much to believe
from so small a boy; and though they feared that the evil pair had charmed the cats to their death, they
preferred not to chide the old cotter till they met him outside his dark and repellent yard.
So Ulthar went to sleep in vain anger; and when the people awakened at dawn--behold! every cat
was back at his accustomed hearth! Large and small, black, grey, striped, yellow and white, none was
missing. Very sleek and fat did the cats appear, and sonorous with purring content. The citizens talked
with one another of the affair, and marveled not a little. Old Kranon again insisted that it was the dark
folk who had taken them, since cats did not return alive from the cottage of the ancient man and his
wife. But all agreed on one thing: that the refusal of all the cats to eat their portions of meat or drink
their saucers of milk was exceedingly curious. And for two whole days the sleek, lazy cats of Ulthar
would touch no food, but only doze by the fire or in the sun.
It was fully a week before the villagers noticed that no lights were appearing at dusk in the
windows of the cottage under the trees. Then the lean Nith remarked that no one had seen the old man
or his wife since the night the cats were away. In another week the burgomaster decided to overcome
his fears and call at the strangely silent dwelling as a matter of duty, though in so doing he was
careful to take with him Shang the blacksmith and Thul the cutter of stone as witnesses. And when
they had broken down the frail door they found only this: two cleanly picked human skeletons on the
earthen floor, and a number of singular beetles crawling in the shadowy corners.
There was subsequently much talk among the burgesses of Ulthar. Zath, the coroner, disputed at
length with Nith, the lean notary; and Kranon and Shang and Thul were overwhelmed with questions.
Even little Atal, the innkeeper's son, was closely questioned and given a sweetmeat as reward. They
talked of the old cotter and his wife, of the caravan of dark wanderers, of small Menes and his black
kitten, of the prayer of Menes and of the sky during that prayer, of the doings of the cats on the night
the caravan left, and of what was later found in the cottage under the dark trees in the repellent yard.
And in the end the burgesses passed that remarkable law which is told of by traders in Hatheg and
discussed by travelers in Nir; namely, that in Ulthar no man may kill a cat.

THE CRAWLING CHAOS
Of the pleasures and pains of opium much has been written. The ecstasies and horrors of De
Quincey and the paradis artificiels of Baudelaire are preserved and interpreted with an art which
makes them immortal, and the world knows well the beauty, the terror and the mystery of those
obscure realms into which the inspired dreamer is transported. But much as has been told, no man has
yet dared intimate the nature of the phantasms thus unfolded to the mind, or hint at the direction of the
unheard-of roads along whose ornate and exotic course the partaker of the drug is so irresistibly
borne. De Quincey was drawn back into Asia, that teeming land of nebulous shadows whose hideous
antiquity is so impressive that "the vast age of the race and name overpowers the sense of youth in
the individual," but farther than that he dared not go. Those who have gone farther seldom returned,
and even when they have, they have been either silent or quite mad. I took opium but once--in the year
of the plague, when doctors sought to deaden the agonies they could not cure. There was an
overdose--my physician was worn out with horror and exertion--and I travelled very far indeed. In
the end I returned and lived, but my nights are filled with strange memories, nor have I ever permitted
a doctor to give me opium again.
The pain and pounding in my head had been quite unendurable when the drug was administered, Of
the future I had no heed; to escape, whether by cure, unconsciousness, or death, was all that
concerned me. I was partly delirious, so that it is hard to place the exact moment of transition, but I
think the effect must have begun shortly before the pounding ceased to be painful. As I have said,
there was an overdose; so my reactions were probably far from normal. The sensation of falling,
curiously dissociated from the idea of gravity or direction, was paramount; though there was
subsidiary impression of unseen throngs in incalculable profusion, throngs of infinitely diverse
nature, but all more or less related to me. Sometimes it seemed less as though I were falling, than as
though the universe or the ages were falling past me. Suddenly my pain ceased, and I began to
associate the pounding with an external rather than internal force. The falling had ceased also, giving
place to a sensation of uneasy, temporary rest; and when I listened closely, I fancied the pounding
was that of the vast, inscrutable sea as its sinister, colossal breakers lacerated some desolate shore
after a storm of titanic magnitude. Then I opened my eyes. For a moment my surroundings seemed
confused, like a projected image hopelessly out of focus, but gradually I realised my solitary
presence in a strange and beautiful room lighted by many windows. Of the exact nature of the
apartment I could form no idea, for my thoughts were still far from settled, but I noticed vari-
coloured rugs and draperies, elaborately fashioned tables, chairs, ottomans, and divans, and delicate
vases and ornaments which conveyed a suggestion of the exotic without being actually alien. These
things I noticed, yet they were not long uppermost in my mind. Slowly but inexorably crawling upon
my consciousness and rising above every other impression, came a dizzying fear of the unknown; a
fear all the greater because I could not analyse it, and seeming to concern a stealthily approaching
menace; not death, but some nameless, unheard--of thing inexpressibly more ghastly and abhorrent.
Presently I realised that the direct symbol and excitant of my fear was the hideous pounding whose
incessant reverberations throbbed maddeningly against my exhausted brain. It seemed to come from a
point outside and below the edifice in which I stood, and to associate itself with the most terrifying
mental images. I felt that some horrible scene or object lurked beyond the silk-hung walls, and shrank
from glancing through the arched, latticed windows that opened so bewilderingly on every hand.
Perceiving shutters attached to these windows, I closed them all, averting my eyes from the exterior
as I did so. Then, employing a flint and steel which I found on one of the small tables, I lit the many
candles reposing about the walls in arabesque sconces. The added sense of security brought by
closed shutters and artificial light calmed my nerves to some degree, but I could not shut out the
monotonous pounding. Now that I was calmer, the sound became as fascinating as it was fearful, and I
felt a contradictory desire to seek out its source despite my still powerful shrinking. Opening a
portiere at the side of the room nearest the pounding, I beheld a small and richly draped corridor
ending in a cavern door and large oriel window. To this window I was irresistibly drawn, though my
ill-defined apprehensions seemed almost equally bent on holding me back. As I approached it I could
see a chaotic whirl of waters in the distance. Then, as I attained it and glanced out on all sides, the
stupendous picture of my surroundings burst upon me with full and devastating force.
I beheld such a sight as I had never beheld before, and which no living person can have seen save
in the delirium of fever or the inferno of opium. The building stood on a narrow point of land--or
what was now a narrow point of land--fully three hundred feet above what must lately have been a
seething vortex of mad waters. On either side of the house there fell a newly washed-out precipice
of red earth, whilst ahead of me the hideous waves were still rolling in frightfully, eating away the
land with ghastly monotony and deliberation. Out a mile or more there rose and fell menacing
breakers at least fifty feet in height, and on the far horizon ghoulish black clouds of grotesque
contour were resting and brooding like unwholesome vultures. The waves were dark and purplish,
almost black, and clutched at the yielding red mud of the bank as if with uncouth, greedy hands. I
could not but feel that some noxious marine mind had declared a war of extermination upon all the
solid ground, perhaps abetted by the angry sky.
Recovering at length from the stupor into which this unnatural spectacle had thrown me, I realized
that my actual physical danger was acute. Even whilst I gazed, the bank had lost many feet, and it
could not be long before the house would fall undermined into the awful pit of lashing waves.
Accordingly I hastened to the opposite side of the edifice, and finding a door, emerged at once,
locking it after me with a curious key which had hung inside. I now beheld more of the strange
region about me, and marked a singular division which seemed to exist in the hostile ocean and
firmament. On each side of the jutting promontory different conditions held sway. At my left as I
faced inland was a gently heaving sea with great green waves rolling peacefully in under a brightly
shining sun. Something about that sun's nature and position made me shudder, but I could not then tell,
and cannot tell now, what it was. At my right also was the sea, but it was blue, calm, and only gently
undulating, while the sky above it was darker and the washed-out bank more nearly white than
reddish. I now turned my attention to the land, and found occasion for fresh surprise; for the
vegetation resembled nothing I had ever seen or read about. It was apparently tropical or at least sub-
tropical--a conclusion borne out by the intense heat of the air. Sometimes I thought I could trace
strange analogies with the flora of my native land, fancying that the well-known plants and shrubs
might assume such forms under a radical change of climate; but the gigantic and omnipresent palm
trees were plainly foreign. The house I had just left was very small--hardly more than a cottage--but
its material was evidently marble, and its architecture was weird and composite, involving a quaint
fusion of Western and Eastern forms. At the corners were Corinthian columns, but the red tile roof
was like that of a Chinese pagoda. From the door inland there stretched a path of singularly white
sand, about four feet wide, and lined on either side with stately palms and unidentifiable flowering
shrubs and plants. It lay toward the side of the promontory where the sea was blue and the bank rather
whitish. Down this path I felt impelled to flee, as if pursued by some malignant spirit from the
pounding ocean. At first it was slightly uphill, then I reached a gentle crest. Behind me I saw the
scene I had left; the entire point with the cottage and the black water, with the green sea on one side
and the blue sea on the other, and a curse unnamed and unnamable lowering over all. I never saw it
again, and often wonder....After this last look I strode ahead and surveyed the inland panorama before
me.
The path, as I have intimated, ran along the right-hand shore as one went inland. Ahead and to the
left I now viewed a magnificent valley comprising thousands of acres, and covered with a swaying
growth of tropical grass higher than my head. Almost at the limit of vision was a colossal palm tree
which seemed to fascinate and beckon me. By this time wonder and escape from the imperilled
peninsula had largely dissipated my fear, but as I paused and sank fatigued to the path, idly digging
with my hands into the warm, whitish-golden sand, a new and acute sense of danger seized me. Some
terror in the swishing tall grass seemed added to that of the diabolically pounding sea, and I started
up crying aloud and disjointedly, "Tiger? Tiger? Is it Tiger? Beast? Beast? Is it a Beast that I am
afraid of?" My mind wandered back to an ancient and classical story of tigers which I had read; I
strove to recall the author, but had difficulty. Then in the midst of my fear I remembered that the tale
was by Rudyard Kipling; nor did the grotesqueness of deeming him an ancient author occur to me; I
wished for the volume containing this story, and had almost started back toward the doomed cottage
to procure it when my better sense and the lure of the palm prevented me.
Whether or not I could have resisted the backward beckoning without the counter-fascination of
the vast palm tree, I do not know. This attraction was now dominant, and I left the path and crawled on
hands and knees down the valley's slope despite my fear of the grass and of the serpents it might
contain. I resolved to fight for life and reason as long as possible against all menaces of sea or land,
though I sometimes feared defeat as the maddening swish of the uncanny grasses joined the still
audible and irritating pounding of the distant breakers. I would frequently pause and put my hands to
my ears for relief, but could never quite shut out the detestable sound. It was, as it seemed to me,
only after ages that I finally dragged myself to the beckoning palm tree and lay quiet beneath its
protecting shade.
There now ensued a series of incidents which transported me to the opposite extremes of ecstasy
and horror; incidents which I tremble to recall and dare not seek to interpret. No sooner had I crawled
beneath the overhanging foliage of the palm, than there dropped from its branches a young child of
such beauty as I never beheld before. Though ragged and dusty, this being bore the features of a
faun or demigod, and seemed almost to diffuse a radiance in the dense shadow of the tree. It smiled
and extended its hand, but before I could arise and speak I heard in the upper air the exquisite melody
of singing; notes high and low blent with a sublime and ethereal harmoniousness. The sun had by this
time sunk below the horizon, and in the twilight I saw an aureole of lambent light encircled the child's
head. Then in a tone of silver it addressed me: "It is the end. They have come down through the
gloaming from the stars. Now all is over, and beyond the Arinurian streams we shall dwell blissfully
in Teloe. " As the child spoke, I beheld a soft radiance through the leaves of the palm tree, and
rising, greeted a pair whom I knew to be the chief singers among those I had heard. A god and
goddess they must have been, for such beauty is not mortal; and they took my hands, saying, "Come,
child, you have heard the voices, and all is well. In Teloe beyond the Milky Way and the Arinurian
streams are cities all of amber and chalcedony. And upon their domes of many facets glisten the
images of strange and beautiful stars. Under the ivory bridges of Teloe flow rivers of liquid gold
bearing pleasure-barges bound for blossomy Cytharion of the Seven Suns. And in Teloe and
Cytharion abide only youth, beauty, and pleasure, nor are any sounds heard, save of laughter, song,
and the lute. Only the gods dwell in Teloe of the golden rivers, but among them shalt thou dwell."
As I listened, enchanted, I suddenly became aware of a change in my surroundings. The palm tree,
so lately overshadowing my exhausted form, was now some distance to my left and considerably
below me. I was obviously floating in the atmosphere; companioned not only by the strange child and
the radiant pair, but by a constantly increasing throng of half-luminous, vine-crowned youths and
maidens with wind-blown hair and joyful countenance. We slowly ascended together, as if borne on a
fragrant breeze which blew not from the earth but from the golden nebulae, and the child whispered
in my ear that I must look always upward to the pathways of light, and never backward to the sphere I
had just left. The youths and maidens now chanted mellifluous choriambics to the accompaniment of
lutes, and I felt enveloped in a peace and happiness more profound than any I had in life imagined,
when the intrusion of a single sound altered my destiny and shattered my soul. Through the ravishing
strains of the singers and the lutanists, as if in mocking, daemoniac concord, throbbed from gulfs
below the damnable, the detestable pounding of that hideous ocean. As those black breakers beat
their message into my ears I forgot the words of the child and looked back, down upon the doomed
scene from which I thought I had escaped.
Down through the aether I saw the accursed earth slowly turning, ever turning, with angry and
tempestuous seas gnawing at wild desolate shores and dashing foam against the tottering towers of
deserted cities. And under a ghastly moon there gleamed sights I can never describe, sights I can
never forget; deserts of corpselike clay and jungles of ruin and decadence where once stretched the
populous plains and villages of my native land, and maelstroms of frothing ocean where once rose
the mighty temples of my forefathers. Around the northern pole steamed a morass of noisome
growths and miasmal vapours, hissing before the onslaught of the ever-mounting waves that curled
and fretted from the shuddering deep. Then a rending report clave the night, and athwart the desert of
deserts appeared a smoking rift. Still the black ocean foamed and gnawed, eating away the desert on
either side as the rift in the center widened and widened. There was now no land left but the desert,
and still the fuming ocean ate and ate. All at once I thought even the pounding sea seemed afraid of
something, afraid of dark gods of the inner earth that are greater than the evil god of waters, but even
if it was it could not turn back; and the desert had suffered too much from those nightmare waves to
help them now. So the ocean ate the last of the land and poured into the smoking gulf, thereby giving
up all it had ever conquered. From the new-flooded lands it flowed again, uncovering death and
decay; and from its ancient and immemorial bed it trickled loathsomely, uncovering nighted secrets of
the years when Time was young and the gods unborn. Above the waves rose weedy remembered
spires. The moon laid pale lilies of light on dead London, and Paris stood up from its damp grave to
be sanctified with star-dust. Then rose spires and monoliths that were weedy but not remembered;
terrible spires and monoliths of lands that men never knew were lands. There was not any pounding
now, but only the unearthly roaring and hissing of waters tumbling into the rift. The smoke of that rift
had changed to steam, and almost hid the world as it grew denser and denser. It seared my face and
hands, and when I looked to see how it affected my companions I found they had all disappeared.
Then very suddenly it ended, and I knew no more till I awaked upon a bed of convalescence. As the
cloud of steam from the Plutonic gulf finally concealed the entire surface from my sight, all the
firmament shrieked at a sudden agony of mad reverberations which shook the trembling aether. In one
delirious flash and burst it happened; one blinding, deafening holocaust of fire, smoke, and thunder
that dissolved the wan moon as it sped outward to the void.
And when the smoke cleared away, and I sought to look upon the earth, I beheld against the
background of cold, humorous stars only the dying sun and the pale mournful planets searching for
their sister.

THE DESCENDANT
Writing on what my doctor tells me is my deathbed, my most hideous fear is that the man is wrong.
I suppose I shall seem to be buried next week, but...
In London there is a man who screams when the church bells ring. He lives all alone with his
streaked cat in Gray's Inn, and people call him harmlessly mad. His room is filled with books of the
tamest and most puerile kind, and hour after hour he tries to lose himself in their feeble pages. All he
seeks from life is not to think. For some reason thought is very horrible to him, and anything which
stirs the imagination he flees as a plague. He is very thin and grey and wrinkled, but there are those
who declare he is not nearly so old as he looks. Fear has its grisly claws upon him, and a sound will
make him start with staring eyes and sweat-beaded forehead. Friends and companions he shuns, for he
wishes to answer no questions. Those who once knew him as scholar and aesthete say it is very
pitiful to see him now. He dropped them all years ago, and no one feels sure whether he left the
country or merely sank from sight in some hidden byway. It is a decade now since he moved into
Gray's Inn, and of where he had been he would say nothing till the night young Williams bought the
Necronomicon.
Williams was a dreamer, and only twenty-three, and when he moved into the ancient house he felt
a strangeness and a breath of cosmic wind about the grey wizened man in the next room. He forced
his friendship where old friends dared not force theirs, and marvelled at the fright that sat upon this
gaunt, haggard watcher and listener. For that the man always watched and listened no one could doubt.
He watched and listened with his mind more than with his eyes and ears, and strove every moment to
drown something in his ceaseless poring over gay, insipid novels. And when the church bells rang
he would stop his ears and scream, and the grey cat that dwelt with him would howl in unison till the
last peal died reverberantly away.
But try as Williams would, he could not make his neighbour speak of anything profound or
hidden. The old man would not live up to his aspect and manner, but would feign a smile and a light
tone and prattle feverishly and frantically of cheerful trifles; his voice every moment rising and
thickening till at last it would split in a piping and incoherent falsetto. That his learning was deep and
thorough, his most trivial remarks made abundantly clear; and Williams was not surprised to hear that
he had been to Harrow and Oxford. Later it developed that he was none other than Lord Northam, of
whose ancient hereditary castle on the Yorkshire coast so many odd things were told; but when
Williams tried to talk of the castle, and of its reputed Roman origin, he refused to admit that there was
anything unusual about it. He even tittered shrilly when the subject of the supposed under-crypts,
hewn out of the solid crag that frowns on the North Sea, was brought up.
So matters went till that night when Williams brought home the infamous Necronomicon of the
mad Arab Abdul Alhazred. He had known of the dreaded volume since his sixteenth year, when his
dawning love of the bizarre had led him to ask queer questions of a bent old bookseller in Chandos
Street; and he had always wondered why men paled when they spoke of it. The old bookseller had
told him that only five copies were known to have survived the shocked edicts of the priests and
lawgivers against it and that all of these were locked up with frightened care by custodians who had
ventured to begin a reading of the hateful black-letter. But now, at last, he had not only found an
accessible copy but had made it his own at a ludicrously low figure. It was at a Jew's shop in the
squalid precincts of Clare Market, where he had often bought strange things before, and he almost
fancied the gnarled old Levite smiled amidst tangles of beard as the great discovery was made. The
bulky leather cover with the brass clasp had been so prominently visible, and the price was so
absurdly slight.
The one glimpse he had had of the title was enough to send him into transports, and some of the
diagrams set in the vague Latin text excited the tensest and most disquieting recollections in his brain.
He felt it was highly necessary to get the ponderous thing home and begin deciphering it, and bore it
out of the shop with such precipitate haste that the old Jew chuckled disturbingly behind him. But
when at last it was safe in his room he found the combination of black-letter and debased idiom too
much for his powers as a linguist, and reluctantly called on his strange, frightened friend for help
with the twisted, mediaeval Latin. Lord Northam was simpering inanities to his streaked cat, and
started violently when the young man entered. Then he saw the volume and shuddered wildly, and
fainted altogether when Williams uttered the title. It was when he regained his senses that he told his
story; told his fantastic figment of madness in frantic whispers, lest his friend be not quick to burn the
accursed book and give wide scattering to its ashes.
There must, Lord Northam whispered, have been something wrong at the start; but it would never
have come to a head if he had not explored too far. He was the nineteenth Baron of a line whose
beginnings went uncomfortably far back into the past--unbelievably far, if vague tradition could be
heeded, for there were family tales of a descent from pre-Saxon times, when a certain Lunaeus
Gabinius Capito, military tribune in the Third Augustan Legion then stationed at Lindum in Roman
Britain, had been summarily expelled from his command for participation in certain rites unconnected
with any known religion. Gabinius had, the rumour ran, come upon a cliffside cavern where strange
folk met together and made the Elder Sign in the dark; strange folk whom the Britons knew not save in
fear, and who were the last to survive from a great land in the west that had sunk, leaving only the
islands with the roths and circles and shrines of which Stonehenge was the greatest. There was no
certainty, of course, in the legend that Gabinius had built an impregnable fortress over the forbidden
cave and founded a line which Pict and Saxon, Dane and Norman were powerless to obliterate; or in
the tacit assumption that from this line sprang the bold companion and lieutenant of the Black Prince
whom Edward Third created Baron of Northam. These things were not certain, yet they were often
told; and in truth the stonework of Northam Keep did look alarmingly like the masonry of Hadrian's
Wall. As a child Lord Northam had had peculiar dreams when sleeping in the older parts of the
castle, and had acquired a constant habit of looking back through his memory for half-amorphous
scenes and patterns and impressions which formed no part of his waking experience. He became a
dreamer who found life tame and unsatisfying; a searcher for strange realms and relationships once
familiar, yet lying nowhere in the visible regions of earth.
Filled with a feeling that our tangible world is only an atom in a fabric vast and ominous, and that
unknown demesnes press on and permeate the sphere of the known at every point, Northam in youth
and young manhood drained in turn the founts of formal religion and occult mystery. Nowhere,
however, could he find ease and content; and as he grew older the staleness and limitations of life
became more and more maddening to him. During the 'nineties he dabbled in Satanism, and at all times
he devoured avidly any doctrine or theory which seemed to promise escape from the close vistas of
science and the dully unvarying laws of Nature. Books like Ignatius Donnelly's commercial account
of Atlantis he absorbed with zest, and a dozen obscure precursors of Charles Fort enthralled him
with their vagaries. He would travel leagues to follow up a furtive village tale of abnormal wonder,
and once went into the desert of Araby to seek a Nameless City of faint report, which no man has
ever beheld. There rose within him the tantalising faith that somewhere an easy gate existed, which if
one found would admit him freely to those outer deeps whose echoes rattled so dimly at the back of
his memory. It might be in the visible world, yet it might be only in his mind and soul. Perhaps he held
within his own half-explored brain that cryptic link which would awaken him to elder and future lives
in forgotten dimensions; which would bind him to the stars, and to the infinities and eternities beyond
them.
THE DOOM THAT CAME TO SARNATH
Written on December 3, 1919. Published June 1920 in The Scot
There is in the land of Mnar a vast still lake that is fed by no stream, and out of which no stream
flows. Ten thousand years ago there stood by its shore the mighty city of Sarnath, but Sarnath stands
there no more.
It is told that in the immemorial years when the world was young, before ever the men of Sarnath
came to the land of Mnar, another city stood beside the lake; the gray stone city of Ib, which was old
as the lake itself, and peopled with beings not pleasing to behold. Very odd and ugly were these
beings, as indeed are most beings of a world yet inchoate and rudely fashioned. It is written on the
brick cylinders of Kadatheron that the beings of Ib were in hue as green as the lake and the mists that
rise above it; that they had bulging eyes, pouting, flabby lips, and curious ears, and were without
voice. It is also written that they descended one night from the moon in a mist; they and the vast still
lake and gray stone city Ib. However this may be, it is certain that they worshipped a sea-green stone
idol chiseled in the likeness of Bokrug, the great water-lizard; before which they danced horribly
when the moon was gibbous. And it is written in the papyrus of Ilarnek, that they one day discovered
fire, and thereafter kindled flames on many ceremonial occasions. But not much is written of these
beings, because they lived in very ancient times, and man is young, and knows but little of the very
ancient living things.
After many eons men came to the land of Mnar, dark shepherd folk with their fleecy flocks, who
built Thraa, Ilarnek, and Kadatheron on the winding river Ai. And certain tribes, more hardy than the
rest, pushed on to the border of the lake and built Sarnath at a spot where precious metals were found
in the earth.
Not far from the gray city of Ib did the wandering tribes lay the first stones of Sarnath, and at the
beings of Ib they marveled greatly. But with their marveling was mixed hate, for they thought it not
meet that beings of such aspect should walk about the world of men at dusk. Nor did they like the
strange sculptures upon the gray monoliths of Ib, for why those sculptures lingered so late in the
world, even until the coming men, none can tell; unless it was because the land of Mnar is very still,
and remote from most other lands, both of waking and of dream.
As the men of Sarnath beheld more of the beings of Ib their hate grew, and it was not less
because they found the beings weak, and soft as jelly to the touch of stones and arrows. So one day
the young warriors, the slingers and the spearmen and the bowmen, marched against Ib and slew all
the inhabitants thereof, pushing the queer bodies into the lake with long spears, because they did not
wish to touch them. And because they did not like the gray sculptured monoliths of Ib they cast these
also into the lake; wondering from the greatness of the labor how ever the stones were brought from
afar, as they must have been, since there is naught like them in the land of Mnar or in the lands
adjacent.
Thus of the very ancient city of Ib was nothing spared, save the sea--green stone idol chiseled in
the likeness of Bokrug, the water-lizard. This the young warriors took back with them as a symbol of
conquest over the old gods and beings of Th, and as a sign of leadership in Mnar. But on the night
after it was set up in the temple, a terrible thing must have happened, for weird lights were seen over
the lake, and in the morning the people found the idol gone and the high-priest Taran-Ish lying dead,
as from some fear unspeakable. And before he died, Taran-Ish had scrawled upon the altar of
chrysolite with coarse shaky strokes the sign of DOOM.
After Taran-Ish there were many high-priests in Sarnath but never was the sea-green stone idol
found. And many centuries came and went, wherein Sarnath prospered exceedingly, so that only
priests and old women remembered what Taran-Ish had scrawled upon the altar of chrysolite.
Betwixt Sarnath and the city of Ilarnek arose a caravan route, and the precious metals from the earth
were exchanged for other metals and rare cloths and jewels and books and tools for artificers and all
things of luxury that are known to the people who dwell along the winding river Ai and beyond. So
Sarnath waxed mighty and learned and beautiful, and sent forth conquering armies to subdue the
neighboring cities; and in time there sate upon a throne in Sarnath the kings of all the land of Mnar and
of many lands adjacent.
The wonder of the world and the pride of all mankind was Sarnath the magnificent. Of polished
desert-quarried marble were its walls, in height three hundred cubits and in breadth seventy-five, so
that chariots might pass each other as men drove them along the top. For full five hundred stadia did
they run, being open only on the side toward the lake where a green stone sea-wall kept back the
waves that rose oddly once a year at the festival of the destroying of Ib. In Sarnath were fifty streets
from the lake to the gates of the caravans, and fifty more intersecting them. With onyx were they
paved, save those whereon the horses and camels and elephants trod, which were paved with granite.
And the gates of Sarnath were as many as the landward ends of the streets, each of bronze, and
flanked by the figures of lions and elephants carven from some stone no longer known among men.
The houses of Sarnath were of glazed brick and chalcedony, each having its walled garden and
crystal lakelet. With strange art were they builded, for no other city had houses like them; and
travelers from Thraa and Ilarnek and Kadatheron marveled at the shining domes wherewith they were
surmounted.
But more marvelous still were the palaces and the temples, and the gardens made by Zokkar the
olden king. There were many palaces, the last of which were mightier than any in Thraa or Ilarnek or
Kadatheron. So high were they that one within might sometimes fancy himself beneath only the sky;
yet when lighted with torches dipt in the oil of Dother their walls showed vast paintings of kings and
armies, of a splendor at once inspiring and stupefying to the beholder. Many were the pillars of the
palaces, all of tinted marble, and carven into designs of surpassing beauty. And in most of the palaces
the floors were mosaics of beryl and lapis lazuli and sardonyx and carbuncle and other choice
materials, so disposed that the beholder might fancy himself walking over beds of the rarest flowers.
And there were likewise fountains, which cast scented waters about in pleasing jets arranged with
cunning art. Outshining all others was the palace of the kings of Mnar and of the lands adjacent. On a
pair of golden crouching lions rested the throne, many steps above the gleaming floor. And it was
wrought of one piece of ivory, though no man lives who knows whence so vast a piece could have
come. In that palace there were also many galleries, and many amphitheaters where lions and men and
elephants battled at the pleasure of the kings. Sometimes the amphitheaters were flooded with water
conveyed from the lake in mighty aqueducts, and then were enacted stirring sea-fights, or combats
betwixt swimmers and deadly marine things.
Lofty and amazing were the seventeen tower-like temples of Sarnath, fashioned of a bright multi-
colored stone not known elsewhere. A full thousand cubits high stood the greatest among them,
wherein the high--priests dwelt with a magnificence scarce less than that of the kings. On the ground
were halls as vast and splendid as those of the palaces; where gathered throngs in worship of Zo-
Kalar and Tamash and Lobon, the chief gods of Sarnath, whose incense-enveloped shrines were as
the thrones of monarchs. Not like the eikons of other gods were those of Zo-Kalar and Tamash and
Lobon. For so close to life were they that one might swear the graceful bearded gods themselves
sate on the ivory thrones. And up unending steps of zircon was the tower-chamber, wherefrom the
high-priests looked out over the city and the plains and the lake by day; and at the cryptic moon and
significant stars and planets, and their reflections in the lake, at night. Here was done the very secret
and ancient rite in detestation of Bokrug, the water--lizard, and here rested the altar of chrysolite
which bore the Doom--scrawl of Taran-Ish.
Wonderful likewise were the gardens made by Zokkar the olden king. In the center of Sarnath they
lay, covering a great space and encircled by a high wall. And they were surmounted by a mighty
dome of glass, through which shone the sun and moon and planets when it was clear, and from which
were hung fulgent images of the sun and moon and stars and planets when it was not clear. In summer
the gardens were cooled with fresh odorous breezes skilfully wafted by fans, and in winter they
were heated with concealed fires, so that in those gardens it was always spring. There ran little
streams over bright pebbles, dividing meads of green and gardens of many hues, and spanned by a
multitude of bridges. Many were the waterfalls in their courses, and many were the hued lakelets into
which they expanded. Over the streams and lakelets rode white swans, whilst the music of rare birds
chimed in with the melody of the waters. In ordered terraces rose the green banks, adorned here and
there with bowers of vines and sweet blossoms, and seats and benches of marble and porphyry. And
there were many small shrines and temples where one might rest or pray to small gods.
Each year there was celebrated in Sarnath the feast of the destroying of Ib, at which time wine,
song, dancing, and merriment of every kind abounded. Great honors were then paid to the shades of
those who had annihilated the odd ancient beings, and the memory of those beings and of their elder
gods was derided by dancers and lutanists crowned with roses from the gardens of Zokkar. And the
kings would look out over the lake and curse the bones of the dead that lay beneath it.
At first the high-priests liked not these festivals, for there had descended amongst them queer
tales of how the sea-green eikon had vanished, and how Taran-Ish had died from fear and left a
warning. And they said that from their high tower they sometimes saw lights beneath the waters of
the lake. But as many years passed without calamity even the priests laughed and cursed and joined in
the orgies of the feasters. Indeed, had they not themselves, in their high tower, often performed the
very ancient and secret rite in detestation of Bokrug, the water-lizard? And a thousand years of riches
and delight passed over Sarnath, wonder of the world.
Gorgeous beyond thought was the feast of the thousandth year of the destroying of Ib. For a
decade had it been talked of in the land of Mnar, and as it drew nigh there came to Sarnath on horses
and camels and elephants men from Thraa, Ilarnek, and Kadetheron, and all the cities of Mnar and the
lands beyond. Before the marble walls on the appointed night were pitched the pavilions of princes
and the tents of travelers. Within his banquet-hall reclined Nargis-Hei, the king, drunken with ancient
wine from the vaults of conquered Pnoth, and surrounded by feasting nobles and hurrying slaves.
There were eaten many strange delicacies at that feast; peacocks from the distant hills of Linplan,
heels of camels from the Bnazic desert, nuts and spices from Sydathrian groves, and pearls from
wave-washed Mtal dissolved in the vinegar of Thraa. Of sauces there were an untold number,
prepared by the subtlest cooks in all Mnar, and suited to the palate of every feaster. But most prized
of all the viands were the great fishes from the lake, each of vast size, and served upon golden
platters set with rubies and diamonds.
Whilst the king and his nobles feasted within the palace, and viewed the crowning dish as it
awaited them on golden platters, others feasted elsewhere. In the tower of the great temple the
priests held revels, and in pavilions without the walls the princes of neighboring lands made merry.
And it was the high-priest Gnai-Kah who first saw the shadows that descended from the gibbous
moon into the lake, and the damnable green mists that arose from the lake to meet the moon and to
shroud in a sinister haze the towers and the domes of fated Sarnath. Thereafter those in the towers
and without the walls beheld strange lights on the water, and saw that the gray rock Akurion, which
was wont to rear high above it near the shore, was almost submerged. And fear grew vaguely yet
swiftly, so that the princes of Ilarnek and of far Rokol took down and folded their tents and pavilions
and departed, though they scarce knew the reason for their departing.
Then, close to the hour of midnight, all the bronze gates of Sarnath burst open and emptied forth a
frenzied throng that blackened the plain, so that all the visiting princes and travelers fled away in
fright. For on the faces of this throng was writ a madness born of horror unendurable, and on their
tongues were words so terrible that no hearer paused for proof. Men whose eyes were wild with
fear shrieked aloud of the sight within the king's banquet-hall, where through the windows were seen
no longer the forms of Nargis-Hei and his nobles and slaves, but a horde of indescribable green
voiceless things with bulging eyes, pouting, flabby lips, and curious ears; things which danced
horribly, bearing in their paws golden platters set with rubies and diamonds and containing uncouth
flames. And the princes and travelers, as they fled from the doomed city of Sarnath on horses and
camels and elephants, looked again upon the mist-begetting lake and saw the gray rock Akurion was
quite submerged. Through all the land of Mnar and the land adjacent spread the tales of those who
had fled from Sarnath, and caravans sought that accursed city and its precious metals no more. It was
long ere any travelers went thither, and even then only the brave and adventurous young men of
yellow hair and blue eyes, who are no kin to the men of Mnar. These men indeed went to the lake to
view Sarnath; but though they found the vast still lake itself, and the gray rock Akurion which rears
high above it near the shore, they beheld not the wonder of the world and pride of all mankind.
Where once had risen walls of three hundred cubits and towers yet higher, now stretched only the
marshy shore, and where once had dwelt fifty million of men now crawled the detestable water-
lizard. Not even the mines of precious metal remained. DOOM had come to Sarnath.
But half buried in the rushes was spied a curious green idol; an exceedingly ancient idol chiseled
in the likeness of Bokrug, the great water-lizard. That idol, enshrined in the high temple at Ilarnek,
was subsequently worshipped beneath the gibbous moon throughout the land of Mnar.

THE DREAM QUEST OF UNKNOWN KADATH
Three times Randolph Carter dreamed of the marvelous city, and three times was he snatched
away while still he paused on the high terrace above it. All golden and lovely it blazed in the sunset,
with walls, temples, colonnades and arched bridges of veined marble, silver--basined fountains of
prismatic spray in broad squares and perfumed gardens, and wide streets marching between delicate
trees and blossom--laden urns and ivory statues in gleaming rows; while on steep northward slopes
climbed tiers of red roofs and old peaked gables harbouring little lanes of grassy cobbles. It was a
fever of the gods, a fanfare of supernal trumpets and a clash of immortal cymbals. Mystery hung
about it as clouds about a fabulous unvisited mountain; and as Carter stood breathless and expectant
on that balustraded parapet there swept up to him the poignancy and suspense of almost--vanished
memory, the pain of lost things and the maddening need to place again what once had been an
awesome and momentous place.
He knew that for him its meaning must once have been supreme; though in what cycle or
incarnation he had known it, or whether in dream or in waking, he could not tell. Vaguely it called up
glimpses of a far forgotten first youth, when wonder and pleasure lay in all the mystery of days, and
dawn and dusk alike strode forth prophetic to the eager sound of lutes and song, unclosing fiery
gates toward further and surprising marvels. But each night as he stood on that high marble terrace
with the curious urns and carven rail and looked off over that hushed sunset city of beauty and
unearthly immanence he felt the bondage of dream's tyrannous gods; for in no wise could he leave
that lofty spot, or descend the wide marmoreal fights flung endlessly down to where those streets of
elder witchery lay outspread and beckoning.
When for the third time he awakened with those flights still undescended and those hushed sunset
streets still untraversed, he prayed long and earnestly to the hidden gods of dream that brood
capricious above the clouds on unknown Kadath, in the cold waste where no man treads. But the gods
made no answer and shewed no relenting, nor did they give any favouring sign when he prayed to
them in dream, and invoked them sacrificially through the bearded priests of Nasht and Kaman-Thah,
whose cavern-temple with its pillar of flame lies not far from the gates of the waking world. It
seemed, however, that his prayers must have been adversely heard, for after even the first of them he
ceased wholly to behold the marvellous city; as if his three glimpses from afar had been mere
accidents or oversights, and against some hidden plan or wish of the gods.
At length, sick with longing for those glittering sunset streets and cryptical hill lanes among
ancient tiled roofs, nor able sleeping or waking to drive them from his mind, Carter resolved to go
with bold entreaty whither no man had gone before, and dare the icy deserts through the dark to
where unknown Kadath, veiled in cloud and crowned with unimagined stars, holds secret and
nocturnal the onyx castle of the Great Ones.
In light slumber he descended the seventy steps to the cavern of flame and talked of this design to
the bearded priests Nasht and Kaman-Thah. And the priests shook their pshent-bearing heads and
vowed it would be the death of his soul. They pointed out that the Great Ones had shown already
their wish, and that it is not agreeable to them to be harassed by insistent pleas. They reminded him,
too, that not only had no man ever been to Kadath, but no man had ever suspected in what part of space
it may lie; whether it be in the dreamlands around our own world, or in those surrounding some
unguessed companion of Fomalhaut or Aldebaran. If in our dreamland, it might conceivably be
reached, but only three human souls since time began had ever crossed and recrossed the black
impious gulfs to other dreamlands, and of that three, two had come back quite mad. There were, in
such voyages, incalculable local dangers; as well as that shocking final peril which gibbers
unmentionably outside the ordered universe, where no dreams reach; that last amorphous blight of
nethermost confusion which blasphemes and bubbles at the centre of all infinity--the boundless
daemon sultan Azathoth, whose name no lips dare speak aloud, and who gnaws hungrily in
inconceivable, unlighted chambers beyond time amidst the muffled, maddening beating of vile drums
and the thin, monotonous whine of accursed flutes; to which detestable pounding and piping dance
slowly, awkwardly, and absurdly the gigantic Ultimate gods, the blind, voiceless, tenebrous,
mindless Other gods whose soul and messenger is the crawling chaos Nyarlathotep.
Of these things was Carter warned by the priests Nasht and Kaman-Thah in the cavern of flame,
but still he resolved to find the gods on unknown Kadath in the cold waste, wherever that might be,
and to win from them the sight and remembrance and shelter of the marvellous sunset city. He knew
that his journey would be strange and long, and that the Great Ones would be against it; but being old
in the land of dream he counted on many useful memories and devices to aid him. So asking a formal
blessing of the priests and thinking shrewdly on his course, he boldly descended the seven hundred
steps to the Gate of Deeper Slumber and set out through the Enchanted Wood.
In the tunnels of that twisted wood, whose low prodigious oaks twine groping boughs and shine
dim with the phosphorescence of strange fungi, dwell the furtive and secretive Zoogs; who know
many obscure secrets of the dream world and a few of the waking world, since the wood at two
places touches the lands of men, though it would be disastrous to say where. Certain unexplained
rumours, events, and vanishments occur among men where the Zoogs have access, and it is well that
they cannot travel far outside the world of dreams. But over the nearer parts of the dream world they
pass freely, flitting small and brown and unseen and bearing back piquant tales to beguile the hours
around their hearths in the forest they love. Most of them live in burrows, but some inhabit the trunks
of the great trees; and although they live mostly on fungi it is muttered that they have also a slight
taste for meat, either physical or spiritual, for certainly many dreamers have entered that wood who
have not come out. Carter, however, had no fear; for he was an old dreamer and had learnt their
fluttering language and made many a treaty with them; having found through their help the splendid
city of Celephais in Ooth-Nargai beyond the Tanarian Hills, where reigns half the year the great
King Kuranes, a man he had known by another name in life. Kuranes was the one soul who had been to
the star-gulls and returned free from madness.
Threading now the low phosphorescent aisles between those gigantic trunks, Carter made
fluttering sounds in the manner of the Zoogs, and listened now and then for responses. He
remembered one particular village of the creatures was in the centre of the wood, where a circle of
great mossy stones in what was once a cleaning tells of older and more terrible dwellers long
forgotten, and toward this spot he hastened. He traced his way by the grotesque fungi, which always
seem better nourished as one approaches the dread circle where elder beings danced and sacrificed.
Finally the great light of those thicker fungi revealed a sinister green and grey vastness pushing up
through the roof of the forest and out of sight. This was the nearest of the great ring of stones, and
Carter knew he was close to the Zoog village. Renewing his fluttering sound, he waited patiently;
and was at last rewarded by an impression of many eyes watching him. It was the Zoogs, for one sees
their weird eyes long before one can discern their small, slippery brown outlines.
Out they swarmed, from hidden burrow and honeycombed tree, till the whole dim-litten region
was alive with them. Some of the wilder ones brushed Carter unpleasantly, and one even nipped
loathsomely at his ear; but these lawless spirits were soon restrained by their elders. The Council of
Sages, recognizing the visitor, offered a gourd of fermented sap from a haunted tree unlike the
others, which had grown from a seed dropt down by someone on the moon; and as Carter drank it
ceremoniously a very strange colloquy began. The Zoogs did not, unfortunately, know where the
peak of Kadath lies, nor could they even say whether the cold waste is in our dream world or in
another. Rumours of the Great Ones came equally from all points; and one might only say that they
were likelier to be seen on high mountain peaks than in valleys, since on such peaks they dance
reminiscently when the moon is above and the clouds beneath.
Then one very ancient Zoog recalled a thing unheard-of by the others; and said that in Ulthar,
beyond the River Skai, there still lingered the last copy of those inconceivably old Pnakotic
Manuscripts made by waking men in forgotten boreal kingdoms and borne into the land of dreams
when the hairy cannibal Gnophkehs overcame many-templed Olathoe and slew all the heroes of the
land of Lomar. Those manuscripts he said, told much of the gods, and besides, in Ulthar there were
men who had seen the signs of the gods, and even one old priest who had scaled a great mountain to
behold them dancing by moonlight. He had failed, though his companion had succeeded and perished
namelessly.
So Randolph Carter thanked the Zoogs, who fluttered amicably and gave him another gourd of
moon-tree wine to take with him, and set out through the phosphorescent wood for the other side,
where the rushing Skai flows down from the slopes of Lerion, and Hatheg and Nir and Ulthar dot the
plain. Behind him, furtive and unseen, crept several of the curious Zoogs; for they wished to learn
what might befall him, and bear back the legend to their people. The vast oaks grew thicker as he
pushed on beyond the village, and he looked sharply for a certain spot where they would thin
somewhat, standing quite dead or dying among the unnaturally dense fungi and the rotting mould and
mushy logs of their fallen brothers. There he would turn sharply aside, for at that spot a mighty slab
of stone rests on the forest floor; and those who have dared approach it say that it bears an iron ring
three feet wide. Remembering the archaic circle of great mossy rocks, and what it was possibly set
up for, the Zoogs do not pause near that expansive slab with its huge ring; for they realise that all
which is forgotten need not necessarily be dead, and they would not like to see the slab rise slowly
and deliberately.
Carter detoured at the proper place, and heard behind him the frightened fluttering of some of the
more timid Zoogs. He had known they would follow him, so he was not disturbed; for one grows
accustomed to the anomalies of these prying creatures. It was twilight when he came to the edge of
the wood, and the strengthening glow told him it was the twilight of morning. Over fertile plains
rolling down to the Skai he saw the smoke of cottage chimneys, and on every hand were the hedges
and ploughed fields and thatched roofs of a peaceful land. Once he stopped at a farmhouse well for a
cup of water, and all the dogs barked affrightedly at the inconspicuous Zoogs that crept through the
grass behind. At another house, where people were stirring, he asked questions about the gods, and
whether they danced often upon Lerion; but the farmer and his wife would only make the Elder Sign
and tell him the way to Nir and Ulthar.
At noon he walked through the one broad high street of Nir, which he had once visited and which
marked his farthest former travels in this direction; and soon afterward he came to the great stone
bridge across the Skai, into whose central piece the masons had sealed a living human sacrifice when
they built it thirteen-hundred years before. Once on the other side, the frequent presence of cats
(who all arched their backs at the trailing Zoogs) revealed the near neighborhood of Ulthar; for in
Ulthar, according to an ancient and significant law, no man may kill a cat. Very pleasant were the
suburbs of Ulthar, with their little green cottages and neatly fenced farms; and still pleasanter was the
quaint town itself, with its old peaked roofs and overhanging upper stories and numberless chimney-
pots and narrow hill streets where one can see old cobbles whenever the graceful cats afford space
enough. Carter, the cats being somewhat dispersed by the half-seen Zoogs, picked his way directly
to the modest Temple of the Elder Ones where the priests and old records were said to be; and once
within that venerable circular tower of ivied stone--which crowns Ulthar's highest hill--he sought
out the patriarch Atal, who had been up the forbidden peak Hatheg-Kia in the stony desert and had
come down again alive.
Atal, seated on an ivory dais in a festooned shrine at the top of the temple, was fully three
centuries old; but still very keen of mind and memory. From him Carter learned many things about the
gods, but mainly that they are indeed only Earth's gods, ruling feebly our own dreamland and having
no power or habitation elsewhere. They might, Atal said, heed a man's prayer if in good humour; but
one must not think of climbing to their onyx stronghold atop Kadath in the cold waste. It was lucky
that no man knew where Kadath towers, for the fruits of ascending it would be very grave. Atal's
companion Banni the Wise had been drawn screaming into the sky for climbing merely the known
peak of Hatheg-Kia. With unknown Kadath, if ever found, matters would be much worse; for although
Earth's gods may sometimes be surpassed by a wise mortal, they are protected by the Other Gods
from Outside, whom it is better not to discuss. At least twice in the world's history the Other Gods
set their seal upon Earth's primal granite; once in antediluvian times, as guessed from a drawing in
those parts of the Pnakotic Manuscripts too ancient to be read, and once on Hatheg-Kia when Barzai
the Wise tried to see Earth's gods dancing by moonlight. So, Atal said, it would be much better to let
all gods alone except in tactful prayers.
Carter, though disappointed by Atal's discouraging advice and by the meagre help to be found in
the Pnakotic Manuscripts and the Seven Cryptical Books of Hsan, did not wholly despair. First he
questioned the old priest about that marvellous sunset city seen from the railed terrace, thinking that
perhaps he might find it without the gods' aid; but Atal could tell him nothing. Probably, Atal said, the
place belonged to his especial dream world and not to the general land of vision that many know; and
conceivably it might be on another planet. In that case Earth's gods could not guide him if they would.
But this was not likely, since the stopping of the dreams shewed pretty clearly that it was something
the Great Ones wished to hide from him.
Then Carter did a wicked thing, offering his guileless host so many draughts of the moon-wine
which the Zoogs had given him that the old man became irresponsibly talkative. Robbed of his
reserve, poor Atal babbled freely of forbidden things; telling of a great image reported by travellers
as carved on the solid rock of the mountain Ngranek, on the isle of Oriab in the Southern Sea, and
hinting that it may be a likeness which Earth's gods once wrought of their own features in the days
when they danced by moonlight on that mountain. And he hiccoughed likewise that the features of that
image are very strange, so that one might easily recognize them, and that they are sure signs of the
authentic race of the gods.
Now the use of all this in finding the gods became at once apparent to Carter. It is known that in
disguise the younger among the Great Ones often espouse the daughters of men, so that around the
borders of the cold waste wherein stands Kadath the peasants must all bear their blood. This being
so, the way to find that waste must be to see the stone face on Ngranek and mark the features; then,
having noted them with care, to search for such features among living men. Where they are plainest
and thickest, there must the gods dwell nearest; and whatever stony waste lies back of the villages in
that place must be that wherein stands Kadath.
Much of the Great Ones might be learnt in such regions, and those with their blood might inherit
little memories very useful to a seeker. They might not know their parentage, for the gods so dislike
to be known among men that none can be found who has seen their faces wittingly; a thing which
Carter realized even as he sought to scale Kadath. But they would have queer lofty thoughts
misunderstood by their fellows, and would sing of far places and gardens so unlike any known even
in the dreamland that common folk would call them fools; and from all this one could perhaps learn
old secrets of Kadath, or gain hints of the marvellous sunset city which the gods held secret. And
more, one might in certain cases seize some well-loved child of a god as hostage; or even capture
some young god himself, disguised and dwelling amongst men with a comely peasant maiden as his
bride.
Atal, however, did not know how to find Ngranek on its isle of Oriab; and recommended that
Carter follow the singing Skai under its bridges down to the Southern Sea; where no burgess of
Ulthar has ever been, but whence the merchants come in boats or with long caravans of mules and
two-wheeled carts. There is a great city there, Dylath-Leen, but in Ulthar its reputation is bad
because of the black three-banked galleys that sail to it with rubies from no clearly named shore. The
traders that come from those galleys to deal with the jewellers are human, or nearly so, but the
rowers are never beheld; and it is not thought wholesome in Ulthar that merchants should trade with
black ships from unknown places whose rowers cannot be exhibited.
By the time he had given this information Atal was very drowsy, and Carter laid him gently on a
couch of inlaid ebony and gathered his long beard decorously on his chest. As he turned to go, he
observed that no suppressed fluttering followed him, and wondered why the Zoogs had become so
lax in their curious pursuit. Then he noticed all the sleek complacent cats of Ulthar licking their
chops with unusual gusto, and recalled the spitting and caterwauling he had faintly heard, in lower
parts of the temple while absorbed in the old priest's conversation. He recalled, too, the evilly
hungry way in which an especially impudent young Zoog had regarded a small black kitten in the
cobbled street outside. And because he loved nothing on earth more than small black kittens, he
stooped and petted the sleek cats of Ulthar as they licked their chops, and did not mourn because
those inquisitive Zoogs would escort him no farther.
It was sunset now, so Carter stopped at an ancient inn on a steep little street overlooking the lower
town. And as he went out on the balcony of his room and gazed down at the sea of red tiled roofs and
cobbled ways and the pleasant fields beyond, all mellow and magical in the slanted light, he swore
that Ulthar would be a very likely place to dwell in always, were not the memory of a greater sunset
city ever goading one onward toward unknown perils. Then twilight fell, and the pink walls of the
plastered gables turned violet and mystic, and little yellow lights floated up one by one from old
lattice windows. And sweet bells pealed in the temple tower above, and the first star winked softly
above the meadows across the Skai. With the night came song, and Carter nodded as the lutanists
praised ancient days from beyond the filigreed balconies and tesselated courts of simple Ulthar. And
there might have been sweetness even in the voices of Ulthar's many cats, but that they were mostly
heavy and silent from strange feasting. Some of them stole off to those cryptical realms which are
known only to cats and which villagers say are on the moon's dark side, whither the cats leap from tall
housetops, but one small black kitten crept upstairs and sprang in Carter's lap to purr and play, and
curled up near his feet when he lay down at last on the little couch whose pillows were stuffed with
fragrant, drowsy herbs.
In the morning Carter joined a caravan of merchants bound for Dylath--Leen with the spun wool
of Ulthar and the cabbages of Ulthar's busy farms. And for six days they rode with tinkling bells on
the smooth road beside the Skai; stopping some nights at the inns of little quaint fishing towns, and on
other nights camping under the stars while snatches of boatmen's songs came from the placid river.
The country was very beautiful, with green hedges and groves and picturesque peaked cottages and
octagonal windmills.
On the seventh day a blur of smoke rose on the horizon ahead, and then the tall black towers of
Dylath-Leen, which is built mostly of basalt. Dylath-Leen with its thin angular towers looks in the
distance like a bit of the Giant's Causeway, and its streets are dark and uninviting. There are many
dismal sea-taverns near the myriad wharves, and all the town is thronged with the strange seamen of
every land on earth and of a few which are said to be not on earth. Carter questioned the oddly robed
men of that city about the peak of Ngranek on the isle of Oriab, and found that they knew of it well.
Ships came from Baharna on that island, one being due to return thither in only a month, and
Ngranek is but two days' zebra-ride from that port. But few had seen the stone face of the god,
because it is on a very difficult side of Ngranek, which overlooks only sheer crags and a valley of
sinister lava. Once the gods were angered with men on that side, and spoke of the matter to the Other
Gods.
It was hard to get this information from the traders and sailors in Dylath-Leen's sea taverns,
because they mostly preferred to whisper of the black galleys. One of them was due in a week with
rubies from its unknown shore, and the townsfolk dreaded to see it dock. The mouths of the men who
came from it to trade were too wide, and the way their turbans were humped up in two points above
their foreheads was in especially bad taste. And their shoes were the shortest and queerest ever seen
in the Six Kingdoms. But worst of all was the matter of the unseen rowers. Those three banks of oars
moved too briskly and accurately and vigorously to be comfortable, and it was not right for a ship to
stay in port for weeks while the merchants traded, yet to give no glimpse of its crew. It was not fair
to the tavern-keepers of Dylath-Leen, or to the grocers and butchers, either; for not a scrap of
provisions was ever sent aboard. The merchants took only gold and stout black slaves from Parg
across the river. That was all they ever took, those unpleasantly featured merchants and their unseen
rowers; never anything from the butchers and grocers, but only gold and the fat black men of Parg
whom they bought by the pound. And the odours from those galleys which the south wind blew in
from the wharves are not to be described. Only by constantly smoking strong thagweed could even
the hardiest denizen of the old sea-taverns bear them. Dylath--Leen would never have tolerated the
black galleys had such rubies been obtainable elsewhere, but no mine in all Barth's dreamland was
known to produce their like.
Of these things Dylath-Leen's cosmopolitan folk chiefly gossiped whilst Carter waited patiently
for the ship from Baharna, which might bear him to the isle whereon carven Ngranek towers lofty
and barren. Meanwhile he did not fall to seek through the haunts of far travellers for any tales they
might have concerning Kadath in the cold waste or a marvellous city of marble walls and silver
fountains seen below terraces in the sunset. Of these things, however, he learned nothing; though he
once thought that a certain old slant-eyed merchant looked queerly intelligent when the cold waste
was spoken of. This man was reputed to trade with the horrible stone villages on the icy desert
plateau of Leng, which no healthy folk visit and whose evil fires are seen at night from afar. He was
even rumoured to have dealt with that High-Priest Not To Be Described, which wears a yellow
silken mask over its face and dwells all alone in a prehistoric stone monastery. That such a person
might well have had nibbling traffick with such beings as may conceivably dwell in the cold waste
was not to be doubted, but Carter soon found that it was no use questioning him.
Then the black galley slipped into the harbour past the basalt wale and the tall lighthouse, silent
and alien, and with a strange stench that the south wind drove into the town. Uneasiness rustled
through the taverns along that waterfront, and after a while the dark wide--mouthed merchants with
humped turbans and short feet clumped steathily ashore to seek the bazaars of the jewellers. Carter
observed them closely, and disliked them more the longer he looked at them. Then he saw them drive
the stout black men of Parg up the gangplank grunting and sweating into that singular galley, and
wondered in what lands--or if in any lands at all--those fat pathetic creatures might be destined to
serve.
And on the third evening of that galley's stay one of the uncomfortable merchants spoke to him,
smirking sinfully and hinting of what he had heard in the taverns of Carter's quest. He appeared to
have knowledge too secret for public telling; and although the sound of his voice was unbearably
hateful, Carter felt that the lore of so far a traveller must not be overlooked. He bade him therefore
be his guest in locked chambers above, and drew out the last of the Zoogs' moon-wine to loosen his
tongue. The strange merchant drank heavily, but smirked unchanged by the draught. Then he drew
forth a curious bottle with wine of his own, and Carter saw that the bottle was a single hollowed
ruby, grotesquely carved in patterns too fabulous to be comprehended. He offered his wine to his
host, and though Carter took only the least sip, he felt the dizziness of space and the fever of
unimagined jungles. All the while the guest had been smiling more and more broadly, and as Carter
slipped into blankness the last thing he saw was that dark odious face convulsed with evil laughter
and something quite unspeakable where one of the two frontal puffs of that orange turban had become
disarranged with the shakings of that epileptic mirth.
Carter next had consciousness amidst horrible odours beneath a tent--like awning on the deck of a
ship, with the marvellous coasts of the Southern Sea flying by in unnatural swiftness. He was not
chained, but three of the dark sardonic merchants stood grinning nearby, and the sight of those humps
in their turbans made him almost as faint as did the stench that filtered up through the sinister hatches.
He saw slip past him the glorious lands and cities of which a fellow-dreamer of earth--a lighthouse-
keeper in ancient Kingsport--had often discoursed in the old days, and recognized the templed
terraces of Zak, abode of forgotten dreams; the spires of infamous Thalarion, that daemon-city of a
thousand wonders where the eidolon Lathi reigns; the charnel gardens of Zura, land of pleasures
unattained, and the twin headlands of crystal, meeting above in a resplendent arch, which guard the
harbour of Sona-Nyl, blessed land of fancy.
Past all these gorgeous lands the malodourous ship flew unwholesomely, urged by the abnormal
strokes of those unseen rowers below. And before the day was done Carter saw that the steersman
could have no other goal than the Basalt Pillars of the West, beyond which simple folk say splendid
Cathuria lies, but which wise dreamers well know are the gates of a monstrous cataract wherein the
oceans of earth's dreamland drop wholly to abysmal nothingness and shoot through the empty spaces
toward other worlds and other stars and the awful voids outside the ordered universe where the
daemon sultan Azathoth gnaws hungrily in chaos amid pounding and piping and the hellish dancing of
the Other Gods, blind, voiceless, tenebrous, and mindless, with their soul and messenger
Nyarlathotep.
Meanwhile the three sardonic merchants would give no word of their intent, though Carter well
knew that they must be leagued with those who wished to hold him from his quest. It is understood in
the land of dream that the Other Gods have many agents moving among men; and all these agents,
whether wholly human or slightly less than human, are eager to work the will of those blind and
mindless things in return for the favour of their hideous soul and messenger, the crawling chaos
Nyarlathotep. So Carter inferred that the merchants of the humped turbans, hearing of his daring
search for the Great Ones in their castle of Kadath, had decided to take him away and deliver him to
Nyarlathotep for whatever nameless bounty might be offered for such a prize. What might be the land
of those merchants in our known universe or in the eldritch spaces outside, Carter could not guess;
nor could he imagine at what hellish trysting-place they would meet the crawling chaos to give him
up and claim their reward. He knew, however, that no beings as nearly human as these would dare
approach the ultimate nighted throne of the daemon Azathoth in the formless central void.
At the set of sun the merchants licked their excessively wide lips and glared hungrily and one of
them went below and returned from some hidden and offensive cabin with a pot and basket of plates.
Then they squatted close together beneath the awning and ate the smoking meat that was passed
around. But when they gave Carter a portion, he found something very terrible in the size and shape
of it; so that he turned even paler than before and cast that portion into the sea when no eye was on
him. And again he thought of those unseen rowers beneath, and of the suspicious nourishment from
which their far too mechanical strength was derived.
It was dark when the galley passed betwixt the Basalt Pillars of the West and the sound of the
ultimate cataract swelled portentous from ahead. And the spray of that cataract rose to obscure the
stars, and the deck grew damp, and the vessel reeled in the surging current of the brink. Then with a
queer whistle and plunge the leap was taken, and Carter felt the terrors of nightmare as earth fell
away and the great boat shot silent and comet-like into planetary space. Never before had he known
what shapeless black things lurk and caper and flounder all through the aether, leering and grinning at
such voyagers as may pass, and sometimes feeling about with slimy paws when some moving object
excites their curiosity. These are the nameless larvae of the Other Gods, and like them are blind and
without mind, and possessed of singular hungers and thirsts.
But that offensive galley did not aim as far as Carter had feared, for he soon saw that the
helmsman was steering a course directly for the moon. The moon was a crescent shining larger and
larger as they approached it, and shewing its singular craters and peaks uncomfortably. The ship
made for the edge, and it soon became clear that its destination was that secret and mysterious side
which is always turned away from earth, and which no fully human person, save perhaps the dreamer
Snireth-Ko, has ever beheld. The close aspect of the moon as the galley drew near proved very
disturbing to Carter, and he did not like the size and shape of the ruins which crumbled here and
there. The dead temples on the mountains were so placed that they could have glorified no suitable
or wholesome gods, and in the symmetries of the broken columns there seemed to be some dark and
inner meaning which did not invite solution. And what the structure and proportions of the olden
worshippers could have been, Carter steadily refused to conjecture.
When the ship rounded the edge, and sailed over those lands unseen by man, there appeared in the
queer landscape certain signs of life, and Carter saw many low, broad, round cottages in fields of
grotesque whitish fungi. He noticed that these cottages had no windows, and thought that their shape
suggested the huts of Esquimaux. Then he glimpsed the oily waves of a sluggish sea, and knew that
the voyage was once more to be by water--or at least through some liquid. The galley struck the
surface with a peculiar sound, and the odd elastic way the waves received it was very perplexing to
Carter.
They now slid along at great speed, once passing and hailing another galley of kindred form, but
generally seeing nothing but that curious sea and a sky that was black and star-strewn even though the
sun shone scorchingly in it.
There presently rose ahead the jagged hills of a leprous-looking coast, and Carter saw the thick
unpleasant grey towers of a city. The way they leaned and bent, the manner in which they were
clustered, and the fact that they had no windows at all, was very disturbing to the prisoner; and he
bitterly mourned the folly which had made him sip the curious wine of that merchant with the humped
turban. As the coast drew nearer, and the hideous stench of that city grew stronger, he saw upon the
jagged hills many forests, some of whose trees he recognized as akin to that solitary moon-tree in the
enchanted wood of earth, from whose sap the small brown Zoogs ferment their curious wine.
Carter could now distinguish moving figures on the noisome wharves ahead, and the better he
saw them the worse he began to fear and detest them. For they were not men at all, or even
approximately men, but great greyish-white slippery things which could expand and contract at will,
and whose principal shape--though it often changed--was that of a sort of toad without any eyes, but
with a curious vibrating mass of short pink tentacles on the end of its blunt, vague snout. These
objects were waddling busily about the wharves, moving bales and crates and boxes with
preternatural strength, and now and then hopping on or off some anchored galley with long oars in
their forepaws. And now and then one would appear driving a herd of clumping slaves, which indeed
were approximate human beings with wide mouths like those merchants who traded in Dylath-Leen;
only these herds, being without turbans or shoes or clothing, did not seem so very human after all.
Some of the slaves--the fatter ones, whom a sort of overseer would pinch experimentally--were
unloaded from ships and nailed in crates which workers pushed into the low warehouses or loaded
on great lumbering vans.
Once a van was hitched and driven off, and the fabulous thing which drew it was such that Carter
gasped, even after having seen the other monstrosities of that hateful place. Now and then a small
herd of slaves dressed and turbaned like the dark merchants would be driven aboard a galley,
followed by a great crew of the slippery toad-things as officers, navigators, and rowers. And Carter
saw that the almost--human creatures were reserved for the more ignominious kinds of servitude
which required no strength, such as steering and cooking, fetching and carrying, and bargaining with
men on the earth or other planets where they traded. These creatures must have been convenient on
earth, for they were truly not unlike men when dressed and carefully shod and turbaned, and could
haggle in the shops of men without embarrassment or curious explanations. But most of them, unless
lean or ill-favoured, were unclothed and packed in crates and drawn off in lumbering lorries by
fabulous things. Occasionally other beings were unloaded and crated; some very like these semi-
humans, some not so similar, and some not similar at all. And he wondered if any of the poor stout
black men of Parg were left to be unloaded and crated and shipped inland in those obnoxious drays.
When the galley landed at a greasy-looking quay of spongy rock a nightmare horde of toad-things
wiggled out of the hatches, and two of them seized Carter and dragged him ashore. The smell and
aspect of that city are beyond telling, and Carter held only scattered images of the tiled streets and
black doorways and endless precipices of grey vertical walls without windows. At length he was
dragged within a low doorway and made to climb infinite steps in pitch blackness. It was, apparently,
all one to the toad-things whether it were light or dark. The odour of the place was intolerable, and
when Carter was locked into a chamber and left alone he scarcely had strength to crawl around and
ascertain its form and dimensions. It was circular, and about twenty feet across.
From then on time ceased to exist. At intervals food was pushed in, but Carter would not touch it.
What his fate would be, he did not know; but he felt that he was held for the coming of that frightful
soul and messenger of infinity's Other Gods, the crawling chaos Nyarlathotep. Finally, after an
unguessed span of hours or days, the great stone door swung wide again, and Carter was shoved
down the stairs and out into the red-litten streets of that fearsome city. It was night on the moon, and
all through the town were stationed slaves bearing torches.
In a detestable square a sort of procession was formed; ten of the toad-things and twenty-four
almost human torch-bearers, eleven on either side, and one each before and behind. Carter was
placed in the middle of the line; five toad-things ahead and five behind, and one almost-human torch-
bearer on either side of him. Certain of the toad-things produced disgustingly carven flutes of ivory
and made loathsome sounds. To that hellish piping the column advanced out of the tiled streets and
into nighted plains of obscene fungi, soon commencing to climb one of the lower and more gradual
hills that lay behind the city. That on some frightful slope or blasphemous plateau the crawling chaos
waited, Carter could not doubt; and he wished that the suspense might soon be over. The whining of
those impious flutes was shocking, and he would have given worlds for some even half-normal
sound; but these toad-things had no voices, and the slaves did not talk.
Then through that star-specked darkness there did come a normal sound. It rolled from the higher
hills, and from all the jagged peaks around it was caught up and echoed in a swelling pandaemoniac
chorus. It was the midnight yell of the cat, and Carter knew at last that the old village folk were right
when they made low guesses about the cryptical realms which are known only to cats, and to which
the elders among cats repair by stealth nocturnally, springing from high housetops. Verily, it is to the
moon's dark side that they go to leap and gambol on the hills and converse with ancient shadows, and
here amidst that column of foetid things Carter heard their homely, friendly cry, and thought of the
steep roofs and warm hearths and little lighted windows of home.
Now much of the speech of cats was known to Randolph Carter, and in this far terrible place he
uttered the cry that was suitable. But that he need not have done, for even as his lips opened he heard
the chorus wax and draw nearer, and saw swift shadows against the stars as small graceful shapes
leaped from hill to hill in gathering legions. The call of the clan had been given, and before the foul
procession had time even to be frightened a cloud of smothering fur and a phalanx of murderous
claws were tidally and tempestuously upon it. The flutes stopped, and there were shrieks in the night.
Dying almost-humans screamed, and cats spit and yowled and roared, but the toad-things made never a
sound as their stinking green ichor oozed fatally upon that porous earth with the obscene fungi.
It was a stupendous sight while the torches lasted, and Carter had never before seen so many cats.
Black, grey, and white; yellow, tiger, and mixed; common, Persian, and Marix; Thibetan, Angora, and
Egyptian; all were there in the fury of battle, and there hovered over them some trace of that
profound and inviolate sanctity which made their goddess great in the temples of Bubastis. They
would leap seven strong at the throat of an almost-human or the pink tentacled snout of a toad-thing
and drag it down savagely to the fungous plain, where myriads of their fellows would surge over it
and into it with the frenzied claws and teeth of a divine battle-fury. Carter had seized a torch from a
stricken slave, but was soon overborne by the surging waves of his loyal defenders. Then he lay in
the utter blackness hearing the clangour of war and the shouts of the victors, and feeling the soft
paws of his friends as they rushed to and fro over him in the fray.
At last awe and exhaustion closed his eyes, and when he opened them again it was upon a strange
scene. The great shining disc of the earth, thirteen times greater than that of the moon as we see it,
had risen with floods of weird light over the lunar landscape; and across all those leagues of wild
plateau and ragged crest there squatted one endless sea of cats in orderly array. Circle on circle they
reached, and two or three leaders out of the ranks were licking his face and purring to him
consolingly. Of the dead slaves and toad-things there were not many signs, but Carter thought he saw
one bone a little way off in the open space between him and the warriors.
Carter now spoke with the leaders in the soft language of cats, and learned that his ancient
friendship with the species was well known and often spoken of in the places where cats congregate.
He had not been unmarked in Ulthar when he passed through, and the sleek old cats had remembered
how he patted them after they had attended to the hungry Zoogs who looked evilly at a small black
kitten. And they recalled, too, how he had welcomed the very little kitten who came to see him at the
inn, and how he had given it a saucer of rich cream in the morning before he left. The grandfather of
that very little kitten was the leader of the army now assembled, for he had seen the evil procession
from a far hill and recognized the prisoner as a sworn friend of his kind on earth and in the land of
dream.
A yowl now came from the farther peak, and the old leader paused abruptly in his conversation. It
was one of the army's outposts, stationed on the highest of the mountains to watch the one foe which
Earth's cats fear; the very large and peculiar cats from Saturn, who for some reason have not been
oblivious of the charm of our moon's dark side. They are leagued by treaty with the evil toad-things,
and are notoriously hostile to our earthly cats; so that at this juncture a meeting would have been a
somewhat grave matter.
After a brief consultation of generals, the cats rose and assumed a closer formation, crowding
protectingly around Carter and preparing to take the great leap through space back to the housetops
of our earth and its dreamland. The old field-marshal advised Carter to let himself be borne along
smoothly and passively in the massed ranks of furry leapers, and told him how to spring when the rest
sprang and land gracefully when the rest landed. He also offered to deposit him in any spot he
desired, and Carter decided on the city of Dylath-Leen whence the black galley had set out; for he
wished to sail thence for Oriab and the carven crest Ngranek, and also to warn the people of the city
to have no more traffick with black galleys, if indeed that traffick could be tactfully and judiciously
broken off. Then, upon a signal, the cats all leaped gracefully with their friend packed securely in
their midst; while in a black cave on an unhallowed summit of the moon-mountains still vainly waited
the crawling chaos Nyarlathotep.
The leap of the cats through space was very swift; and being surrounded by his companions
Carter did not see this time the great black shapelessnesses that lurk and caper and flounder in the
abyss. Before he fully realised what had happened he was back in his familiar room at the inn at
Dylath-Leen, and the stealthy, friendly cats were pouring out of the window in streams. The old
leader from Ulthar was the last to leave, and as Carter shook his paw he said he would be able to get
home by cockcrow. When dawn came, Carter went downstairs and learned that a week had elapsed
since his capture and leaving. There was still nearly a fortnight to wait for the ship bound toward
Oriab, and during that time he said what he could against the black galleys and their infamous ways.
Most of the townsfolk believed him; yet so fond were the jewellers of great rubies that none would
wholly promise to cease trafficking with the wide-mouthed merchants. If aught of evil ever befalls
Dylath-Leen through such traffick, it will not be his fault.
In about a week the desiderate ship put in by the black wale and tall lighthouse, and Carter was
glad to see that she was a barque of wholesome men, with painted sides and yellow lateen sails and a
grey captain in silken robes. Her cargo was the fragrant resin of Oriab's inner groves, and the
delicate pottery baked by the artists of Baharna, and the strange little figures carved from Ngranek's
ancient lava. For this they were paid in the wool of Ulthar and the iridescent textiles of Hatheg and
the ivory that the black men carve across the river in Parg. Carter made arrangements with the captain
to go to Baharna and was told that the voyage would take ten days. And during his week of waiting he
talked much with that captain of Ngranek, and was told that very few had seen the carven face thereon;
but that most travellers are content to learn its legends from old people and lava--gatherers and
image-makers in Baharna and afterward say in their far homes that they have indeed beheld it. The
captain was not even sure that any person now living had beheld that carven face, for the wrong side
of Ngranek is very difficult and barren and sinister, and there are rumours of caves near the peak
wherein dwell the night-gaunts. But the captain did not wish to say just what a night-gaunt might be
like, since such cattle are known to haunt most persistently the dreams of those who think too often of
them. Then Carter asked that captain about unknown Kadath in the cold waste, and the marvellous
sunset city, but of these the good man could truly tell nothing.
Carter sailed out of Dylath-Leen one early morning when the tide turned, and saw the first rays of
sunrise on the thin angular towers of that dismal basalt town. And for two days they sailed eastward in
sight of green coasts, and saw often the pleasant fishing towns that climbed up steeply with their red
roofs and chimney-pots from old dreaming wharves and beaches where nets lay drying. But on the
third day they turned sharply south where the roll of water was stronger, and soon passed from sight
of any land. On the fifth day the sailors were nervous, but the captain apologized for their fears,
saying that the ship was about to pass over the weedy walls and broken columns of a sunken city too
old for memory, and that when the water was clear one could see so many moving shadows in that
deep place that simple folk disliked it. He admitted, moreover, that many ships had been lost in that
part of the sea; having been hailed when quite close to it, but never seen again.
That night the moon was very bright, and one could see a great way down in the water. There was
so little wind that the ship could not move much, and the ocean was very calm. Looking over the rail
Carter saw many fathoms deep the dome of the great temple, and in front of it an avenue of unnatural
sphinxes leading to what was once a public square. Dolphins sported merrily in and out of the ruins,
and porpoises revelled clumsily here and there, sometimes coming to the surface and leaping clear
out of the sea. As the ship drifted on a little the floor of the ocean rose in hills, and one could clearly
mark the lines of ancient climbing streets and the washed-down walls of myriad little houses.
Then the suburbs appeared, and finally a great lone building on a hill, of simpler architecture than
the other structures, and in much better repair. It was dark and low and covered four sides of a
square, with a tower at each corner, a paved court in the centre, and small curious round windows all
over it. Probably it was of basalt, though weeds draped the greater part; and such was its lonely and
impressive place on that far hill that it may have been a temple or a monastery. Some phosphorescent
fish inside it gave the small round windows an aspect of shining, and Carter did not blame the sailors
much for their fears. Then by the watery moonlight he noticed an odd high monolith in the middle of
that central court, and saw that something was tied to it. And when after getting a telescope from the
captain's cabin he saw that that bound thing was a sailor in the silk robes of Oriab, head downward
and without any eyes, he was glad that a rising breeze soon took the ship ahead to more healthy parts
of the sea.
The next day they spoke with a ship with violet sails bound for Zar, in the land of forgotten
dreams, with bulbs of strange coloured lilies for cargo. And on the evening of the eleventh day they
came in sight of the isle of Oriab with Ngranek rising jagged and snow-crowned in the distance.
Oriab is a very great isle, and its port of Baharna a mighty city. The wharves of Baharna are of
porphyry, and the city rises in great stone terraces behind them, having streets of steps that are
frequently arched over by buildings and the bridges between buildings. There is a great canal which
goes under the whole city in a tunnel with granite gates and leads to the inland lake of Yath, on whose
farther shore are the vast clay-brick ruins of a primal city whose name is not remembered. As the
ship drew into the harbour at evening the twin beacons Thon and Thal gleamed a welcome, and in all
the million windows of Baharna's terraces mellow lights peeped out quietly and gradually as the stars
peep out overhead in the dusk, till that steep and climbing seaport became a glittering constellation
hung between the stars of heaven and the reflections of those stars in the still harbour.
The captain, after landing, made Carter a guest in his own small house on the shores of Yath
where the rear of the town slopes down to it; and his wife and servants brought strange toothsome
foods for the traveller's delight. And in the days after that Carter asked for rumours and legends of
Ngranek in all the taverns and public places where lava-gatherers and image-makers meet, but could
find no one who had been up the higher slopes or seen the carven face. Ngranek was a hard mountain
with only an accursed valley behind it, and besides, one could never depend on the certainty that
night-gaunts are altogether fabulous.
When the captain sailed hack to Dylath-Leen Carter took quarters in an ancient tavern opening on
an alley of steps in the original part of the town, which is built of brick and resembles the ruins of
Yath's farther shore. Here he laid his plans for the ascent of Ngranek, and correlated all that he had
learned from the lava-gatherers about the roads thither. The keeper of the tavern was a very old man,
and had heard so many legends that he was a great help. He even took Carter to an upper room in that
ancient house and shewed him a crude picture which a traveller had scratched on the clay wall in the
old days when men were bolder and less reluctant to visit Ngranek's higher slopes. The old tavern-
keeper's great-grandfather had heard from his great--grandfather that the traveller who scratched that
picture had climbed Ngranek and seen the carven face, here drawing it for others to behold, but
Carter had very great doubts, since the large rough features on the wall were hasty and careless, and
wholly overshadowed by a crowd of little companion shapes in the worst possible taste, with horns
and wings and claws and curling tails.
At last, having gained all the information he was likely to gain in the taverns and public places of
Baharna, Carter hired a zebra and set out one morning on the road by Yath's shore for those inland
parts wherein towers stony Ngranek. On his right were rolling hills and pleasant orchards and neat
little stone farmhouses, and he was much reminded of those fertile fields that flank the Skai. By
evening he was near the nameless ancient ruins on Yath's farther shore, and though old lava-gatherers
had warned him not to camp there at night, he tethered his zebra to a curious pillar before a crumbling
wall and laid his blanket in a sheltered corner beneath some carvings whose meaning none could
decipher. Around him he wrapped another blanket, for the nights are cold in Oriab; and when upon
awaking once he thought he felt the wings of some insect brushing his face he covered his head
altogether and slept in peace till roused by the magah birds in distant resin groves.
The sun had just come up over the great slope whereon leagues of primal brick foundations and
worn walls and occasional cracked pillars and pedestals stretched down desolate to the shore of
Yath, and Carter looked about for his tethered zebra. Great was his dismay to see that docile beast
stretched prostrate beside the curious pillar to which it had been tied, and still greater was he vexed
on finding that the steed was quite dead, with its blood all sucked away through a singular wound in
its throat. His pack had been disturbed, and several shiny knickknacks taken away, and all round on the
dusty soil were great webbed footprints for which he could not in any way account. The legends and
warnings of lava-gatherers occurred to him, and he thought of what had brushed his face in the night.
Then he shouldered his pack and strode on toward Ngranek, though not without a shiver when he saw
close to him as the highway passed through the ruins a great gaping arch low in the wall of an old
temple, with steps leading down into darkness farther than he could peer.
His course now lay uphill through wilder and partly wooded country, and he saw only the huts of
charcoal-burners and the camp of those who gathered resin from the groves. The whole air was
fragrant with balsam, and all the magah birds sang blithely as they flashed their seven colours in the
sun. Near sunset he came on a new camp of lava--gatherers returning with laden sacks from
Ngranek's lower slopes; and here he also camped, listening to the songs and tales of the men, and
overhearing what they whispered about a companion they had lost. He had climbed high to reach a
mass of fine lava above him, and at nightfall did not return to his fellows. When they looked for him
the next day they found only his turban, nor was there any sign on the crags below that he had fallen.
They did not search any more, because the old man among them said it would be of no use.
No one ever found what the night-gaunts took, though those beasts themselves were so uncertain
as to be almost fabulous. Carter asked them if night-gaunts sucked blood and liked shiny things and
left webbed footprints, but they all shook their heads negatively and seemed frightened at his making
such an inquiry. When he saw how taciturn they had become he asked them no more, but went to sleep
in his blanket.
The next day he rose with the lava-gatherers and exchanged farewells as they rode west and he
rode east on a zebra he bought of them. Their older men gave him blessings and warnings, and told
him he had better not climb too high on Ngranek, but while he thanked them heartily he was in no
wise dissuaded. For still did he feel that he must find the gods on unknown Kadath; and win from them
a way to that haunting and marvellous city in the sunset. By noon, after a long uphill ride, he came
upon some abandoned brick villages of the hill-people who had once dwelt thus close to Ngranek
and carved images from its smooth lava. Here they had dwelt till the days of the old tavernkeeper's
grandfather, but about that time they felt that their presence was disliked. Their homes had crept even
up the mountain's slope, and the higher they built the more people they would miss when the sun rose.
At last they decided it would be better to leave altogether, since things were sometimes glimpsed in
the darkness which no one could interpret favourably; so in the end all of them went down to the sea
and dwelt in Baharna, inhabiting a very old quarter and teaching their sons the old art of image-making
which to this day they carry on. It was from these children of the exiled hill-people that Carter had
heard the best tales about Ngranek when searching through Baharna's ancient taverns.
All this time the great gaunt side of Ngranek was looming up higher and higher as Carter
approached it. There were sparse trees on the lower slopes and feeble shrubs above them, and then
the bare hideous rock rose spectral into the sky, to mix with frost and ice and eternal snow. Carter
could see the rifts and ruggedness of that sombre stone, and did not welcome the prospect of
climbing it. In places there were solid streams of lava, and scoriac heaps that littered slopes and
ledges. Ninety aeons ago, before even the gods had danced upon its pointed peak, that mountain had
spoken with fire and roared with the voices of the inner thunders. Now it towered all silent and
sinister, bearing on the hidden side that secret titan image whereof rumour told. And there were
caves in that mountain, which might be empty and alone with elder darkness, or might--if legend
spoke truly--hold horrors of a form not to be surmised.
The ground sloped upward to the foot of Ngranek, thinly covered with scrub oaks and ash trees,
and strewn with bits of rock, lava, and ancient cinder. There were the charred embers of many camps,
where the lava-gatherers were wont to stop, and several rude altars which they had built either to
propitiate the Great Ones or to ward off what they dreamed of in Ngranek's high passes and
labyrinthine caves. At evening Carter reached the farthermost pile of embers and camped for the
night, tethering his zebra to a sapling and wrapping himself well in his blankets before going to
sleep. And all through the night a voonith howled distantly from the shore of some hidden pool, but
Carter felt no fear of that amphibious terror, since he had been told with certainty that not one of them
dares even approach the slope of Ngranek.
In the clear sunshine of morning Carter began the long ascent, taking his zebra as far as that useful
beast could go, but tying it to a stunted ash tree when the floor of the thin wood became too steep.
Thereafter he scrambled up alone; first through the forest with its ruins of old villages in overgrown
clearings, and then over the tough grass where anaemic shrubs grew here and there. He regretted
coming clear of the trees, since the slope was very precipitous and the whole thing rather dizzying.
At length he began to discern all the countryside spread out beneath him whenever he looked about;
the deserted huts of the image-makers, the groves of resin trees and the camps of those who gathered
from them, the woods where prismatic magahs nest and sing, and even a hint very far away of the
shores of Yath and of those forbidding ancient ruins whose name is forgotten. He found it best not to
look around, and kept on climbing and climbing till the shrubs became very sparse and there was often
nothing but the tough grass to cling to.
Then the soil became meagre, with great patches of bare rock cropping out, and now and then the
nest of a condor in a crevice. Finally there was nothing at all but the bare rock, and had it not been
very rough and weathered, he could scarcely have ascended farther. Knobs, ledges, and pinnacles,
however, helped greatly; and it was cheering to see occasionally the sign of some lava-gatherer
scratched clumsily in the friable stone, and know that wholesome human creatures had been there
before him. After a certain height the presence of man was further shewn by handholds and footholds
hewn where they were needed, and by little quarries and excavations where some choice vein or
stream of lava had been found. In one place a narrow ledge had been chopped artificially to an
especially rich deposit far to the right of the main line of ascent. Once or twice Carter dared to look
around, and was almost stunned by the spread of landscape below. All the island betwixt him and the
coast lay open to his sight, with Baharna's stone terraces and the smoke of its chimneys mystical in
the distance. And beyond that the illimitable Southern Sea with all its curious secrets.
Thus far there had been much winding around the mountain, so that the farther and carven side was
still hidden. Carter now saw a ledge running upward and to the left which seemed to head the way he
wished, and this course he took in the hope that it might prove continuous. After ten minutes he saw it
was indeed no cul-de-sac, but that it led steeply on in an arc which would, unless suddenly
interrupted or deflected, bring him after a few hours' climbing to that unknown southern slope
overlooking the desolate crags and the accursed valley of lava. As new country came into view
below him he saw that it was bleaker and wilder than those seaward lands he had traversed. The
mountain's side, too, was somewhat different; being here pierced by curious cracks and caves not
found on the straighter route he had left. Some of these were above him and some beneath him, all
opening on sheerly perpendicular cliffs and wholly unreachable by the feet of man. The air was very
cold now, but so hard was the climbing that he did not mind it. Only the increasing rarity bothered
him, and he thought that perhaps it was this which had turned the heads of other travellers and excited
those absurd tales of night-gaunts whereby they explained the loss of such climbers as fell from
these perilous paths. He was not much impressed by travellers' tales, but had a good curved scimitar
in case of any trouble. All lesser thoughts were lost in the wish to see that carven face which might
set him on the track of the gods atop unknown Kadath.
At last, in the fearsome iciness of upper space, he came round fully to the hidden side of Ngranek
and saw in infinite gulfs below him the lesser crags and sterile abysses of lava which marked olden
wrath of the Great Ones. There was unfolded, too, a vast expanse of country to the south; but it was a
desert land without fair fields or cottage chimneys, and seemed to have no ending. No trace of the
sea was visible on this side, for Oriab is a great island. Black caverns and odd crevices were still
numerous on the sheer vertical cliffs, but none of them was accessible to a climber. There now
loomed aloft a great beetling mass which hampered the upward view, and Carter was for a moment
shaken with doubt lest it prove impassable. Poised in windy insecurity miles above earth, with only
space and death on one side and only slippery walls of rock on the other, he knew for a moment the
fear that makes men shun Ngranek's hidden side. He could not turn round, yet the sun was already low.
If there were no way aloft, the night would find him crouching there still, and the dawn would not
find him at all.
But there was a way, and he saw it in due season. Only a very expert dreamer could have used
those imperceptible footholds, yet to Carter they were sufficient. Surmounting now the outward-
hanging rock, he found the slope above much easier than that below, since a great glacier's melting
had left a generous space with loam and ledges. To the left a precipice dropped straight from
unknown heights to unknown depths, with a cave's dark mouth just out of reach above him. Elsewhere,
however, the mountain slanted back strongly, and even gave him space to lean and rest.
He felt from the chill that he must be near the snow line, and looked up to see what glittering
pinnacles might be shining in that late ruddy sunlight. Surely enough, there was the snow uncounted
thousands of feet above, and below it a great beetling crag like that he had just climbed; hanging
there forever in bold outline. And when he saw that crag he gasped and cried out aloud, and clutched
at the jagged rock in awe; for the titan bulge had not stayed as earth's dawn had shaped it, but gleamed
red and stupendous in the sunset with the carved and polished features of a god.
Stern and terrible shone that face that the sunset lit with fire. How vast it was no mind can ever
measure, but Carter knew at once that man could never have fashioned it. It was a god chiselled by the
hands of the gods, and it looked down haughty and majestic upon the seeker. Rumour had said it was
strange and not to be mistaken, and Carter saw that it was indeed so; for those long narrow eyes and
long-lobed ears, and that thin nose and pointed chin, all spoke of a race that is not of men but of gods.
He clung overawed in that lofty and perilous eyrie, even though it was this which he had
expected and come to find; for there is in a god's face more of marvel than prediction can tell, and
when that face is vaster than a great temple and seen looking downward at sunset in the scyptic
silences of that upper world from whose dark lava it was divinely hewn of old, the marvel is so
strong that none may escape it.
Here, too, was the added marvel of recognition; for although he had planned to search all
dreamland over for those whose likeness to this face might mark them as the god's children, he now
knew that he need not do so. Certainly, the great face carven on that mountain was of no strange sort,
but the kin of such as he had seen often in the taverns of the seaport Celephais which lies in Ooth-
Nargai beyond the Tanarian Hills and is ruled over by that King Kuranes whom Carter once knew in
waking life. Every year sailors with such a face came in dark ships from the north to trade their onyx
for the carved jade and spun gold and little red singing birds of Celephais, and it was clear that these
could be no others than the half-gods he sought. Where they dwelt, there must the cold waste lie
close, and within it unknown Kadath and its onyx castle for the Great Ones. So to Celephais he must
go, far distant from the isle of Oriab, and in such parts as would take him back to Dylath-Teen and up
the Skai to the bridge by Nir, and again into the enchanted wood of the Zoogs, whence the way would
bend northward through the garden lands by Oukranos to the gilded spires of Thran, where he might
find a galleon bound over the Cerenarian Sea.
But dusk was now thick, and the great carven face looked down even sterner in shadow. Perched
on that ledge night found the seeker; and in the blackness he might neither go down nor go up, but
only stand and cling and shiver in that narrow place till the day came, praying to keep awake lest sleep
loose his hold and send him down the dizzy miles of air to the crags and sharp rocks of the accursed
valley. The stars came out, but save for them there was only black nothingness in his eyes;
nothingness leagued with death, against whose beckoning he might do no more than cling to the rocks
and lean back away from an unseen brink. The last thing of earth that he saw in the gloaming was a
condor soaring close to the westward precipice beside him, and darting screaming away when it
came near the cave whose mouth yawned just out of reach.
Suddenly, without a warning sound in the dark, Carter felt his curved scimitar drawn stealthily out
of his belt by some unseen hand. Then he heard it clatter down over the rocks below. And between
him and the Milky Way he thought he saw a very terrible outline of something noxiously thin and
horned and tailed and bat-winged. Other things, too, had begun to blot out patches of stars west of
him, as if a flock of vague entities were flapping thickly and silently out of that inaccessible cave in
the face of the precipice. Then a sort of cold rubbery arm seized his neck and something else seized
his feet, and he was lifted inconsiderately up and swung about in space. Another minute and the stars
were gone, and Carter knew that the night-gaunts had got him.
They bore him breathless into that cliffside cavern and through monstrous labyrinths beyond.
When he struggled, as at first he did by instinct, they tickled him with deliberation. They made no
sound at all themselves, and even their membranous wings were silent. They were frightfully cold
and damp and slippery, and their paws kneaded one detestably. Soon they were plunging hideously
downward through inconceivable abysses in a whirling, giddying, sickening rush of dank, tomb-like
air; and Carter felt they were shooting into the ultimate vortex of shrieking and daemonic madness.
He screamed again and again, but whenever he did so the black paws tickled him with greater
subtlety. Then he saw a sort of grey phosphorescence about, and guessed they were coming even to
that inner world of subterrene horror of which dim legends tell, and which is litten only by the pale
death--fire wherewith reeks the ghoulish air and the primal mists of the pits at earth's core.
At last far below him he saw faint lines of grey and ominous pinnacles which he knew must be the
fabled Peaks of Throk. Awful and sinister they stand in the haunted disc of sunless and eternal depths;
higher than man may reckon, and guarding terrible valleys where the Dholes crawl and burrow
nastily. But Carter preferred to look at them than at his captors, which were indeed shocking and
uncouth black things with smooth, oily, whale-like surfaces, unpleasant horns that curved inward
toward each other, bat wings whose beating made no sound, ugly prehensile paws, and barbed tails
that lashed needlessly and disquietingly. And worst of all, they never spoke or laughed, and never
smiled because they had no faces at all to smile with, but only a suggestive blankness where a face
ought to be. All they ever did was clutch and fly and tickle; that was the way of night-gaunts.
As the band flew lower the Peaks of Throk rose grey and towering on all sides, and one saw
clearly that nothing lived on that austere and impressive granite of the endless twilight. At still lower
levels the death-fires in the air gave out, and one met only the primal blackness of the void save aloft
where the thin peaks stood out goblin-like. Soon the peaks were very far away, and nothing about but
great rushing winds with the dankness of nethermost grottoes in them. Then in the end the night-
gaunts landed on a floor of unseen things which felt like layers of bones, and left Carter all alone in
that black valley. To bring him thither was the duty of the night-gaunts that guard Ngranek; and this
done, they flapped away silently. When Carter tried to trace their flight he found he could not, since
even the Peaks of Throk had faded out of sight. There was nothing anywhere but blackness and
horror and silence and bones.
Now Carter knew from a certain source that he was in the vale of Pnoth, where crawl and burrow
the enormous Dholes; but he did not know what to expect, because no one has ever seen a Dhole or
even guessed what such a thing may be like. Dholes are known only by dim rumour, from the rustling
they make amongst mountains of bones and the slimy touch they have when they wriggle past one.
They cannot be seen because they creep only in the dark. Carter did not wish to meet a Dhole, so
listened intently for any sound in the unknown depths of bones about him. Even in this fearsome place
he had a plan and an objective, for whispers of Pnoth were not unknown to one with whom he had
talked much in the old days. In brief, it seemed fairly likely that this was the spot into which all the
ghouls of the waking world cast the refuse of their feastings; and that if he but had good luck he
might stumble upon that mighty crag taller even than Throk's peaks which marks the edge of their
domain. Showers of bones would tell him where to look, and once found he could call to a ghoul to
let down a ladder; for strange to say, he had a very singular link with these terrible creatures.
A man he had known in Boston--a painter of strange pictures with a secret studio in an ancient and
unhallowed alley near a graveyard--had actually made friends with the ghouls and had taught him to
understand the simpler part of their disgusting meeping and glibbering. This man had vanished at last,
and Carter was not sure but that he might find him now, and use for the first time in dreamland that far-
away English of his dim waking life. In any case, he felt he could persuade a ghoul to guide him out
of Pnoth; and it would be better to meet a ghoul, which one can see, than a Dhole, which one cannot
see.
So Carter walked in the dark, and ran when he thought he heard something among the bones
underfoot. Once he bumped into a stony slope, and knew it must be the base of one of Throk's peaks.
Then at last he heard a monstrous rattling and clatter which reached far up in the air, and became sure
he had come nigh the crag of the ghouls. He was not sure he could be heard from this valley miles
below, but realised that the inner world has strange laws. As he pondered he was struck by a flying
bone so heavy that it must have been a skull, and therefore realising his nearness to the fateful crag
he sent up as best he might that meeping cry which is the call of the ghoul.
Sound travels slowly, so it was some time before he heard an answering glibber. But it came at
last, and before long he was told that a rope ladder would be lowered. The wait for this was very
tense, since there was no telling what might not have been stirred up among those bones by his
shouting. Indeed, it was not long before he actually did hear a vague rustling afar off. As this
thoughtfully approached, he became more and more uncomfortable; for he did not wish to move away
from the spot where the ladder would come. Finally the tension grew almost unbearable, and he was
about to flee in panic when the thud of something on the newly heaped bones nearby drew his notice
from the other sound. It was the ladder, and after a minute of groping he had it taut in his hands. But
the other sound did not cease, and followed him even as he climbed. He had gone fully five feet from
the ground when the rattling beneath waxed emphatic, and was a good ten feet up when something
swayed the ladder from below. At a height which must have been fifteen or twenty feet he felt his
whole side brushed by a great slippery length which grew alternately convex and concave with
wriggling; and hereafter he climbed desperately to escape the unendurable nuzzling of that loathsome
and overfed Dhole whose form no man might see.
For hours he climbed with aching and blistered hands, seeing again the grey death-fire and
Throk's uncomfortable pinnacles. At last he discerned above him the projecting edge of the great
crag of the ghouls, whose vertical side he could not glimpse; and hours later he saw a curious face
peering over it as a gargoyle peers over a parapet of Notre Dame. This almost made him lose his
hold through faintness, but a moment later he was himself again; for his vanished friend Richard
Pickman had once introduced him to a ghoul, and he knew well their canine faces and slumping forms
and unmentionable idiosyncrasies. So he had himself well under control when that hideous thing
pulled him out of the dizzy emptiness over the edge of the crag, and did not scream at the partly
consumed refuse heaped at one side or at the squatting circles of ghouls who gnawed and watched
curiously.
He was now on a dim-litten plain whose sole topographical features were great boulders and the
entrances of burrows. The ghouls were in general respectful, even if one did attempt to pinch him
while several others eyed his leanness speculatively. Through patient glibbering he made inquiries
regarding his vanished friend, and found he had become a ghoul of some prominence in abysses
nearer the waking world. A greenish elderly ghoul offered to conduct him to Pickman's present
habitation, so despite a natural loathing he followed the creature into a capacious burrow and
crawled after him for hours in the blackness of rank mould. They emerged on a dim plain strewn with
singular relics of earth--old gravestones, broken urns, and grotesque fragments of monuments--and
Carter realised with some emotion that he was probably nearer the waking world than at any other
time since he had gone down the seven hundred steps from the cavern of flame to the Gate of Deeper
Slumber.
There, on a tombstone of 1768 stolen from the Granary Burying Ground in Boston, sat a ghoul
which was once the artist Richard Upton Pickman. It was naked and rubbery, and had acquired so
much of the ghoulish physiognomy that its human origin was already obscure. But it still remembered
a little English, and was able to converse with Carter in grunts and monosyllables, helped out now
and then by the glibbering of ghouls. When it learned that Carter wished to get to the enchanted wood
and from there to the city Celephais in Ooth-Nargai beyond the Tanarian Hills, it seemed rather
doubtful; for these ghouls of the waking world do no business in the graveyards of upper dreamland
(leaving that to the red-footed wamps that are spawned in dead cities), and many things intervene
betwixt their gulf and the enchanted wood, including the terrible kingdom of the Gugs.
The Gugs, hairy and gigantic, once reared stone circles in that wood and made strange sacrifices
to the Other Gods and the crawling chaos Nyarlathotep, until one night an abomination of theirs
reached the ears of earth's gods and they were banished to caverns below. Only a great trap door of
stone with an iron ring connects the abyss of the earth-ghouls with the enchanted wood, and this the
Gugs are afraid to open because of a curse. That a mortal dreamer could traverse their cavern realm
and leave by that door is inconceivable; for mortal dreamers were their former food, and they have
legends of the toothsomeness of such dreamers even though banishment has restricted their diet to
the ghasts, those repulsive beings which die in the light, and which live in the vaults of Zin and leap
on long hind legs like kangaroos.
So the ghoul that was Pickman advised Carter either to leave the abyss at Sarkomand, that deserted
city in the valley below Leng where black nitrous stairways guarded by winged diarote lions lead
down from dreamland to the lower gulfs, or to return through a churchyard to the waking world and
begin the quest anew down the seventy steps of light slumber to the cavern of flame and the seven
hundred steps to the Gate of Deeper Slumber and the enchanted wood. This, however, did not suit the
seeker; for he knew nothing of the way from Leng to Ooth-Nargai, and was likewise reluctant to
awake lest he forget all he had so far gained in this dream. It was disastrous to his quest to forget the
august and celestial faces of those seamen from the north who traded onyx in Celephais, and who,
being the sons of gods, must point the way to the cold waste and Kadath where the Great Ones dwell.
After much persuasion the ghoul consented to guide his guest inside the great wall of the Gugs'
kingdom. There was one chance that Carter might be able to steal through that twilight realm of
circular stone towers at an hour when the giants would be all gorged and snoring indoors, and reach
the central tower with the sign of Koth upon it, which has the stairs leading up to that stone trap door
in the enchanted wood. Pickman even consented to lend three ghouls to help with a tombstone lever in
raising the stone door; for of ghouls the Gugs are somewhat afraid, and they often flee from their
own colossal graveyards when they see them feasting there.
He also advised Carter to disguise as a ghoul himself; shaving the beard he had allowed to grow
(for ghouls have none), wallowing naked in the mould to get the correct surface, and loping in the
usual slumping way, with his clothing carried in a bundle as if it were a choice morsel from a tomb.
They would reach the city of Gugs--which is coterminous with the whole kingdom--through the
proper burrows, emerging in a cemetery not far from the stair-containing Tower of Koth. They must
beware, however, of a large cave near the cemetery; for this is the mouth of the vaults of Zin, and the
vindictive ghasts are always on watch there murderously for those denizens of the upper abyss who
hunt and prey on them. The ghasts try to come out when the Gugs sleep and they attack ghouls as
readily as Gugs, for they cannot discriminate. They are very primitive, and eat one another. The Gugs
have a sentry at a narrow in the vaults of Zin, but he is often drowsy and is sometimes surprised by a
party of ghasts. Though ghasts cannot live in real light, they can endure the grey twilight of the abyss
for hours.
So at length Carter crawled through endless burrows with three helpful ghouls bearing the slate
gravestone of Col. Nepemiah Derby, obit 1719, from the Charter Street Burying Ground in Salem.
When they came again into open twilight they were in a forest of vast lichened monoliths reaching
nearly as high as the eye could see and forming the modest gravestones of the Gugs. On the right of
the hole out of which they wriggled, and seen through aisles of monoliths, was a stupendous vista of
cyclopean round towers mounting up illimitable into the grey air of inner earth. This was the great
city of the Gugs, whose doorways are thirty feet high. Ghouls come here often, for a buried Gug
will feed a community for almost a year, and even with the added peril it is better to burrow for Gugs
than to bother with the graves of men. Carter now understood the occasional titan bones he had felt
beneath him in the vale of Pnoth.
Straight ahead, and just outside the cemetery, rose a sheer perpendicular cliff at whose base an
immense and forbidding cavern yawned. This the ghouls told Carter to avoid as much as possible,
since it was the entrance to the unhallowed vaults of Zin where Gugs hunt ghasts in the darkness. And
truly, that warning was soon well justified; for the moment a ghoul began to creep toward the towers
to see if the hour of the Gugs' resting had been rightly timed, there glowed in the gloom of that great
cavern's mouth first one pair of yellowish-red eyes and then another, implying that the Gugs were
one sentry less, and that ghasts have indeed an excellent sharpness of smell. So the ghoul returned to
the burrow and motioned his companions to be silent. It was best to leave the ghasts to their own
devices, and there was a possibility that they might soon withdraw, since they must naturally be rather
tired after coping with a Gug sentry in the black vaults. After a moment something about the size of a
small horse hopped out into the grey twilight, and Carter turned sick at the aspect of that scabrous and
unwholesome beast, whose face is so curiously human despite the absence of a nose, a forehead, and
other important particulars.
Presently three other ghasts hopped out to join their fellow, and a ghoul glibbered softly at
Carter that their absence of battle-scars was a bad sign. It proved that they had not fought the Gug
sentry at all, but had merely slipped past him as he slept, so that their strength and savagery were still
unimpaired and would remain so till they had found and disposed of a victim. It was very unpleasant to
see those filthy and disproportioned animals which soon numbered about fifteen, grubbing about and
making their kangaroo leaps in the grey twilight where titan towers and monoliths arose, but it was
still more unpleasant when they spoke among themselves in the coughing gutturals of ghasts. And yet,
horrible as they were, they were not so horrible as what presently came out of the cave after them
with disconcerting suddenness.
It was a paw, fully two feet and a half across, and equipped with formidable talons. After it came
another paw, and after that a great black-furred arm to which both of the paws were attached by short
forearms. Then two pink eyes shone, and the head of the awakened Gug sentry, large as a barrel,
wabbled into view. The eyes jutted two inches from each side, shaded by bony protuberances
overgrown with coarse hairs. But the head was chiefly terrible because of the mouth. That mouth
had great yellow fangs and ran from the top to the bottom of the head, opening vertically instead of
horizontally.
But before that unfortunate Gug could emerge from the cave and rise to his full twenty feet, the
vindictive ghasts were upon him. Carter feared for a moment that he would give an alarm and arouse
all his kin, till a ghoul softly glibbered that Gugs have no voice but talk by means of facial
expression. The battle which then ensued was truly a frightful one. From all sides the venomous
ghasts rushed feverishly at the creeping Gug, nipping and tearing with their muzzles, and mauling
murderously with their hard pointed hooves. All the time they coughed excitedly, screaming when
the great vertical mouth of the Gug would occasionally bite into one of their number, so that the
noise of the combat would surely have aroused the sleeping city had not the weakening of the sentry
begun to transfer the action farther and farther within the cavern. As it was, the tumult soon receded
altogether from sight in the blackness, with only occasional evil echoes to mark its continuance.
Then the most alert of the ghouls gave the signal for all to advance, and Carter followed the
loping three out of the forest of monoliths and into the dark noisome streets of that awful city whose
rounded towers of cyclopean stone soared up beyond the sight. Silently they shambled over that
rough rock pavement, hearing with disgust the abominable muffled snortings from great black
doorways which marked the slumber of the Gugs. Apprehensive of the ending of the rest hour, the
ghouls set a somewhat rapid pace; but even so the journey was no brief one, for distances in that town
of giants are on a great scale. At last, however, they came to a somewhat open space before a tower
even vaster than the rest; above whose colossal doorway was fixed a monstrous symbol in bas-relief
which made one shudder without knowing its meaning. This was the central tower with the sign of
Koth, and those huge stone steps just visible through the dusk within were the beginning of the great
flight leading to upper dreamland and the enchanted wood.
There now began a climb of interminable length in utter blackness: made almost impossible by the
monstrous size of the steps, which were fashioned for Gugs, and were therefore nearly a yard high.
Of their number Carter could form no just estimate, for he soon became so worn out that the tireless
and elastic ghouls were forced to aid him. All through the endless climb there lurked the peril of
detection and pursuit; for though no Gug dares lift the stone door to the forest because of the Great
One's curse, there are no such restraints concerning the tower and the steps, and escaped ghasts are
often chased, even to the very top. So sharp are the ears of Gugs, that the bare feet and hands of the
climbers might readily be heard when the city awoke; and it would of course take but little time for
the striding giants, accustomed from their ghast-hunts in the vaults of Zin to seeing without light, to
overtake their smaller and slower quarry on those cyclopean steps. It was very depressing to reflect
that the silent pursuing Gugs would not be heard at all, but would come very suddenly and shockingly
in the dark upon the climbers. Nor could the traditional fear of Gugs for ghouls be depended upon in
that peculiar place where the advantages lay so heavily with the Gugs. There was also some peril
from the furtive and venomous ghasts, which frequently hopped up onto the tower during the sleep
hour of the Gugs. If the Gugs slept long, and the ghasts returned soon from their deed in the cavern,
the scent of the climbers might easily be picked up by those loathsome and ill-disposed things; in
which case it would almost be better to be eaten by a Gug.
Then, after aeons of climbing, there came a cough from the darkness above; and matters assumed
a very grave and unexpected turn.
It was clear that a ghast, or perhaps even more, had strayed into that tower before the coming of
Carter and his guides; and it was equally clear that this peril was very close. After a breathless
second the leading ghoul pushed Carter to the wall and arranged his kinfolk in the best possible way,
with the old slate tombstone raised for a crushing blow whenever the enemy might come in sight.
Ghouls can see in the dark, so the party was not as badly off as Carter would have been alone. In
another moment the clatter of hooves revealed the downward hopping of at least one beast, and the
slab-bearing ghouls poised their weapon for a desperate blow. Presently two yellowish-red eyes
flashed into view, and the panting of the ghast became audible above its clattering. As it hopped
down to the step above the ghouls, they wielded the ancient gravestone with prodigious force, so
that there was only a wheeze and a choking before the victim collapsed in a noxious heap. There
seemed to be only this one animal, and after a moment of listening the ghouls tapped Carter as a signal
to proceed again. As before, they were obliged to aid him; and he was glad to leave that place of
carnage where the ghast's uncouth remains sprawled invisible in the blackness.
At last the ghouls brought their companion to a halt; and feeling above him, Carter realised that
the great stone trap door was reached at last. To open so vast a thing completely was not to be
thought of, but the ghouls hoped to get it up just enough to slip the gravestone under as a prop, and
permit Carter to escape through the crack. They themselves planned to descend again and return
through the city of the Gugs, since their elusiveness was great, and they did not know the way
overland to spectral Sarkomand with its lion-guarded gate to the abyss.
Mighty was the straining of those three ghouls at the stone of the door above them, and Carter
helped push with as much strength as he had. They judged the edge next the top of the staircase to be
the right one, and to this they bent all the force of their disreputably nourished muscles. After a few
moments a crack of light appeared; and Carter, to whom that task had been entrusted, slipped the end
of the old gravestone in the aperture. There now ensued a mighty heaving; but progress was very
slow, and they had of course to return to their first position every time they failed to turn the slab and
prop the portal open.
Suddenly their desperation was magnified a thousand fold by a sound on the steps below them. It
was only the thumping and rattling of the slain ghast's hooved body as it rolled down to lower levels;
but of all the possible causes of that body's dislodgement and rolling, none was in the least
reassuring. Therefore, knowing the ways of Gugs, the ghouls set to with something of a frenzy; and
in a surprisingly short time had the door so high that they were able to hold it still whilst Carter
turned the slab and left a generous opening. They now helped Carter through, letting him climb up to
their rubbery shoulders and later guiding his feet as he clutched at the blessed soil of the upper
dreamland outside. Another second and they were through themselves, knocking away the gravestone
and closing the great trap door while a panting became audible beneath. Because of the Great One's
curse no Gug might ever emerge from that portal, so with a deep relief and sense of repose Carter
lay quietly on the thick grotesque fungi of the enchanted wood while his guides squatted near in the
manner that ghouls rest.
Weird as was that enchanted wood through which he had fared so long ago, it was verily a haven
and a delight after those gulfs he had now left behind. There was no living denizen about, for Zoogs
shun the mysterious door in fear and Carter at once consulted with his ghouls about their future
course. To return through the tower they no longer dared, and the waking world did not appeal to
them when they learned that they must pass the priests Nasht and Kaman-Thah in the cavern of flame.
So at length they decided to return through Sarkomand and its gate of the abyss, though of how to get
there they knew nothing. Carter recalled that it lies in the valley below Leng, and recalled likewise
that he had seen in Dylath-Leen a sinister, slant-eyed old merchant reputed to trade on Leng,
therefore he advised the ghouls to seek out Dylath-Leen, crossing the fields to Nir and the Skai and
following the river to its mouth. This they at once resolved to do, and lost no time in loping off,
since the thickening of the dusk promised a full night ahead for travel. And Carter shook the paws of
those repulsive beasts, thanking them for their help and sending his gratitude to the beast which once
was Pickman; but could not help sighing with pleasure when they left. For a ghoul is a ghoul, and at
best an unpleasant companion for man. After that Carter sought a forest pool and cleansed himself of
the mud of nether earth, thereupon reassuming the clothes he had so carefully carried.
It was now night in that redoubtable wood of monstrous trees, but because of the
phosphorescence one might travel as well as by day; wherefore Carter set out upon the well-known
route toward Celephais, in Ooth-Nargai beyond the Tanarian Hills. And as he went he thought of the
zebra he had left tethered to an ash-tree on Ngranek in far-away Oriab so many aeons ago, and
wondered if any lava-gatherers had fed and released it. And he wondered, too, if he would ever
return to Baharna and pay for the zebra that was slain by night in those ancient ruins by Yath's shore,
and if the old tavernkeeper would remember him. Such were the thoughts that came to him in the air
of the regained upper dreamland.
But presently his progress was halted by a sound from a very large hollow tree. He had avoided
the great circle of stones, since he did not care to speak with Zoogs just now; but it appeared from
the singular fluttering in that huge tree that important councils were in session elsewhere. Upon
drawing nearer he made out the accents of a tense and heated discussion; and before long became
conscious of matters which he viewed with the greatest concern. For a war on the cats was under
debate in that sovereign assembly of Zoogs. It all came from the loss of the party which had sneaked
after Carter to Ulthar, and which the cats had justly punished for unsuitable intentions. The matter had
long rankled; and now, or at least within a month, the marshalled Zoogs were about to strike the
whole feline tribe in a series of surprise attacks, taking individual cats or groups of cats unawares,
and giving not even the myriad cats of Ulthar a proper chance to drill and mobilise. This was the plan
of the Zoogs, and Carter saw that he must foil it before leaving upon his mighty quest.
Very quietly therefore did Randolph Carter steal to the edge of the wood and send the cry of the
cat over the starlit fields. And a great grimalkin in a nearby cottage took up the burden and relayed it
across leagues of rolling meadow to warriors large and small, black, grey, tiger, white, yellow, and
mixed, and it echoed through Nir and beyond the Skai even into Ulthar, and Ulthar's numerous cats
called in chorus and fell into a line of march. It was fortunate that the moon was not up, so that all the
cats were on earth. Swiftly and silently leaping, they sprang from every hearth and housetop and
poured in a great furry sea across the plains to the edge of the wood. Carter was there to greet them,
and the sight of shapely, wholesome cats was indeed good for his eyes after the things he had seen
and walked with in the abyss. He was glad to see his venerable friend and one-time rescuer at the
head of Ulthar's detachment, a collar of rank around his sleek neck, and whiskers bristling at a martial
angle. Better still, as a sub-lieutenant in that army was a brisk young fellow who proved to be none
other than the very little kitten at the inn to whom Carter had given a saucer of rich cream on that
long-vanished morning in Ulthar. He was a strapping and promising cat now, and purred as he shook
hands with his friend. His grandfather said he was doing very well in the army, and that he might well
expect a captaincy after one more campaign.
Carter now outlined the peril of the cat tribe, and was rewarded by deep-throated purrs of
gratitude from all sides. Consulting with the generals, he prepared a plan of instant action which
involved marching at once upon the Zoog council and other known strongholds of Zoogs;
forestalling their surprise attacks and forcing them to terms before the mobilization of their army of
invasion. Thereupon without a moment's loss that great ocean of cats flooded the enchanted wood and
surged around the council tree and the great stone circle. Flutterings rose to panic pitch as the enemy
saw the newcomers and there was very little resistance among the furtive and curious brown Zoogs.
They saw that they were beaten in advance, and turned from thoughts of vengeance to thoughts of
present self-preservation.
Half the cats now seated themselves in a circular formation with the captured Zoogs in the centre,
leaving open a lane down which were marched the additional captives rounded up by the other cats in
other parts of the wood. Terms were discussed at length, Carter acting as interpreter, and it was
decided that the Zoogs might remain a free tribe on condition of rendering to the cats a large tribute
of grouse, quail, and pheasants from the less fabulous parts of the forest. Twelve young Zoogs of
noble families were taken as hostages to be kept in the Temple of Cats at Ulthar, and the victors made
it plain that any disappearances of cats on the borders of the Zoog domain would be followed by
consequences highly disastrous to Zoogs. These matters disposed of, the assembled cats broke ranks
and permitted the Zoogs to slink off one by one to their respective homes, which they hastened to do
with many a sullen backward glance.
The old cat general now offered Carter an escort through the forest to whatever border he
wished to reach, deeming it likely that the Zoogs would harbour dire resentment against him for the
frustration of their warlike enterprise. This offer he welcomed with gratitude; not only for the safety
it afforded, but because he liked the graceful companionship of cats. So in the midst of a pleasant and
playful regiment, relaxed after the successful performance of its duty, Randolph Carter walked with
dignity through that enchanted and phosphorescent wood of titan trees, talking of his quest with the
old general and his grandson whilst others of the band indulged in fantastic gambols or chased fallen
leaves that the wind drove among the fungi of that primeval floor. And the old cat said that he had
heard much of unknown Kadath in the cold waste, but did not know where it was. As for the
marvellous sunset city, he had not even heard of that, but would gladly relay to Carter anything he
might later learn.
He gave the seeker some passwords of great value among the cats of dreamland, and commended
him especially to the old chief of the cats in Celephais, whither he was bound. That old cat, already
slightly known to Carter, was a dignified maltese; and would prove highly influential in any
transaction. It was dawn when they came to the proper edge of the wood, and Carter bade his friends
a reluctant farewell. The young sub-lieutenant he had met as a small kitten would have followed him
had not the old general forbidden it, but that austere patriarch insisted that the path of duty lay with the
tribe and the army. So Carter set out alone over the golden fields that stretched mysterious beside a
willow-fringed river, and the cats went back into the wood.
Well did the traveller know those garden lands that lie betwixt the wood of the Cerenerian Sea,
and blithely did he follow the singing river Oukianos that marked his course. The sun rose higher
over gentle slopes of grove and lawn, and heightened the colours of the thousand flowers that
starred each knoll and dangle. A blessed haze lies upon all this region, wherein is held a little more
of the sunlight than other places hold, and a little more of the summer's humming music of birds and
bees; so that men walk through it as through a faery place, and feel greater joy and wonder than they
ever afterward remember.
By noon Carter reached the jasper terraces of Kiran which slope down to the river's edge and
bear that temple of loveliness wherein the King of Ilek-Vad comes from his far realm on the twilight
sea once a year in a golden palanquin to pray to the god of Oukianos, who sang to him in youth when
he dwelt in a cottage by its banks. All of jasper is that temple, and covering an acre of ground with its
walls and courts, its seven pinnacled towers, and its inner shrine where the river enters through
hidden channels and the god sings softly in the night. Many times the moon hears strange music as it
shines on those courts and terraces and pinnacles, but whether that music be the song of the god or
the chant of the cryptical priests, none but the King of Ilek--Vad may say; for only he had entered the
temple or seen the priests. Now, in the drowsiness of day, that carven and delicate fane was silent,
and Carter heard only the murmur of the great stream and the hum of the birds and bees as he walked
onward under the enchanted sun.
All that afternoon the pilgrim wandered on through perfumed meadows and in the lee of gentle
riverward hills bearing peaceful thatched cottages and the shrines of amiable gods carven from
jasper or chrysoberyl. Sometimes he walked close to the bank of Oukianos and whistled to the
sprightly and iridescent fish of that crystal stream, and at other times he paused amidst the whispering
rushes and gazed at the great dark wood on the farther side, whose trees came down clear to the
water's edge. In former dreams he had seen quaint lumbering buopoths come shyly out of that wood
to drink, but now he could not glimpse any. Once in a while he paused to watch a carnivorous fish
catch a fishing bird, which it lured to the water by showing its tempting scales in the sun, and grasped
by the beak with its enormous mouth as the winged hunter sought to dart down upon it.
Toward evening he mounted a low grassy rise and saw before him flaming in the sunset the
thousand gilded spires of Thran. Lofty beyond belief are the alabaster walls of that incredible city,
sloping inward toward the top and wrought in one solid piece by what means no man knows, for they
are more ancient than memory. Yet lofty as they are with their hundred gates and two hundred turrets,
the clustered towers within, all white beneath their golden spires, are loftier still; so that men on the
plain around see them soaring into the sky, sometimes shining clear, sometimes caught at the top in
tangles of cloud and mist, and sometimes clouded lower down with their utmost pinnacles blazing
free above the vapours. And where Thran's gates open on the river are great wharves of marble, with
ornate galleons of fragrant cedar and calamander riding gently at anchor, and strange bearded sailors
sitting on casks and bales with the hieroglyphs of far places. Landward beyond the walls lies the
farm country, where small white cottages dream between little hills, and narrow roads with many
stone bridges wind gracefully among streams and gardens.
Down through this verdant land Carter walked at evening, and saw twilight float up from the river
to the marvellous golden spires of Thran. And just at the hour of dusk he came to the southern gate,
and was stopped by a red-robed sentry till he had told three dreams beyond belief, and proved
himself a dreamer worthy to walk up Thran's steep mysterious streets and linger in the bazaars where
the wares of the ornate galleons were sold. Then into that incredible city he walked; through a wall
so thick that the gate was a tunnel, and thereafter amidst curved and undulant ways winding deep and
narrow between the heavenward towers. Lights shone through grated and balconied windows, and the
sound of lutes and pipes stole timid from inner courts where marble fountains bubbled. Carter knew
his way, and edged down through darker streets to the river, where at an old sea tavern he found the
captains and seamen he had known in myriad other dreams. There he bought his passage to Celephais
on a great green galleon, and there he stopped for the night after speaking gravely to the venerable
cat of that inn, who blinked dozing before an enormous hearth and dreamed of old wars and forgotten
gods.
In the morning Carter boarded the galleon bound for Celephais, and sat in the prow as the ropes
were cast off and the long sail down to the Cerenerian Sea begun. For many leagues the banks were
much as they were above Thran, with now and then a curious temple rising on the farther hills toward
the right, and a drowsy village on the shore, with steep red roofs and nets spread in the sun. Mindful
of his search, Carter questioned all the mariners closely about those whom they had met in the
taverns of Celephais, asking the names and ways of the strange men with long, narrow eyes, long-
lobed ears, thin noses, and pointed chins who came in dark ships from the north and traded onyx for
the carved jade and spun gold and little red singing birds of Celephais. Of these men the sailors knew
not much, save that they talked but seldom and spread a kind of awe about them.
Their land, very far away, was called Inquanok, and not many people cared to go thither because it
was a cold twilight land, and said to be close to unpleasant Leng; although high impassable mountains
towered on the side where Leng was thought to lie, so that none might say whether this evil plateau
with its horrible stone villages and unmentionable monastery were really there, or whether the
rumour were only a fear that timid people felt in the night when those formidable barrier peaks
loomed black against a rising moon. Certainly, men reached Leng from very different oceans. Of
other boundaries of Inquanok those sailors had no notion, nor had they heard of the cold waste and
unknown Kadath save from vague unplaced report. And of the marvellous sunset city which Carter
sought they knew nothing at all. So the traveller asked no more of far things, but bided his time till he
might talk with those strange men from cold and twilight Inquanok who are the seed of such gods as
carved their features on Ngranek.
Late in the day the galleon reached those bends of the river which traverse the perfumed jungles
of Kied. Here Carter wished he might disembark, for in those tropic tangles sleep wondrous palaces
of ivory, lone and unbroken, where once dwelt fabulous monarchs of a land whose name is forgotten.
Spells of the Elder Ones keep those places unharmed and undecayed, for it is written that there may
one day be need of them again; and elephant caravans have glimpsed them from afar by moonlight,
though none dares approach them closely because of the guardians to which their wholeness is due.
But the ship swept on, and dusk hushed the hum of the day, and the first stars above blinked answers
to the early fireflies on the banks as that jungle fell far behind, leaving only its fragrance as a memory
that it had been. And all through the night that galleon floated on past mysteries unseen and
unsuspected. Once a lookout reported fires on the hills to the east, but the sleepy captain said they
had better not be looked at too much, since it was highly uncertain just who or what had lit them.
In the morning the river had broadened out greatly, and Carter saw by the houses along the banks
that they were close to the vast trading city of Hlanith on the CerenerianSea. Here the walls are of
rugged granite, and the houses peakedly fantastic with beamed and plastered gables. The men of
Hlanith are more like those of the waking world than any others in dreamland; so that the city is not
sought except for barter, but is prized for the solid work of its artisans. The wharves of Hlanith are
of oak, and there the galleon made fast while the captain traded in the taverns. Carter also went
ashore, and looked curiously upon the rutted streets where wooden ox carts lumbered and feverish
merchants cried their wares vacuously in the bazaars. The sea taverns were all close to the wharves
on cobbled lanes salted with the spray of high tides, and seemed exceedingly ancient with their low
black-beamed ceilings and casements of greenish bull's-eye panes. Ancient sailors in those taverns
talked much of distant ports, and told many stories of the curious men from twilight Inquanok, but had
little to add to what the seamen of the galleon had told. Then at last, after much unloading and loading,
the ship set sail once more over the sunset sea, and the high walls and gables of Hlanith grew less as
the last golden light of day lent them a wonder and beauty beyond any that men had given them.
Two nights and two days the galleon sailed over the Cerenerian Sea, sighting no land and
speaking but one other vessel. Then near sunset of the second day there loomed up ahead the snowy
peak of Aran with its gingko-trees swaying on the lower slope, and Carter knew that they were come
to the land of Ooth-Nargai and the marvellous city of Celephais. Swiftly there came into sight the
glittering minarets of that fabulous town, and the untarnished marble walls with their bronze statues,
and the great stone bridge where Naraxa joins the sea. Then rose the gentle hills behind the town,
with their groves and gardens of asphodels and the small shrines and cottages upon them; and far in
the background the purple ridge of the Tanarians, potent and mystical, behind which lay forbidden
ways into the waking world and toward other regions of dream.
The harbour was full of painted galleys, some of which were from the marble cloud-city of
Serannian, that lies in ethereal space beyond where the sea meets the sky, and some of which were
from more substantial parts of dreamland. Among these the steersman threaded his way up to the
spice-fragrant wharves, where the galleon made fast in the dusk as the city's million lights began to
twinkle out over the water. Ever new seemed this deathless city of vision, for here time has no
power to tarnish or destroy. As it has always been is still the turquoise of Nath-Horthath, and the
eighty orchid-wreathed priests are the same who builded it ten thousand years ago. Shining still is
the bronze of the great gates, nor are the onyx pavements ever worn or broken. And the great bronze
statues on the walls look down on merchants and camel drivers older than fable, yet without one grey
hair in their forked beards.
Carter did not once seek out the temple or the palace or the citadel, but stayed by the seaward
wall among traders and sailors. And when it was too late for rumours and legends he sought out an
ancient tavern he knew well, and rested with dreams of the gods on unknown Kadath whom he sought.
The next day he searched all along the quays for some of the strange mariners of Inquanok, but was
told that none were now in port, their galley not being due from the north for full two weeks. He
found, however, one Thorabonian sailor who had been to Inquanok and had worked in the onyx
quarries of that twilight place; and this sailor said there was certainly a descent to the north of the
peopled region, which everybody seemed to fear and shun. The Thorabonian opined that this desert
led around the utmost rim of impassable peaks into Leng's horrible plateau, and that this was why men
feared it; though he admitted there were other vague tales of evil presences and nameless sentinels.
Whether or not this could be the fabled waste wherein unknown Kadath stands he did not know; but it
seemed unlikely that those presences and sentinels, if indeed they existed, were stationed for nought.
On the following day Carter walked up the Street of the Pillars to the turquoise temple and talked
with the High-Priest. Though Nath-Horthath is chiefly worshipped in Celephais, all the Great Ones
are mentioned in diurnal prayers; and the priest was reasonably versed in their moods. Like Atal in
distant Ulthar, he strongly advised against any attempts to see them; declaring that they are testy and
capricious, and subject to strange protection from the mindless Other Gods from Outside, whose
soul and messenger is the crawling chaos Nyarlathotep. Their jealous hiding of the marvellous
sunset city shewed clearly that they did not wish Carter to reach it, and it was doubtful how they
would regard a guest whose object was to see them and plead before them. No man had ever found
Kadath in the past, and it might be just as well if none ever found it in the future. Such rumours as
were told about that onyx castle of the Great Ones were not by any means reassuring.
Having thanked the orchid-crowned High-Priest, Carter left the temple and sought out the bazaar
of the sheep-butchers, where the old chief of Celephais' cats dwelt sleek and contented. That grey
and dignified being was sunning himself on the onyx pavement, and extended a languid paw as his
caller approached. But when Carter repeated the passwords and introductions furnished him by the
old cat general of Ulthar, the furry patriarch became very cordial and communicative; and told much
of the secret lore known to cats on the seaward slopes of Ooth-Nargai. Best of all, he repeated
several things told him furtively by the timid waterfront cats of Celephais about the men of Inquanok,
on whose dark ships no cat will go.
It seems that these men have an aura not of earth about them, though that is not the reason why no
cat will sail on their ships. The reason for this is that Inquanok holds shadows which no cat can
endure, so that in all that cold twilight realm there is never a cheering purr or a homely mew.
Whether it be because of things wafted over the impassable peaks from hypothetical Leng, or
because of things filtering down from the chilly desert to the north, none may say; but it remains a
fact that in that far land there broods a hint of outer space which cats do not like, and to which they
are more sensitive than men. Therefore they will not go on the dark ships that seek the basalt quays of
Inquanok.
The old chief of the cats also told him where to find his friend King Kuranes, who in Carter's
latter dreams had reigned alternately in the rose-crystal Palace of the Seventy Delights at Celephais
and in the turreted cloud-castle of sky-floating Serannian. It seemed that he could no more find
content in those places, but had formed a mighty longing for the English cliffs and downlands of his
boyhood; where in little dreaming villages England's old songs hover at evening behind lattice
windows, and where grey church towers peep lovely through the verdure of distant valleys. He
could not go back to these things in the waking world because his body was dead; but he had done the
next best thing and dreamed a small tract of such countryside in the region east of the city where
meadows roll gracefully up from the sea-cliffs to the foot of the Tanarian Hills. There he dwelt in a
grey Gothic manor-house of stone looking on the sea, and tried to think it was ancient Trevor
Towers, where he was born and where thirteen generations of his forefathers had first seen the light.
And on the coast nearby he had built a little Cornish fishing village with steep cobbled ways, settling
therein such people as had the most English faces, and seeking ever to teach them the dear
remembered accents of old Cornwall fishers. And in a valley not far off he had reared a great
Norman Abbey whose tower he could see from his window, placing around it in the churchyard grey
stones with the names of his ancestors carved thereon, and with a moss somewhat like Old England's
moss. For though Kuranes was a monarch in the land of dream, with all imagined pomps and marvels,
splendours and beauties, ecstasies and delights, novelties and excitements at his command, he would
gladly have resigned forever the whole of his power and luxury and freedom for one blessed day as
a simple boy in that pure and quiet England, that ancient, beloved England which had moulded his
being and of which he must always be immutably a part.
So when Carter bade that old grey chief of the cats adieu, he did not seek the terraced palace of
rose crystal but walked out the eastern gate and across the daisied fields toward a peaked gable
which he glimpsed through the oaks of a park sloping up to the sea-cliffs. And in time he came to a
great hedge and a gate with a little brick lodge, and when he rang the bell there hobbled to admit him
no robed and annointed lackey of the palace, but a small stubby old man in a smock who spoke as best
he could in the quaint tones of far Cornwall. And Carter walked up the shady path between trees as
near as possible to England's trees, and clumbed the terraces among gardens set out as in Queen
Anne's time. At the door, flanked by stone cats in the old way, he was met by a whiskered butler in
suitable livery; and was presently taken to the library where Kuranes, Lord of Ooth-Nargai and the
Sky around Serannian, sat pensive in a chair by the window looking on his little seacoast village and
wishing that his old nurse would come in and scold him because he was not ready for that hateful
lawn-party at the vicar's, with the carriage waiting and his mother nearly out of patience.
Kuranes, clad in a dressing gown of the sort favoured by London tailors in his youth, rose
eagerly to meet his guest; for the sight of an Anglo-Saxon from the waking world was very dear to
him, even if it was a Saxon from Boston, Massachusetts, instead of from Cornwall. And for long they
talked of old times, having much to say because both were old dreamers and well versed in the
wonders of incredible places. Kuranes, indeed, had been out beyond the stars in the ultimate void, and
was said to be the only one who had ever returned sane from such a voyage.
At length Carter brought up the subject of his quest, and asked of his host those questions he had
asked of so many others. Kuranes did not know where Kadath was, or the marvellous sunset city; but
he did know that the Great Ones were very dangerous creatures to seek out, and that the Other Gods
had strange ways of protecting them from impertinent curiosity. He had learned much of the Other
Gods in distant parts of space, especially in that region where form does not exist, and coloured
gases study the innermost secrets. The violet gas S'ngac had told him terrible things of the crawling
chaos Nyarlathotep, and had warned him never to approach the central void where the daemon sultan
Azathoth gnaws hungrily in the dark.
Altogether, it was not well to meddle with the Elder Ones; and if they persistently denied all
access to the marvellous sunset city, it were better not to seek that city.
Kuranes furthermore doubted whether his guest would profit aught by coming to the city even
were he to gain it. He himself had dreamed and yearned long years for lovely Celephais and the land
of Ooth-Nargai, and for the freedom and colour and high experience of life devoid of its chains, and
conventions, and stupidities. But now that he was come into that city and that land, and was the king
thereof, he found the freedom and the vividness all too soon worn out, and monotonous for want of
linkage with anything firm in his feelings and memories. He was a king in Ooth-Nargai, but found no
meaning therein, and drooped always for the old familiar things of England that had shaped his youth.
All his kingdom would he give for the sound of Cornish church bells over the downs, and all the
thousand minarets of Celephais for the steep homely roofs of the village near his home. So he told
his guest that the unknown sunset city might not hold quite that content he sought, and that perhaps it
had better remain a glorious and half--remembered dream. For he had visited Carter often in the old
waking days, and knew well the lovely New England slopes that had given him birth.
At the last, he was very certain, the seeker would long only for the early remembered scenes; the
glow of Beacon Hill at evening, the tall steeples and winding hill streets of quaint Kingsport, the
hoary gambrel roofs of ancient and witch-haunted Arkham, and the blessed meads and valleys where
stone walls rambled and white farmhouse gables peeped out from bowers of verdure. These things
he told Randolph Carter, but still the seeker held to his purpose. And in the end they parted each with
his own conviction, and Carter went back through the bronze gate into Celephais and down the Street
of Pillars to the old sea wall, where he talked more with the mariners of far ports and waited for the
dark ship from cold and twilight Inquanok, whose strange-faced sailors and onyx-traders had in them
the blood of the Great Ones.
One starlit evening when the Pharos shone splendid over the harbour the longed-for ship put in,
and strange-faced sailors and traders appeared one by one and group by group in the ancient taverns
along the sea wall. It was very exciting to see again those living faces so like the godlike features of
Ngranek, but Carter did not hasten to speak with the silent seamen. He did not know how much of
pride and secrecy and dim supernal memory might fill those children of the Great Ones, and was sure
it would not be wise to tell them of his quest or ask too closely of that cold desert stretching north of
their twilight land. They talked little with the other folk in those ancient sea taverns; but would gather
in groups in remote comers and sing among themselves the haunting airs of unknown places, or chant
long tales to one another in accents alien to the rest of dreamland. And so rare and moving were those
airs and tales that one might guess their wonders from the faces of those who listened, even though
the words came to common ears only as strange cadence and obscure melody.
For a week the strange seamen lingered in the taverns and traded in the bazaars of Celephais, and
before they sailed Carter had taken passage on their dark ship, telling them that he was an old onyx
miner and wishful to work in their quarries. That ship was very lovey and cunningly wrought, being
of teakwood with ebony fittings and traceries of gold, and the cabin in which the traveller lodged had
hangings of silk and velvet. One morning at the turn of the tide the sails were raised and the anchor
lilted, and as Carter stood on the high stern he saw the sunrise-blazing walls and bronze statues and
golden minarets of ageless Celephais sink into the distance, and the snowy peak of Mount Man grow
smaller and smaller. By noon there was nothing in sight save the gentle blue of the Cerenerian Sea,
with one painted galley afar off bound for that realm of Serannian where the sea meets the sky.
And the night came with gorgeous stars, and the dark ship steered for Charles' Wain and the Little
Bear as they swung slowly round the pole. And the sailors sang strange songs of unknown places,
and they stole off one by one to the forecastle while the wistful watchers murmured old chants and
leaned over the rail to glimpse the luminous fish playing in bowers beneath the sea. Carter went to
sleep at midnight, and rose in the glow of a young morning, marking that the sun seemed farther south
than was its wont. And all through that second day he made progress in knowing the men of the ship,
getting them little by little to talk of their cold twilight land, of their exquisite onyx city, and of their
fear of the high and impassable peaks beyond which Leng was said to be. They told him how sorry
they were that no cats would stay in the land of Inquanok, and how they thought the hidden nearness of
Leng was to blame for it. Only of the stony desert to the north they would not talk. There was
something disquieting about that desert, and it was thought expedient not to admit its existence.
On later days they talked of the quarries in which Carter said he was going to work. There were
many of them, for all the city of Inquanok was builded of onyx, whilst great polished blocks of it
were traded in Rinar, Ogrothan, and Celephais and at home with the merchants of Thraa, Flarnek, and
Kadatheron, for the beautiful wares of those fabulous ports. And far to the north, almost in the cold
desert whose existence the men of Inquanok did not care to admit, there was an unused quarry greater
than all the rest; from which had been hewn in forgotten times such prodigious lumps and blocks that
the sight of their chiselled vacancies struck terror to all who beheld. Who had mined those
incredible blocks, and whither they had been transported, no man might say; but it was thought best
not to trouble that quarry, around which such inhuman memories might conceivably cling. So it was
left all alone in the twilight, with only the raven and the rumoured Shantak-bird to brood on its
immensities. when Carter heard of this quarry he was moved to deep thought, for he knew from old
tales that the Great Ones' castle atop unknown Kadath is of onyx.
Each day the sun wheeled lower and lower in the sky, and the mists overhead grew thicker and
thicker. And in two weeks there was not any sunlight at all, but only a weird grey twilight shining
through a dome of eternal cloud by day, and a cold starless phosphorescence from the under side of
that cloud by night. On the twentieth day a great jagged rock in the sea was sighted from afar, the first
land glimpsed since Man's snowy peak had dwindled behind the ship. Carter asked the captain the
name of that rock, but was told that it had no name and had never been sought by any vessel because
of the sounds that came from it at night. And when, after dark, a dull and ceaseless howling arose
from that jagged granite place, the traveller was glad that no stop had been made, and that the rock had
no name. The seamen prayed and chanted till the noise was out of earshot, and Carter dreamed
terrible dreams within dreams in the small hours.
Two mornings after that there loomed far ahead and to the east a line of great grey peaks whose
tops were lost in the changeless clouds of that twilight world. And at the sight of them the sailors
sang glad songs, and some knelt down on the deck to pray, so that Carter knew they were come to the
land of Inquanok and would soon be moored to the basalt quays of the great town bearing that land's
name. Toward noon a dark coastline appeared, and before three o'clock there stood out against the
north the bulbous domes and fantastic spires of the onyx city. Rare and curious did that archaic city
rise above its walls and quays, all of delicate black with scrolls, flutings, and arabesques of inlaid
gold. Tall and many-windowed were the houses, and carved on every side with flowers and patterns
whose dark symmetries dazzled the eye with a beauty more poignant than light. Some ended in
swelling domes that tapered to a point, others in terraced pyramids whereon rose clustered minarets
displaying every phase of strangeness and imagination. The walls were low, and pierced by frequent
gates, each under a great arch rising high above the general level and capped by the head of a god
chiselled with that same skill displayed in the monstrous face on distant Ngranek. On a hill in the
centre rose a sixteen-angled tower greater than all the rest and bearing a high pinnacled belfry
resting on a flattened dome. This, the seamen said, was the Temple of the Elder Ones, and was ruled
by an old High-Priest sad with inner secrets.
At intervals the clang of a strange bell shivered over the onyx city, answered each time by a peal
of mystic music made up of horns, viols, and chanting voices. And from a row of tripods on a galley
round the high dome of the temple there burst flares of flame at certain moments; for the priests and
people of that city were wise in the primal mysteries, and faithful in keeping the rhythms of the Great
Ones as set forth in scrolls older than the Pnakotic Manuscripts. As the ship rode past the great basalt
breakwater into the harbour the lesser noises of the city grew manifest, and Carter saw the slaves,
sailors, and merchants on the docks. The sailors and merchants were of the strange-faced race of the
gods, but the slaves were squat, slant--eyed folk said by rumour to have drifted somehow across or
around the impassable peaks from the valleys beyond Leng. The wharves reached wide outside the
city wall and bore upon them all manner of merchandise from the galleys anchored there, while at one
end were great piles of onyx both carved and uncarved awaiting shipment to the far markets of Rinar,
Ograthan and Celephais.
It was not yet evening when the dark ship anchored beside a jutting quay of stone, and all the
sailors and traders filed ashore and through the arched gate into the city. The streets of that city were
paved with onyx and some of them were wide and straight whilst others were crooked and narrow.
The houses near the water were lower than the rest, and bore above their curiously arched doorways
certain signs of gold said to be in honour of the respective small gods that favoured each. The
captain of the ship took Carter to an old sea tavern where flocked the mariners of quaint countries,
and promised that he would next day shew him the wonders of the twilight city, and lead him to the
taverns of the onyx-miners by the northern wall. And evening fell, and little bronze lamps were
lighted, and the sailors in that tavern sang songs of remote places. But when from its high tower the
great bell shivered over the city, and the peal of the horns and viols and voices rose cryptical in
answer thereto, all ceased their songs or tales and bowed silent till the last echo died away. For there
is a wonder and a strangeness on the twilight city of Inquanok, and men fear to be lax in its rites lest a
doom and a vengeance lurk unsuspectedly close.
Far in the shadows of that tavern Carter saw a squat form he did not like, for it was unmistakably
that of the old slant-eyed merchant he had seen so long before in the taverns of Dylath-Leen, who
was reputed to trade with the horrible stone villages of Leng which no healthy folk visit and whose
evil fires are seen at night from afar, and even to have dealt with that High-Priest Not To Be
Described, which wears a yellow silken mask over its face and dwells all alone in a prehistoric stone
monastery. This man had seemed to shew a queer gleam of knowing when Carter asked the traders of
DylathLeen about the cold waste and Kadath; and somehow his presence in dark and haunted Inquanok,
so close to the wonders of the north, was not a reassuring thing. He slipped wholly out of sight
before Carter could speak to him, and sailors later said that he had come with a yak caravan from
some point not well determined, bearing the colossal and rich-flavoured eggs of the rumoured
Shantak-bird to trade for the dextrous jade goblets that merchants brought from Ilarnek.
On the following morning the ship-captain led Carter through the onyx streets of Inquanok, dark
under their twilight sky. The inlaid doors and figured house-fronts, carven balconies and crystal-
paned oriels all gleamed with a sombre and polished loveliness; and now and then a plaza would open
out with black pillars, colonades, and the statues of curious beings both human and fabulous. Some of
the vistas down long and unbending streets, or through side alleys and over bulbous domes, spires,
and arabesqued roofs, were weird and beautiful beyond words; and nothing was more splendid than
the massive heights of the great central Temple of the Elder Ones with its sixteen carven sides, its
flattened dome, and its lofty pinnacled belfry, overtopping all else, and majestic whatever its
foreground. And always to the east, far beyond the city walls and the leagues of pasture land, rose
the gaunt grey sides of those topless and impassable peaks across which hideous Leng was said to
lie.
The captain took Carter to the mighty temple, which is set with its walled garden in a great round
plaza whence the streets go as spokes from a wheel's hub. The seven arched gates of that garden,
each having over it a carven face like those on the city's gates, are always open, and the people roam
reverently at will down the tiled paths and through the little lanes lined with grotesque termini and the
shrines of modest gods. And there are fountains, pools, and basins there to reflect the frequent blaze
of the tripods on the high balcony, all of onyx and having in them small luminous fish taken by divers
from the lower bowers of ocean. When the deep clang from the temple belfry shivers over the
garden and the city, and the answer of the horns and viols and voices peals out from the seven lodges
by the garden gates, there issue from the seven doors of the temple long columns of masked and
hooded priests in black, bearing at arm's length before them great golden bowls from which a
curious steam rises. And all the seven columns strut peculiarly in single file, legs thrown far forward
without bending the knees, down the walks that lead to the seven lodges, wherein they disappear and
do not appear again. It is said that subterrene paths connect the lodges with the temple, and that the
long files of priests return through them; nor is it unwhispered that deep flights of onyx steps go
down to mysteries that are never told. But only a few are those who hint that the priests in the masked
and hooded columns are not human beings.
Carter did not enter the temple, because none but the Veiled King is permitted to do that. But
before he left the garden the hour of the bell came, and he heard the shivering clang deafening above
him, and the wailing of the horns and viols and voices loud from the lodges by the gates. And down
the seven great walks stalked the long files of bowl-bearing priests in their singular way, giving to
the traveller a fear which human priests do not often give. When the last of them had vanished he left
that garden, noting as he did so a spot on the pavement over which the bowls had passed. Even the
ship-captain did not like that spot, and hurried him on toward the hill whereon the Veiled King's
palace rises many-domed and marvellous.
The ways to the onyx palace are steep and narrow, all but the broad curving one where the king
and his companions ride on yaks or in yak--drawn chariots. Carter and his guide climbed up an alley
that was all steps, between inlaid walls hearing strange signs in gold, and under balconies and oriels
whence sometimes floated soft strains of music or breaths of exotic fragrance. Always ahead
loomed those titan walls, mighty buttresses, and clustered and bulbous domes for which the Veiled
King's palace is famous; and at length they passed under a great black arch and emerged in the
gardens of the monarch's pleasure. There Carter paused in faintness at so much beauty, for the onyx
terraces and colonnaded walks, the gay porterres and delicate flowering trees espaliered to golden
lattices, the brazen urns and tripods with cunning bas-reliefs, the pedestalled and almost breathing
statues of veined black marble, the basalt-bottomed lagoon's tiled fountains with luminous fish, the
tiny temples of iridescent singing birds atop carven columns, the marvellous scrollwork of the great
bronze gates, and the blossoming vines trained along every inch of the polished walls all joined to
form a sight whose loveliness was beyond reality, and half-fabulous even in the land of dreams.
There it shimmered like a vision under that grey twilight sky, with the domed and fretted
magnificence of the palace ahead, and the fantastic silhouette of the distant impassable peaks on the
right. And ever the small birds and the fountains sang, while the perfume of rare blossoms spread
like a veil over that incredible garden. No other human presence was there, and Carter was glad it
was so. Then they turned and descended again the onyx alley of steps, for the palace itself no visitor
may enter; and it is not well to look too long and steadily at the great central dome, since it is said to
house the archaic father of all the rumoured Shantak-birds, and to send out queer dreams to the
curious.
After that the captain took Carter to the north quarter of the town, near the Gate of the Caravans,
where are the taverns of the yak--merchants and the onyx-miners. And there, in a low-ceiled inn of
quarrymen, they said farewell; for business called the captain whilst Carter was eager to talk with
miners about the north. There were many men in that inn, and the traveller was not long in speaking to
some of them; saying that he was an old miner of onyx, and anxious to know somewhat of Inquanok's
quarries. But all that he learned was not much more than he knew before, for the miners were timid
and evasive about the cold desert to the north and the quarry that no man visits. They had fears of
fabled emissaries from around the mountains where Leng is said to lie, and of evil presences and
nameless sentinels far north among the scattered rocks. And they whispered also that the rumoured
Shantak-birds are no wholesome things; it being. indeed for the best that no man has ever truly seen
one (for that fabled father of Shantaks in the king's dome is fed in the dark).
The next day, saying that he wished to look over all the various mines for himself and to visit the
scattered farms and quaint onyx villages of Inquanok, Carter hired a yak and stuffed great leathern
saddle-bags for a journey. Beyond the Gate of the Caravans the road lay straight betwixt tilled fields,
with many odd farmhouses crowned by low domes. At some of these houses the seeker stopped to
ask questions; once finding a host so austere and reticent, and so full of an unplaced majesty like to
that in the huge features on Ngranek, that he felt certain he had come at last upon one of the Great
Ones themselves, or upon one with full nine-tenths of their blood, dwelling amongst men. And to that
austere and reticent cotter he was careful to speak very well of the gods, and to praise all the
blessings they had ever accorded him.
That night Carter camped in a roadside meadow beneath a great lygath--tree to which he tied his
yak, and in the morning resumed his northward pilgrimage. At about ten o'clock he reached the small-
domed village of Urg, where traders rest and miners tell their tales, and paused in its taverns till
noon. It is here that the great caravan road turns west toward Selarn, but Carter kept on north by the
quarry road. All the afternoon he followed that rising road, which was somewhat narrower than the
great highway, and which now led through a region with more rocks than tilled fields. And by
evening the low hills on his left had risen into sizable black cliffs, so that he knew he was close to
the mining country. All the while the great gaunt sides of the impassable mountains towered afar off
at his right, and the farther he went, the worse tales he heard of them from the scattered farmers and
traders and drivers of lumbering onyx-carts along the way.
On the second night he camped in the shadow of a large black crag, tethering his yak to a stake
driven in the ground. He observed the greater phosphorescence of the clouds at his northerly point,
and more than once thought he saw dark shapes outlined against them. And on the third morning he
came in sight of the first onyx quarry, and greeted the men who there laboured with picks and chisels.
Before evening he had passed eleven quarries; the land being here given over altogether to onyx
cliffs and boulders, with no vegetation at all, but only great rocky fragments scattered about a floor
of black earth, with the grey impassable peaks always rising gaunt and sinister on his right. The third
night he spent in a camp of quarry men whose flickering fires cast weird reflections on the polished
cliffs to the west. And they sang many songs and told many tales, shewing such strange knowledge of
the olden days and the habits of gods that Carter could see they held many latent memories of their
sires the Great Ones. They asked him whither he went, and cautioned him not to go too far to the
north; but he replied that he was seeking new cliffs of onyx, and would take no more risks than were
common among prospectors. In the morning he bade them adieu and rode on into the darkening north,
where they had warned him he would find the feared and unvisited quarry whence hands older than
men's hands had wrenched prodigious blocks. But he did not like it when, turning back to wave a last
farewell, he thought he saw approaching the camp that squat and evasive old merchant with slanting
eyes, whose conjectured traffick with Leng was the gossip of distant Dylath-Leen.
After two more quarries the inhabited part of Inquanok seemed to end, and the road narrowed to a
steeply rising yak-path among forbidding black cliffs. Always on the right towered the gaunt and
distant peaks, and as Carter climbed farther and farther into this untraversed realm he found it grew
darker and colder. Soon he perceived that there were no prints of feet or hooves on the black path
beneath, and realised that he was indeed come into strange and deserted ways of elder time. Once in a
while a raven would croak far overhead, and now and then a flapping behind some vast rock would
make him think uncomfortably of the rumoured Shantak-bird. But in the main he was alone with his
shaggy steed, and it troubled him to observe that this excellent yak became more and more reluctant
to advance, and more and more disposed to snort affrightedly at any small noise along the route.
The path now contracted between sable and glistening walls, and began to display an even greater
steepness than before. It was a bad footing, and the yak often slipped on the stony fragments strewn
thickly about. In two hours Carter saw ahead a definite crest, beyond which was nothing but dull grey
sky, and blessed the prospect of a level or downward course. To reach this crest, however, was no
easy task; for the way had grown nearly perpendicular, and was perilous with loose black gravel and
small stones. Eventually Carter dismounted and led his dubious yak; pulling very hard when the
animal balked or stumbled, and keeping his own footing as best he might. Then suddenly he came to
the top and saw beyond, and gasped at what he saw.
The path indeed led straight ahead and slightly down, with the same lines of high natural walls as
before; but on the left hand there opened out a monstrous space, vast acres in extent, where some
archaic power had riven and rent the native cliffs of onyx in the form of a giant's quarry. Far back into
the solid precipice ran that cyclopean gouge, and deep down within earth's bowels its lower delvings
yawned. It was no quarry of man, and the concave sides were scarred with great squares, yards wide,
which told of the size of the blocks once hewn by nameless hands and chisels. High over its jagged
rim huge ravens flapped and croaked, and vague whirrings in the unseen depths told of bats or urhags
or less mentionable presences haunting the endless blackness. There Carter stood in the narrow way
amidst the twilight with the rocky path sloping down before him; tall onyx cliffs on his right that led
on as far as he could see and tall cliffs on the left chopped off just ahead to make that terrible and
unearthly quarry.
All at once the yak uttered a cry and burst from his control, leaping past him and darting on in a
panic till it vanished down the narrow slope toward the north. Stones kicked by its flying hooves fell
over the brink of the quarry and lost themselves in the dark without any sound of striking bottom; but
Carter ignored the perils of that scanty path as he raced breathlessly after the flying steed. Soon the
left--behind cliffs resumed their course, making the way once more a narrow lane; and still the
traveller leaped on after the yak whose great wide prints told of its desperate flight.
Once he thought he heard the hoofbeats of the frightened beast, and doubled his speed from this
encouragement. He was covering miles, and little by little the way was broadening in front till he
knew he must soon emerge on the cold and dreaded desert to the north. The gaunt grey flanks of the
distant impassable peaks were again visible above the right-hand crags, and ahead were the rocks and
boulders of an open space which was clearly a foretaste of the dark arid limitless plain. And once
more those hoofbeats sounded in his ears, plainer than before, but this time giving terror instead of
encouragement because he realised that they were not the frightened hoofbeats of his fleeing yak.
The beats were ruthless and purposeful, and they were behind him.
Carter's pursuit of the yak became now a flight from an unseen thing, for though he dared not
glance over his shoulder he felt that the presence behind him could be nothing wholesome or
mentionable. His yak must have heard or felt it first, and he did not like to ask himself whether it had
followed him from the haunts of men or had floundered up out of that black quarry pit. Meanwhile the
cliffs had been left behind, so that the oncoming night fell over a great waste of sand and spectral
rocks wherein all paths were lost. He could not see the hoofprints of his yak, but always from behind
him there came that detestable clopping; mingled now and then with what he fancied were titanic
flappings and whirrings. That he was losing ground seemed unhappily clear to him, and he knew he
was hopelessly lost in this broken and blasted desert of meaningless rocks and untravelled sands.
Only those remote and impassable peaks on the right gave him any sense of direction, and even they
were less clear as the grey twilight waned and the sickly phosphorescence of the clouds took its
place.
Then dim and misty in the darkling north before him he glimpsed a terrible thing. He had thought
it for some moments a range of black mountains, but now he saw it was something more. The
phosphorescence of the brooding clouds shewed it plainly, and even silhouetted parts of it as
vapours glowed behind. How distant it was he could not tell, but it must have been very far. It was
thousands of feet high, stretching in a great concave arc from the grey impassable peaks to the
unimagined westward spaces, and had once indeed been a ridge of mighty onyx hills. But now these
hills were hills no more, for some hand greater than man's had touched them. Silent they squatted
there atop the world like wolves or ghouls, crowned with clouds and mists and guarding the secrets
of the north forever. All in a great half circle they squatted, those dog-like mountains carven into
monstrous watching statues, and their right hands were raised in menace against mankind.
It was only the flickering light of the clouds that made their mitred double heads seem to move,
but as Carter stumbled on he saw arise from their shadowy caps great forms whose motions were no
delusion. Winged and whirring, those forms grew larger each moment, and the traveller knew his
stumbling was at an end. They were not any birds or bats known elsewhere on earth or in dreamland,
for they were larger than elephants and had heads like a horse's. Carter knew that they must be the
Shantak-birds of ill rumour, and wondered no more what evil guardians and nameless sentinels made
men avoid the boreal rock desert. And as he stopped in final resignation he dared at last to look
behind him, where indeed was trotting the squat slant-eyed trader of evil legend, grinning astride a
lean yak and leading on a noxious horde of leering Shantaks to whose wings still clung the rime and
nitre of the nether pits.
Trapped though he was by fabulous and hippocephalic winged nightmares that pressed around in
great unholy circles, Randolph Carter did not lose consciousness. Lofty and horrible those titan
gargoyles towered above him, while the slant-eyed merchant leaped down from his yak and stood
grinning before the captive. Then the man motioned Carter to mount one of the repugnant Shantaks,
helping him up as his judgement struggled with his loathing. It was hard work ascending, for the
Shantak-bird has scales instead of feathers, and those scales are very slippery. Once he was seated,
the slant-eyed man hopped up behind him, leaving the lean yak to be led away northward toward the
ring of carven mountains by one of the incredible bird colossi.
There now followed a hideous whirl through frigid space, endlessly up and eastward toward the
gaunt grey flanks of those impassable mountains beyond which Leng was said to be. Far above the
clouds they flew, till at last there lay beneath them those fabled summits which the folk of Inquanok
have never seen, and which lie always in high vortices of gleaming mist. Carter beheld them very
plainly as they passed below, and saw upon their topmost peaks strange caves which made him think
of those on Ngranek; but he did not question his captor about these things when he noticed that both
the man and the horse--headed Shantak appeared oddly fearful of them, hurrying past nervously and
shewing great tension until they were left far in the rear.
The Shantak now flew lower, revealing beneath the canopy of cloud a grey barren plain whereon
at great distances shone little feeble fires. As they descended there appeared at intervals lone huts of
granite and bleak stone villages whose tiny windows glowed with pallid light. And there came from
those huts and villages a shrill droning of pipes and a nauseous rattle of crotala which proved at once
that Inquanok's people are right in their geographic rumours. For travellers have heard such sounds
before, and know that they float only from the cold desert plateau which healthy folk never visit; that
haunted place of evil and mystery which is Leng.
Around the feeble fires dark forms were dancing, and Carter was curious as to what manner of
beings they might be; for no healthy folk have ever been to Leng, and the place is known only by its
fires and stone huts as seen from afar. Very slowly and awkwardly did those forms leap, and with an
insane twisting and bending not good to behold; so that Carter did not wonder at the monstrous evil
imputed to them by vague legend, or the fear in which all dreamland holds their abhorrent frozen
plateau. As the Shantak flew lower, the repulsiveness of the dancers became tinged with a certain
hellish familiarity; and the prisoner kept straining his eyes and racking his memory for clues to where
he had seen such creatures before.
They leaped as though they had hooves instead of feet, and seemed to wear a sort of wig or
headpiece with small horns. Of other clothing they had none, but most of them were quite furry.
Behind they had dwarfish tails, and when they glanced upward he saw the excessive width of their
mouths. Then he knew what they were, and that they did not wear any wigs or headpieces after all.
For the cryptic folk of Leng were of one race with the uncomfortable merchants of the black galleys
that traded rubies at Dylath-Leen; those not quite human merchants who are the slaves of the
monstrous moon-things! They were indeed the same dark folk who had shanghaied Carter on their
noisome galley so long ago, and whose kith he had seen driven in herds about the unclean wharves of
that accursed lunar city, with the leaner ones toiling and the fatter ones taken away in crates for other
needs of their polypous and amorphous masters. Now he saw where such ambiguous creatures came
from, and shuddered at the thought that Leng must be known to these formless abominations from the
moon.
But the Shantak flew on past the fires and the stone huts and the less than human dancers, and
soared over sterile hills of grey granite and dim wastes of rock and ice and snow. Day came, and the
phosphorescence of low clouds gave place to the misty twilight of that northern world, and still the
vile bird winged meaningly through the cold and silence. At times the slant-eyed man talked with his
steed in a hateful and guttural language, and the Shantak would answer with tittering tones that rasped
like the scratching of ground glass. AlI this while the land was getting higher, and finally they came
to a wind-swept table--land which seemed the very roof of a blasted and tenantless world. There, all
alone in the hush and the dusk and the cold, rose the uncouth stones of a squat windowless building,
around which a circle of crude monoliths stood. In all this arrangement there was nothing human, and
Carter surmised from old tales that he was indeed come to that most dreadful and legendary of all
places, the remote and prehistoric monastery wherein dwells uncompanioned the High-Priest Not To
Be Described, which wears a yellow silken mask over its face and prays to the Other Gods and their
crawling chaos Nyarlathotep.
The loathsome bird now settled to the ground, and the slant-eyed man hopped down and helped
his captive alight. Of the purpose of his seizure Carter now felt very sure; for clearly the slant-eyed
merchant was an agent of the darker powers, eager to drag before his masters a mortal whose
presumption had aimed at the finding of unknown Kadath and the saying of a prayer before the faces
of the Great Ones in their onyx castle. It seemed likely that this merchant had caused his former
capture by the slaves of the moon-things in Dylath-Leen, and that he now meant to do what the
rescuing cats had baffled; taking the victim to some dread rendezvous with monstrous Nyarlathotep
and telling with what boldness the seeking of unknown Kadath had been tried. Leng and the cold
waste north of Inquanok must be close to the Other Gods, and there the passes to Kadath are well
guarded.
The slant-eyed man was small, but the great hippocephalic bird was there to see he was obeyed;
so Carter followed where he led, and passed within the circle of standing rocks and into the low
arched doorway of that windowless stone monastery. There were no lights inside, but the evil
merchant lit a small clay lamp bearing morbid bas-reliefs and prodded his prisoner on through mazes
of narrow winding corridors. On the walls of the corridors were printed frightful scenes older than
history, and in a style unknown to the archaeologists of earth. After countless aeons their pigments
were brilliant still, for the cold and dryness of hideous Leng keep alive many primal things. Carter
saw them fleetingly in the rays of that dim and moving lamp, and shuddered at the tale they told.
Through those archaic frescoes Leng's annals stalked; and the horned, hooved, and wide-mouthed
almost-humans danced evilly amidst forgotten cities. There were scenes of old wars, wherein Leng's
almost-humans fought with the bloated purple spiders of the neighbouring vales; and there were
scenes also of the coming of the black galleys from the moon, and of the submission of Leng's
people to the polypous and amorphous blasphemies that hopped and floundered and wriggled out of
them. Those slippery greyish-white blasphemies they worshipped as gods, nor ever complained
when scores of their best and fatted males were taken away in the black galleys. The monstrous
moon-beasts made their camp on a jagged isle in the sea, and Carter could tell from the frescoes that
this was none other than the lone nameless rock he had seen when sailing to Inquanok; that grey
accursed rock which Inquanok's seamen shun, and from which vile howlings reverberate all through
the night.
And in those frescoes was shewn the great seaport and capital of the almost-humans; proud and
pillared betwixt the cliffs and the basalt wharves, and wondrous with high fanes and carven places.
Great gardens and columned streets led from the cliffs and from each of the six sphinx-crowned
gates to a vast central plaza, and in that plaza was a pair of winged colossal lions guarding the top of
a subterrene staircase. Again and again were those huge winged lions shewn, their mighty flanks of
diarite glistening in the grey twilight of the day and the cloudy phosphorescence of the night. And as
Carter stumbled past their frequent and repeated pictures it came to him at last what indeed they were,
and what city it was that the almost-humans had ruled so anciently before the coming of the black
galleys. There could be no mistake, for the legends of dreamland are generous and profuse.
Indubitably that primal city was no less a place than storied Sarkomand, whose ruins had bleached for
a million years before the first true human saw the light, and whose twin titan lions guard eternally
the steps that lead down from dreamland to the Great Abyss.
Other views shewed the gaunt grey peaks dividing Leng from Inquanok, and the monstrous
Shantak-birds that build nests on the ledges half way up. And they shewed likewise the curious caves
near the very topmost pinnacles, and how even the boldest of the Shantaks fly screaming away from
them. Carter had seen those caves when he passed over them, and had noticed their likeness to the
caves on Ngranek. Now he knew that the likeness was more than a chance one, for in these pictures
were shewn their fearsome denizens; and those bat-wings, curving horns, barbed tails, prehensile
paws and rubbery bodies were not strange to him. He had met those silent, flitting and clutching
creatures before; those mindless guardians of the Great Abyss whom even the Great Ones fear, and
who own not Nyarlathotep but hoary Nodens as their lord. For they were the dreaded night-gaunts,
who never laugh or smile because they have no faces, and who flop unendingly in the dark betwixt
the Vale of Pnath and the passes to the outer world.
The slant-eyed merchant had now prodded Carter into a great domed space whose walls were
carved in shocking bas-reliefs, and whose centre held a gaping circular pit surrounded by six
malignly stained stone altars in a ring. There was no light in this vast evil-smelling crypt, and the
small lamp of the sinister merchant shone so feebly that one could grasp details only little by little. At
the farther end was a high stone dais reached by five steps; and there on a golden throne sat a lumpish
figure robed in yellow silk figured with red and having a yellow silken mask over its face. To this
being the slant--eyed man made certain signs with his hands, and the lurker in the dark replied by
raising a disgustingly carven flute of ivory in silk--covered paws and blowing certain loathsome
sounds from beneath its flowing yellow mask. This colloquy went on for some time, and to Carter
there was something sickeningly familiar in the sound of that flute and the stench of the malodorous
place. It made him think of a frightful red-litten city and of the revolting procession that once filed
through it; of that, and of an awful climb through lunar countryside beyond, before the rescuing rush
of earth's friendly cats. He knew that the creature on the dais was without doubt the High--Priest Not
To Be Described, of which legend whispers such fiendish and abnormal possibilities, but he feared
to think just what that abhorred High-Priest might be.
Then the figured silk slipped a trifle from one of the greyish-white paws, and Carter knew what
the noisome High-Priest was. And in that hideous second, stark fear drove him to something his
reason would never have dared to attempt, for in all his shaken consciousness there was room only
for one frantic will to escape from what squatted on that golden throne. He knew that hopeless
labyrinths of stone lay betwixt him and the cold table-land outside, and that even on that table-land the
noxious Shantek still waited; yet in spite of all this there was in his mind only the instant need to get
away from that wriggling, silk-robed monstrosity.
The slant-eyed man had set the curious lamp upon one of the high and wickedly stained altar-
stones by the pit, and had moved forward somewhat to talk to the High-Priest with his hands. Carter,
hitherto wholly passive, now gave that man a terrific push with all the wild strength of fear, so that
the victim toppled at once into that gaping well which rumour holds to reach down to the hellish
Vaults of Zin where Gugs hunt ghasts in the dark. In almost the same second he seized the lamp from
the altar and darted out into the frescoed labyrinths, racing this way and that as chance determined and
trying not to think of the stealthy padding of shapeless paws on the stones behind him, or of the silent
wrigglings and crawlings which must be going on back there in lightless corridors.
After a few moments he regretted his thoughtless haste, and wished he had tried to follow
backward the frescoes he had passed on the way in. True, they were so confused and duplicated that
they could not have done him much good, but he wished none the less he had made the attempt. Those
he now saw were even more horrible than those he had seen then, and he knew he was not in the
corridors leading outside. In time he became quite sure he was not followed, and slackened his pace
somewhat; but scarce had he breathed in half relief when a new peril beset him. His lamp was
waning, and he would soon be in pitch blackness with no means of sight or guidance.
When the light was all gone he groped slowly in the dark, and prayed to the Great Ones for such
help as they might afford. At times he felt the stone floor sloping up or down, and once he stumbled
over a step for which no reason seemed to exist. The farther he went the damper it seemed to be, and
when he was able to feel a junction or the mouth of a side passage he always chose the way which
sloped downward the least. He believed, though, that his general course was down; and the vault-like
smell and incrustations on the greasy walls and floor alike warned him he was burrowing deep in
Leng's unwholesome table-land. But there was not any warning of the thing which came at last; only
the thing itself with its terror and shock and breath-taking chaos. One moment he was groping slowly
over the slippery floor of an almost level place, and the next he was shooting dizzily downward in
the dark through a burrow which must have been well-nigh vertical.
Of the length of that hideous sliding he could never be sure, but it seemed to take hours of
delirious nausea and ecstatic frenzy. Then he realized he was still, with the phosphorescent clouds
of a northern night shining sickly above him. All around were crumbling walls and broken columns,
and the pavement on which he lay was pierced by straggling grass and wrenched asunder by frequent
shrubs and roots. Behind him a basalt cliff rose topless and perpendicular; its dark side sculptured
into repellent scenes, and pierced by an arched and carven entrance to the inner blacknesses out of
which he had come. Ahead stretched double rows of pillars, and the fragments and pedestals of
pillars, that spoke of a broad and bygone street; and from the urns and basins along the way he knew it
had been a great street of gardens. Far off at its end the pillars spread to mark a vast round plaza, and
in that open circle there loomed gigantic under the lurid night clouds a pair of monstrous things.
Huge winged lions of diarite they were, with blackness and shadow between them. Full twenty feet
they reared their grotesque and unbroken heads, and snarled derisive on the ruins around them. And
Carter knew right well what they must be, for legend tells of only one such twain. They were the
changeless guardians of the Great Abyss, and these dark ruins were in truth primordial Sarkomand.
Carter's first act was to close and barricade the archway in the cliff with fallen blocks and odd
debris that lay around. He wished no follower from Leng's hateful monastery, for along the way
ahead would lurk enough of other dangers. Of how to get from Sarkomand to the peopled parts of
dreamland he knew nothing at all; nor could he gain much by descending to the grottoes of the
ghouls, since he knew they were no better informed than he. The three ghouls which had helped him
through the city of Gugs to the outer world had not known how to reach Sarkomand in their journey
back, but had planned to ask old traders in Dylath-Leen. He did not like to think of going again to the
subterrene world of Gugs and risking once more that hellish tower of Koth with its Cyclopean steps
leading to the enchanted wood, yet he felt he might have to try this course if all else failed. Over
Leng's plateau past the lone monastery he dared not go unaided; for the High-Priest's emissaries must
be many, while at the journey's end there would no doubt be the Shantaks and perhaps other things to
deal with. If he could get a boat he might sail back to Inquanok past the jagged and hideous rock in the
sea, for the primal frescoes in the monastery labyrinth had shewn that this frightful place lies not far
from Sarkomand's basalt quays. But to find a boat in this aeon-deserted city was no probable thing,
and it did not appear likely that he could ever make one.
Such were the thoughts of Randolph Carter when a new impression began beating upon his mind.
All this while there had stretched before him the great corpse-like width of fabled Sarkomand with
its black broken pillars and crumbling sphinx-crowned gates and titan stones and monstrous winged
lions against the sickly glow of those luminous night clouds. Now he saw far ahead and on the right a
glow that no clouds could account for, and knew he was not alone in the silence of that dead city. The
glow rose and fell fitfully, flickering with a greenish tinge which did not reassure the watcher. And
when he crept closer, down the littered street and through some narrow gaps between tumbled walls,
he perceived that it was a campfire near the wharves with many vague forms clustered darkly around
it; and a lethal odour hanging heavily over all. Beyond was the oily lapping of the harbour water with
a great ship riding at anchor, and Carter paused in stark terror when he saw that the ship was indeed
one of the dreaded black galleys from the moon.
Then, just as he was about to creep back from that detestable flame, he saw a stirring among the
vague dark forms and heard a peculiar and unmistakable sound. It was the frightened meeping of a
ghoul, and in a moment it had swelled to a veritable chorus of anguish. Secure as he was in the
shadow of monstrous ruins, Carter allowed his curiosity to conquer his fear, and crept forward again
instead of retreating. Once in crossing an open street he wriggled worm-like on his stomach, and in
another place he had to rise to his feet to avoid making a noise among heaps of fallen marble. But
always he succeeded in avoiding discovery, so that in a short time he had found a spot behind a titan
pillar where he could watch the whole green-litten scene of action. There around a hideous fire fed
by the obnoxious stems of lunar fungi, there squatted a stinking circle of the toadlike moonbeasts and
their almost-human slaves. Some of these slaves were heating curious iron spears in the leaping
flames, and at intervals applying their white--hot points to three tightly trussed prisoners that lay
writhing before the leaders of the party. From the motions of their tentacles Carter could see that the
blunt-snouted moonbeasts were enjoying the spectacle hugely, and vast was his horror when he
suddenly recognised the frantic meeping and knew that the tortured ghouls were none other than the
faithful trio which had guided him safely from the abyss, and had thereafter set out from the
enchanted wood to find Sarkomand and the gate to their native deeps.
The number of malodorous moonbeasts about that greenish fire was very great, and Carter saw
that he could do nothing now to save his former allies. Of how the ghouls had been captured he
could not guess; but fancied that the grey toadlike blasphemies had heard them inquire in Dylath-Leen
concerning the way to Sarkomand and had not wished them to approach so closely the hateful plateau
of Leng and the High-Priest Not To Be Described. For a moment he pondered on what he ought to
do, and recalled how near he was to the gate of the ghouls' black kingdom. Clearly it was wisest to
creep east to the plaza of twin lions and descend at once to the gulf, where assuredly he would meet
no horrors worse than those above, and where he might soon find ghouls eager to rescue their
brethren and perhaps to wipe out the moonbeasts from the black galley. It occurred to him that the
portal, like other gates to the abyss, might be guarded by flocks of night-gaunts; but he did not fear
these faceless creatures now. He had learned that they are bound by solemn treaties with the ghouls,
and the ghoul which was Pickman had taught him how to glibber a password they understood.
So Carter began another silent crawl through the ruins, edging slowly toward the great central
plaza and the winged lions. It was ticklish work, but the moonbeasts were pleasantly busy and did not
hear the slight noises which he twice made by accident among the scattered stones. At last he
reached the open space and picked his way among the stunned trees and vines that had grown up
therein. The gigantic lions loomed terrible above him in the sickly glow of the phosphorescent night
clouds, but he manfully persisted toward them and presently crept round to their faces, knowing it
was on that side he would find the mighty darkness which they guard. Ten feet apart crouched the
mocking-faced beasts of diarite, brooding on cyclopean pedestals whose sides were chiselled in
fearsome bas-reliefs. Betwixt them was a tiled court with a central space which had once been railed
with balusters of onyx. Midway in this space a black well opened, and Carter soon saw that he had
indeed reached the yawning gulf whose crusted and mouldy stone steps lead down to the crypts of
nightmare.
Terrible is the memory of that dark descent in which hours wore themselves away whilst Carter
wound sightlessly round and round down a fathomless spiral of steep and slippery stairs. So worn
and narrow were the steps, and so greasy with the ooze of inner earth, that the climber never quite
knew when to expect a breathless fall and hurtling down to the ultimate pits; and he was likewise
uncertain just when or how the guardian night-gaunts would suddenly pounce upon him, if indeed
there were any stationed in this primeval passage. All about him was a stifling odour of nether gulfs,
and he felt that the air of these choking depths was not made for mankind. In time he became very
numb and somnolent, moving more from automatic impulse than from reasoned will; nor did he realize
any change when he stopped moving altogether as something quietly seized him from behind. He was
flying very rapidly through the air before a malevolent tickling told him that the rubbery night-gaunts
had performed their duty.
Awaked to the fact that he was in the cold, damp clutch of the faceless flutterers, Carter
remembered the password of the ghouls and glibbered it as loudly as he could amidst the wind and
chaos of flight. Mindless though night-gaunts are said to be, the effect was instantaneous; for all
tickling stopped at once, and the creatures hastened to shift their captive to a more comfortable
position. Thus encouraged Carter ventured some explanations; telling of the seizure and torture of
three ghouls by the moonbeasts, and of the need of assembling a party to rescue them. The night-
gaunts, though inarticulate, seemed to understand what was said; and shewed greater haste and
purpose in their flight. Suddenly the dense blackness gave place to the grey twilight of inner earth,
and there opened up ahead one of those flat sterile plains on which ghouls love to squat and gnaw.
Scattered tombstones and osseous fragments told of the denizens of that place; and as Carter gave a
loud meep of urgent summons, a score of burrows emptied forth their leathery, dog-like tenants. The
night-gaunts now flew low and set their passenger upon his feet, afterward withdrawing a little and
forming a hunched semicircle on the ground while the ghouls greeted the newcomer.
Carter glibbered his message rapidly and explicitly to the grotesque company, and four of them at
once departed through different burrows to spread the news to others and gather such troops as
might be available for a rescue. After a long wait a ghoul of some importance appeared, and made
significant signs to the night-gaunts, causing two of the latter to fly off into the dark. Thereafter there
were constant accessions to the hunched flock of night-gaunts on the plain, till at length the slimy soil
was fairly black with them. Meanwhile fresh ghouls crawled out of the burrows one by one, all
glibbering excitedly and forming in crude battle array not far from the huddled night--gaunts. In time
there appeared that proud and influential ghoul which was once the artist Richard Pickman of Boston,
and to him Carter glibbered a very full account of what had occurred. The erstwhile Pickman,
pleased to greet his ancient friend again, seemed very much impressed, and held a conference with
other chiefs a little apart from the growing throng.
Finally, after scanning the ranks with care, the assembled chiefs all meeped in unison and began
glibbering orders to the crowds of ghouls and night-gaunts. A large detachment of the horned flyers
vanished at once, while the rest grouped themselves two by two on their knees with extended
forelegs, awaiting the approach of the ghouls one by one. As each ghoul reached the pair of night-
gaunts to which he was assigned, he was taken up and borne away into the blackness; till at last the
whole throng had vanished save for Carter, Pickman, and the other chiefs, and a few pairs of night-
gaunts. Pickman explained that night--gaunts are the advance guard and battle steeds of the ghouls,
and that the army was issuing forth to Sarkomand to deal with the moonbeasts. Then Carter and the
ghoulish chiefs approached the waiting bearers and were taken up by the damp, slippery paws.
Another moment and all were whirling in wind and darkness; endlessly up, up, up to the gate of the
winged and the special ruins of primal Sarkomand.
When, after a great interval, Carter saw again the sickly light of Sarkomand's nocturnal sky, it was
to behold the great central plaza swarming with militant ghouls and night-gaunts. Day, he felt sure,
must be almost due; but so strong was the army that no surprise of the enemy would be needed. The
greenish flare near the wharves still glimmered faintly, though the absence of ghoulish meeping
shewed that the torture of the prisoners was over for the nonce. Softly glibbering directions to their
steeds and to the flock of riderless night-gaunts ahead, the ghouls presently rose in wide whirring
columns and swept on over the bleak ruins toward the evil flame. Carter was now beside Pickman in
the front rank of ghouls, and saw as they approached the noisome camp that the moonbeasts were
totally unprepared. The three prisoners lay bound and inert beside the fire, while their toadlike
captors slumped drowsily about in no certain order. The almost-human slaves were asleep, even the
sentinels shirking a duty which in this realm must have seemed to them merely perfunctory.
The final swoop of the night-gaunts and mounted ghouls was very sudden, each of the greyish
toadlike blasphemies and their almost-human slaves being seized by a group of night-gaunts before a
sound was made. The moonbeasts, of course, were voiceless; and even the slaves had little chance to
scream before rubbery paws choked them into silence. Horrible were the writhings of those great
jellyfish abnormalities as the sardonic night-gaunts clutched them, but nothing availed against the
strength of those black prehensile talons. When a moonbeast writhed too violently, a night-gaunt
would seize and pull its quivering pink tentacles; which seemed to hurt so much that the victim would
cease its struggles. Carter expected to see much slaughter, but found that the ghouls were far subtler
in their plans. They glibbered certain simple orders to the night-gaunts which held the captives,
trusting the rest to instinct; and soon the hapless creatures were borne silently away into the Great
Abyss, to be distributed impartially amongst the Dholes, Gugs, ghasts and other dwellers in darkness
whose modes of nourishment are not painless to their chosen victims. Meanwhile the three bound
ghouls had been released and consoled by their conquering kinsfolk, whilst various parties searched
the neighborhood for possible remaining moonbeasts, and boarded the evil-smelling black galley at
the wharf to make sure that nothing had escaped the general defeat. Surely enough, the capture had
been thorough, for not a sign of further life could the victors detect. Carter, anxious to preserve a
means of access to the rest of dreamland, urged them not to sink the anchored galley; and this request
was freely granted out of gratitude for his act in reporting the plight of the captured trio. On the ship
were found some very curious objects and decorations, some of which Carter cast at once into the
sea.
Ghouls and night-gaunts now formed themselves in separate groups, the former questioning their
rescued fellow anent past happenings. It appeared that the three had followed Carter's directions and
proceeded from the enchanted wood to Dylath-Leen by way of Nir and the Skin, stealing human
clothes at a lonely farmhouse and loping as closely as possible in the fashion of a man's walk. In
Dylath-Leen's taverns their grotesque ways and faces had aroused much comment; but they had
persisted in asking the way to Sarkomand until at last an old traveller was able to tell them. Then they
knew that only a ship for Lelag-Leng would serve their purpose, and prepared to wait patiently for
such a vessel.
But evil spies had doubtless reported much; for shortly a black galley put into port, and the wide-
mouthed ruby merchants invited the ghouls to drink with them in a tavern. Wine was produced from
one of those sinister bottles grotesquely carven from a single ruby, and after that the ghouls found
themselves prisoners on the black galley as Carter had found himself. This time, however, the unseen
rowers steered not for the moon but for antique Sarkomand; bent evidently on taking their captives
before the High-Priest Not To Be Described. They had touched at the jagged rock in the northern
sea which Inquanok's mariners shun, and the ghouls had there seen for the first time the red masters
of the ship; being sickened despite their own callousness by such extremes of malign shapelessness
and fearsome odour. There, too, were witnessed the nameless pastimes of the toadlike resident
garrison-such pastimes as give rise to the night-howlings which men fear. After that had come the
landing at ruined Sarkomand and the beginning of the tortures, whose continuance the present rescue
had prevented.
Future plans were next discussed, the three rescued ghouls suggesting a raid on the jagged rock
and the extermination of the toadlike garrison there. To this, however, the night-gaunts objected;
since the prospect of flying over water did not please them. Most of the ghouls favoured the design,
but were at a loss how to follow it without the help of the winged night-gaunts. Thereupon Carter,
seeing that they could not navigate the anchored galley, offered to teach them the use of the great
banks of oars; to which proposal they eagerly assented. Grey day had now come, and under that
leaden northern sky a picked detachment of ghouls filed into the noisome ship and took their seats on
the rowers' benches. Carter found them fairly apt at learning, and before night had risked several
experimental trips around the harbour. Not till three days later, however, did he deem it safe to
attempt the voyage of conquest. Then, the rowers trained and the night-gaunts safely stowed in the
forecastle, the party set sail at last; Pickman and the other chiefs gathering on deck and discussing
models of approach and procedure.
On the very first night the howlings from the rock were heard. Such was their timbre that all the
galley's crew shook visibly; but most of all trembled the three rescued ghouls who knew precisely
what those howlings meant. It was not thought best to attempt an attack by night, so the ship lay to
under the phosphorescent clouds to wait for the dawn of a greyish day. when the light was ample and
the howlings still the rowers resumed their strokes, and the galley drew closer and closer to that
jagged rock whose granite pinnacles clawed fantastically at the dull sky. The sides of the rock were
very steep; but on ledges here and there could be seen the bulging walls of queer windowless
dwellings, and the low railings guarding travelled highroads. No ship of men had ever come so near
the place, or at least, had never come so near and departed again; but Carter and the ghouls were void
of fear and kept inflexibly on, rounding the eastern face of the rock and seeking the wharves which
the rescued trio described as being on the southern side within a harbour formed of steep headlands.
The headlands were prolongations of the island proper, and came so closely together that only
one ship at a time might pass between them. There seemed to be no watchers on the outside, so the
galley was steered boldly through the flume-like strait and into the stagnant putrid harbour beyond.
Here, however, all was bustle and activity; with several ships lying at anchor along a forbidding
stone quay, and scores of almost-human slaves and moonbeasts by the waterfront handling crates and
boxes or driving nameless and fabulous horrors hitched to lumbering lorries. There was a small
stone town hewn out of the vertical cliff above the wharves, with the start of a winding road that
spiralled out of sight toward higher ledges of the rock. Of what lay inside that prodigious peak of
granite none might say, but the things one saw on the outside were far from encouraging.
At sight of the incoming galley the crowds on the wharves displayed much eagerness; those with
eyes staring intently, and those without eyes wriggling their pink tentacles expectantly. They did not,
of course, realize that the black ship had changed hands; for ghouls look much like the horned and
hooved almost-humans, and the night-gaunts were all out of sight below. By this time the leaders had
fully formed a plan; which was to loose the night-gaunts as soon as the wharf was touched, and then
to sail directly away, leaving matters wholly to the instincts of those almost-mindless creatures.
Marooned on the rock, the horned flyers would first of all seize whatever living things they found
there, and afterward, quite helpless to think except in terms of the homing instinct, would forget their
fears of water and fly swiftly back to the abyss; bearing their noisome prey to appropriate
destinations in the dark, from which not much would emerge alive.
The ghoul that was Pickman now went below and gave the night-gaunts their simple instructions,
while the ship drew very near to the ominous and malodorous wharves. Presently a fresh stir rose
along the waterfront, and Carter saw that the motions of the galley had begun to excite suspicion.
Evidently the steersman was not making for the right dock, and probably the watchers had noticed the
difference between the hideous ghouls and the almost-human slaves whose places they were taking.
Some silent alarm must have been given, for almost at once a horde of the mephitic moonbeasts began
to pour from the little black doorways of the windowless houses and down the winding road at the
right. A rain of curious javelins struck the galley as the prow hit the wharf felling two ghouls and
slightly wounding another; but at this point all the hatches were thrown open to emit a black cloud of
whirring night-gaunts which swarmed over the town like a flock of horned and cyclopean bats.
The jellyish moonbeasts had procured a great pole and were trying to push off the invading ship,
but when the night-gaunts struck them they thought of such things no more. It was a very terrible
spectacle to see those faceless and rubbery ticklers at their pastime, and tremendously impressive to
watch the dense cloud of them spreading through the town and up the winding roadway to the reaches
above. Sometimes a group of the black flutterers would drop a toadlike prisoner from aloft by
mistake, and the manner in which the victim would burst was highly offensive to the sight and smell.
When the last of the night-gaunts had left the galley the ghoulish leaders glibbered an order of
withdrawal, and the rowers pulled quietly out of the harbour between the grey headlands while still
the town was a chaos of battle and conquest.
The Pickman ghoul allowed several hours for the night-gaunts to make up their rudimentary minds
and overcome their fear of flying over the sea, and kept the galley standing about a mile off the
jagged rock while he waited, and dressed the wounds of the injured men. Night fell, and the grey
twilight gave place to the sickly phosphorescence of low clouds, and all the while the leaders
watched the high peaks of that accursed rock for signs of the night-gaunts' flight. Toward morning a
black speck was seen hovering timidly over the top-most pinnacle, and shortly afterward the speck
had become a swarm. Just before daybreak the swarm seemed to scatter, and within a quarter of an
hour it had vanished wholly in the distance toward the northeast. Once or twice something seemed to
fall from the thing swarm into the sea; but Carter did not worry, since he knew from observation that
the toadlike moonbeasts cannot swim. At length, when the ghouls were satisfied that all the night-
gaunts had left for Sarkomand and the Great Abyss with their doomed burdens, the galley put back
into the harbour betwixt the grey headlands; and all the hideous company landed and roamed
curiously over the denuded rock with its towers and eyries and fortresses chiselled from the solid
stone.
Frightful were the secrets uncovered in those evil and windowless crypts; for the remnants of
unfinished pastimes were many, and in various stages of departure from their primal state. Carter put
out of the way certain things which were after a fashion alive, and fled precipitately from a few other
things about which he could not be very positive. The stench-filled houses were furnished mostly
with grotesque stools and benches carven from moon-trees, and were painted inside with nameless
and frantic designs. Countless weapons, implements, and ornaments lay about, including some large
idols of solid ruby depicting singular beings not found on the earth. These latter did not, despite their
material, invite either appropriation or long inspection; and Carter took the trouble to hammer five of
them into very small pieces. The scattered spears and javelins he collected, and with Pickman's
approval distributed among the ghouls. Such devices were new to the doglike lopers, but their
relative simplicity made them easy to master after a few concise hints.
The upper parts of the rock held more temples than private homes, and in numerous hewn
chambers were found terrible carven altars and doubtfully stained fonts and shrines for the worship
of things more monstrous than the wild gods atop Kadath. From the rear of one great temple stretched
a low black passage which Carter followed far into the rock with a torch till he came to a lightless
domed hall of vast proportions, whose vaultings were covered with demoniac carvings and in whose
centre yawned a foul and bottomless well like that in the hideous monastery of Leng where broods
alone the High-Priest Not To Be Described. On the distant shadowy side, beyond the noisome well,
he thought he discerned a small door of strangely wrought bronze; but for some reason he felt an
unaccountable dread of opening it or even approaching it, and hastened back through the cavern to his
unlovely allies as they shambled about with an ease and abandon he could scarcely feel. The ghouls
had observed the unfinished pastimes of the moonbeasts, and had profited in their fashion. They had
also found a hogshead of potent moon-wine, and were rolling it down to the wharves for removal and
later use in diplomatic dealings, though the rescued trio, remembering its effect on them in Dylath-
Leen, had warned their company to taste none of it. Of rubies from lunar mines there was a great
store, both rough and polished, in one of the vaults near the water; but when the ghouls found they
were not good to eat they lost all interest in them. Carter did not try to carry any away, since he knew
too much about those which had mined them.
Suddenly there came an excited meeping from the sentries on the wharves, and all the loathsome
foragers turned from their tasks to stare seaward and cluster round the waterfront. Betwixt the grey
headlands a fresh black galley was rapidly advancing, and it would be but a moment before the
almost-humans on deck would perceive the invasion of the town and give the alarm to the monstrous
things below. Fortunately the ghouls still bore the spears and javelins which Carter had distributed
amongst them; and at his command, sustained by the being that was Pickman, they now formed a line of
battle and prepared to prevent the landing of the ship. Presently a burst of excitement on the galley
told of the crew's discovery of the changed state of things, and the instant stoppage of the vessel
proved that the superior numbers of the ghouls had been noted and taken into account. After a moment
of hesitation the new comers silently turned and passed out between the headlands again, but not for
an instant did the ghouls imagine that the conflict was averted. Either the dark ship would seek
reinforcements or the crew would try to land elsewhere on the island; hence a party of scouts was at
once sent up toward the pinnacle to see what the enemy's course would be.
In a very few minutes the ghoul returned breathless to say that the moonbeasts and almost-humans
were landing on the outside of the more easterly of the rugged grey headlands, and ascending by
hidden paths and ledges which a goat could scarcely tread in safety. Almost immediately afterward
the galley was sighted again through the flume-like strait, but only for a second. Then a few moments
later, a second messenger panted down from aloft to say that another party was landing on the other
headland; both being much more numerous than the size of the galley would seem to allow for. The
ship itself, moving slowly with only one sparsely manned tier of oars, soon hove in sight betwixt the
cliffs, and lay to in the foetid harbour as if to watch the coming fray and stand by for any possible
use.
By this time Carter and Pickman had divided the ghouls into three parties, one to meet each of the
two invading columns and one to remain in the town. The first two at once scrambled up the rocks in
their respective directions, while the third was subdivided into a land party and a sea party. The sea
party, commanded by Carter, boarded the anchored galley and rowed out to meet the under-manned
galley of the newcomers; whereat the latter retreated through the strait to the open sea. Carter did not
at once pursue it, for he knew he might be needed more acutely near the town.
Meanwhile the frightful detachments of the moonbeasts and almost-humans had lumbered up to the
top of the headlands and were shockingly silhouetted on either side against the grey twilight sky.
The thin hellish flutes of the invaders had now begun to whine, and the general effect of those
hybrid, half-amorphous processions was as nauseating as the actual odour given off by the toadlike
lunar blasphemies. Then the two parties of the ghouls swarmed into sight and joined the silhouetted
panorama. Javelins began to fly from both sides, and the swelling meeps of the ghouls and the bestial
howls of the almost--humans gradually joined the hellish whine of the flutes to form a frantick and
indescribable chaos of daemon cacophony. Now and then bodies fell from the narrow ridges of the
headlands into the sea outside or the harbour inside, in the latter case being sucked quickly under by
certain submarine lurkers whose presence was indicated only by prodigious bubbles.
For half an hour this dual battle raged in the sky, till upon the west cliff the invaders were
completely annihilated. On the east cliff, however, where the leader of the moonbeast party appeared
to be present, the ghouls had not fared so well; and were slowly retreating to the slopes of the
pinnacle proper. Pickman had quickly ordered reinforcements for this front from the party in the
town, and these had helped greatly in the earlier stages of the combat. Then, when the western battle
was over, the victorious survivors hastened across to the aid of their hard-pressed fellows; turning
the tide and forcing the invaders back again along the narrow ridge of the headland. The almost-
humans were by this time all slain, but the last of the toadlike horrors fought desperately with the
great spears clutched in their powerful and disgusting paws. The time for javelins was now nearly
past, and the fight became a hand-to-hand contest of what few spearmen could meet upon that narrow
ridge.
As fury and recklessness increased, the number falling into the sea became very great. Those
striking the harbour met nameless extinction from the unseen bubblers, but of those striking the open
sea some were able to swim to the foot of the cliffs and land on tidal rocks, while the hovering
galley of the enemy rescued several moonbeasts. The cliffs were unscalable except where the
monsters had debarked, so that none of the ghouls on the rocks could rejoin their battle-line. Some
were killed by javelins from the hostile galley or from the moonbeasts above, but a few survived to
be rescued. When the security of the land parties seemed assured, Carter's galley sallied forth
between the headlands and drove the hostile ship far out to sea; pausing to rescue such ghouls as
were on the rocks or still swimming in the ocean. Several moonbeasts washed on rocks or reefs
were speedily put out of the way.
Finally, the moonbeast galley being safely in the distance and the invading land army concentrated
in one place, Carter landed a considerable force on the eastern headland in the enemy's rear; after
which the fight was short-lived indeed. Attacked from both sides, the noisome flounderers were
rapidly cut to pieces or pushed into the sea, till by evening the ghoulish chiefs agreed that the island
was again clear of them. The hostile galley, meanwhile, had disappeared; and it was decided that the
evil jagged rock had better be evacuated before any overwhelming horde of lunar horrors might be
assembled and brought against the victors.
So by night Pickman and Carter assembled all the ghouls and counted them with care, finding that
over a fourth had been lost in the day's battles. The wounded were placed on bunks in the galley, for
Pickman always discouraged the old ghoulish custom of killing and eating one's own wounded, and
the able-bodied troops were assigned to the oars or to such other places as they might most usefully
fill. Under the low phosphorescent clouds of night the galley sailed, and Carter was not sorry to be
departing from the island of unwholesome secrets, whose lightless domed hall with its bottomless
well and repellent bronze door lingered restlessly in his fancy. Dawn found the ship in sight of
Sarkomand's ruined quays of basalt, where a few night-gaunt sentries still waited, squatting like black
horned gargoyles on the broken columns and crumbling sphinxes of that fearful city which lived and
died before the years of man.
The ghouls made camp amongst the fallen stones of Sarkomand, despatching a messenger for
enough night-gaunts to serve them as steeds. Pickman and the other chiefs were effusive in their
gratitude for the aid Carter had lent them. Carter now began to feel that his plans were indeed
maturing well, and that he would be able to command the help of these fearsome allies not only in
quitting this part of dreamland, but in pursuing his ultimate quest for the gods atop unknown Kadath,
and the marvellous sunset city they so strangely withheld from his slumbers. Accordingly he spoke
of these things to the ghoulish leaders; telling what he knew of the cold waste wherein Kadath stands
and of the monstrous Shantaks and the mountains carven into double-headed images which guard it.
He spoke of the fear of Shantaks for night-gaunts, and of how the vast hippocephalic birds fly
screaming from the black burrows high up on the gaunt grey peaks that divide Inquanok from hateful
Leng. He spoke, too, of the things he had learned concerning night-gaunts from the frescoes in the
windowless monastery of the High-Priest Not To Be Described; how even the Great Ones fear them,
and how their ruler is not the crawling chaos Nyarlathotep at all, but hoary and immemorial Nodens,
Lord of the Great Abyss.
All these things Carter glibbered to the assembled ghouls, and presently outlined that request
which he had in mind and which he did not think extravagant considering the services he had so lately
rendered the rubbery doglike lopers. He wished very much, he said, for the services of enough
night-gaunts to bear him safely through the aft past the realm of Shantaks and carven mountains, and up
into the old waste beyond the returning tracks of any other mortal. He desired to fly to the onyx castle
atop unknown Kadath in the cold waste to plead with the Great Ones for the sunset city they denied
him, and felt sure that the night-gaunts could take him thither without trouble; high above the perils of
the plain, and over the hideous double heads of those carven sentinel mountains that squat eternally in
the grey dusk. For the horned and faceless creatures there could be no danger from aught of earth
since the Great Ones themselves dread them. And even were unexpected things to come from the
Other Gods, who are prone to oversee the affairs of earth's milder gods, the night-gaunts need not
fear; for the outer hells are indifferent matters to such silent and slippery flyers as own not
Nyarlathotep for their master, but bow only to potent and archaic Nodens.
A flock of ten or fifteen night-gaunts, Carter glibbered, would surely be enough to keep any
combination of Shantaks at a distance, though perhaps it might be well to have some ghouls in the
party to manage the creatures, their ways being better known to their ghoulish allies than to men. The
party could land him at some convenient point within whatever walls that fabulous onyx citadel might
have, waiting in the shadows for his return or his signal whilst he ventured inside the castle to give
prayer to the gods of earth. If any ghouls chose to escort him into the throne-room of the Great
Ones, he would be thankful, for their presence would add weight and importance to his plea. He
would not, however, insist upon this but merely wished transportation to and from the castle atop
unknown Kadath; the final journey being either to the marvellous sunset city itself, in case of gods
proved favourable, or back to the earthward Gate of Deeper Slumber in the Enchanted Wood in case
his prayers were fruitless.
Whilst Carter was speaking all the ghouls listened with great attention, and as the moments
advanced the sky became black with clouds of those night-gaunts for which messengers had been
sent. The winged steeds settled in a semicircle around the ghoulish army, waiting respectfully as the
doglike chieftains considered the wish of the earthly traveller. The ghoul that was Pickman
glibbered gravely with his fellows and in the end Carter was offered far more than he had at most
expected. As he had aided the ghouls in their conquest of the moonbeasts, so would they aid him in
his daring voyage to realms whence none had ever returned; lending him not merely a few of their
allied night-gaunts, but their entire army as then encamped, veteran fighting ghouls and newly
assembled night-gaunts alike, save only a small garrison for the captured black galley and such spoils
as had come from the jagged rock in the sea. They would set out through the aft whenever he might
wish, and once arrived on Kadath a suitable train of ghouls would attend him in state as he placed his
petition before earth's gods in their onyx castle.
Moved by a gratitude and satisfaction beyond words, Carter made plans with the ghoulish leaders
for his audacious voyage. The army would fly high, they decided, over hideous Leng with its
nameless monastery and wicked stone villages; stopping only at the vast grey peaks to confer with the
Shantak-frightening night-gaunts whose burrows honeycombed their summits. They would then,
according to what advice they might receive from those denizens, choose their final course;
approaching unknown Kadath either through the desert of carven mountains north of Inquanok, or
through the more northerly reaches of repulsive Leng itself. Doglike and soulless as they are, the
ghouls and night-gaunts had no dread of what those untrodden deserts might reveal; nor did they feel
any deterring awe at the thought of Kadath towering lone with its onyx castle of mystery.
About midday the ghouls and night-gaunts prepared for flight, each ghoul selecting a suitable
pair of horned steeds to bear him. Carter was placed well up toward the head of the column beside
Pickman, and in front of the whole a double line of riderless night-gaunts was provided as a
vanguard. At a brisk meep from Pickman the whole shocking army rose in a nightmare cloud above
the broken columns and crumbling sphinxes of primordial Sarkomand; higher and higher, till even the
great basalt cliff behind the town was cleared, and the cold, sterile table-land of Leng's outskirts laid
open to sight. Still higher flew the black host, till even this table-land grew small beneath them; and
as they worked northward over the wind-swept plateau of horror Carter saw once again with a
shudder the circle of crude monoliths and the squat windowless building which he knew held that
frightful silken-masked blasphemy from whose clutches he had so narrowly escaped. This time no
descent was made as the army swept batlike over the sterile landscape, passing the feeble fires of the
unwholesome stone villages at a great altitude, and pausing not at all to mark the morbid twistings of
the hooved, horned almost-humans that dance and pipe eternally therein. Once they saw a Shantak-bird
flying low over the plain, but when it saw them it screamed noxiously and flapped off to the north in
grotesque panic.
At dusk they reached the jagged grey peaks that form the barrier of Inquanok, and hovered about
these strange caves near the summits which Carter recalled as so frightful to the Shantaks. At the
insistent meeping of the ghoulish leaders there issued forth from each lofty burrow a stream of
horned black flyers with which the ghouls and night-gaunts of the party conferred at length by means
of ugly gestures. It soon became clear that the best course would be that over the cold waste north of
Inquanok, for Leng's northward reaches are full of unseen pitfalls that even the night-gaunts dislike;
abysmal influences centering in certain white hemispherical buildings on curious knolls, which
common folklore associates unpleasantly with the Other Gods and their crawling chaos Nyarlathotep.
Of Kadath the flutterers of the peaks knew almost nothing, save that there must be some mighty
marvel toward the north, over which the Shantaks and the carven mountains stand guard. They hinted
at rumoured abnormalities of proportion in those trackless leagues beyond, and recalled vague
whispers of a realm where night broods eternally; but of definite data they had nothing to give. So
Carter and his party thanked them kindly; and, crossing the topmost granite pinnacles to the skies of
Inquanok, dropped below the level of the phosphorescent night clouds and beheld in the distance
those terrible squatting gargoyles that were mountains till some titan hand carved fright into their
virgin rock.
There they squatted in a hellish half-circle, their legs on the desert sand and their mitres piercing
the luminous clouds; sinister, wolflike, and double-headed, with faces of fury and right hands raised,
dully and malignly watching the rim of man's world and guarding with horror the reaches of a cold
northern world that is not man's. From their hideous laps rose evil Shantaks of elephantine bulk, but
these all fled with insane titters as the vanguard of night-gaunts was sighted in the misty sky.
Northward above those gargoyle mountains the army flew, and over leagues of dim desert where
never a landmark rose. Less and less luminous grew the clouds, till at length Carter could see only
blackness around him; but never did the winged steeds falter, bred as they were in earth's blackest
crypts, and seeing not with any eyes, but with the whole dank surface of their slippery forms. On and
on they flew, past winds of dubious scent and sounds of dubious import; ever in thickest darkness,
and covering such prodigious spaces that Carter wondered whether or not they could still be within
earth's dreamland.
Then suddenly the clouds thinned and the stars shone spectrally above. All below was still black,
but those pallid beacons in the sky seemed alive with a meaning and directiveness they had never
possessed elsewhere. It was not that the figures of the constellations were different, but that the
same familiar shapes now revealed a significance they had formerly failed to make plain. Everything
focussed toward the north; every curve and asterism of the glittering sky became part of a vast design
whose function was to hurry first the eye and then the whole observer onward to some secret and
terrible goal of convergence beyond the frozen waste that stretched endlessly ahead. Carter looked
toward the east where the great ridge of barrier peaks had towered along all the length of Inquanok
and saw against the stars a jagged silhouette which told of its continued presence. It was more broken
now, with yawning clefts and fantastically erratic pinnacles; and Carter studied closely the
suggestive turnings and inclinations of that grotesque outline, which seemed to share with the stars
some subtle northward urge.
They were flying past at a tremendous speed, so that the watcher had to strain hard to catch
details; when all at once he beheld just above the line of the topmost peaks a dark and moving object
against the stars, whose course exactly paralleled that of his own bizarre party. The ghouls had
likewise glimpsed it, for he heard their low glibbering all about him, and for a moment he fancied the
object was a gigantic Shantak, of a size vastly greater than that of the average specimen. Soon,
however, he saw that this theory would not hold; for the shape of the thing above the mountains was
not that of any hippocephalic bird. Its outline against the stars, necessarily vague as it was, resembled
rather some huge mitred head, or pair of heads infinitely magnified; and its rapid bobbing flight
through the sky seemed most peculiarly a wingless one. Carter could not tell which side of the
mountains it was on, but soon perceived that it had parts below the parts he had first seen, since it
blotted out all the stars in places where the ridge was deeply cleft.
Then came a wide gap in the range, where the hideous reaches of transmontane Leng were joined
to the cold waste on this side by a low pass trough which the stars shone wanly. Carter watched this
gap with intense care, knowing that he might see outlined against the sky beyond it the lower parts of
the vast thing that flew undulantly above the pinnacles. The object had now floated ahead a trifle, and
every eye of the party was fixed on the rift where it would presently appear in full-length silhouette.
Gradually the huge thing above the peaks neared the gap, slightly slackening its speed as if
conscious of having outdistanced the ghoulish army. For another minute suspense was keen, and then
the brief instant of full silhouette and revelation came; bringing to the lips of the ghouls an awed and
half-choked meep of cosmic fear, and to the soul of the traveller a chill that never wholly left it. For
the mammoth bobbing shape that overtopped the ridge was only a head--a mitred double head--and
below it in terrible vastness loped the frightful swollen body that bore it; the mountain--high
monstrosity that walked in stealth and silence; the hyaena-like distortion of a giant anthropoid shape
that trotted blackly against the sky, its repulsive pair of cone-capped heads reaching half way to the
zenith.
Carter did not lose consciousness or even scream aloud, for he was an old dreamer; but he
looked behind him in horror and shuddered when he saw that there were other monstrous heads
silhouetted above the level of the peaks, bobbing along stealthily after the first one. And straight in
the rear were three of the mighty mountain shapes seen full against the southern stars, tiptoeing
wolflike and lumberingly, their tall mitres nodding thousands of feet in the aft. The carven mountains,
then, had not stayed squatting in that rigid semicircle north of Inquanok, with right hands uplifted.
They had duties to perform, and were not remiss. But it was horrible that they never spoke, and never
even made a sound in walking.
Meanwhile the ghoul that was Pickman had glibbered an order to the night-gaunts, and the whole
army soared higher into the air. Up toward the stars the grotesque column shot, till nothing stood out
any longer against the sky; neither the grey granite ridge that was still nor the carven mitred
mountains that walked. All was blackness beneath as the fluttering legion surged northward amidst
rushing winds and invisible laughter in the aether, and never a Shantak or less mentionable entity rose
from the haunted wastes to pursue them. The farther they went, the faster they flew, till soon their
dizzying speed seemed to pass that of a rifle ball and approach that of a planet in its orbit. Carter
wondered how with such speed the earth could still stretch beneath them, but knew that in the land of
dream dimensions have strange properties. That they were in a realm of eternal night he felt certain,
and he fancied that the constellations overhead had subtly emphasized their northward focus;
gathering themselves up as it were to cast the flying army into the void of the boreal pole, as the
folds of a bag are gathered up to cast out the last bits of substance therein.
Then he noticed with terror that the wings of the night-gaunts were not flapping any more. The
horned and faceless steeds had folded their membranous appendages, and were resting quite passive
in the chaos of wind that whirled and chuckled as it bore them on. A force not of earth had seized on
the army, and ghouls and night-gaunts alike were powerless before a current which pulled madly and
relentlessly into the north whence no mortal had ever returned. At length a lone pallid light was seen
on the skyline ahead, thereafter rising steadily as they approached, and having beneath it a black mass
that blotted out the stars. Carter saw that it must be some beacon on a mountain, for only a mountain
could rise so vast as seen from so prodigious a height in the air.
Higher and higher rose the light and the blackness beneath it, till all the northern sky was
obscured by the rugged conical mass. Lofty as the army was, that pale and sinister beacon rose above
it, towering monstrous over all peaks and concernments of earth, and tasting the atomless aether
where the cryptical moon and the mad planets reel. No mountain known of man was that which loomed
before them. The high clouds far below were but a fringe for its foothills. The groping dizziness of
topmost air was but a girdle for its loins. Scornful and spectral climbed that bridge betwixt earth and
heaven, black in eternal night, and crowned with a pshent of unknown stars whose awful and
significant outline grew every moment clearer. Ghouls meeped in wonder as they saw it, and Carter
shivered in fear lest all the hurtling army be dashed to pieces on the unyielding onyx of that
cyclopean cliff.
Higher and higher rose the light, till it mingled with the loftiest orbs of the zenith and winked
down at the flyers with lurid mockery. All the north beneath it was blackness now; dread, stony
blackness from infinite depths to infinite heights, with only that pale winking beacon perched
unreachably at the top of all vision. Carter studied the light more closely, and saw at last what lines
its inky background made against the stars. There were towers on that titan mountaintop; horrible
domed towers in noxious and incalculable tiers and clusters beyond any dreamable workmanship of
man; battlements and terraces of wonder and menace, all limned tiny and black and distant against the
starry pshent that glowed malevolently at the uppermost rim of sight. Capping that most measureless
of mountains was a castle beyond all mortal thought, and in it glowed the daemon-light. Then
Randolph Carter knew that his quest was done, and that he saw above him the goal of all forbidden
steps and audacious visions; the fabulous, the incredible home of the Great Ones atop unknown
Kadath.
Even as he realised this thing, Carter noticed a change in the course of the helplessly wind-
sucked party. They were rising abruptly now, and it was plain that the focus of their flight was the
onyx castle where the pale light shone. So close was the great black mountain that its sides sped by
them dizzily as they shot upward, and in the darkness they could discern nothing upon it. Vaster and
vaster loomed the tenebrous towers of the nighted castle above, and Carter could see that it was
well-nigh blasphemous in its immensity. Well might its stones have been quarried by nameless
workmen in that horrible gulf rent out of the rock in the hill pass north of Inquanok, for such was its
size that a man on its threshold stood even as air out on the steps of earth's loftiest fortress. The
pshent of unknown stars above the myriad domed turrets glowed with a sallow, sickly flare, so that a
kind of twilight hung about the murky walls of slippery onyx. The pallid beacon was now seen to be a
single shining window high up in one of the loftiest towers, and as the helpless army neared the top
of the mountain Carter thought he detected unpleasant shadows flitting across the feebly luminous
expanse. It was a strangely arched window, of a design wholly alien to earth.
The solid rock now gave place to the giant foundations of the monstrous castle, and it seemed that
the speed of the party was somewhat abated. Vast walls shot up, and there was a glimpse of a great
gate through which the voyagers were swept. All was night in the titan courtyard, and then came the
deeper blackness of inmost things as a huge arched portal engulfed the column. Vortices of cold
wind surged dankly through sightless labyrinths of onyx, and Carter could never tell what Cyclopean
stairs and corridors lay silent along the route of his endless aerial twisting. Always upward led the
terrible plunge in darkness, and never a sound, touch or glimpse broke the dense pall of mystery.
Large as the army of ghouls and night-gaunts was, it was lost in the prodigious voids of that more
than earthly castle. And when at last there suddenly dawned around him the lurid light of that single
tower room whose lofty window had served as a beacon, it took Carter long to discern the far walls
and high, distant ceiling, and to realize that he was indeed not again in the boundless air outside.
Randolph Carter had hoped to come into the throne-room of the Great Ones with poise and
dignity, flanked and followed by impressive lines of ghouls in ceremonial order, and offering his
prayer as a free and potent master among dreamers. He had known that the Great Ones themselves are
not beyond a mortal's power to cope with, and had trusted to luck that the Other Gods and their
crawling chaos Nyarlathotep would not happen to come to their aid at the crucial moment, as they had
so often done before when men sought out earth's gods in their home or on their mountains. And with
his hideous escort he had half hoped to defy even the Other Gods if need were, knowing as he did
that ghouls have no masters, and that night-gaunts own not Nyarlathotep but only archaic Nodens for
their lord. But now he saw that supernal Kadath in its cold waste is indeed girt with dark wonders and
nameless sentinels, and that the Other Gods are of a surety vigilant in guarding the mild, feeble gods
of earth. Void as they are of lordship over ghouls and night-gaunts, the mindless, shapeless
blasphemies of outer space can yet control them when they must; so that it was not in state as a free
and potent master of dreamers that Randolph Carter came into the Great Ones' throne-room with his
ghouls. Swept and herded by nightmare tempests from the stars, and dogged by unseen horrors of the
northern waste, all that army floated captive and helpless in the lurid light, dropping numbly to the
onyx floor when by some voiceless order the winds of fright dissolved.
Before no golden dais had Randolph Carter come, nor was there any august circle of crowned
and haloed beings with narrow eyes, long-lobed ears, thin nose, and pointed chin whose kinship to
the carven face on Ngranek might stamp them as those to whom a dreamer might pray. Save for the
one tower room the onyx castle atop Kadath was dark, and the masters were not there. Carter had
come to unknown Kadath in the cold waste, but he had not found the gods. Yet still the lurid light
glowed in that one tower room whose size was so little less than that of all outdoors, and whose
distant walls and roof were so nearly lost to sight in thin, curling mists. Earth's gods were not there,
it was true, but of subtler and less visible presences there could be no lack. Where the mild gods are
absent, the Other Gods are not unrepresented; and certainly, the onyx castle of castles was far from
tenantless. In what outrageous form or forms terror would next reveal itself Carter could by no
means imagine. He felt that his visit had been expected, and wondered how close a watch had all
along been kept upon him by the crawling chaos Nyarlathotep. It is Nyarlathotep, horror of infinite
shapes and dread soul and messenger of the Other Gods, that the fungous moonbeasts serve; and
Carter thought of the black galley that had vanished when the tide of battle turned against the toadlike
abnormalities on the jagged rock in the sea.
Reflecting upon these things, he was staggering to his feet in the midst of his nightmare company
when there rang without warning through that pale-litten and limitless chamber the hideous blast of a
daemon trumpet. Three times pealed that frightful brazen scream, and when the echoes of the third
blast had died chucklingly away Randolph Carter saw that he was alone. Whither, why and how the
ghouls and night--gaunts had been snatched from sight was not for him to divine. He knew only that
he was suddenly alone, and that whatever unseen powers lurked mockingly around him were no
powers of earth's friendly dreamland. Presently from the chamber's uttermost reaches a new sound
came. This, too, was a rhythmic trumpeting; but of a kind far removed from the three raucous blasts
which had dissolved his goodly cohorts. In this low fanfare echoed all the wonder and melody of
ethereal dream; exotic vistas of unimagined loveliness floating from each strange chord and subtly
alien cadence. Odours of incense came to match the golden notes; and overhead a great light dawned,
its colours changing in cycles unknown to earth's spectrum, and following the song of the trumpets in
weird symphonic harmonies. Torches flared in the distance, and the beat of drums throbbed nearer
amidst waves of tense expectancy.
Out of the thinning mists and the cloud of strange incenses filed twin columns of giant black
slaves with loin-cloths of iridescent silk. Upon their heads were strapped vast helmet-like torches of
glittering metal, from which the fragrance of obscure balsams spread in fumous spirals. In their right
hands were crystal wands whose tips were carven into leering chimaeras, while their left hands
grasped long thin silver trumpets which they blew in turn. Armlets and anklets of gold they had, and
between each pair of anklets stretched a golden chain that held its wearer to a sober gait. That they
were true black men of earth's dreamland was at once apparent, but it seemed less likely that their
rites and costumes were wholly things of our earth. Ten feet from Carter the columns stopped, and as
they did so each trumpet flew abruptly to its bearer's thick lips. Wild and ecstatic was the blast that
followed, and wilder still the cry that chorused just after from dark throats somehow made shrill by
strange artifice.
Then down the wide lane betwixt the two columns a lone figure strode; a tall, slim figure with the
young face of an antique Pharaoh, gay with prismatic robes and crowned with a golden pshent that
glowed with inherent light. Close up to Carter strode that regal figure; whose proud carriage and
smart features had in them the fascination of a dark god or fallen archangel, and around whose eyes
there lurked the languid sparkle of capricious humour. It spoke, and in its mellow tones there rippled
the wild music of Lethean streams.
"Randolph Carter," said the voice, "you have come to see the Great Ones whom it is unlawful for
men to see. Watchers have spoken of this thing, and the Other Gods have grunted as they rolled and
tumbled mindlessly to the sound of thin flutes in the black ultimate void where broods the daemon-
sultan whose name no lips dare speak aloud.
"When Barzai the Wise climbed Hatheg-Kia to see the Greater Ones dance and howl above the
clouds in the moonlight he never returned. The Other Gods were there, and they did what was
expected. Zenig of Aphorat sought to reach unknown Kadath in the cold waste, and his skull is now
set in a ring on the little finger of one whom I need not name.
"But you, Randolph Carter, have braved all things of earth's dreamland, and burn still with the
flame of quest. You came not as one curious, but as one seeking his due, nor have you failed ever in
reverence toward the mild gods of earth. Yet have these gods kept you from the marvellous sunset
city of your dreams, and wholly through their own small covetousness; for verily, they craved the
weird loveliness of that which your fancy had fashioned, and vowed that henceforward no other spot
should be their abode.
"They are gone from their castle on unknown Kadath to dwell in your marvellous city. All
through its palaces of veined marble they revel by day, and when the sun sets they go out in the
perfumed gardens and watch the golden glory on temples and colonnades, arched bridges and silver-
basined fountains, and wide streets with blossom-laden urns and ivory statues in gleaming rows. And
when night comes they climb tall terraces in the dew, and sit on carved benches of porphyry scanning
the stars, or lean over pale balustrades to gaze at the town's steep northward slopes, where one by
one the little windows in old peaked gables shine softly out with the calm yellow light of homely
candles.
"The gods love your marvellous city, and walk no more in the ways of the gods. They have
forgotten the high places of earth, and the mountains that knew their youth. The earth has no longer
any gods that are gods, and only the Other Ones from outer space hold sway on unremembered
Kadath. Far away in a valley of your own childhood, Randolph Carter, play the heedless Great Ones.
You have dreamed too well, O wise arch-dreamer, for you have drawn dream's gods away from the
world of all men's visions to that which is wholly yours; having builded out of your boyhood's small
fancies a city more lovely than all the phantoms that have gone before.
"It is not well that earth's gods leave their thrones for the spider to spin on, and their realm for the
Others to sway in the dark manner of Others. Fain would the powers from outside bring chaos and
horror to you, Randolph Carter, who are the cause of their upsetting, but that they know it is by you
alone that the gods may be sent back to their world. In that half-waking dreamland which is yours, no
power of uttermost night may pursue; and only you can send the selfish Great Ones gently out of your
marvellous sunset city, back through the northern twilight to their wonted place atop unknown Kadath
in the cold waste.
"So. Randolph Carter, in the name of the Other Gods I spare you and charge you to seek that
sunset city which is yours, and to send thence the drowsy truant gods for whom the dream world
waits. Not hard to find is that roseal fever of the gods, that fanfare of supernal trumpets and clash of
immortal cymbals, that mystery whose place and meaning have haunted you through the halls of
waking and the gulfs of dreaming, and tormented you with hints of vanished memory and the pain of
lost things awesome and momentous. Not hard to find is that symbol and relic of your days of
wonder, for truly, it is but the stable and eternal gem wherein all that wonder sparkles crystallised to
light your evening path. Behold! It is not over unknown seas but back over well-known years that
your quest must go; back to the bright strange things of infancy and the quick sun-drenched glimpses
of magic that old scenes brought to wide young eyes.
"For know you, that your gold and marble city of wonder is only the sum of what you have seen
and loved in youth. It is the glory of Boston's hillside roofs and western windows aflame with sunset,
of the flower-fragrant Common and the great dome on the hill and the tangle of gables and chimneys
in the violet valley where the many-bridged Charles flows drowsily. These things you saw,
Randolph Carter, when your nurse first wheeled you out in the springtime, and they will be the last
things you will ever see with eyes of memory and of love. And there is antique Salem with its
brooding years, and spectral Marblehead scaling its rocky precipices into past centuries! And the
glory of Salem's towers and spires seen afar from Marblehead's pastures across the harbour against
the setting sun.
"There is Providence quaint and lordly on its seven hills over the blue harbour, with terraces of
green leading up to steeples and citadels of living antiquity, and Newport climbing wraithlike from
its dreaming breakwater. Arkham is there, with its moss-grown gambrel roofs and the rocky rolling
meadows behind it; and antediluvian Kingsport hoary with stacked chimneys and deserted quays and
overhanging gables, and the marvel of high cliffs and the milky-misted ocean with tolling buoys
beyond.
"Cool vales in Concord, cobbled lands in Portsmouth, twilight bends of rustic New Hampshire
roads where giant elms half hide white farmhouse walls and creaking well-sweeps. Gloucester's salt
wharves and Truro's windy willows. Vistas of distant steepled towns and hills beyond hills along the
North Shore, hushed stony slopes and low ivied cottages in the lee of huge boulders in Rhode
Island's back country. Scent of the sea and fragrance of the fields; spell of the dark woods and joy of
the orchards and gardens at dawn. These, Randolph Carter, are your city; for they are yourself. New
England bore you, and into your soul she poured a liquid loveliness which cannot die. This
loveliness, moulded, crystallised, and polished by years of memory and dreaming, is your terraced
wonder of elusive sunsets; and to find that marble parapet with curious urns and carven rail, and
descend at last these endless balustraded steps to the city of broad squares and prismatic fountains,
you need only to turn back to the thoughts and visions of your wistful boyhood.
"Look! through that window shine the stars of eternal night. Even now they are shining above the
scenes you have known and cherished, drinking of their charm that they may shine more lovely over
the gardens of dream. There is Antares-he is winking at this moment over the roofs of Tremont
Street, and you could see him from your window on Beacon Hill. Out beyond those stars yawn the
gulfs from whence my mindless masters have sent me. Some day you too may traverse them, but if
you are wise you will beware such folly; for of those mortals who have been and returned, only one
preserves a mind unshattered by the pounding, clawing horrors of the void. Terrors and blasphemies
gnaw at one another for space, and there is more evil in the lesser ones than in the greater; even as
you know from the deeds of those who sought to deliver you into my hands, whilst I myself
harboured no wish to shatter you, and would indeed have helped you hither long ago had I not been
elsewhere busy, and certain that you would yourself find the way. Shun then, the outer hells, and stick
to the calm, lovely things of your youth. Seek out your marvellous city and drive thence the recreant
Great Ones, sending them back gently to those scenes which are of their own youth, and which wait
uneasy for their return.
"Easier even then the way of dim memory is the way I will prepare for you. See! There comes
hither a monstrous Shantak, led by a slave who for your peace of mind had best keep invisible. Mount
and be ready--there! Yogash the Black will help you on the scaly horror. Steer for that brightest star
just south of the zenith--it is Vega, and in two hours will be just above the terrace of your sunset city.
Steer for it only till you hear a far-off singing in the high aether. Higher than that lurks madness, so
rein your Shantak when the first note lures. Look then back to earth, and you will see shining the
deathless altar--flame of Ired-Naa from the sacred roof of a temple. That temple is in your desiderate
sunset city, so steer for it before you heed the singing and are lost.
"When you draw nigh the city steer for the same high parapet whence of old you scanned the
outspread glory, prodding the Shantak till he cry aloud. That cry the Great Ones will hear and know
as they sit on their perfumed terraces, and there will come upon them such a homesickness that all of
your city's wonders will not console them for the absence of Kadath's grim castle and the pshent of
eternal stars that crowns it.
"Then must you land amongst them with the Shantak, and let them see and touch that noisome and
hippocephalic bird; meanwhile discoursing to them of unknown Kadath, which you will so lately
have left, and telling them how its boundless halls are lovely and unlighted, where of old they used
to leap and revel in supernal radiance. And the Shantak will talk to them in the manner of Shantaks, but
it will have no powers of persuasion beyond the recalling of elder days.
"Over and over must you speak to the wandering Great Ones of their home and youth, till at last
they will weep and ask to be shewn the returning path they have forgotten. Thereat can you loose the
waiting Shantak, sending him skyward with the homing cry of his kind; hearing which the Great Ones
will prance and jump with antique mirth, and forthwith stride after the loathly bird in the fashion of
gods, through the deep gulfs of heaven to Kadath's familiar towers and domes.
"Then will the marvellous sunset city be yours to cherish and inhabit for ever, and once more
will earth's gods rule the dreams of men from their accustomed seat. Go now--the casement is open
and the stars await outside. Already your Shantak wheezes and titters with impatience. Steer for Vega
through the night, but turn when the singing sounds. Forget not this warning, lest horrors unthinkable
suck you into the gulf of shrieking and ululant madness. Remember the Other Gods; they are great and
mindless and terrible, and lurk in the outer voids. They are good gods to shun.
"Hei! Aa-shanta 'nygh! You are off! Send back earth's gods to their haunts on unknown Kadath, and
pray to all space that you may never meet me in my thousand other forms. Farewell, Randolph Carter,
and beware; for I am Nyarlathotep, the Crawling Chaos."
And Randolph Carter, gasping and dizzy on his hideous Shantak, shot screamingly into space
toward the cold blue glare of boreal Vega; looking but once behind him at the clustered and chaotic
turrets of the onyx nightmare wherein still glowed the lone lurid light of that window above the air
and the clouds of earth's dreamland. Great polypous horrors slid darkly past, and unseen bat wings
beat multitudinous around him, but still he clung to the unwholesome mane of that loathly and
hippocephalic scaled bird. The stars danced mockingly, almost shifting now and then to form pale
signs of doom that one might wonder one had not seen and feared before; and ever the winds of
nether howled of vague blackness and loneliness beyond the cosmos.
Then through the glittering vault ahead there fell a hush of portent, and all the winds and horrors
slunk away as night things slink away before the dawn. Trembling in waves that golden wisps of
nebula made weirdly visible, there rose a timid hint of far-off melody, droning in faint chords that
our own universe of stars knows not. And as that music grew, the Shantak raised its ears and plunged
ahead, and Carter likewise bent to catch each lovely strain. It was a song, but not the song of any
voice. Night and the spheres sang it, and it was old when space and Nyarlathotep and the Other Gods
were born.
Faster flew the Shantak, and lower bent the rider, drunk with the marvel of strange gulfs, and
whirling in the crystal coils of outer magic. Then came too late the warning of the evil one, the
sardonic caution of the daemon legate who had bidden the seeker beware the madness of that song.
Only to taunt had Nyarlathotep marked out the way to safety and the marvellous sunset city; only to
mock had that black messenger revealed the secret of these truant gods whose steps he could so
easily lead back at will. For madness and the void's wild vengeance are Nyarlathotep's only gifts to
the presumptuous; and frantick though the rider strove to turn his disgusting steed, that leering,
tittering Shantak coursed on impetuous and relentless, flapping its great slippery wings in malignant
joy and headed for those unhallowed pits whither no dreams reach; that last amorphous blight of
nether-most confusion where bubbles and blasphemes at infinity's centre the mindless daemon-sultan
Azathoth, whose name no lips dare speak aloud.
Unswerving and obedient to the foul legate's orders, that hellish bird plunged onward through
shoals of shapeless lurkers and caperers in darkness, and vacuous herds of drifting entities that
pawed and groped and groped and pawed; the nameless larvae of the Other Gods, that are like them
blind and without mind, and possessed of singular hungers and thirsts
Onward unswerving and relentless, and tittering hilariously to watch the chuckling and hysterics
into which the risen song of night and the spheres had turned, that eldritch scaly monster bore its
helpless rider; hurtling and shooting, cleaving the uttermost rim and spanning the outermost abysses;
leaving behind the stars and the realms of matter, and darting meteor-like through stark formlessness
toward those inconceivable, unlighted chambers beyond time wherein Azathoth gnaws shapeless and
ravenous amidst the muffled, maddening beat of vile drums and the thin, monotonous whine of
accursed flutes.
Onward--onward--through the screaming, cackling, and blackly populous gulfs--and then from
some dim blessed distance there came an image and a thought to Randolph Carter the doomed. Too
well had Nyarlathotep planned his mocking and his tantalising, for he had brought up that which no
gusts of icy terror could quite efface. Home--New England--Beacon Hill--the waking world.
"For know you, that your gold and marble city of wonder is only the sum of what you have seen
and loved in youth...the glory of Boston's hillside roofs and western windows aflame with sunset; of
the flower--fragrant Common and the great dome on the hill and the tangle of gables and chimneys in
the violet valley where the many-bridged Charles flows drowsily...this loveliness, moulded,
crystallised, and polished by years of memory and dreaming, is your terraced wonder of elusive
sunsets; and to find that marble parapet with curious urns and carven rail, and descend at last those
endless balustraded steps to the city of broad squares and prismatic fountains, you need only to turn
back to the thoughts and visions of your wistful boyhood."
Onward--onward--dizzily onward to ultimate doom through the blackness where sightless feelers
pawed and slimy snouts jostled and nameless things tittered and tittered and tittered. But the image and
the thought had come, and Randolph Carter knew clearly that he was dreaming and only dreaming, and
that somewhere in the background the world of waking and the city of his infancy still lay. Words
came again--"You need only turn back to the thoughts and visions of your wistful boyhood."Turn--
turn--blackness on every side, but Randolph Carter could turn.
Thick though the rushing nightmare that clutched his senses, Randolph Carter could turn and
move. He could move, and if he chose he could leap off the evil Shantak that bore him hurtlingly
doomward at the orders of Nyarlathotep. He could leap off and dare those depths of night that
yawned interminably down, those depths of fear whose terrors yet could not exceed the nameless
doom that lurked waiting at chaos' core. He could turn and move and leap--he could--he would--he
would--he would.
Off that vast hippocephalic abomination leaped the doomed and desperate dreamer, and down
through endless voids of sentient blackness he fell. Aeons reeled, universes died and were born
again, stars became nebulae and nebulae became stars, and still Randolph Carter fell through those
endless voids of sentient blackness.
Then in the slow creeping course of eternity the utmost cycle of the cosmos churned itself into
another futile completion, and all things became again as they were unreckoned kalpas before. Matter
and light were born anew as space once had known them; and comets, suns and worlds sprang flaming
into life, though nothing survived to tell that they had been and gone, been and gone, always and
always, back to no first beginning.
And there was a firmament again, and a wind, and a glare of purple light in the eyes of the falling
dreamer. There were gods and presences and wills; beauty and evil, and the shrieking of noxious
night robbed of its prey. For through the unknown ultimate cycle had lived a thought and a vision of a
dreamer's boyhood, and now there were remade a waking world and an old cherished city to body and
to justify these things. Out of the void S'ngac the violet gas had pointed the way, and archaic Nodens
was bellowing his guidance from unhinted deeps.
Stars swelled to dawns, and dawns burst into fountains of gold, carmine, and purple, and still the
dreamer fell. Cries rent the aether as ribbons of light beat back the fiends from outside. And hoary
Nodens raised a howl of triumph when Nyarlathotep, close on his quarry, stopped baffled by a glare
that seared his formless hunting-horrors to grey dust. Randolph Carter had indeed descended at last
the wide marmoreal flights to his marvellous city, for he was come again to the fair New England
world that had wrought him.
So to the organ chords of morning's myriad whistles, and dawn's blaze thrown dazzling through
purple panes by the great gold dome of the State House on the hill, Randolph Carter leaped
shoutingly awake within his Boston room. Birds sang in hidden gardens and the perfume of trellised
vines came wistful from arbours his grandfather had reared. Beauty and light glowed from classic
mantel and carven cornice and walls grotesquely figured, while a sleek black cat rose yawning from
hearthside sleep that his master's start and shriek had disturbed. And vast infinities away, past the Gate
of Deeper Slumber and the enchanted wood and the garden lands and the Cerenarian Sea and the
twilight reaches of Inquanok, the crawling chaos Nyarlathotep strode brooding into the onyx castle
atop unknown Kadath in the cold waste, and taunted insolently the mild gods of earth whom he had
snatched abruptly from their scented revels in the marvellous sunset city.

THE EVIL CLERGYMAN
"Yes, he lived here--but I don't advise your doing anything. Your curiosity makes you
irresponsible. We never come here at night, and it's only because of his will that we keep it this way.
You know what he did. That abominable society took charge at last, and we don't know where he is
buried. There was no way the law or anything else could reach the society.
"I hope you won't stay till after dark. And I beg of you to let that thing on the table--the thing that
looks like a match-box--alone. We don't know what it is, but we suspect it has something to do with
what he did. We even avoid looking at it very steadily."
After a time the man left me alone in the attic room. It was very dingy and dusty, and only
primitively furnished, but it had a neatness which showed it was not a slum-denizen's quarters. There
were shelves full of theological and classical books, and another bookcase containing treatises on
magic--Paracelsus, Albertus Magnus, Trithemius, Hermes Trismegistus, Borellus, and others in a
strange alphabet whose titles I could not decipher. The furniture was very plain. There was a door,
but it led only into a closet. The only egress was the aperture in the floor up to which the crude,
steep staircase led. The windows were of bull's-eye pattern, and the black oak beams bespoke
unbelievable antiquity. Plainly, this house was of the Old World. I seemed to know where I was, but
cannot recall what I then knew. Certainly the town was not London. My impression is of a small
seaport.
The small object on the table fascinated me intensely. I seemed to know what to do with it, for I
drew a pocket electric light--or what looked like one--out of my pocket and nervously tested its
flashes. The light was not white but violet, and seemed less like true light than like some radioactive
bombardment. I recall that I did not regard it as a common flashlight--indeed, I had a common
flashlight in another pocket.
It was getting dark, and the ancient roofs and chimney-pots outside looked very queer through the
bull's-eye window-panes. Finally I summoned up courage and propped the small object up on the
table against a book--then turned the rays of the peculiar violet light upon it. The light seemed now to
be more like a rain of hail or small violet particles than like a continuous beam. As the particles
struck the glassy surface at the center of the strange device, they seemed to produce a crackling
noise like the sputtering of a vacuum tube through which sparks are passed. The dark glassy surface
displayed a pinkish glow, and a vague white shape seemed to be taking form at its center. Then I
noticed that I was not alone in the room--and put the ray--projector back in my pocket.
But the newcomer did not speak--nor did I hear any sound whatever during all the immediately
following moments. Everything was shadowy pantomime, as if seen at a vast distance through some
intervening haze--although on the other hand the newcomer and all subsequent comers loomed large
and close, as if both near and distant, according to some abnormal geometry.
The newcomer was a thin, dark man of medium height attired in the clerical garb of the Anglican
church. He was apparently about thirty years old, with a sallow, olive complexion and fairly good
features, but an abnormally high forehead. His black hair was well cut and neatly brushed, and he was
clean-shaven though blue-chinned with a heavy growth of beard. He wore rimless spectacles with
steel bows. His build and lower facial features were like other clergymen I had seen, but he had a
vastly higher forehead, and was darker and more intelligent-looking--also more subtly and
concealedly evil-looking. At the present moment--having just lighted a faint oil lamp--he looked
nervous, and before I knew it he was casting all his magical books into a fireplace on the window
side of the room (where the wall slanted sharply) which I had not noticed before. The flames
devoured the volumes greedily--leaping up in strange colors and emitting indescribably hideous
odors as the strangely hieroglyphed leaves and wormy bindings succumbed to the devastating
element. All at once I saw there were others in the room--grave-looking men in clerical costume, one
of whom wore the bands and knee-breeches of a bishop. Though I could hear nothing, I could see
that they were bringing a decision of vast import to the first-comer. They seemed to hate and fear him
at the same time, and he seemed to return these sentiments. His face set itself into a grim expression,
but I could see his right hand shaking as he tried to grip the back of a chair. The bishop pointed to the
empty case and to the fireplace (where the flames had died down amidst a charred, non-committal
mass), and seemed filled with a peculiar loathing. The first-comer then gave a wry smile and reached
out with his left hand toward the small object on the table. Everyone then seemed frightened. The
procession of clerics began filing down the steep stairs through the trapdoor in the floor, turning and
making menacing gestures as they left. The bishop was last to go.
The first-comer now went to a cupboard on the inner side of the room and extracted a coil of
rope. Mounting a chair, he attached one end of the rope to a hook in the great exposed central beam
of black oak, and began making a noose with the other end. Realizing he was about to hang himself, I
started forward to dissuade or save him. He saw me and ceased his preparations, looking at me with a
kind of triumph which puzzled and disturbed me. He slowly stepped down from the chair and began
gliding toward me with a positively wolfish grin on his dark, thin-lipped face.
I felt somehow in deadly peril, and drew out the peculiar ray-projector as a weapon of defense.
Why I thought it could help me, I do not know. I turned it on--full in his face, and saw the sallow
features glow first with violet and then with pinkish light. His expression of wolfish exultation
began to be crowded aside by a look of profound fear--which did not, however, wholly displace the
exultation. He stopped in his tracks--then, flailing his arms wildly in the air, began to stagger
backwards. I saw he was edging toward the open stair-well in the floor, and tried to shout a warning,
but he did not hear me. In another instant he had lurched backward through the opening and was lost to
view.
I found difficulty in moving toward the stair-well, but when I did get there I found no crushed
body on the floor below. Instead there was a clatter of people coming up with lanterns, for the spell
of phantasmal silence had broken, and I once more heard sounds and saw figures as normally tri-
dimensional. Something had evidently drawn a crowd to this place. Had there been a noise I had not
heard?
Presently the two people (simple villagers, apparently) farthest in the lead saw me--and stood
paralyzed. One of them shrieked loudly and reverberantly:
"Ahrrh!...It be'ee, zur? Again?"
Then they all turned and fled frantically. All, that is, but one. When the crowd was gone I saw the
grave-bearded man who had brought me to this place--standing alone with a lantern. He was gazing at
me gaspingly and fascinatedly, but did not seem afraid. Then he began to ascend the stairs, and joined
me in the attic. He spoke:
"So you didn't let it alone! I'm sorry. I know what has happened. It happened once before, but the
man got frightened and shot himself. You ought not to have made him come back. You know what he
wants. But you mustn't get frightened like the other man he got. Something very strange and terrible
has happened to you, but it didn't get far enough to hurt your mind and personality. If you'll keep cool,
and accept the need for making certain radical readjustments in your life, you can keep right on
enjoying the world, and the fruits of your scholarship. But you can't live here--and I don't think you'll
wish to go back to London. I'd advise America.
"You mustn't try anything more with that--thing. Nothing can be put back now. It would only make
matters worse to do--or summon--anything. You are not as badly off as you might be--but you must
get out of here at once and stay away. You'd better thank Heaven it didn't go further...
"I'm going to prepare you as bluntly as I can. There's been a certain change--in your personal
appearance. He always causes that. But in a new country you can get used to it. There's a mirror up at
the other end of the room, and I'm going to take you to it. You'll get a shock--though you will see
nothing repulsive."
I was now shaking with a deadly fear, and the bearded man almost had to hold me up as he walked
me across the room to the mirror, the faint lamp (i.e., that formerly on the table, not the still fainter
lantern he had brought) in his free hand. This is what I saw in the glass:
A thin, dark man of medium stature attired in the clerical garb of the Anglican church, apparently
about thirty, and with rimless, steel--bowed glasses glistening beneath a sallow, olive forehead of
abnormal height.
It was the silent first-comer who had burned his books.
For all the rest of my life, in outward form, I was to be that man!

THE HORROR AT MARTIN'S BEACH
I have never heard an even approximately adequate explanation of the horror at Martin's Beach.
Despite the large number of witnesses, no two accounts agree; and the testimony taken by local
authorities contains the most amazing discrepancies.
Perhaps this haziness is natural in view of the unheard-of character of the horror itself, the
almost paralytic terror of all who saw it, and the efforts made by the fashionable Wavecrest Inn to
hush it up after the publicity created by Prof. Ahon's article "Are Hypnotic Powers Confined to
Recognized Humanity?"
Against all these obstacles I am striving to present a coherent version; for I beheld the hideous
occurrence, and believe it should be known in view of the appalling possibilities it suggests.
Martin's Beach is once more popular as a watering-place, but I shudder when I think of it. Indeed, I
cannot look at the ocean at all now without shuddering.
Fate is not always without a sense of drama and climax, hence the terrible happening of August 8,
1922, swiftly followed a period of minor and agreeably wonder-fraught excitement at Martin's
Beach. On May 17 the crew of the fishing smack Alma of Gloucester, under Capt. James P. Orne,
killed, after a battle of nearly forty hours, a marine monster whose size and aspect produced the
greatest possible stir in scientific circles and caused certain Boston naturalists to take every
precaution for its taxidermic preservation.
The object was some fifty feet in length, of roughly cylindrical shape, and about ten feet in
diameter. It was unmistakably a gilled fish in its major affiliations; but with certain curious
modifications such as rudimentary forelegs and six-toed feet in place of pectoral fins, which
prompted the widest speculation. Its extraordinary mouth, its thick and scaly hide, and its single,
deep-set eye were wonders scarcely less remarkable than its colossal dimensions; and when the
naturalists pronounced it an infant organism, which could not have been hatched more than a few days,
public interest mounted to extraordinary heights.
Capt. Orne, with typical Yankee shrewdness, obtained a vessel large enough to hold the object in
its hull, and arranged for the exhibition of his prize. With judicious carpentry he prepared what
amounted to an excellent marine museum, and, sailing south to the wealthy resort district of Martin's
Beach, anchored at the hotel wharf and reaped a harvest of admission fees.
The intrinsic marvelousness of the object, and the importance which it clearly bore in the minds
of many scientific visitors from near and far, combined to make it the season's sensation. That it was
absolutely unique--unique to a scientifically revolutionary degree--was well understood. The
naturalists had shown plainly that it radically differed from the similarly immense fish caught off the
Florida coast; that, while it was obviously an inhabitant of almost incredible depths, perhaps
thousands of feet, its brain and principal organs indicated a development startlingly vast, and out of all
proportion to anything hitherto associated with the fish tribe.
On the morning of July 20 the sensation was increased by the loss of the vessel and its strange
treasure. In the storm of the preceding night it had broken from its moorings and vanished forever
from the sight of man, carrying with it the guard who had slept aboard despite the threatening
weather. Capt. Orne, backed by extensive scientific interests and aided by large numbers of fishing
boats from Gloucester, made a thorough and exhaustive searching cruise, but with no result other
than the prompting of interest and conversation. By August 7 hope was abandoned, and Capt. Orne had
returned to the Wavecrest Inn to wind up his business affairs at Martin's Beach and confer with
certain of the scientific men who remained there. The horror came on August 8.
It was in the twilight, when grey sea-birds hovered low near the shore and a rising moon began to
make a glittering path across the waters. The scene is important to remember, for every impression
counts. On the beach were several strollers and a few late bathers; stragglers from the distant cottage
colony that rose modestly on a green hill to the north, or from the adjacent cliff-perched Inn whose
imposing towers proclaimed its allegiance to wealth and grandeur.
Well within viewing distance was another set of spectators, the loungers on the Inn's high-ceiled
and lantern-lighted veranda, who appeared to be enjoying the dance music from the sumptuous
ballroom inside. These spectators, who included Capt. Orne and his group of scientific confreres,
joined the beach group before the horror progressed far; as did many more from the Inn. Certainly
there was no lack of witnesses, confused though their stories be with fear and doubt of what they
saw.
There is no exact record of the time the thing began, although a majority say that the fairly round
moon was "about a foot" above the low-lying vapors of the horizon. They mention the moon because
what they saw seemed subtly connected with it--a sort of stealthy, deliberate, menacing ripple which
rolled in from the far skyline along the shimmering lane of reflected moonbeams, yet which seemed
to subside before it reached the shore.
Many did not notice this ripple until reminded by later events; but it seems to have been very
marked, differing in height and motion from the normal waves around it. Some called it cunning and
calculating. And as it died away craftily by the black reefs afar out, there suddenly came belching up
out of the glitter-streaked brine a cry of death; a scream of anguish and despair that moved pity even
while it mocked it.
First to respond to the cry were the two life guards then on duty; sturdy fellows in white bathing
attire, with their calling proclaimed in large red letters across their chests. Accustomed as they were
to rescue work, and to the screams of the drowning, they could find nothing familiar in the unearthly
ululation; yet with a trained sense of duty they ignored the strangeness and proceeded to follow their
usual course.
Hastily seizing an air-cushion, which with its attached coil of rope lay always at hand, one of
them ran swiftly along the shore to the scene of the gathering crowd; whence, after whirling it about
to gain momentum, he flung the hollow disc far out in the direction from which the sound had come.
As the cushion disappeared in the waves, the crowd curiously awaited a sight of the hapless being
whose distress had been so great; eager to see the rescue made by the massive rope.
But that rescue was soon acknowledged to be no swift and easy matter; for, pull as they might on
the rope, the two muscular guards could not move the object at the other end. Instead, they found that
object pulling with equal or even greater force in the very opposite direction, till in a few seconds
they were dragged off their feet and into the water by the strange power which had seized on the
proffered life-preserver.
One of them, recovering himself, called immediately for help from the crowd on the shore, to
whom he flung the remaining coil of rope; and in a moment the guards were seconded by all the
hardier men, among whom Capt. Orne was foremost. More than a dozen strong hands were now
tugging desperately at the stout line, yet wholly without avail.
Hard as they tugged, the strange force at the other end tugged harder; and since neither side
relaxed for an instant, the rope became rigid as steel with the enormous strain. The struggling
participants, as well as the spectators, were by this time consumed with curiosity as to the nature of
the force in the sea. The idea of a drowning man had long been dismissed; and hints of whales,
submarines, monsters, and demons now passed freely around. Where humanity had first led the
rescuers, wonder kept them at their task; and they hauled with a grim determination to uncover the
mystery.
It being decided at last that a whale must have swallowed the air-cushion, Capt. Orne, as a natural
leader, shouted to those on shore that a boat must be obtained in order to approach, harpoon, and land
the unseen leviathan. Several men at once prepared to scatter in quest of a suitable craft, while others
came to supplant the captain at the straining rope, since his place was logically with whatever boat
party might be formed. His own idea of the situation was very broad, and by no means limited to
whales, since he had to do with a monster so much stranger. He wondered what might be the acts and
manifestations of an adult of the species of which the fifty-foot creature had been the merest infant.
And now there developed with appalling suddenness the crucial fact which changed the entire
scene from one of wonder to one of horror, and dazed with fright the assembled band of toilers and
onlookers. Capt. Orne, turning to leave his post at the rope, found his hands held in their place with
unaccountable strength; and in a moment he realized that he was unable to let go of the rope. His
plight was instantly divined, and as each companion tested his own situation the same condition was
encountered. The fact could not be denied--every struggler was irresistibly held in some mysterious
bondage to the hempen line which was slowly, hideously, and relentlessly pulling them out to sea.
Speechless horror ensued; a horror in which the spectators were petrified to utter inaction and
mental chaos. Their complete demoralization is reflected in the conflicting accounts they give, and
the sheepish excuses they offer for their seemingly callous inertia. I was one of them, and know.
Even the strugglers, after a few frantic screams and futile groans, succumbed to the paralyzing
influence and kept silent and fatalistic in the face of unknown powers. There they stood in the pallid
moonlight, blindly pulling against a spectral doom and swaying monotonously backward and forward
as the water rose first to their knees, then to their hips. The moon went partly under a cloud, and in
the half-light the line of swaying men resembled some sinister and gigantic centipede, writhing in the
clutch of a terrible creeping death.
Harder and harder grew the rope, as the tug in both directions increased, and the strands swelled
with the undisturbed soaking of the rising waves. Slowly the tide advanced, till the sands so lately
peopled by laughing children and whispering lovers were now swallowed by the inexorable flow.
The herd of panic-stricken watchers surged blindly backward as the water crept above their feet,
while the frightful line of strugglers swayed hideously on, half submerged, and now at a substantial
distance from their audience. Silence was complete.
The crowd, having gained a huddling-place beyond reach of the tide, stared in mute fascination;
without offering a word of advice or encouragement, or attempting any kind of assistance. There was
in the air a nightmare fear of impending evils such as the world had never before known.
Minutes seemed lengthened into hours, and still that human snake of swaying torsos was seen
above the fast rising tide. Rhythmically it undulated; slowly, horribly, with the seal of doom upon it.
Thicker clouds now passed over the ascending moon, and the glittering path on the waters faded
nearly out.
Very dimly writhed the serpentine line of nodding heads, with now and then the livid face of a
backward-glancing victim gleaming pale in the darkness. Faster and faster gathered the clouds, till at
length their angry rifts shot down sharp tongues of febrile flame. Thunders rolled, softly at first, yet
soon increasing to a deafening, maddening intensity. Then came a culminating crash--a shock whose
reverberations seemed to shake land and sea alike--and on its heels a cloudburst whose drenching
violence overpowered the darkened world as if the heavens themselves had opened to pour forth a
vindictive torrent.
The spectators, instinctively acting despite the absence of conscious and coherent thought, now
retreated up the cliff steps to the hotel veranda. Rumors had reached the guests inside, so that the
refugees found a state of terror nearly equal to their own. I think a few frightened words were
uttered, but cannot be sure.
Some, who were staying at the Inn, retired in terror to their rooms; while others remained to
watch the fast sinking victims as the line of bobbing heads showed above the mounting waves in the
fitful lightning flashes. I recall thinking of those heads, and the bulging eyes they must contain; eyes
that might well reflect all the fright, panic, and delirium of a malignant universe--all the sorrow, sin,
and misery, blasted hopes and unfulfilled desires, fear, loathing and anguish of the ages since time's
beginning; eyes alight with all the soul-racking pain of eternally blazing infernos.
And as I gazed out beyond the heads, my fancy conjured up still another eye; a single eye, equally
alight, yet with a purpose so revolting to my brain that the vision soon passed. Held in the clutches of
an unknown vise, the line of the damned dragged on; their silent screams and unuttered prayers known
only to the demons of the black waves and the night-wind.
There now burst from the infuriate sky such a mad cataclysm of satanic sound that even the former
crash seemed dwarfed. Amidst a blinding glare of descending fire the voice of heaven resounded
with the blasphemies of hell, and the mingled agony of all the lost reverberated in one apocalyptic,
planet-rending peal of Cyclopean din. It was the end of the storm, for with uncanny suddenness the
rain ceased and the moon once more cast her pallid beams on a strangely quieted sea.
There was no line of bobbing heads now. The waters were calm and deserted, and broken only by
the fading ripples of what seemed to be a whirlpool far out in the path of the moonlight whence the
strange cry had first come. But as I looked along that treacherous lane of silvery sheen, with fancy
fevered and senses overwrought, there trickled upon my ears from some abysmal sunken waste the
faint and sinister echoes of a laugh.

THE HORROR AT RED HOOK
CONTENTS
I
II
III
IV
V
VI
VII
I
Not many weeks ago, on a street corner in the village of Pascoag, Rhode Island, a tall, heavily
built, and wholesome-looking pedestrian furnished much speculation by a singular lapse of
behaviour. He had, it appears, been descending the hill by the road from Chepachet; and encountering
the compact section, had turned to his left into the main thoroughfare where several modest business
blocks convey a touch of the urban. At this point, without visible provocation, he committed his
astonishing lapse; staring queerly for a second at the tallest of the buildings before him, and then,
with a series of terrified, hysterical shrieks, breaking into a frantic run which ended in a stumble and
fall at the next crossing. Picked up and dusted off by ready hands, he was found to be conscious,
organically unhurt, and evidently cured of his sudden nervous attack. He muttered some shamefaced
explanations involving a strain he had undergone, and with downcast glance turned back up the
Chepachet road, trudging out of sight without once looking behind him. It was a strange incident to
befall so large, robust, normal-featured, and capable-looking a man, and the strangeness was not
lessened by the remarks of a bystander who had recognised him as the boarder of a well-known
dairyman on the outskirts of Chepachet.
He was, it developed, a New York police detective named Thomas F. Malone, now on a long
leave of absence under medical treatment after some disproportionately arduous work on a gruesome
local case which accident had made dramatic. There had been a collapse of several old brick
buildings during a raid in which he had shared, and something about the wholesale loss of life, both
of prisoners and of his companions, had peculiarly appalled him. As a result, he had acquired an
acute and anomalous horror of any buildings even remotely suggesting the ones which had fallen in,
so that in the end mental specialists forbade him the sight of such things for an indefinite period. A
police surgeon with relatives in Chepachet had put forward that quaint hamlet of wooden colonial
houses as an ideal spot for the psychological convalescence; and thither the sufferer had gone,
promising never to venture among the brick-lined streets of larger villages till duly advised by the
Woonsocket specialist with whom he was put in touch. This walk to Pascoag for magazines had been
a mistake, and the patient had paid in fright, bruises, and humiliation for his disobedience.
So much the gossips of Chepachet and Pascoag knew; and so much, also, the most learned
specialists believed. But Malone had at first told the specialists much more, ceasing only when he
saw that utter incredulity was his portion. Thereafter he held his peace, protesting not at all when it
was generally agreed that the collapse of certain squalid brick houses in the Red Hook section of
Brooklyn, and the consequent death of many brave officers, had unseated his nervous equilibrium. He
had worked too hard, all said, in trying to clean up those nests of disorder and violence; certain
features were shocking enough, in all conscience, and the unexpected tragedy was the last straw.
This was a simple explanation which everyone could understand, and because Malone was not a
simple person he perceived that he had better let it suffice. To hint to unimaginative people of a
horror beyond all human conception--a horror of houses and blocks and cities leprous and cancerous
with evil dragged from elder worlds--would be merely to invite a padded cell instead of a restful
rustication, and Malone was a man of sense despite his mysticism. He had the Celt's far vision of
weird and hidden things, but the logician's quick eye for the outwardly unconvincing; an amalgam
which had led him far afield in the forty-two years of his life, and set him in strange places for a
Dublin University man born in a Georgian villa near Phoenix Park.
And now, as he reviewed the things he had seen and felt and apprehended, Malone was content to
keep unshared the secret of what could reduce a dauntless fighter to a quivering neurotic; what could
make old brick slums and seas of dark, subtle faces a thing of nightmare and eldritch portent. It would
not be the first time his sensations had been forced to bide uninterpreted--for was not his very act of
plunging into the polyglot abyss of New York's underworld a freak beyond sensible explanation?
What could he tell the prosaic of the antique witcheries and grotesque marvels discernible to
sensitive eyes amidst the poison cauldron where all the varied dregs of unwholesome ages mix their
venom and perpetuate their obscene terrors? He had seen the hellish green flame of secret wonder in
this blatant, evasive welter of outward greed and inward blasphemy, and had smiled gently when all
the New-Yorkers he knew scoffed at his experiment in police work. They had been very witty and
cynical, deriding his fantastic pursuit of unknowable mysteries and assuring him that in these days
New York held nothing but cheapness and vulgarity. One of them had wagered him a heavy sum that
he could not--despite many poignant things to his credit in the Dublin Review--even write a truly
interesting story of New York low life; and now, looking back, he perceived that cosmic irony had
justified the prophet's words while secretly confuting their flippant meaning. The horror, as
glimpsed at last, could not make a story--for like the book cited by Poe's German authority, 'es lsst
sich nicht lesen--it does not permit itself to be read.'
II
To Malone the sense of latent mystery in existence was always present. In youth he had felt the
hidden beauty and ecstasy of things, and had been a poet; but poverty and sorrow and exile had turned
his gaze in darker directions, and he had thrilled at the imputations of evil in the world around. Daily
life had for him come to be a phantasmagoria of macabre shadow-studies; now glittering and leering
with concealed rottenness as in Beardsley's best manner, now hinting terrors behind the commonest
shapes and objects as in the subtler and less obvious work of Gustave Dor. He would often regard
it as merciful that most persons of high intelligence jeer at the inmost mysteries; for, he argued, if
superior minds were ever placed in fullest contact with the secrets preserved by ancient and lowly
cults, the resultant abnormalities would soon not only wreck the world, but threaten the very integrity
of the universe. All this reflection was no doubt morbid, but keen logic and a deep sense of humour
ably offset it. Malone was satisfied to let his notions remain as half-spied and forbidden visions to be
lightly played with; and hysteria came only when duty flung him into a hell of revelation too sudden
and insidious to escape.
He had for some time been detailed to the Butler Street station in Brooklyn when the Red Hook
matter came to his notice. Red Hook is a maze of hybrid squalor near the ancient waterfront opposite
Governor's Island, with dirty highways climbing the hill from the wharves to that higher ground
where the decayed lengths of Clinton and Court Streets lead off toward the Borough Hall. Its houses
are mostly of brick, dating from the first quarter to the middle of the nineteenth century, and some of
the obscurer alleys and byways have that alluring antique flavour which conventional reading leads
us to call 'Dickensian'. The population is a hopeless tangle and enigma; Syrian, Spanish, Italian, and
Negro elements impinging upon one another, and fragments of Scandinavian and American belts lying
not far distant. It is a babel of sound and filth, and sends out strange cries to answer the lapping oily
waves at its grimy piers and the monstrous organ litanies of the harbour whistles. Here long ago a
brighter picture dwelt, with clear--eyed mariners on the lower streets and homes of taste and
substance where the larger houses line the hill. One can trace the relics of this former happiness in
the trim shapes of the buildings, the occasional graceful churches, and the evidences of original art
and background in bits of detail here and there--a worn flight of steps, a battered doorway, a wormy
pair of decorative columns or pilasters, or a fragment of once green space with bent and rusted iron
railing. The houses are generally in solid blocks, and now and then a many-windowed cupola arises
to tell of days when the households of captains and ship-owners watched the sea.
From this tangle of material and spiritual putrescence the blasphemies of an hundred dialects
assail the sky. Hordes of prowlers reel shouting and singing along the lanes and thoroughfares,
occasional furtive hands suddenly extinguish lights and pull down curtains, and swarthy, sin-pitted
faces disappear from windows when visitors pick their way through. Policemen despair of order or
reform, and seek rather to erect barriers protecting the outside world from the contagion. The clang
of the patrol is answered by a kind of spectral silence, and such prisoners as are taken are never
communicative. Visible offences are as varied as the local dialects, and run the gamut from the
smuggling of rum and prohibited aliens through diverse stages of lawlessness and obscure vice to
murder and mutilation in their most abhorrent guises. That these visible affairs are not more frequent
is not to the neighbourhood's credit, unless the power of concealment be an art demanding credit.
More people enter Red Hook than leave it--or at least, than leave it by the landward side--and those
who are not loquacious are the likeliest to leave.
Malone found in this state of things a faint stench of secrets more terrible than any of the sins
denounced by citizens and bemoaned by priests and philanthropists. He was conscious, as one who
united imagination with scientific knowledge, that modern people under lawless conditions tend
uncannily to repeat the darkest instinctive patterns of primitive half-ape savagery in their daily life
and ritual observances; and he had often viewed with an anthropologist's shudder the chanting,
cursing processions of blear-eyed and pockmarked young men which wound their way along in the
dark small hours of morning. One saw groups of these youths incessantly; sometimes in leering
vigils on street corners, sometimes in doorways playing eerily on cheap instruments of music,
sometimes in stupefied dozes or indecent dialogues around cafeteria tables near Borough Hall, and
sometimes in whispering converse around dingy taxicabs drawn up at the high stoops of crumbling
and closely shuttered old houses. They chilled and fascinated him more than he dared confess to his
associates on the force, for he seemed to see in them some monstrous thread of secret continuity;
some fiendish, cryptical, and ancient pattern utterly beyond and below the sordid mass of facts and
habits and haunts listed with such conscientious technical care by the police. They must be, he felt
inwardly, the heirs of some shocking and primordial tradition; the sharers of debased and broken
scraps from cults and ceremonies older than mankind. Their coherence and definiteness suggested it,
and it shewed in the singular suspicion of order which lurked beneath their squalid disorder. He had
not read in vain such treatises as Miss Murray's Witch-Cult in Western Europe; and knew that up to
recent years there had certainly survived among peasants and furtive folk a frightful and clandestine
system of assemblies and orgies descended from dark religions antedating the Aryan world, and
appearing in popular legends as Black Masses and Witches' Sabbaths. That these hellish vestiges of
old Turanian-Asiatic magic and fertility cults were even now wholly dead he could not for a moment
suppose, and he frequently wondered how much older and how much blacker than the very worst of
the muttered tales some of them might really be.
III
It was the case of Robert Suydam which took Malone to the heart of things in Red Hook. Suydam
was a lettered recluse of ancient Dutch family, possessed originally of barely independent means,
and inhabiting the spacious but ill-preserved mansion which his grandfather had built in Flatbush
when that village was little more than a pleasant group of colonial cottages surrounding the steepled
and ivy-clad Reformed Church with its iron-railed yard of Netherlandish gravestones. In his lonely
house, set back from Martense Street amidst a yard of venerable trees, Suydam had read and brooded
for some six decades except for a period a generation before, when he had sailed for the old world
and remained there out of sight for eight years. He could afford no servants, and would admit but few
visitors to his absolute solitude; eschewing close friendships and receiving his rare acquaintances in
one of the three ground-floor rooms which he kept in order--a vast, high-ceiled library whose walls
were solidly packed with tattered books of ponderous, archaic, and vaguely repellent aspect. The
growth of the town and its final absorption in the Brooklyn district had meant nothing to Suydam, and
he had come to mean less and less to the town. Elderly people still pointed him out on the streets, but
to most of the recent population he was merely a queer, corpulent old fellow whose unkempt white
hair, stubbly beard, shiny black clothes, and gold-headed cane earned him an amused glance and
nothing more. Malone did not know him by sight till duty called him to the case, but had heard of him
indirectly as a really profound authority on mediaeval superstition, and had once idly meant to look up
an out-of-print pamphlet of his on the Kabbalah and the Faustus legend, which a friend had quoted
from memory.
Suydam became a case when his distant and only relatives sought court pronouncements on his
sanity. Their action seemed sudden to the outside world, but was really undertaken only after
prolonged observation and sorrowful debate. It was based on certain odd changes in his speech and
habits; wild references to impending wonders, and unaccountable hauntings of disreputable Brooklyn
neighbourhoods. He had been growing shabbier and shabbier with the years, and now prowled about
like a veritable mendicant; seen occasionally by humiliated friends in subway stations, or loitering on
the benches around Borough Hall in conversation with groups of swarthy, evil-looking strangers.
When he spoke it was to babble of unlimited powers almost within his grasp, and to repeat with
knowing leers such mystical words or names as 'Sephiroth', 'Ashmodai', and 'Samal'. The court
action revealed that he was using up his income and wasting his principal in the purchase of curious
tomes imported from London and Paris, and in the maintenance of a squalid basement flat in the Red
Hook district where he spent nearly every night, receiving odd delegations of mixed rowdies and
foreigners, and apparently conducting some kind of ceremonial service behind the green blinds of
secretive windows. Detectives assigned to follow him reported strange cries and chants and prancing
of feet filtering out from these nocturnal rites, and shuddered at their peculiar ecstasy and abandon
despite the commonness of weird orgies in that sodden section. When, however, the matter came to a
hearing, Suydam managed to preserve his liberty. Before the judge his manner grew urbane and
reasonable, and he freely admitted the queerness of demeanour and extravagant cast of language into
which he had fallen through excessive devotion to study and research. He was, he said, engaged in
the investigation of certain details of European tradition which required the closest contact with
foreign groups and their songs and folk dances. The notion that any low secret society was preying
upon him, as hinted by his relatives, was obviously absurd; and shewed how sadly limited was their
understanding of him and his work. Triumphing with his calm explanations, he was suffered to depart
unhindered; and the paid detectives of the Suydams, Corlears, and Van Brunts were withdrawn in
resigned disgust.
It was here that an alliance of Federal inspectors and police, Malone with them, entered the case.
The law had watched the Suydam action with interest, and had in many instances been called upon to
aid the private detectives. In this work it developed that Suydam's new associates were among the
blackest and most vicious criminals of Red Hook's devious lanes, and that at least a third of them
were known and repeated offenders in the matter of thievery, disorder, and the importation of illegal
immigrants. Indeed, it would not have been too much to say that the old scholar's particular circle
coincided almost perfectly with the worst of the organized cliques which smuggled ashore certain
nameless and unclassified Asian dregs wisely turned back by Ellis Island. In the teeming rookeries of
Parker Place--since renamed--where Suydam had his basement flat, there had grown up a very
unusual colony of unclassified slant-eyed folk who used the Arabic alphabet but were eloquently
repudiated by the great mass of Syrians in and around Atlantic Avenue. They could all have been
deported for lack of credentials, but legalism is slow-moving, and one does not disturb Red Hook
unless publicity forces one to.
These creatures attended a tumbledown stone church, used Wednesdays as a dance-hall, which
reared its Gothic buttresses near the vilest part of the waterfront. It was nominally Catholic; but
priests throughout Brooklyn denied the place all standing and authenticity, and policemen agreed with
them when they listened to the noises it emitted at night. Malone used to fancy he heard terrible
cracked bass notes from a hidden organ far underground when the church stood empty and unlighted,
whilst all observers dreaded the shrieking and drumming which accompanied the visible services.
Suydam, when questioned, said he thought the ritual was some remnant of Nestorian Christianity
tinctured with the Shamanism of Thibet. Most of the people, he conjectured, were of Mongoloid
stock, originating somewhere in or near Kurdistan--and Malone could not help recalling that
Kurdistan is the land of the Yezidis, last survivors of the Persian devil-worshippers. However this
may have been, the stir of the Suydam investigation made it certain that these unauthorised newcomers
were flooding Red Hook in increasing numbers; entering through some marine conspiracy unreached
by revenue officers and harbour police, overrunning Parker Place and rapidly spreading up the hill,
and welcomed with curious fraternalism by the other assorted denizens of the region. Their squat
figures and characteristic squinting physiognomies, grotesquely combined with flashy American
clothing, appeared more and more numerously among the loafers and nomad gangsters of the
Borough Hall section; till at length it was deemed necessary to compute their numbers, ascertain
their sources and occupations, and find if possible a way to round them up and deliver them to the
proper immigration authorities. To this task Malone was assigned by agreement of Federal and city
forces, and as he commenced his canvass of Red Hook he felt poised upon the brink of nameless
terrors, with the shabby, unkempt figure of Robert Suydam as arch-fiend and adversary.
IV
Police methods are varied and ingenious. Malone, through unostentatious rambles, carefully
casual conversations, well-timed offers of hip-pocket liquor, and judicious dialogues with
frightened prisoners, learned many isolated facts about the movement whose aspect had become so
menacing. The newcomers were indeed Kurds, but of a dialect obscure and puzzling to exact
philology. Such of them as worked lived mostly as dock-hands and unlicenced pedlars, though
frequently serving in Greek restaurants and tending corner news stands. Most of them, however, had
no visible means of support; and were obviously connected with underworld pursuits, of which
smuggling and 'bootlegging' were the least indescribable. They had come in steamships, apparently
tramp freighters, and had been unloaded by stealth on moonless nights in rowboats which stole under
a certain wharf and followed a hidden canal to a secret subterranean pool beneath a house. This
wharf, canal, and house Malone could not locate, for the memories of his informants were
exceedingly confused, while their speech was to a great extent beyond even the ablest interpreters;
nor could he gain any real data on the reasons for their systematic importation. They were reticent
about the exact spot from which they had come, and were never sufficiently off guard to reveal the
agencies which had sought them out and directed their course. Indeed, they developed something
like acute fright when asked the reasons for their presence. Gangsters of other breeds were equally
taciturn, and the most that could be gathered was that some god or great priesthood had promised
them unheard-of powers and supernatural glories and rulerships in a strange land.
The attendance of both newcomers and old gangsters at Suydam's closely guarded nocturnal
meetings was very regular, and the police soon learned that the erstwhile recluse had leased
additional flats to accommodate such guests as knew his password; at last occupying three entire
houses and permanently harbouring many of his queer companions. He spent but little time now at his
Flatbush home, apparently going and coming only to obtain and return books; and his face and manner
had attained an appalling pitch of wildness. Malone twice interviewed him, but was each time
brusquely repulsed. He knew nothing, he said, of any mysterious plots or movements; and had no idea
how the Kurds could have entered or what they wanted. His business was to study undisturbed the
folklore of all the immigrants of the district; a business with which policemen had no legitimate
concern. Malone mentioned his admiration for Suydam's old brochure on the Kabbalah and other
myths, but the old man's softening was only momentary. He sensed an intrusion, and rebuffed his
visitor in no uncertain way; till Malone withdrew disgusted, and turned to other channels of
information.
What Malone would have unearthed could he have worked continuously on the case, we shall
never know. As it was, a stupid conflict between city and Federal authority suspended the
investigations for several months, during which the detective was busy with other assignments. But at
no time did he lose interest, or fail to stand amazed at what began to happen to Robert Suydam. Just at
the time when a wave of kidnappings and disappearances spread its excitement over New York, the
unkempt scholar embarked upon a metamorphosis as startling as it was absurd. One day he was seen
near Borough Hall with clean-shaved face, well-trimmed hair, and tastefully immaculate attire, and on
every day thereafter some obscure improvement was noticed in him. He maintained his new
fastidiousness without interruption, added to it an unwonted sparkle of eye and crispness of speech,
and began little by little to shed the corpulence which had so long deformed him. Now frequently
taken for less than his age, he acquired an elasticity of step and buoyancy of demeanour to match the
new tradition, and shewed a curious darkening of the hair which somehow did not suggest dye. As
the months passed, he commenced to dress less and less conservatively, and finally astonished his
new friends by renovating and redecorating his Flatbush mansion, which he threw open in a series of
receptions, summoning all the acquaintances he could remember, and extending a special welcome to
the fully forgiven relatives who had so lately sought his restraint. Some attended through curiosity,
others through duty; but all were suddenly charmed by the dawning grace and urbanity of the former
hermit. He had, he asserted, accomplished most of his allotted work; and having just inherited some
property from a half--forgotten European friend, was about to spend his remaining years in a brighter
second youth which ease, care, and diet had made possible to him. Less and less was he seen at Red
Hook, and more and more did he move in the society to which he was born. Policemen noted a
tendency of the gangsters to congregate at the old stone church and dance-hall instead of at the
basement flat in Parker Place, though the latter and its recent annexes still overflowed with noxious
life.
Then two incidents occurred--wide enough apart, but both of intense interest in the case as
Malone envisaged it. One was a quiet announcement in the Eagle of Robert Suydam's engagement to
Miss Cornelia Gerritsen of Bayside, a young woman of excellent position, and distantly related to the
elderly bridegroom-elect; whilst the other was a raid on the dance-hall church by city police, after a
report that the face of a kidnapped child had been seen for a second at one of the basement windows.
Malone had participated in this raid, and studied the place with much care when inside. Nothing was
found--in fact, the building was entirely deserted when visited--but the sensitive Celt was vaguely
disturbed by many things about the interior. There were crudely painted panels he did not like--panels
which depicted sacred faces with peculiarly worldly and sardonic expressions, and which
occasionally took liberties that even a layman's sense of decorum could scarcely countenance. Then,
too, he did not relish the Greek inscription on the wall above the pulpit; an ancient incantation which
he had once stumbled upon in Dublin college days, and which read, literally translated,
'O friend and companion of night, thou who rejoicest in the baying of dogs and spilt blood, who
wanderest in the midst of shades among the tombs, who longest for blood and bringest terror to
mortals, Gorgo, Mormo, look favourably on our sacrifices!'
When he read this he shuddered, and thought vaguely of the cracked bass organ notes he fancied
he had heard beneath the church on certain nights. He shuddered again at the rust around the rim of a
metal basin which stood on the altar, and paused nervously when his nostrils seemed to detect a
curious and ghastly stench from somewhere in the neighbourhood. That organ memory haunted him,
and he explored the basement with particular assiduity before he left. The place was very hateful to
him; yet after all, were the blasphemous panels and inscriptions more than mere crudities perpetrated
by the ignorant?
By the time of Suydam's wedding the kidnapping epidemic had become a popular newspaper
scandal. Most of the victims were young children of the lowest classes, but the increasing number of
disappearances had worked up a sentiment of the strongest fury. Journals clamoured for action from
the police, and once more the Butler Street Station sent its men over Red Hook for clues,
discoveries, and criminals. Malone was glad to be on the trail again, and took pride in a raid on one of
Suydam's Parker Place houses. There, indeed, no stolen child was found, despite the tales of screams
and the red sash picked up in the areaway; but the paintings and rough inscriptions on the peeling
walls of most of the rooms, and the primitive chemical laboratory in the attic, all helped to convince
the detective that he was on the track of something tremendous. The paintings were appalling--
hideous monsters of every shape and size, and parodies on human outlines which cannot be
described. The writing was in red, and varied from Arabic to Greek, Roman, and Hebrew letters.
Malone could not read much of it, but what he did decipher was portentous and cabbalistic enough.
One frequently repeated motto was in a Sort of Hebraised Hellenistic Greek, and suggested the most
terrible daemon-evocations of the Alexandrian decadence:
'HEL-HELOYM-SOTHER-EMMANVEL-SABAOTH-AGLA-
TETRAGRAMMATON-AGYROS-OTHEOS-ISCHYROS-
ATHANATOS-IEHOVA-VA-ADONAI-SADAY-HOMOVSION-
MESSIAS-ESCHEREHEYE'
Circles and pentagrams loomed on every hand, and told indubitably of the strange beliefs and
aspirations of those who dwelt so squalidly here. In the cellar, however, the strangest thing was
found--a pile of genuine gold ingots covered carelessly with a piece of burlap, and bearing upon
their shining surfaces the same weird hieroglyphics which also adorned the walls. During the raid
the police encountered only a passive resistance from the squinting Orientals that swarmed from
every door. Finding nothing relevant, they had to leave all as it was; but the precinct captain wrote
Suydam a note advising him to look closely to the character of his tenants and protgs in view of the
growing public clamour.
V
Then came the June wedding and the great sensation. Flatbush was gay for the hour about high
noon, and pennanted motors thronged the streets near the old Dutch church where an awning stretched
from door to highway. No local event ever surpassed the Suydam-Gerritsen nuptials in tone and
scale, and the party which escorted bride and groom to the Cunard Pier was, if not exactly the
smartest, at least a solid page from the Social Register. At five o'clock adieux were waved, and the
ponderous liner edged away from the long pier, slowly turned its nose seaward, discarded its tug,
and headed for the widening water spaces that led to old world wonders. By night the outer harbour
was cleared, and late passengers watched the stars twinkling above an unpolluted ocean.
Whether the tramp steamer or the scream was first to gain attention, no one can say. Probably they
were simultaneous, but it is of no use to calculate. The scream came from the Suydam stateroom, and
the sailor who broke down the door could perhaps have told frightful things if he had not forthwith
gone completely mad--as it is, he shrieked more loudly than the first victims, and thereafter ran
simpering about the vessel till caught and put in irons. The ship's doctor who entered the stateroom
and turned on the lights a moment later did not go mad, but told nobody what he saw till afterward,
when he corresponded with Malone in Chepachet. It was murder--strangulation--but one need not say
that the claw-mark on Mrs. Suydam's throat could not have come from her husband's or any other
human hand, or that upon the white wall there flickered for an instant in hateful red a legend which,
later copied from memory, seems to have been nothing less than the fearsome Chaldee letters of the
word 'LILITH'. One need not mention these things because they vanished so quickly--as for Suydam,
one could at least bar others from the room until one knew what to think oneself. The doctor has
distinctly assured Malone that he did not see IT. The open porthole, just before he turned on the
lights, was clouded for a second with a certain phosphorescence, and for a moment there seemed to
echo in the night outside the suggestion of a faint and hellish tittering; but no real outline met the eye.
As proof, the doctor points to his continued sanity.
Then the tramp steamer claimed all attention. A boat put off, and a horde of swart, insolent
ruffians in officers' dress swarmed aboard the temporarily halted Cunarder. They wanted Suydam or
his body--they had known of his trip, and for certain reasons were sure he would die. The captain's
deck was almost a pandemonium; for at the instant, between the doctor's report from the stateroom and
the demands of the men from the tramp, not even the wisest and gravest seaman could think what to do.
Suddenly the leader of the visiting mariners, an Arab with a hatefully negroid mouth, pulled forth a
dirty, crumpled paper and handed it to the captain. It was signed by Robert Suydam, and bore the
following odd message.
Captain and doctor looked at each other, and the latter whispered something to the former. Finally
they nodded rather helplessly and led the way to the Suydam stateroom. The doctor directed the
captain's glance away as he unlocked the door and admitted the strange seamen, nor did he breathe
easily till they filed out with their burden after an unaccountably long period of preparation. It was
wrapped in bedding from the berths, and the doctor was glad that the outlines were not very
revealing. Somehow the men got the thing over the side and away to their tramp steamer without
uncovering it. The Cunarder started again, and the doctor and a ship's undertaker sought out the
Suydam stateroorn to perform what last services they could. Once more the physician was forced to
reticence and even to mendacity, for a hellish thing had happened. When the undertaker asked him
why he had drained off all of Mrs. Suydam's blood, he neglected to affirm that he had not done so;
nor did he point to the vacant bottle-spaces on the rack, or to the odour in the sink which shewed the
hasty disposition of the bottles' original contents. The pockets of those men--if men they were--had
bulged damnably when they left the ship. Two hours later, and the world knew by radio all that it
ought to know of the horrible affair.
VI
That same June evening, without having heard a word from the sea, Malone was desperately busy
among the alleys of Red Hook. A sudden stir seemed to permeate the place, and as if apprised by
'grapevine telegraph' of something singular, the denizens clustered expectantly around the dance-hall
church and the houses in Parker Place. Three children had just disappeared--blue-eyed Norwegians
from the streets toward Gowanus--and there were rumours of a mob forming among the sturdy
Vikings of that section. Malone had for weeks been urging his colleagues to attempt a general
cleanup; and at last, moved by conditions more obvious to their common sense than the conjectures of
a Dublin dreamer, they had agreed upon a final stroke. The unrest and menace of this evening had
been the deciding factor, and just about midnight a raiding party recruited from three stations
descended upon Parker Place and its environs. Doors were battered in, stragglers arrested, and
candlelighted rooms forced to disgorge unbelievable throngs of mixed foreigners in figured robes,
mitres, and other inexplicable devices. Much was lost in the melee, for objects were thrown hastily
down unexpected shafts, and betraying odours deadened by the sudden kindling of pungent incense.
But spattered blood was everywhere, and Malone shuddered whenever he saw a brazier or altar from
which the smoke was still rising.
He wanted to be in several places at once, and decided on Suydam's basement flat only after a
messenger had reported the complete emptiness of the dilapidated dance-hall church. The flat, he
thought, must hold some clue to a cult of which the occult scholar had so obviously become the
centre and leader; and it was with real expectancy that he ransacked the musty rooms, noted their
vaguely charnel odour, and examined the curious books, instruments, gold ingots, and glass-
stoppered bottles scattered carelessly here and there. Once a lean, black-and-white cat edged
between his feet and tripped him, overturning at the same time a beaker half full of a red liquid. The
shock was severe, and to this day Malone is not certain of what he saw; but in dreams he still pictures
that cat as it scuttled away with certain monstrous alterations and peculiarities. Then came the locked
cellar door, and the search for something to break it down. A heavy stool stood near, and its tough
seat was more than enough for the antique panels. A crack formed and enlarged, and the whole door
gave way--but from the other side; whence poured a howling tumult of ice-cold wind with all the
stenches of the bottomless pit, and whence reached a sucking force not of earth or heaven, which,
coiling sentiently about the paralysed detective, dragged him through the aperture and down
unmeasured spaces filled with whispers and wails, and gusts of mocking laughter.
Of course it was a dream. All the specialists have told him so, and he has nothing to prove the
contrary. Indeed, he would rather have it thus; for then the sight of old brick slums and dark foreign
faces would not eat so deeply into his soul. But at the time it was all horribly real, and nothing can
ever efface the memory of those nighted crypts, those titan arcades, and those half-formed shapes of
hell that strode gigantically in silence holding half-eaten things whose still surviving portions
screamed for mercy or laughed with madness. Odours of incense and corruption joined in sickening
concert, and the black air was alive with the cloudy, semi-visible bulk of shapeless elemental things
with eyes. Somewhere dark sticky water was lapping at onyx piers, and once the shivery tinkle of
raucous little bells pealed out to greet the insane titter of a naked phosphorescent thing which swam
into sight, scrambled ashore, and climbed up to squat leeringly on a carved golden pedestal in the
background.
Avenues of limitless night seemed to radiate in every direction, till one might fancy that here lay
the root of a contagion destined to sicken and swallow cities, and engulf nations in the foetor of
hybrid pestilence. Here cosmic sin had entered, and festered by unhallowed rites had commenced the
grinning march of death that was to rot us all to fungous abnormalities too hideous for the grave's
holding. Satan here held his Babylonish court, and in the blood of stainless childhood the leprous
limbs of phosphorescent Lilith were laved. Incubi and succubae howled praise to Hecate, and
headless moon-calves bleated to the Magna Mater. Goats leaped to the sound of thin accursed flutes,
and aegipans chased endlessly after misshapen fauns over rocks twisted like swollen toads. Moloch
and Ashtaroth were not absent; for in this quintessence of all damnation the bounds of consciousness
were let down, and man's fancy lay open to vistas of every realm of horror and every forbidden
dimension that evil had power to mould. The world and Nature were helpless against such assaults
from unsealed wells of night, nor could any sign or prayer check the Walpurgis-riot of horror which
had come when a sage with the hateful key had stumbled on a horde with the locked and brimming
coffer of transmitted daemon-lore.
Suddenly a ray of physical light shot through these phantasms, and Malone heard the sound of
oars amidst the blasphemies of things that should be dead. A boat with a lantern in its prow darted into
sight, made fast to an iron ring in the slimy stone pier, and vomited forth several dark men bearing a
long burden swathed in bedding. They took it to the naked phosphorescent thing on the carved golden
pedestal, and the thing tittered and pawed at the bedding. Then they unswathed it, and propped upright
before the pedestal the gangrenous corpse of a corpulent old man with stubbly beard and unkempt
white hair. The phosphorescent thing tittered again, and the men produced bottles from their pockets
and anointed its feet with red, whilst they afterward gave the bottles to the thing to drink from.
All at once, from an arcaded avenue leading endlessly away, there came the daemoniac rattle and
wheeze of a blasphemous organ, choking and rumbling out the mockeries of hell in a cracked,
sardonic bass. In an instant every moving entity was electrified; and forming at once into a ceremonial
procession, the nightmare horde slithered away in quest of the sound--goat, satyr, and aegipan,
incubus, succubus and lemur, twisted toad and shapeless elemental, dog-faced howler and silent
strutter in darkness--all led by the abominable naked phosphorescent thing that had squatted on the
carved golden throne, and that now strode insolently bearing in its arms the glassy-eyed corpse of the
corpulent old man. The strange dark men danced in the rear, and the whole column skipped and leaped
with Dionysiac fury. Malone staggered after them a few steps, delirious and hazy, and doubtful of his
place in this or in any world. Then he turned, faltered, and sank down on the cold damp stone, gasping
and shivering as the daemon organ croaked on, and the howling and drumming and tinkling of the mad
procession grew fainter and fainter.
Vaguely he was conscious of chanted horrors and shocking croakings afar off. Now and then a
wail or whine of ceremonial devotion would float to him through the black arcade, whilst eventually
there rose the dreadful Greek incantation whose text he had read above the pulpit of that dance-hall
church.
As the chant closed, a general shout went up, and hissing sounds nearly drowned the croaking of
the cracked bass organ. Then a gasp as from many throats, and a babel of barked and bleated words--
'Lilith, Great Lilith, behold the Bridegroom!' More cries, a clamour of rioting, and the sharp,
clicking footfalls of a running figure. The footfalls approached, and Malone raised himself to his
elbow to look.
The luminosity of the crypt, lately diminished, had now slightly increased; and in that devil-light
there appeared the fleeing form of that which should not flee or feel or breathe--the glassy-eyed,
gangrenous corpse of the corpulent old man, now needing no support, but animated by some infernal
sorcery of the rite just closed. After it raced the naked, tittering, phosphorescent thing that belonged
on the carven pedestal, and still farther behind panted the dark men, and all the dread crew of sentient
loathsomenesses. The corpse was gaining on its pursuers, and seemed bent on a definite object,
straining with every rotting muscle toward the carved golden pedestal, whose necromantic
importance was evidently so great. Another moment and it had reached its goal, whilst the trailing
throng laboured on with more frantic speed. But they were too late, for in one final spurt of strength
which ripped tendon from tendon and sent its noisome bulk floundering to the floor in a state of
jellyish dissolution, the staring corpse which had been Robert Suydam achieved its object and its
triumph. The push had been tremendous, but the force had held out; and as the pusher collapsed to a
muddy blotch of corruption the pedestal he had pushed tottered, tipped, and finally careened from its
onyx base into the thick waters below, sending up a parting gleam of carven gold as it sank heavily to
undreamable gulfs of lower Tartarus. In that instant, too, the whole scene of horror faded to
nothingness before Malone's eyes; and he fainted amidst a thunderous crash which seemed to blot out
all the evil universe.
VII
Malone's dream, experienced in full before he knew of Suydam's death and transfer at sea, was
curiously supplemented by some odd realities of the case; though that is no reason why anyone
should believe it. The three old houses in Parker Place, doubtless long rotten with decay in its most
insidious form, collapsed without visible cause while half the raiders and most of the prisoners were
inside; and of both the greater number were instantly killed. Only in the basements and cellars was
there much saving of life, and Malone was lucky to have been deep below the house of Robert
Suydam. For he really was there, as no one is disposed to deny. They found him unconscious by the
edge of a night-black pool, with a grotesquely horrible jumble of decay and bone, identifiable
through dental work as the body of Suydam, a few feet away. The case was plain, for it was hither
that the smugglers' underground canal led; and the men who took Suydam from the ship had brought
him home. They themselves were never found, or at least never identified; and the ship's doctor is not
yet satisfied with the simple certitudes of the police.
Suydam was evidently a leader in extensive man-smuggling operations, for the canal to his house
was but one of several subterranean channels and tunnels in the neighbourhood. There was a tunnel
from this house to a crypt beneath the dance-hall church; a crypt accessible from the church only
through a narrow secret passage in the north wall, and in whose chambers some singular and terrible
things were discovered. The croaking organ was there, as well as a vast arched chapel with wooden
benches and a strangely figured altar. The walls were lined with small cells, in seventeen of which--
hideous to relate--solitary prisoners in a state of complete idiocy were found chained, including four
mothers with infants of disturbingly strange appearance. These infants died soon after exposure to
the light; a circumstance which the doctors thought rather merciful. Nobody but Malone, among
those who inspected them, remembered the sombre question of old Delrio: 'An sint unquam daemones
incubi et succubae, et an ex tali congressu proles nasci queat?'
Before the canals were filled up they were thoroughly dredged, and yielded forth a sensational
array of sawed and split bones of all sizes. The kidnapping epidemic, very clearly, had been traced
home; though only two of the surviving prisoners could by any legal thread be connected with it.
These men are now in prison, since they failed of conviction as accessories in the actual murders.
The carved golden pedestal or throne so often mentioned by Malone as of primary occult importance
was never brought to light, though at one place under the Suydam house the canal was observed to
sink into a well too deep for dredging. It was choked up at the mouth and cemented over when the
cellars of the new houses were made, but Malone often speculates on what lies beneath. The police,
satisfied that they had shattered a dangerous gang of maniacs and man-smugglers, turned over to the
Federal authorities the unconvicted Kurds, who before their deportation were conclusively found to
belong to the Yezidi clan of devil-worshippers. The tramp ship and its crew remain an elusive
mystery, though cynical detectives are once more ready to combat its smuggling and rum-running
ventures. Malone thinks these detectives shew a sadly limited perspective in their lack of wonder at
the myriad unexplainable details, and the suggestive obscurity of the whole case; though he is just as
critical of the newspapers, which saw only a morbid sensation and gloated over a minor sadist cult
which they might have proclaimed a horror from the universe's very heart. But he is content to rest
silent in Chepachet, calming his nervous system and praying that time may gradually transfer his
terrible experience from the realm of present reality to that of picturesque and semi-mythical
remoteness.
Robert Suydam sleeps beside his bride in Greenwood Cemetery. No funeral was held over the
strangely released bones, and relatives are grateful for the swift oblivion which overtook the case as
a whole. The scholar's connexion with the Red Hook horrors, indeed, was never emblazoned by
legal proof; since his death forestalled the inquiry he would otherwise have faced. His own end is
not much mentioned, and the Suydams hope that posterity may recall him only as a gentle recluse who
dabbled in harmless magic and folklore.
As for Red Hook--it is always the same. Suydam came and went; a terror gathered and faded; but
the evil spirit of darkness and squalor broods on amongst the mongrels in the old brick houses, and
prowling bands still parade on unknown errands past windows where lights and twisted faces
unaccountably appear and disappear. Age-old horror is a hydra with a thousand heads, and the cults
of darkness are rooted in blasphemies deeper than the well of Democritus. The soul of the beast is
omnipresent and triumphant, and Red Hook's legions of blear-eyed, pockmarked youths still chant and
curse and howl as they file from abyss to abyss, none knows whence or whither, pushed on by blind
laws of biology which they may never understand. As of old, more people enter Red Hook than leave
it on the landward side, and there are already rumours of new canals running underground to certain
centres of traffic in liquor and less mentionable things.
The dance-hall church is now mostly a dance-hall, and queer faces have appeared at night at the
windows. Lately a policeman expressed the belief that the filled-up crypt has been dug out again, and
for no simply explainable purpose. Who are we to combat poisons older than history and mankind?
Apes danced in Asia to those horrors, and the cancer lurks secure and spreading where furtiveness
hides in rows of decaying brick.
Malone does not shudder without cause--for only the other day an officer overheard a swarthy
squinting hag teaching a small child some whispered patois in the shadow of an areaway. He listened,
and thought it very strange when he heard her repeat over and over again.
'O friend and companion of night, thou who rejoicest in the baying of dogs and spilt blood, who
wanderest in the midst of shades among the tombs, who longest for blood and bringest terror to
mortals, Gorgo, Mormo, look favourably on our sacrifices!'

THE HOUND
In my tortured ears there sounds unceasingly a nightmare whirring and flapping, and a faint distant
baying as of some gigantic hound. It is not dream--it is not, I fear, even madness--for too much has
already happened to give me these merciful doubts.
St John is a mangled corpse; I alone know why, and such is my knowledge that I am about to blow
out my brains for fear I shall be mangled in the same way. Down unlit and illimitable corridors of
eldrith phantasy sweeps the black, shapeless Nemesis that drives me to self-annihilation.
May heaven forgive the folly and morbidity which led us both to so monstrous a fate! Wearied
with the commonplaces of a prosaic world; where even the joys of romance and adventure soon
grow stale, St John and I had followed enthusiastically every aesthetic and intellectual movement
which promised respite from our devastating ennui. The enigmas of the symbolists and the ecstasies
of the pre-Raphaelites all were ours in their time, but each new mood was drained too soon, of its
diverting novelty and appeal.
Only the somber philosophy of the decadents could help us, and this we found potent only by
increasing gradually the depth and diablism 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 expedition, or catalogue even partly the worst of the
trophies adorning the nameless museum 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 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 line of red charnel things
hand in hand woven in voluminous black hangings. Through these pipes came at will the odors our
moods most craved; sometimes the scent of pale funeral lilies; sometimes the narcotic incense of
imagined Eastern shrines of the kingly dead, and sometimes--how I shudder to recall it!--the
frightful, soul-upheaving stenches of the uncovered-grave.
Around the walls of this repellent chamber were cases of antique mummies alternating with
comely, lifelike bodies perfectly stuffed and cured by the taxidermist's art, and with headstones
snatched from the oldest churchyards of the world. Niches here and there contained skulls of all
shapes, and heads preserved in various stages of dissolution. There one might find the rotting, bald
pates of famous noblemen, and the flesh and radiantly golden heads of new-buried children.
Statues and painting there were, all of fiendish subjects and some executed by St John and myself.
A locked portfolio, bound in tanned human skin, held certain unknown and unnameable drawings
which it was rumored Goya had perpetrated but dared not acknowledge. There were nauseous
musical instruments, stringed, brass, 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 destroy it long before I thought of
destroying myself!
The predatory excursions on which we collected our unmentionable treasures were always
artistically memorable events. We were no vulgar ghouls, but worked only under certain conditions
of mood, landscape, environment, weather, season, and moonlight. These pastimes were to us the
most exquisite form of aesthetic expression, and we gave their details a fastidious technical care. An
inappropriate hour, a jarring lighting effect, or a clumsy manipulation of the damp sod, would almost
totally destroy for us that ecstatic titillation which followed the exhumation of some ominous,
grinning secret of the earth. Our quest for novel scenes and piquant conditions was feverish and
insatiate--St John was always the leader, and he it was who led the way at last to that mocking,
accursed spot which brought us our hideous and inevitable doom.
By what malign fatality were we lured to that terrible Holland churchyard? I think it was the dark
rumor and legendry, the tales of one buried for five centuries, who had himself been a ghoul in his
time and had stolen a potent thing from a mighty sepulchre. I can recall the scene in these final
moments--the pale autumnal moon over the graves, casting long horrible shadows; the grotesque
trees, drooping sullenly to meet the neglected grass and the crumbling slabs; the vast legions of
strangely colossal bats that flew against the moon; the antique ivied church pointing a huge spectral
finger at the livid sky; the phosphorescent insects that danced like death-fires under the yews in a
distant corner; the odors of mould, vegetation, and less explicable things that mingled feebly with the
night-wind from over far swamps and seas; and, worst of all, the faint deep-toned baying of some
gigantic hound which we could neither see nor definitely place. As we heard this suggestion of
baying we shuddered, remembering the tales of the peasantry; for he whom we sought had centuries
before been found in this self same spot, torn and mangled by the claws and teeth of some
unspeakable beast.
I remember how we delved in the ghoul's grave with our spades, and how we thrilled at the
picture of ourselves, the grave, the pale watching moon, the horrible shadows, the grotesque trees,
the titanic bats, the antique church, the dancing death-fires, the sickening odors, the gently moaning
night-wind, and the strange, half-heard directionless baying of whose objective existence we could
scarcely be sure.
Then we struck a substance harder than the damp mould, and beheld a rotting oblong box crusted
with mineral deposits from the long undisturbed ground. It was incredibly tough and thick, but so old
that we finally pried it open and feasted our eyes on what it held.
Much--amazingly much--was left of the object despite the lapse of five hundred years. The
skeleton, though crushed in places by the jaws of the thing that had killed it, held together with
surprising firmness, and we gloated over the clean white skull and its long, firm teeth and its eyeless
sockets that once had glowed with a charnel fever like our own. In the coffin lay an amulet of curious
and exotic design, which had apparently been worn around the sleeper's neck. It was the oddly
conventionalised figure of a crouching winged hound, or sphinx with a semi-canine face, and was
exquisitely carved in antique Oriental fashion from a small piece of green jade. The expression of its
features was repellent in the extreme, savoring at once of death, bestiality and malevolence. Around
the base was an inscription in characters which neither St John nor I could identify; and on the bottom,
like a maker's seal, was graven a grotesque and formidable skull.
Immediately upon beholding this amulet we knew that we must possess it; that this treasure alone
was our logical pelf from the centuried grave. Even had its outlines been unfamiliar we would have
desired it, but as we looked more closely we saw that it was not wholly unfamiliar. Alien it indeed
was to all art and literature which sane and balanced readers know, but we recognized it as the thing
hinted of in the forbidden Necronomicon of the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred; the ghastly soul-symbol
of the corpse-eating cult of inaccessible Leng, in Central Asia. All too well did we trace the sinister
lineaments described by the old Arab daemonologist; lineaments, he wrote, drawn from some
obscure supernatural manifestation of the souls of those who vexed and gnawed at the dead.
Seizing the green jade object, we gave a last glance at the bleached and cavern-eyed face of its
owner and closed up the grave as we found it. As we hastened from the abhorrent spot, the stolen
amulet in St John's pocket, we thought we saw the bats descend in a body to the earth we had so lately
rifled, as if seeking for some cursed and unholy nourishment. But the autumn moon shone weak and
pale, and we could not be sure.
So, too, as we sailed the next day away from Holland to our home, we thought we heard the faint
distant baying of some gigantic hound in the background. But the autumn wind moaned sad and wan,
and we could not be sure.
Less than a week after our return to England, strange things began to happen. We lived as
recluses; devoid of friends, alone, and without servants in a few rooms of an ancient manor-house on
a bleak and unfrequented moor; so that our doors were seldom disturbed by the knock of the visitor.
Now, however, we were troubled by what seemed to be a frequent fumbling in the night, not only
around the doors but around the windows also, upper as well as lower. Once we fancied that a large,
opaque body darkened the library window when the moon was shining against it, and another time we
thought we heard a whirring or flapping sound not far off. On each occasion investigation revealed
nothing, and we began to ascribe the occurrences to imagination which still prolonged in our ears the
faint far baying we thought we had heard in the Holland churchyard. The jade amulet now reposed in
a niche in our museum, and sometimes we burned a strangely scented candle before it. We read much
in Alhazred's Necronomicon about its properties, and about the relation of ghosts' souls to the
objects it symbolized; and were disturbed by what we read.
Then terror came.
On the night of September 24, 19--, I heard a knock at my chamber door. Fancying it St John's, I
bade the knocker enter, but was answered only by a shrill laugh. There was no one in the corridor.
When I aroused St John from his sleep, he professed entire ignorance of the event, and became as
worried as I. It was the night that the faint, distant baying over the moor became to us a certain and
dreaded reality.
Four days later, whilst we were both in the hidden museum, there came a low, cautious scratching
at the single door which led to the secret library staircase. Our alarm was now divided, for, besides
our fear of the unknown, we had always entertained a dread that our grisly collection might be
discovered. Extinguishing all lights, we proceeded to the door and threw it suddenly open;
whereupon we felt an unaccountable rush of air, and heard, as if receding far away, a queer
combination of rustling, tittering, and articulate chatter. Whether we were mad, dreaming, or in our
senses, we did not try to determine. We only realized, with the blackest of apprehensions, that the
apparently disembodied chatter was beyond a doubt in the Dutch language.
After that we lived in growing horror and fascination. Mostly we held to the theory that we were
jointly going mad from our life of unnatural excitements, but sometimes it pleased us more to
dramatize ourselves as the victims of some creeping and appalling doom. Bizarre manifestations
were now too frequent to count. Our lonely house was seemingly alive with the presence of some
malign being whose nature we could not guess, and every night that daemoniac baying rolled over the
wind-swept moor, always louder and louder. On October 29 we found in the soft earth underneath the
library window a series of footprints utterly impossible to describe. They were as baffling as the
hordes of great bats which haunted the old manor-house in unprecedented and increasing numbers.
The horror reached a culmination on November 18, when St John, walking home after dark from
the dismal railway station, was seized by some frightful carnivorous thing and torn to ribbons. His
screams had reached the house, and I had hastened to the terrible scene in time to hear a whir of
wings and see a vague black cloudy thing silhouetted against the rising moon.
My friend was dying when I spoke to him, and he could not answer coherently. All he could do
was to whisper, "The amulet--that damned thing--"
Then he collapsed, an inert mass of mangled flesh.
I buried him the next midnight in one of our neglected gardens, and mumbled over his body one of
the devilish rituals he had loved in life. And as I pronounced the last daemoniac sentence I heard afar
on the moor the faint baying of some gigantic hound. The moon was up, but I dared not look at it. And
when I saw on the dim-lighted moor a wide, nebulous shadow sweeping from mound to mound, I shut
my eyes and threw myself face down upon the ground. When I arose, trembling, I know not how much
later, I staggered into the house and made shocking obeisances before the enshrined amulet of green
jade.
Being now afraid to live alone in the ancient house on the moor, I departed on the following day
for London, taking with me the amulet after destroying by fire and burial the rest of the impious
collection in the museum. But after three nights I heard the baying again, and before a week was over
felt strange eyes upon me whenever it was dark. One evening as I strolled on Victoria Embankment
for some needed air, I saw a black shape obscure one of the reflections of the lamps in the water. A
wind, stronger than the night-wind, rushed by, and I knew that what had befallen St John must soon
befall me.
The next day I carefully wrapped the green jade amulet and sailed for Holland. What mercy I
might gain by returning the thing to its silent, sleeping owner I knew not; but I felt that I must try any
step conceivably logical. What the hound was, and why it had pursued me, were questions still
vague; but I had first heard the baying in that ancient churchyard, and every subsequent event
including St John's dying whisper had served to connect the curse with the stealing of the amulet.
Accordingly I sank into the nethermost abysses of despair when, at an inn in Rotterdam, I discovered
that thieves had despoiled me of this sole means of salvation.
The baying was loud that evening, and in the morning I read of a nameless deed in the vilest
quarter of the city. The rabble were in terror, for upon an evil tenement had fallen a red death beyond
the foulest previous crime of the neighborhood. In a squalid thieves' den an entire family had been
torn to shreds by an unknown thing which left no trace, and those around had heard all night a faint,
deep, insistent note as of a gigantic hound.
So at last I stood again in the unwholesome churchyard where a pale winter moon cast hideous
shadows and leafless trees drooped sullenly to meet the withered, frosty grass and cracking slabs,
and the ivied church pointed a jeering finger at the unfriendly sky, and the night--wind howled
maniacally from over frozen swamps and frigid seas. The baying was very faint now, and it ceased
altogether as I approached the ancient grave I had once violated, and frightened away an abnormally
large horde of bats which had been hovering curiously around it.
I know not why I went thither unless to pray, or gibber out insane pleas and apologies to the calm
white thing that lay within; but, whatever my reason, I attacked the half frozen sod with a desperation
partly mine and partly that of a dominating will outside myself. Excavation was much easier than I
expected, though at one point I encountered a queer interruption; when a lean vulture darted down out
of the cold sky and pecked frantically at the grave-earth until I killed him with a blow of my spade.
Finally I reached the rotting oblong box and removed the damp nitrous cover. This is the last rational
act I ever performed.
For crouched within that centuried coffin, embraced by a closepacked nightmare retinue of huge,
sinewy, sleeping bats, was the bony thing my friend and I had robbed; not clean and placid as we had
seen it then, but covered with caked blood and shreds of alien flesh and hair, and leering sentiently at
me with phosphorescent sockets and sharp ensanguined fangs yawning twistedly in mockery of my
inevitable doom. And when it gave from those grinning jaws a deep, sardonic bay as of some gigantic
hound, and I saw that it held in its gory filthy claw the lost and fateful amulet of green jade, I merely
screamed and ran away idiotically, my screams soon dissolving into peals of hysterical laughter.
Madness rides the star-wind...claws and teeth sharpened on centuries of corpses...dripping death
astride a bacchanale of bats from nigh--black ruins of buried temples of Belial...Now, as the baying
of that dead fleshless monstrosity grows louder and louder, and the stealthy whirring and flapping of
those accursed web-wings closer and closer, I shall seek with my revolver the oblivion which is my
only refuge from the unnamed and unnameable.

THE LURKING FEAR
CONTENTS:
I. The Shadow On The Chimney
II. A Passer In The Storm
III. What The Red Glare Meant
IV. The Horror In The Eyes
I. The Shadow On The Chimney
There was thunder in the air on the night I went to the deserted mansion atop Tempest Mountain to
find the lurking fear. I was not alone, for foolhardiness was not then mixed with that love of the
grotesque and the terrible which has made my career a series of quests for strange horrors in
literature and in life. With me were two faithful and muscular men for whom I had sent when the time
came; men long associated with me in my ghastly explorations because of their peculiar fitness.
We had started quietly from the village because of the reporters who still lingered about after the
eldritch panic of a month before--the nightmare creeping death. Later, I thought, they might aid me;
but I did not want them then. Would to God I had let them share the search, that I might not have had to
bear the secret alone so long; to bear it alone for fear the world would call me mad or go mad itself
at the demon implications of the thing. Now that I am telling it anyway, lest the brooding make me a
maniac, I wish I had never concealed it. For I, and I only, know what manner of fear lurked on that
spectral and desolate mountain.
In a small motor-car we covered the miles of primeval forest and hill until the wooded ascent
checked it. The country bore an aspect more than usually sinister as we viewed it by night and
without the accustomed crowds of investigators, so that we were often tempted to use the acetylene
headlight despite the attention it might attract. It was not a wholesome landscape after dark, and I
believe I would have noticed its morbidity even had I been ignorant of the terror that stalked there. Of
wild creatures there were none--they are wise when death leers close. The ancient lightning-scarred
trees seemed unnaturally large and twisted, and the other vegetation unnaturally thick and feverish,
while curious mounds and hummocks in the weedy, fulgurite-pitted earth reminded me of snakes and
dead men's skulls swelled to gigantic proportions.
Fear had lurked on Tempest Mountain for more than a century. This I learned at once from
newspaper accounts of the catastrophe which first brought the region to the world's notice. The
place is a remote, lonely elevation in that part of the Catskills where Dutch civilization once feebly
and transiently penetrated, leaving behind as it receded only a few mined mansions and a degenerate
squatter population inhabiting pitiful hamlets on isolated slopes. Normal beings seldom visited the
locality till the state police were formed, and even now only infrequent troopers patrol it. The fear,
however, is an old tradition throughout the neighboring villages; since it is a prime topic in the
simple discourse of the poor mongrels who sometimes leave their valleys to trade handwoven
baskets for such primitive necessities as they cannot shoot, raise, or make.
The lurking fear dwelt in the shunned and deserted Martense mansion, which crowned the high
but gradual eminence whose liability to frequent thunderstorms gave it the name of TempestMountain.
For over a hundred years the antique, grove-circled stone house had been the subject of stories
incredibly wild and monstrously hideous; stories of a silent colossal creeping death which stalked
abroad in summer. With whimpering insistence the squatters told tales of a demon which seized lone
wayfarers after dark, either carrying them off or leaving them in a frightful state of gnawed
dismemberment; while sometimes they whispered of blood trails toward the distant mansion. Some
said the thunder called the lurking fear out of its habitation, while others said the thunder was its
voice.
No one outside the backwoods had believed these varying and conflicting stories, with their
incoherent, extravagant descriptions of the hall-glimpsed fiend; yet not a farmer or villager doubted
that the Martense mansion was ghoulishly haunted. Local history forbade such a doubt, although no
ghostly evidence was ever found by such investigators as had visited the building after some
especially vivid tale of the squatters. Grandmothers told strange myths of the Martense spectre;
myths concerning the Martense family itself, its queer hereditary dissimilarity of eyes, its long,
unnatural annals, and the murder which had cursed it.
The terror which brought me to the scene was a sudden and portentous confirmation of the
mountaineers' wildest legends. One summer night, after a thunderstorm of unprecedented violence,
the countryside was aroused by a squatter stampede which no mere delusion could create. The pitiful
throngs of natives shrieked and whined of the unnamable horror which had descended upon them, and
they were not doubted. They had not seen it, but had heard such cries from one of their hamlets that
they knew a creeping death had come.
In the morning citizens and state troopers followed the shuddering mountaineers to the place
where they said the death had come. Death was indeed there. The ground under one of the squatter's
villages had caved in after a lightning stroke, destroying several of the malodorous shanties; but
upon this property damage was superimposed an organic devastation which paled it to insignificance.
Of a possible seventy-five natives who had inhabited this spot, not one living specimen was visible.
The disordered earth was covered with blood and human debris bespeaking too vividly the ravages
of demon teeth and talons; yet no visible trail led away from the carnage. That some hideous animal
must be the cause, everyone quickly agreed; nor did any tongue now revive the charge that such
cryptic deaths formed merely the sordid murders common in decadent communities. That charge was
revived only when about twenty-five of the estimated population were found missing from the dead;
and even then it was hard to explain the murder of fifty by half that number. But the fact remained that
on a summer night a bolt had come out of the heavens and left a dead village whose corpses were
horribly mangled, chewed, and clawed.
The excited countryside immediately connected the horror with the haunted Martense mansion,
though the localities were over three miles apart. The troopers were more skeptical; including the
mansion only casually in their investigations, and dropping it altogether when they found it
thoroughly deserted. Country and village people, however I canvassed the place with infinite care;
overturning everything in the house, sounding ponds and brooks, beating down bushes, and
ransacking the nearby forests. All was in vain; the death that had come had left no trace save
destruction itself.
By the second day of the search the affair was fully treated by the newspapers, whose reporters
overran TempestMountain. They described it in much detail, and with many interviews to elucidate
the horror's history as told by local grandams. I followed the accounts languidly at first, for I am a
connoisseur in horrors; but after a week I detected an atmosphere which stirred me oddly, so that on
August 5th, 1921, I registered among the reporters who crowded the hotel at Lefferts Corners,
nearest village to Tempest Mountain and acknowledged headquarters of the searchers. Three weeks
more, and the dispersal of the reporters left me free to begin a terrible exploration based on the
minute inquiries and surveying with which I had meanwhile busied myself.
So on this summer night, while distant thunder rumbled, I left a silent motor-car and tramped with
two armed companions up the last mound-covered reaches of Tempest Mountain, casting the beams
of an electric torch on the spectral grey walls that began to appear through giant oaks ahead. In this
morbid night solitude and feeble shifting illumination, the vast boxlike pile displayed obscure hints
of terror which day could not uncover; yet I did not hesitate, since I had come with fierce resolution
to test an idea. I believed that the thunder called the death-demon out of some fearsome secret place;
and be that demon solid entity or vaporous pestilence, I meant to see it.
I had thoroughly searched the ruin before, hence knew my plan well; choosing as the seat of my
vigil the old room of Jan Martense, whose murder looms so great in the rural legends. I felt subtly
that the apartment of this ancient victim was best for my purposes. The chamber, measuring about
twenty feet square, contained like the other rooms some rubbish which had once been furniture. It lay
on the second story, on the southeast corner of the house, and had an immense east window and
narrow south window, both devoid of panes or shutters. Opposite the large window was an enormous
Dutch fireplace with scriptural tiles representing the prodigal son, and opposite the narrow window
was a spacious bed built into the wall.
As the tree-muffled thunder grew louder, I arranged my plan's details. First I fastened side by
side to the ledge of the large window three rope ladders which I had brought with me. I knew they
reached a suitable spot on the grass outside, for I had tested them. Then the three of us dragged from
another room a wide four-poster bedstead, crowding it laterally against the window. Having strewn it
with fir boughs, all now rested on it with drawn automatics, two relaxing while the third watched.
From whatever direction the demon might come, our potential escape was provided. If it came from
within the house, we had the window ladders; if from outside the door and the stairs. We did not
think, judging from precedent, that it would pursue us far even at worst.
I watched from midnight to one o'clock, when in spite of the sinister house, the unprotected
window, and the approaching thunder and lightning, I felt singularly drowsy. I was between my two
companions, George Bennett being toward the window and William Tobey toward the fireplace.
Bennett was asleep, having apparently felt the same anomalous drowsiness which affected me, so I
designated Tobey for the next watch although even he was nodding. It is curious how intently I had
been watching the fireplace.
The increasing thunder must have affected my dreams, for in the brief time I slept there came to
me apocalyptic visions. Once I partly awaked, probably because the sleeper toward the window had
restlessly flung an arm across my chest. I was not sufficiently awake to see whether Tobey was
attending to his duties as sentinel, but felt a distinct anxiety on that score. Never before had the
presence of evil so poignantly oppressed me. Later I must have dropped asleep again, for it was out
of a phantasmal chaos that my mind leaped when the night grew hideous with shrieks beyond anything
in my former experience or imagination.
In that shrieking the inmost soul of human fear and agony clawed hopelessly and insanely at the
ebony gates of oblivion. I awoke to red madness and the mockery of diabolism, as farther and farther
down inconceivable vistas that phobic and crystalline anguish retreated and reverberated. There was
no light, but I knew from the empty space at my right that Tobey was gone, God alone knew whither.
Across my chest still lay the heavy arm of the sleeper at my left.
Then came the devastating stroke of lightning which shook the whole mountain, lit the darkest
crypts of the hoary grove, and splintered the patriarch of the twisted trees. In the demon flash of a
monstrous fireball the sleeper started up suddenly while the glare from beyond the window threw his
shadow vividly upon the chimney above the fireplace from which my eyes had never strayed. That I
am still alive and sane, is a marvel I cannot fathom. I cannot fathom it, for the shadow on that chimney
was not that of George Bennett or of any other human creature, but a blasphemous abnormality from
hell's nethermost craters; a nameless, shapeless abomination which no mind could fully grasp and no
pen even partly describe. In another second I was alone in the accursed mansion, shivering and
gibbering. George Bennett and William Tobey had left no trace, not even of a struggle. They were
never heard of again.
II. A Passer In The Storm
For days after that hideous experience in the forest-swathed mansion I lay nervously exhausted in
my hotel room at Lefferts Corners. I do not remember exactly how I managed to reach the motor-car,
start it, and slip unobserved back to the village; for I retain no distinct impression save of wild-armed
titan trees, demoniac mutterings of thunder, and Charonian shadows athwart the low mounds that
dotted and streaked the region.
As I shivered and brooded on the casting of that brain-blasting shadow, I knew that I had at last
pried out one of earth's supreme horrors--one of those nameless blights of outer voids whose faint
demon scratchings we sometimes hear on the farthest rim of space, yet from which our own finite
vision has given us a merciful immunity. The shadow I had seen, I hardly dared to analyse or identify.
Something had lain between me and the window that night, but I shuddered whenever I could not cast
off the instinct to classify it. If it had only snarled, or bayed, or laughed titteringly--even that would
have relieved the abysmal hideousness. But it was so silent. It had rested a heavy arm or foreleg on
my chest...
Obviously it was organic, or had once been organic...Jan Martense, whose room I had invaded,
was buried in the grave-yard near the mansion...I must find Bennett and Tobey, if they lived...why had
it picked them, and left me for the last?...Drowsiness is so stifling, and dreams are so horrible...
In a short time I realised that I must tell my story to someone or break down completely. I had
already decided not to abandon the quest for the lurking fear, for in my rash ignorance it seemed to
me that uncertainty was worse than enlightenment, however terrible the latter might prove to be.
Accordingly I resolved in my mind the best course to pursue; whom to select for my confidences,
and how to track down the thing which had obliterated two men and cast a nightmare shadow.
My chief acquaintances at Lefferts Corners had been the affable reporters, of whom several had
still remained to collect final echoes of the tragedy. It was from these that I determined to choose a
colleague, and the more I reflected the more my preference inclined toward one Arthur Munroe, a
dark, lean man of about thirty-five, whose education, taste, intelligence, and temperament all seemed
to mark him as one not bound to conventional ideas and experiences.
On an afternoon in early September, Arthur Munroe listened to my story. I saw from the beginning
that he was both interested and sympathetic, and when I had finished he analysed and discussed the
thing with the greatest shrewdness and judgement. His advice, moreover, was eminently practical; for
he recommended a postponement of operations at the Martense mansion until we might become
fortified with more detailed historical and geographical data. On his initiative we combed the
countryside for information regarding the terrible Martense family, and discovered a man who
possessed a marvelously illuminating ancestral diary. We also talked at length with such of the
mountain mongrels as had not fled from the terror and confusion to remoter slopes, and slope again
scanned for dens and caves, but all without result. And yet, as I have said, vague new fears hovered
menacingly over us; as if giant bat-winged gryphons looked on transcosmic gulfs.
As the afternoon advanced, it became increasingly difficult to see; and we heard the rumble of a
thunderstorm gathering over TempestMountain. This sound in such a locality naturally stirred us,
though less than it would have done at night. As it was, we hoped desperately that the storm would
last until well after dark; and with that hope turned from our aimless hillside searching toward the
nearest inhabited hamlet to gather a body of squatters as helpers in the investigation. Timid as they
were, a few of the younger men were sufficiently inspired by our protective leadership to promise
such help.
We had hardly more than turned, however, when there descended such a blinding sheet of
torrential rain that shelter became imperative. The extreme, almost nocturnal darkness of the sky
caused us to stumble badly, but guided by the frequent flashes of lightning and by our minute
knowledge of the hamlet we soon reached the least porous cabin of the lot; an heterogeneous
combination of logs and boards whose still existing door and single tiny window both faced Maple
Hill. Barring the door after us against the fury of the wind and rain, we put in place the crude window
shutter which our frequent searches had taught us where to find. It was dismal sitting there on rickety
boxes in the pitchy darkness, but we smoked pipes and occasionally flashed our pocket lamps about.
Now and then we could see the lightning through cracks in the wall; the afternoon was so incredibly
dark that each flash was extremely vivid.
The stormy vigil reminded me shudderingly of my ghastly night on TempestMountain. My mind
turned to that odd question which had kept recurring ever since the nightmare thing had happened; and
again I wondered why the demon, approaching the three watchers either from the window or the
interior, had begun with the men on each side and left the middle man till the last, when the titan
fireball had scared it away. Why had it not taken its victims in natural order, with myself second, from
whichever direction it had approached? With what manner of far-reaching tentacles did it prey? Or
did it know that I was the leader, and saved me for a fate worse than that of my companions?
In the midst of these reflections, as if dramatically arranged to intensify them, there fell nearby a
terrific bolt of lightning followed by the sound of sliding earth. At the same time the wolfish wind
rose to demoniac crescendos of ululation. We were sure that the one tree on Maple Hill had been
struck again, and Munroe rose from his box and went to the tiny window to ascertain the damage.
When he took down the shutter the wind, and rain howled deafeningly in, so that I could not hear what
he said; but I waited while he leaned out and tried to fathom Nature's pandemonium.
Gradually a calming of the wind and dispersal of the unusual darkness told of the storm's passing.
I had hoped it would last into the night to help our quest, but a furtive sunbeam from a knothole
behind me removed the likelihood of such a thing. Suggesting to Munroe that we had better get some
light even if more showers came, I unbarred and opened the crude door. The ground outside was a
singular mass of mud and pools, with fresh heaps of earth from the slight landslide; but I saw nothing
to justify the interest which kept my companion silently leaning out the window. Crossing to where
he leaned, I touched his shoulder; but he did not move. Then, as I playfully shook him and turned him
around, I felt the strangling tendrils of a cancerous horror whose roots reached into illimitable pasts
and fathomless abysms of the night that broods beyond time.
For Arthur Munroe was dead. And on what remained of his chewed and gouged head there was
no longer a face.
III. What The Red Glare Meant
On the tempest-racked night of November 8, 1921, with a lantern which cast charnel shadows, I
stood digging alone and idiotically in the grave of Jan Martense. I had begun to dig in the afternoon,
because a thunderstorm was brewing, and now that it was dark and the storm had burst above the
maniacally thick foliage I was glad.
I believe that my mind was partly unhinged by events since August 5th; the demon shadow in the
mansion, the general strain and disappointment, and the thing that occurred at the hamlet in an October
storm. After that thing I had dug a grave for one whose death I could not understand. I knew that
others could not understand either, so let them think Arthur Munroe had wandered away. They
searched, but found nothing. The squatters might have understood, but I dared not frighten them more.
I myself seemed strangely callous. That shock at the mansion had done something to my brain, and I
could think only of the quest for a horror now grown to cataclysmic stature in my imagination; a quest
which the fate of Arthur Munroe made me vow to keep silent and solitary.
The scene of my excavations would alone have been enough to unnerve any ordinary man. Baleful
primal trees of unholy size, age, and grotesqueness leered above me like the pillars of some hellish
Druidic temple; muffling the thunder, hushing the clawing wind, and admitting but little rain. Beyond
the scarred trunks in the background, illumined by faint flashes of filtered lightning, rose the damp
ivied stones of the deserted mansion, while somewhat nearer was the abandoned Dutch garden whose
walks and beds were polluted by a white, fungous, foetid, over-nourished vegetation that never saw
full daylight. And nearest of all was the graveyard, where deformed trees tossed insane branches as
their roots displaced unhallowed slabs and sucked venom from what lay below. Now and then,
beneath the brown pall of leaves that rotted and festered in the antediluvian forest darkness, I could
trace the sinister outlines of some of those low mounds which characterized the lightning-pierced
region.
History had led me to this archaic grave. History, indeed, was all I had after everything else
ended in mocking Satanism. I now believed that the lurking fear was no material being, but a wolf-
fanged ghost that rode the midnight lightning. And I believed, because of the masses of local
tradition I had unearthed in search with Arthur Munroe, that the ghost was that of Jan Martense, who
died in 1762. This is why I was digging idiotically in his grave.
The Martense mansion was built in 1670 by Gerrit Martense, a wealthy New-Amsterdam merchant
who disliked the changing order under British rule, and had constructed this magnificent domicile on
a remote woodland summit whose untrodden solitude and unusual scenery pleased him. The only
substantial disappointment encountered in this site was that which concerned the prevalence of
violent thunderstorms in summer. When selecting the hill and building his mansion, Mynheer
Martense had laid these frequent natural outbursts to some peculiarity of the year; but in time he
perceived that the locality was especially liable to such phenomena. At length, having found these
storms injurious to his head, he fitted up a cellar into which he could retreat from their wildest
pandemonium.
Of Gerrit Martense's descendants less is known than of himself; since they were all reared in
hatred of the English civilisation, and trained to shun such of the colonists as accepted it. Their life
was exceedingly secluded, and people declared that their isolation had made them heavy of speech
and comprehension. In appearance all were marked by a peculiar inherited dissimilarity of eyes; one
generally being blue and the other brown. Their social contacts grew fewer and fewer, till at last
they took to intermarrying with the numerous menial class about the estate. Many of the crowded
family degenerated, moved across the valley, and merged with the mongrel population which was
later to produce the pitiful squatters. The rest had stuck sullenly to their ancestral mansion, becoming
more and more clannish and taciturn, yet developing a nervous responsiveness to the frequent
thunderstorms.
Most of this information reached the outside world through young Jan Martense, who from some
kind of restlessness joined the colonial army when news of the Albany Convention reached Tempest
Mountain. He was the first of Gerrit's descendants to see much of the world; and when he returned in
1760 after six years of campaigning, he was hated as an outsider by his father, uncles, and brothers,
in spite of his dissimilar Martense eyes. No longer could he share the peculiarities and prejudices of
the Martenses, while the very mountain thunderstorms failed to intoxicate him as they had before.
Instead, his surroundings depressed him; and he frequently wrote to a friend in Albany of plans to
leave the paternal roof.
In the spring of 1763 Jonathan Gifford, the Albany friend of Jan Martense, became worried by his
correspondent's silence; especially in view of the conditions and quarrels at the Martense mansion.
Determined to visit Jan in person, he went into the mountains on horseback. His diary states that he
reached TempestMountain on September 20, finding the mansion in great decrepitude. The sullen,
odd-eyed Martenses, whose unclean animal aspect shocked him, told him in broken gutterals that Jan
was dead. He had, they insisted, been struck by lightning the autumn before; and now lay buried
behind the neglected sunken gardens. They showed the visitor the grave, barren and devoid of
markers. Something in the Martenses' manner gave Gifford a feeling of repulsion and suspicion, and a
week later he returned with spade and mattock to explore the sepulchral spot. He found what he
expected--a skull crushed cruelly as if by savage blows--so returning to Albany he openly charged
the Martenses with the murder of their kinsman.
Legal evidence was lacking, but the story spread rapidly round the countryside; and from that time
the Martenses were ostracised by the world. No one would deal with them, and their distant manor
was shunned as an accursed place. Somehow they managed to live on independently by the product of
their estate, for occasional lights glimpsed from far-away hills attested their continued presence.
These lights were seen as late as 1810, but toward the last they became very infrequent.
Meanwhile there grew up about the mansion and the mountain a body of diabolic legendry. The
place was avoided with doubled assiduousness, and invested with every whispered myth tradition
could supply. It remained unvisited till 1816, when the continued absence of lights was noticed by the
squatters. At that time a party made investigations, finding the house deserted and partly in ruins.
There were no skeletons about, so that departure rather than death was inferred. The clan seemed
to have left several years before, and improvised penthouses showed how numerous it had grown
prior to its migration. Its cultural level had fallen very low, as proved by decaying furniture and
scattered silverware which must have been long abandoned when its owners left. But though the
dreaded Martenses were gone, the fear of the haunted house continued; and grew very acute when
new and strange stories arose among the mountain decadents. There it stood; deserted, feared, and
linked with the vengeful ghost of Jan Martense. There it still stood on the night I dug in Jan
Martense's grave.
I have described my protracted digging as idiotic, and such it indeed was in object and method.
The coffin of Jan Martense had soon been unearthed--it now held only dust and nitre--but in my fury
to exhume his ghost I delved irrationally and clumsily down beneath where he had lain. God knows
what I expected to find--I only felt that I was digging in the grave of a man whose ghost stalked by
night.
It is impossible to say what monstrous depth I had attained when my spade, and soon my feet,
broke through the ground beneath. The event, under the circumstances, was tremendous; for in the
existence of a subterranean space here, my mad theories had terrible confirmation. My slight fall had
extinguished the lantern, but I produced an electric pocket lamp and viewed the small horizontal
tunnel which led away indefinitely in both directions. It was amply large enough for a man to wriggle
through; and though no sane person would have tried at that time, I forgot danger, reason, and
cleanliness in my single-minded fever to unearth the lurking fear. Choosing the direction toward the
house, I scrambled recklessly into the narrow burrow; squirming ahead blindly and rapidly, and
flashing but seldom the lamp I kept before me.
What language can describe the spectacle of a man lost in infinitely abysmal earth; pawing,
twisting, wheezing; scrambling madly through sunken convolutions of immemorial blackness without
an idea of time, safety, direction, or definite object? There is something hideous in it, but that is what
I did. I did it for so long that life faded to a far memory, and I became one with the moles and grubs
of nighted depths. Indeed, it was only by accident that after interminable writhings I jarred my
forgotten electric lamp alight, so that it shone eerily along the burrow of caked loam that stretched
and curved ahead.
I had been scrambling in this way for some time, so that my battery had burned very low, when the
passage suddenly inclined sharply upward, altering my mode of progress. And as I raised my glance
it was without preparation that I saw glistening in the distance two demoniac reflections of my
expiring lamp; two reflections glowing with a baneful and unmistakable effulgence, and provoking
maddeningly nebulous memories. I stopped automatically, though lacking the brain to retreat. The
eyes approached, yet of the thing that bore them I could distinguish only a claw. But what a claw!
Then far overhead I heard a faint crashing which I recognized. It was the wild thunder of the
mountain, raised to hysteric fury--I must have been crawling upward for some time, so that the
surface was now quite near. And as the muffled thunder clattered, those eyes still stared with
vacuous viciousness.
Thank God I did not then know what it was, else I should have died. But I was saved by the very
thunder that had summoned it, for after a hideous wait there burst from the unseen outside sky one of
those frequent mountainward bolts whose aftermath I had noticed here and there as gashes of
disturbed earth and fulgurites of various sizes. With Cyclopean rage it tore through the soil above
that damnable pit, blinding and deafening me, yet not wholly reducing me to a coma. In the chaos of
sliding, shifting earth I clawed and floundered helplessly till the rain on my head steadied me and I
saw that I had come to the surface in a familiar spot; a steep unforested place on the southwest slope
of the mountain. Recurrent sheet lightnings illumed the tumbled ground and the remains of the curious
low hummock which had stretched down from the wooded higher slope, but there was nothing in the
chaos to show my place of egress from the lethal catacomb. My brain was as great a chaos as the
earth, and as a distant red glare burst on the landscape from the south I hardly realised the horror I
had been through.
But when two days later the squatters told me what the red glare meant, I felt more horror than that
which the mould-burrow and the claw and eyes had given; more horror because of the overwhelming
implications. In a hamlet twenty miles away an orgy of fear had followed the bolt which brought me
above ground, and a nameless thing had dropped from an overhanging tree into a weak-roofed cabin.
It had done a deed, but the squatters had fired the cabin in frenzy before it could escape. It had been
doing that deed at the very moment the earth caved in on the thing with the claw and eyes.
IV. The Horror In The Eyes
There can be nothing normal in the mind of one who, knowing what I knew of the horrors of
TempestMountain, would seek alone for the fear that lurked there. That at least two of the fear's
embodiments were destroyed, formed but a slight guarantee of mental and physical safety in this
Acheron of multiform diabolism; yet I continued my quest with even greater zeal as events and
revelations became more monstrous. When, two days after my frightful crawl through that crypt of
the eyes and claw, I learned that a thing had malignly hovered twenty miles away at the same instant
the eyes were glaring at me, I experienced virtual convulsions of fright. But that fright was so mixed
with wonder and alluring grotesqueness, that it was almost a pleasant sensation. Sometimes, in the
throes of a nightmare when unseen powers whirl one over the roofs of strange dead cities toward the
grinning chasm of Nis, it is a relief and even a delight to shriek wildly and throw oneself voluntarily
along with the hideous vortex of dream-doom into whatever bottomless gulf may yawn. And so it was
with the walking nightmare of Tempest Mountain; the discovery that two monsters had haunted the
spot gave me ultimately a mad craving to plunge into the very earth of the accursed region, and with
bare hands dig out the death that leered from every inch of the poisonous soil.
As soon as possible I visited the grave of Jan Martense and dug vainly where I had dug before.
Some extensive cave-in had obliterated all trace of the underground passage, while the rain had
washed so much earth back into the excavation that I could not tell how deeply I had dug that other
day. I likewise made a difficult trip to the distant hamlet where the death-creature had been burnt, and
was little repaid for my trouble. In the ashes of the fateful cabin I found several bones, but apparently
none of the monster's. The squatters said the thing had had only one victim; but in this I judged them
inaccurate, since besides the complete skull of a human being, there was another bony fragment
which seemed certainly to have belonged to a human skull at some time. Though the rapid drop of the
monster had been seen, no one could say just what the creature was like; those who had glimpsed it
called it simply a devil. Examining the great tree where it had lurked, I could discern no distinctive
marks. I tried to find some trail into the black forest, but on this occasion could not stand the sight of
those morbidly large boles, or of those vast serpent-like roots that twisted so malevolently before
they sank into the earth.
My next step was to reexamine with microscopic care the deserted hamlet where death had come
most abundantly, and where Arthur Munroe had seen something he never lived to describe. Though
my vain previous searches had been exceedingly minute, I now had new data to test; for my horrible
grave-crawl convinced me that at least one of the phases of the monstrosity had been an underground
creature. This time, on the 14th of November, my quest concerned itself mostly with the slopes of
ConeMountain and Maple Hill where they overlook the unfortunate hamlet, and I gave particular
attention to the loose earth of the landslide region on the latter eminence.
The afternoon of my search brought nothing to light, and dusk came as I stood on Maple Hill
looking down at the hamlet and across the valley to Tempest Mountain. There had been a gorgeous
sunset, and now the moon came up, nearly full and shedding a silver flood over the plain, the distant
mountainside, and the curious low mounds that rose here and there. It was a peaceful Arcadian scene,
but knowing what it hid I hated it. I hated the mocking moon, the hypocritical plain, the festering
mountain, and those sinister mounds. Everything seemed to me tainted with a loathsome contagion, and
inspired by a noxious alliance with distorted hidden powers.
Presently, as I gazed abstractedly at the moonlit panorama, my eye became attracted by something
singular in the nature and arrangement of a certain topographical element. Without having any exact
knowledge of geology, I had from the first been interested in the odd mounds and hummocks of the
region. I had noticed that they were pretty widely distributed around TempestMountain, though less
numerous on the plain than near the hilltop itself, where prehistoric glaciation had doubtless found
feebler opposition to its striking and fantastic caprices. Now, in the light of that low moon which cast
long weird shadows, it struck me forcibly that the various points and lines of the mound system had a
peculiar relation to the summit of Tempest Mountain. That summit was undeniably a centre from
which the lines or rows of points radiated indefinitely and irregularly, as if the unwholesome
Martense mansion had thrown visible tentacles of terror. The idea of such tentacles gave me an
unexplained thrill, and I stopped to analyse my reason for believing these mounds glacial phenomena.
The more I analysed the less I believed, and against my newly opened mind there began to beat
grotesque and horrible analogies based on superficial aspects and upon my experience beneath the
earth. Before I knew it I was uttering frenzied and disjointed words to myself; "My
God!...Molehills...the damned place must be honeycombed...how many...that night at the
mansion...they took Bennett and Tobey first...on each side of us..."Then I was digging frantically into
the mound which had stretched nearest me; digging desperately, shiveringly, but almost jubilantly;
digging and at last shrieking aloud with some unplaced emotion as I came upon a tunnel or burrow
just like the one through which I had crawled on the other demoniac night.
After that I recall running, spade in hand; a hideous run across moon--litten, mound-marked
meadows and through diseased, precipitous abysses of haunted hillside forest; leaping screaming,
panting, bounding toward the terrible Martense mansion. I recall digging unreasonably in all parts of
the brier-choked cellar; digging to find the core and centre of that malignant universe of mounds. And
then I recall how I laughed when I stumbled on the passageway; the hole at the base of the old
chimney, where the thick weeds grew and cast queer shadows in the light of the lone candle I had
happened to have with me. What still remained down in that hell-hive, lurking and waiting for the
thunder to arouse it, I did not know. Two had been killed; perhaps that had finished it. But still there
remained that burning determination to reach the innermost secret of the fear, which I had once more
come to deem definite, material, and organic.
My indecisive speculation whether to explore the passage alone and immediately with my pocket-
light or to try to assemble a band of squatters for the quest, was interrupted after a time by a sudden
rush of wind from the outside which blew out the candle and left me in stark blackness. The moon no
longer shone through the chinks and apertures above me, and with a sense of fateful alarm I heard the
sinister and significant rumble of approaching thunder. A confusion of associated ideas possessed
my brain, leading me to grope back toward the farthest corner of the cellar. My eyes, however, never
turned away from the horrible opening at the base of the chimney; and I began to get glimpses of the
crumbling bricks and unhealthy weeds as faint glows of lightning penetrated the weeds outside and
illumined the chinks in the upper wall. Every second I was consumed with a mixture of fear and
curiosity. What would the storm call forth--or was there anything left for it to call? Guided by a
lightning flash I settled myself down behind a dense clump of vegetation, through which I could see
the opening without being seen.
If heaven is merciful, it will some day efface from my consciousness the sight that I saw, and let
me live my last years in peace. I cannot sleep at night now, and have to take opiates when it thunders.
The thing came abruptly and unannounced; a demon, ratlike scurrying from pits remote and
unimaginable, a hellish panting and stifled grunting, and then from that opening beneath the chimney a
burst of multitudinous and leprous life--a loathsome night-spawned flood of organic corruption more
devastatingly hideous than the blackest conjurations of mortal madness and morbidity. Seething,
stewing, surging, bubbling like serpents' slime it rolled up and out of that yawning hole, spreading
like a septic contagion and streaming from the cellar at every point of egress--streaming out to
scatter through the accursed midnight forests and strew fear, madness, and death.
God knows how many there were--there must have been thousands. To see the stream of them in
that faint intermittent lightning was shocking. When they had thinned out enough to be glimpsed as
separate organisms, I saw that they were dwarfed, deformed hairy devils or apes--monstrous and
diabolic caricatures of the monkey tribe. They were so hideously silent; there was hardly a squeal
when one of the last stragglers turned with the skill of long practice to make a meal in accustomed
fashion on a weaker companion. Others snapped up what it left and ate with slavering relish. Then, in
spite of my daze of fright and disgust, my morbid curiosity triumphed; and as the last of the
monstrosities oozed up alone from that nether world of unknown nightmare, I drew my automatic
pistol and shot it under cover of the thunder.
Shrieking, slithering, torrential shadows of red viscous madness chasing one another through
endless, ensanguined corridors of purple fulgurous sky...formless phantasms and kaleidoscopic
mutations of a ghoulish, remembered scene; forests of monstrous over-nourished oaks with serpent
roots twisting and sucking unnamable juices from an earth verminous with millions of cannibal devils;
mound-like tentacles groping from underground nuclei of polypous perversion... insane lightning
over malignant ivied walls and demon arcades choked with fungous vegetation...Heaven be thanked
for the instinct which led me unconscious to places where men dwell; to the peaceful village that
slept under the calm stars of clearing skies.
I had recovered enough in a week to send to Albany for a gang of men to blow up the Martense
mansion and the entire top of TempestMountain with dynamite, stop up all the discoverable mound-
burrows, and destroy certain over-nourished trees whose very existence seemed an insult to sanity. I
could sleep a little after they had done this, but true rest will never come as long as I remember that
nameless secret of the lurking fear. The thing will haunt me, for who can say the extermination is
complete, and that analogous phenomena do not exist all over the world? Who can, with my
knowledge, think of the earth's unknown caverns without a nightmare dread of future possibilities? I
cannot see a well or a subway entrance without shuddering...why cannot the doctors give me
something to make me sleep, or truly calm my brain when it thunders?
What I saw in the glow of flashlight after I shot the unspeakable straggling object was so simple
that almost a minute elapsed before I understood and went delirious. The object was nauseous; a
filthy whitish gorilla thing with sharp yellow fangs and matted fur. It was the ultimate product of
mammalian degeneration; the frightful outcome of isolated spawning, multiplication, and cannibal
nutrition above and below the ground; the embodiment of all the snarling and chaos and grinning fear
that lurk behind life. It had looked at me as it died, and its eyes had the same odd quality that marked
those other eyes which had stared at me underground and excited cloudy recollections. One eye was
blue, the other brown. They were the dissimilar Martense eyes of the old legends, and I knew in one
inundating cataclysm of voiceless horror what had become of that vanished family; the terrible and
thunder-crazed house of Martense.

THE MOON BOG
Somewhere, to what remote and fearsome region I know not, Denys Barry has gone. I was with
him the last night he lived among men, and heard his screams when the thing came to him; but all the
peasants and police in CountyMeath could never find him, or the others, though they searched long
and far. And now I shudder when I hear the frogs piping in swamps, or see the moon in lonely places.
I had known Denys Barry well in America, where he had grown rich, and had congratulated him
when he bought back the old castle by the bog at sleepy Kilderry. It was from Kilderry that his father
had come, and it was there that he wished to enjoy his wealth among ancestral scenes. Men of his
blood had once ruled over Kilderry and built and dwelt in the castle, but those days were very
remote, so that for generations the castle had been empty and decaying. After he went to Ireland,
Barry wrote me often, and told me how under his care the gray castle was rising tower by tower to
its ancient splendor, how the ivy was climbing slowly over the restored walls as it had climbed so
many centuries ago, and how the peasants blessed him for bringing back the old days with his gold
from over the sea. But in time there came troubles, and the peasants ceased to bless him, and fled
away instead as from a doom. And then he sent a letter and asked me to visit him, for he was lonely in
the castle with no one to speak to save the new servants and laborers he had brought from the North.
The bog was the cause of all these troubles, as Barry told me the night I came to the castle. I had
reached Kilderry in the summer sunset, as the gold of the sky lighted the green of the hills and
groves and the blue of the bog, where on a far islet a strange olden ruin glistened spectrally. That
sunset was very beautiful, but the peasants at Ballylough had warned me against it and said that
Kilderry had become accursed, so that I almost shuddered to see the high turrets of the castle gilded
with fire. Barry's motor had met me at the Ballylough station, for Kilderry is off the railway. The
villagers had shunned the car and the driver from the North, but had whispered to me with pale faces
when they saw I was going to Kilderry. And that night, after our reunion, Barry told me why.
The peasants had gone from Kilderry because Denys Barry was to drain the great bog. For all his
love of Ireland, America had not left him untouched, and he hated the beautiful wasted space where
peat might be cut and land opened up. The legends and superstitions of Kilderry did not move him,
and he laughed when the peasants first refused to help, and then cursed him and went away to
Ballylough with their few belongings as they saw his determination. In their place he sent for
laborers from the North, and when the servants left he replaced them likewise. But it was lonely
among strangers, so Barry had asked me to come.
When I heard the fears which had driven the people from Kilderry, I laughed as loudly as my
friend had laughed, for these fears were of the vaguest, wildest, and most absurd character. They had
to do with some preposterous legend of the bog, and a grim guardian spirit that dwelt in the strange
olden ruin on the far islet I had seen in the sunset. There were tales of dancing lights in the dark of
the moon, and of chill winds when the night was warm; of wraiths in white hovering over the waters,
and of an imagined city of stone deep down below the swampy surface. But foremost among the
weird fancies, and alone in its absolute unanimity, was that of the curse awaiting him who should dare
to touch or drain the vast reddish morass. There were secrets, said the peasants, which must not be
uncovered; secrets that had lain hidden since the plague came to the children of Partholan in the
fabulous years beyond history. In the Book of Invaders it is told that these sons of the Greeks were
all buried at Tallaght, but old men in Kilderry said that one city was overlooked save by its patron
moon--goddess; so that only the wooded hills buried it when the men of Nemed swept down from
Scythia in their thirty ships.
Such were the idle tales which had made the villagers leave Kilderry, and when I heard them I did
not wonder that Denys Barry had refused to listen. He had, however, a great interest in antiquities,
and proposed to explore the bog thoroughly when it was drained. The white ruins on the islet he had
often visited, but though their age was plainly great, and their contour very little like that of most
ruins in Ireland, they were too dilapidated to tell the days of their glory. Now the work of drainage
was ready to begin, and the laborers from the North were soon to strip the forbidden bog of its green
moss and red heather, and kill the tiny shell-paved streamlets and quiet blue pools fringed with
rushes.
After Barry had told me these things I was very drowsy, for the travels of the day had been
wearying and my host had talked late into the night. A man-servant showed me to my room, which was
in a remote tower overlooking the village and the plain at the edge of the bog, and the bog itself; so
that I could see from my windows in the moonlight the silent roofs from which the peasants had fled
and which now sheltered the laborers from the North, and too, the parish church with its antique
spire, and far out across the brooding bog the remote olden ruin on the islet gleaming white and
spectral. Just as I dropped to sleep I fancied I heard faint sounds from the distance; sounds that were
wild and half musical, and stirred me with a weird excitement which colored my dreams. But when I
awaked next morning I felt it had all been a dream, for the visions I had seen were more wonderful
than any sound of wild pipes in the night. Influenced by the legends that Barry had related, my mind
had in slumber hovered around a stately city in a green valley, where marble streets and statues, villas
and temples, carvings and inscriptions, all spoke in certain tones the glory that was Greece. When I
told this dream to Barry we had both laughed; but I laughed the louder, because he was perplexed
about his laborers from the North. For the sixth time they had all overslept, waking very slowly and
dazedly, and acting as if they had not rested, although they were known to have gone early to bed the
night before.
That morning and afternoon I wandered alone through the sun-gilded village and talked now and
then with idle laborers, for Barry was busy with the final plans for beginning his work of drainage.
The laborers were not as happy as they might have been, for most of them seemed uneasy over some
dream which they had had, yet which they tried in vain to remember. I told them of my dream, but they
were not interested till I spoke of the weird sounds I thought I had heard. Then they looked oddly at
me, and said that they seemed to remember weird sounds, too.
In the evening Barry dined with me and announced that he would begin the drainage in two days. I
was glad, for although I disliked to see the moss and the heather and the little streams and lakes
depart, I had a growing wish to discern the ancient secrets the deep-matted peat might hide. And that
night my dreams of piping flutes and marble peristyles came to a sudden and disquieting end; for upon
the city in the valley I saw a pestilence descend, and then a frightful avalanche of wooded slopes that
covered the dead bodies in the streets and left unburied only the temple of Artemis on the high peak,
where the aged moon-priestess Cleis lay cold and silent with a crown of ivory on her silver head.
I have said that I awaked suddenly and in alarm. For some time I could not tell whether I was
waking or sleeping, for the sound of flutes still rang shrilly in my ears; but when I saw on the floor
the icy moonbeams and the outlines of a latticed gothic window, I decided I must be awake and in the
castle of Kilderry. Then I heard a clock from some remote landing below strike the hour of two, and
knew I was awake. Yet still there came that monstrous piping from afar; wild, weird airs that made me
think of some dance of fauns on distant Maenalus. It would not let me sleep, and in impatience I sprang
up and paced the floor. Only by chance did I go to the north window and look out upon the silent
village and the plain at the edge of the bog. I had no wish to gaze abroad, for I wanted to sleep; but
the flutes tormented me, and I had to do or see something. How could I have suspected the thing I
was to behold?
There in the moonlight that flooded the spacious plain was a spectacle which no mortal, having
seen it, could ever forget. To the sound of reedy pipes that echoed over the bog there glided silently
and eerily a mixed throng of swaying figures, reeling through such a revel as the Sicilians may have
danced to Demeter in the old days under the harvest moon beside the Cyane. The wide plain, the
golden moonlight, the shadowy moving forms, and above all the shrill monotonous piping, produced
an effect which almost paralyzed me; yet I noted amidst my fear that half of these tireless mechanical
dancers were the laborers whom I had thought asleep, whilst the other half were strange airy beings
in white, half-indeterminate in nature, but suggesting pale wistful naiads from the haunted fountains of
the bog. I do not know how long I gazed at this sight from the lonely turret window before I dropped
suddenly in a dreamless swoon, out of which the high sun of morning aroused me.
My first impulse on awaking was to communicate all my fears and observations to Denys Barry,
but as I saw the sunlight glowing through the latticed east window I became sure that there was no
reality in what I thought I had seen. I am given to strange fantasms, yet am never weak enough to
believe in them; so on this occasion contented myself with questioning the laborers, who slept very
late and recalled nothing of the previous night save misty dreams of shrill sounds. This matter of the
spectral piping harassed me greatly, and I wondered if the crickets of autumn had come before their
time to vex the night and haunt the visions of men. Later in the day I watched Barry in the library
poring over his plans for the great work which was to begin on the morrow, and for the first time felt
a touch of the same kind of fear that had driven the peasants away. For some unknown reason I
dreaded the thought of disturbing the ancient bog and its sunless secrets, and pictured terrible sights
lying black under the unmeasured depth of age-old peat. That these secrets should be brought to light
seemed injudicious, and I began to wish for an excuse to leave the castle and the village. I went so
far as to talk casually to Barry on the subject, but did not dare continue after he gave his resounding
laugh. So I was silent when the sun set fulgently over the far hills, and Kilderry blazed all red and
gold in a flame that seemed a portent.
Whether the events of that night were of reality or illusion I shall never ascertain. Certainly they
transcend anything we dream of in nature and the universe; yet in no normal fashion can I explain those
disappearances which were known to all men after it was over. I retired early and full of dread, and
for a long time could not sleep in the uncanny silence of the tower. It was very dark, for although the
sky was clear the moon was now well in the wane, and would not rise till the small hours. I thought as
I lay there of Denys Barry, and of what would befall that bog when the day came, and found myself
almost frantic with an impulse to rush out into the night, take Barry's car, and drive madly to
Ballylough out of the menaced lands. But before my fears could crystallize into action I had fallen
asleep, and gazed in dreams upon the city in the valley, cold and dead under a shroud of hideous
shadow.
Probably it was the shrill piping that awaked me, yet that piping was not what I noticed first when I
opened my eyes. I was lying with my back to the east window overlooking the bog, where the waning
moon would rise, and therefore expected to see light cast on the opposite wall before me; but I had
not looked for such a sight as now appeared. Light indeed glowed on the panels ahead, but it was not
any light that the moon gives. Terrible and piercing was the shaft of ruddy refulgence that streamed
through the gothic window, and the whole chamber was brilliant with a splendor intense and
unearthly. My immediate actions were peculiar for such a situation, but it is only in tales that a man
does the dramatic and foreseen thing. Instead of looking out across the bog toward the source of the
new light, I kept my eyes from the window in panic fear, and clumsily drew on my clothing with some
dazed idea of escape. I remember seizing my revolver and hat, but before it was over I had lost them
both without firing the one or donning the other. After a time the fascination of the red radiance
overcame my fright, and I crept to the east window and looked out whilst the maddening, incessant
piping whined and reverberated through the castle and over all the village.
Over the bog was a deluge of flaring light, scarlet and sinister, and pouring from the strange
olden ruin on the far islet. The aspect of that ruin I can not describe--I must have been mad, for it
seemed to rise majestic and undecayed, splendid and column-cinctured, the flame--reflecting marble
of its entablature piercing the sky like the apex of a temple on a mountain-top. Flutes shrieked and
drums began to beat, and as I watched in awe and terror I thought I saw dark saltant forms silhouetted
grotesquely against the vision of marble and effulgence. The effect was titanic--altogether
unthinkable--and I might have stared indefinitely had not the sound of the piping seemed to grow
stronger at my left. Trembling with a terror oddly mixed with ecstasy, I crossed the circular room to
the north window from which I could see the village and the plain at the edge of the bog. There my
eyes dilated again with a wild wonder as great as if I had not just turned from a scene beyond the pale
of nature, for on the ghastly red-litten plain was moving a procession of beings in such a manner as
none ever saw before save in nightmares.
Half gliding, half floating in the air, the white-clad bog-wraiths were slowly retreating toward
the still waters and the island ruin in fantastic formations suggesting some ancient and solemn
ceremonial dance. Their waving translucent arms, guided by the detestable piping of those unseen
flutes, beckoned in uncanny rhythm to a throng of lurching laborers who followed doglike with blind,
brainless, floundering steps as if dragged by a clumsy but resistless demon-will. As the naiads
neared the bog, without altering their course, a new line of stumbling stragglers zigzagged drunkenly
out of the castle from some door far below my window, groped sightlessly across the courtyard and
through the intervening bit of village, and joined the floundering column of laborers on the plain.
Despite their distance below me I at once knew they were the servants brought from the North, for I
recognized the ugly and unwieldy form of the cook, whose very absurdness had now become
unutterably tragic. The flutes piped horribly, and again I heard the beating of the drums from the
direction of the island ruin. Then silently and gracefully the naiads reached the water and melted one
by one into the ancient bog; while the line of followers, never checking their speed, splashed
awkwardly after them and vanished amidst a tiny vortex of unwholesome bubbles which I could
barely see in the scarlet light. And as the last pathetic straggler, the fat cook, sank heavily out of
sight in that sullen pool, the flutes and the drums grew silent, and the blinding red rays from the ruins
snapped instantaneously out, leaving the village of doom lone and desolate in the wan beams of a
new-risen moon.
My condition was now one of indescribable chaos. Not knowing whether I was mad or sane,
sleeping or waking, I was saved only by a merciful numbness. I believe I did ridiculous things such
as offering prayers to Artemis, Latona, Demeter, Persephone, and Plouton. All that I recalled of a
classic youth came to my lips as the horrors of the situation roused my deepest superstitions. I felt
that I had witnessed the death of a whole village, and knew I was alone in the castle with Denys
Barry, whose boldness had brought down a doom. As I thought of him, new terrors convulsed me,
and I fell to the floor; not fainting, but physically helpless. Then I felt the icy blast from the east
window where the moon had risen, and began to hear the shrieks in the castle far below me. Soon
those shrieks had attained a magnitude and quality which can not be written of, and which makes me
faint as I think of them. All I can say is that they came from something I had known as a friend.
At some time during this shocking period the cold wind and the screaming must have roused me,
for my next impression is of racing madly through inky rooms and corridors and out across the
courtyard into the hideous night. They found me at dawn wandering mindless near Ballylough, but
what unhinged me utterly was not any of the horrors I had seen or heard before. What I muttered
about as I came slowly out of the shadows was a pair of fantastic incidents which occurred in my
flight: incidents of no significance, yet which haunt me unceasingly when I am alone in certain marshy
places or in the moonlight.
As I fled from that accursed castle along the bog's edge I heard a new sound: common, yet unlike
any I had heard before at Kilderry. The stagnant waters, lately quite devoid of animal life, now
teemed with a horde of slimy enormous frogs which piped shrilly and incessantly in tones strangely
out of keeping with their size. They glistened bloated and green in the moonbeams, and seemed to
gaze up at the fount of light. I followed the gaze of one very fat and ugly frog, and saw the second of
the things which drove my senses away.
Stretching directly from the strange olden ruin on the far islet to the waning moon, my eyes
seemed to trace a beam of faint quivering radiance having no reflection in the waters of the bog. And
upward along that pallid path my fevered fancy pictured a thin shadow slowly writhing; a vague
contorted shadow struggling as if drawn by unseen demons. Crazed as I was, I saw in that awful
shadow a monstrous resemblance--a nauseous, unbelievable caricature--a blasphemous effigy of him
who had been Denys Barry.

THE MUSIC OF ERICH ZANN
I have examined maps of the city with the greatest care, yet have never again found the Rue
d'Auseil. These maps have not been modern maps alone, for I know that names change. I have, on the
contrary, delved deeply into all the antiquities of the place, and have personally explored every
region, of whatever name, which could possibly answer to the street I knew as the Rue d'Auseil. But
despite all I have done, it remains an humiliating fact that I cannot find the house, the street, or even
the locality, where, during the last months of my impoverished life as a student of metaphysics at the
university, I heard the music of Erich Zann.
That my memory is broken, I do not wonder; for my health, physical and mental, was gravely
disturbed throughout the period of my residence in the Rue d'Auseil, and I recall that I took none of
my few acquaintances there. But that I cannot find the place again is both singular and perplexing; for
it was within a half-hour's walk of the university and was distinguished by peculiarities which could
hardly be forgotten by any one who had been there. I have never met a person who has seen the Rue
d'Auseil.
The Rue d'Auseil lay across a dark river bordered by precipitous brick blear-windowed
warehouses and spanned by a ponderous bridge of dark stone. It was always shadowy along that
river, as if the smoke of neighboring factories shut out the sun perpetually. The river was also
odorous with evil stenches which I have never smelled elsewhere, and which may some day help me
to find it, since I should recognize them at once. Beyond the bridge were narrow cobbled streets
with rails; and then came the ascent, at first gradual, but incredibly steep as the Rue d'Auseil was
reached.
I have never seen another street as narrow and steep as the Rue d'Auseil. It was almost a cliff,
closed to all vehicles, consisting in several places of flights of steps, and ending at the top in a lofty
ivied wall. Its paving was irregular, sometimes stone slabs, sometimes cobblestones, and sometimes
bare earth with struggling greenish-grey vegetation. The houses were tall, peaked-roofed,
incredibly old, and crazily leaning backward, forward, and sidewise. Occasionally an opposite pair,
both leaning forward, almost met across the street like an arch; and certainly they kept most of the
light from the ground below. There were a few overhead bridges from house to house across the
street.
The inhabitants of that street impressed me peculiarly; At first I thought it was because they were
all silent and reticent; but later decided it was because they were all very old. I do not know how I
came to live on such a street, but I was not myself when I moved there. I had been living in many poor
places, always evicted for want of money; until at last I came upon that tottering house in the Rue
d'Auseil kept by the paralytic Blandot. It was the third house from the top of the street, and by far the
tallest of them all.
My room was on the fifth story; the only inhabited room there, since the house was almost empty.
On the night I arrived I heard strang music from the peaked garret overhead, and the next day asked
old Blandot about it. He told me it was an old German viol-player, a strange dumb man who signed his
name as Erich Zann, and who played evenings in a cheap theater orchestra; adding that Zann's desire to
play in the night after his return from the theater was the reason he had chosen this lofty and isolated
garret room, whose single gable window was the only point on the street from which one could look
over the terminating wall at the declivity and panorama beyond.
Thereafter I heard Zann every night, and although he kept me awake, I was haunted by the
weirdness of his music. Knowing little of the art myself, I was yet certain that none of his harmonies
had any relation to music I had heard before; and concluded that he was a composer of highly
original genius. The longer I listened, the more I was fascinated, until after a week I resolved to
make the old man's acquaintance.
One night as he was returning from his work, I intercepted Zann in the hallway and told him that I
would like to know him and be with him when he played. He was a small, lean, bent person, with
shabby clothes, blue eyes, grotesque, satyrlike face, and nearly bald head; and at my first words
seemed both angered and frightened. My obvious friendliness, however, finally melted him; and he
grudgingly motioned to me to follow him up the dark, creaking and rickety attic stairs. His room, one
of only two in the steeply pitched garret, was on the west side, toward the high wall that formed the
upper end of the street. Its size was very great, and seemed the greater because of its extraordinary
barrenness and neglect. Of furniture there was only a narrow iron bedstead, a dingy wash-stand, a
small table, a large bookcase, an iron music-rack, and three old-fashioned chairs. Sheets of music
were piled in disorder about the floor. The walls were of bare boards, and had probably never
known plaster; whilst the abundance of dust and cobwebs made the place seem more deserted than
inhabited. Evidently Erich Zann's world of beauty lay in some far cosmos of the imagination.
Motioning me to sit down, the dumb man closed the door, turned the large wooden bolt, and
lighted a candle to augment the one he had brought with him. He now removed his viol from its
motheaten covering, and taking it, seated himself in the least uncomfortable of the chairs. He did not
employ the music-rack, but, offering no choice and playing from memory, enchanted me for over an
hour with strains I had never heard before; strains which must have been of his own devising. To
describe their exact nature is impossible for one unversed in music. They were a kind of fugue, with
recurrent passages of the most captivating quality, but to me were notable for the absence of any of
the weird notes I had overheard from my room below on other occasions.
Those haunting notes I had remembered, and had often hummed and whistled inaccurately to
myself, so when the player at length laid down his bow I asked him if he would render some of them.
As I began my request the wrinkled satyrlike face lost the bored placidity it had possessed during the
playing, and seemed to show the same curious mixture of anger and fright which I had noticed when
first I accosted the old man. For a moment I was inclined to use persuasion, regarding rather lightly
the whims of senility; and even tried to awaken my host's weirder mood by whistling a few of the
strains to which I had listened the night before. But I did not pursue this course for more than a
moment; for when the dumb musician recognized the whistled air his face grew suddenly distorted
with an expression wholly beyond analysis, and his long, cold, bony right hand reached out to stop
my mouth and silence the crude imitation. As he did this he further demonstrated his eccentricity by
casting a startled glance toward the lone curtained window, as if fearful of some intruder--a glance
doubly absurd, since the garret stood high and inaccessible above all the adjacent roofs, this window
being the only point on the steep street, as the concierge had told me, from which one could see over
the wall at the summit.
The old man's glance brought Blandot's remark to my mind, and with a certain capriciousness I felt
a wish to look out over the wide and dizzying panorama of moonlit roofs and city lights beyond the
hilltop, which of all the dwellers in the Rue d'Auseil only this crabbed musician could see. I moved
toward the window and would have drawn aside the nondescript curtains, when with a frightened rage
even greater than before, the dumb lodger was upon me again; this time motioning with his head
toward the door as he nervously strove to drag me thither with both hands. Now thoroughly
disgusted with my host, I ordered him to release me, and told him I would go at once. His clutch
relaxed, and as he saw my disgust and offense, his own anger seemed to subside. He tightened his
relaxing grip, but this time in a friendly manner, forcing me into a chair; then with an appearance of
wistfulness crossing to the littered table, where he wrote many words with a pencil, in the labored
French of a foreigner.
The note which he finally handed me was an appeal for tolerance and forgiveness. Zann said that
he was old, lonely, and afflicted with strange fears and nervous disorders connected with his music
and with other things. He had enjoyed my listening to his music, and wished I would come again and
not mind his eccentricities. But he could not play to another his weird harmonies, and could not bear
hearing them from another; nor could he bear having anything in his room touched by another. He had
not known until our hallway conversation that I could overhear his playing in my room, and now asked
me if I would arrange with Blandot to take a lower room where I could not hear him in the night. He
would, he wrote, defray the difference in rent.
As I sat deciphering the execrable French, I felt more lenient toward the old man. He was a victim
of physical and nervous suffering, as was I; and my metaphysical studies had taught me kindness. In
the silence there came a slight sound from the window--the shutter must have rattled in the night
wind, and for some reason I started almost as violently as did Erich Zann. So when I had finished
reading, I shook my host by the hand, and departed as a friend.
The next day Blandot gave me a more expensive room on the third floor, between the apartments
of an aged money-lender and the room of a respectable upholsterer. There was no one on the fourth
floor.
It was not long before I found that Zann's eagerness for my company was not as great as it had
seemed while he was persuading me to move down from the fifth story. He did not ask me to call on
him, and when I did call he appeared uneasy and played listlessly. This was always at night--in the
day he slept and would admit no one. My liking for him did not grow, though the attic room and the
weird music seemed to hold an odd fascination for me. I had a curious desire to look out of that
window, over the wall and down the unseen slope at the glittering roofs and spires which must lie
outspread there. Once I went up to the garret during theater hours, when Zann was away, but the door
was locked.
What I did succeed in doing was to overhear the nocturnal playing of the dumb old man. At first I
would tip-toe up to my old fifth floor, then I grew bold enough to climb the last creaking staircase to
the peaked garret. There in the narrow hall, outside the bolted door with the covered keyhole, I often
heard sounds which filled me with an indefinable dread--the dread of vague wonder and brooding
mystery. It was not that the sounds were hideous, for they were not; but that they held vibrations
suggesting nothing on this globe of earth, and that at certain intervals they assumed a symphonic
quality which I could hardly conceive as produced by one player. Certainly, Erich Zann was a genius
of wild power. As the weeks passed, the playing grew wilder, whilst the old musician acquired an
increasing haggardness and furtiveness pitiful to behold. He now refused to admit me at any time, and
shunned me whenever we met on the stairs.
Then one night as I listened at the door, I heard the shrieking viol swell into a chaotic babel of
sound; a pandemonium which would have led me to doubt my own shaking sanity had there not come
from behind that barred portal a piteous proof that the horror was real--the awful, inarticulate cry
which only a mute can utter, and which rises only in moments of the most terrible fear or anguish. I
knocked repeatedly at the door, but received no response. Afterward I waited in the black hallway,
shivering with cold and fear, till I heard the poor musician's feeble effort to rise from the floor by
the aid of a chair. Believing him just conscious after a fainting fit, I renewed my rapping, at the same
time calling out my name reassuringly. I heard Zann stumble to the window and close both shutter and
sash, then stumble to the door, which he falteringly unfastened to admit me. This time his delight at
having me present was real; for his distorted face gleamed with relief while he clutched at my coat
as a child clutches at its mother's skirts.
Shaking pathetically, the old man forced me into a chair whilst he sank into another, beside which
his viol and bow lay carelessly on the floor. He sat for some time inactive, nodding oddly, but having
a paradoxical suggestion of intense and frightened listening. Subsequently he seemed to be satisfied,
and crossing to a chair by the table wrote a brief note, handed it to me, and returned to the table,
where he began to write rapidly and incessantly. The note implored me in the name of mercy, and for
the sake of my own curiosity, to wait where I was while he prepared a full account in German of all
the marvels and terrors which beset him. I waited, and the dumb man's pencil flew.
It was perhaps an hour later, while I still waited and while the old musician's feverishly written
sheets still continued to pile up, that I saw Zann start as from the hint of a horrible shock.
Unmistakably he was looking at the curtained window and listening shudderingly. Then I half fancied
I heard a sound myself; though it was not a horrible sound, but rather an exquisitely low and infinitely
distant musical note, suggesting a player in one of the neighboring houses, or in some abode beyond
the lofty wall over which I had never been able to look. Upon Zann the effect was terrible, for,
dropping his pencil, suddenly he rose, seized his viol, and commenced to rend the night with the
wildest playing I had ever heard from his bow save when listening at the barred door.
It would be useless to describe the playing of Erich Zann on that dreadful night. It was more
horrible than anything I had ever overheard, because I could now see the expression of his face, and
could realize that this time the motive was stark fear. He was trying to make a noise; to ward
something off or drown something out--what, I could not imagine, awesome though I felt it must be.
The playing grew fantastic, dehnous, and hysterical, yet kept to the last the qualities of supreme
genius which I knew this strange old man possessed. I recognized the air--it was a wild Hungarian
dance popular in the theaters, and I reflected for a moment that this was the first time I had ever heard
Zann play the work of another composer.
Louder and louder, wilder and wilder, mounted the shrieking and whining of that desperate viol.
The player was dripping with an uncanny perspiration and twisted like a monkey, always looking
frantically at the curtained window. In his frenzied strains I could almost see shadowy satyrs and
bacchanals dancing and whirling insanely through seething abysses of clouds and smoke and
lightning. And then I thought I heard a shriller, steadier note that was not from the viol; a calm,
deliberate, purposeful, mocking note from far away in the West.
At this juncture the shutter began to rattle in a howling night wind which had sprung up outside as
if in answer to the mad playing within. Zann's screaming viol now outdid itself emitting sounds I had
never thought a viol could emit. The shutter rattled more loudly, unfastened, and commenced
slamming against the window. Then the glass broke shiveringly under the persistent impacts, and the
chill wind rushed in, making the candles sputter and rustling the sheets of paper on the table where
Zann had begun to write out his horrible secret. I looked at Zann, and saw that he was past conscious
observation. His blue eyes were bulging, glassy and sightless, and the frantic playing had become a
blind, mechanical, unrecognizable orgy that no pen could even suggest.
A sudden gust, stronger than the others, caught up the manuscript and bore it toward the window. I
followed the flying sheets in desperation, but they were gone before I reached the demolished
panes. Then I remembered my old wish to gaze from this window, the only window in the Rue
d'Auseil from which one might see the slope beyond the wall, and the city outspread beneath. It was
very dark, but the city's lights always burned, and I expected to see them there amidst the rain and
wind. Yet when I looked from that highest of all gable windows, looked while the candles sputtered
and the insane viol howled with the night-wind, I saw no city spread below, and no friendly lights
gleamed from remembered streets, but only the blackness of space illimitable; unimagined space
alive with motion and music, and having no semblance of anything on earth. And as I stood there
looking in terror, the wind blew out both the candles in that ancient peaked garret, leaving me in
savage and impenetrable darkness with chaos and pandemonium before me, and the demon madness of
that night-baying viol behind me.
I staggered back in the dark, without the means of striking a light, crashing against the table,
overturning a chair, and finally groping my way to the place where the blackness screamed with
shocking music. To save myself and Erich Zann I could at least try, whatever the powers opposed to
me. Once I thought some chill thing brushed me, and I screamed, but my scream could not be heard
above that hideous viol. Suddenly out of the blackness the madly sawing bow struck me, and I knew I
was close to the player. I felt ahead, touched the back of Zann's chair, and then found and shook his
shoulder in an effort to bring him to his senses.
He did not respond, and still the viol shrieked on without slackening. I moved my hand to his head,
whose mechanical nodding I was able to stop, and shouted in his ear that we must both flee from the
unknown things of the night. But he neither answered me nor abated the frenzy of his unutterable
music, while all through the garret strange currents of wind seemed to dance in the darkness and
babel. When my hand touched his ear I shuddered, though I knew not why--knew not why till I felt the
still face; the ice-cold, stiffened, unbreathing face whose glassy eyes bulged uselessly into the void.
And then, by some miracle, finding the door and the large wooden bolt, I plunged wildly away from
that glassy-eyed thing in the dark, and from the ghoulish howling of that accursed viol whose fury
increased even as I plunged.
Leaping, floating, flying down those endless stairs through the dark house; racing mindlessly out
into the narrow, steep, and ancient street of steps and tottering houses; clattering down steps and over
cobbles to the lower streets and the putrid canyon-walled river; panting across the great dark bridge
to the broader, healthier streets and boulevards we know; all these are terrible impressions that
linger with me. And I recall that there was no wind, and that the moon was out, and that all the lights
of the city twinkled.
Despite my most careful searches and investigations, I have never since been able to find the Rue
d'Auseil. But I am not wholly sorry; either for this or for the loss in undreamable abysses of the
closely--written sheets which alone could have explained the music of Erich Zann.

THE OTHER GODS
But now they have betaken themselves to unknown Kadath in the cold waste where no man treads,
and are grown stern, having no higher peak whereto to flee at the coming of men. They are grown
stern, and where once they suffered men to displace them, they now forbid men to come; or coming,
to depart. It is well for men that they know not of Kadath in the cold waste; else they would seek
injudiciously to scale it.
Sometimes when earth's gods are homesick they visit in the still of the night the peaks where
once they dwelt, and weep softly as they try to play in the olden way on remembered slopes. Men
have felt the tears of the gods on white-capped Thurai, though they have thought it rain; and have
heard the sighs of the gods in the plaintive dawn-winds of Lerion. In cloud-ships the gods are wont
to travel, and wise cotters have legends that keep them from certain high peaks at night when it is
cloudy, for the gods are not lenient as of old.
In Ulthar, which lies beyond the river Skai, once dwelt an old man avid to behold the gods of
earth; a man deeply learned in the seven cryptical books of earth, and familiar with the Pnakotic
Manuscripts of distant and frozen Lomar. His name was Barzai the Wise, and the villagers tell of how
he went up a mountain on the night of the strange eclipse.
Barzai knew so much of the gods that he could tell of their comings and goings, and guessed so
many of their secrets that he was deemed half a god himself. It was he who wisely advised the
burgesses of Ulthar when they passed their remarkable law against the slaying of cats, and who first
told the young priest Atal where it is that black cats go at midnight on St. John's Eve. Barzai was
learned in the lore of the earth's gods, and had gained a desire to look upon their faces. He believed
that his great secret knowledge of gods could shield him from their wrath, so resolved to go up to
the summit of high and rocky Hatheg-Kla on a night when he knew the gods would be there.
Hatheg-Kla is far in the stony desert beyond Hatheg, for which it is named, and rises like a rock
statue in a silent temple. Around its peak the mists play always mournfully, for mists are the memories
of the gods, and the gods loved Hatheg-Kla when they dwelt upon it in the old days. Often the gods
of earth visit Hatheg-Kla in their ships of clouds, casting pale vapors over the slopes as they dance
reminiscently on the summit under a clear moon. The villagers of Hatheg say it is ill to climb the
Hatheg-Kla at any time, and deadly to climb it by night when pale vapors hide the summit and the
moon; but Barzai heeded them not when he came from neighboring Ulthar with the young priest Atal,
who was his disciple. Atal was only the son of an innkeeper, and was sometimes afraid; but Barzai's
father had been a landgrave who dwelt in an ancient castle, so he had no common superstition in his
blood, and only laughed at the fearful cotters.
Banzai and Atal went out of Hatheg into the stony desert despite the prayers of peasants, and
talked of earth's gods by their campfires at night. Many days they traveled, and from afar saw lofty
Hatheg-Kla with his aureole of mournful mist. On the thirteenth day they reached the mountain's
lonely base, and Atal spoke of his fears. But Barzai was old and learned and had no fears, so led the
way up the slope that no man had scaled since the time of Sansu, who is written of with fright in the
moldy Pnakotic Manuscripts.
The way was rocky, and made perilous by chasms, cliffs, and falling stones. Later it grew cold
and snowy; and Barzai and Atal often slipped and fell as they hewed and plodded upward with staves
and axes. Finally the air grew thin, and the sky changed color, and the climbers found it hard to
breathe; but still they toiled up and up, marveling at the strangeness of the scene and thrilling at the
thought of what would happen on the summit when the moon was out and the pale vapours spread
around. For three days they climbed higher and higher toward the roof of the world; then they
camped to wait for the clouding of the moon.
For four nights no clouds came, and the moon shone down cold through the thin mournful mist
around the silent pinnacle. Then on the fifth night, which was the night of the full moon, Barzai saw
some dense clouds far to the north, and stayed up with Atal to watch them draw near. Thick and
majestic they sailed, slowly and deliberately onward; ranging themselves round the peak high above
the watchers, and hiding the moon and the summit from view. For a long hour the watchers gazed,
whilst the vapours swirled and the screen of clouds grew thicker and more restless. Barzai was wise
in the lore of earth's gods, and listened hard for certain sounds, but Atal felt the chill of the vapours
and the awe of the night, and feared much. And when Barzai began to climb higher and beckon
eagerly, it was long before Atal would follow.
So thick were the vapours that the way was hard, and though Atal followed at last, he could
scarce see the gray shape of Barzai on the dim slope above in the clouded moonlight. Barzai forged
very far ahead, and seemed despite his age to climb more easily than Atal; fearing not the steepness
that began to grow too great for any save a strong and dauntless man, nor pausing at wide black
chasms that Atal could scarce leap. And so they went up wildly over rocks and gulfs, slipping and
stumbling, and sometimes awed at the vastness and horrible silence of bleak ice pinnacles and mute
granite steeps.
Very suddenly Barzai went out of Atal's sight, scaling a hideous cliff that seemed to bulge
outward and block the path for any climber not inspired of earth's gods. Atal was far below, and
planning what he should do when he reached the place, when curiously he noticed that the light had
grown strong, as if the cloudless peak and moonlit meetingplace of the gods were very near. And as
he scrambled on toward the bulging cliff and litten sky he felt fears more shocking than any he had
known before. Then through the high mists he heard the voice of Barzai shouting wildly in delight:
"I have heard the gods. I have heard earth's gods singing in revelry on Hatheg-Kla! The voices
of earth's gods are known to Barzai the Prophet! The mists are thin and the moon is bright, and I shall
see the gods dancing wildly on Hatheg-Kla that they loved in youth. The wisdom of Barzai hath made
him greater than earth's gods, and against his will their spells and barriers are as naught; Barzai will
behold the gods, the proud gods, the secret gods, the gods of earth who spurn the sight of man!"
Atal could not hear the voices Barzai heard, but he was now close to the bulging cliff and
scanning it for footholds. Then he heard Barzai's voice grow shriller and louder:
"The mist is very thin, and the moon casts shadows on the slope; the voices of earth's gods are
high and wild, and they fear the coming of Barzai the Wise, who is greater than they...The moon's
light flickers, as earth's gods dance against it; I shall see the dancing forms of the gods that leap and
howl in the moonlight...The light is dimmer and the gods are afraid..."
Whilst Barzai was shouting these things Atal felt a spectral change in all the air, as if the laws of
earth were bowing to greater laws; for though the way was steeper than ever, the upward path was
now grown fearsomely easy, and the bulging cliff proved scarce an obstacle when he reached it and
slid perilously up its convex face. The light of the moon had strangely failed, and as Atal plunged
upward through the mists he heard Barzai the Wise shrieking in the shadows:
"The moon is dark, and the gods dance in the night; there is terror in the sky, for upon the moon
hath sunk an eclipse foretold in no books of men or of earth's gods...There is unknown magic on
Hatheg-Kla, for the screams of the frightened gods have turned to laughter, and the slopes of ice
shoot up endlessly into the black heavens whither I am plunging...Hei! Hei! At last! In the dim light I
behold the gods of earth!"
And now Atal, slipping dizzily up over inconceivable steeps, heard in the dark a loathsome
laughing, mixed with such a cry as no man else ever heard save in the Phlegethon of unrelatable
nightmares; a cry wherein reverberated the horror and anguish of a haunted lifetime packed into one
atrocious moment:
"The other gods! The other gods! The gods of the outer hells that guard the feeble gods of
earth!...Look away...Go back...Do not see! Do not see! The vengeance of the infinite abysses...That
cursed, that damnable pit...Merciful gods of earth, I am falling into the sky!"
And as Atal shut his eyes and stopped his ears and tried to hump downward against the frightful
pull from unknown heights, there resounded on Hatheg-Kla that terrible peal of thunder which
awaked the good cotters of the plains and the honest burgesses of Hatheg, Nir and Ulthar, and caused
them to behold through the clouds that strange eclipse of the moon that no book ever predicted. And
when the moon came out at last Atal was safe on the lower snows of the mountain without sight of
earth's gods, or of the other gods.
Now it is told in the moldy Pnakotic Manuscripts that Sansu found naught but wordless ice and
rock when he did climb Hatheg-Kla in the youth of the world. Yet when the men of Ulthar and Nir and
Hatheg crushed their fears and scaled that haunted steep by day in search of Barzai the Wise, they
found graven in the naked stone of the summit a curious and cyclopean symbol fifty cubits wide, as if
the rock had been riven by some titanic chisel. And the symbol was like to one that learned men have
discerned in those frightful parts of the Pnakotic Manuscripts which were too ancient to be read.
This they found.
Barzai the Wise they never found, nor could the holy priest Atal ever be persuaded to pray for
his soul's repose. Moreover, to this day the people of Ulthar and Nir and Hatheg fear eclipses, and
pray by night when pale vapors hide the mountain-top and the moon. And above the mists on Hatheg-
Kla, earth's gods sometimes dance reminiscently; for they know they are safe, and love to come from
unknown Kadath in ships of clouds and play in the olden way, as they did when earth was new and men
not given to the climbing of inaccessible places.

THE OUTSIDER
Unhappy is he to whom the memories of childhood bring only fear and sadness. Wretched is he
who looks back upon lone hours in vast and dismal chambers with brown hangings and maddening
rows of antique books, or upon awed watches in twilight groves of grotesque, gigantic, and vine-
encumbered trees that silently wave twisted branches far aloft. Such a lot the gods gave to me--to me,
the dazed, the disappointed; the barren, the broken. And yet I am strangely content and cling
desperately to those sere memories, when my mind momentarily threatens to reach beyond to the
other.
I know not where I was born, save that the castle was infinitely old and infinitely horrible, full of
dark passages and having high ceilings where the eye could find only cobwebs and shadows. The
stones in the crumbling corridors seemed always hideously damp, and there was an accursed smell
everywhere, as of the piled-up corpses of dead generations. It was never light, so that I used
sometimes to light candles and gaze steadily at them for relief, nor was there any sun outdoors, since
the terrible trees grew high above the topmost accessible tower. There was one black tower which
reached above the trees into the unknown outer sky, but that was partly ruined and could not be
ascended save by a well-nigh impossible climb up the sheer wall, stone by stone.
I must have lived years in this place, but I cannot measure the time. Beings must have cared for my
needs, yet I cannot recall any person except myself, or anything alive but the noiseless rats and bats
and spiders. I think that whoever nursed me must have been shockingly aged, since my first
conception of a living person was that of somebody mockingly like myself, yet distorted, shrivelled,
and decaying like the castle. To me there was nothing grotesque in the bones and skeletons that
strewed some of the stone crypts deep down among the foundations. I fantastically associated these
things with everyday events, and thought them more natural than the coloured pictures of living
beings which I found in many of the mouldy books. From such books I learned all that I know. No
teacher urged or guided me, and I do not recall hearing any human voice in all those years--not even
my own; for although I had read of speech, I had never thought to try to speak aloud. My aspect was a
matter equally unthought of, for there were no mirrors in the castle, and I merely regarded myself by
instinct as akin to the youthful figures I saw drawn and painted in the books. I felt conscious of youth
because I remembered so little.
Outside, across the putrid moat and under the dark mute trees, I would often lie and dream for
hours about what I read in the books; and would longingly picture myself amidst gay crowds in the
sunny world beyond the endless forests. Once I tried to escape from the forest, but as I went farther
from the castle the shade grew denser and the air more filled with brooding fear; so that I ran
frantically back lest I lose my way in a labyrinth of nighted silence.
So through endless twilights I dreamed and waited, though I knew not what I waited for. Then in
the shadowy solitude my longing for light grew so frantic that I could rest no more, and I lifted
entreating hands to the single black ruined tower that reached above the forest into the unknown outer
sky. And at last I resolved to scale that tower, fall though I might; since it were better to glimpse the
sky and perish, than to live without ever beholding day.
In the dank twilight I climbed the worn and aged stone stairs till I reached the level where they
ceased, and thereafter clung perilously to small footholds leading upward. Ghastly and terrible was
that dead, stairless cylinder of rock; black, ruined, and deserted, and sinister with startled bats whose
wings made no noise. But more ghastly and terrible still was the slowness of my progress; for climb
as I might, the darkness overhead grew no thinner, and a new chill as of haunted and venerable mould
assailed me. I shivered as I wondered why I did not reach the light, and would have looked down had
I dared. I fancied that night had come suddenly upon me, and vainly groped with one free hand for a
window embrasure, that I might peer out and above, and try to judge the height I had once attained.
All at once, after an infinity of awesome, sightless, crawling up that concave and desperate
precipice, I felt my head touch a solid thing, and I knew I must have gained the roof, or at least some
kind of floor. In the darkness I raised my free hand and tested the barrier, finding it stone and
immovable. Then came a deadly circuit of the tower, clinging to whatever holds the slimy wall could
give; till finally my testing hand found the barrier yielding, and I turned upward again, pushing the
slab or door with my head as I used both hands in my fearful ascent. There was no light revealed
above, and as my hands went higher I knew that my climb was for the nonce ended; since the slab was
the trapdoor of an aperture leading to a level stone surface of greater circumference than the lower
tower, no doubt the floor of some lofty and capacious observation chamber. I crawled through
carefully, and tried to prevent the heavy slab from falling back into place, but failed in the latter
attempt. As I lay exhausted on the stone floor I heard the eerie echoes of its fall, hoped when
necessary to pry it up again.
Believing I was now at prodigious height, far above the accursed branches of the wood, I
dragged myself up from the floor and fumbled about for windows, that I might look for the first time
upon the sky, and the moon and stars of which I had read. But on every hand I was disappointed; since
all that I found were vast shelves of marble, bearing odious oblong boxes of disturbing size. More
and more I reflected, and wondered what hoary secrets might abide in this high apartment so many
aeons cut off from the castle below. Then unexpectedly my hands came upon a doorway, where hung
a portal of stone, rough with strange chiselling. Trying it, I found it locked; but with a supreme burst
of strength I overcame all obstacles and dragged it open inward. As I did so there came to me the
purest ecstasy I have ever known; for shining tranquilly through an ornate grating of iron, and down a
short stone passageway of steps that ascended from the newly found doorway, was the radiant full
moon, which I had never before seen save in dreams and in vague visions I dared not call memories.
Fancying now that I had attained the very pinnacle of the castle, I commenced to rush up the few
steps beyond the door; but the sudden veiling of the moon by a cloud caused me to stumble, and I felt
my way more slowly in the dark. It was still very dark when I reached the grating--which I tried
carefully and found unlocked, but which I did not open for fear of falling from the amazing height to
which I had climbed. Then the moon came out.
Most demoniacal of all shocks is that of the abysmally unexpected and grotesquely unbelievable.
Nothing I had before undergone could compare in terror with what I now saw; with the bizarre
marvels that sight implied. The sight itself was as simple as it was stupefying, for it was merely this:
instead of a dizzying prospect of treetops seen from a lofty eminence, there stretched around me on
the level through the grating nothing less than the solid ground, decked and diversified by marble
slabs and columns, and overshadowed by an ancient stone church, whose ruined spire gleamed
spectrally in the moonlight.
Half unconscious, I opened the grating and staggered out upon the white gravel path that
stretched away in two directions. My mind, stunned and chaotic as it was, still held the frantic craving
for light; and not even the fantastic wonder which had happened could stay my course. I neither knew
nor cared whether my experience was insanity, dreaming, or magic; but was determined to gaze on
brilliance and gaiety at any cost. I knew not who I was or what I was, or what my surroundings might
be; though as I continued to stumble along I became conscious of a kind of fearsome latent memory
that made my progress not wholly fortuitous. I passed under an arch out of that region of slabs and
columns, and wandered through the open country; sometimes following the visible road, but
sometimes leaving it curiously to tread across meadows where only occasional ruins bespoke the
ancient presence of a forgotten road. Once I swam across a swift river where crumbling, mossy
masonry told of a bridge long vanished.
Over two hours must have passed before I reached what seemed to be my goal, a venerable ivied
castle in a thickly wooded park, maddeningly familiar, yet full of perplexing strangeness to me. I saw
that the moat was filled in, and that some of the well-known towers were demolished, whilst new
wings existed to confuse the beholder. But what I observed with chief interest and delight were the
open windows--gorgeously ablaze with light and sending forth sound of the gayest revelry.
Advancing to one of these I looked in and saw an oddly dressed company indeed; making merry, and
speaking brightly to one another. I had never, seemingly, heard human speech before and could guess
only vaguely what was said. Some of the faces seemed to hold expressions that brought up
incredibly remote recollections, others were utterly alien.
I now stepped through the low window into the brilliantly lighted room, stepping as I did so from
my single bright moment of hope to my blackest convulsion of despair and realization. The nightmare
was quick to come, for as I entered, there occurred immediately one of the most terrifying
demonstrations I had ever conceived. Scarcely had I crossed the sill when there descended upon the
whole company a sudden and unheralded fear of hideous intensity, distorting every face and evoking
the most horrible screams from nearly every throat. Flight was universal, and in the clamour and
panic several fell in a swoon and were dragged away by their madly fleeing companions. Many
covered their eyes with their hands, and plunged blindly and awkwardly in their race to escape,
overturning furniture and stumbling against the walls before they managed to reach one of the many
doors.
The cries were shocking; and as I stood in the brilliant apartment alone and dazed, listening to
their vanishing echoes, I trembled at the thought of what might be lurking near me unseen. At a casual
inspection the room seemed deserted, but when I moved towards one of the alcoves I thought I
detected a presence there--a hint of motion beyond the golden-arched doorway leading to another
and somewhat similar room. As I approached the arch I began to perceive the presence more clearly;
and then, with the first and last sound I ever uttered--a ghastly ululation that revolted me almost as
poignantly as its noxious cause--I beheld in full, frightful vividness the inconceivable, indescribable,
and unmentionable monstrosity which had by its simple appearance changed a merry company to a
herd of delirious fugitives.
I cannot even hint what it was like, for it was a compound of all that is unclean, uncanny,
unwelcome, abnormal, and detestable. It was the ghoulish shade of decay, antiquity, and dissolution;
the putrid, dripping eidolon of unwholesome revelation, the awful baring of that which the merciful
earth should always hide. God knows it was not of this world--or no longer of this world--yet to my
horror I saw in its eaten-away and bone-revealing outlines a leering, abhorrent travesty on the human
shape; and in its mouldy, disintegrating apparel an unspeakable quality that chilled me even more.
I was almost paralysed, but not too much so to make a feeble effort towards flight; a backward
stumble which failed to break the spell in which the nameless, voiceless monster held me. My eyes
bewitched by the glassy orbs which stared loathsomely into them, refused to close; though they
were mercifully blurred, and showed the terrible object but indistinctly after the first shock. I tried to
raise my hand to shut out the sight, yet so stunned were my nerves that my arm could not fully obey
my will. The attempt, however, was enough to disturb my balance; so that I had to stagger forward
several steps to avoid falling. As I did so I became suddenly and agonizingly aware of the nearness
of the carrion thing, whose hideous hollow breathing I half fancied I could hear. Nearly mad, I found
myself yet able to throw out a hand to ward of the foetid apparition which pressed so close; when in
one cataclysmic second of cosmic nightmarishness and hellish accident my fingers touched the
rotting outstretched paw of the monster beneath the golden arch.
I did not shriek, but all the fiendish ghouls that ride the nightwind shrieked for me as in that same
second there crashed down upon my mind a single fleeting avalanche of soul-annihilating memory. I
knew in that second all that had been; I remembered beyond the frightful castle and the trees, and
recognized the altered edifice in which I now stood; I recognized, most terrible of all, the unholy
abomination that stood leering before me as I withdrew my sullied fingers from its own.
But in the cosmos there is balm as well as bitterness, and that balm is nepenthe. In the supreme
horror of that second I forgot what had horrified me, and the burst of black memory vanished in a
chaos of echoing images. In a dream I fled from that haunted and accursed pile, and ran swiftly and
silently in the moonlight. When I returned to the churchyard place of marble and went down the steps
I found the stone trap-door immovable; but I was not sorry, for I had hated the antique castle and the
trees. Now I ride with the mocking and friendly ghouls on the night-wind, and play by day amongst
the catacombs of Nephren-Ka in the sealed and unknown valley of Hadoth by the Nile. I know that
light is not for me, save that of the moon over the rock tombs of Neb, nor any gaiety save the
unnamed feasts of Nitokris beneath the Great Pyramid; yet in my new wildness and freedom I almost
welcome the bitterness of alienage.
For although nepenthe has calmed me, I know always that I am an outsider; a stranger in this
century and among those who are still men. This I have known ever since I stretched out my fingers
to the abomination within that great gilded frame; stretched out my fingers and touched a cold and
unyielding surface of polished glass.

THE PICTURE IN THE HOUSE
Most horrible of all sights are the little unpainted wooden houses remote from travelled ways,
usually squatted upon some damp grassy slope or leaning against some gigantic outcropping of rock.
Two hundred years and more they have leaned or squatted there, while the vines have crawled and
the trees have swelled and spread. They are almost hidden now in lawless luxuriances of green and
guardian shrouds of shadow; but the small-paned windows still stare shockingly, as if blinking
through a lethal stupor which wards off madness by dulling the memory of unutterable things.
In such houses have dwelt generations of strange people, whose like the world has never seen.
Seized with a gloomy and fanatical belief which exiled them from their kind, their ancestors sought
the wilderness for freedom. There the scions of a conquering race indeed flourished free from the
restrictions of their fellows, but cowered in an appalling slavery to the dismal phantasms of their
own minds. Divorced from the enlightenment of civilization, the strength of these Puritans turned into
singular channels; and in their isolation, morbid self-repression, and struggle for life with relentless
Nature, there came to them dark furtive traits from the prehistoric depths of their cold Northern
heritage. By necessity practical and by philosophy stern, these folks were not beautiful in their sins.
Erring as all mortals must, they were forced by their rigid code to seek concealment above all else;
so that they came to use less and less taste in what they concealed. Only the silent, sleepy, staring
houses in the backwoods can tell all that has lain hidden since the early days, and they are not
communicative, being loath to shake off the drowsiness which helps them forget. Sometimes one
feels that it would be merciful to tear down these houses, for they must often dream.
It was to a time-battered edifice of this description that I was driven one afternoon in November,
1896, by a rain of such chilling copiousness that any shelter was preferable to exposure. I had been
travelling for some time amongst the people of the MiskatonicValley in quest of certain genealogical
data; and from the remote, devious, and problematical nature of my course, had deemed it convenient
to employ a bicycle despite the lateness of the season. Now I found myself upon an apparently
abandoned road which I had chosen as the shortest cut to Arkham, overtaken by the storm at a point
far from any town, and confronted with no refuge save the antique and repellent wooden building
which blinked with bleared windows from between two huge leafless elms near the foot of a rocky
hill. Distant though it is from the remnant of a road, this house none the less impressed me
unfavorably the very moment I espied it. Honest, wholesome structures do not stare at travellers so
slyly and hauntingly, and in my genealogical researches I had encountered legends of a century
before which biased me against places of this kind. Yet the force of the elements was such as to
overcome my scruples, and I did not hesitate to wheel my machine up the weedy rise to the closed
door which seemed at once so suggestive and secretive.
I had somehow taken it for granted that the house was abandoned, yet as I approached it I was not
so sure, for though the walks were indeed overgrown with weeds, they seemed to retain their nature
a little too well to argue complete desertion. Therefore instead of trying the door I knocked, feeling
as I did so a trepidation I could scarcely explain. As I waited on the rough, mossy rock which served
as a door-step, I glanced at the neighboring windows and the panes of the transom above me, and
noticed that although old, rattling, and almost opaque with dirt, they were not broken. The building,
then, must still be inhabited, despite its isolation and general neglect. However, my rapping evoked
no response, so after repeating the summons I tried the rusty latch and found the door unfastened.
Inside was a little vestibule with walls from which the plaster was falling, and through the doorway
came a faint but peculiarly hateful odor. I entered, carrying my bicycle, and closed the door behind
me. Ahead rose a narrow staircase, flanked by a small door probably leading to the cellar, while to
the left and right were closed doors leading to rooms on the ground floor.
Leaning my cycle against the wall I opened the door at the left, and crossed into a small low-
ceiled chamber but dimly lighted by its two dusty windows and furnished in the barest and most
primitive possible way. It appeared to be a kind of sitting-room, for it had a table and several chairs,
and an immense fireplace above which ticked an antique clock on a mantel. Books and papers were
very few, and in the prevailing gloom I could not readily discern the titles. What interested me was
the uniform air of archaism as displayed in every visible detail. Most of the houses in this region I
had found rich in relics of the past, but here the antiquity was curiously complete; for in all the room
I could not discover a single article of definitely post-revolutionary date. Had the furnishings been
less humble, the place would have been a collector's paradise.
As I surveyed this quaint apartment, I felt an increase in that aversion first excited by the bleak
exterior of the house. Just what it was that I feared or loathed, I could by no means define; but
something in the whole atmosphere seemed redolent of unhallowed age, of unpleasant crudeness, and
of secrets which should be forgotten. I felt disinclined to sit down, and wandered about examining
the various articles which I had noticed. The first object of my curiosity was a book of medium size
lying upon the table and presenting such an antediluvian aspect that I marvelled at beholding it outside
a museum or library. It was bound in leather with metal fittings, and was in an excellent state of
preservation; being altogether an unusual sort of volume to encounter in an abode so lowly. When I
opened it to the title page my wonder grew even greater, for it proved to be nothing less rare than
Pigafetta's account of the Congo region, written in Latin from the notes of the sailor Lopex and
printed at Frankfurt in 1598. I had often heard of this work, with its curious illustrations by the
brothers De Bry, hence for a moment forgot my uneasiness in my desire to turn the pages before me.
The engravings were indeed interesting, drawn wholly from imagination and careless descriptions,
and represented negroes with white skins and Caucasian features; nor would I soon have closed the
book had not an exceedingly trivial circumstance upset my tired nerves and revived my sensation of
disquiet. What annoyed me was merely the persistent way in which the volume tended to fall open of
itself at Plate XII, which represented in gruesome detail a butcher's shop of the cannibal Anziques. I
experienced some shame at my susceptibility to so slight a thing, but the drawing nevertheless
disturbed me, especially in connection with some adjacent passages descriptive of Anzique
gastronomy.
I had turned to a neighboring shelf and was examining its meagre literary contents--an eighteenth
century Bible, a "Pilgrim's Progress" of like period, illustrated with grotesque woodcuts and printed
by the almanack-maker Isaiah Thomas, the rotting bulk of Cotton Mather's "Magnalia Christi
Americana," and a few other books of evidently equal age--when my attention was aroused by the
unmistakable sound of walking in the room overhead. At first astonished and startled, considering the
lack of response to my recent knocking at the door, I immediately afterward concluded that the walker
had just awakened from a sound sleep, and listened with less surprise as the footsteps sounded on the
creaking stairs. The tread was heavy, yet seemed to contain a curious quality of cautiousness; a
quality which I disliked the more because the tread was heavy. When I had entered the room I had
shut the door behind me. Now, after a moment of silence during which the walker may have been
inspecting my bicycle in the hall, I heard a fumbling at the latch and saw the paneled portal swing
open again.
In the doorway stood a person of such singular appearance that I should have exclaimed aloud but
for the restraints of good breeding. Old, white-bearded, and ragged, my host possessed a
countenance and physique which inspired equal wonder and respect. His height could not have been
less than six feet, and despite a general air of age and poverty he was stout and powerful in
proportion. His face, almost hidden by a long beard which grew high on the cheeks, seemed
abnormally ruddy and less wrinkled than one might expect; while over a high forehead fell a shock of
white hair little thinned by the years. His blue eyes, though a trifle bloodshot, seemed inexplicably
keen and burning. But for his horrible unkemptness the man would have been as distinguished-looking
as he was impressive. This unkemptness, however, made him offensive despite his face and figure.
Of what his clothing consisted I could hardly tell, for it seemed to me no more than a mass of tatters
surmounting a pair of high, heavy boots; and his lack of cleanliness surpassed description.
The appearance of this man, and the instinctive fear he inspired, prepared me for something like
enmity; so that I almost shuddered through surprise and a sense of uncanny incongruity when he
motioned me to a chair and addressed me in a thin, weak voice full of fawning respect and ingratiating
hospitality. His speech was very curious, an extreme form of Yankee dialect I had thought long
extinct; and I studied it closely as he sat down opposite me for conversation.
"Ketched in the rain, be ye?" he greeted. "Glad ye was nigh the haouse en' hed the sense ta come
right in. I calc'late I was alseep, else I'd a heerd ye--I ain't as young as I uster be, an' I need a
paowerful sight o' naps naowadays. Trav'lin fur? I hain't seed many folks 'long this rud sence they tuk
off the Arkham stage."
I replied that I was going to Arkham, and apologized for my rude entry into his domicile,
whereupon he continued.
"Glad ta see ye, young Sir--new faces is scurce arount here, an' I hain't got much ta cheer me up
these days. Guess yew hail from Bosting, don't ye? I never ben thar, but I kin tell a taown man when I
see 'im--we hed one fer deestrick schoolmaster in 'eighty-four, but he quit suddent an' no one never
heerd on 'im sence--" here the old man lapsed into a kind of chuckle, and made no explanation when I
questioned him. He seemed to be in an aboundingly good humor, yet to possess those eccentricities
which one might guess from his grooming. For some time he rambled on with an almost feverish
geniality, when it struck me to ask him how he came by so rare a book as Pigafetta's "Regnum
Congo."The effect of this volume had not left me, and I felt a certain hesitancy in speaking of it, but
curiosity overmastered all the vague fears which had steadily accumulated since my first glimpse of
the house. To my relief, the question did not seem an awkward one, for the old man answered freely
and volubly.
"Oh, that Afriky book? Cap'n Ebenezer Holt traded me thet in 'sixty--eight--him as was kilt in the
war."Something about the name of Ebenezer Holt caused me to look up sharply. I had encountered it
in my genealogical work, but not in any record since the Revolution. I wondered if my host could
help me in the task at which I was laboring, and resolved to ask him about it later on. He continued.
"Ebenezer was on a Salem merchantman for years, an' picked up a sight o' queer stuff in every
port. He got this in London, I guess--he uster like ter buy things at the shops. I was up ta his haouse
onct, on the hill, tradin' hosses, when I see this book. I relished the picters, so he give it in on a swap.
'Tis a queer book--here, leave me git on my spectacles--" The old man fumbled among his rags,
producing a pair of dirty and amazingly antique glasses with small octagonal lenses and steel bows.
Donning these, he reached for the volume on the table and turned the pages lovingly.
"Ebenezer cud read a leetle o' this--'tis Latin--but I can't. I had two er three schoolmasters read
me a bit, and Passon Clark, him they say got draownded in the pond--kin yew make anything outen it?"
I told him that I could, and translated for his benefit a paragraph near the beginning. If I erred, he was
not scholar enough to correct me; for he seemed childishly pleased at my English version. His
proximity was becoming rather obnoxious, yet I saw no way to escape without offending him. I was
amused at the childish fondness of this ignorant old man for the pictures in a book he could not read,
and wondered how much better he could read the few books in English which adorned the room.
This revelation of simplicity removed much of the ill-defined apprehension I had felt, and I smiled as
my host rambled on:
"Queer haow picters kin set a body thinkin'. Take this un here near the front. Hey yew ever seed
trees like thet, with big leaves a floppin' over an' daown? And them men--them can't be niggers--they
dew beat all. Kinder like Injuns, I guess, even ef they be in Afriky. Some o' these here critters looks
like monkeys, or half monkeys an' half men, but I never heerd o' nothin' like this un."Here he pointed
to a fabulous creature of the artist, which one might describe as a sort of dragon with the head of an
alligator.
"But naow I'll show ye the best un--over here nigh the middle--"The old man's speech grew a
trifle thicker and his eyes assumed a brighter glow; but his fumbling hands, though seemingly
clumsier than before, were entirely adequate to their mission. The book fell open, almost of its own
accord and as if from frequent consultation at this place, to the repellent twelfth plate showing a
butcher's shop amongst the Anzique cannibals. My sense of restlessness returned, though I did not
exhibit it. The especially bizarre thing was that the artist had made his Africans look like white men--
the limbs and quarters hanging about the walls of the shop were ghastly, while the butcher with his
axe was hideously incongruous. But my host seemed to relish the view as much as I disliked it.
"What d'ye think o' this--ain't never see the like hereabouts, eh? When I see this I telled Eb Holt,
'That's suthin' ta stir ye up an' make yer blood tickle.' When I read in Scripter about slayin'--like them
Midianites was slew--I kinder think things, but I ain't got no picter of it. Here a body kin see all they
is to it--I s'pose 'tis sinful, but ain't we all born an' livin' in sin?--Thet feller bein' chopped up gives
me a tickle every time I look at 'im--I hey ta keep lookin' at 'im--see whar the butcher cut off his feet?
Thar's his head on thet bench, with one arm side of it, an' t'other arm's on the other side o' the meat
block."
As the man mumbled on in his shocking ecstasy the expression on his hairy, spectacled face
became indescribable, but his voice sank rather than mounted. My own sensations can scarcely be
recorded. All the terror I had dimly felt before rushed upon me actively and vividly, and I knew that I
loathed the ancient and abhorrent creature so near me with an infinite intensity. His madness, or at
least his partial perversion, seemed beyond dispute. He was almost whispering now, with a huskiness
more terrible than a scream, and I trembled as I listened.
"As I says, 'tis queer haow picters sets ye thinkin'. D'ye know, young Sir, I'm right sot on this un
here. Arter I got the book off Eb I uster look at it a lot, especial when I'd heerd Passon Clark rant o'
Sundays in his big wig. Onct I tried suthin' funny--here, young Sir, don't git skeert--all I done was ter
look at the picter afore I kilt the sheep for market--killin' sheep was kinder more fun arter lookin' at
it--" The tone of the old man now sank very low, sometimes becoming so faint that his words were
hardly audible. I listened to the rain, and to the rattling of the bleared, small-paned windows, and
marked a rumbling of approaching thunder quite unusual for the season. Once a terrific flash and peal
shook the frail house to its foundations, but the whisperer seemed not to notice it.
"Killin' sheep was kinder more fun--but d'ye know, 'twan't quite satisfyin'. Queer haow a cravin'
gits a holt on ye--As ye love the Almighty, young man, don't tell nobody, but I swar ter Gawd thet
picter begun to make me hungry fer victuals I couldn't raise nor buy--here, set still, what's ailin' ye?--
I didn't do nothin', only I wondered haow 'twud be ef I did--They say meat makes blood an' flesh, an'
gives ye new life, so I wondered ef 'twudn't make a man live longer an' longer ef 'twas more the
same--" But the whisperer never continued. The interruption was not produced by my fright, nor by
the rapidly increasing storm amidst whose fury I was presently to open my eyes on a smoky solitude
of blackened ruins. It was produced by a very simple though somewhat unusual happening.
The open book lay flat between us, with the picture staring repulsively upward. As the old man
whispered the words "more the same" a tiny splattering impact was heard, and something showed on
the yellowed paper of the upturned volume. I thought of the rain and of a leaky roof, but rain is not
red. On the butcher's shop of the Anzique cannibals a small red spattering glistened picturesquely,
lending vividness to the horror of the engraving. The old man saw it, and stopped whispering even
before my expression of horror made it necessary; saw it and glanced quickly toward the floor of the
room he had left an hour before. I followed his glance, and beheld just above us on the loose plaster
of the ancient ceiling a large irregular spot of wet crimson which seemed to spread even as I viewed
it. I did not shriek or move, but merely shut my eyes. A moment later came the titanic thunderbolt of
thunderbolts; blasting that accursed house of unutterable secrets and bringing the oblivion which
alone saved my mind.

THE QUEST OF IRANON
"I am Iranon, and come from Aira, a far city that I recall only dimly but seek to find again. I am a
singer of songs that I learned in the far city, and my calling is to make beauty with the things
remembered of childhood. My wealth is in little memories and dreams, and in hopes that I sing in
gardens when the moon is tender and the west wind stirs the lotus-buds."
When the men of Teloth heard these things they whispered to one another; for though in the
granite city there is no laughter or song, the stern men sometimes look to the Karthian hills in the
spring and think of the lutes of distant Oonai whereof travellers have told. And thinking thus, they
bade the stranger stay and sing in the square before the Tower of Mlin, though they liked not the
colour of his tattered robe, nor the myrrh in his hair, nor his chaplet of vine-leaves, nor the youth in
his golden voice. At evening Iranon sang, and while he sang an old man prayed and a blind man said
he saw a nimbus over the singer's head. But most of the men of Teloth yawned, and some laughed and
some went to sleep; for Iranon told nothing useful, singing only his memories, his dreams, and his
hopes.
"I remember the twilight, the moon, and soft songs, and the window where I was rocked to sleep.
And through the window was the street where the golden lights came, and where the shadows danced
on houses of marble. I remember the square of moonlight on the floor, that was not like any other
light, and the visions that danced on the moonbeams when my mother sang to me. And too, I remember
the sun of morning bright above the many-coloured hills in summer, and the sweetness of flowers
borne on the south wind that made the trees sing.
"Oh Aira, city of marble and beryl, how many are thy beauties! How I loved the warm and fragrant
groves across the hyaline Nithra, and the falls of the tiny Kra that flowed though the verdant valley!
In those groves and in the vale the children wove wreathes for one another, and at dusk I dreamed
strange dreams under the yath-trees on the mountain as I saw below me the lights of the city, and the
curving Nithra reflecting a ribbon of stars.
"And in the city were the palaces of veined and tinted marble, with golden domes and painted
walls, and green gardens with cerulean pools and crystal fountains. Often I played in the gardens and
waded in the pools, and lay and dreamed among the pale flowers under the trees. And sometimes at
sunset I would climb the long hilly street to the citadel and the open place, and look down upon Aira,
the magic city of marble and beryl, splendid in a robe of golden flame.
"Long have I missed thee, Aira, for I was but young when we went into exile; but my father was
thy King and I shall come again to thee, for it is so decreed of Fate. All through seven lands have I
sought thee, and some day shall I reign over thy groves and gardens, thy streets and palaces, and sing
to men who shall know whereof I sing, and laugh not nor turn away. For I am Iranon, who was a
Prince in Aira."
That night the men of Teloth lodged the stranger in a stable, and in the morning an archon came to
him and told him to go to the shop of Athok the cobbler, and be apprenticed to him.
"But I am Iranon, a singer of songs, " he said, "and have no heart for the cobbler's trade."
"All in Teloth must toil," replied the archon, "for that is the law." Then said Iranon:
"Wherefore do ye toil; is it not that ye may live and be happy? And if ye toil only that ye may toil
more, when shall happiness find you? Ye toil to live, but is not life made of beauty and song? And if
ye suffer no singers among you, where shall be the fruits of your toil? Toil without song is like a
weary journey without an end. Were not death more pleasing?" But the archon was sullen and did not
understand, and rebuked the stranger.
"Thou art a strange youth, and I like not thy face or thy voice. The words thou speakest are
blasphemy, for the gods of Teloth have said that toil is good. Our gods have promised us a haven of
light beyond death, where shall be rest without end, and crystal coldness amidst which none shall vex
his mind with thought or his eyes with beauty. Go thou then to Athok the cobbler or be gone out of
the city by sunset. All here must serve, and song is folly."
So Iranon went out of the stable and walked over the narrow stone streets between the gloomy
square house of granite, seeking something green, for all was of stone. On the faces of men were
frowns, but by the stone embankment along the sluggish river Zuro sat a young boy with sad eyes
gazing into the waters to spy green budding branches washed down from the hills by the freshets.
And the boy said to him:
"Art thou not indeed he of whom the archons tell, who seekest a far city in a fair land? I am
Romnod, and borne of the blood of Teloth, but am not old in the ways of the granite city, and yearn
daily for the warm groves and the distant lands of beauty and song. Beyond the Karthian hills lieth
Oonai, the city of lutes and dancing, which men whisper of and say is both lovely and terrible.Thither
would I go were I old enough to find the way, and thither shouldst thou go and thou wouldst sing and
have men listen to thee. Let us leave the city of Teloth and fare together among the hills of spring.
Thou shalt shew me the ways of travel and I will attend thy songs at evening when the stars one by
one bring dreams to the minds of dreamers. And peradventure it may be that Oonai the city of lutes
and dancing is even the fair Aira thou seekest, for it is told that thou hast not known Aira since the old
days, and a name often changeth. Let us go to Oonai, O Iranon of the golden head, where men shall
know our longings and welcome us as brothers, nor even laugh or frown at what we say." And Iranon
answered:
"Be it so, small one; if any in this stone place yearn for beauty he must seek the mountains and
beyond, and I would not leave thee to pine by the sluggish Zuro. But think not that delight and
understanding dwell just across the Karthian hills, or in any spot thou canst find in a day's, or a year's,
or a lustrum's journey. Behold, when I was small like thee I dwelt in the valley of Narthos by the
frigid Xari, where none would listen to my dreams; and I told myself that when older I would go to
Sinara on the southern slope, and sing to smiling dromedary-men in the marketplace. But when I went
to Sinara I found the dromedary-men all drunken and ribald, and saw that their songs were not as mine,
so I travelled in a barge down the Xari to onyx--walled Jaren. And the soldiers at Jaren laughed at me
and drave me out, so that I wandered to many cities. I have seen Stethelos that is below the great
cataract, and have gazed on the marsh where Sarnath once stood. I have been to thraa, Ilarnek, and
Kadatheron on the winding river Ai, and have dwelt long in Olathoe in the land of Lomar. But though
I have had listeners sometimes, they have ever been few. and I know that welcome shall wait me only
in Aira, the city of marble and beryl where my father once ruled as King. So for Aira shall we seek,
though it were well to visit distant and lute-blessed Oonai across the Karthian hills, which may
indeed be Aira, though I think not. Aira's beauty is past imagining, and none can tell of it without
rapture, whilst of Oonai the camel-drivers whisper leeringly."
At the sunset Iranon and small Romnod went forth from Teloth, and for long wandered amidst the
green hills and cool forests. The way was rough and obscure, and never did they seem nearer to
Oonai the city of lutes and dancing; but in the dusk as the stars came out Iranon would sing of Aira
and its beauties and Romnod would listen, so that they were both happy after a fashion. They ate
plentifully of fruit and red berries, and marked not the passing of time, but many years must have
slipped away. Small Romnod was now not so small, and spoke deeply instead of shrilly, though
Iranon was always the same, and decked his golden hair with vines and fragrant resins found in the
woods. So it came to pass that Romnod seemed older than Iranon, though he had been very small
when Iranon had found him watching for green budding branches in Teloth beside the sluggish stone-
banked Zuro.
Then one night when the moon was full the travellers came to a mountain crest and looked down
upon the myriad light of Oonai. Peasants had told them they were near, and Iranon knew that this was
not his native city of Aira. The lights of Oonai were not like those of Aira; for they were harsh and
glaring, while the lights of Aira shine as softly and magically as shone the moonlight on the floor by
the window where Iranon's mother once rocked him to sleep with song. But Oonai was a city of lutes
and dancing, so Iranon and Romnod went down the steep slope that they might find men to whom sings
and dreams would bring pleasure. And when they were come into the town they found rose-wreathed
revellers bound from house to house and leaning from windows and balconies, who listened to the
songs of Iranon and tossed him flowers and applauded when he was done. Then for a moment did
Iranon believe he had found those who thought and felt even as he, though the town was not a
hundredth as fair as Aira.
When dawn came Iranon looked about with dismay, for the domes of Oonai were not golden in the
sun, but grey and dismal. And the men of Oonai were pale with revelling, and dull with wine, and
unlike the radient men of Aira. But because the people had thrown him blossoms and acclaimed his
sings Iranon stayed on, and with him Romnod, who liked the revelry of the town and wore in his dark
hair roses and myrtle. Often at night Iranon sang to the revellers, but he was always as before,
crowned only in the vine of the mountains and remembering the marble streets of Aira and the hyaline
Nithra. In the frescoed halls of the Monarch did he sing, upon a crystal dais raised over a floor that
was a mirror, and as he sang, he brought pictures to his hearers till the floor seemed to reflect old,
beautiful, and half-remembered things instead of the wine-reddened feasters who pelted him with
roses. And the King bade him put away his tattered purple, and clothed him in satin and cloth-of-gold,
with rings of green jade and bracelets of tinted ivory, and lodged him in a gilded and tapestried
chamber on a bed of sweet carven wood with canopies and coverlets of flower--embroidered silk.
Thus dwelt Iranon in Oonai, the city of lutes and dancing.
It is not known how long Iranon tarried in Oonai, but one day the King brought to the palace some
wild whirling dancers from the Liranian desert, and dusky flute-players from Drinen in the East, and
after that the revellers threw their roses not so much at Iranon as at the dancers and flute-players. And
day by day that Romnod who had been a small boy in granite Teloth grew coarser and redder with
wine, till he dreamed less and less, and listened with less delight to the songs of Iranon. But though
Iranon was sad he ceased not to sing, and at evening told again of his dreams of Aira, the city of
marble and beryl. Then one night the reddened and fattened Romnod snorted heavily amidst the
poppied silks of his banquet-couch and died writhing, whilst Iranon, pale and slender, sang to himself
in a far corner. And when Iranon had wept over the grave of Romnod and strewn it with green
branches, such as Romnod used to love, he put aside his silks and gauds and went forgotten out of
Oonai the city of lutes and dancing clad only in the ragged purple in which he had come, and
garlanded with fresh vines from the mountains.
Into the sunset wandered Iranon, seeking still for his native land and for men who would
understand his songs and dreams. In all the cities of Cydathria and in the lands beyond the Bnazie
desert gay-faced children laughed at his olden songs and tattered robe of purple; but Iranon stayed
ever young, and wore wreathes upon his golden head whilst he sang of Aira, delight of the past and
hope of the future.
So came he one night to the squallid cot of an antique shepherd, bent and dirty, who kept flocks on
a stony slope above a quicksand marsh. To this man Iranon spoke, as to so many others:
"Canst thou tell me where I may find Aira, the city of marble and beryl, where flows the hyaline
nithra and where the falls of the tiny Kra sing to the verdant valleys and hills forested with yath
trees?" and the shepherd, hearing, looked long and strangely at Iranon, as if recalling something very
far away in time, and noted each line of the stranger's face, and his golden hair, and his crown of
vine-leaves. But he was old, and shook his head as he replied:
"O stranger, I have indeed heard the name of Aira, and the other names thou hast spoken, but they
come to me from afar down the waste of long years. I heard them in my youth from the lips of a
playmate, a beggar's boy given to strange dreams, who would weave long tales about the moon and
the flowers and the west wind. We used to laugh at him, for we knew him from his birth though he
thought himself a King's son. He was comely, even as thou, but full of folly and strangeness; and he
ran away when small to find those who would listen gladly to his songs and dreams. How often hath
he sung to me of lands that never were, and things that never can be! Of Aira did he speak much; of
Aira and the river Nithra, and the falls of the tiny Kra. There would he ever say he once dwelt as a
Prince, though here we knew him from his birth. Nor was there ever a marble city of Aira, or those
who could delight in strange songs, save in the dreams of mine old playmate Iranon who is gone."
And in the twilight, as the stars came out one by one and the moon cast on the marsh a radiance
like that which a child sees quivering on the floor as he is rocked to sleep at evening, there walked
into the lethal quicksands a very old man in tattered purple, crowned with withered vine-leaves and
gazing ahead as if upon the golden domes of a fair city where dreams are understood. That night
something of youth and beauty died in the elder world.

THE RATS IN THE WALLS
On 16 July 1923, I moved into Exham Priory after the last workman had finished his labours. The
restoration had been a stupendous task, for little had remained of the deserted pile but a shell-like
ruin; yet because it had been the seat of my ancestors, I let no expense deter me. The place had not
been inhabited since the reign of James the First, when a tragedy of intensely hideous, though largely
unexplained, nature had struck down the master, five of his children, and several servants; and driven
forth under a cloud of suspicion and terror the third son, my lineal progenitor and the only survivor
of the abhorred line.
With this sole heir denounced as a murderer, the estate had reverted to the crown, nor had the
accused man made any attempt to exculpate himself or regain his property. Shaken by some horror
greater than that of conscience or the law, and expressing only a frantic wish to exclude the ancient
edifice from his sight and memory, Walter de la Poer, eleventh Baron Exham, fled to Virginia and
there founded the family which by the next century had become known as Delapore.
Exham Priory had remained untenanted, though later allotted to the estates of the Norrys family
and much studied because of its peculiarly composite architecture; an architecture involving Gothic
towers resting on a Saxon or Romanesque substructure, whose foundation in turn was of a still
earlier order or blend of orders--Roman, and even Druidic or native Cymric, if legends speak truly.
This foundation was a very singular thing, being merged on one side with the solid limestone of the
precipice from whose brink the priory overlooked a desolate valley three miles west of the village
of Anchester.
Architects and antiquarians loved to examine this strange relic of forgotten centuries, but the
country folk hated it. They had hated it hundreds of years before, when my ancestors lived there, and
they hated it now, with the moss and mould of abandonment on it. I had not been a day in Anchester
before I knew I came of an accursed house. And this week workmen have blown up Exham Priory,
and are busy obliterating the traces of its foundations. The bare statistics of my ancestry I had always
known, together with the fact that my first American forebear had come to the colonies under a
strange cloud. Of details, however, I had been kept wholly ignorant through the policy of reticence
always maintained by the Delapores. Unlike our planter neighbours, we seldom boasted of crusading
ancestors or other mediaeval and Renaissance heroes; nor was any kind of tradition handed down
except what may have been recorded in the sealed envelope left before the Civil War by every
squire to his eldest son for posthumous opening. The glories we cherished were those achieved
since the migration; the glories of a proud and honourable, if somewhat reserved and unsocial
Virginia line.
During the war our fortunes were extinguished and our whole existence changed by the burning
of Carfax, our home on the banks of the James. My grandfather, advanced in years, had perished in
that incendiary outrage, and with him the envelope that had bound us all to the past. I can recall that
fire today as I saw it then at the age of seven, with the federal soldiers shouting, the women
screaming, and the negroes howling and praying. My father was in the army, defending Richmond,
and after many formalities my mother and I were passed through the lines to join him.
When the war ended we all moved north, whence my mother had come; and I grew to manhood,
middle age, and ultimate wealth as a stolid Yankee. Neither my father nor I ever knew what our
hereditary envelope had contained, and as I merged into the greyness of Massachusetts business life I
lost all interest in the mysteries which evidently lurked far back in my family tree. Had I suspected
their nature, how gladly I would have left Exham Priory to its moss, bats and cobwebs!
My father died in 1904, but without any message to leave to me, or to my only child, Alfred, a
motherless boy of ten. It was this boy who reversed the order of family information, for although I
could give him only jesting conjectures about the past, he wrote me of some very interesting
ancestral legends when the late war took him to England in 1917 as an aviation officer. Apparently the
Delapores had a colourful and perhaps sinister history, for a friend of my son's, Capt. Edward
Norrys of the Royal Flying Corps, dwelt near the family seat at Anchester and related some peasant
superstitions which few novelists could equal for wildness and incredibility. Norrys himself, of
course, did not take them so seriously; but they amused my son and made good material for his letters
to me. It was this legendry which definitely turned my attention to my transatlantic heritage, and made
me resolve to purchase and restore the family seat which Norrys showed to Alfred in its picturesque
desertion, and offered to get for him at a surprisingly reasonable figure, since his own uncle was the
present owner.
I bought Exham Priory in 1918, but was almost immediately distracted from my plans of
restoration by the return of my son as a maimed invalid. During the two years that he lived I thought
of nothing but his care, having even placed my business under the direction of partners.
In 1921, as I found myself bereaved and aimless, a retired manufacturer no longer young, I
resolved to divert my remaining years with my new possession. Visiting Anchester in December, I
was entertained by Capt. Norrys, a plump, amiable young man who had thought much of my son, and
secured his assistance in gathering plans and anecdotes to guide in the coming restoration. Exham
Priory itself I saw without emotion, a jumble of tottering mediaeval ruins covered with lichens and
honeycombed with rooks' nests, perched perilously upon a precipice, and denuded of floors or other
interior features save the stone walls of the separate towers.
As I gradually recovered the image of the edifice as it had been when my ancestors left it over
three centuries before, I began to hire workmen for the reconstruction. In every case I was forced to
go outside the immediate locality, for the Anchester villagers had an almost unbelievable fear and
hatred of the place. The sentiment was so great that it was sometimes communicated to the outside
labourers, causing numerous desertions; whilst its scope appeared to include both the priory and its
ancient family.
My son had told me that he was somewhat avoided during his visits because he was a de la Poer,
and I now found myself subtly ostracized for a like reason until I convinced the peasants how little I
knew of my heritage. Even then they sullenly disliked me, so that I had to collect most of the village
traditions through the mediation of Norrys. What the people could not forgive, perhaps, was that I
had come to restore a symbol so abhorrent to them; for, rationally or not, they viewed Exham Priory
as nothing less than a haunt of fiends and werewolves.
Piecing together the tales which Norrys collected for me, and supplementing them with the
accounts of several savants who had studied the ruins, I deduced that Exham Priory stood on the site
of a prehistoric temple; a Druidical or ante-Druidical thing which must have been contemporary with
Stonehenge. That indescribable rites had been celebrated there, few doubted, and there were
unpleasant tales of the transference of these rites into the Cybele worship which the Romans had
introduced.
Inscriptions still visible in the sub-cellar bore such unmistakable letters as 'DIV...OPS...MAGNA.
MAT...', sign of the Magna Mater whose dark worship was once vainly forbidden to Roman citizens.
Anchester had been the camp of the third Augustan legion, as many remains attest, and it was said that
the temple of Cybele was splendid and thronged with worshippers who performed nameless
ceremonies at the bidding of a Phrygian priest. Tales added that the fall of the old religion did not
end the orgies at the temple, but that the priests lived on in the new faith without real change.
Likewise was it said that the rites did not vanish with the Roman power, and that certain among the
Saxons added to what remained of the temple, and gave it the essential outline it subsequently
preserved, making it the centre of a cult feared through half the heptarchy. About 1000 A.D. the
place is mentioned in a chronicle as being a substantial stone priory housing a strange and powerful
monastic order and surrounded by extensive gardens which needed no walls to exclude a frightened
populace. It was never destroyed by the Danes, though after the Norman Conquest it must have
declined tremendously, since there was no impediment when Henry the Third granted the site to my
ancestor, Gilbert de la Poer, First Baron Exham, in 1261.
Of my family before this date there is no evil report, but something strange must have happened
then. In one chronicle there is a reference to a de la Poer as "cursed of God in 1307", whilst village
legendry had nothing but evil and frantic fear to tell of the castle that went up on the foundations of
the old temple and priory. The fireside tales were of the most grisly description, all the ghastlier
because of their frightened reticence and cloudy evasiveness. They represented my ancestors as a
race of hereditary daemons beside whom Gilles de Retz and the Marquis de Sade would seem the
veriest tyros, and hinted whisperingly at their responsibility for the occasional disappearances of
villagers through several generations.
The worst characters, apparently, were the barons and their direct heirs; at least, most was
whispered about these. If of healthier inclinations, it was said, an heir would early and mysteriously
die to make way for another more typical scion. There seemed to be an inner cult in the family,
presided over by the head of the house, and sometimes closed except to a few members.
Temperament rather than ancestry was evidently the basis of this cult, for it was entered by several
who married into the family. Lady Margaret Trevor from Cornwall, wife of Godfrey, the second son
of the fifth baron, became a favourite bane of children all over the countryside, and the daemon
heroine of a particularly horrible old ballad not yet extinct near the Welsh border. Preserved in
balladry, too, though not illustrating the same point, is the hideous tale of Lady Mary de la Poer, who
shortly after her marriage to the Earl of Shrewsfield was killed by him and his mother, both of the
slayers being absolved and blessed by the priest to whom they confessed what they dared not repeat
to the world.
These myths and ballads, typical as they were of crude superstition, repelled me greatly. Their
persistence, and their application to so long a line of my ancestors, were especially annoying; whilst
the imputations of monstrous habits proved unpleasantly reminiscent of the one known scandal of my
immediate forebears--the case of my cousin, young Randolph Delapore of Carfax who went among
the negroes and became a voodoo priest after he returned from the Mexican War.
I was much less disturbed by the vaguer tales of wails and howlings in the barren, windswept
valley beneath the limestone cliff; of the graveyard stenches after the spring rains; of the
floundering, squealing white thing on which Sir John Clave's horse had trod one night in a lonely
field; and of the servant who had gone mad at what he saw in the priory in the full light of day. These
things were hackneyed spectral lore, and I was at that time a pronounced sceptic. The accounts of
vanished peasants were less to be dismissed, though not especially significant in view of mediaeval
custom. Prying curiosity meant death, and more than one severed head had been publicly shown on
the bastions--now effaced--around Exham Priory.
A few of the tales were exceedingly picturesque, and made me wish I had learnt more of the
comparative mythology in my youth. There was, for instance, the belief that a legion of bat-winged
devils kept Witches' Sabbath each night at the priory--a legion whose sustenance might explain the
disproportionate abundance of coarse vegetables harvested in the vast gardens. And, most vivid of
all, there was the dramatic epic of the rats--the scampering army of obscene vermin which had burst
forth from the castle three months after the tragedy that doomed it to desertion--the lean, filthy,
ravenous army which had swept all before it and devoured fowl, cats, dogs, hogs, sheep, and even
two hapless human beings before its fury was spent. Around that unforgettable rodent army a whole
separate cycle of myths revolves, for it scattered among the village homes and brought curses and
horrors in its train.
Such was the lore that assailed me as I pushed to completion, with an elderly obstinacy, the work
of restoring my ancestral home. It must not be imagined for a moment that these tales formed my
principal psychological environment. On the other hand, I was constantly praised and encouraged by
Capt. Norrys and the antiquarians who surrounded and aided me. When the task was done, over two
years after its commencement, I viewed the great rooms, wainscoted walls, vaulted ceilings,
mullioned windows, and broad staircases with a pride which fully compensated for the prodigious
expense of the restoration.
Every attribute of the Middle Ages was cunningly reproduced and the new parts blended
perfectly with the original walls and foundations. The seat of my fathers was complete, and I looked
forward to redeeming at last the local fame of the line which ended in me. I could reside here
permanently, and prove that a de la Poer (for I had adopted again the original spelling of the name)
need not be a fiend. My comfort was perhaps augmented by the fact that, although Exham Priory was
mediaevally fitted, its interior was in truth wholly new and free from old vermin and old ghosts alike.
As I have said, I moved in on 16 July 1923. My household consisted of seven servants and nine
cats, of which latter species I am particularly fond. My eldest cat, "Nigger-Man", was seven years
old and had come with me from my home in Bolton, Massachusetts; the others I had accumulated
whilst living with Capt. Norrys' family during the restoration of the priory.
For five days our routine proceeded with the utmost placidity, my time being spent mostly in the
codification of old family data. I had now obtained some very circumstantial accounts of the final
tragedy and flight of Walter de la Poer, which I conceived to be the probable contents of the
hereditary paper lost in the fire at Carfax. It appeared that my ancestor was accused with much reason
of having killed all the other members of his household, except four servant confederates, in their
sleep, about two weeks after a shocking discovery which changed his whole demeanour, but which,
except by implication, he disclosed to no one save perhaps the servants who assisted him and
afterwards fled beyond reach.
This deliberate slaughter, which included a father, three brothers, and two sisters, was largely
condoned by the villagers, and so slackly treated by the law that its perpetrator escaped honoured,
unharmed, and undisguised to Virginia; the general whispered sentiment being that he had purged the
land of an immemorial curse. What discovery had prompted an act so terrible, I could scarcely even
conjecture. Walter de la Poer must have known for years the sinister tales about his family, so that
this material could have given him no fresh impulse. Had he, then, witnessed some appalling ancient
rite, or stumbled upon some frightful and revealing symbol in the priory or its vicinity? He was
reputed to have been a shy, gentle youth in England. In Virginia he seemed not so much hard or bitter
as harassed and apprehensive. He was spoken of in the diary of another gentleman adventurer, Francis
Harley of Bellview, as a man of unexampled justice, honour, and delicacy.
On 22 July occurred the first incident which, though lightly dismissed at the time, takes on a
preternatural significance in relation to later events. It was so simple as to be almost negligible, and
could not possibly have been noticed under the circumstances; for it must be recalled that since I was
in a building practically fresh and new except for the walls, and surrounded by a well-balanced staff
of servitors, apprehension would have been absurd despite the locality.
What I afterward remembered is merely this--that my old black cat, whose moods I know so well,
was undoubtedly alert and anxious to an extent wholly out of keeping with his natural character. He
roved from room to room, restless and disturbed, and sniffed constantly about the walls which
formed part of the Gothic structure. I realize how trite this sounds--like the inevitable dog in the
ghost story, which always growls before his master sees the sheeted figure--yet I cannot
consistently suppress it.
The following day a servant complained of restlessness among all the cats in the house. He came
to me in my study, a lofty west room on the second storey, with groined arches, black oak panelling,
and a triple Gothic window overlooking the limestone cliff and desolate valley; and even as he spoke
I saw the jetty form of Nigger-Man creeping along the west wall and scratching at the new panels
which overlaid the ancient stone.
I told the man that there must be a singular odour or emanation from the old stonework,
imperceptible to human senses, but affecting the delicate organs of cats even through the new
woodwork. This I truly believed, and when the fellow suggested the presence of mice or rats, I
mentioned that there had been no rats there for three hundred years, and that even the field mice of the
surrounding country could hardly be found in these high walls, where they had never been known to
stray. That afternoon I called on Capt. Norrys, and he assured me that it would be quite incredible for
field mice to infest the priory in such a sudden and unprecedented fashion.
That night, dispensing as usual with a valet, I retired in the west tower chamber which I had
chosen as my own, reached from the study by a stone staircase and short gallery--the former partly
ancient, the latter entirely restored. This room was circular, very high, and without wainscoting,
being hung with arras which I had myself chosen in London.
Seeing that Nigger-Man was with me, I shut the heavy Gothic door and retired by the light of the
electric bulbs which so cleverly counterfeited candles, finally switching off the light and sinking on
the carved and canopied four-poster, with the venerable cat in his accustomed place across my feet. I
did not draw the curtains, but gazed out at the narrow window which I faced. There was a suspicion
of aurora in the sky, and the delicate traceries of the window were pleasantly silhouetted.
At some time I must have fallen quietly asleep, for I recall a distinct sense of leaving strange
dreams, when the cat started violently from his placid position. I saw him in the faint auroral glow,
head strained forward, fore feet on my ankles, and hind feet stretched behind. He was looking
intensely at a point on the wall somewhat west of the window, a point which to my eye had nothing to
mark it, but toward which all my attention was now directed.
And as I watched, I knew that Nigger-Man was not vainly excited. Whether the arras actually
moved I cannot say. I think it did, very slightly. But what I can swear to is that behind it I heard a low,
distinct scurrying as of rats or mice. In a moment the cat had jumped bodily on the screening tapestry,
bringing the affected section to the floor with his weight, and exposing a damp, ancient wall of stone;
patched here and there by the restorers, and devoid of any trace of rodent prowlers.
Nigger-Man raced up and down the floor by this part of the wall, clawing the fallen arras and
seemingly trying at times to insert a paw between the wall and the oaken floor. He found nothing, and
after a time returned wearily to his place across my feet. I had not moved, but I did not sleep again
that night.
In the morning I questioned all the servants, and found that none of them had noticed anything
unusual, save that the cook remembered the actions of a cat which had rested on her windowsill. This
cat had howled at some unknown hour of the night, awaking the cook in time for her to see him dart
purposefully out of the open door down the stairs. I drowsed away the noontime, and in the afternoon
called again on Capt. Norrys, who became exceedingly interested in what I told him. The odd
incidents--so slight yet so curious--appealed to his sense of the picturesque and elicited from him a
number of reminiscenses of local ghostly lore. We were genuinely perplexed at the presence of rats,
and Norrys lent me some traps and Paris green, which I had the servants place in strategic localities
when I returned.
I retired early, being very sleepy, but was harassed by dreams of the most horrible sort. I seemed
to be looking down from an immense height upon a twilit grotto, knee-deep with filth, where a white-
bearded daemon swineherd drove about with his staff a flock of fungous, flabby beasts whose
appearance filled me with unutterable loathing. Then, as the swineherd paused and nodded over his
task, a mighty swarm of rats rained down on the stinking abyss and fell to devouring beasts and man
alike.
From this terrific vision I was abruptly awakened by the motions of Nigger-Man, who had been
sleeping as usual across my feet. This time I did not have to question the source of his snarls and
hisses, and of the fear which made him sink his claws into my ankle, unconscious of their effect; for
on every side of the chamber the walls were alive with nauseous sound--the veminous slithering of
ravenous, gigantic rats. There was now no aurora to show the state of the arras--the fallen section of
which had been replaced--but I was not too frightened to switch on the light.
As the bulbs leapt into radiance I saw a hideous shaking all over the tapestry, causing the
somewhat peculiar designs to execute a singular dance of death. This motion disappeared almost at
once, and the sound with it. Springing out of bed, I poked at the arras with the long handle of a
warming-pan that rested near, and lifted one section to see what lay beneath. There was nothing but
the patched stone wall, and even the cat had lost his tense realization of abnormal presences. When I
examined the circular trap that had been placed in the room, I found all of the openings sprung,
though no trace remained of what had been caught and had escaped.
Further sleep was out of the question, so lighting a candle, I opened the door and went out in the
gallery towards the stairs to my study, Nigger-Man following at my heels. Before we had reached
the stone steps, however, the cat darted ahead of me and vanished down the ancient flight. As I
descended the stairs myself, I became suddenly aware of sounds in the great room below; sounds of
a nature which could not be mistaken.
The oak-panelled walls were alive with rats, scampering and milling whilst Nigger-Man was
racing about with the fury of a baffled hunter. Reaching the bottom, I switched on the light, which did
not this time cause the noise to subside. The rats continued their riot, stampeding with such force and
distinctness that I could finally assign to their motions a definite direction. These creatures, in
numbers apparently inexhaustible, were engaged in one stupendous migration from inconceivable
heights to some depth conceivably or inconceivably below.
I now heard steps in the corridor, and in another moment two servants pushed open the massive
door. They were searching the house for some unknown source of disturbance which had thrown all
the cats into a snarling panic and caused them to plunge precipitately down several flights of stairs
and squat, yowling, before the closed door to the sub-cellar. I asked them if they had heard the rats,
but they replied in the negative. And when I turned to call their attention to the sounds in the panels, I
realized that the noise had ceased.
With the two men, I went down to the door of the sub-cellar, but found the cats already dispersed.
Later I resolved to explore the crypt below, but for the present I merely made a round of the traps.
All were sprung, yet all were tenantless. Satisfying myself that no one had heard the rats save the
felines and me, I sat in my study till morning, thinking profoundly and recalling every scrap of legend
I had unearthed concerning the building I inhabited. I slept some in the forenoon, leaning back in the
one comfortable library chair which my mediaeval plan of furnishing could not banish. Later I
telephoned to Capt. Norrys, who came over and helped me explore the sub-cellar.
Absolutely nothing untoward was found, although we could not repress a thrill at the knowledge
that this vault was built by Roman hands. Every low arch and massive pillar was Roman--not the
debased Romanesque of the bungling Saxons, but the severe and harmonious classicism of the age of
the Caesars; indeed, the walls abounded with inscriptions familiar to the antiquarians who had
repeatedly explored the place--things like "P. GETAE. PROP...TEMP...DONA..."and "L.
PRAEG...VS...PONTIFI...ATYS..."
The reference to Atys made me shiver, for I had read Catullus and knew something of the hideous
rites of the Eastern god, whose worship was so mixed with that of Cybele. Norrys and I, by the light
of lanterns, tried to interpret the odd and nearly effaced designs on certain irregularly rectangular
blocks of stone generally held to be altars, but could make nothing of them. We remembered that one
pattern, a sort of rayed sun, was held by students to imply a non-Roman origin suggesting that these
altars had merely been adopted by the Roman priests from some older and perhaps aboriginal temple
on the same site. On one of these blocks were some brown stains which made me wonder. The
largest, in the centre of the room, had certain features on the upper surface which indicated its
connection with fire--probably burnt offerings.
Such were the sights in that crypt before whose door the cats howled, and where Norrys and I
now determined to pass the night. Couches were brought down by the servants, who were told not to
mind any nocturnal actions of the cats, and Nigger-Man was admitted as much for help as for
companionship. We decided to keep the great oak door--a modern replica with slits for ventilation--
tightly closed; and, with this attended to, we retired with lanterns still burning to await whatever
might occur.
The vault was very deep in the foundations of the priory, and undoubtedly far down on the face of
the beetling limestone cliff overlooking the waste valley. That it had been the goal of the scuffling
and unexplainable rats I could not doubt, though why, I could not tell. As we lay there expectantly, I
found my vigil occasionally mixed with half-formed dreams from which the uneasy motions of the
cat across my feet would rouse me.
These dreams were not wholesome, but horribly like the one I had had the night before. I saw
again the twilit grotto, and the swineherd with his unmentionable fungous beasts wallowing in filth,
and as I looked at these things they seemed nearer and more distinct--so distinct that I could almost
observe their features. Then I did observe the flabby features of one of them--and awakened with
such a scream that Nigger-Man started up, whilst Capt. Norrys, who had not slept, laughed
considerably. Norrys might have laughed more--or perhaps less--had he known what it was that made
me scream. But I did not remember myself till later. Ultimate horror often paralyses memory in a
merciful way.
Norrys waked me when the phenomena began. Out of the same frightful dream I was called by his
gentle shaking and his urging to listen to the cats. Indeed, there was much to listen to, for beyond the
closed door at the head of the stone steps was a veritable nightmare of feline yelling and clawing,
whilst Nigger-Man, unmindful of his kindred outside, was running excitedly round the bare stone
walls, in which I heard the same babel of scurrying rats that had troubled me the night before.
An acute terror now rose within me, for here were anomalies which nothing normal could well
explain. These rats, if not the creatures of a madness which I shared with the cats alone, must be
burrowing and sliding in Roman walls I had thought to be solid limestone blocks...unless perhaps the
action of water through more than seventeen centuries had eaten winding tunnels which rodent bodies
had worn clear and ample...But even so, the spectral horror was no less; for if these were living
vermin why did not Norrys hear their disgusting commotion? Why did he urge me to watch Nigger-
Man and listen to the cats outside, and why did he guess wildly and vaguely at what could have
aroused them?
By the time I had managed to tell him, as rationally as I could, what I thought I was hearing, my
ears gave me the last fading impression of scurrying; which had retreated still downward, far
underneath this deepest of sub-cellars till it seemed as if the whole cliff below were riddled with
questing rats. Norrys was not as sceptical as I had anticipated, but instead seemed profoundly moved.
He motioned to me to notice that the cats at the door had ceased their clamour, as if giving up the rats
for lost; whilst Nigger-Man had a burst of renewed restlessness, and was clawing frantically around
the bottom of the large stone altar in the centre of the room, which was nearer Norrys' couch than
mine.
My fear of the unknown was at this point very great. Something astounding had occurred, and I
saw that Capt. Norrys, a younger, stouter, and presumably more naturally materialistic man, was
affected fully as much as myself--perhaps because of his lifelong and intimate familiarity with local
legend. We could for the moment do nothing but watch the old black cat as he pawed with decreasing
fervour at the base of the altar, occasionally looking up and mewing to me in that persuasive manner
which he used when he wished me to perform some favour for him.
Norrys now took a lantern close to the altar and examined the place where Nigger-Man was
pawing; silently kneeling and scraping away the lichens of the centuries which joined the massive
pre-Roman block to the tessellated floor. He did not find anything, and was about to abandon his
efforts when I noticed a trivial circumstance which made me shudder, even though it implied nothing
more than I had already imagined.
I told him of it, and we both looked at its almost imperceptible manifestation with the fixedness of
fascinated discovery and acknowledgment. It was only this--that the flame of the lantern set down near
the altar was slightly but certainly flickering from a draught of air which it had not before received,
and which came indubitably from the crevice between floor and altar where Norrys was scraping
away the lichens.
We spent the rest of the night in the brilliantly-lighted study, nervously discussing what we
should do next. The discovery that some vault deeper than the deepest known masonry of the Romans
underlay this accursed pile, some vault unsuspected by the curious antiquarians of three centuries,
would have been sufficient to excite us without any background of the sinister. As it was, the
fascination became two--fold; and we paused in doubt whether to abandon our search and quit the
priory forever in superstitious caution, or to gratify our sense of adventure and brave whatever
horrors might await us in the unknown depths.
By morning we had compromised, and decided to go to London to gather a group of
archaeologists and scientific men fit to cope with the mystery. It should be mentioned that before
leaving the sub-cellar we had vainly tried to move the central altar which we now recognized as the
gate to a new pit of nameless fear. What secret would open the gate, wiser men than we would have
to find.
During many days in London Capt. Norrys and I presented our facts, conjectures, and legendary
anecdotes to five eminent authorities, all men who could be trusted to respect any family disclosures
which future explorations might develop. We found most of them little disposed to scoff but, instead,
intensely interested and sincerely sympathetic. It is hardly necessary to name them all, but I may say
that they included Sir William Brinton, whose excavations in the Troad excited most of the world in
their day. As we all took the train for Anchester I felt myself poised on the brink of frightful
revelations, a sensation symbolized by the air of mourning among the many Americans at the
unexpected death of the President on the other side of the world.
On the evening of 7 August we reached Exham Priory, where the servants assured me that nothing
unusual had occurred. The cats, even old Nigger-Man, had been perfectly placid, and not a trap in the
house had been sprung. We were to begin exploring on the following day, awaiting which I assigned
well-appointed rooms to all my guests.
I myself retired in my own tower chamber, with Nigger-Man across my feet. Sleep came quickly,
but hideous dreams assailed me. There was a vision of a Roman feast like that of Trimalchio, with a
horror in a covered platter. Then came that damnable, recurrent thing about the swineherd and his
filthy drove in the twilit grotto. Yet when I awoke it was full daylight, with normal sounds in the
house below. The rats, living or spectral, had not troubled me; and Nigger-Man was still quietly
asleep. On going down, I found that the same tranquillity had prevailed elsewhere; a condition which
one of the assembled servants--a fellow named Thornton, devoted to the psychic--rather absurdly
laid to the fact that I had now been shown the thing which certain forces had wished to show me.
All was now ready, and at 11 A.M. our entire group of seven men, bearing powerful electric
searchlights and implements of excavation, went down to the sub-cellar and bolted the door behind
us. Nigger-Man was with us, for the investigators found no occasion to despise his excitability, and
were indeed anxious that he be present in case of obscure rodent manifestations. We noted the Roman
inscriptions and unknown altar designs only briefly, for three of the savants had already seen them,
and all knew their characteristics. Prime attention was paid to the momentous central altar, and within
an hour Sir William Brinton had caused it to tilt backward, balanced by some unknown species of
counterweight.
There now lay revealed such a horror as would have overwhelmed us had we not been prepared.
Through a nearly square opening in the tiled floor, sprawling on a flight of stone steps so
prodigiously worn that it was little more than an inclined plane at the centre, was a ghastly array of
human or semi-human bones. Those which retained their collocation as skeletons showed attitudes of
panic fear, and over all were the marks of rodent gnawing. The skulls denoted nothing short of utter
idiocy, cretinism, or primitive semi-apedom.
Above the hellishly littered steps arched a descending passage seemingly chiselled from the
solid rock, and conducting a current of air. This current was not a sudden and noxious rush as from a
closed vault, but a cool breeze with something of freshness in it. We did not pause long, but
shiveringly began to clear a passage down the steps. It was then that Sir William, examining the hewn
walls, made the odd observation that the passage, according to the direction of the strokes, must have
been chiselled from beneath.
I must be very deliberate now, and choose my words. After ploughing down a few steps amidst
the gnawled bones we saw that there was light ahead; not any mystic phosphorescence, but a filtered
daylight which could not come except from unknown fissures in the cliff that over--looked the waste
valley. That such fissures had escaped notice from outside was hardly remarkable, for not only is the
valley wholly uninhabited, but the cliff is so high and beetling that only an aeronaut could study its
face in detail. A few steps more, and our breaths were literally snatched from us by what we saw; so
literally that Thornton, the psychic investigator, actually fainted in the arms of the dazed men who
stood behind him. Norrys, his plump face utterly white and flabby, simply cried out inarticulately;
whilst I think that what I did was to gasp or hiss, and cover my eyes.
The man behind me--the only one of the party older than I--croaked the hackneyed "My God!" in
the most cracked voice I ever heard. Of seven cultivated men, only Sir William Brinton retained his
composure, a thing the more to his credit because he led the party and must have seen the sight first.
It was a twilit grotto of enormous height, stretching away farther than any eye could see; a
subterraneous world of limitless mystery and horrible suggestion. There were buildings and other
architectural remains--in one terrified glance I saw a weird pattern of tumuli, a savage circle of
monoliths, a low-domed Roman ruin, a sprawling Saxon pile, and an early English edifice of wood--
but all these were dwarfed by the ghoulish spectacle presented by the general surface of the ground.
For yards about the steps extended an insane tangle of human bones, or bones at least as human as
those on the steps. Like a foamy sea they stretched, some fallen apart, but others wholly or partly
articulated as skeletons; these latter invariably in postures of daemoniac frenzy, either fighting off
some menace or clutching other forms with cannibal intent.
When Dr Trask, the anthropologist, stopped to classify the skulls, he found a degraded mixture
which utterly baffled him. They were mostly lower than the Piltdown man in the scale of evolution,
but in every case definitely human. Many were of higher grade, and a very few were the skulls of
supremely and sensitively developed types. All the bones were gnawed, mostly by rats, but somewhat
by others of the half-human drove. Mixed with them were many tiny hones of rats--fallen members of
the lethal army which closed the ancient epic.
I wonder that any man among us lived and kept his sanity through that hideous day of discovery.
Not Hoffman nor Huysmans could conceive a scene more wildly incredible, more frenetically
repellent, or more Gothically grotesque than the twilit grotto through which we seven staggered;
each stumbling on revelation after revelation, and trying to keep for the nonce from thinking of the
events which must have taken place there three hundred, or a thousand, or two thousand or ten
thousand years ago. It was the antechamber of hell, and poor Thornton fainted again when Trask told
him that some of the skeleton things must have descended as quadrupeds through the last twenty or
more generations.
Horror piled on horror as we began to interpret the architectural remains. The quadruped things--
with their occasional recruits from the biped class--had been kept in stone pens, out of which they
must have broken in their last delirium of hunger or rat-fear. There had been great herds of them,
evidently fattened on the coarse vegetables whose remains could be found as a sort of poisonous
ensilage at the bottom of the huge stone bins older than Rome. I knew now why my ancestors had had
such excessive gardens--would to heaven I could forget! The purpose of the herds I did not have to
ask.
Sir William, standing with his searchlight in the Roman ruin, translated aloud the most shocking
ritual I have ever known; and told of the diet of the antediluvian cult which the priests of Cybele
found and mingled with their own. Norrys, used as he was to the trenches, could not walk straight
when he came out of the English building. It was a butcher shop and kitchen--he had expected that--
but it was too much to see familiar English implements in such a place, and to read familiar English
graffiti there, some as recent as 1610. I could not go in that building--that building whose daemon
activities were stopped only by the dagger of my ancestor Walter de la Poer.
What I did venture to enter was the low Saxon building whose oaken door had fallen, and there I
found a terrible row of ten stone cells with rusty bars. Three had tenants, all skeletons of high grade,
and on the bony forefinger of one I found a seal ring with my own coat-of--arms. Sir William found a
vault with far older cells below the Roman chapel, but these cells were empty. Below them was a
low crypt with cases of formally arranged bones, some of them bearing terrible parallel inscriptions
carved in Latin, Greek, and the tongue of Phyrgia.
Meanwhile, Dr Trask had opened one of the prehistoric tumuli, and brought to light skulls which
were slightly more human than a gorilla's, and which bore indescribably ideographic carvings.
Through all this horror my cat stalked unperturbed. Once I saw him monstrously perched atop a
mountain of bones, and wondered at the secrets that might lie behind his yellow eyes.
Having grasped to some slight degree the frightful revelations of this twilit area--an area so
hideously foreshadowed by my recurrent dream--we turned to that apparently boundless depth of
midnight cavern where no ray of light from the cliff could penetrate. We shall never know what
sightless Stygian worlds yawn beyond the little distance we went, for it was decided that such
secrets are not good for mankind. But there was plenty to engross us close at hand, for we had not
gone far before the searchlights showed that accursed infinity of pits in which the rats had feasted,
and whose sudden lack of replenishment had driven the ravenous rodent army first to turn on the
living herds of starving things, and then to burst forth from the priory in that historic orgy of
devastation which the peasants will never forget.
God! those carrion black pits of sawed, picked bones and opened skulls! Those nightmare chasms
choked with the pithecanthropoid, Celtic, Roman, and English bones of countless unhallowed
centuries! Some of them were full, and none can say how deep they had once been. Others were still
bottomless to our searchlights, and peopled by unnamable fancies. What, I thought, of the hapless rats
that stumbled into such traps amidst the blackness of their quests in this grisly Tartarus?
Once my foot slipped near a horribly yawning brink, and I had a moment of ecstatic fear. I must
have been musing a long time, for I could not see any of the party but plump Capt. Norrys. Then there
came a sound from that inky, boundless, farther distance that I thought I knew; and I saw my old black
cat dart past me like a winged Egyptian god, straight into the illimitable gulf of the unknown. But I
was not far behind, for there was no doubt after another second. It was the eldritch scurrying of those
fiend-born rats, always questing for new horrors, and determined to lead me on even unto those
grinning caverns of earth's centre where Nyarlathotep, the mad faceless god, howls blindly in the
darkness to the piping of two amorphous idiot flute--players.
My searchlight expired, but still I ran. I heard voices, and yowls, and echoes, but above all there
gently rose that impious, insidious scurrying; gently rising, rising, as a stiff bloated corpse gently
rises above an oily river that flows under the endless onyx bridges to a black, putrid sea.
Something bumped into me--something soft and plump. It must have been the rats; the viscous,
gelatinous, ravenous army that feast on the dead and the living...Why shouldn't rats eat a de la Poer as
a de la Poer eats forbidden things?...The war ate my boy, damn them all...and the Yanks ate Carfax
with flames and burnt Grandsire Delapore and the secret...No, no, I tell you, I am not that daemon
swineherd in the twilit grotto! It was not Edward Norrys' fat face on that flabby fungous thing! Who
says I am a de la Poer? He lived, but my boy died!...Shall a Norrys hold the land of a de la Poer?...It's
voodoo, I tell you...that spotted snake...Curse you, Thornton, I'll teach you to faint at what my family
do!...'Sblood, thou stinkard, I'll learn ye how to gust...wolde ye swynke me thilke wys?...Magna
Mater! Magna Mater!...Atys...Dia ad aghaidh's ad aodaun...agus bas dunarch ort! Dhonas 's dholas ort,
agus leat-sa!...Ungl unl... rrlh...chchch...
This is what they say I said when they found me in the blackness after three hours; found me
crouching in the blackness over the plump, half--eaten body of Capt. Norrys, with my own cat
leaping and tearing at my throat. Now they have blown up Exham Priory, taken my Nigger-Man away
from me, and shut me into this barred room at Hanwell with fearful whispers about my heredity and
experience. Thornton is in the next room, but they prevent me from talking to him. They are trying,
too, to suppress most of the facts concerning the priory. When I speak of poor Norrys they accuse
me of this hideous thing, but they must know that I did not do it. They must know it was the rats; the
slithering scurrying rats whose scampering will never let me sleep; the daemon rats that race behind
the padding in this room and beckon me down to greater horrors than I have ever known; the rats they
can never hear; the rats, the rats in the walls.

THE SHUNNED HOUSE
CONTENTS
I
II
III
IV
V
I
From even the greatest of horrors irony is seldom absent. Sometimes it enters directly into the
composition of the events, while sometimes it relates only to their fortuitous position among persons
and places. The latter sort is splendidly exemplified by a case in the ancient city of Providence,
where in the late forties Edgar Allan Poe used to sojourn often during his unsuccessful wooing of
the gifted poetess, Mrs. Whitman. Poe generally stopped at the Mansion House in Benefit Street--the
renamed Golden Ball Inn whose roof has sheltered Washington, Jefferson, and Lafayette--and his
favourite walk led northward along the same street to Mrs. Whitman's home and the neighbouring
hillside churchyard of St. John's whose hidden expanse of eighteenth-century gravestones had for
him a peculiar fascination.
Now the irony is this. In this walk, so many times repeated, the world's greatest master of the
terrible and the bizarre was obliged to pass a particular house on the eastern side of the street; a
dingy, antiquated structure perched on the abruptly rising side hill, with a great unkept yard dating
from a time when the region was partly open country. It does not appear that he ever wrote or spoke
of it, nor is there any evidence that he even noticed it. And yet that house, to the two persons in
possession of certain information, equals or outranks in horror the wildest phantasy of the genius
who so often passed it unknowingly, and stands starkly leering as a symbol of all that is unutterably
hideous.
The house was--and for that matter still is--of a kind to attract the attention of the curious.
Originally a farm or semi-farm building, it followed the average New England colonial lines of the
middle eighteenth century--the prosperous peaked-roof sort, with two stories and dormerless attic,
and with the Georgian doorway and interior paneling dictated by the progress of taste at that time. It
faced south, with one gable end buried to the lower windows in the eastward rising hill, and the other
exposed to the foundations toward the street. Its construction, over a century and a half ago, had
followed the grading and straightening of the road in that especial vicinity; for Benefit Street--at first
called Back Street--was laid out as a lane winding amongst the graveyards of the first settlers, and
straightened only when the removal of the bodies to the North Burial Ground made it decently
possible to cut through the old family plots.
At the start, the western wall had lain some twenty feet up a precipitous lawn from the roadway;
but a widening of the street at about the time of the Revolution sheared off most of the intervening
space, exposing the foundations so that a brick basement wall had to be made, giving the deep cellar a
street frontage with the door and two windows above ground, close to the new line of public travel.
When the sidewalk was laid out a century ago the last of the intervening space was removed; and Poe
in his walks must have seen only a sheer ascent of dull grey brick flush with the sidewalk and
surmounted at a height of ten feet by the antique shingled bulk of the house proper.
The farm-like grounds extended back very deeply up the hill, al most to Wheaton Street. The
space south of the house, abutting on Benefit Street, was of course greatly above the existing
sidewalk level, forming a terrace bounded by a high bank wall of damp, mossy stone pierced by a
steep flight of narrow steps which led inward between canyon-like surfaces to the upper region of
mangy lawn, rheumy brick walls, and neglected gardens whose dismantled cement urns, rusted kettles
fallen from tripods of knotty sticks, and similar paraphernalia set off the weather-beaten front door
with its broken fanlight, rotting Ionic pilasters, and wormy triangular pediment.
What I heard in my youth about the shunned house was merely that people died there in alarmingly
great numbers. That, I was told, was why the original owners had moved out some twenty years after
building the place. It was plainly unhealthy, perhaps because of the dampness and fungous growth in
the cellar, the general sickish smell, the draughts of the hallways, or the quality of the well and pump
water. These things were bad enough, and these were all that gained belief among the person whom I
knew. Only the notebooks of my antiquarian uncle, Dr. Elihu Whipple, revealed to me at length the
darker, vaguer surmises which formed an undercurrent of folk-lore among old-time servants and
humble folk, surmises which never travelled far, and which were largely forgotten when Providence
grew to be a metropolis with a shifting modern population.
The general fact is, that the house was never regarded by the solid part of the community as in
any real sense "haunted."There were no widespread tales of rattling chains, cold currents of air,
extinguished lights, or faces at the window. Extremists sometimes said the house was "unlucky," but
that is as far as even they went. What was really beyond dispute is that a frightful proportion of
persons died there; or more accurately, had died there, since after some peculiar happenings over
sixty years ago the building had become deserted through the sheer impossibility of renting it. These
persons were not all cut off suddenly by any one cause; rather did it seem that their vitality was
insidiously sapped, so that each one died the sooner from whatever tendency to weakness he may
have naturally had. And those who did not die displayed in varying degree a type of anaemia or
consumption, and sometimes a decline of the mental faculties, which spoke ill for the salubriousness
of the building. Neighbouring houses, it must be added, seemed entirely free from the noxious
quality.
This much I knew before my insistent questioning led my uncle to show me the notes which
finally embarked us both on our hideous investigation. In my childhood the shunned house was
vacant, with barren, gnarled and terrible old trees, long, queerly pale grass and nightmarishly
misshapen weeds in the high terraced yard where birds never lingered. We boys used to overrun the
place, and I can still recall my youthful terror not only at the morbid strangeness of this sinister
vegetation, but at the eldritch atmosphere and odour of the dilapidated house, whose unlocked front
door was often entered in quest of shudders. The small-paned windows were largely broken, and a
nameless air of desolation hung round the precarious panelling, shaky interior shutters, peeling
wallpaper, falling plaster, rickety staircases, and such fragments of battered furniture as still
remained. The dust and cobwebs added their touch of the fearful; and brave indeed was the boy who
would voluntarily ascend the ladder to the attic, a vast raftered length lighted only by small blinking
windows in the gable ends, and filled with a massed wreckage of chests, chairs, and spinning-wheels
which infinite years of deposit had shrouded and festooned into monstrous and hellish shapes.
But after all, the attic was not the most terrible part of the house. It was the dank, humid cellar
which somehow exerted the strongest repulsion on us, even though it was wholly above ground on
the street side, with only a thin door and window-pierced brick wall to separate it from the busy
sidewalk. We scarcely knew whether to haunt it in spectral fascination, or to shun it for the sake of
our souls and our sanity. For one thing, the bad odour of the house was strongest there; and for
another thing, we did not like the white fungous growths which occasionally sprang up in rainy
summer weather from the hard earth floor. Those fungi, grotesquely like the vegetation in the yard
outside, were truly horrible in their outlines; detestable parodies of toadstools and Indian pipes,
whose like we had never seen in any other situation. They rotted quickly, and at one stage became
slightly phosphorescent; so that nocturnal passers-by sometimes spoke of witch--fires glowing
behind the broken panes of the foetor-spreading windows.
We never--even in our wildest Hallowe'en moods--visited this cellar by night, but in some of our
daytime visits could detect the phosphorescence, especially when the day was dark and wet. There
was also a subtler thing we often thought we detected--a very strange thing which was, however,
merely suggestive at most. I refer to a sort of cloudy whitish pattern on the dirt floor--a vague,
shifting deposit of mould or nitre which we sometimes thought we could trace amidst the sparse
fungous growths near the huge fireplace of the basement kitchen. Once in a while it struck us that this
patch bore an uncanny resemblance to a doubled-up human figure, though generally no such kinship
existed, and often there was no whitish deposit whatever. On a certain rainy afternoon when this
illusion seemed phenomenally strong, and when, in addition, I had fancied I glimpsed a kind of thin,
yellowish, shimmering exhalation rising from the nitrous pattern toward the yawning fireplace, I
spoke to my uncle about the matter. He smiled at this odd conceit, but it seemed that his smile was
tinged with reminiscence. Later I heard that a similar notion entered into some of the wild ancient
tales of the common folk--a notion likewise alluding to ghoulish, wolfish shapes taken by smoke
from the great chimney, and queer contours assumed by certain of the sinuous tree--roots that thrust
their way into the cellar through the loose foundation-stones.
II
Not till my adult years did my uncle set before me the notes and data which he had collected
concerning the shunned house. Dr. Whipple was a sane, conservative physician of the old school,
and for all his interest in the place was not eager to encourage young thoughts toward the abnormal.
His own view, postulating simply a building and location of markedly unsanitary qualities, had
nothing to do with abnormality; but he realized that the very picturesqueness which aroused his own
interest would in a boy's fanciful mind take on all manner of gruesome imaginative associations.
The doctor was a bachelor; a white-haired, clean-shaven, old-fashioned gentleman, and a local
historian of note, who had often broken a lance with such controversial guardians of tradition as
Sidney S. Rider and Thomas W. Bicknell. He lived with one manservant in a Georgian homestead
with knocker and iron-railed steps, balanced eerily on the steep ascent of North Court Street beside
the ancient brick court and colony house where his grandfather--a cousin of that celebrated
privateersman, Capt. Whipple, who burnt His Majesty's armed schooner Gaspee in 1772--had voted in
the legislature on May 4, 1776, for the independence of the Rhode Island Colony. Around him in the
damp, low-ceiled library with the musty white paneling, heavy carved overmantel and small-paned,
vine-shaded windows, were the relics and records of his ancient family, among which were many
dubious allusions to the shunned house in Benefit Street. That pest spot lies not far distant--for
Benefit runs ledgewise just above the court house along the precipitous hill up which the first
settlement climbed.
When, in the end, my insistent pestering and maturing years evoked from my uncle the hoarded
lore I sought, there lay before me a strange enough chronicle. Long-winded, statistical, and drearily
genealogical as some of the matter was, there ran through it a continuous thread of brooding,
tenacious horror and preternatural malevolence which impressed me even more than it had impressed
the good doctor. Separate events fitted together uncannily, and seemingly irrelevant details held
mines of hideous possibilities. A new and burning curiosity grew in me, compared to which my
boyish curiosity was feeble and inchoate. The first revelation led to an exhaustive research, and
finally to that shuddering quest which proved so disastrous to myself and mine. For at last my uncle
insisted on joining the search I had commenced, and after a certain night in that house he did not come
away with me. I am lonely without that gentle soul whose long years were filled only with honour,
virtue, good taste, benevolence, and learning. I have reared a marble urn to his memory in St. John's
churchyard--the place that Poe loved--the hidden grove of giant willows on the hill, where tombs
and headstones huddle quietly between the hoary bulk of the church and the houses and bank walls of
Benefit Street.
The history of the house, opening amidst a maze of dates, revealed no trace of the sinister either
about its construction or about the prosperous and honourable family who built it. Yet from the first a
taint of calamity, soon increased to boding significance, was apparent. My uncle's carefully compiled
record began with the building of the structure in 1763, and followed the theme with an unusual
amount of detail. The shunned house, it seems, was first inhabited by William Harris and his wife
Rhoby Dexter, with their children, Elkanah, born in 1755, Abigail, born in 1757, William, Jr., born in
1759, and Ruth, born in 1761. Harris was a substantial merchant and seaman in the West India trade,
connected with the firm of Obadiah Brown and his nephews. After Brown's death in 1761, the new
firm of Nicholas Brown & Co. made him master of the brig Prudence, Providence-built, of 120 tons,
thus enabling him to erect the new homestead he had desired ever since his marriage.
The site he had chosen--a recently straightened part of the new and fashionable Back Street,
which ran along the side of the hill above crowded Cheapside--was all that could be wished, and the
building did justice to the location. It was the best that moderate means could afford, and Harris
hastened to move in before the birth of a fifth child which the family expected. That child, a boy,
came in December; but was still-born. Nor was any child to be born alive in that house for a century
and a half.
The next April sickness occurred among the children, and Abigail and Ruth died before the month
was over. Dr. Job Ives diagnosed the trouble as some infantile fever, though others declared it was
more of a mere wasting-away or decline. It seemed, in any event, to be contagious; for Hannah
Bowen, one of the two servants, died of it in the following June. Eli Liddeason, the other servant,
constantly complained of weakness; and would have returned to his father's farm in Rehoboth but for
a sudden attachment for Mehitabel Pierce, who was hired to succeed Hannah. He died the next year--
a sad year indeed, since it marked the death of William Harris himself, enfeebled as he was by the
climate of Martinique, where his occupation had kept him for considerable periods during the
preceding decade.
The widowed Rhoby Harris never recovered from the shock of her husband's death, and the
passing of her firstborn Elkanah two years later was the final blow to her reason. In 1768 she fell
victim to a mild form of insanity, and was thereafter confined to the upper part of the house, her elder
maiden sister, Mercy Dexter, having moved in to take charge of the family. Mercy was a plain, raw-
boned woman of great strength, but her health visibly declined from the time of her advent. She was
greatly devoted to her unfortunate sister, and had an especial affection for her only surviving nephew
William, who from a sturdy infant had become a sickly, spindling lad. In this year the servant
Mehitabel died, and the other servant, Preserved Smith, left without coherent explanation--or at least,
with only some wild tales and a complaint that he disliked the smell of the place. For a time Mercy
could secure no more help, since the seven deaths and case of madness, all occurring within five
years' space, had begun to set in motion the body of fireside rumour which later became so bizarre.
Ultimately, however, she obtained new servants from out of town; Ann White, a morose woman from
that part of North Kingstown now set off as the township of Exeter, and a capable Boston man named
Zenas Low.
It was Ann White who first gave definite shape to the sinister idle talk. Mercy should have known
better than to hire anyone from the Nooseneck Hill country, for that remote bit of backwoods was
then, as now, a seat of the most uncomfortable superstitions. As lately as 1892 an Exeter community
exhumed a dead body and ceremoniously burnt its heart in order to prevent certain alleged visitations
injurious to the public health and peace, and one may imagine the point of view of the same section in
1768. Ann's tongue was perniciously active, and within a few months Mercy discharged her, filling
her place with a faithful and amiable Amazon from Newport, Maria Robbins.
Meanwhile poor Rhoby Harris, in her madness, gave voice to dreams and imaginings of the most
hideous sort. At times her screams became insupportable, and for long periods she would utter
shrieking horrors which necessitated her son's temporary residence with his cousin, Peleg Harris, in
Presbyterian Lane near the new college building. The boy would seem to improve after these visits,
and had Mercy been as wise as she was well-meaning, she would have let him live permanently with
Peleg. Just what Mrs. Harris cried out in her fits of violence, tradition hesitates to say; or rather,
presents such extravagant accounts that they nullify themselves through sheer absurdity. Certainly it
sounds absurd to hear that a woman educated only in the rudiments of French often shouted for hours
in a coarse and idiomatic form of that language, or that the same person, alone and guarded,
complained wildly of a staring thing which bit and chewed at her. In 1772 the servant Zenas died, and
when Mrs. Harris heard of it she laughed with a shocking delight utterly foreign to her. The next
year she herself died, and was laid to rest in the North Burial Ground beside her husband.
Upon the outbreak of trouble with Great Britain in 1775, William Harris, despite his scant sixteen
years and feeble constitution, managed to enlist in the Army of Observation under General Greene;
and from that time on enjoyed a steady rise in health and prestige.
In 1780, as a Captain in Rhode Island forces in New Jersey under Colonel Angell, he met and
married Phebe Hetfield of Elizabethtown, whom he brought to Providence upon his honourable
discharge in the following year.
The young soldier's return was not a thing of unmitigated happiness. The house, it is true, was
still in good condition; and the street had been widened and changed in name from Back Street to
Benefit Street. But Mercy Dexter's once robust frame had undergone a sag and curious decay, so that
she was now a stooped and pathetic figure with hollow voice and disconcerting pallor--qualities
shared to a singular degree by the one remaining servant Maria. In the autumn of 1782 Phebe Harris
gave birth to a still-born daughter, and on the fifteenth of the next May Mercy Dexter took leave of a
useful, austere, and virtuous life.
William Harris, at last thoroughly convinced of the radically unhealthful nature of his abode, now
took steps toward quitting it and closing it forever. Securing temporary quarters for himself and wife
at the newly opened Golden Ball Inn, he arranged for the building of a new and finer house in
Westminster Street, in the growing part of the town across the Great Bridge. There, in 1785, his son
Dutee was born; and there the family dwelt till the encroachments of commerce drove them back
across the river and over the hill to Angell Street, in the newer East Side residence district, where
the late Archer Harris built his sumptuous but hideous French-roofed mansion in 1876. William and
Phebe both succumbed to the yellow fever epidemic in 1797, but Dutee was brought up by his cousin
Rathbone Harris, Peleg's son.
Rathbone was a practical man, and rented the Benefit Street house despite William's wish to keep
it vacant. He considered it an obligation to his ward to make the most of all the boy's property, nor
did he concern himself with the deaths and illnesses which caused so many changes of tenants, or the
steadily growing aversion with which the house was generally regarded. It is likely that he felt only
vexation when, in 1804, the town council ordered him to fumigate the place with sulphur, tar and gum
camphor on account of the much-discussed deaths of four persons, presumably caused by the then
diminishing fever epidemic. They said the place had a febrile smell.
Dutee himself thought little of the house, for he grew up to be a privateersman, and served with
distinction on the Vigilant under Capt. Cahoone in the War of 1812. He returned unharmed, married in
1814, and became a father on that memorable night of September 23, 1815, when a great gale drove
the waters of the bay over half the town, and floated a tall sloop well up Westminster Street so that its
masts almost tapped the Harris windows in symbolic affirmation that the new boy, Welcome, was a
seaman's son.
Welcome did not survive his father, but lived to perish gloriously at Fredericksburg in 1862.
Neither he nor his son Archer knew of the shunned house as other than a nuisance almost impossible
to rent--perhaps on account of the mustiness and sickly odour of unkempt old age. Indeed, it never
was rented after a series of deaths culminating in 1861, which the excitement of the war tended to
throw into obscurity. Carrington Harris, last of the male line, knew it only as a deserted and
somewhat picturesque center of legend until I told him my experience. He had meant to tear it down
and build an apartment house on the site, but after my account, decided to let it stand, install plumbing,
and rent it. Nor has he yet had any difficulty in obtaining tenants. The horror has gone.
III
It may well be imagined how powerfully I was affected by the annals of the Harrises. In this
continuous record there seemed to me to brood a persistent evil beyond anything in nature as I had
known it; an evil clearly connected with the house and not with the family. This impression was
confirmed by my uncle's less systematic array of miscellaneous data--legends transcribed from
servant gossip, cuttings from the papers, copies of death certificates by fellow-physicians, and the
like. All of this material I cannot hope to give, for my uncle was a tireless antiquarian and very
deeply interested in the shunned house; but I may refer to several dominant points which earn notice
by their recurrence through many reports from diverse sources. For example, the servant gossip was
practically unanimous in attributing to the fungous and malodorous cellar of the house a vast
supremacy in evil influence. There had been servants--Ann White especially--who would not use the
cellar kitchen, and at least three well-defined legends bore upon the queer quasi-human or diabolic
outlines assumed by tree-roots and patches of mould in that region. These latter narratives interested
me profoundly, on account of what I had seen in my boyhood, but I felt that most of the significance
had in each case been largely obscured by additions from the common stock of local ghost lore.
Ann White, with her Exeter superstition, had promulgated the most extravagant and at the same
time most consistent tale; alleging that there must lie buried beneath the house one of those vampires-
-the dead who retain their bodily form and live on the blood or breath of the living--whose hideous
legions send their preying shapes or spirits abroad by night. To destroy a vampire one must, the
grandmothers say, exhume it and burn its heart, or at least drive a stake through that organ; and Ann's
dogged insistence on a search under the cellar had been prominent in bringing about her discharge.
Her tales, however, commanded a wide audience, and were the more readily accepted because
the house indeed stood on land once used for burial purposes. To me their interest depended less on
this circumstance than on the peculiarly appropriate way in which they dove-tailed with certain other
things--the complaint of the departing servant Preserved Smith, who had preceded Ann and never
heard of her, that something "sucked his breath" at night; the death-certificates of fever victims of
1804, issued by Dr. Chad Hopkins, and showing the four deceased persons all unaccountably lacking
in blood; and the obscure passages of poor Rhoby Harris's ravings, where she complained of the
sharp teeth of a glassy-eyed, half-visible presence.
Free from unwarranted superstition though I am, these things produced in me an odd sensation,
which was intensified by a pair of widely separated newspaper cuttings relating to deaths in the
shunned house--one from the Providence Gazette and Country-Journal of April 12, 1815, and the other
from the Daily Transcript and Chronicle of October 27, 1845--each of which detailed an appallingly
grisly circumstance whose duplication was remarkable. It seems that in both instances the dying
person, in 1815 a gentle old lady named Stafford and in 1845 a school-teacher of middle age named
Eleazar Durfee, became transfigured in a horrible way; glaring glassily and attempting to bite the
throat of the attending physician. Even more puzzling, though, was the final case which put an end to
the renting of the house--a series of anaemia deaths preceded by progressive madnesses wherein the
patient would craftily attempt the lives of his relatives by incisions in the neck or wrists.
This was in 1860 and 1861, when my uncle had just begun his medical practice; and before
leaving for the front he heard much of it from his elder professional colleagues. The really
inexplicable thing was the way in which the victims--ignorant people, for the ill-smelling and widely
shunned house could now be rented to no others--would babble maledictions in French, a language
they could not possibly have studied to any extent. It made one think of poor Rhoby Harris nearly a
century before, and so moved my uncle that he commenced collecting historical data on the house
after listening, some time subsequent to his return from the war, to the first-hand account of Drs.
Chase and Whitmarsh. Indeed, I could see that my uncle had thought deeply on the subject, and that he
was glad of my own interest--an open-minded and sympathetic interest which enabled him to discuss
with me matters at which others would merely have laughed. His fancy had not gone so far as mine,
but he felt that the place was rare in its imaginative potentialities, and worthy of note as an inspiration
in the field of the grotesque and macabre.
For my part, I was disposed to take the whole subject with profound seriousness, and began at
once not only to review the evidence, but to accumulate as much as I could. I talked with the elderly
Archer Harris, then owner of the house, many times before his death in 1916; and obtained from him
and his still surviving maiden sister Alice an authentic corroboration of all the family data my uncle
had collected. When, however, I asked them what connection with France or its language the house
could have, they confessed themselves as frankly baffled and ignorant as I. Archer knew nothing, and
all that Miss Harris could say was that an old allusion her grandfather, Dutee Harris, had heard of
might have shed a little light. The old seaman, who had survived his son Welcome's death in battle by
two years, had not himself known the legend; but recalled that his earliest nurse, the ancient Maria
Robbins, seemed darkly aware of something that might have lent a weird significance to the French
ravings of Rhoby Harris, which she had so often heard during the last days of that hapless woman.
Maria had been at the shunned house from 1769 till the removal of the family in 1783, and had seen
Mercy Dexter die. Once she hinted to the child Dutee of a somewhat peculiar circumstance in
Mercy's last moments, but he had soon for gotten all about it save that it was something peculiar. The
granddaughter, moreover, recalled even this much with difficulty. She and her brother were not so
much interested in the house as was Archer's son Carrington, the present owner, with whom I talked
after my experience.
Having exhausted the Harris family of all the information it could furnish, I turned my attention to
early town records and deeds with a zeal more penetrating than that which my uncle had occasionally
shown in the same work. What I wished was a comprehensive history of the site from its very
settlement in 1636--or even before, if any Narragansett Indian legend could be unearthed to supply
the data. I found, at the start, that the land had been part of a long strip of the lot granted originally to
John Throckmorton; one of many similar strips beginning at the Town Street beside the river and
extending up over the hill to a line roughly corresponding with the modern Hope Street. The
Throckmorton lot had later, of course, been much subdivided; and I became very assiduous in tracing
that section through which Back or Benefit Street was later run. It had, a rumour indeed said, been the
Throckmorton graveyard; but as I examined the records more carefully, I found that the graves had
all been transferred at an early date to the North Burial Ground on the Pawtucket West Road.
Then suddenly I came--by a rare piece of chance, since it was not in the main body of records and
might easily have been missed--upon something which aroused my keenest eagerness, fitting in as it
did with several of the queerest phases of the affair. It was the record of a lease in 1697, of a small
tract of ground to an Etienne Roulet and wife. At last the French element had appeared--that, and
another deeper element of horror which the name conjured up from the darkest recesses of my weird
and heterogeneous reading--and I feverishly studied the platting of the locality as it had been before
the cutting through and partial straightening of Back Street between 1747 and 1758. I found what I had
half expected, that where the shunned house now stood, the Roulets had laid out their graveyard
behind a one-story and attic cottage, and that no record of any transfer of graves existed. The
document, indeed, ended in much confusion; and I was forced to ransack both the Rhode Island
Historical Society and Shepley Library before I could find a local door which the name of Etienne
Roulet would unlock. In the end I did find something; something of such vague but monstrous import
that I set about at once to examine the cellar of the shunned house itself with a new and excited
minuteness.
The Roulets, it seemed, had come in 1696 from East Greenwich, down the west shore of
Narragansett Bay. They were Huguenots from Caude, and had encountered much opposition before
the Providence selectmen allowed them to settle in the town. Unpopularity had dogged them in East
Greenwich, whither they had come in 1686, after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, and rumour
said that the cause of dislike extended beyond mere racial and national prejudice, or the land disputes
which involved other French settlers with the English in rivalries which not even Governor Andros
could quell. But their ardent Protestantism--too ardent, some whispered--and their evident distress
when virtually driven from the village had been granted a haven; and the swarthy Etienne Roulet, less
apt at agriculture than at reading queer books and drawing queer diagrams, was given a clerical post
in the warehouse at Pardon Tillinghast's wharf, far south in Town Street. There had, however, been a
riot of some sort later on--perhaps forty years later, after old Roulet's death--and no one seemed to
hear of the family after that.
For a century and more, it appeared, the Roulets had been well remembered and frequently
discussed as vivid incidents in the quiet life of a New England seaport. Etienne's son Paul, a surly
fellow whose erratic conduct had probably provoked the riot which wiped out the family, was
particularly a source of speculation; and though Providence never shared the witchcraft panics of
her Puritan neighbours, it was freely intimated by old wives that his prayers were neither uttered at
the proper time nor directed toward the proper object. All this had undoubtedly formed the basis of
the legend known by old Maria Robbins. What relation it had to the French ravings of Rhoby Harris
and other inhabitants of the shunned house, imagination or future discovery alone could determine. I
wondered how many of those who had known the legends realized that additional link with the
terrible which my wider reading had given me; that ominous item in the annals of morbid horror
which tells of the creature Jacques Roulet, of Caude, who in 1598 was condemned to death as a
daemoniac but afterward saved from the stake by the Paris parliament and shut in a madhouse. He had
been found covered with blood and shreds of flesh in a wood, shortly after the killing and rending of
a boy by a pair of wolves. One wolf was seen to lope away unhurt. Surely a pretty hearthside tale,
with a queer significance as to name and place; but I decided that the Providence gossips could not
have generally known of it. Had they known, the coincidence of names would have brought some
drastic and frightened action--indeed, might not its limited whispering have precipitated the final riot
which erased the Roulets from the town?
I now visited the accursed place with increased frequency; studying the unwholesome vegetation
of the garden, examining all the walls of the building, and poring over every inch of the earthen
cellar floor. Finally, with Carrington Harris's permission, I fitted a key to the disused door opening
from the cellar directly upon Benefit Street, preferring to have a more immediate access to the
outside world than the dark stairs, ground floor hall, and front door could give. There, where
morbidity lurked most thickly, I searched and poked during long afternoons when the sunlight filtered
in through the cobwebbed above--ground door which placed me only a few feet from the placid
sidewalk outside. Nothing new rewarded my efforts--only the same depressing mustiness and faint
suggestions of noxious odours and nitrous outlines on the floor--and I fancy that many pedestrians
must have watched me curiously through the broken panes.
At length, upon a suggestion of my uncle's, I decided to try the spot nocturnally; and one stormy
midnight ran the beams of an electric torch over the mouldy floor with its uncanny shapes and
distorted, half-phosphorescent fungi. The place had dispirited me curiously that evening, and I was
almost prepared when I saw--or thought I saw--amidst the whitish deposits a particularly sharp
definition of the "huddled form" I had suspected from boyhood. Its clearness was astonishing and
unprecedented--and as I watched I seemed to see again the thin, yellowish, shimmering exhalation
which had startled me on that rainy afternoon so many years before.
Above the anthropomorphic patch of mould by the fireplace it rose; a subtle, sickish, almost
luminous vapour which, as it hung trembling in the dampness, seemed to develop vague and shocking
suggestions of form, gradually trailing off into nebulous decay and passing up into the blackness of
the great chimney with a foetor in its wake. It was truly horrible, and the more so to me because of
what I knew of the spot. Refusing to flee, I watched it fade--and as I watched I felt that it was in turn
watching me greedily with eyes more imaginable than visible. When I told my uncle about it he was
greatly aroused; and after a tense hour of reflection, arrived at a definite and drastic decision.
Weighing in his mind the importance of the matter, and the significance of our relation to it, he
insisted that we both test--and if possible destroy--the horror of the house by a joint night or nights
of aggressive vigil in that musty and fungous-cursed cellar.
IV
On Wednesday, June 25, 1919, after a proper notification of Carrington Harris which did not
include surmises as to what we expected to find, my uncle and I conveyed to the shunned house two
camp chairs and a folding camp cot, together with some scientific mechanism of greater weight and
intricacy. These we placed in the cellar during the day, screening the windows with paper and
planning to return in the evening for our first vigil. We had locked the door from the cellar to the
ground floor; and having a key to the outside cellar door, we were prepared to leave our expensive
and delicate apparatus--which we had obtained secretly and at great cost--as many days as our vigil
might need to be protracted. It was our design to sit up together till very late, and then watch singly
till dawn in two-hour stretches, myself first and then my companion; the inactive member resting on
the cot.
The natural leadership with which my uncle procured the instruments from the laboratories of
BrownUniversity and the Cranston Street Armory, and instinctively assumed direction of our venture,
was a marvellous commentary on the potential vitality and resilience of a man of eighty-one. Elihu
Whipple had lived according to the hygienic laws he had preached as a physician, and but for what
happened later would be here in full vigour today. Only two persons suspect what did happen--
Carrington Harris and myself. I had to tell Harris because he owned the house and deserved to know
what had gone out of it. Then, too, we had spoken to him in advance of our quest; and I felt after my
uncle's going that he would understand and assist me in some vitally necessary public explanations.
He turned very pale, but agreed to help me, and decided that it would now be safe to rent the house.
To declare that we were not nervous on that rainy night of watching would be an exaggeration
both gross and ridiculous. We were not, as I have said, in any sense childishly superstitious, but
scientific study and reflection had taught us that the known universe of three dimensions embraces the
merest fraction of the whole cosmos of substance and energy. In this case an overwhelming
preponderance of evidence from numerous authentic sources pointed to the tenacious existence of
certain forces of great power and, so far as the human point of view is concerned, exceptional
malignancy. To say that we actually believed in vampires or werewolves would be a carelessly
inclusive statement. Rather must it be said that we were not prepared to deny the possibility of certain
unfamiliar and unclassified modifications of vital force and attenuated matter; existing very
infrequently in three-dimensional space because of its more intimate connection with other spatial
units, yet close enough to the boundary of our own to furnish us occasional manifestations which we,
for lack of a proper vantage-point, may never hope to understand.
In short, it seemed to my uncle and me that an incontrovertible array of facts pointed to some
lingering influence in the shunned house; traceable to one or another of the ill-favoured French
settlers of two centuries before, and still operative through rare and unknown laws of atomic and
electronic motion. That the family of Roulet had possessed an abnormal affinity for outer circles of
entity--dark spheres which for normal folk hold only repulsion and terror--their recorded history
seemed to prove. Had not, then, the riots of those bygone seventeen-thirties set moving certain
kinetic patterns in the morbid brain of one or more of them--notably the sinister Paul Roulet--which
obscurely survived the bodies murdered, and continued to function in some multiple-dimensioned
space along the original lines of force determined by a frantic hatred of the encroaching community?
Such a thing was surely not a physical or biochemical impossibility in the light of a newer
science which includes the theories of relativity and intra-atomic action. One might easily imagine an
alien nucleus of substance or energy, formless or otherwise, kept alive by imperceptible or
immaterial subtractions from the life-force or bodily tissue and fluids of other and more palpably
living things into which it penetrates and with whose fabric it sometimes completely merges itself. It
might be actively hostile, or it might be dictated merely by blind motives of self-preservation. In any
case such a monster must of necessity be in our scheme of things an anomaly and an intruder, whose
extirpation forms a primary duty with every man not an enemy to the world's life, health, and sanity.
What baffled us was our utter ignorance of the aspect in which we might encounter the thing. No
sane person had even seen it, and few had ever felt it definitely. It might be pure energy--a form
ethereal and outside the realm of substance--or it might be partly material; some unknown and
equivocal mass of plasticity, capable of changing at will to nebulous approximations of the solid,
liquid, gaseous, or tenuously unparticled states. The anthropomorphic patch of mould on the floor,
the form of the yellowish vapour, and the curvature of the tree-roots in some of the old tales, all
argued at least a remote and reminiscent connection with the human shape; but how representative or
permanent that similarity might be, none could say with any kind of certainty.
We had devised two weapons to fight it; a large and specially fitted Crookes tube operated by
powerful storage batteries and provided with peculiar screens and reflectors, in case it proved
intangible and opposable only by vigorously destructive ether radiations, and a pair of military flame-
throwers of the sort used in the World War, in case it proved partly material and susceptible of
mechanical destruction--for like the superstitious Exeter rustics, we were prepared to burn the
thing's heart out if heart existed to burn. All this aggressive mechanism we set in the cellar in
positions carefully arranged with reference to the cot and chairs, and to the spot before the fireplace
where the mould had taken strange shapes. That suggestive patch, by the way, was only faintly visible
when we placed our furniture and instruments, and when we returned that evening for the actual vigil.
For a moment I half-doubted that I had ever seen it in the more definitely limned form--but then I
thought of the legends.
Our cellar vigil began at 10 P.M., daylight saving time, and as it continued we found no promise
of pertinent developments. A weak, filtered glow from the rain-harassed street lamps outside, and a
feeble phosphorescence from the detestable fungi within, showed the dripping stone of the walls,
from which all traces of whitewash had vanished; the dank, foetid and mildew-tainted hard earth floor
with its obscene fungi; the rotting remains of what had been stools, chairs and tables, and other more
shapeless furniture; the heavy planks and massive beams of the ground floor overhead; the decrepit
plank door leading to bins and chambers beneath other parts of the house; the crumbling stone
staircase with ruined wooden hand-rail; and the crude and cavernous fireplace of blackened brick
where rusted iron fragments revealed the past presence of hooks, andirons, spit, crane, and a door to
the Dutch oven--these things, and our austere cot and camp chairs, and the heavy and intricate
destructive machinery we had brought.
We had, as in my own former explorations, left the door to the street unlocked; so that a direct and
practical path of escape might lie open in case of manifestations beyond our power to deal with. It
was our idea that our continued nocturnal presence would call forth whatever malign entity lurked
there; and that being prepared, we could dispose of the thing with one or the other of our provided
means as soon as we had recognised and observed it sufficiently. How long it might require to evoke
and extinguish the thing, we had no notion. It occurred to us, too, that our venture was far from safe,
for in what strength the thing might appear no one could tell. But we deemed the game worth the
hazard, and embarked on it alone and unhesitatingly; conscious that the seeking of outside aid would
only expose us to ridicule and perhaps defeat our entire purpose. Such was our frame of mind as we
talked--far into the night, till my uncle's growing drowsiness made me remind him to lie down for his
two-hour sleep.
Something like fear chilled me as I sat there in the small hours alone--I say alone, for one who
sits by a sleeper is indeed alone; perhaps more alone than he can realise. My uncle breathed heavily,
his deep inhalations and exhalations accompanied by the rain outside, and punctuated by another
nerve-racking sound of distant dripping water within--for the house was repulsively damp even in dry
weather, and in this storm positively swamp-like. I studied the loose, antique masonry of the walls in
the fungous-light and the feeble rays which stole in from the street through the screened windows;
and once, when the noisome atmosphere of the place seemed about to sicken me, I opened the door
and looked up and down the street, feasting my eyes on familiar sights and my nostrils on wholesome
air. Still nothing occurred to reward my watching; and I yawned repeatedly, fatigue getting the better
of apprehension.
Then the stirring of my uncle in his sleep attracted my notice. He had turned restlessly on the cot
several times during the latter half of the first hour, but now he was breathing with unusual
irregularity, occasionally heaving a sigh which held more than a few of the qualities of a choking
moan. I turned my electric flashlight on him and found his face averted, so rising and crossing to the
other side of the cot, I again flashed the light to see if he seemed in any pain. What I saw unnerved
me most surprisingly, considering its relative triviality. It must have been merely the association of
an odd circumstance with the sinister nature of our location and mission, for surely the circumstance
was not in itself frightful or unnatural. It was merely that my uncle's facial expression, disturbed no
doubt by the strange dreams which our situation prompted, betrayed considerable agitation, and
seemed not at all characteristic of him. His habitual expression was one of kindly and well-bred
calm, whereas now a variety of emotions seemed struggling within him. I think, on the whole, that it
was this variety which chiefly disturbed me. My uncle, as he gasped and tossed in increasing
perturbation and with eyes that had now started open, seemed not one man but many men, and
suggested a curious quality of alienage from himself.
All at once he commenced to mutter, and I did not like the look of his mouth and teeth as he spoke.
The words were at first indistinguishable, and then--with a tremendous start--I recognised something
about them which filled me with icy fear till I recalled the breadth of my uncle's education and the
interminable translations he had made from anthropological and antiquarian articles in the Revue des
Deux Mondes. For the venerable Elihu Whipple was muttering in French, and the few phrases I could
distinguish seemed connected with the darkest myths he had ever adapted from the famous Paris
magazine.
Suddenly a perspiration broke out on the sleeper's forehead, and he leaped abruptly up, half
awake. The jumble of French changed to a cry in English, and the hoarse voice shouted excitedly,
"My breath, my breath!" Then the awakening became complete, and with a subsidence of facial
expression to the normal state my uncle seized my hand and began to relate a dream whose nucleus of
significance I could only surmise with a kind of awe.
He had, he said, floated off from a very ordinary series of dream-pictures into a scene whose
strangeness was related to nothing he had ever read. It was of this world, and yet not of it--a shadowy
geometrical confusion in which could be seen elements of familiar things in most unfamiliar and
perturbing combinations. There was a suggestion of queerly disordered pictures superimposed one
upon an other; an arrangement in which the essentials of time as well as of space seemed dissolved
and mixed in the most illogical fashion. In this kaleidoscopic vortex of phantasmal images were
occasional snap-shots, if one might use the term, of singular clearness but unaccountable
heterogeneity.
Once my uncle thought he lay in a carelessly dug open pit, with a crowd of angry faces framed by
straggling locks and three-cornered hats frowning down at him. Again he seemed to be in the interior
of a house--an old house, apparently--but the details and inhabitants were constantly changing, and he
could never be certain of the faces or the furniture, or even of the room itself, since doors and
windows seemed in just as great a state of flux as the more presumably mobile objects. It was queer--
damnably queer--and my uncle spoke almost sheepishly, as if half expecting not to be believed, when
he declared that of the strange faces many had unmistakably borne the features of the Harris family.
And all the while there was a personal sensation of choking, as if some pervasive presence had
spread itself through his body and sought to possess itself of his vital processes. I shuddered at the
thought of those vital processes, worn as they were by eighty--one years of continuous functioning,
in conflict with unknown forces of which the youngest and strongest system might well be afraid; but
in another moment reflected that dreams are only dreams, and that these uncomfortable visions could
be, at most, no more than my uncle's reaction to the investigations and expectations which had lately
filled our minds to the exclusion of all else.
Conversation, also, soon tended to dispel my sense of strangeness; and in time I yielded to my
yawns and took my turn at slumber. My uncle seemed now very wakeful, and welcomed his period of
watching even though the nightmare had aroused him far ahead of his allotted two hours. Sleep
seized me quickly, and I was at once haunted with dreams of the most disturbing kind. I felt, in my
visions, a cosmic and abysmal loneness; with hostility surging from all sides upon some prison
where I lay confined. I seemed bound and gagged, and taunted by the echoing yells of distant
multitudes who thirsted for my blood. My uncle's face came to me with less pleasant associations
than in waking hours, and I recall many futile struggles and attempts to scream. It was not a pleasant
sleep, and for a second I was not sorry for the echoing shriek which clove through the barriers of
dream and flung me to a sharp and startled awakeness in which every actual object before my eyes
stood out with more than natural clearness and reality.
V
I had been lying with my face away from my uncle's chair, so that in this sudden flash of
awakening I saw only the door to the street, the more northerly window, and the wall and floor and
ceiling toward the north of the room, all photographed with morbid vividness on my brain in a light
brighter than the glow of the fungi or the rays from the street outside. It was not a strong or even a
fairly strong light; certainly not nearly strong enough to read an average book by. But it cast a
shadow of myself and the cot on the floor, and had a yellowish, penetrating force that hinted at things
more potent than luminosity. This I perceived with unhealthy sharpness despite the fact that two of my
other senses were violently assailed. For on my ears rang the reverberations of that shocking scream,
while my nostrils revolted at the stench which filled the place. My mind, as alert as my senses,
recognised the gravely unusual; and almost automatically I leaped up and turned about to grasp the
destructive instruments which we had left trained on the mouldy spot before the fireplace. As I
turned, I dreaded what I was to see; for the scream had been in my uncle's voice, and I knew not
against what menace I should have to defend him and myself.
Yet after all, the sight was worse than I had dreaded. There are horrors beyond horrors, and this
was one of those nuclei of all dreamable hideousness which the cosmos saves to blast an accursed
and unhappy few. Out of the fungous-ridden earth steamed up a vaporous corpse-light, yellow and
diseased, which bubbled and lapped to a gigantic height in vague outlines half human and half
monstrous, through which I could see the chimney and fireplace beyond. It was all eyes--wolfish and
mocking--and the rugose insect-like head dissolved at the top to a thin stream of mist which curled
putridly about and finally vanished up the chimney. I say that I saw this thing, but it is only in
conscious retrospection that I ever definitely traced its damnable approach to form. At the time it was
to me only a seething dimly phosphorescent cloud of fungous loathsomeness, enveloping and
dissolving to an abhorrent plasticity the one object to which all my attention was focused. That object
was my uncle--the venerable Elihu Whipple--who with blackening and decaying features leered and
gibbered at me, and reached out dripping claws to rend me in the fury which this horror had brought.
It was a sense of routine which kept me from going mad. I had drilled myself in preparation for
the crucial moment, and blind training saved me. Recognising the bubbling evil as no substance
reachable by matter or material chemistry, and therefore ignoring the flame-thrower which loomed
on my left, I threw on the current of the Crookes tube apparatus, and focussed toward that scene of
immortal blasphemousness the strongest ether radiations which men's art can arouse from the spaces
and fluids of nature. There was a bluish haze and a frenzied sputtering, and the yellowish
phosphorescence grew dimmer to my eyes. But I saw the dimness was only that of contrast, and that
the waves from the machine had no effect whatever.
Then, in the midst of that daemoniac spectacle, I saw a fresh horror which brought cries to my
lips and sent me fumbling and staggering towards that unlocked door to the quiet street, careless of
what abnormal terrors I loosed upon the world, or what thoughts or judgments of men I brought down
upon my head. In that dim blend of blue and yellow the form of my uncle had commenced a nauseous
liquefaction whose essence eludes all description, and in which there played across his vanishing
face such changes of identity as only madness can conceive. He was at once a devil and a multitude, a
charnel-house and a pageant. Lit by the mixed and uncertain beams, that gelatinous face assumed a
dozen--a score--a hundred--aspects; grinning, as it sank to the ground on a body that melted like
tallow, in the caricatured likeness of legions strange and yet not strange.
I saw the features of the Harris line, masculine and feminine, adult and infantile, and other features
old and young, coarse and refined, familiar and unfamiliar. For a second there flashed a degraded
counterfeit of a miniature of poor Rhoby Harris that I had seen in the School of Design Museum, and
another time I thought I caught the rawboned image of Mercy Dexter as I recalled her from a painting
in Carrington Harris's house. It was frightful beyond conception; toward the last, when a curious
blend of servant and baby visages flickered close to the fungous floor where a pool of greenish
grease was spreading, it seemed as though the shifting features fought against themselves, and strove
to form contours like those of my uncle's kindly face. I like to think that he existed at that moment, and
that he tried to bid me farewell. It seems to me I hiccoughed a farewell from my own parched throat
as I lurched out into the street; a thin stream of grease following me through the door to the rain-
drenched sidewalk.
The rest is shadowy and monstrous. There was no one in the soaking street, and in all the world
there was no one I dared tell. I walked aimlessly south past College Hill and the Athenaeum, down
Hopkins Street, and over the bridge to the business section where tall buildings seemed to guard me
as modern material things guard the world from ancient and unwholesome wonder. Then the grey
dawn unfolded wetly from the east, silhouetting the archaic hill and its venerable steeples, and
beckoning me to the place where my terrible work was still unfinished. And in the end I went, wet,
hatless, and dazed in the morning light, and entered that awful door in Benefit Street which I had left
ajar, and which still swung cryptically in full sight of the early householders to whom I dared not
speak.
The grease was gone, for the mouldy floor was porous. And in front of the fireplace was no
vestige of the giant doubled-up form in nitre. I looked at the cot, the chairs, the instruments, my
neglected hat, and the yellowed straw hat of my uncle. Dazedness was uppermost, and I could
scarcely recall what was dream and what was reality. Then thought trickled back, and I knew that I had
witnessed things more horrible than I had dreamed. Sitting down, I tried to conjecture as nearly as
sanity would let me just what had happened, and how I might end the horror, if indeed it had been real.
Matter it seemed not to be, nor ether, nor anything else conceivable by mortal mind. What, then, but
some exotic emanation; some vampirish vapour such as Exeter rustics tell of as lurking over certain
church yards? This I felt was the clue, and again I looked at the floor before the fireplace where the
mould and nitre had taken strange forms. In ten minutes my mind was made up, and taking my hat I set
out for home, where I bathed, ate, and gave by telephone an order for a pick-axe, a spade, a military
gas-mask, and six carboys of sulphuric acid, all to be delivered the next morning at the cellar door of
the shunned house in Benefit Street. After that I tried to sleep; and failing, passed the hours in reading
and in the composition of inane verses to counteract my mood.
At 11 A.M. the next day I commenced digging. It was sunny weather, and I was glad of that. I was
still alone, for as much as I feared the unknown horror I sought, there was more fear in the thought of
telling anybody. Later I told Harris only through sheer necessity, and because he had heard odd tales
from old people which disposed him ever so little toward belief. As I turned up the stinking black
earth in front of the fireplace, my spade causing a viscous yellow ichor to ooze from the white fungi
which it severed, I trembled at the dubious thoughts of what I might uncover. Some secrets of inner
earth are not good for mankind, and this seemed to me one of them.
My hand shook perceptibly, but still I delved; after a while standing in the large hole I had made.
With the deepening of the hole, which was about six feet square, the evil smell increased; and I lost
all doubt of my imminent contact with the hellish thing whose emanations had cursed the house for
over a century and a half. I wondered what it would look like--what its form and substance would be,
and how big it might have waxed through long ages of life-sucking. At length I climbed out of the
hole and dispersed the heaped-up dirt, then arranging the great carboys of acid around and near two
sides, so that when necessary I might empty them all down the aperture in quick succession. After that
I dumped earth only along the other two sides; working more slowly and donning my gas-mask as the
smell grew. I was nearly unnerved at my proximity to a nameless thing at the bottom of a pit.
Suddenly my spade struck something softer than earth. I shuddered and made a motion as if to
climb out of the hole, which was now as deep as my neck. Then courage returned, and I scraped away
more dirt in the light of the electric torch I had provided. The surface I uncovered was fishy and
glassy--a kind of semi-putrid congealed jelly with suggestions of translucency. I scraped further, and
saw that it had form. There was a rift where a part of the substance was folded over. The exposed
area was huge and roughly cylindrical; like a mammoth soft blue-white stovepipe doubled in two, its
largest part some two feet in diameter. Still more I scraped, and then abruptly I leaped out of the hole
and away from the filthy thing; frantically unstopping and tilting the heavy carboys, and precipitating
their corrosive contents one after another down that charnel gulf and upon this unthinkable
abnormality whose titan elbow I had seen.
The blinding maelstrom of greenish-yellow vapour which surged tempestuously up from that
hole as the floods of acid descended, will never leave my memory. All along the hill people tell of
the yellow day, when virulent and horrible fumes arose from the factory waste dumped in the
ProvidenceRiver, but I know how mistaken they are as to the source. They tell, too, of the hideous
roar which at the same time came from some disordered water-pipe or gas main underground--but
again I could correct them if I dared. It was unspeakably shocking, and I do not see how I lived
through it. I did faint after emptying the fourth carboy, which I had to handle after the fumes had
begun to penetrate my mask; but when I recovered I saw that the hole was emitting no fresh vapours.
The two remaining carboys I emptied down without particular result, and after a time I felt it safe
to shovel the earth back into the pit. It was twilight before I was done, but fear had gone out of the
place. The dampness was less foetid, and all the strange fungi had withered to a kind of harmless
greyish powder which blew ashlike along the floor. One of earth's nethermost terrors had perished
forever; and if there be a hell, it had received at last the daemon soul of an unhallowed thing. And as I
patted down the last spadeful of mould, I shed the first of many tears with which I have paid
unaffected tribute to my beloved uncle's memory.
The next spring no more pale grass and strange weeds came up in the shunned house's terraced
garden, and shortly afterward Carrington Harris rented the place. It is still spectral, but its
strangeness fascinates me, and I shall find mixed with my relief a queer regret when it is torn down to
make way for a tawdry shop or vulgar apartment building. The barren old trees in the yard have begun
to bear small, sweet apples, and last year the birds nested in their gnarled boughs.

THE SILVER KEY
He had read much of things as they are, and talked with too many people. Well-meaning
philosophers had taught him to look into the logical relations of things, and analyse the processes
which shaped his thoughts and fancies. Wonder had gone away, and he had forgotten that all life is
only a set of pictures in the brain, among which there is no difference betwixt those born of real
things and those born of inward dreamings, and no cause to value the one above the other. Custom
had dinned into his ears a superstitious reverence for that which tangibly and physically exists, and
had made him secretly ashamed to dwell in visions. Wise men told him his simple fancies were inane
and childish, and even more absurd because their actors persist in fancying them full of meaning and
purpose as the blind cosmos grinds aimlessly on from nothing to something and from something back
to nothing again, neither heeding nor knowing the wishes or existence of the minds that flicker for a
second now and then in the darkness.
They had chained him down to things that are, and had then explained the workings of those things
till mystery had gone out of the world. When he complained, and longed to escape into twilight
realms where magic moulded all the little vivid fragments and prized associations of his mind into
vistas of breathless expectancy and unquenchable delight, they turned him instead toward the new-
found prodigies of science, bidding him find wonder in the atom's vortex and mystery in the sky's
dimensions. And when he had failed to find these boons in things whose laws are known and
measurable, they told him he lacked imagination, and was immature because he preferred dream-
illusions to the illusions of our physical creation.
So Carter had tried to do as others did, and pretended that the common events and emotions of
earthy minds were more important than the fantasies of rare and delicate souls. He did not dissent
when they told him that the animal pain of a stuck pig or dyspeptic ploughman in real life is a greater
thing than the peerless beauty of Narath with its hundred carven gates and domes of chalcedony,
which he dimly remembered from his dreams; and under their guidance he cultivated a painstaking
sense of pity and tragedy.
Once in a while, though, he could not help seeing how shallow, fickle, and meaningless all human
aspirations are, and how emptily our real impulses contrast with those pompous ideals we profess to
hold. Then he would have recourse to the polite laughter they had taught him to use against the
extravagance and artificiality of dreams; for he saw that the daily life of our world is every inch as
extravagant and artificial, and far less worthy of respect because of its poverty in beauty and its silly
reluctance to admit its own lack of reason and purpose. In this way he became a kind of humorist, for
he did not see that even humour is empty in a mindless universe devoid of any true standard of
consistency or inconsistency.
In the first days of his bondage he had turned to the gentle churchly faith endeared to him by the
naive trust of his fathers, for thence stretched mystic avenues which seemed to promise escape from
life. Only on closer view did he mark the starved fancy and beauty, the stale and prosy triteness, and
the owlish gravity and grotesque claims of solid truth which reigned boresomely and
overwhelmingly among most of its professors; or feel to the full the awkwardness with which it
sought to keep alive as literal fact the outgrown fears and guesses of a primal race confronting the
unknown. It wearied Carter to see how solemnly people tried to make earthly reality out of old myths
which every step of their boasted science confuted, and this misplaced seriousness killed the
attachment he might have kept for the ancient creeds had they been content to offer the sonorous rites
and emotional outlets in their true guise of ethereal fantasy.
But when he came to study those who had thrown off the old myths, he found them even more
ugly than those who had not. They did not know that beauty lies in harmony, and that loveliness of life
has no standard amidst an aimless cosmos save only its harmony with the dreams and the feelings
which have gone before and blindly moulded our little spheres out of the rest of chaos. They did not
see that good and evil and beauty and ugliness are only ornamental fruits of perspective, whose sole
value lies in their linkage to what chance made our fathers think and feel, and whose finer details are
different for every race and culture. Instead, they either denied these things altogether or transferred
them to the crude, vague instincts which they shared with the beasts and peasants; so that their lives
were dragged malodorously out in pain, ugliness, and disproportion, yet filled with a ludicrous pride
at having escaped from something no more unsound than that which still held them. They had traded
the false gods of fear and blind piety for those of license and anarchy.
Carter did not taste deeply of these modern freedoms; for their cheapness and squalor sickened a
spirit loving beauty alone while his reason rebelled at the flimsy logic with which their champions
tried to gild brute impulse with a sacredness stripped from the idols they had discarded. He saw that
most of them, in common with their cast-off priestcraft, could not escape from the delusion that life
has a meaning apart from that which men dream into it; and could not lay aside the crude notion of
ethics and obligations beyond those of beauty, even when all Nature shrieked of its unconsciousness
and impersonal unmorality in the light of their scientific discoveries. Warped and bigoted with
preconceived illusions of justice, freedom, and consistency, they cast off the old lore and the old
way with the old beliefs; nor ever stopped to think that that lore and those ways were the sole makers
of their present thoughts and judgments, and the sole guides and standards in a meaningless universe
without fixed aims or stable points of reference. Having lost these artificial settings, their lives
grew void of direction and dramatic interest; till at length they strove to drown their ennui in bustle
and pretended usefulness, noise and excitement, barbaric display and animal sensation. When these
things palled, disappointed, or grew nauseous through revulsion, they cultivated irony and bitterness,
and found fault with the social order. Never could they realize that their brute foundations were as
shifting and contradictory as the gods of their elders, and that the satisfaction of one moment is the
bane of the next. Calm, lasting beauty comes only in a dream, and this solace the world had thrown
away when in its worship of the real it threw away the secrets of childhood and innocence.
Amidst this chaos of hollowness and unrest Carter tried to live as befitted a man of keen thought
and good heritage. With his dreams fading under the ridicule of the age he could not believe in
anything, but the love of harmony kept him close to the ways of his race and station. He walked
impassive through the cities of men, and sighed because no vista seemed fully real; because every
flash of yellow sunlight on tall roofs and every glimpse of balustraded plazas in the first lamps of
evening served only to remind him of dreams he had once known, and to make him homesick for
ethereal lands he no longer knew how to find. Travel was only a mockery; and even the Great War
stirred him but little, though he served from the first in the Foreign Legion of France. For a while he
sought friends, but soon grew weary of the crudeness of their emotions, and the sameness and
earthiness of their visions. He felt vaguely glad that all his relatives were distant and out of touch
with him, for they would not have understood his mental life. That is, none but his grandfather and
great-uncle Christopher could, and they were long dead.
Then he began once more the writing of books, which he had left off when dreams first failed
him. But here, too, was there no satisfaction or fulfillment; for the touch of earth was upon his mind,
and he could not think of lovely things as he had done of yore. Ironic humor dragged down all the
twilight minarets he reared, and the earthy fear of improbability blasted all the delicate and amazing
flowers in his faery gardens. The convention of assumed pity spilt mawkishness on his characters,
while the myth of an important reality and significant human events and emotions debased all his high
fantasy into thin--veiled allegory and cheap social satire. His new novels were successful as his old
ones had never been; and because he knew how empty they must be to please an empty herd, he
burned them and ceased his writing. They were very graceful novels, in which he urbanely laughed
at the dreams he lightly sketched; but he saw that their sophistication had sapped all their life away.
It was after this that he cultivated deliberate illusion, and dabbled in the notions of the bizarre and
the eccentric as an antidote for the commonplace. Most of these, however, soon showed their
poverty and barrenness; and he saw that the popular doctrines of occultism are as dry and inflexible
as those of science, yet without even the slender palliative of truth to redeem them. Gross stupidity,
falsehood, and muddled thinking are not dream; and form no escape from life to a mind trained above
their own level. So Carter bought stranger books and sought out deeper and more terrible men of
fantastic erudition; delving into arcana of consciousness that few have trod, and learning things about
the secret pits of life, legend, and immemorial antiquity which disturbed him ever afterward. He
decided to live on a rarer plane, and furnished his Boston home to suit his changing moods; one room
for each, hung in appropriate colours, furnished with befitting books and objects, and provided with
sources of the proper sensations of light, heat, sound, taste, and odour.
Once he heard of a man in the south, who was shunned and feared for the blasphemous things he
read in prehistoric books and clay tablets smuggled from India and Arabia. Him he visited, living
with him and sharing his studies for seven years, till horror overtook them one midnight in an
unknown and archaic graveyard, and only one emerged where two had entered. Then he went back to
Arkham, the terrible witch-haunted old town of his forefathers in New England, and had experiences
in the dark, amidst the hoary willows and tottering gambrel roofs, which made him seal forever
certain pages in the diary of a wild-minded ancestor. But these horrors took him only to the edge of
reality, and were not of the true dream country he had known in youth; so that at fifty he despaired of
any rest or contentment in a world grown too busy for beauty and too shrewd for dreams.
Having perceived at last the hollowness and futility of real things, Carter spent his days in
retirement, and in wistful disjointed memories of his dream-filled youth. He thought it rather silly that
he bothered to keep on living at all, and got from a South American acquaintance a very curious
liquid to take him to oblivion without suffering. Inertia and force of habit, however, caused him to
defer action; and he lingered indecisively among thoughts of old times, taking down the strange
hangings from his walls and refitting the house as it was in his early boyhood--purple panes,
Victorian furniture, and all.
With the passage of time he became almost glad he had lingered, for his relics of youth and his
cleavage from the world made life and sophistication seem very distant and unreal; so much so that a
touch of magic and expectancy stole back into his nightly slumbers. For years those slumbers had
known only such twisted reflections of every--day things as the commonest slumbers know, but now
there returned a flicker of something stranger and wilder; something of vaguely awesome imminence
which took the form of tensely clear pictures from his childhood days, and made him think of little
inconsequential things he had long forgotten. He would often awake calling for his mother and
grandfather, both in their graves a quarter of a century.
Then one night his grandfather reminded him of the key. The grey old scholar, as vivid as in life,
spoke long and earnestly of their ancient line, and of the strange visions of the delicate and sensitive
men who composed it. He spoke of the flame-eyed Crusader who learnt wild secrets of the Saracens
that held him captive; and of the first Sir Randolph Carter who studied magic when Elizabeth was
queen. He spoke, too, of that Edmund Carter who had just escaped hanging in the Salem witchcraft,
and who had placed in an antique box a great silver key handed down from his ancestors. Before
Carter awaked, the gentle visitant had told him where to find that box; that carved oak box of archaic
wonder whose grotesque lid no hand had raised for two centuries.
In the dust and shadows of the great attic he found it, remote and forgotten at the back of a drawer
in a tall chest. It was about a foot square, and its Gothic carvings were so fearful that he did not
marvel no person since Edmund Carter had dared to open it. It gave forth no noise when shaken, but
was mystic with the scent of unremembered spices. That it held a key was indeed only a dim legend,
and Randolph Carter's father had never known such a box existed. It was bound in rusty iron, and no
means was provided for working the formidable lock. Carter vaguely understood that he would find
within it some key to the lost gate of dreams, but of where and how to use it his grandfather had told
him nothing.
An old servant forced the carven lid, shaking as he did so at the hideous faces leering from the
blackened wood, and at some unplaced familiarity. Inside, wrapped in a discoloured parchment, was a
huge key of tarnished silver covered with cryptical arabesques; but of any legible explanation there
was none. The parchment was voluminous, and held only the strange hieroglyphs of an unknown
tongue written with an antique reed. Carter recognized the characters as those he had seen on a
certain papyrus scroll belonging to that terrible scholar of the South who had vanished one midnight
in a nameless cemetery. The man had always shivered when he read this scroll, and Carter shivered
now.
But he cleaned the key, and kept it by him nightly in its aromatic box of ancient oak. His dreams
were meanwhile increasing in vividness, and though showing him none of the strange cities and
incredible gardens of the old days, were assuming a definite cast whose purpose could not be
mistaken. They were calling him back along the years, and with the mingled wills of all his fathers
were pulling him toward some hidden and ancestral source. Then he knew he must go into the past
and merge himself with old things, and day after day he thought of the hills to the north where
haunted Arkham and the rushing Miskatonic and the lonely rustic homestead of his people lay.
In the brooding fire of autumn Carter took the old remembered way past graceful lines of rolling
hill and stone-walled meadow, distant vale and hanging woodland, curving road and nestling
farmstead, and the crystal windings of the Miskatonic, crossed here and there by rustic bridges of
wood or stone. At one bend he saw the group of giant elms among which an ancestor had oddly
vanished a century and a half before, and shuddered as the wind blew meaningly through them. Then
there was the crumbling farmhouse of old Goody Fowler the witch, with its little evil windows and
great roof sloping nearly to the ground on the north side. He speeded up his car as he passed it, and
did not slacken till he had mounted the hill where his mother and her fathers before her were born,
and where the old white house still looked proudly across the road at the breathlessly lovely
panorama of rocky slope and verdant valley, with the distant spires of Kingsport on the horizon, and
hints of the archaic, dream-laden sea in the farthest background.
Then came the steeper slope that held the old Carter place he had not seen in over forty years.
Afternoon was far gone when he reached the foot, and at the bend half way up he paused to scan the
outspread countryside golden and glorified in the slanting floods of magic poured out by a western
sun. All the strangeness and expectancy of his recent dreams seemed present in this hushed and
unearthly landscape, and he thought of the unknown solitudes of other planets as his eyes traced out
the velvet and deserted lawns shining undulant between their tumbled walls, and clumps of faery
forest setting off far lines of purple hills beyond hills, and the spectral wooded valley dipping down
in shadow to dank hollows where trickling waters crooned and gurgled among swollen and distorted
roots.
Something made him feel that motors did not belong in the realm he was seeking, so he left his
car at the edge of the forest, and putting the great key in his coat pocket walked on up the hill. Woods
now engulfed him utterly, though he knew the house was on a high knoll that cleared the trees except
to the north. He wondered how it would look, for it had been left vacant and untended through his
neglect since the death of his strange great-uncle Christopher thirty years before. In his boyhood he
had revelled through long visits there, and had found weird marvels in the woods beyond the
orchard.
Shadows thickened around him, for the night was near. Once a gap in the trees opened up to the
right, so that he saw off across leagues of twilight meadow and spied the old Congregational steeple
on Central Hill in Kingsport; pink with the last flush of day, the panes of the little round windows
blazing with reflected fire. Then, when he was in deep shadow again, he recalled with a start that the
glimpse must have come from childish memory alone, since the old white church had long been torn
down to make room for the Congregational Hospital. He had read of it with interest, for the paper
had told about some strange burrows or passages found in the rocky hill beneath.
Through his puzzlement a voice piped, and he started again at its familiarity after long years. Old
Benijah Corey had been his Uncle Christopher's hired man, and was aged even in those far-off times
of his boyhood visits. Now he must be well over a hundred, but that piping voice could come from
no one else. He could distinguish no words, yet the tone was haunting and unmistakable. To think that
"Old Benijy" should still be alive!
"Mister Randy! Mister Randy! Wharbe ye? D'ye want to skeer yer Aunt Marthy plumb to death?
Hain't she tuld ye to keep nigh the place in the arternoon an' git back afur dark? Randy!
Ran...dee!...He's the beatin'est boy fer runnin' off in the woods I ever see; haff the time a-settin'
moonin' raound that snake-den in the upper timberlot!...Hey yew, Ran...dee!"
Randolph Carter stopped in the pitch darkness and rubbed his hand across his eyes. Something
was queer. He had been somewhere he ought not to be; had strayed very far away to places where he
had not belonged, and was now inexcusably late. He had not noticed the time on the Kingsport
steeple, though he could easily have made it out with his pocket telescope; but he knew his lateness
was something very strange and unprecedented. He was not sure he had his little telescope with him,
and put his hand in his blouse pocket to see. No, it was not there, but there was the big silver key he
had found in a box somewhere. Uncle Chris had told him something odd once about an old unopened
box with a key in it, but Aunt Martha had stopped the story abruptly, saying it was no kind of thing to
tell a child whose head was already too full of queer fancies. He tried to recall just where he had
found the key, but something seemed very confused. He guessed it was in the attic at home in Boston,
and dimly remembered bribing Parks with half his week's allowance to help him open the box and
keep quiet about it; but when he remembered this, the face of Parks came up very strangely, as if the
wrinkles of long years had fallen upon the brisk little Cockney.
"Ran...dee! Ran...dee! Hi! Hi! Randy!"
A swaying lantern came around the black bend, and old Benijah pounced on the silent and
bewildered form of the pilgrim.
"Durn ye, boy, so thar ye be! Ain't ye got a tongue in yer head, that ye can't answer a body! I ben
callin' this haff hour, an' ye must a heerd me long ago! Dun't ye know yer Aunt Marthy's all a-fidget
over yer bein' off arter dark? Wait till I tell yer Uncle Chris when he gits hum! Ye'd orta know these
here woods ain't no fitten place to be traipsin' this hour! They's things abroad what dun't do nobody
no good, as my gran'-sir knowed afur me. Come, Mister Randy, or Hannah wunt keep supper no
longer!"
So Randolph Carter was marched up the road where wondering stars glimmered through high
autumn boughs. And dogs barked as the yellow light of small-paned windows shone out at the farther
turn, and the Pleiades twinkled across the open knoll where a great gambrel roof stood black against
the dim west. Aunt Martha was in the doorway, and did not scold too hard when Benijah shoved the
truant in. She knew Uncle Chris well enough to expect such things of the Carter blood. Randolph did
not show his key, but ate his supper in silence and protested only when bedtime came. He sometimes
dreamed better when awake, and he wanted to use that key.
In the morning Randolph was up early, and would have run off to the upper timberlot if Uncle
Chris had not caught him and forced him into his chair by the breakfast table. He looked impatiently
around the low-pitched room with the rag carpet and exposed beams and corner--posts, and smiled
only when the orchard boughs scratched at the leaded panes of the rear window. The trees and the
hills were close to him, and formed the gates of that timeless realm which was his true country.
Then, when he was free, he felt in his blouse pocket for the key; and being reassured, skipped off
across the orchard to the rise beyond, where the wooded hill climbed again to heights above even
the treeless knoll. The floor of the forest was mossy and mysterious, and great lichened rocks rose
vaguely here and there in the dim light like Druid monoliths among the swollen and twisted trunks of
a sacred grove. Once in his ascent Randolph crossed a rushing stream whose falls a little way off
sang runic incantations to the lurking fauns and aegipans and dryads.
Then he came to the strange cave in the forest slope, the dreaded "snake-den" which country folk
shunned, and away from which Benijah had warned him again and again. It was deep; far deeper than
anyone but Randolph suspected, for the boy had found a fissure in the farthermost black corner that
led to a loftier grotto beyond--a haunting sepulchral place whose granite walls held a curious
illusion of conscious artifice. On this occasion he crawled in as usual, lighting his way with matches
filched from the sitting-room matchsafe, and edging through the final crevice with an eagerness hard
to explain even to himself. He could not tell why he approached the farther wall so confidently, or
why he instinctively drew forth the great silver key as he did so. But on he went, and when he danced
back to the house that night he offered no excuses for his lateness, nor heeded in the least the
reproofs he gained for ignoring the noon-tide dinner-horn altogether.
Now it is agreed by all the distant relatives of Randolph Carter that something occurred to
heighten his imagination in his tenth year. His cousin, Ernest B. Aspinwall, Esq., of Chicago, is fully
ten years his senior; and distinctly recalls a change in the boy after the autumn of 1883. Randolph had
looked on scenes of fantasy that few others can ever have beheld, and stranger still were some of the
qualities which he showed in relation to very mundane things. He seemed, in fine, to have picked up
an odd gift of prophecy; and reacted unusually to things which, though at the time without meaning,
were later found to justify the singular impressions. In subsequent decades as new inventions, new
names, and new events appeared one by one in the book of history, people would now and then recall
wonderingly how Carter had years before let fall some careless word of undoubted connection with
what was then far in the future. He did not himself understand these words, or know why certain
things made him feel certain emotions; but fancied that some unremembered dream must be
responsible. It was as early as 1897 that he turned pale when some traveller mentioned the French
town of Belloy-en-Santerre, and friends remembered it when he was almost mortally wounded there
in 1916, while serving with the Foreign Legion in the Great War.
Carter's relatives talk much of these things because he has lately disappeared. His little old
servant Parks, who for years bore patiently with his vagaries, last saw him on the morning he drove
off alone in his car with a key he had recently found. Parks had helped him get the key from the old
box containing it, and had felt strangely affected by the grotesque carvings on the box, and by some
other odd quality he could not name. When Carter left, he had said he was going to visit his old
ancestral country around Arkham.
Half way up Elm Mountain, on the way to the ruins of the old Carter place, they found his motor
set carefully by the roadside; and in it was a box of fragrant wood with carvings that frightened the
countrymen who stumbled on it. The box held only a queer parchment whose characters no linguist
or palaeographer has been able to decipher or identify. Rain had long effaced any possible
footprints, though Boston investigators had something to say about evidences of disturbances among
the fallen timbers of the Carter place. It was, they averred, as though someone had groped about the
ruins at no distant period. A common white handkerchief found among forest rocks on the hillside
beyond cannot be identified as belonging to the missing man.
There is talk of apportioning Randolph Carter's estate among his heirs, but I shall stand firmly
against this course because I do not believe he is dead. There are twists of time and space, of vision
and reality, which only a dreamer can divine; and from what I know of Carter I think he has merely
found a way to traverse these mazes. Whether or not he will ever come back, I cannot say. He wanted
the lands of dream he had lost, and yearned for the days of his childhood. Then he found a key, and I
somehow believe he was able to use it to strange advantage.
I shall ask him when I see him, for I expect to meet him shortly in a certain dream-city we both
used to haunt. It is rumoured in Ulthar, beyond the River Skai, that a new king reigns on the opal
throne of Ilek-Vad, that fabulous town of turrets atop the hollow cliffs of glass overlooking the
twilight sea wherein the bearded and finny Gnorri build their singular labyrinths, and I believe I know
how to interpret this rumour. Certainly, I look forward impatiently to the sight of that great silver key,
for in its cryptical arabesques there may stand symbolised all the aims and mysteries of a blindly
impersonal cosmos.

THE STATEMENT OF RANDOLPH CARTER
I repeat to you, gentlemen, that your inquisition is fruitless. Detain me here forever if you will;
confine or execute me if you must have a victim to propitiate the illusion you call justice; but I can
say no more than I have said already. Everything that I can remember, I have told you with perfect
candour. Nothing has been distorted or concealed, and if anything remains vague, it is only because
of the dark cloud which has come over my mind--that cloud and the nebulous nature of the horrors
which brought it upon me.
Again I say, I do not know what has become of Harley Warren, though I think--almost hope--that
he is in peaceful oblivion, if there be anywhere so blessed a thing. It is true that I have for five years
been his closest friend, and a partial sharer of his terrible researches into the unknown. I will not
deny, though my memory is uncertain and indistinct, that this witness of yours may have seen us
together as he says, on the Gainsville pike, walking toward BigCypressSwamp, at half past 11 on that
awful night. That we bore electric lanterns, spades, and a curious coil of wire with attached
instruments, I will even affirm; for these things all played a part in the single hideous scene which
remains burned into my shaken recollection. But of what followed, and of the reason I was found
alone and dazed on the edge of the swamp next morning, I must insist that I know nothing save what I
have told you over and over again. You say to me that there is nothing in the swamp or near it which
could form the setting of that frightful episode. I reply that I knew nothing beyond what I saw. Vision
or nightmare it may have been--vision or nightmare I fervently hope it was--yet it is all that my mind
retains of what took place in those shocking hours after we left the sight of men. And why Harley
Warren did not return, he or his shade--or some nameless thing I cannot describe--alone can tell.
As I have said before, the weird studies of Harley Warren were well known to me, and to some
extent shared by me. Of his vast collection of strange, rare books on forbidden subjects I have read
all that are written in the languages of which I am master; but these are few as compared with those in
languages I cannot understand. Most, I believe, are in Arabic; and the fiend-inspired book which
brought on the end--the book which he carried in his pocket out of the world--was written in
characters whose like I never saw elsewhere. Warren would never tell me just what was in that book.
As to the nature of our studies--must I say again that I no longer retain full comprehension? It seems
to me rather merciful that I do not, for they were terrible studies, which I pursued more through
reluctant fascination than through actual inclination. Warren always dominated me, and sometimes I
feared him. I remember how I shuddered at his facial expression on the night before the awful
happening, when he talked so incessantly of his theory, why certain corpses never decay, but rest
firm and fat in their tombs for a thousand years. But I do not fear him now, for I suspect that he has
known horrors beyond my ken. Now I fear for him.
Once more I say that I have no clear idea of our object on that night. Certainly, it had much to do
with something in the book which Warren carried with him--that ancient book in undecipherable
characters which had come to him from India a month before--but I swear I do not know what it was
that we expected to find. Your witness says he saw us at half past 11 on the Gainsville pike, headed
for Big Cypress Swamp. This is probably true, but I have no distinct memory of it. The picture
seared into my soul is of one scene only, and the hour must have been long after midnight; for a
waning crescent moon was high in the vaporous heavens.
The place was an ancient cemetery; so ancient that I trembled at the manifold signs of immemorial
years. It was in a deep, damp hollow, overgrown with rank grass, moss, and curious creeping weeds,
and filled with a vague stench which my idle fancy associated absurdly with rotting stone. On every
hand were the signs of neglect and decrepitude, and I seemed haunted by the notion that Warren and I
were the first living creatures to invade a lethal silence of centuries. Over the valley's rim a wan,
waning crescent moon peered through the noisome vapors that seemed to emanate from unheard of
catacombs, and by its feeble, wavering beams I could distinguish a repellent array of antique slabs,
urns, cenotaphs, and mausoleum facades; all crumbling, moss-grown, and moisture-stained, and partly
concealed by the gross luxuriance of the unhealthy vegetation.
My first vivid impression of my own presence in this terrible necropolis concerns the act of
pausing with Warren before a certain half-obliterated sepulcher and of throwing down some burdens
which we seemed to have been carrying. I now observed that I had with me an electric lantern and
two spades, whilst my companion was supplied with a similar lantern and a portable telephone outfit.
No word was uttered, for the spot and the task seemed known to us; and without delay we seized our
spades and commenced to clear away the grass, weeds, and drifted earth from the flat, archaic
mortuary. After uncovering the entire surface, which consisted of three immense granite slabs, we
stepped back some distance to survey the charnel scene; and Warren appeared to make some mental
calculations. Then he returned to the sepulcher, and using his spade as a lever, sought to pry up the
slab lying nearest to a stony ruin which may have been a monument in its day. He did not succeed, and
motioned to me to come to his assistance. Finally our combined strength loosened the stone, which
we raised and tipped to one side.
The removal of the slab revealed a black aperture, from which rushed an effluence of miasmal
gases so nauseous that we started back in horror. After an interval, however, we approached the pit
again, and found the exhalations less unbearable. Our lanterns disclosed the top of a flight of stone
steps, dripping with some detestable ichor of the inner earth, and bordered by moist walls encrusted
with niter. And now for the first time my memory records verbal discourse, Warren addressing me at
length in his mellow tenor voice; a voice singularly unperturbed by our awesome surroundings.
"I'm sorry to have to ask you to stay on the surface," he said, "but it would be a crime to let
anyone with your frail nerves go down there. You can't imagine, even from what you have read and
from what I've told you, the things I shall have to see and do. It's fiendish work, Carter, and I doubt if
any man without ironclad sensibilities could ever see it through and come up alive and sane. I don't
wish to offend you, and Heaven knows I'd be glad enough to have you with me; but the responsibility
is in a certain sense mine, and I couldn't drag a bundle of nerves like you down to probable death or
madness. I tell you, you can't imagine what the thing is really like! But I promise to keep you
informed over the telephone of every move--you see I've enough wire here to reach to the center of
the earth and back!"
I can still hear, in memory, those coolly spoken words; and I can still remember my
remonstrances. I seemed desperately anxious to accompany my friend into those sepulchral depths,
yet he proved inflexibly obdurate. At one time he threatened to abandon the expedition if I remained
insistent; a threat which proved effective, since he alone held the key to the thing. All this I can still
remember, though I no longer know what manner of thing we sought. After he had obtained my
reluctant acquiescence in his design, Warren picked up the reel of wire and adjusted the instruments.
At his nod I took one of the latter and seated myself upon an aged, discolored gravestone close by
the newly uncovered aperture. Then he shook my hand, shouldered the coil of wire, and disappeared
within that indescribable ossuary.
For a minute I kept sight of the glow of his lantern, and heard the rustle of the wire as he laid it
down after him; but the glow soon disappeared abruptly, as if a turn in the stone staircase had been
encountered, and the sound died away almost as quickly. I was alone, yet bound to the unknown depths
by those magic strands whose insulated surface lay green beneath the struggling beams of that
waning crescent moon.
I constantly consulted my watch by the light of my electric lantern, and listened with feverish
anxiety at the receiver of the telephone; but for more than a quarter of an hour heard nothing. Then a
faint clicking came from the instrument, and I called down to my friend in a tense voice. Apprehensive
as I was, I was nevertheless unprepared for the words which came up from that uncanny vault in
accents more alarmed and quivering than any I had heard before from Harley Warren. He who had so
calmly left me a little while previously, now called from below in a shaky whisper more portentous
than the loudest shriek:
"God! If you could see what I am seeing!"
I could not answer. Speechless, I could only wait. Then came the frenzied tones again:
"Carter, it's terrible--monstrous--unbelievable!"
This time my voice did not fail me, and I poured into the transmitter a flood of excited questions.
Terrified, I continued to repeat, "Warren, what is it? What is it?"
Once more came the voice of my friend, still hoarse with fear, and now apparently tinged with
despair:
"I can't tell you, Carter! It's too utterly beyond thought--I dare not tell you--no man could know it
and live--Great God! I never dreamed of this!"
Stillness again, save for my now incoherent torrent of shuddering inquiry. Then the voice of
Warren in a pitch of wilder consternation:
"Carter! for the love of God, put back the slab and get out of this if you can! Quick!--leave
everything else and make for the outside--it's your only chance! Do as I say, and don't ask me to
explain!"
I heard, yet was able only to repeat my frantic questions. Around me were the tombs and the
darkness and the shadows; below me, some peril beyond the radius of the human imagination. But my
friend was in greater danger than I, and through my fear I felt a vague resentment that he should deem
me capable of deserting him under such circumstances. More clicking, and after a pause a piteous cry
from Warren:
"Beat it! For God's sake, put back the slab and beat it, Carter!"
Something in the boyish slang of my evidently stricken companion unleashed my faculties. I
formed and shouted a resolution, "Warren, brace up! I'm coming down!" But at this offer the tone of
my auditor changed to a scream of utter despair:
"Don't! You can't understand! It's too late--and my own fault. Put back the slab and run--there's
nothing else you or anyone can do now!"
The tone changed again, this time acquiring a softer quality, as of hopeless resignation. Yet it
remained tense through anxiety for me.
"Quick--before it's too late!"
I tried not to heed him; tried to break through the paralysis which held me, and to fulfil my vow to
rush down to his aid. But his next whisper found me still held inert in the chains of stark horror.
"Carter--hurry! It's no use--you must go--better one than two--the slab--"
A pause, more clicking, then the faint voice of Warren:
"Nearly over now--don't make it harder--cover up those damned steps and run for your life--
you're losing time--so long, Carter--won't see you again."
Here Warren's whisper swelled into a cry; a cry that gradually rose to a shriek fraught with all
the horror of the ages--
"Curse these hellish things--legions--My God! Beat it! Beat it! BEAT IT!"
After that was silence. I know not how many interminable eons I sat stupefied; whispering,
muttering, calling, screaming into that telephone. Over and over again through those eons I
whispered and muttered, called, shouted, and screamed, "Warren! Warren! Answer me--are you
there?"
And then there came to me the crowning horror of all--the unbelievable, unthinkable, almost
unmentionable thing. I have said that eons seemed to elapse after Warren shrieked forth his last
despairing warning, and that only my own cries now broke the hideous silence. But after a while
there was a further clicking in the receiver, and I strained my ears to listen. Again I called down,
"Warren, are you there?" and in answer heard the thing which has brought this cloud over my mind. I
do not try, gentlemen, to account for that thing--that voice--nor can I venture to describe it in detail,
since the first words took away my consciousness and created a mental blank which reaches to the
time of my awakening in the hospital. Shall I say that the voice was deep; hollow; gelatinous; remote;
unearthly; inhuman; disembodied? What shall I say? It was the end of my experience, and is the end of
my story. I heard it, and knew no more--heard it as I sat petrified in that unknown cemetery in the
hollow, amidst the crumbling stones and the falling tombs, the rank vegetation and the miasmal
vapors--heard it well up from the innermost depths of that damnable open sepulcher as I watched
amorphous, necrophagous shadows dance beneath an accursed waning moon.
And this is what it said:
"You fool, Warren is DEAD!"

THE STRANGE HIGH HOUSE IN THE MIST
Now north of archaic Kingsport the crags climb lofty and curious, terrace on terrace, till the
northernmost hangs in the sky like a gray frozen wind-cloud. Alone it is, a bleak point jutting in
limitless space, for there the coast turns sharp where the great Miskatonic pours out of the plains
past Arkham, bringing woodland legends and little quaint memories of New England's hills. The sea-
folk of Kingsport look up at that cliff as other sea-folk look up at the pole--star, and time the night's
watches by the way it hides or shows the Great Bear, Cassiopeia and the Dragon. Among them it is
one with the firmament, and truly, it is hidden from them when the mist hides the stars or the sun.
Some of the cliffs they love, as that whose grotesque profile they call Father Neptune, or that
whose pillared steps they term "The Causeway"; but this one they fear because it is so near the sky.
The Portuguese sailors coming in from a voyage cross themselves when they first see it, and the old
Yankees believe it would be a much graver matter than death to climb it, if indeed that were possible.
Nevertheless there is an ancient house on that cliff, and at evening men see lights in the small-paned
windows.
The ancient house has always been there, and people say One dwells within who talks with the
morning mists that come up from the deep, and perhaps sees singular things oceanward at those times
when the cliff's rim becomes the rim of all earth, and solemn buoys toll free in the white aether of
faery. This they tell from hearsay, for that forbidding crag is always unvisited, and natives dislike to
train telescopes on it. Summer boarders have indeed scanned it with jaunty binoculars, but have never
seen more than the gray primeval roof, peaked and shingled, whose eaves come nearly to the gray
foundations, and the dim yellow light of the little windows peeping out from under those eaves in the
dusk. These summer people do not believe that the same One has lived in the ancient house for
hundreds of years, but can not prove their heresy to any real Kingsporter. Even the Terrible Old Man
who talks to leaden pendulums in bottles, buys groceries with centuried Spanish gold, and keeps
stone idols in the yard of his antediluvian cottage in Water Street can only say these things were the
same when his grandfather was a boy, and that must have been inconceivable ages ago, when Belcher
or Shirley or Pownall or Bernard was Governor of His Majesty's Province of the Massachusetts-
Bay.
Then one summer there came a philosopher into Kingsport. His name was Thomas Olney, and he
taught ponderous things in a college by Narragansett Bay. With stout wife and romping children he
came, and his eyes were weary with seeing the same things for many years, and thinking the same
well-disciplined thoughts. He looked at the mists from the diadem of Father Neptune, and tried to
walk into their white world of mystery along the titan steps of The Causeway. Morning after morning
he would lie on the cliffs and look over the world's rim at the cryptical aether beyond, listening to
spectral bells and the wild cries of what might have been gulls. Then, when the mist would lift and
the sea stand out prosy with the smoke of steamers, he would sigh and descend to the town, where he
loved to thread the narrow olden lanes up and down hill, and study the crazy tottering gables and odd-
pillared doorways which had sheltered so many generations of sturdy sea-folk. And he even talked
with the Terrible Old Man, who was not fond of strangers, and was invited into his fearsomely
archaic cottage where low ceilings and wormy panelling hear the echoes of disquieting soliloquies
in the dark small hours.
Of course it was inevitable that Olney should mark the gray unvisited cottage in the sky, on that
sinister northward crag which is one with the mists and the firmament. Always over Kingsport it
hung, and always its mystery sounded in whispers through Kingsport's crooked alleys. The Terrible
Old Man wheezed a tale that his father had told him, of lightning that shot one night up from that
peaked cottage to the clouds of higher heaven; and Granny Orne, whose tiny gambrel-roofed abode
in Ship Street is all covered with moss and ivy, croaked over something her grandmother had heard at
second-hand, about shapes that flapped out of the eastern mists straight into the narrow single door of
that unreachable place--for the door is set close to the edge of the crag toward the ocean, and
glimpsed only from ships at sea.
At length, being avid for new strange things and held back by neither the Kingsporter's fear nor
the summer boarder's usual indolence, Olney made a very terrible resolve. Despite a conservative
training--or because of it, for humdrum lives breed wistful longings of the unknown--he swore a
great oath to scale that avoided northern cliff and visit the abnormally antique gray cottage in the sky.
Very plausibly his saner self argued that the place must be tenanted by people who reached it from
inland along the easier ridge beside the Miskatonic's estuary. Probably they traded in Arkham,
knowing how little Kingsport liked their habitation or perhaps being unable to climb down the cliff
on the Kingsport side. Olney walked out along the lesser cliffs to where the great crag leaped
insolently up to consort with celestial things, and became very sure that no human feet could mount it
or descend it on that beetling southern slope. East and north it rose thousands of feet perpendicular
from the water so only the western side, inland and toward Arkham, remained.
One early morning in August Olney set out to find a path to the inaccessible pinnacle. He worked
northwest along pleasant back roads, past Hooper's Pond and the old brick powder-house to where
the pastures slope up to the ridge above the Miskatonic and give a lovely vista of Arkham's white
Georgian steeples across leagues of river and meadow. Here he found a shady road to Arkham, but
no trail at all in the seaward direction he wished. Woods and fields crowded up to the high bank of
the river's mouth, and bore not a sign of man's presence; not even a stone wall or a straying cow, but
only the tall grass and giant trees and tangles of briars that the first Indian might have seen. As he
climbed slowly east, higher and higher above the estuary on his left and nearer and nearer the sea, he
found the way growing in difficulty till he wondered how ever the dwellers in that disliked place
managed to reach the world outside, and whether they came often to market in Arkham.
Then the trees thinned, and far below him on his right he saw the hills and antique roofs and
spires of Kingsport. Even Central Hill was a dwarf from this height, and he could just make out the
ancient graveyard by the Congregational Hospital beneath which rumor said some terrible caves or
burrows lurked. Ahead lay sparse grass and scrub blueberry bushes, and beyond them the naked rock
of the crag and the thin peak of the dreaded gray cottage. Now the ridge narrowed, and Olney grew
dizzy at his loneness in the sky, south of him the frightful precipice above Kingsport, north of him
the vertical drop of nearly a mile to the river's mouth. Suddenly a great chasm opened before him, ten
feet deep, so that he had to let himself down by his hands and drop to a slanting floor, and then crawl
perilously up a natural defile in the opposite wall. So this was the way the folk of the uncanny house
journeyed betwixt earth and sky!
When he climbed out of the chasm a morning mist was gathering, but he clearly saw the lofty and
unhallowed cottage ahead; walls as gray as the rock, and high peak standing bold against the milky
white of the seaward vapors. And he perceived that there was no door on this landward end, but only
a couple of small lattice windows with dingy bull's-eye panes leaded in seventeenth century fashion.
All around him was cloud and chaos, and he could see nothing below the whiteness of illimitable
space. He was alone in the sky with this queer and very disturbing house; and when he sidled around
to the front and saw that the wall stood flush with the cliff's edge, so that the single narrow door was
not to be reached save from the empty aether, he felt a distinct terror that altitude could not wholly
explain. And it was very odd that shingles so worm-eaten could survive, or bricks so crumbled still
form a standing chimney.
As the mist thickened, Olney crept around to the windows on the north and west and south sides,
trying them but finding them all locked. He was vaguely glad they were locked, because the more he
saw of that house the less he wished to get in. Then a sound halted him. He heard a lock rattle and a
bolt shoot, and a long creaking follow as if a heavy door were slowly and cautiously opened. This
was on the oceanward side that he could not see, where the narrow portal opened on blank space
thousands of feet in the misty sky above the waves.
Then there was heavy, deliberate tramping in the cottage, and Olney heard the windows opening,
first on the north side opposite him, and then on the west just around the corner. Next would come the
south windows, under the great low eaves on the side where he stood; and it must be said that he was
more than uncomfortable as he thought of the detestable house on one side and the vacancy of upper
air on the other. When a fumbling came in the nearer casements he crept around to the west again,
flattening himself against the wall beside the now opened windows. It was plain that the owner had
come home; but he had not come from the land, nor from any balloon or airship that could be
imagined. Steps sounded again, and Olney edged round to the north; but before he could find a haven
a voice called softly, and he knew he must confront his host.
Stuck out of the west window was a great black-bearded face whose eyes were phosphorescent
with the imprint of unheard-of sights. But the voice was gentle, and of a quaint olden kind, so that
Olney did not shudder when a brown hand reached out to help him over the sill and into that low room
of black oak wainscots and carved Tudor furnishings. The man was clad in very ancient garments, and
had about him an unplaceable nimbus of sea-lore and dreams of tall galleons. Olney does not recall
many of the wonders he told, or even who he was; but says that he was strange and kindly, and filled
with the magic of unfathomed voids of time and space. The small room seemed green with a dim
aqueous light, and Olney saw that the far windows to the east were not open, but shut against the
misty aether with dull panes like the bottoms of old bottles.
That bearded host seemed young, yet looked out of eyes steeped in the elder mysteries; and from
the tales of marvelous ancient things he related, it must be guessed that the village folk were right in
saying he had communed with the mists of the sea and the clouds of the sky ever since there was any
village to watch his taciturn dwelling from the plain below. And the day wore on, and still Olney
listened to rumors of old times and far places, and heard how the kings of Atlantis fought with the
slippery blasphemies that wriggled out of rifts in ocean's floor, and how the pillared and weedy
temple of Poseidon is still glimpsed at midnight by lost ships, who knew by its sight that they are
lost. Years of the Titans were recalled, but the host grew timid when he spoke of the dim first age of
chaos before the gods or even the Elder Ones were born, and when the other gods came to dance on
the peak of Hatheg-Kia in the stony desert near Ulthar, beyond the River Skai.
It was at this point that there came a knocking on the door; that ancient door of nail-studded oak
beyond which lay only the abyss of white cloud. Olney started in fright, but the bearded man
motioned him to be still, and tiptoed to the door to look out through a very small peephole. What he
saw he did not like, so pressed his fingers to his lips and tiptoed around to shut and lock all the
windows before returning to the ancient settle beside his guest. Then Olney saw lingering against the
translucent squares of each of the little dim windows in succession a queer black outline as the caller
moved inquisitively about before leaving; and he was glad his host had not answered the knocking.
For there are strange objects in the great abyss, and the seeker of dreams must take care not to stir up
or meet the wrong ones.
Then the shadows began to gather; first little furtive ones under the table, and then bolder ones in
the dark panelled corners. And the bearded man made enigmatical gestures of prayer, and lit tall
candles in curiously wrought brass candle-sticks. Frequently he would glance at the door as if he
expected someone, and at length his glance seemed answered by a singular rapping which must have
followed some very ancient and secret code. This time he did not even glance through the peep-hole,
but swung the great oak bar and shot the bolt, unlatching the heavy door and flinging it wide to the
stars and the mist.
And then to the sound of obscure harmonies there floated into that room from the deep all the
dreams and memories of earth's sunken Mighty Ones. And golden flames played about weedy locks,
so that Olney was dazzled as he did them homage. Trident-bearing Neptune was there, and sportive
tritons and fantastic nereids, and upon dolphins' backs was balanced a vast crenulate shell wherein
rode the gay and awful form of primal Nodens, Lord of the Great Abyss. And the conchs of the
tritons gave weird blasts, and the nereids made strange sounds by striking on the grotesque resonant
shells of unknown lurkers in black seacaves. Then hoary Nodens reached forth a wizened hand and
helped Olney and his host into the vast shell, whereat the conchs and the gongs set up a wild and
awesome clamor. And out into the limitless aether reeled that fabulous train, the noise of whose
shouting was lost in the echoes of thunder.
All night in Kingsport they watched that lofty cliff when the storm and the mists gave them
glimpses of it, and when toward the small hours the little dim windows went dark they whispered of
dread and disaster. And Olney's children and stout wife prayed to the bland proper god of Baptists,
and hoped that the traveller would borrow an umbrella and rubbers unless the rain stopped by
morning. Then dawn swam dripping and mist-wreathed out of the sea, and the buoys tolled solemn in
vortices of white aether. And at noon elfin horns rang over the ocean as Olney, dry and lightfooted,
climbed down from the cliffs to antique Kingsport with the look of far places in his eyes. He could
not recall what he had dreamed in the skyperched hut of that still nameless hermit, or say how he had
crept down that crag untraversed by other feet. Nor could he talk of these matters at all save with the
Terrible Old Man, who afterward mumbled queer things in his long white beard; vowing that the man
who came down from that crag was not wholly the man who went up, and that somewhere under that
gray peaked roof, or amidst inconceivable reaches of that sinister white mist, there lingered still the
lost spirit of him who was Thomas Olney.
And ever since that hour, through dull dragging years of grayness and weariness, the philosopher
has labored and eaten and slept and done uncomplaining the suitable deeds of a citizen. Not any more
does he long for the magic of farther hills, or sigh for secrets that peer like green reefs from a
bottomless sea. The sameness of his days no longer gives him sorrow and well-disciplined thoughts
have grown enough for his imagination. His good wife waxes stouter and his children older and
prosier and more useful, and he never fails to smile correctly with pride when the occasion calls for
it. In his glance there is not any restless light, and all he ever listens for solemn bells or far elfin
horns it is only at night when old dreams are wandering. He has never seen Kingsport again, for his
family disliked the funny old houses and complained that the drains were impossibly bad. They have a
trim bungalow now at Bristol Highlands, where no tall crags tower, and the neighbors are urban and
modern.
But in Kingsport strange tales are abroad, and even the Terrible Old Man admits a thing untold by
his grandfather. For now, when the wind sweeps boisterous out of the north past the high ancient
house that is one with the firmament, there is broken at last that ominous, brooding silence ever
before the bane of Kingsport's maritime cotters. And old folk tell of pleasing voices heard singing
there, and of laughter that swells with joys beyond earth's joys; and say that at evening the little low
windows are brighter than formerly. They say, too, that the fierce aurora comes oftener to that spot,
shining blue in the north with visions of frozen worlds while the crag and the cottage hang black and
fantastic against wild coruscations. And the mists of the dawn are thicker, and sailors are not quite so
sure that all the muffled seaward ringing is that of the solemn buoys.
Worst of all, though, is the shrivelling of old fears in the hearts of Kingsport's young men, who
grow prone to listen at night to the north wind's faint distant sounds. They swear no harm or pain can
inhabit that high peaked cottage, for in the new voices gladness beats, and with them the tinkle of
laughter and music. What tales the sea-mists may bring to that haunted and northernmost pinnacle they
do not know, but they long to extract some hint of the wonders that knock at the cliff-yawning door
when clouds are thickest. And patriarchs dread lest some day one by one they seek out that
inaccessible peak in the sky, and learn what centuried secrets hide beneath the steep shingled roof
which is part of the rocks and the stars and the ancient fears of Kingsport. That those venturesome
youths will come back they do not doubt, but they think a light may be gone from their eyes, and a
will from their hearts. And they do not wish quaint Kingsport with its climbing lanes and archaic
gables to drag listless down the years while voice by voice the laughing chorus grows stronger and
wilder in that unknown and terrible eyrie where mists and the dreams of mists stop to rest on their
way from the sea to the skies.
They do not wish the souls of their young men to leave the pleasant hearths and gambrel-roofed
taverns of old Kingsport, nor do they wish the laughter and song in that high rocky place to grow
louder. For as the voice which has come has brought fresh mists from the sea and from the north
fresh lights, so do they say that still other voices will bring more mists and more lights, till perhaps
the olden gods (whose existence they hint only in whispers for fear the Congregational parson shall
hear} may come out of the deep and from unknown Kadath in the cold waste and make their dwelling
on that evilly appropriate crag so close to the gentle hills and valleys of quiet, simple fisher folk.
This they do not wish, for to plain people things not of earth are unwelcome; and besides, the
Terrible Old Man often recalls what Olney said about a knock that the lone dweller feared, and a
shape seen black and inquisitive against the mist through those queer translucent windows of leaded
bull's-eyes.
All these things, however, the Elder Ones only may decide; and meanwhile the morning mist still
comes up by that lovely vertiginous peak with the steep ancient house, that gray, low-eaved house
where none is seen but where evening brings furtive lights while the north wind tells of strange
revels. White and feathery it comes from the deep to its brothers the clouds, full of dreams of dank
pastures and caves of leviathan. And when tales fly thick in the grottoes of tritons, and conchs in
seaweed cities blow wild tunes learned from the Elder Ones, then great eager vapors flock to heaven
laden with lore; and Kingsport, nestling uneasy in its lesser cliffs below that awesome hanging
sentinel of rock, sees oceanward only a mystic whiteness, as if the cliff's rim were the rim of all
earth, and the solemn bells of the buoys tolled free in the aether of faery.

THE STREET
Men of strength and honour fashioned that Street: good valiant men of our blood who had come
from the Blessed Isles across the sea. At first it was but a path trodden by bearers of water from the
woodland spring to the cluster of houses by the beach. Then, as more men came to the growing
cluster of houses and looked about for places to dwell, they built cabins along the north side, cabins
of stout oaken logs with masonry on the side toward the forest, for many Indians lurked there with
fire-arrows. And in a few years more, men built cabins on the south side of the Street.
Up and down the Street walked grave men in conical hats, who most of the time carried muskets
or fowling pieces. And there were also their bonneted wives and sober children. In the evening these
men with their wives and children would sit about gigantic hearths and read and speak. Very simple
were the things of which they read and spoke, yet things which gave them courage and goodness and
helped them by day to subdue the forest and till the fields. And the children would listen and learn of
the laws and deeds of old, and of that dear England which they had never seen or could not
remember.
There was war, and thereafter no more Indians troubled the Street. The men, busy with labour,
waxed prosperous and as happy as they knew how to be. And the children grew up comfortable, and
more families came from the MotherLand to dwell on the Street. And the children's children, and the
newcomers' children, grew up. The town was now a city, and one by one the cabins gave place to
houses--simple, beautiful houses of brick and wood, with stone steps and iron railings and fanlights
over the doors. No flimsy creations were these houses, for they were made to serve many a
generation. Within there were carven mantels and graceful stairs, and sensible, pleasing furniture,
china, and silver, brought from the MotherLand.
So the Street drank in the dreams of a young people and rejoiced as its dwellers became more
graceful and happy. Where once had been only strength and honour, taste and learning now abode as
well. Books and paintings and music came to the houses, and the young men went to the university
which rose above the plain to the north. In the place of conical hats and small-swords, of lace and
snowy periwigs, there were cobblestones over which clattered many a blooded horse and rumbled
many a gilded coach; and brick sidewalks with horse blocks and hitching-posts.
There were in that Street many trees: elms and oaks and maples of dignity; so that in the summer,
the scene was all soft verdure and twittering bird-song. And behind the houses were walled rose-
gardens with hedged paths and sundials, where at evening the moon and stars would shine
bewitchingly while fragrant blossoms glistened with dew.
So the Street dreamed on, past wars, calamities, and change. Once, most of the young men went
away, and some never came back. That was when they furled the old flag and put up a new banner of
stripes and stars. But though men talked of great changes, the Street felt them not, for its folk were
still the same, speaking of the old familiar things in the old familiar accounts. And the trees still
sheltered singing birds, and at evening the moon and stars looked down upon dewy blossoms in the
walled rose-gardens.
In time there were no more swords, three-cornered hats, or periwigs in the Street. How strange
seemed the inhabitants with their walking--sticks, tall beavers, and cropped heads! New sounds came
from the distance--first strange puffings and shrieks from the river a mile away, and then, many years
later, strange puffings and shrieks and rumblings from other directions. The air was not quite so pure
as before, but the spirit of the place had not changed. The blood and soul of their ancestors had
fashioned the Street. Nor did the spirit change when they tore open the earth to lay down strange
pipes, or when they set up tall posts bearing weird wires. There was so much ancient lore in that
Street, that the past could not easily be forgotten.
Then came days of evil, when many who had known the Street of old knew it no more, and many
knew it who had not known it before, and went away, for their accents were coarse and strident, and
their mien and faces unpleasing. Their thoughts, too, fought with the wise, just spirit of the Street, so
that the Street pined silently as its houses fell into decay, and its trees died one by one, and its rose-
gardens grew rank with weeds and waste. But it felt a stir of pride one day when again marched forth
young men, some of whom never came back. These young men were clad in blue.
With the years, worse fortune came to the Street. Its trees were all gone now, and its rose-
gardens were displaced by the backs of cheap, ugly new buildings on parallel streets. Yet the houses
remained, despite the ravages of the years and the storms and worms, for they had been made to serve
many a generation. New kinds of faces appeared in the Street, swarthy, sinister faces with furtive
eyes and odd features, whose owners spoke unfamiliar words and placed signs in known and unknown
characters upon most of the musty houses. Push-carts crowded the gutters. A sordid, undefinable
stench settled over the place, and the ancient spirit slept.
Great excitement once came to the Street. War and revolution were raging across the seas; a
dynasty had collapsed, and its degenerate subjects were flocking with dubious intent to the
WesternLand. Many of these took lodgings in the battered houses that had once known the songs of
birds and the scent of roses. Then the Western Land itself awoke and joined the Mother Land in her
titanic struggle for civilization. Over the cities once more floated the old flag, companioned by the
new flag, and by a plainer, yet glorious tricolour. But not many flags floated over the Street, for
therein brooded only fear and hatred and ignorance. Again young men went forth, but not quite as did
the young men of those other days. Something was lacking. And the sons of those young men of other
days, who did indeed go forth in olive-drab with the true spirit of their ancestors, went from distant
places and knew not the Street and its ancient spirit.
Over the seas there was a great victory, and in triumph most of the young men returned. Those
who had lacked something lacked it no longer, yet did fear and hatred and ignorance still brood over
the Street; for many had stayed behind, and many strangers had come from distance places to the
ancient houses. And the young men who had returned dwelt there no longer. Swarthy and sinister
were most of the strangers, yet among them one might find a few faces like those who fashioned the
Street and moulded its spirit. Like and yet unlike, for there was in the eyes of all a weird, unhealthy
glitter as of greed, ambition, vindictiveness, or misguided zeal. Unrest and treason were abroad
amongst an evil few who plotted to strike the Western Land its death blow, that they might mount to
power over its ruins, even as assassins had mounted in that unhappy, frozen land from whence most of
them had come. And the heart of that plotting was in the Street, whose crumbling houses teemed with
alien makers of discord and echoed with the plans and speeches of those who yearned for the
appointed day of blood, flame and crime.
Of the various odd assemblages in the Street, the Law said much but could prove little. With
great diligence did men of hidden badges linger and listen about such places as Petrovitch's Bakery,
the squalid Rifkin School of Modern Economics, the Circle Social Club, and the Liberty Cafe. There
congregated sinister men in great numbers, yet always was their speech guarded or in a foreign
tongue. And still the old houses stood, with their forgotten lore of nobler, departed centuries; of
sturdy Colonial tenants and dewy rose-gardens in the moonlight. Sometimes a lone poet or traveler
would come to view them, and would try to picture them in their vanished glory; yet of such travelers
and poets there were not many.
The rumour now spread widely that these houses contained the leaders of a vast band of
terrorists, who on a designated day were to launch an orgy of slaughter for the extermination of
America and of all the fine old traditions which the Street had loved. Handbills and papers fluttered
about filthy gutters; handbills and papers printed in many tongues and in many characters, yet all
bearing messages of crime and rebellion. In these writings the people were urged to tear down the
laws and virtues that our fathers had exalted, to stamp out the soul of the old America--the soul that
was bequeathed through a thousand and a half years of Anglo-Saxon freedom, justice, and
moderation. It was said that the swart men who dwelt in the Street and congregated in its rotting
edifices were the brains of a hideous revolution, that at their word of command many millions of
brainless, besotted beasts would stretch forth their noisome talons from the slums of a thousand
cities, burning, slaying, and destroying till the land of our fathers should be no more. All this was
said and repeated, and many looked forward in dread to the fourth day of July, about which the
strange writings hinted much; yet could nothing be found to place the guilt. None could tell just
whose arrest might cut off the damnable plotting at its source. Many times came bands of blue-coated
police to search the shaky houses, though at last they ceased to come; for they too had grown tired
of law and order, and had abandoned all the city to its fate. Then men in olive-drab came, bearing
muskets, till it seemed as if in its sad sleep the Street must have some haunting dreams of those other
days, when musketbearing men in conical hats walked along it from the woodland spring to the cluster
of houses by the beach. Yet could no act be performed to check the impending cataclysm, for the
swart, sinister men were old in cunning.
So the Street slept uneasily on, till one night there gathered in Petrovitch's Bakery, and the Rifkin
School of Modern Economics, and the Circle Social Club, and Liberty Cafe, and in other places as
well, vast hordes of men whose eyes were big with horrible triumph and expectation. Over hidden
wires strange messages traveled, and much was said of still stranger messages yet to travel; but most
of this was not guessed till afterward, when the Western Land was safe from the peril. The men in
olive-drab could not tell what was happening, or what they ought to do; for the swart, sinister men
were skilled in subtlety and concealment.
And yet the men in olive-drab will always remember that night, and will speak of the Street as they
tell of it to their grandchildren; for many of them were sent there toward morning on a mission unlike
that which they had expected. It was known that this nest of anarchy was old, and that the houses were
tottering from the ravages of the years and the storms and worms; yet was the happening of that
summer night a surprise because of its very queer uniformity. It was, indeed, an exceedingly singular
happening, though after all, a simple one. For without warning, in one of the small hours beyond
midnight, all the ravages of the years and the storms and the worms came to a tremendous climax; and
after the crash there was nothing left standing in the Street save two ancient chimneys and part of a
stout brick wall. Nor did anything that had been alive come alive from the ruins. A poet and a traveler,
who came with the mighty crowd that sought the scene, tell odd stories. The poet says that all
through the hours before dawn he beheld sordid ruins indistinctly in the glare of the arc-lights; that
there loomed above the wreckage another picture wherein he could describe moonlight and fair
houses and elms and oaks and maples of dignity. And the traveler declares that instead of the place's
wonted stench there lingered a delicate fragrance as of roses in full bloom. But are not the dreams of
poets and the tales of travelers notoriously false?
There be those who say that things and places have souls, and there be those who say they have
not; I dare not say, myself, but I have told you of the Street.

THE TEMPLE
Manuscript Found On The Coast Of Yucatan
On August 20, 1917, I, Karl Heinrich, Graf von Altberg-Ehrenstein, Lieutenant-Commander in the
Imperial German Navy and in charge of the submarine U-29, deposit this bottle and record in the
Atlantic Ocean at a point to me unknown but probably about N. Latitude 20 degrees, W. Longitude 35
degrees, where my ship lies disabled on the ocean floor. I do so because of my desire to set certain
unusual facts before the public; a thing I shall not in all probability survive to accomplish in person,
since the circumstances surrounding me are as menacing as they are extraordinary, and involve not
only the hopeless crippling of the U-29, but the impairment of my iron German will in a manner most
disastrous.
On the afternoon of June 18, as reported by wireless to the U-61, bound for Kiel, we torpedoed
the British freighter Victory, New York to Liverpool, in N. Latitude 45 degrees 16 minutes, W.
Longitude 28 degrees 34 minutes; permitting the crew to leave in boats in order to obtain a good
cinema view for the admiralty records. The ship sank quite picturesquely, bow first, the stem rising
high out of the water whilst the hull shot down perpendicularly to the bottom of the sea. Our camera
missed nothing, and I regret that so fine a reel of film should never reach Berlin. After that we sank
the lifeboats with our guns and submerged.
When we rose to the surface about sunset, a seaman's body was found on the deck, hands gripping
the railing in curious fashion. The poor fellow was young, rather dark, and very handsome; probably
an Italian or Greek, and undoubtedly of the Victory's crew. He had evidently sought refuge on the
very ship which had been forced to destroy his own--one more victim of the unjust war of
aggression which the English pig-dogs are waging upon the Fatherland. Our men searched him for
souvenirs, and found in his coat pocket a very odd bit of ivory carved to represent a youth's head
crowned with laurel. My fellow-officer, Lieutenant Kienze, believed that the thing was of great age
and artistic value, so took it from the men for himself. How it had ever come into the possession of a
common sailor neither he nor I could imagine.
As the dead man was thrown overboard there occurred two incidents which created much
disturbance amongst the crew. The fellow's eyes had been closed; but in the dragging of his body to
the rail they were jarred open, and many seemed to entertain a queer delusion that they gazed steadily
and mockingly at Schmidt and Zimmer, who were bent over the corpse. The Boatswain Muller, an
elderly man who would have known better had he not been a superstitious Alsatian swine, became so
excited by this impression that he watched the body in the water; and swore that after it sank a little it
drew its limbs into a swimming position and sped away to the south under the waves. Kienze and I did
not like these displays of peasant ignorance, and severely reprimanded the men, particularly Muller.
The next day a very troublesome situation was created by the indisposition of some of the crew.
They were evidently suffering from the nervous strain of our long voyage, and had had bad dreams.
Several seemed quite dazed and stupid; and after satisfying myself that they were not feigning their
weakness, I excused them from their duties. The sea was rather rough, so we descended to a depth
where the waves were less troublesome. Here we were comparatively calm, despite a somewhat
puzzling southward current which we could not identify from our oceanographic charts. The moans
of the sick men were decidedly annoying; but since they did not appear to demoralize the rest of the
crew, we did not resort to extreme measures. It was our plan to remain where we were and intercept
the liner Dacia, mentioned in information from agents in New York.
In the early evening we rose to the surface, and found the sea less heavy. The smoke of a
battleship was on the northern horizon, but our distance and ability to submerge made us safe. What
worried us more was the talk of Boatswain Muller, which grew wilder as night came on. He was in a
detestably childish state, and babbled of some illusion of dead bodies drifting past the undersea
portholes; bodies which looked at him intensely, and which he recognized in spite of bloating as
having seen dying during some of our victorious German exploits. And he said that the young man we
had found and tossed overboard was their leader. This was very gruesome and abnormal, so we
confined Muller in irons and had him soundly whipped. The men were not pleased at his punishment,
but discipline was necessary. We also denied the request of a delegation headed by Seaman Zimmer,
that the curious carved ivory head be cast into the sea.
On June 20, Seaman Bohin and Schmidt, who had been ill the day before, became violently insane.
I regretted that no physician was included in our complement of officers, since German lives are
precious; but the constant ravings of the two concerning a terrible curse were most subversive of
discipline, so drastic steps were taken. The crew accepted the event in a sullen fashion, but it seemed
to quiet Muller; who thereafter gave us no trouble. In the evening we released him, and he went about
his duties silently.
In the week that followed we were all very nervous, watching for the Dacia. The tension was
aggravated by the disappearance of Muller and Zimmer, who undoubtedly committed suicide as a
result of the fears which had seemed to harass them, though they were not observed in the act of
jumping overboard. I was rather glad to be rid of Muller, for even his silence had unfavorably
affected the crew. Everyone seemed inclined to be silent now, as though holding a secret fear. Many
were ill, but none made a disturbance. Lieutenant Kienze chafed under the strain, and was annoyed by
the merest trifle--such as the school of dolphins which gathered about the U-29 in increasing
numbers, and the growing intensity of that southward current which was not on our chart.
It at length became apparent that we had missed the Dacia altogether. Such failures are not
uncommon, and we were more pleased than disappointed, since our return to Wilhelmshaven was now
in order. At noon June 28 we turned northeastward, and despite some rather comical entanglements
with the unusual masses of dolphins, were soon under way.
The explosion in the engine room at 2 A.M. was wholly a surprise. No defect in the machinery or
carelessness in the men had been noticed, yet without warning the ship was racked from end to end
with a colossal shock. Lieutenant Kienze hurried to the engine room, finding the fuel-tank and most of
the mechanism shattered, and Engineers Raabe and Schneider instantly killed. Our situation had
suddenly become grave indeed; for though the chemical air regenerators were intact, and though we
could use the devices for raising and submerging the ship and opening the hatches as long as
compressed air and storage batteries might hold out, we were powerless to propel or guide the
submarine. To seek rescue in the life-boats would be to deliver ourselves into the hands of enemies
unreasonably embittered against our great German nation, and our wireless had failed ever since the
Victory affair to put us in touch with a fellow U-boat of the Imperial Navy.
From the hour of the accident till July 2 we drifted constantly to the south, almost without plans
and encountering no vessel. Dolphins still encircled the U-29, a somewhat remarkable circumstance
considering the distance we had covered. On the morning of July 2 we sighted a warship flying
American colors, and the men became very restless in their desire to surrender. Finally Lieutenant
Menze had to shoot a seaman named Traube, who urged this un-German act with especial violence.
This quieted the crew for the time, and we submerged unseen.
The next afternoon a dense flock of sea-birds appeared from the south, and the ocean began to
heave ominously. Closing our hatches, we awaited developments until we realized that we must
either submerge or be swamped in the mounting waves. Our air pressure and electricity were
diminishing, and we wished to avoid all unnecessary use of our slender mechanical resources; but in
this case there was no choice. We did not descend far, and when after several hours the sea was
calmer, we decided to return to the surface. Here, however, a new trouble developed; for the ship
failed to respond to our direction in spite of all that the mechanics could do. As the men grew more
frightened at this undersea imprisonment, some of them began to mutter again about Lieutenant
Kienze's ivory image, but the sight of an automatic pistol calmed them. We kept the poor devils as
busy as we could, tinkering at the machinery even when we knew it was useless.
Kienze and I usually slept at different times; and it was during my sleep, about 5 A.M., July 4, that
the general mutiny broke loose. The six remaining pigs of seamen, suspecting that we were lost, had
suddenly burst into a mad fury at our refusal to surrender to the Yankee battleship two days before,
and were in a delirium of cursing and destruction. They roared like the animals they were, and broke
instruments and furniture indiscriminately; screaming about such nonsense as the curse of the ivory
image and the dark dead youth who looked at them and swam away. Lieutenant Kienze seemed
paralyzed and inefficient, as one might expect of a soft, womanish Rhinelander. I shot all six men, for
it was necessary, and made sure that none remained alive.
We expelled the bodies through the double hatches and were alone in the U-29. Kienze seemed
very nervous, and drank heavily. It was decided that we remain alive as long as possible, using the
large stock of provisions and chemical supply of oxygen, none of which had suffered from the crazy
antics of those swine-hound seamen. Our compasses, depth gauges, and other delicate instruments
were ruined; so that henceforth our only reckoning would be guess work, based on our watches, the
calendar, and our apparent drift as judged by any objects we might spy through the portholes or from
the conning tower. Fortunately we had storage batteries still capable of long use, both for interior
lighting and for the searchlight. We often cast a beam around the ship, but saw only dolphins,
swimming parallel to our own drifting course. I was scientifically interested in those dolphins; for
though the ordinary Delphinus delphis is a cetacean mammal, unable to subsist without air, I watched
one of the swimmers closely for two hours, and did not see him alter his submerged condition.
With the passage of time Kienze and I decided that we were still drifting south, meanwhile
sinking deeper and deeper. We noted the marine fauna and flora, and read much on the subject in the
books I had carried with me for spare moments. I could not help observing, however, the inferior
scientific knowledge of my companion. His mind was not Prussian, but given to imaginings and
speculations which have no value. The fact of our coming death affected him curiously, and he
would frequently pray in remorse over the men, women, and children we had sent to the bottom;
forgetting that all things are noble which serve the German state. After a time he became noticeably
unbalanced, gazing for hours at his ivory image and weaving fanciful stories of the lost and forgotten
things under the sea. Sometimes, as a psychological experiment, I would lead him on in the
wanderings, and listen to his endless poetical quotations and tales of sunken ships. I was very sorry
for him, for I dislike to see a German suffer; but he was not a good man to die with. For myself I was
proud, knowing how the Fatherland would revere my memory and how my sons would be taught to be
men like me.
On August 9, we espied the ocean floor, and sent a powerful beam from the searchlight over it. It
was a vast undulating plain, mostly covered with seaweed, and strewn with the shells of small
mollusks. Here and there were slimy objects of puzzling contour, draped with weeds and encrusted
with barnacles, which Kienze declared must be ancient ships lying in their graves. He was puzzled by
one thing, a peak of solid matter, protruding above the oceanbed nearly four feet at its apex; about
two feet thick, with flat sides and smooth upper surfaces which met at a very obtuse angle. I called
the peak a bit of outcropping rock, but Kienze thought he saw carvings on it. After a while he began
to shudder, and turned away from the scene as if frightened; yet could give no explanation save that
he was overcome with the vastness, darkness, remoteness, antiquity, and mystery of the oceanic
abysses. His mind was tired, but I am always a German, and was quick to notice two things: that the U-
29 was standing the deep-sea pressure splendidly, and that the peculiar dolphins were still about us,
even at a depth where the existence of high organisms is considered impossible by most naturalists.
That I had previously overestimated our depth, I was sure; but none the less we must still have been
deep enough to make these phenomena remarkable. Our southward speed, as gauged by the ocean
floor, was about as I had estimated from the organisms passed at higher levels.
It was at 3:15 PM., August 12, that poor Kienze went wholly mad. He had been in the conning
tower using the searchlight when I saw him bound into the library compartment where I sat reading,
and his face at once betrayed him. I will repeat here what he said, underlining the words he
emphasized: "He is calling! He is calling! I hear him! We must go!" As he spoke he took his ivory
image from the table, pocketed it, and seized my arm in an effort to drag me up the companionway to
the deck. In a moment I understood that he meant to open the hatch and plunge with me into the water
outside, a vagary of suicidal and homicidal mania for which I was scarcely prepared. As I hung back
and attempted to soothe him he grew more violent, saying: "Come now--do not wait until later; it is
better to repent and be forgiven than to defy and be condemned."Then I tried the opposite of the
soothing plan, and told him he was mad--pitifully demented. But he was unmoved, and cried: "If I am
mad, it is mercy. May the gods pity the man who in his callousness can remain sane to the hideous
end! Come and be mad whilst he still calls with mercy!"
This outburst seemed to relieve a pressure in his brain; for as he finished he grew much milder,
asking me to let him depart alone if I would not accompany him. My course at once became clear. He
was a German, but only a Rhinelander and a commoner; and he was now a potentially dangerous
madman. By complying with his suicidal request I could immediately free myself from one who was
no longer a companion but a menace. I asked him to give me the ivory image before he went, but this
request brought from him such uncanny laughter that I did not repeat it. Then I asked him if he wished
to leave any keepsake or lock of hair for his family in Germany in case I should be rescued, but again
he gave me that strange laugh. So as he climbed the ladder I went to the levers and, allowing proper
time-intervals, operated the machinery which sent him to his death. After I saw that he was no longer
in the boat I threw the searchlight around the water in an effort to obtain a last glimpse of him since I
wished to ascertain whether the water-pressure would flatten him as it theoretically should, or
whether the body would be unaffected, like those extraordinary dolphins. I did not, however,
succeed in finding my late companion, for the dolphins were massed thickly and obscuringly about
the conning tower.
That evening I regretted that I had not taken the ivory image surreptitiously from poor Kienze's
pocket as he left, for the memory of it fascinated me. I could not forget the youthful, beautiful head
with its leafy crown, though I am not by nature an artist. I was also sorry that I had no one with whom
to converse. Kienze, though not my mental equal, was much better than no one. I did not sleep well
that night, and wondered exactly when the end would come. Surely, I had little enough chance of
rescue.
The next day I ascended to the conning tower and commenced the customary searchlight
explorations. Northward the view was much the same as it had been all the four days since we had
sighted the bottom, but I perceived that the drifting of the U-29 was less rapid. As I swung the beam
around to the south, I noticed that the ocean floor ahead fell away in a marked declivity, and bore
curiously regular blocks of stone in certain places, disposed as if in accordance with definite
patterns. The boat did not at once descend to match the greater ocean depth, so I was soon forced to
adjust the searchlight to cast a sharply downward beam. Owing to the abruptness of the change a wire
was disconnected, which necessitated a delay of many minutes for repairs; but at length the light
streamed on again, flooding the marine valley below me.
I am not given to emotion of any kind, but my amazement was very great when I saw what lay
revealed in that electrical glow. And yet as one reared in the best Kultur of Prussia, I should not have
been amazed, for geology and tradition alike tell us of great transpositions in oceanic and continental
areas. What I saw was an extended and elaborate array of ruined edifices; all of magnificent though
unclassified architecture, and in various stages of preservation. Most appeared to be of marble,
gleaming whitely in the rays of the searchlight, and the general plan was of a large city at the bottom
of a narrow valley, with numerous isolated temples and villas on the steep slopes above. Roofs were
fallen and columns were broken, but there still remained an air of immemorially ancient splendor
which nothing could efface.
Confronted at last with the Atlantis I had formerly deemed largely a myth, I was the most eager of
explorers. At the bottom of that valley a river once had flowed; for as I examined the scene more
closely I beheld the remains of stone and marble bridges and sea-walls, and terraces and embankments
once verdant and beautiful. In my enthusiasm I became nearly as idiotic and sentimental as poor
Kienze, and was very tardy in noticing that the southward current had ceased at last, allowing the U-
29 to settle slowly down upon the sunken city as an airplane settles upon a town of the upper earth. I
was slow, to, in realizing that the school of unusual dolphins had vanished.
In about two hours the boat rested in a paved plaza close to the rocky wall of the valley. On one
side I could view the entire city as it sloped from the plaza down to the old river-bank; on the other
side, in startling proximity, I was confronted by the richly ornate and perfectly preserved facade of a
great building, evidently a temple, hollowed from the solid rock. Of the original workmanship of this
titanic thing I can only make conjectures. The facade, of immense magnitude, apparently covers a
continuous hollow recess; for its windows are many and widely distributed. In the center yawns a
great open door, reached by an impressive flight of steps, and surrounded by exquisite carvings like
the figures of Bacchanals in relief. Foremost of all are the great columns and frieze, both decorated
with sculptures of inexpressible beauty; obviously portraying idealized pastoral scenes and
processions of priests and priestesses bearing strange ceremonial devices in adoration of a radiant
god. The art is of the most phenomenal perfection, largely Hellenic in idea, yet strangely individual.
It imparts an impression of terrible antiquity, as though it were the remotest rather than the immediate
ancestor of Greek art. Nor can I doubt that every detail of this massive product was fashioned from
the virgin hillside rock of our planet. It is palpably a part of the valley wall, though how the vast
interior was ever excavated I cannot imagine. Perhaps a cavern or series of caverns furnished the
nucleus. Neither age nor submersion has corroded the pristine grandeur of this awful fane--for fane
indeed it must be--and today after thousands of years it rests untarnished and inviolate in the endless
night and silence of an ocean-chasm.
I cannot reckon the number of hours I spent in gazing at the sunken city with its buildings, arches,
statues, and bridges, and the colossal temple with its beauty and mystery. Though I knew that death
was near, my curiosity was consuming; and I threw the searchlight beam about in eager quest. The
shaft of light permitted me to learn many details, but refused to show anything within the gaping door
of the rock-hewn temple; and after a time I turned off the current, conscious of the need of
conserving power. The rays were now perceptibly dimmer than they had been during the weeks of
drifting. And as if sharpened by the coming deprivation of light, my desire to explore the watery
secrets grew. I, a German, should be the first to tread those eon--forgotten ways!
I produced and examined a deep-sea diving suit of jointed metal, and experimented with the
portable light and air regenerator. Though I should have trouble in managing the double hatches
alone, I believed I could overcome all obstacles with my scientific skill and actually walk about the
dead city in person.
On August 16 I effected an exit from the U-29, and laboriously made my way through the ruined
and mud-choked streets to the ancient river. I found no skeletons or other human remains, but gleaned
a wealth of archeological lore from sculptures and coins. Of this I cannot now speak save to utter my
awe at a culture in the full noon of glory when cave-dwellers roamed Europe and the Nile flowed
unwatched to the sea. Others, guided by this manuscript if it shall ever be found, must unfold the
mysteries at which I can only hint. I returned to the boat as my electric batteries grew feeble,
resolved to explore the rock temple on the following day.
On the 17th, as my impulse to search out the mystery of the temple waxed still more insistent, a
great disappointment befell me; for I found that the materials needed to replenish the portable light
had perished in the mutiny of those pigs in July. My rage was unbounded, yet my German sense
forbade me to venture unprepared into an utterly black interior which might prove the lair of some
indescribable marine monster or a labyrinth of passages from whose windings I could never extricate
myself. All I could do was to turn on the waning searchlight of the U-29, and with its aid walk up the
temple steps and study the exterior carvings. The shaft of light entered the door at an upward angle,
and I peered in to see if I could glimpse anything, but all in vain. Not even the roof was visible; and
though I took a step or two inside after testing the floor with a staff, I dared not go farther.
Moreover, for the first time in my life I experienced the emotion of dread. I began to realize how
some of poor Kienze's moods had arisen, for as the temple drew me more and more, I feared its
aqueous abysses with a blind and mounting terror. Returning to the submarine, I turned off the lights
and sat thinking in the dark. Electricity must now be saved for emergencies.
Saturday the 18th I spent in total darkness, tormented by thoughts and memories that threatened to
overcome my German will. Kienze had gone mad and perished before reaching this sinister remnant
of a past unwholesomely remote, and had advised me to go with him. Was, indeed, Fate preserving
my reason only to draw me irresistibly to an end more horrible and unthinkable than any man has
dreamed of? Clearly, my nerves were sorely taxed, and I must cast off these impressions of weaker
men.
I could not sleep Saturday night, and turned on the lights regardless of the future. It was annoying
that the electricity should not last out the air and provisions. I revived my thoughts of euthanasia, and
examined my automatic pistol. Toward morning I must have dropped asleep with the lights on, for I
awoke in darkness yesterday afternoon to find the batteries dead. I struck several matches in
succession, and desperately regretted the improvidence which had caused us long ago to use up the
few candles we carried.
After the fading of the last match I dared to waste, I sat very quietly without a light. As I
considered the inevitable end my mind ran over preceding events, and developed a hitherto dormant
impression which would have caused a weaker and more superstitious man to shudder. The head of
the radiant god in the sculptures on the rock temple is the same as that carven bit of ivory which the
dead sailor brought from the sea and which poor Kienze carried back into the sea.
I was a little dazed by this coincidence, but did not become terrified. It is only the inferior thinker
who hastens to explain the singular and the complex by the primitive shortcut of supernaturalism. The
coincidence was strange, but I was too sound a reasoner to connect circumstances which admit of no
logical connection, or to associate in any uncanny fashion the disastrous events which had led from
the Victory affair to my present plight. Feeling the need of more rest, I took a sedative and secured
some more sleep. My nervous condition was reflected in my dreams, for I seemed to hear the cries
of drowning persons, and to see dead faces pressing against the portholes of the boat. And among the
dead faces was the living, mocking face of the youth with the ivory image.
I must be careful how I record my awakening today, for I am unstrung, and much hallucination is
necessarily mixed with fact. Psychologically my case is most interesting, and I regret that it cannot be
observed scientifically by a competent German authority. Upon opening my eyes my first sensation
was an overmastering desire to visit the rock temple; a desire which grew every instant, yet which I
automatically sought to resist through some emotion of fear which operated in the reverse direction.
Next there came to me the impression of light amidst the darkness of dead batteries, and I seemed to
see a sort of phosphorescent glow in the water through the porthole which opened toward the
temple. This aroused my curiosity, for I knew of no deep--sea organism capable of emitting such
luminosity.
But before I could investigate there came a third impression which because of its irrationality
caused me to doubt the objectivity of anything my senses might record. It was an aural delusion; a
sensation of rhythmic, melodic sound as of some wild yet beautiful chant or choral hymn, coming
from the outside through the absolutely sound--proof hull of the U-29. Convinced of my
psychological and nervous abnormallty, I lighted some matches and poured a stiff dose of sodium
bromide solution, which seemed to calm me to the extent of dispelling the illusion of sound. But the
phosphorescence remained, and I had difficulty in repressing a childish impulse to go to the porthole
and seek its source. It was horribly realistic, and I could soon distinguish by its aid the familiar
objects around me, as well as the empty sodium bromide glass of which I had had no former visual
impression in its present location. This last circumstance made me ponder, and I crossed the room and
touched the glass. It was indeed in the place where I had seemed to see it. Now I knew that the light
was either real or part of an hallucination so fixed and consistent that I could not hope to dispel it, so
abandoning all resistance I ascended to the conning tower to look for the luminous agency. Might it
not actually be another U-boat, offering possibilities of rescue?
It is well that the reader accept nothing which follows as objective truth, for since the events
transcend natural law, they are necessarily the subjective and unreal creations of my overtaxed mind.
When I attained the conning tower I found the sea in general far less luminous than I had expected.
There was no animal or vegetable phosphorescence about, and the city that sloped down to the river
was invisible in blackness. What I did see was not spectacular, not grotesque or terrifying, yet it
removed my last vestige of trust in my consciousness. For the door and windows of the undersea
temple hewn from the rocky hill were vividly aglow with a flickering radiance, as from a mighty
altar-flame far within.
Later incidents are chaotic. As I stared at the uncannily lighted door and windows, I became
subject to the most extravagant visions--visions so extravagant that I cannot even relate them. I
fancied that I discerned objects in the temple; objects both stationary and moving; and seemed to hear
again the unreal chant that had floated to me when first I awaked. And over all rose thoughts and fears
which centered in the youth from the sea and the ivory image whose carving was duplicated on the
frieze and columns of the temple before me. I thought of poor Kienze, and wondered where his body
rested with the image he had carried back into the sea. He had warned me of something, and I had not
heeded--but he was a soft-headed Rhinelander who went mad at troubles a Prussian could bear with
ease.
The rest is very simple. My impulse to visit and enter the temple has now become an inexplicable
and imperious command which ultimately cannot be denied. My own German will no longer controls
my acts, and volition is henceforward possible only in minor matters. Such madness it was which
drove Kienze to his death, bare-headed and unprotected in the ocean; but I am a Prussian and a man of
sense, and will use to the last what little will I have. When first I saw that I must go, I prepared my
diving suit, helmet, and air regenerator for instant donning, and immediately commenced to write this
hurried chronicle in the hope that it may some day reach the world. I shall seal the manuscript in a
bottle and entrust it to the sea as I leave the U-29 for ever.
I have no fear, not even from the prophecies of the madman Kienze. What I have seen cannot be
true, and I know that this madness of my own will at most lead only to suffocation when my air is
gone. The light in the temple is a sheer delusion, and I shall die calmly like a German, in the black and
forgotten depths. This demoniac laughter which I hear as I write comes only from my own weakening
brain. So I will carefully don my suit and walk boldly up the steps into the primal shrine, that silent
secret of unfathomed waters and uncounted years.

THE TERRIBLE OLD MAN
The inhabitants of Kingsport say and think many things about the Terrible Old Man which
generally keep him safe from the attention of gentlemen like Mr. Ricci and his colleagues, despite
the almost certain fact that he hides a fortune of indefinite magnitude somewhere about his musty and
venerable abode. He is, in truth, a very strange person, believed to have been a captain of East India
clipper ships in his day; so old that no one can remember when he was young, and so taciturn that few
know his real name. Among the gnarled trees in the front yard of his aged and neglected place he
maintains a strange collection of large stones, oddly grouped and painted so that they resemble the
idols in some obscure Eastern temple. This collection frightens away most of the small boys who
love to taunt the Terrible Old Man about his long white hair and beard, or to break the small--paned
windows of his dwelling with wicked missiles; but there are other things which frighten the older
and more curious folk who sometimes steal up to the house to peer in through the dusty panes. These
folk say that on a table in a bare room on the ground floor are many peculiar bottles, in each a small
piece of lead suspended pendulum-wise from a string. And they say that the Terrible Old Man talks to
these bottles, addressing them by such names as Jack, Scar--Face, Long Tom, Spanish Joe, Peters,
and Mate Ellis, and that whenever he speaks to a bottle the little lead pendulum within makes certain
definite vibrations as if in answer.
Those who have watched the tall, lean, Terrible Old Man in these peculiar conversations, do not
watch him again. But Angelo Ricci and Joe Czanek and Manuel Silva were not of Kingsport blood;
they were of that new and heterogeneous alien stock which lies outside the charmed circle of New
England life and traditions, and they saw in the Terrible Old Man merely a tottering, almost helpless
grey-beard, who could not walk without the aid of his knotted cane, and whose thin, weak hands
shook pitifully. They were really quite sorry in their way for the lonely, unpopular old fellow,
whom everybody shunned, and at whom all the dogs barked singularly. But business is business, and
to a robber whose soul is in his profession, there is a lure and a challenge about a very old and very
feeble man who has no account at the bank, and who pays for his few necessities at the village store
with Spanish gold and silver minted two centuries ago.
Messrs. Ricci, Czanek, and Silva selected the night of April 11th for their call. Mr. Ricci and Mr.
Silva were to interview the poor old gentleman, whilst Mr. Czanek waited for them and their
presumable metallic burden with a covered motor-car in Ship Street, by the gate in the tall rear wall
of their host's grounds. Desire to avoid needless explanations in case of unexpected police
intrusions prompted these plans for a quiet and unostentatious departure.
As prearranged, the three adventurers started out separately in order to prevent any evil-minded
suspicions afterward. Messrs. Ricci and Silva met in Water Street by the old man's front gate, and
although they did not like the way the moon shone down upon the painted stones through the budding
branches of the gnarled trees, they had more important things to think about than mere idle
superstition. They feared it might be unpleasant work making the Terrible Old Man loquacious
concerning his hoarded gold and silver, for aged sea--captains are notably stubborn and perverse.
Still, he was very old and very feeble, and there were two visitors. Messrs. Ricci and Silva were
experienced in the art of making unwilling persons voluble, and the screams of a weak and
exceptionally venerable man can be easily muffled. So they moved up to the one lighted window and
heard the Terrible Old Man talking childishly to his bottles with pendulums. Then they donned masks
and knocked politely at the weather-stained oaken door.
Waiting seemed very long to Mr. Czanek as he fidgeted restlessly in the covered motor-car by
the Terrible Old Man's back gate in Ship Street. He was more than ordinarily tender-hearted, and he
did not like the hideous screams he had heard in the ancient house just after the hour appointed for
the deed. Had he not told his colleagues to be as gentle as possible with the pathetic old sea-captain?
Very nervously he watched that narrow oaken gate in the high and ivy-clad stone wall. Frequently he
consulted his watch, and wondered at the delay. Had the old man died before revealing where his
treasure was hidden, and had a thorough search become necessary? Mr. Czanek did not like to wait so
long in the dark in such a place. Then he sensed a soft tread or tapping on the walk inside the gate,
heard a gentle fumbling at the rusty latch, and saw the narrow, heavy door swing inward. And in the
pallid glow of the single dim street-lamp he strained his eyes to see what his colleagues had brought
out of that sinister house which loomed so close behind. But when he looked, he did not see what he
had expected; for his colleagues were not there at all, but only the Terrible Old Man leaning quietly
on his knotted cane and smiling hideously. Mr. Czanek had never before noticed the colour of that
man's eyes; now he saw that they were yellow.
Little things make considerable excitement in little towns, which is the reason that Kingsport
people talked all that spring and summer about the three unidentifiable bodies, horribly slashed as
with many cutlasses, and horribly mangled as by the tread of many cruel boot-heels, which the tide
washed in. And some people even spoke of things as trivial as the deserted motor-car found in Ship
Street, or certain especially inhuman cries, probably of a stray animal or migratory bird, heard in the
night by wakeful citizens. But in this idle village gossip the Terrible Old Man took no interest at all.
He was by nature reserved, and when one is aged and feeble, one's reserve is doubly strong.
Besides, so ancient a sea-captain must have witnessed scores of things much more stirring in the far-
off days of his unremembered youth.

The Thing on the Doorstep
I
II
III
IV
V
I
It is true that I have sent six bullets through the head of my best friend, and yet I hope to show by
this statement that I am not his murderer. At first I shall be called a madman--madder than the man I
shot in his cell at the Arkham Sanitarium. Later some of my readers will weigh each statement,
correlate it with the known facts, and ask themselves how I could have believed otherwise than I did
after facing the evidence of that horror--that thing on the doorstep.
Until then I also saw nothing but madness in the wild tales I have acted on. Even now I ask myself
whether I was misled--or whether I am not mad after all. I do not know--but others have strange
things to tell of Edward and Asenath Derby, and even the stolid police are at their wits' ends to
account for that last terrible visit. They have tried weakly to concoct a theory of a ghastly jest or
warning by discharged servants, yet they know in their hearts that the truth is something infinitely
more terrible and incredible.
So I say that I have not murdered Edward Derby. Rather have I avenged him, and in so doing
purged the earth of a horror whose survival might have loosed untold terrors on all mankind. There
are black zones of shadow close to our daily paths, and now and then some evil soul breaks a passage
through. When that happens, the man who knows must strike before reckoning the consequences.
I have known Edward Pickman Derby all his life. Eight years my junior, he was so precocious
that we had much in common from the time he was eight and I was sixteen. He was the most
phenomenal child scholar I have ever known, and at seven was writing verse of a sombre, fantastic,
almost morbid cast which astonished the tutors surrounding him. Perhaps his private education and
coddled seclusion had something to do with his premature flowering. An only child, he had organic
weaknesses which startled his doting parents and caused them to keep him closely chained to their
side. He was never allowed out without his nurse, and seldom had a chance to play unconstrainedly
with other children. All this doubtless fostered a strange secretive life in the boy, with imagination
as his one avenue of freedom.
At any rate, his juvenile learning was prodigious and bizarre; and his facile writings such as to
captivate me despite my greater age. About that time I had leanings toward art of a somewhat
grotesque cast, and I found in this younger child a rare kindred spirit. What lay behind our joint love
of shadows and marvels was, no doubt, the ancient, mouldering, and subtly fearsome town in which
we live--witch-cursed, legend-haunted Arkham, whose huddled, sagging gambrel roofs and
crumbling Georgian balustrades brood out the centuries beside the darkly muttering Miskatonic.
As time went by I turned to architecture and gave up my design of illustrating a book of Edward's
demoniac poems, yet our comradeship suffered no lessening. Young Derby's odd genius developed
remarkably, and in his eighteenth year his collected nightmare-lyrics made a real sensation when
issued under the title Azathoth and Other Horrors. He was a close correspondent of the notorious
Baudelairean poet Justin Geoffrey, who wrote The People of the Monolith and died screaming in a
madhouse in 1926 after a visit to a sinister, ill-regarded village in Hungary.
In self-reliance and practical affairs, however, Derby was greatly retarded because of his
coddled existence. His health had improved, but his habits of childish dependence were fostered by
over-careful parents, so that he never travelled alone, made independent decisions, or assumed
responsibilities. It was early seen that he would not be equal to a struggle in the business or
professional arena, but the family fortune was so ample that this formed no tragedy. As he grew to
years of manhood he retained a deceptive aspect of boyishness. Blond and blue-eyed, he had the
fresh complexion of a child; and his attempt to raise a moustache were discernible only with
difficulty. His voice was soft and light, and his unexercised life gave him a juvenile chubbiness
rather than the paunchiness of premature middle age. He was of good height, and his handsome face
would have made him a notable gallant had not his shyness held him to seclusion and bookishness.
Derby's parents took him abroad every summer, and he was quick to seize on the surface aspects
of European thought and expression. His Poe-like talents turned more and more toward the decadent,
and other artistic sensitiveness and yearnings were half-aroused in him. We had great discussions in
those days. I had been through Harvard, had studied in a Boston architect's office, had married, and
had finally returned to Arkham to practise my profession--settling in the family homestead in
Saltonstall Street since my father had moved to Florida for his health. Edward used to call almost
every evening, till I came to regard him as one of the household. He had a characteristic way of
ringing the doorbell or sounding the knocker that grew to be a veritable code signal, so that after
dinner I always listened for the familiar three brisk strokes followed by two more after a pause. Less
frequently I would visit at his house and note with envy the obscure volumes in his constantly
growing library.
Derby went through Miskatonic University in Arkahm since his parents would not let him board
away from them. He entered at sixteen and completed his course in three years, majoring in English
and French literature and receiving high marks in everything but mathematics and the sciences. He
mingled very little with the other students, though looking enviously at the "daring" or "Bohemian"
set--whose superficially "smart" language and meaningless ironic pose he aped, and whose dubious
conduct he wished he dared adopt.
What he did do was to become an almost fanatical devotee of subterranean magical lore, for
which Miskatonic's library was and is famous. Always a dweller on the surface of phantasy and
strangeness, he now delved deep into the actual runes and riddles left by a fabulous past for the
guidance or puzzlement of posterity. He read things like the frightful Book of Eibon, the
Unaussprechlichen Kulten of von Junzt, and the forbidden Necronomicon of the mad Arab Abdul
Alhazred, though he did not tell his parents he had seen them. Edward was twenty when my son and
only child was born, and seemed pleased when I named the newcomer Edward Derby Upton after him.
By the time he was twenty-five Edward Derby was a prodigiously learned man and a fairly well
known poet and fantaisiste though his lack of contacts and responsibilities had slowed down his
literary growth by making his products derivative and over-bookish. I was perhaps his closest
friend--finding him an inexhaustible mine of vital theoretical topics, while he relied on me for advice
in whatever matters he did not wish to refer to his parents. He remained single--more through
shyness, inertia, and parental protectiveness than through inclination--and moved in society only to
the slightest and most perfunctory extent. When the war came both health and ingrained timidity kept
him at home. I went to Plattsburg for a commission but never got overseas.
So the years wore on. Edward's mother died when he was thirty-four and for months he was
incapacitated by some odd psychological malady. His father took him to Europe, however, and he
managed to pull out of his trouble without visible effects. Afterward he seemed to feel a sort of
grotesque exhilaration, as if of partial escape from some unseen bondage. He began to mingle in the
more "advanced" college set despite his middle age, and was present at some extremely wild doings-
-on one occasion paying heavy blackmail (which he borrowed of me) to keep his presence at a
certain affair from his father's notice. Some of the whispered rumors about the wild Miskatonic set
were extremely singular. There was even talk of black magic and of happenings utterly beyond
credibility.
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 HallSchool at Kingsport--and had been inclined to shun her
because of her odd reputation. She was dark, smallish, and very good-looking except for
overprotuberant eyes; but something in her expression alienated extremely sensitive people. It was,
however, largely her origin and conversation which caused average folk to avoid her. She was one
of the Innsmouth Waites, and dark legends have clustered for generations about crumbling, half-
deserted Innsmouth and its people. There are tales of horrible bargains about the year 1850, and of a
strange element "not quite human" in the ancient families of the run-down fishing port--tales such as
only old--time Yankees can devise and repeat with proper awesomeness.
Asenath's case was aggravated by the fact that she was Ephraim Waite's daughter--the child of his
old age by an unknown wife who always went veiled. Ephraim lived in a half-decayed mansion in
Washington Street, Innsmouth, and those who had seen the place (Arkham folk avoid going to
Innsmouth whenever they can) declared that the attic windows were always boarded, and that strange
sounds sometimes floated from within as evening drew on. The old man was known to have been a
prodigious magical student in his day, and legend averred that he could raise or quell storms at sea
according to his whim. I had seen him once or twice in my youth as he came to Arkham to consult
forbidden tomes at the college library, and had hated his wolfish, saturnine face with its tangle of
iron-grey beard. He had died insane--under rather queer circumstances--just before his daughter (by
his will made a nominal ward of the principal) entered the Hall School, but she had been his morbidly
avid pupil and looked fiendishly like him at times.
The friend whose daughter had gone to school with Asenath Waite repeated many curious things
when the news of Edward's acquaintance with her began to spread about. Asenath, it seemed, had
posed as a kind of magician at school; and had really seemed able to accomplish some highly
baffling marvels. She professed to be able to raise thunderstorms, though her seeming success was
generally laid to some uncanny knack at prediction. All animals markedly disliked her, and she could
make any dog howl by certain motions of her right hand. There were times when she displayed
snatches of knowledge and language very singular--and very shocking--for a young girl; when she
would frighten her schoolmates with leers and winks of an inexplicable kind, and would seem to
extract an obscene zestful irony from her present situation.
Most unusual, though, were the well-attested cases of her influence over other persons. She was,
beyond question, a genuine hypnotist. By gazing peculiarly at a fellow-student she would often give
the latter a distinct feeling of exchanged personality--as if the subject were placed momentarily in the
magician's body and able to stare half across the room at her real body, whose eyes blazed and
protruded with an alien expression. Asenath often made wild claims about the nature of
consciousness and about its independence of the physical frame--or at least from the life-processes
of the physical frame. Her crowning rage, however, was that she was not a man; since she believed a
male brain had certain unique and far-reaching cosmic powers. Given a man's brain, she declared, she
could not only equal but surpass her father in mastery of unknown forces.
Edward met Asenath at a gathering of "intelligentsia" held in one of the students' rooms, and
could talk of nothing else when he came to see me the next day. He had found her full of the interests
and erudition which engrossed him most, and was in addition wildly taken with her appearance. I had
never seen the young woman, and recalled casual references only faintly, but I knew who she was. It
seemed rather regrettable that Derby should become so upheaved about her; but I said nothing to
discourage him, since infatuation thrives on opposition. He was not, he said, mentioning her to his
father.
In the next few weeks I heard of very little but Asenath from young Derby. Others now remarked
Edward's autumnal gallantry, though they agreed that he did not look even nearly his actual age, or
seem at all inappropriate as an escort for his bizarre divinity. He was only a trifle paunchy despite his
indolence and self-indulgence, and his face was absolutely without lines. Asenath, on the other hand,
had the premature crow's feet which come from the exercises of an intense will.
About this time Edward brought the girl to call on me, and I at once saw that his interest was by no
means one-sided. She eyed him continually with an almost predatory air, and I perceived that their
intimacy was beyond untangling. Soon afterward I had a visit from old Mr. Derby, whom I had always
admired and respected. He had heard the tales of his son's new friendship, and had wormed the whole
truth out of "the boy."Edward meant to marry Asenath, and had even been looking at houses in the
suburbs. Knowing my usually great influence with his son, the father wondered if I could help to
break the ill-advised affair off; but I regretfully expressed my doubts. This time it was not a question
of Edward's weak will but of the woman's strong will. The perennial child had transferred his
dependence from the parental image to a new and stronger image, and nothing could be done about it.
The wedding was performed a month later--by a justice of the 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 neutralisaton, leading ultimately
to responsible independence? He came alone, for Asenath was very busy. She had brought a vast
store of books and apparatus from Innsmouth (Derby shuddered as he spoke the name), and was
finishing the restoration of the Crowninshield house and grounds.
Her home--in that town--was a rather disgusting place, but certain objects in it had taught him
some surprising things. He was progressing fast in esoteric lore now that he had Asenath's guidance.
Some of the experiments she proposed were very daring and radical--he did not feel at liberty to
describe them--but he had confidence in her powers and intentions. The three servants were very
queer--an incredibly aged couple who had been with old Ephraim and referred occasionally to him
and to Asenath's dead mother in a cryptic way, and a swarthy young wench who had marked anomalies
of feature and seemed to exude a perpetual odour of fish.
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--aside from those exceptional
occasions--actually relaxed into a kind of exaggerated immaturity, save when a trace of the new
sadness or understanding would flash across it. It was really very puzzling. Meanwhile the Derbys
almost dropped out of the gay college circle--not through their own disgust, we heard, but because
something about their present studies shocked even the most callous of the other decadents.
It was in the third year of the marriage that Edward began to hint openly to me of a certain fear and
dissatisfaction. He would let fall remarks about things "going too far," and would talk darkly about
the need of "gaining his identity."At first I ignored such references, but in time I began to question
him guardedly, remembering what my friend's daughter had said about Asenath's hypnotic influence
over the other girls at school--the cases where students had thought they were in her body looking
across the room at themselves. This questioning seemed to make him at once alarmed and grateful,
and once he mumbled something about having a serious talk with me later. About this time old Mr.
Derby died, for which I was afterward very thankful. Edward was badly upset, though by no means
disorganized. He had seen astonishingly little of his parent since his marriage, for Asenath had
concentrated in herself all his vital sense of family linkage. Some called him callous in his loss--
especially since those jaunty and confident moods in the car began to increase. He now wished to
move back into the old family mansion, but Asenath insisted on staying in the Crowninshield house to
which she had become well adjusted.
Not long afterward my wife heard a curious thing from a friend--one of the few who had not
dropped the Derbys. She had been out to the end of High Street to call on the couple, and had seen a
car shoot briskly out of the drive with Edward's oddly confident and almost sneering face above the
wheel. Ringing the bell, she had been told by the repulsive wench that Asenath was also out; but had
chanced to look at the house in leaving. There, at one of Edward's library windows, she had
glimpsed a hastily withdrawn face--a face whose expression of pain, defeat, and wistful
hopelessness was poignant beyond description. It was--incredibly enough in view of its usual
domineering cast--Asenath's; yet the caller had vowed that in that instant the sad, muddled eyes of
poor Edward were gazing out from it.
Edward's calls now grew a trifle more frequent, and his hints occasionally became concrete.
What he said was not to be believed, even in centuried and legend-haunted Arkham; but he threw out
his dark lore with a sincerity and convincingness which made one fear for his sanity. He talked about
terrible meetings in lonely places, of cyclopean ruins in the heart of the Maine woods beneath which
vast staircases led down to abysses of nighted secrets, of complex angles that led through invisible
walls to other regions of space and time, and of hideous exchanges of personality that permitted
explorations in remote and forbidden places, on other worlds, and in different space--time continua.
He would now and then back up certain crazy hints by exhibiting objects which utterly nonplussed
me--elusively coloured and bafflingly textured objects like nothing ever heard of on earth, whose
insane curves and surfaces answered no conceivable purpose, and followed no conceivable
geometry. These things, he said, came "from outside"; and his wife knew how to get them.
Sometimes--but always in frightened and ambiguous whisper--he would suggest things about old
Ephraim Waite, whom he had seen occasionally at the college library in the old days. These
adumbrations were never specific, but seemed to revolve around some especially horrible doubt as
to whether the old wizard were really dead--in a spiritual as well as corporeal sense.
At times Derby would halt abruptly in his revelations, and I wondered whether Asenath could
possibly have divined his speech at a distance and cut him off through some unknown sort of
telepathic mesmerism--some power of the kind she had displayed at school. Certainly, she suspected
that he told me things, for as the weeks passed she tried to stop his visits with words and glances of a
most inexplicable potency. Only with difficulty could he get to see me, for although he would
pretend to be going somewhere else, some invisible force would generally clog his motions or make
him forget his destination for the time being. His visits usually came when Asenath was way--"away
in her own body," as he once oddly put it. She always found out later--the servants watched his
goings and coming--but evidently she thought it inexpedient to do anything drastic.
IV
Derby had been married more than three years on that August day when I got that telegram from
Maine. I had not seen him for two months, but had heard he was away "on business."Asenath was
supposed to be with him, though watchful gossip declared there was someone upstairs in the house
behind the doubly curtained windows. They had watched the purchases made by the servants. And
now the town marshal of Chesuncook had wired of the draggled madman who stumbled out of the
woods with delirious ravings and screamed to me for protection. It was Edward--and he had been just
able to recall his own name and address.
Chesuncook is close to the wildest, deepest, and least explored forest belt in Maine, and it took a
whole day of feverish jolting through fantastic and forbidding scenery to get there in a car. I found
Derby in a cell at the town farm, vacillating between frenzy and apathy. He knew me at once, and
began pouring out a meaningless, half-incoherent torrent of words in my direction.
"Dan, for God's sake! The pit of the shoggoths! Down the six thousand steps...the abomination of
abominations...I never would let her take me, and then I found myself there--Ia! Shub-Niggurath!--
The shape rose up from the altar, and there were five hundred that howled--The Hooded Thing
bleated 'Kamog! Kamog!'--that was old Ephraim's secret name in the coven--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'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 recognized from bygone browsings in forbidden volumes, and at times made
me shudder with a certain thread of mythological consistency--or convincing coherence--which ran
through his maundering. Again and again he would pause, as if to gather courage for some final and
terrible disclosure.
"Dan, Dan, don't you remember him--wild eyes and the unkempt beard that never turned white? He
glared at me once, and I never forgot it. Now she glares that way. And I know why! He found it in the
Necronomicon--the formula. I don't dare tell you the page yet, but when I do you can read and
understand. Then you will know what has engulfed me. On, on, on, on--body to body to body--he
means never to die. The life-glow--he knows how to break the link...it can flicker on a while even
when the body is dead. I'll give you hints and maybe you'll guess. Listen, Dan--do you know why my
wife always takes such pains with that silly backhand writing? Have you ever seen a manuscript of
old Ephraim's? Do you want to know why I shivered when I saw some hasty notes Asenath had jotted
down?
"Asenath--is there such a person? Why did they half-think there was poison in old Ephraim's
stomach? Why do the Gilmans whisper about the way he shrieked--like a frightened child--when he
went mad and Asenath locked him up in the padded attic room where--the other--had been? Was it old
Ephraim's soul that was locked in? Who locked in whom? Why had he been looking for months for
someone with a fine mind and a weak will?--Why did he curse that his daughter wasn't a son? Tell
me? Daniel Upton--what devilish exchange was perpetrated in the house of horror where that
blasphemous monster had his trusting, weak-willed half-human child at his mercy? Didn't he make it
permanent--as she'll do in the end with me? Tell me why that thing that calls itself Asenath writes
differently off guard, so that you can't tell its script from--"
Then the thing happened. Derby's voice was rising to a thin treble scream as he raved, when
suddenly it was shut off with an almost mechanical click. I thought of those other occasions at my
home when his confidences had abruptly ceased--when I had half-fancied that some obscure
telepathic wave of Asenath's mental force was intervening to keep him silent. This, though, was
something altogether different--and, I felt, infinitely more horrible. The face beside me was twisted
almost unrecognizably for a moment, while through the whole body there passed a shivering motion-
-as if all the bones, organs, muscles, nerves, and glands were adjusting themselves to a radically
different posture, set of stresses, and general personality.
Just where the supreme horror lay, I could not for my life tell; yet there swept over me such a
swamping wave of sickness and repulsion--such a freezing, petrifying sense of utter alienage and
abnormality--that my grasp of the wheel grew feeble and uncertain. The figure beside me seemed
less like a lifelong friend than like some monstrous intrusion from outer space--some damnable,
utterly accursed focus of unknown and malign cosmic forces.
I had faltered only a moment, but before another moment was over my companion had seized the
wheel and forced me to change places with him. The dusk was now very thick, and the lights of
Portland far behind, so I could not see much of his face. The blaze of his eyes, though, was
phenomenal; and I knew that he must now be in that queerly energized state--so unlike his usual self--
which so many people had noticed. It seemed odd and incredible that listless Edward Derby--he who
could never assert himself, and who had never learned to drive--should be ordering me about and
taking the wheel of my own car, yet that was precisely what had happened. He did not speak for some
time, and in my inexplicable horror I was glad he did not.
In the lights of Biddeford and Saco I saw his firmly set mouth, and shivered at the blaze of his
eyes. The people were right--he did look damnably like his wife and like old Ephraim when in these
moods. I did not wonder that the moods were disliked--there was certainly something unnatural in
them, and I felt the sinister element all the more because of the wild ravings I had been hearing. This
man, for all my lifelong knowledge of Edward Pickman Derby, was a stranger--an intrusion of some
sort from the black abyss.
He did not speak until we were on a dark stretch of road, and when he did his voice seemed
utterly unfamiliar. It was deeper, firmer, and more decisive than I had ever known it to be; while its
accent and pronunciation were altogether changed--though vaguely, remotely, and rather disturbingly
recalling something I could not quite place. There was, I thought, a trace of very profound and very
genuine irony in the timbre--not the flashy, meaninglessly jaunty pseudo-irony of the callow
"sophisticate," which Derby had habitually affected, but something grim, basic, pervasive, and
potentially evil. I marvelled at the self-possession so soon following the spell of panic-struck
muttering.
"I hope you'll forget my attack back there, Upton," he was saying. "You know what my nerves are,
and I guess you can excuse such things. I'm enormously grateful, of course, for this lift home.
"And you must forget, too, any crazy things I may have been saying about my wife--and about
things in general. That's what comes from overstudy in a field like mine. My philosophy is full of
bizarre concepts, and when the mind gets worn out it cooks up all sorts of imaginary concrete
applications. I shall take a rest from now on--you probably won't see me for some time, and you
needn't blame Asenath for it.
"This trip was a bit queer, but it's really very simple. There are certain Indian relics in the north
wood--standing stones, and all that--which mean a good deal in folklore, and Asenath and I are
following that stuff up. It was a hard search, so I seem to have gone off my head. I must send
somebody for the car when I get home. A month's relaxation will put me on my feet."
I do not recall just what my own part of the conversation was, for the baffling alienage of my
seatmate filled all my consciousness. With every moment my feeling of elusive cosmic horror
increased, till at length I was in a virtual delirium of longing for the end of the drive. Derby did not
offer to relinquish the wheel, and I was glad of the speed with which Portsmouth and Newburyport
flashed by.
At the junction where the main highway runs inland and avoids Innsmouth, I was half-afraid my
driver would take the bleak shore road that goes through that damnable place. He did not, however,
but darted rapidly past Rowley and Ipswich toward our destination. We reached Arkham before
midnight, and found the lights still on at the old Crowninshield house. Derby left the car with a hasty
repetition of his thanks, and I drove home alone with a curious feeling of relief. It had been a terrible
drive--all the more terrible because I could not quite tell why--and I did not regret Derby's forecast
of a long absence from my company.
V
The next two months were full of rumours. People spoke of seeing Derby more and more in his
new energized state, and Asenath was scarcely ever in to her callers. I had only one visit from
Edward, when he called briefly in Asenath's car--duly reclaimed from wherever he had left it in
Maine--to get some books he had lent me. He was in his new state, and paused only long enough for
some evasively polite remarks. It was plain that he had nothing to discuss with me when in this
condition--and I noticed that he did not even trouble to give the old three-and-two signal when
ringing the doorbell. As on that evening in the car, I felt a faint, infinitely deep horror which I could
not explain; so that his swift departure was a prodigious relief.
In mid-September Derby was away for a week, and some of the decadent college set talked
knowingly of the matter--hinting at a meeting with a notorious cult-leader, lately expelled from
England, who had established headquarters in New York. For my part I could not get that strange ride
from Maine out of my head. The transformation I had witnessed had affected me profoundly, and I
caught myself again and again trying to account for the thing--and for the extreme horror it had
inspired in me.
But the oddest rumours were those about the sobbing in the old Crowninshield house. The voice
seemed to be a woman's, and some of the younger people thought it sounded like Asenath's. It was
heard only at rare intervals, and would sometimes be choked off as if by force. There was talk of an
investigation, but this was dispelled one day when Asenath appeared in the streets and chatted in a
sprightly way with a large number of acquaintances--apologizing for her recent absence and
speaking incidentally about the nervous breakdown and hysteria of a guest from Boston. The guest
was never seen, but Asenath's appearance left nothing to be said. And then someone complicated
matters by whispering that the sobs had once or twice been in a man's voice.
One evening in mid-October, I heard the familiar three-and-two ring at the front door. Answering
it myself, I found Edward on the steps, and saw in a moment that his personality was the old one
which I had not encountered since the day of his ravings on that terrible ride from Chesuncook. His
face was twitching with a mixture of odd emotions in which fear and triumph seemed to share
dominion, and he looked furtively over his shoulder as I closed the door behind him.
Following me clumsily to the study, he asked for some whiskey to steady his nerves. I forbore to
question him, but waited till he felt like beginning whatever he wanted to say. At length he ventured
some information in a choking voice.
"Asenath has gone, Dan. We had a long talk last night while the servants were out, and I made her
promise to stop preying on me. Of course I had certain--certain occult defences I never told you
about. She had to give in, but got frightfully angry. Just packed up and started for New York--walked
right out to catch the eight-twenty in to Boston. I suppose people will talk, but I can't help that. You
needn't mention that there was any trouble--just say she's gone on a long research trip.
"She's probably going to stay with one of her horrible groups of devotees. I hope she'll go west
and get a divorce--anyhow, I've made her promise to keep away and let me alone. It was horrible,
Dan--she was stealing my body--crowding me out--making a prisoner of me. I lay low and pretended
to let her do it, but I had to be on the watch. I could plan if I was careful, for she can't read my mind
literally, or in detail. All she could read of my planning was a sort of general mood of rebellion--and
she always thought I was helpless. Never thought I could get the best of her...but I had a spell or two
that worked."
Derby looked over his shoulder and took some more whiskey.
"I paid off those damned servants this morning when they got back. They were ugly about it, and
asked questions, but they went. They're her kin--Innsmouth people--and were hand and glove with
her. I hope they'll let me alone--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 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
did, or it did before--" Edward's face was now atrociously distorted, and he bent it uncomfortably
close to mine as his voice fell to a whisper.
"You must know what I hinted in the car--that she isn't Asenath at all, but really old Ephraim
himself. I suspected it a year and a half ago, and I know it now. Her handwriting shows it when she
goes off guard--sometimes she jots down a note in writing that's just like her father's manuscripts,
stroke for stroke--and sometimes she says things that nobody but an old man like Ephraim could say.
He changed forms with her when he felt death coming--she was the only one he could find with the
right kind of brain and a weak enough will--he got her body permanently, just as she almost got mine,
and then poisoned the old body he'd put her into. Haven't you seen old Ephraim's soul glaring out of
that she-devil's eyes dozens of times--and out of mine when she has control of my body?"
The whisperer was panting, and paused for breath. I said nothing; and when he resumed his voice
was nearer normal. This, I reflected, was a case for the asylum, but I would not be the one to send
him there. Perhaps time and freedom from Asenath would do its work. I could see that he would
never wish to dabble in morbid occultism again.
"I'll tell you more later--I must have a long rest now. I'll tell you something of the forbidden
horrors she led me into--something of the age-old horrors that even now are festering in out-of-the-
way corners with a few monstrous priests to keep them alive. Some people know things about the
universe that nobody ought to know, and can do things that nobody ought to be able to do. I've been in
it up to my neck, but that's the end. Today I'd burn that damned Necronomicon and all the rest if I were
librarian at Miskatonic.
"But she can't get me now. I must get out of that accursed house as soon as I can, and settle down
at home. You'll help me, I know, if I need help. Those devilish servants, you know--and if people
should get too inquisitive about Asenath. You see, I can't give them her address...Then there are
certain groups of searchers--certain cults, you know--that might misunderstand our breaking
up...some of them have damnably curious ideas and methods. I know you'll stand by me if anything
happens--even if I have to tell you a lot that will shock you..."
I had Edward stay and sleep in one of the guest-chambers that night, and in the morning he seemed
calmer. We discussed certain possible arrangements for his moving back into the Derby mansion, and
I hoped he would lose no time in making the change. He did not call the next evening, but I saw him
frequently during the ensuing weeks. We talked as little as possible about strange and unpleasant
things, but discussed the renovation of the old Derby house, and the travels which Edward promised
to take with my son and me the following summer.
Of Asenath we said almost nothing, for I saw that the subject was a peculiarly disturbing one.
Gossip, of course, was rife; but that was no novelty in connection with the strange menage at the old
Crowninshield house. One thing I did not like was what Derby's banker let fall in an over-expansive
mood at the Miskatonic Club--about the cheques Edward was sending regularly to a Moses and
Abigail Sargent and a Eunice Babson in Innsmouth. That looked as if those evil-faced servants were
extorting some kind of tribute from him--yet he had not mentioned the matter to me.
I wished that the summer--and my son's Harvard vacation--would come, so that we could get
Edward to Europe. He was not, I soon saw, mending as rapidly as I had hoped he would; for there
was something a bit hysterical in his occasional exhilaration, while his moods of fright and
depression were altogether too frequent. The old Derby house was ready by December, yet Edward
constantly put off moving. Though he hated and seemed to fear the Crowninshield place, he was at
the same time queerly enslaved by it. He could not seem to begin dismantling things, and invented
every kind of excuse to postpone action. When I pointed this out to him he appeared unaccountably
frightened. His father's old butler--who was there with other reacquired servants--told me one day
that Edward's occasional prowlings about the house, and especially down cellar, looked odd and
unwholesome to him. I wondered if Asenath had been writing disturbing letters, but the butler said
there was no mail which could have come from her.
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--Ia! Shub-Niggurath! The Goat with
a Thousand Young!...
"The flame--the flame--beyond body, beyond life--in the earth--oh, God!"
I pulled him back to his chair and poured some wine down his throat as his frenzy sank to a dull
apathy. He did not resist, but kept his lips moving as if talking to himself. Presently I realized that he
was trying to talk to me, and bent my ear to his mouth to catch the feeble words.
"Again, again--she's trying--I might have known--nothing can stop that force; not distance nor
magic, nor death--it comes and comes, mostly in the night--I can't leave--it's horrible--oh, God, Dan,
if you only knew as I do just how horrible it is..."
When he had slumped down into a stupor I propped him with pillows and let normal sleep
overtake him. I did not call a doctor, for I knew what would be said of his sanity, and wished to give
nature a chance if I possibly could. He waked at midnight, and I put him to bed upstairs, but he was
gone by morning. He had let himself quietly out of the house--and his butler, when called on the
wire, said he was at home pacing about the library.
Edward went to pieces rapidly after that. He did not call again, but I went daily to see him. He
would always be sitting in his library, staring at nothing and having an air of abnormal listening.
Sometimes he talked rationally, but always on trivial topics. Any mention of his trouble, of future
plans, or of Asenath would send him into a frenzy. His butler said he had frightful seizures at night,
during which he might eventually do himself harm.
I had a long talk with his doctor, banker, and lawyer, and finally took the physician with two
specialist colleagues to visit him. The spasms that resulted from the first questions were violent and
pitiable--and that evening a closed car took his poor struggling body to the Arkham Sanitarium. I was
made his guardian and called on him twice weekly--almost weeping to hear his wild shrieks,
awesome whispers, and dreadful, droning repetitions of such phrases as "I had to do it--I had to do
it--it'll get me--it'll get me--down there--down there in the dark--Mother! Mother! Dan! Save me--
save me--"
How much hope of recovery there was, no one could say, but I tried my best to be optimistic.
Edward must have a home if he emerged, so I transferred his servants to the Derby mansion, which
would surely be his sane choice. What to do about the Crowninshield place with its complex
arrangements and collections of utterly inexplicable objects I could not decide, so left it momentarily
untouched--telling the Derby household to go over and dust the chief rooms once a week, and
ordering the furnace man to have a fire on those days.
The final nightmare came before Candlemas--heralded, in cruel irony, by a false gleam of hope.
One morning late in January the sanitarium telephoned to report that Edward's reason had suddenly
come back. His continuous memory, they said, was badly impaired; but sanity itself was certain. Of
course he must remain some time for observation, but there could be little doubt of the outcome. All
going well, he would surely be free in a week.
I hastened over in a flood of delight, but stood bewildered when a nurse took me to Edward's
room. The patient rose to greet me, extending his hand with a polite smile; but I saw in an instant that
he bore the strangely energized personality which had seemed so foreign to his own nature--the
competent personality I had found so vaguely horrible, and which Edward himself had once vowed
was the intruding soul of his wife. There was the same blazing vision--so like Asenath's and old
Ephraim's--and the same firm mouth; and when he spoke I could sense the same grim, pervasive irony
in his voice--the deep irony so redolent of potential evil. This was the person who had driven my car
through the night five months before--the person I had not seen since that brief call when he had
forgotten the oldtime doorbell signal and stirred such nebulous fears in me--and now he filled me
with the same dim feeling of blasphemous alienage and ineffable cosmic hideousness.
He spoke affably of arrangements for release--and there was nothing for me to do but assent,
despite some remarkable gaps in his recent memories. Yet I felt that something was terribly,
inexplicably wrong and abnormal. There were horrors in this thing that I could not reach. This was a
sane person--but was it indeed the Edward Derby I had known? If not, who or what was it--and where
was Edward? Ought it to be free or confined--or ought it to be extirpated from the face of the earth?
There was a hint of the abysmally sardonic in everything the creature said--the Asenath-like eyes lent
a special and baffling mockery to certain words about the early liberty earned by an especially close
confinement! I must have behaved very awkwardly, and was glad to beat a retreat.
All that day and the next I racked my brain over the problem. What had happened? What sort of
mind looked out through those alien eyes in Edward's face? I could think of nothing but this dimly
terrible enigma, and gave up all efforts to perform my usual work. The second morning the hospital
called up to say that the recovered patient was unchanged, and by evening I was close to a nervous
collapse--a state I admit, though others will vow it coloured my subsequent vision. I have nothing to
say on this point except that no madness of mine could account for all the evidence.
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 about midnight. When the call was traced afterward it was found to come
from the old Crowninshield house, though it was fully half a week from the housemaid's day to be
there. I shall only hint what was found at that house--the upheaval in a remote cellar storeroom, the
tracks, the dirt, the hastily rifled wardrobe, the baffling marks on the telephone, the clumsily used
stationery, and the detestable stench lingering over everything. The police, poor fools, have their
smug little theories, and are still searching for those sinister discharged servants--who have dropped
out of sight amidst the present furore. They speak of a 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? I will not
be driven out of my body...I will not change souls with that bullet-ridden lich in the madhouse!
But let me try to tell coherently of that final horror. I will not speak of what the police
persistently ignored--the tales of that dwarfed, grotesque, malodorous thing met by at least three
wayfarers in High Street just before two o'clock, and the nature of the single footprints in certain
places. I will say only that just about two the doorbell and knocker waked me--doorbell and knocker
both, applied alternately and uncertainly in a kind of weak desperation, and each trying to keep
Edward's old signal of three-and-two strokes.
Roused from sound sleep, my mind leaped into a turmoil. Derby at the door--and remembering the
old code! That new personality had not remembered it...was Edward suddenly back in his rightful
state? Why was he here in such evident stress and haste? Had he been released ahead of time, or had
he escaped? Perhaps, I thought as I flung on a robe and bounded downstairs, his return to his own
self had brought raving and violence, revoking his discharge and driving him to a desperate dash for
freedom. Whatever had happened, he was good old Edward again, and I would help him!
When I opened the door into the elm-arched blackness a gust of insufferably foetid wind almost
flung me prostrate. I choked in nausea, and for a second scarcely saw the dwarfed, humped figure on
the steps. The summons had been Edward's, but who was this foul, stunted parody? Where had
Edward had time to go? His ring had sounded only a second before the door opened.
The caller had on one of Edward's overcoats--its bottom almost touching the ground, and its
sleeves rolled back yet still covering the hands. On the head was a slouch hat pulled low, while a
black silk muffler concealed the face. As I stepped unsteadily forward, the figure made a semi-liquid
sound like that I had heard over the telephone--"glub...glub..."--and thrust at me a large, closely
written paper impaled on the end of a long pencil. Still reeling from the morbid and unaccountable
foetor, I seized the paper and tried to read it in the light from the doorway.
Beyond question, it was in Edward's script. But why had he written when he was close enough to
ring--and why was the script so awkward, coarse and shaky? I could make out nothing in the dim half
light, so edged back into the hall, the dwarf figure clumping mechanically after but pausing on the
inner door's threshold. The odour of this singular messenger was really appalling, and I hoped (not in
vain, thank God!) that my wife would not wake and confront it.
Then, as I read the paper, I felt my knees give under me and my vision go black. I was lying on the
floor when I came to, that accursed sheet still clutched in my fear-rigid hand. This is what it said.
"Dan--go to the sanitarium and kill it. Exterminate it. It isn't Edward Derby any more. She got me--
it's Asenath--and she has been dead three months and a half. I lied when I said she had gone away. I
killed her. I had to. It was sudden, but we were alone and I was in my right body. I saw a candlestick
and smashed her head in. She would have got me for good at Hallowmass.
"I buried her in the farther cellar storeroom under some old boxes and cleaned up all the traces.
The servants suspected next morning, but they have such secrets that they dare not tell the police. I
sent them off, but God knows what they--and others of the cult--will do.
"I thought for a while I was all right, and then I felt the tugging at my brain. I knew what it was--I
ought to have remembered. A soul like hers--or Ephraim's--is half detached, and keeps right on after
death as long as the body lasts. She was getting me--making me change bodies with her--seizing my
body and 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 this last word and warning. Kill that fiend if you value the peace and comfort of
the world. See that it is cremated. If you don't, it will live on and on, body to body forever, and I can't
tell you what it will do. Keep clear of black magic, Dan, it's the devil's business. Goodbye--you've
been a great friend. Tell the police whatever they'll believe--and I'm damnably sorry to drag all this
on you. I'll be at peace before long--this thing won't hold together much more. Hope you can read
this. And kill that thing--kill it.
Yours--Ed."
It was only afterward that I read the last half of this paper, for I had fainted at the end of the third
paragraph. I fainted again when I saw and smelled what cluttered up the threshold where the warm air
had struck it. The messenger would not move or have consciousness any more.
The butler, tougher-fibred than I, did not faint at what met him in the hall in the morning. Instead,
he telephoned the police. When they came I had been taken upstairs to bed, but the--other mass--lay
where it had collapsed in the night. The men put handkerchiefs to their noses.
What they finally found inside Edward's oddly-assorted clothes was mostly liquescent horror.
There were bones, too--and a crushed-in skull. Some dental work positively identified the skull as
Asenath's.

THE TOMB
In relating the circumstances which have led to my confinement within this refuge for the
demented, I am aware that my present position will create a natural doubt of the authenticity of my
narrative. It is an unfortunate fact that the bulk of humanity is too limited in its mental vision to weigh
with patience and intelligence those isolated phenomena, seen and felt only by a psychologically
sensitive few, which lie outside its common experience. Men of broader intellect know that there is
no sharp distinction betwixt the real and the unreal; that all things appear as they do only by virtue of
the delicate individual physical and mental media through which we are made conscious of them; but
the prosaic materialism of the majority condemns as madness the flashes of super-sight which
penetrate the common veil of obvious empiricism.
My name is Jervas Dudley, and from earliest childhood I have been a dreamer and a visionary.
Wealthy beyond the necessity of a commercial life, and temperamentally unfitted for the formal
studies and social recreations of my acquaintances, I have dwelt ever in realms apart from the visible
world; spending my youth and adolescence in ancient and little-known books, and in roaming the
fields and groves of the region near my ancestral home. I do not think that what I read in these books
or saw in these fields and groves was exactly what other boys read and saw there; but of this I must
say little, since detailed speech would but confirm those cruel slanders upon my intellect which I
sometimes overhear from the whispers of the stealthy attendants around me. It is sufficient for me to
relate events without analysing causes.
I have said that I dwelt apart from the visible world, but I have not said that I dwelt alone. This no
human creature may do; for lacking the fellowship of the living, he inevitably draws upon the
companionship of things that are not, or are no longer, living. Close by my home there lies a singular
wooded hollow, in whose twilight deeps I spent most of my time; reading, thinking and dreaming.
Down its moss-covered slopes my first steps of infancy were taken, and around its grotesquely
gnarled oak trees my first fancies of boyhood were woven. Well did I come to know the presiding
dryads of those trees, and often have I watched their wild dances in the struggling beams of waning
moon--but of these things I must not now speak. I will tell only of the lone tomb in the darkest of the
hillside thickets; the deserted tomb of the Hydes, an old and exalted family whose last direct
descendant had been laid within its black recesses many decades before my birth.
The vault to which I refer is an ancient granite, weathered and discoloured by the mists and
dampness of generations. Excavated back into the hillside, the structure is visible only at the
entrance. The door, a ponderous and forbidding slab of stone, hangs upon rusted iron hinges, and is
fastened ajar in a queerly sinister way by means of heavy iron chains and padlocks, according to a
gruesome fashion of half a century ago. The abode of the race whose scions are inurned had once
crowned the declivity which holds the tomb, but had long since fallen victim to the flames which
sprang up from a disastrous stroke of lighting. Of the midnight storm which destroyed this gloomy
mansion, the older inhabitants of the region sometimes speak in hushed and uneasy voices; alluding to
what they call "divine wrath" in a manner that in later years vaguely increased the always strong
fascination which I felt for the forest-darkened sepulchre. One man only had perished in the fire.
When the last of the Hydes was buried in this place of shade and stillness, the sad urnful of ashes had
come from a distant land; to which the family had repaired when the mansion burned down. No one
remains to lay flowers before the granite portal, and few care to brave the depressing shadows
which seem to linger strangely about the water-worn stones.
I shall never forget the afternoon when first I stumbled upon the half-hidden house of the dead. It
was in mid-summer, when the alchemy of Nature transmutes the sylvan landscape to one vivid and
almost homogeneous mass of green; when the senses are well-nigh intoxicated with the surging seas
of moist verdure and the subtly indefinable odours of the soil and the vegetation. In such
surroundings the mind loses its perspective; time and space become trivial and unreal, and echoes of
a forgotten prehistoric past beat insistently upon the enthralled consciousness. All day I had been
wandering through the mystic groves of the hollow; thinking thoughts I need not discuss, and
conversing with things I need not name. In years a child of ten, I had seen and heard many wonders
unknown to the throng; and was oddly aged in certain respects. When, upon forcing my way between
two savage clumps of briers, I suddenly encountered the entrance of the vault, I had no knowledge of
what I had discovered. The dark blocks of granite, the door so curiously ajar, and the funereal
carvings above the arch, aroused in me no associations of mournful or terrible character. Of graves
and tombs I knew and imagined much, but had on account of my peculiar temperament been kept from
all personal contact with churchyards and cemeteries. The strange stone house on the woodland
slope was to me only a source of interest and speculation; and its cold, damp interior, into which I
vainly peered through the aperture so tantalisingly left, contained for me no hint of death or decay.
But in that instant of curiosity was born the madly unreasoning desire which has brought me to this
hell of confinement. Spurred on by a voice which must have come from the hideous soul of the
forest, I resolved to enter the beckoning gloom in spite of the ponderous chains which barred my
passage. In the waning light of day I alternately rattled the rusty impediments with a view to throwing
wide the stone door, and essayed to squeeze my slight form through the space already provided; but
neither plan met with success. At first curious, I was not frantic; and when in the thickening twilight I
returned to my home, I had sworn to the hundred gods of the grove that at any cost I would some day
force an entrance to the black chilly depths that seemed calling out to me. The physician with the
iron-grey beard who comes each day to my room once told a visitor that this decision marked the
beginnings of a pitiful monomania; but I will leave final judgement to my readers when they shall
have learnt all.
The months following my discovery were spent in futile attempts to force the complicated
padlock of the slightly open vault, and in carefully guarded inquiries regarding the nature and history
of the structure. With the traditionally receptive ears of the small boy, I learned much; though an
habitual secretiveness caused me to tell no one of my information or my resolve. It is perhaps worth
mentioning that I was not at all surprised or terrified on learning of the nature of the vault. My rather
original ideas regarding life and death had caused me to associate the cold clay with the breathing
body in a vague fashion; and I felt that the great sinister family of the burned-down mansion was in
some way represented within the stone space I sought to explore. Mumbled tales of the weird rites
and godless revels of bygone years in the ancient hall gave to me a new and potent interest in the
tomb, before whose door I would sit for hours at a time each day. Once I thrust a candle within the
nearly closed entrance, but could see nothing save a flight of damp stone steps leading downward.
The odour of the place repelled yet bewitched me. I felt I had known it before, in a past remote
beyond all recollection; beyond even my tenancy of the body I now possess.
The year after I first beheld the tomb, I stumbled upon a worm-eaten translation of Plutarch's Lives
in the book-filled attic of my home. Reading the life of Theseus, I was much impressed by that
passage telling of the great stone beneath which the boyish hero was to find his tokens of destiny
whenever he should become old enough to lift its enormous weight. This legend had the effect of
dispelling my keenest impatience to enter the vault, for it made me feel that the time was not yet ripe.
Later, I told myself, I should grow to a strength and ingenuity which might enable me to unfasten the
heavily chained door with ease; but until then I would do better by conforming to what seemed the
will of Fate.
Accordingly my watches by the dank portal became less persistent, and much of my time was
spent in other though equally strange pursuits. I would sometimes rise very quietly in the night,
stealing out to walk in those churchyards and places of burial from which I had been kept by my
parents. What I did there I may not say, for I am not now sure of the reality of certain things; but I
know that on the day after such a nocturnal ramble I would often astonish those about me with my
knowledge of topics almost forgotten for many generations. It was after a night like this that I
shocked the community with a queer conceit about the burial of the rich and celebrated Squire
Brewster, a maker of local history who was interred in 1711, and whose slate headstone, bearing a
graven skull and crossbones, was slowly crumbling to power. In a moment of childish imagination I
vowed not only that the undertaker, Goodman Simpson, had stolen the silver-buckled shoes, silken
hose, and satin small-clothes of the deceased before burial; but that the Squire himself, not fully
inanimate, had turned twice in his mound-covered coffin on the day of interment.
But the idea of entering the tomb never left my thoughts; being indeed stimulated by the
unexpected genealogical discover that my own maternal ancestry possessed at least a slight link with
the supposedly extinct family of the Hydes. Last of my paternal race, I was likewise the last of this
older and more mysterious line. I began to feel that the tomb was mine, and to look forward with hot
eagerness to the time when I might pass within that stone door and down those slimy stone steps in the
dark. I now formed the habit of listening very intently at the slightly open portal, choosing my
favourite hours of midnight stillness for the odd vigil. By the time I came of age, I had made a small
clearing in the thicket before the mould-stained facade of the hillside, allowing the surrounding
vegetation to encircle and overhang the space like the walls and roof of sylvan bower. This bower
was my temple, the fastened door my shrine, and here I would like outstretched on the mossy ground,
thinking strange thoughts and dreaming of strange dreams.
The night of the first revelation was a sultry one. I must have fallen asleep from fatigue, for it
was with a distinct sense of awakening that I heard the voices. Of those tones and accents I hesitate to
speak; of their quality I will not speak; but I may say that they presented certain uncanny differences in
vocabulary, pronunciation, and mode of utterance. Every shade of New England dialect, from the
uncouth syllables of the Puritan colonists to the precise rhetoric of fifty years ago, seemed
represented in that shadowy colloquy, though it was only later that I noticed the fact. At the time,
indeed, my attention was distracted from this matter by another phenomenon; a phenomenon so
fleeting that I could not take oath upon its reality. I barely fancied that as I awoke, a light had been
hurriedly extinguished within the sunken sepulchre. I do not think I was either astounded or panic-
stricken, but I know that I was greatly and permanently changed that night. Upon returning home I went
with much directness to a rotting chest in the attic, wherein I found the key which next day unlocked
with ease the barrier I had so long stormed in vain.
It was in the soft glow of late afternoon that I first entered the vault on the abandoned slope. A
spell was upon me, and my heart leaped with an exultation I can but ill describe. As I closed the door
behind me and descended the dripping steps by the light of my lone candle, I seemed to know the way;
and though the candle sputtered with the stifling reek of the place, I felt singularly at home in the
musty, charnel-house air. Looking about me, I beheld many marble slabs bearing coffins, or the
remains of coffins. Some of these were sealed and intact, but others had nearly vanished, leaving the
silver handles and plates isolated amidst certain curious heaps of whitish dust. Upon one plate I read
the name of Sir Geoffrey Hyde, who had come from Sussex in 1640 and died here a few years later.
In a conspicuous alcove was one fairly well-preserved and untenanted casket, adorned with a single
name which brought to me both a smile and a shudder. An odd impulse caused me to climb upon the
broad slab, extinguish my candle, and lie down within the vacant box.
In the grey light of dawn I staggered from the vault and locked the chain of the door behind me. I
was no longer a young man, though but twenty-one winters had chilled my bodily frame. Early-rising
villagers who observed my homeward progress looked at me strangely, and marvelled at the signs of
ribald revelry which they saw in one whose life was known to be sober and solitary. I did not appear
before my parents till after a long and refreshing sleep.
Henceforward I haunted the tomb each night; seeing, hearing, and doing things I must never
reveal. My speech, always susceptible to environmental influences, was the first thing to succumb to
the change; and my suddenly acquired archaism of diction was soon remarked upon. Later a queer
boldness and recklessness came into my demeanour, till I unconsciously grew to possess the bearing
of a man of the world despite my lifelong seclusion. My formerly silent tongue waxed voluble with
the easy grace of a Chesterfield or the godless cynicism of a Rochester. I displayed a peculiar
erudition utterly unlike the fantastic, monkish lore over which I had pored in youth; and covered the
flyleaves of my books with facile impromptu epigrams which brought up suggestions of Gay, Prior,
and the sprightliest of Augustan wits and rimesters. One morning at breakfast I came close to disaster
by declaiming in palpably liquourish accents an effusion of eighteenth--century Bacchanalian mirth; a
bit of Georgian playfulness never recorded in a book, which ran something like this:
Come hither, my lads, with your tankards of ale,
And drink to the present before it shall fail;
Pile each on your platter a mountain of beef,
For 'tis eating and drinking that bring us relief:
So fill up your glass,
So life will soon pass;
When you're dead ye'll ne'er drink to your king or your lass!
Anacreon had a red nose, so they say;
But what's a red nose if ye're happy and gay?
Gad split me! I'd rather be red whilst I'm here,
Than white as a lily--and dead half a year!
So Betty, my miss,
Come give me kiss;
In hell there's no innkeeper's daughter like this!
Young Harry, propp'd up just as straight as he's able,
Will soon lose his wig and slip under the table;
But fill up your goblets and pass 'em around--
Better under the table than under the ground!
So revel and chaff
As ye thirstily quaff:
Under six feet of dirt 'tis less easy to laugh!
The fiend strike me blue! I'm scarce able to walk,
And damn me if I can stand upright or talk!
Here, landlord, bid Betty to summon a chair;
I'll try home for a while, for my wife is not there!
So lend me a hand;
I'm not able to stand,
But I'm gay whilst I linger on top of the land!
About this time I conceived my present fear of fire and thunderstorms. Previously indifferent to
such things, I had now an unspeakable horror of them; and would retire to the innermost recesses of
the house whenever the heavens threatened an electrical display. A favourite haunt of mine during the
day was the ruined cellar of the mansion that had burned down, and in fancy I would picture the
structure as it had been in its prime. On one occasion I startled a villager by leading him confidently
to a shallow sub-cellar, of whose existence I seemed to know in spite of the fact that it had been
unseen and forgotten for many generations.
At last came that which I had long feared. My parents, alarmed at the altered manner and
appearance of their only son, commenced to exert over my movements a kindly espionage which
threatened to result in disaster. I had told no one of my visits to the tomb, having guarded my secret
purpose with religious zeal since childhood; but now I was forced to exercise care in threading the
mazes of the wooded hollow, that I might throw off a possible pursuer. My key to the vault I kept
suspended from a cord about my neck, its presence known only to me. I never carried out of the
sepulchre any of the things I came upon whilst within its walls.
One morning as I emerged from the damp tomb and fastened the chain of the portal with none too
steady hand, I beheld in an adjacent thicket the dreaded face of a watcher. Surely the end was near; for
my bower was discovered, and the objective of my nocturnal journeys revealed. The man did not
accost me, so I hastened home in an effort to overhear what he might report to my careworn father.
Were my sojourns beyond the chained door about to be proclaimed to the world? Imagine my
delighted astonishment on hearing the spy inform my parent in cautious whisper that I had spent the
night in the bower outside the tomb; my sleep-filmed eyes fixed upon the crevice where the padlocked
portal stood ajar! By what miracle had the watcher been thus deluded? I was now convinced that a
supernatural agency protected me. Made bold by this heaven-sent circumstance, I began to resume
perfect openness in going to the vault; confident that no one could witness my entrance. For a week I
tasted to the full the joys of that charnel conviviality which I must not describe, when the thing
happened, and I was borne away to this accursed abode of sorrow and monotony.
I should not have ventured out that night; for the taint of thunder was in the clouds, and hellish
phosphorescence rose from the rank swamp at the bottom of the hollow. The call of the dead, too,
was different. Instead of the hillside tomb, it was the charred cellar on the crest of the slope whose
presiding daemon beckoned to me with unseen fingers. As I emerged from an intervening grove upon
the plain before the ruin, I beheld in the misty moonlight a thing I had always vaguely expected. The
mansion, gone for a century, once more reared its stately height to the raptured vision; every window
ablaze with the splendour of many candles. Up the long drive rolled the coaches of the Boston
gentry, whilst on foot came a numerous assemblage of powdered exquisites from the neighbouring
mansions. With this throng I mingled, though I knew I belonged with the hosts rather than the guests.
Inside the hall were music, laughter, and wine on every hand. Several faces I recognised; though I
should have known them better had they been shrivelled or eaten away by death and decomposition.
Amidst a wild and reckless throng I was the wildest and most abandoned. Gay blasphemy poured in
torrents from my lips, and in my shocking sallies I heeded no law of God, Man, or Nature. Suddenly a
peal of thunder, resonant even above the din of the swinish revelry, clave the very roof and laid a
hush of fear upon the boisterous company. Red tongues of flame and searing gusts of heat engulfed
the house; and the roysterers, struck with terror at the descent of a calamity which seemed to
transcend the bounds of unguided Nature, fled shrieking into the night. I alone remained, riveted to
my seat by a grovelling fear which I had never felt before. And then a second horror took possession
of my soul. Burnt alive to ashes, my body dispersed by the four winds, I might never lie in the tomb of
Hydes! Was not my coffin prepared for me? Had I not a right to rest till eternity amongst the
descendants of Sir Geoffrey Hyde? Aye! I would claim my heritage of death, even though my soul
go seeking through the ages for another corporeal tenement to represent it on that vacant slab in the
alcove of the vault. Jervas Hyde should never share the sad fate of Palinurus!
As the phantom of the burning house faded, I found myself screaming and struggling madly in the
arms of two men, one of whom was the spy who had followed me to the tomb. Rain was pouring
down in torrents, and upon the southern horizon were flashes of the lightning that had so lately
passed over our heads. My father, his face lined with sorrow, stood by as I shouted my demands to
be laid within the tomb; frequently admonishing my captors to treat me as gently as they could. A
blackened circle on the floor of the ruined cellar told of a violent stroke from the heavens; and from
this spot a group of curious villagers with lanterns were prying a small box of antique workmanship
which the thunderbolt had brought to light. Ceasing my futile and now objectless writhing, I watched
the spectators as they viewed the treasure-trove, and was permitted to share in their discoveries. The
box, whose fastenings were broken by the stroke which had unearthed it, contained many papers and
objects of value; but I had eyes for one thing alone. It was the porcelain miniature of a young man in a
smartly curled bag-wig, and bore the initials "J.H."The face was such that as I gazed, I might well
have been studying my mirror.
On the following day I was brought to this room with the barred windows, but I have been kept
informed of certain things through an aged and simple-minded servitor, for whom I bore a fondness
in infancy, and who like me loves the churchyard. What I have dared relate of my experiences within
the vault has brought me only pitying smiles. My father, who visits me frequently, declares that at no
time did I pass the chained portal, and swears that the rusted padlock had not been touched for fifty
years when he examined it. He even says that all the village knew of my journeys to the tomb, and that
I was often watched as I slept in the bower outside the grim facade, my half-open eyes fixed on the
crevice that leads to the interior. Against these assertions I have no tangible proof to offer, since my
key to the padlock was lost in the struggle on that night of horrors. The strange things of the past
which I learnt during those nocturnal meetings with the dead he dismisses as the fruits of my lifelong
and omnivorous browsing amongst the ancient volumes of the family library. Had it not been for my
old servant Hiram, I should have by this time become quite convinced of my madness.
But Hiram, loyal to the last, has held faith in me, and has done that which impels me to make
public at least a part of my story. A week ago he burst open the lock which chains the door of the
tomb perpetually ajar, and descended with a lantern into the murky depths. On a slab in an alcove he
found an old but empty coffin whose tarnished plate bears the single word "Jervas". In that coffin and
in that vault they have promised me I shall be buried.

THE TRANSITION OF JUAN ROMERO
Of the events which took place at the Norton Mine on October eighteenth and nineteenth, 1894, I
have no desire to speak. A sense of duty to science is all that impels me to recall, in the last years of
my life, scenes and happenings fraught with a terror doubly acute because I cannot wholly define it.
But I believe that before I die I should tell what I know of the--shall I say transition--of Juan Romero.
My name and origin need not be related to posterity; in fact, I fancy it is better that they should not
be, for when a man suddenly migrates to the States or the Colonies, he leaves his past behind him.
Besides, what I once was is not in the least relevant to my narrative; save perhaps the fact that during
my service in India I was more at home amongst white-bearded native teachers than amongst my
brother--officers. I had delved not a little into odd Eastern lore when overtaken by the calamities
which brought about my new life in America's vast West--a life wherein I found it well to accept a
name--my present one--which is very common and carries no meaning.
In the summer and autumn of 1894 I dwelt in the drear expanses of the CactusMountains, employed
as a common labourer at the celebrated Norton Mine, whose discovery by an aged prospector some
years before had turned the surrounding region from a nearly unpeopled waste to a seething cauldron
of sordid life. A cavern of gold, lying deep beneath a mountain lake, had enriched its venerable
finder beyond his wildest dreams, and now formed the seat of extensive tunneling operations on the
part of the corporation to which it had finally been sold. Additional grottoes had been found, and the
yield of yellow metal was exceedingly great; so that a mighty and heterogeneous army of miners
toiled day and night in the numerous passages and rock hollows. The Superintendent, a Mr. Arthur,
often discussed the singularity of the local geological formations; speculating on the probable extent
of the chain of caves, and estimating the future of the titanic mining enterprises. He considered the
auriferous cavities the result of the action of water, and believed the last of them would soon be
opened.
It was not long after my arrival and employment that Juan Romero came to the Norton Mine. One
of the large herd of unkempt Mexicans attracted thither from the neighbouring country, he at first
attracted attention only because of his features; which though plainly of the Red Indian type, were yet
remarkable for their light colour and refined conformation, being vastly unlike those of the average
"greaser" or Piute of the locality. It is curious that although he differed so widely from the mass of
Hispanicised and tribal Indians, Romero gave not the least impression of Caucasian blood. It was not
the Castilian conquistador or the American pioneer, but the ancient and noble Aztec, whom
imagination called to view when the silent peon would rise in the early morning and gaze in
fascination at the sun as it crept above the eastern hills, meanwhile stretching out his arms to the orb
as if in the performance of some rite whose nature he did not himself comprehend. But save for his
face, Romero was not in any way suggestive of nobility. Ignorant and dirty, he was at home amongst
the other brown-skinned Mexicans; having come (so I was afterward told) from the very lowest sort
of surroundings. He had been found as a child in a crude mountain hut, the only survivor of an
epidemic which had stalked lethally by. Near the hut, close to a rather unusual rock fissure, had lain
two skeletons, newly picked by vultures, and presumably forming the sole remains of his parents. No
one recalled their identity, and they were soon forgotten by the many. Indeed, the crumbling of the
adobe hut and the closing of the rock-fissure by a subsequent avalanche had helped to efface even
the scene from recollection. Reared by a Mexican cattle-thief who had given him his name, Juan
differed little from his fellows.
The attachment which Romero manifested toward me was undoubtedly commenced through the
quaint and ancient Hindoo ring which I wore when not engaged in active labour. Of its nature, and
manner of coming into my possession, I cannot speak. It was my last link with a chapter of my life
forever closed, and I valued it highly. Soon I observed that the odd-looking Mexican was likewise
interested; eyeing it with an expression that banished all suspicion of mere covetousness. Its hoary
hieroglyphs seemed to stir some faint recollection in his untutored but active mind, though he could
not possibly have beheld their like before. Within a few weeks after his advent, Romero was like a
faithful servant to me; this notwithstanding the fact that I was myself but an ordinary miner. Our
conversation was necessarily limited. He knew but a few words of English, while I found my
Oxonian Spanish was something quite different from the patois of the peon of New Spain.
The event which I am about to relate was unheralded by long premonitions. Though the man
Romero had interested me, and though my ring had affected him peculiarly, I think that neither of us
had any expectation of what was to follow when the great blast was set off. Geological
considerations had dictated an extension of the mine directly downward from the deepest part of the
subterranean area; and the belief of the Superintendent that only solid rock would be encountered, had
led to the placing of a prodigious charge of dynamite. With this work Romero and I were not
connected, wherefore our first knowledge of extraordinary conditions came from others. The
charge, heavier perhaps than had been estimated, had seemed to shake the entire mountain. Windows
in shanties on the slope outside were shattered by the shock, whilst miners throughout the nearer
passages were knocked from their feet. Jewel Lake, which lay above the scene of action, heaved as
in a tempest. Upon investigation it was seen that a new abyss yawned indefinitely below the seat of
the blast; an abyss so monstrous that no handy line might fathom it, nor any lamp illuminate it. Baffled,
the excavators sought a conference with the Superintendent, who ordered great lengths of rope to be
taken to the pit, and spliced and lowered without cessation till a bottom might be discovered.
Shortly afterward the pale-faced workmen apprised the Superintendent of their failure. Firmly
though respectfully, they signified their refusal to revisit the chasm or indeed to work further in the
mine until it might be sealed. Something beyond their experience was evidently confronting them, for
so far as they could ascertain, the void below was infinite. The Superintendent did not reproach them.
Instead, he pondered deeply, and made plans for the following day. The night shift did not go on that
evening.
At two in the morning a lone coyote on the mountain began to howl dismally. From somewhere
within the works a dog barked an answer; either to the coyote--or to something else. A storm was
gathering around the peaks of the range, and weirdly shaped clouds scudded horribly across the
blurred patch of celestial light which marked a gibbous moon's attempts to shine through many layers
of cirro-stratus vapours. It was Romero's voice, coming from the bunk above, that awakened me, a
voice excited and tense with some vague expectation I could not understand:
"Madre de Dios!--el sonido--ese sonido--oiga Vd!--lo oye Vd?--seor, THAT SOUND!"
I listened, wondering what sound he meant. The coyote, the dog, the storm, all were audible; the
last named now gaining ascendancy as the wind shrieked more and more frantically. Flashes of
lightning were visible through the bunk-house window. I questioned the nervous Mexican, repeating
the sounds I had heard:
"El coyote--el perro--el viento?"
But Romero did not reply. Then he commenced whispering as in awe:
"El ritmo, seor--el ritmo de la tierra--THAT THROB DOWN IN THE GROUND!"
And now I also heard; heard and shivered and without knowing why. Deep, deep, below me was a
sound--a rhythm, just as the peon had said--which, though exceedingly faint, yet dominated even the
dog, the coyote, and the increasing tempest. To seek to describe it was useless--for it was such that
no description is possible. Perhaps it was like the pulsing of the engines far down in a great liner, as
sensed from the deck, yet it was not so mechanical; not so devoid of the element of the life and
consciousness. Of all its qualities, remoteness in the earth most impressed me. To my mind rushed
fragments of a passage in Joseph Glanvil which Poe has quoted with tremendous effect:
".....the vastness, profundity, and unsearchableness of His works, which have a depth in them
greater than the well of Democritus."
Suddenly Romero leaped from his bunk, pausing before me to gaze at the strange ring on my hand,
which glistened queerly in every flash of lightning, and then staring intently in the direction of the
mine shaft. I also rose, and both of us stood motionless for a time, straining our ears as the uncanny
rhythm seemed more and more to take on a vital quality. Then without apparent volition we began to
move toward the door, whose rattling in the gale held a comforting suggestion of earthly reality. The
chanting in the depths--for such the sound now seemed to be--grew in volume and distinctness; and
we felt irresistibly urged out into the storm and thence to the gaping blackness of the shaft.
We encountered no living creature, for the men of the night shift had been released from duty, and
were doubtless at the Dry Gulch settlement pouring sinister rumours into the ear of some drowsy
bartender. From the watchman's cabin, however, gleamed a small square of yellow light like a
guardian eye. I dimly wondered how the rhythmic sound had affected the watchman; but Romero was
moving more swiftly now, and I followed without pausing.
As we descended the shaft, the sound beneath grew definitely composite. It struck me as horribly
like a sort of Oriental ceremony, with beating of drums and chanting of many voices. I have, as you
are aware, been much in India. Romero and I moved without material hesitancy through drifts and
down ladders; ever toward the thing that allured us, yet ever with a pitifully helpless fear and
reluctance. At one time I fancied I had gone mad--this was when, on wondering how our way was
lighted in the absence of lamp or candle, I realized that the ancient ring on my finger was glowing
with eerie radiance, diffusing a pallid lustre through the damp, heavy air around.
It was without warning that Romero, after clambering down one of the many wide ladders, broke
into a run and left me alone. Some new and wild note in the drumming and chanting, perceptible but
slightly to me, had acted on him in a startling fashion; and with a wild outcry he forged ahead
unguided in the cavern's gloom. I heard his repeated shrieks before me, as he stumbled awkwardly
along the level places and scrambled madly down the rickety ladders. And frightened as I was, I yet
retained enough of my perception to note that his speech, when articulate, was not of any sort known
to me. Harsh but impressive polysyllables had replaced the customary mixture of bad Spanish and
worse English, and of these, only the oft repeated cry "Huitzilopotchli" seemed in the least familiar.
Later I definitely placed that word in the works of a great historian--and shuddered when the
association came to me.
The climax of that awful night was composite but fairly brief, beginning just as I reached the final
cavern of the journey. Out of the darkness immediately ahead burst a final shriek from the Mexican,
which was joined by such a chorus of uncouth sound as I could never hear again and survive. In that
moment it seemed as if all the hidden terrors and monstrosities of earth had become articulate in an
effort to overwhelm the human race. Simultaneously the light from my ring was extinguished, and I
saw a new light glimmering from lower space but a few yards ahead of me. I had arrived at the abyss,
which was now redly aglow, and which had evidently swallowed up the unfortunate Romero.
Advancing, I peered over the edge of that chasm which no line could fathom, and which was now a
pandemonium of flickering flame and hideous uproar. At first I beheld nothing but a seething blur of
luminosity; but then shapes, all infinitely distant, began to detach themselves from the confusion, and I
saw--was it Juan Romero?--but God! I dare not tell you what I saw!..Some power from heaven,
coming to my aid, obliterated both sights and sounds in such a crash as may be heard when two
universes collide in space. Chaos supervened, and I knew the peace of oblivion.
I hardly know how to continue, since conditions so singular are involved; but I will do my best,
not even trying to differentiate betwixt the real and the apparent. When I awakened, I was safe in my
bunk and the red glow of dawn was visible at the window. Some distance away the lifeless body of
Juan Romero lay upon a table, surrounded by a group of men, including the camp doctor. The men
were discussing the strange death of the Mexican as he lay asleep; a death seemingly connected in
some way with the terrible bolt of lightning which had struck and shaken the mountain. No direct
cause was evident, and an autopsy failed to show any reason why Romero should not be living.
Snatches of conversation indicated beyond a doubt that neither Romero nor I had left the bunk-house
during the night; that neither of us had been awake during the frightful storm which had passed over
the Cactus range. That storm, said men who had ventured down the mine shaft, had caused extensive
caving-in, and had completely closed the deep abyss which had created so much apprehension the
day before. When I asked the watchman what sounds he had heard prior to the mighty thunderbolt; he
mentioned a coyote, a dog, and the snarling mountain wind--nothing more. Nor do I doubt his word.
Upon the resumption of work, Superintendent Arthur called upon some especially dependable
men to make a few investigations around the spot where the gulf had appeared. Though hardly eager,
they obeyed, and a deep boring was made. Results were very curious. The roof of the void, as seen
when it was open, was not by any means thick; yet now the drills of the investigators met what
appeared to be a limitless extent of solid rock. Finding nothing else, not even gold, the
Superintendent abandoned his attempts; but a perplexed look occasionally steals over his countenance
as he sits thinking at his desk.
One other thing is curious. Shortly after waking on that morning after the storm, I noticed the
unaccountable absence of my Hindoo ring from my finger. I had prized it greatly, yet nevertheless
felt a sensation of relief at its disappearance. If one of my fellow-miners appropriated it, he must
have been quite clever in disposing of his booty, for despite advertisements and a police search, the
ring was never seen again. Somehow I doubt if it was stolen by mortal hands, for many strange things
were taught me in India.
My opinion of my whole experience varies from time to time. In broad daylight, and at most
seasons I am apt to think the greater part of it a mere dream; but sometimes in the autumn, about two in
the morning when the winds and animals howl dismally, there comes from inconceivable depths
below a damnable suggestion of rhythmical throbbing..and I feel that the transition of Juan Romero
was a terrible one indeed.

THE TREE
Many years ago, when the hillside villa was new and resplendent, there dwelt within it the two
sculptors Kalos and Musides. From Lydia to Neapolis the beauty of their work was praised, and none
dared say that the one excelled the other in skill. The Hermes of Kalos stood in a marble shrine in
Corinth, and the Pallas of Musides surmounted a pillar in Athens near the Parthenon. All men paid
homage to Kalos and Musides, and marvelled that no shadow of artistic jealousy cooled the warmth
of their brotherly friendship.
But though Kalos and Musides dwelt in unbroken harmony, their natures were not alike. Whilst
Musides revelled by night amidst the urban gaieties of Tegea, Kalos would remain at home; stealing
away from the sight of his slaves into the cool recesses of the olive grove. There he would meditate
upon the visions that filled his mind, and there devise the forms of beauty which later became
immortal in breathing marble. Idle folk, indeed, said that Kalos conversed with the spirits of the
grove, and that his statues were but images of the fauns and dryads he met there for he patterned his
work after no living model.
So famous were Kalos and Musides, that none wondered when the Tyrant of Syracuse sent to
them deputies to speak of the costly statue of Tyche which he had planned for his city. Of great size
and cunning workmanship must the statue be, for it was to form a wonder of nations and a goal of
travellers. Exalted beyond thought would be he whose work should gain acceptance, and for this
honor Kalos and Musides were invited to compete. Their brotherly love was well known, and the
crafty Tyrant surmised that each, instead of concealing his work from the other, would offer aid and
advice; this charity producing two images of unheard of beauty, the lovelier of which would eclipse
even the dreams of poets.
With joy the sculptors hailed the Tyrant's offer, so that in the days that followed their slaves
heard the ceaseless blows of chisels. Not from each other did Kalos and Musides conceal their
work, but the sight was for them alone. Saving theirs, no eyes beheld the two divine figures released
by skillful blows from the rough blocks that had imprisoned them since the world began.
At night, as of yore, Musides sought the banquet halls of Tegea whilst Kalos wandered alone in
the olive grove. But as time passed, men observed a want of gaiety in the once sparkling Musides. It
was strange, they said amongst themselves that depression should thus seize one with so great a
chance to win art's loftiest reward. Many months passed yet in the sour face of Musides came nothing
of the sharp expectancy which the situation should arouse.
Then one day Musides spoke of the illness of Kalos, after which none marvelled again at his
sadness, since the sculptors' attachment was known to be deep and sacred. Subsequently many went to
visit Kalos, and indeed noticed the pallor of his face; but there was about him a happy serenity which
made his glance more magical than the glance of Musides who was clearly distracted with anxiety
and who pushed aside all the slaves in his eagerness to feed and wait upon his friend with his own
hands. Hidden behind heavy curtains stood the two unfinished figures of Tyche, little touched of late
by the sick man and his faithful attendant.
As Kalos grew inexplicably weaker and weaker despite the ministrations of puzzled physicians
and of his assiduous friend, he desired to be carried often to the grove which he so loved. There he
would ask to be left alone, as if wishing to speak with unseen things. Musides ever granted his
requests, though his eyes filled with visible tears at the thought that Kalos should care more for the
fauns and the dryads than for him. At last the end drew near, and Kalos discoursed of things beyond
this life. Musides, weeping, promised him a sepulchre more lovely than the tomb of Mausolus; but
Kalos bade him speak no more of marble glories. Only one wish now haunted the mind of the dying
man; that twigs from certain olive trees in the grove be buried by his resting place--close to his head.
And one night, sitting alone in the darkness of the olive grove, Kalos died. Beautiful beyond words
was the marble sepulchre which stricken Musides carved for his beloved friend. None but Kalos
himself could have fashioned such basreliefs, wherein were displayed all the splendours of
Elysium. Nor did Musides fail to bury close to Kalos' head the olive twigs from the grove.
As the first violence of Musides' grief gave place to resignation, he labored with diligence upon
his figure of Tyche. All honour was now his, since the Tyrant of Syracuse would have the work of
none save him or Kalos. His task proved a vent for his emotion and he toiled more steadily each day,
shunning the gaieties he once had relished. Meanwhile his evenings were spent beside the tomb of
his friend, where a young olive tree had sprung up near the sleeper's head. So swift was the growth
of this tree, and so strange was its form, that all who beheld it exclaimed in surprise; and Musides
seemed at once fascinated and repelled.
Three years after the death of Kalos, Musides despatched a messenger to the Tyrant, and it was
whispered in the agora at Tegea that the mighty statue was finished. By this time the tree by the tomb
had attained amazing proportions, exceeding all other trees of its kind, and sending out a singularly
heavy branch above the apartment in which Musides labored. As many visitors came to view the
prodigious tree, as to admire the art of the sculptor, so that Musides was seldom alone. But he did
not mind his multitude of guests; indeed, he seemed to dread being alone now that his absorbing work
was done. The bleak mountain wind, sighing through the olive grove and the tomb-tree, had an
uncanny way of forming vaguely articulate sounds.
The sky was dark on the evening that the Tyrant's emissaries came to Tegea. It was definitely
known that they had come to bear away the great image of Tyche and bring eternal honour to
Musides, so their reception by the proxenoi was of great warmth. As the night wore on a violent
storm of wind broke over the crest of Maenalus, and the men from far Syracuse were glad that they
rested snugly in the town. They talked of their illustrious Tyrant, and of the splendour of his capital
and exulted in the glory of the statue which Musides had wrought for him. And then the men of
Tegea spoke of the goodness of Musides, and of his heavy grief for his friend and how not even the
coming laurels of art could console him in the absence of Kalos, who might have worn those laurels
instead. Of the tree which grew by the tomb, near the head of Kalos, they also spoke. The wind
shrieked more horribly, and both the Syracusans and the Arcadians prayed to Aiolos.
In the sunshine of the morning the proxenoi led the Tyrant's messengers up the slope to the abode
of the sculptor, but the night wind had done strange things. Slaves' cries ascended from a scene of
desolation, and no more amidst the olive grove rose the gleaming colonnades of that vast hall
wherein Musides had dreamed and toiled. Lone and shaken mourned the humble courts and the lower
walls, for upon the sumptuous greater peristyle had fallen squarely the heavy overhanging bough of
the strange new tree, reducing the stately poem in marble with odd completeness to a mound of
unsightly ruins. Strangers and Tegeans stood aghast, looking from the wreckage to the great, sinister
tree whose aspect was so weirdly human and whose roots reached so queerly into the sculptured
sepulchre of Kalos. And their fear and dismay increased when they searched the fallen apartment, for
of the gentle Musides, and of the marvellously fashioned image of Tyche, no trace could be
discovered. Amidst such stupendous ruin only chaos dwelt, and the representatives of two cities left
disappointed; Syracusans that they had no statue to bear home, Tegeans that they had no artist to
crown. However, the Syracusans obtained after a while a very splendid statue in Athens, and the
Tegeans consoled themselves by erecting in the agora a marble temple commemorating the gifts,
virtues, and brotherly piety of Musides.
But the olive grove still stands, as does the tree growing out of the tomb of Kalos, and the old
bee-keeper told me that sometimes the boughs whisper to one another in the night wind, saying over
and over again. "Oida! Oida!--I know! I know!"

THE UNNAMABLE
With this friend, Joel Manton, I had often languidly disputed. He was principal of the EastHigh
School, born and bred in Boston and sharing New England's self-satisfied deafness to the delicate
overtones of life. It was his view that only our normal, objective experiences possess any esthetic
significance, and that it is the province of the artist not so much to rouse strong emotion by action,
ecstasy, and astonishment, as to maintain a placid interest and appreciation by accurate, detailed
transcripts of everyday affairs. Especially did he object to my preoccupation with the mystical and
the unexplained; for although believing in the supernatural much more fully than I, he would not admit
that it is sufficiently commonplace for literary treatment. That a mind can find its greatest pleasure in
escapes from the daily treadmill, and in original and dramatic recombinations of images usually
thrown by habit and fatigue into the hackneyed patterns of actual existence, was something virtually
incredible to his clear, practical, and logical intellect. With him all things and feelings had fixed
dimensions, properties, causes, and effects; and although he vaguely knew that the mind sometimes
holds visions and sensations of far less geometrical, classifiable, and workable nature, he believed
himself justified in drawing an arbitrary line and ruling out of court all that cannot be experienced and
understood by the average citizen. Besides, he was almost sure that nothing can be really
"unnamable." It didn't sound sensible to him.
Though I well realized the futility of imaginative and metaphysical arguments against the
complacency of an orthodox sun-dweller, something in the scene of this afternoon colloquy moved
me to more than usual contentiousness. The crumbling slate slabs, the patriarchal trees, and the
centuried gambrel roofs of the witch-haunted old town that stretched around, all combined to rouse
my spirit in defense of my work; and I was soon carrying my thrusts into the enemy's own country. It
was not, indeed, difficult to begin a counter-attack, for I knew that Joel Manton actually half clung to
many old-wives' superstitions which sophisticated people had long outgrown; beliefs in the
appearance of dying persons at distant places, and in the impressions left by old faces on the
windows through which they had gazed all their lives. To credit these whisperings of rural
grandmothers, I now insisted, argued a faith in the existence of spectral substances on the earth apart
from and subsequent to their material counterparts. It argued a capability of believing in phenomena
beyond all normal notions; for if a dead man can transmit his visible or tangible image half across the
world, or down the stretch of the centuries, how can it be absurd to suppose that deserted houses are
full of queer sentient things, or that old graveyards teem with the terrible, unbodied intelligence of
generations? And since spirit, in order to cause all the manifestations attributed to it, cannot be limited
by any of the laws of matter, why is it extravagant to imagine psychically living dead things in
shapes--or absences of shapes--which must for human spectators be utterly and appallingly
"unnamable"? "Common sense" in reflecting on these subjects, I assured my friend with some warmth,
is merely a stupid absence of imagination and mental flexibility.
Twilight had now approached, but neither of us felt any wish to cease speaking. Manton seemed
unimpressed by my arguments, and eager to refute them, having that confidence in his own opinions
which had doubtless caused his success as a teacher; whilst I was too sure of my ground to fear
defeat. The dusk fell, and lights faintly gleamed in some of the distant windows, but we did not move.
Our seat on the tomb was very comfortable, and I knew that my prosaic friend would not mind the
cavernous rift in the ancient, root-disturbed brickwork close behind us, or the utter blackness of the
spot brought by the intervention of a tottering, deserted seventeenth-century house between us and
the nearest lighted road. There in the dark, upon that riven tomb by the deserted house, we talked on
about the "unnamable" and after my friend had finished his scoffing I told him of the awful evidence
behind the story at which he had scoffed the most.
My tale had been called The Attic Window, and appeared in the January, 1922, issue of Whispers.
In a good many places, especially the South and the Pacific coast, they took the magazines off the
stands at the complaints of silly milk-sops; but New England didn't get the thrill and merely shrugged
its shoulders at my extravagance. The thing, it was averred, was biologically impossible to start
with; merely another of those crazy country mutterings which Cotton Mather had been gullible
enough to dump into his chaotic Magnalia Christi Americana, and so poorly authenticated that even he
had not ventured to name the locality where the horror occurred. And as to the way I amplified the
bare jotting of the old mystic--that was quite impossible, and characteristic of a flighty and notional
scribbler! Mather had indeed told of the thing as being born, but nobody but a cheap sensationalist
would think of having it grow up, look into people's windows at night, and be hidden in the attic of a
house, in flesh and in spirit, till someone saw it at the window centuries later and couldn't describe
what it was that turned his hair gray. All this was flagrant trashiness, and my friend Manton was not
slow to insist on that fact. Then I told him what I had found in an old diary kept between 1706 and
1723, unearthed among family papers not a mile from where we were sitting; that, and the certain
reality of the scars on my ancestor's chest and back which the diary described. I told him, too, of the
fears of others in that region, and how they were whispered down for generations; and how no
mythical madness came to the boy who in 1793 entered an abandoned house to examine certain traces
suspected to be there.
It had been an eldritch thing--no wonder sensitive students shudder at the Puritan age in
Massachusetts. So little is known of what went on beneath the surface--so little, yet such a ghastly
festering as it bubbles up putrescently in occasional ghoulish glimpses. The witchcraft terror is a
horrible ray of light on what was stewing in men's crushed brains, but even that is a trifle. There was
no beauty; no freedom--we can see that from the architectural and household remains, and the
poisonous sermons of the cramped divines. And inside that rusted iron straitjacket lurked gibbering
hideousness, perversion, and diabolism. Here, truly, was the apotheosis of The Unnamable.
Cotton Mather, in that demoniac sixth book which no one should read after dark, minced no words
as he flung forth his anathema. Stern as a Jewish prophet, and laconically un-amazed as none since his
day could be, he told of the beast that had brought forth what was more than beast but less than man--
the thing with the blemished eye--and of the screaming drunken wretch that hanged for having such an
eye. This much he baldly told, yet without a hint of what came after. Perhaps he did not know, or
perhaps he knew and did not dare to tell. Others knew, but did not dare to tell--there is no public hint
of why they whispered about the lock on the door to the attic stairs in the house of a childless,
broken, embittered old man who had put up a blank slate slab by an avoided grave, although one may
trace enough evasive legends to curdle the thinnest blood.
It is all in that ancestral diary I found; all the hushed innuendoes and furtive tales of things with a
blemished eye seen at windows in the night or in deserted meadows near the woods. Something had
caught my ancestor on a dark valley road, leaving him with marks of horns on his chest and of apelike
claws on his back; and when they looked for prints in the trampled dust they found the mixed marks of
split hooves and vaguely anthropoid paws. Once a post-rider said he saw an old man chasing and
calling to a frightful loping, nameless thing on Meadow Hill in the thinly moonlit hours before dawn,
and many believed him. Certainly, there was strange talk one night in 1710 when the childless, broken
old man was buried in the crypt behind his own house in sight of the blank slate slab. They never
unlocked that attic door, but left the whole house as it was, dreaded and deserted. When noises came
from it, they whispered and shivered; and hoped that the lock on that attic door was strong. Then they
stopped hoping when the horror occurred at the parsonage, leaving not a soul alive or in one piece.
With the years the legends take on a spectral character--I suppose the thing, if it was a living thing,
must have died. The memory had lingered hideously--all the more hideous because it was so secret.
During this narration my friend Manton had become very silent, and I saw that my words had
impressed him. He did not laugh as I paused, but asked quite seriously about the boy who went mad in
1793, and who had presumably been the hero of my fiction. I told him why the boy had gone to that
shunned, deserted house, and remarked that he ought to be interested, since he believed that windows
retained latent images of those who had sat at them. The boy had gone to look at the windows of that
horrible attic, because of tales of things seen behind them, and had come back screaming maniacally.
Manton remained thoughtful as I said this, but gradually reverted to his analytical mood. He
granted for the sake of argument that some unnatural monster had really existed, but reminded me that
even the most morbid perversion of nature need not be unnamable or scientifically indescribable. I
admired his clearness and persistence, and added some further revelations I had collected among the
old people. Those later spectral legends, I made plain, related to monstrous apparitions more
frightful than anything organic could be; apparitions of gigantic bestial forms sometimes visible and
sometimes only tangible, which floated about on moonless nights and haunted the old house, the crypt
behind it, and the grave where a sapling had sprouted beside an illegible slab. Whether or not such
apparitions had ever gored or smothered people to death, as told in uncorroborated traditions, they
had produced a strong and consistent impression; and were yet darkly feared by very aged natives,
though largely forgotten by the last two generations--perhaps dying for lack of being thought about.
Moreover, so far as esthetic theory was involved, if the psychic emanations of human creatures be
grotesque distortions, what coherent representation could express or portray so gibbous and
infamous a nebulosity as the specter of a malign, chaotic perversion, itself a morbid blasphemy
against nature? Molded by the dead brain of a hybrid nightmare, would not such a vaporous terror
constitute in all loathsome truth the exquisitely, the shriekingly unnamable?
The hour must now have grown very late. A singularly noiseless bat brushed by me, and I believe
it touched Manton also, for although I could not see him I felt him raise his arm. Presently he spoke.
"But is that house with the attic window still standing and deserted?"
"Yes," I answered, "I have seen it."
"And did you find anything there--in the attic or anywhere else?"
"There were some bones up under the eaves. They may have been what that boy saw--if he was
sensitive he wouldn't have needed anything in the window-glass to unhinge him. If they all came from
the same object it must have been an hysterical, delirious monstrosity. It would have been
blasphemous to leave such bones in the world, so I went back with a sack and took them to the tomb
behind the house. There was an opening where I could dump them in. Don't think I was a fool--you
ought to have seen that skull. It had four-inch horns, but a face and jaw something like yours and
mine."
At last I could feel a real shiver run through Manton, who had moved very near. But his curiosity
was undeterred.
"And what about the window-panes?"
"They were all gone. One window had lost its entire frame, and in all the others there was not a
trace of glass in the little diamond apertures. They were that kind--the old lattice windows that went
out of use before 1700. I don't believe they've had any glass for a hundred years or more--maybe the
boy broke 'em if he got that far; the legend doesn't say."
Manton was reflecting again.
"I'd like to see that house, Carter. Where is it? Glass or no glass, I must explore it a little. And the
tomb where you put those bones, and the other grave without an inscription--the whole thing must be
a bit terrible."
"You did see it--until it got dark."
My friend was more wrought upon than I had suspected, for at this touch of harmless
theatricalism he started neurotically away from me and actually cried out with a sort of gulping gasp
which released a strain of previous repression. It was an odd cry, and all the more terrible because it
was answered. For as it was still echoing, I heard a creaking sound through the pitchy blackness, and
knew that a lattice window was opening in that accursed old house beside us. And because all the
other frames were long since fallen, I knew that it was the grisly glassless frame of that demoniac
attic window.
Then came a noxious rush of noisome, frigid air from that same dreaded direction, followed by a
piercing shriek just beside me on that shocking rifted tomb of man and monster. In another instant I
was knocked from my gruesome bench by the devilish threshing of some unseen entity of titanic size
but undetermined nature; knocked sprawling on the root-clutched mold of that abhorrent graveyard,
while from the tomb came such a stifled uproar of gasping and whirring that my fancy peopled the
rayless gloom with Miltonic legions of the misshapen damned. There was a vortex of withering, ice-
cold wind, and then the rattle of loose bricks and plaster; but I had mercifully fainted before I could
learn what it meant.
Manton, though smaller than I, is more resilient; for we opened our eyes at almost the same
instant, despite his greater injuries. Our couches were side by side, and we knew in a few seconds
that we were in St. Mary's Hospital. Attendants were grouped about in tense curiosity, eager to aid
our memory by telling us how we came there, and we soon heard of the farmer who had found us at
noon in a lonely field beyond Meadow Hill, a mile from the old burying ground, on a spot where an
ancient slaughterhouse is reputed to have stood. Manton had two malignant wounds in the chest, and
some less severe cuts or gougings in the back. I was not so seriously hurt, but was covered with
welts and contusions of the most bewildering character, including the print of a split hoof. It was
plain that Manton knew more than I, but he told nothing to the puzzled and interested physicians till he
had learned what our injuries were. Then he said we were the victims of a vicious bull--though the
animal was a difficult thing to place and account for.
After the doctors and nurses had left, I whispered an awe struck question:
"Good God, Manton, but what was it? Those scars--was it like that?"
And I was too dazed to exult when he whispered back a thing I had half expected--
"No--it wasn't that way at all. It was everywhere--a gelatin--a slime yet it had shapes, a thousand
shapes of horror beyond all memory. There were eyes--and a blemish. It was the pit--the maelstrom-
-the ultimate abomination. Carter, it was the unnamable!

THE WHITE SHIP
I am Basil Elton, keeper of the North Point light that my father and grandfather kept before me.
Far from the shore stands the gray lighthouse, above sunken slimy rocks that are seen when the tide is
low, but unseen when the tide is high. Past that beacon for a century have swept the majestic barques
of the seven seas. In the days of my grandfather there were many; in the days of my father not so
many; and now there are so few that I sometimes feel strangely alone, as though I were the last man
on our planet.
From far shores came those white-sailed argosies of old; from far Eastern shores where warm
suns shine and sweet odors linger about strange gardens and gay temples. The old captains of the sea
came often to my grandfather and told him of these things which in turn he told to my father, and my
father told to me in the long autumn evenings when the wind howled eerily from the East. And I have
read more of these things, and of many things besides, in the books men gave me when I was young
and filled with wonder.
But more wonderful than the lore of old men and the lore of books is the secret lore of ocean.
Blue, green, gray, white or black; smooth, ruffled, or mountainous; that ocean is not silent. All my
days have I watched it and listened to it, and I know it well. At first it told to me only the plain little
tales of calm beaches and near ports, but with the years it grew more friendly and spoke of other
things; of things more strange and more distant in space and time. Sometimes at twilight the gray
vapors of the horizon have parted to grant me glimpses of the ways beyond; and sometimes at night
the deep waters of the sea have grown clear and phosphorescent, to grant me glimpses of the ways
beneath. And these glimpses have been as often of the ways that were and the ways that might be, as
of the ways that are; for ocean is more ancient than the mountains, and freighted with the memories
and the dreams of Time.
Out of the South it was that the White Ship used to come when the moon was full and high in the
heavens. Out of the South it would glide very smoothly and silently over the sea. And whether the
sea was rough or calm, and whether the wind was friendly or adverse, it would always glide
smoothly and silently, its sails distant and its long strange tiers of oars moving rhythmically. One
night I espied upon the deck a man, bearded and robed, and he seemed to beckon me to embark for far
unknown shores. Many times afterward I saw him under the full moon, and ever did he beckon me.
Very brightly did the moon shine on the night I answered the call, and I walked out over the
waters to the White Ship on a bridge of moonbeams. The man who had beckoned now spoke a
welcome to me in a soft language I seemed to know well, and the hours were filled with soft songs
of the oarsmen as we glided away into a mysterious South, golden with the glow of that full, mellow
moon.
And when the day dawned, rosy and effulgent, I beheld the green shore of far lands, bright and
beautiful, and to me unknown. Up from the sea rose lordly terraces of verdure, tree-studded, and
shewing here and there the gleaming white roofs and colonnades of strange temples. As we drew
nearer the green shore the bearded man told me of that land, the land of Zar, where dwell all the
dreams and thoughts of beauty that come to men once and then are forgotten. And when I looked upon
the terraces again I saw that what he said was true, for among the sights before me were many things
I had once seen through the mists beyond the horizon and in the phosphorescent depths of ocean.
There too were forms and fantasies more splendid than any I had ever known; the visions of young
poets who died in want before the world could learn of what they had seen and dreamed. But we did
not set foot upon the sloping meadows of Zar, for it is told that he who treads them may nevermore
return to his native shore.
As the White Ship sailed silently away from the templed terraces of Zar, we beheld on the distant
horizon ahead the spires of a mighty city; and the bearded man said to me, "This is Thalarion, the City
of a Thousand Wonders, wherein reside all those mysteries that man has striven in vain to
fathom."And I looked again, at closer range, and saw that the city was greater than any city I had
known or dreamed of before. Into the sky the spires of its temples reached, so that no man might
behold their peaks; and far back beyond the horizon stretched the grim, gray walls, over which one
might spy only a few roofs, weird and ominous, yet adorned with rich friezes and alluring sculptures.
I yearned mightily to enter this fascinating yet repellent city, and besought the bearded man to land me
at the stone pier by the huge carven gate Akariel; but he gently denied my wish, saying, "Into
Thalarion, the City of a Thousand Wonders, many have passed but none returned. Therein walk only
daemons and mad things that are no longer men, and the streets are white with the unburied bones of
those who have looked upon the eidolon Lathi, that reigns over the city."So the White Ship sailed on
past the walls of Thalarion, and followed for many days a southward-flying bird, whose glossy
plumage matched the sky out of which it had appeared.
Then came we to a pleasant coast gay with blossoms of every hue, where as far inland as we
could see basked lovely groves and radiant arbors beneath a meridian sun. From bowers beyond our
view came bursts of song and snatches of lyric harmony, interspersed with faint laughter so
delicious that I urged the rowers onward in my eagerness to reach the scene. And the bearded man
spoke no word, but watched me as we approached the lily-lined shore. Suddenly a wind blowing
from over the flowery meadows and leafy woods brought a scent at which I trembled. The wind
grew stronger, and the air was filled with the lethal, charnel odor of plague-stricken towns and
uncovered cemeteries. And as we sailed madly away from that damnable coast the bearded man spoke
at last, saying, "This is Xura, the Land of Pleasures Unattained."
So once more the White Ship followed the bird of heaven, over warm blessed seas fanned by
caressing, aromatic breezes. Day after day and night after night did we sail, and when the moon was
full we would listen to soft songs of the oarsmen, sweet as on that distant night when we sailed away
from my far native land. And it was by moonlight that we anchored at last in the harbor of Sona-Nyl,
which is guarded by twin headlands of crystal that rise from the sea and meet in a resplendent arch.
This is the Land of Fancy, and we walked to the verdant shore upon a golden bridge of moonbeams.
In the Land of Sona-Nyl there is neither time nor space, neither suffering nor death; and there I
dwelt for many aeons. Green are the groves and pastures, bright and fragrant the flowers, blue and
musical the streams, clear and cool the fountains, and stately and gorgeous the temples, castles, and
cities of Sona-Nyl. Of that land there is no bound, for beyond each vista of beauty rises another more
beautiful. Over the countryside and amidst the splendor of cities can move at will the happy folk, of
whom all are gifted with unmarred grace and unalloyed happiness. For the aeons that I dwelt there I
wandered blissfully through gardens where quaint pagodas peep from pleasing clumps of bushes,
and where the white walks are bordered with delicate blossoms. I climbed gentle hills from whose
summits I could see entrancing panoramas of loveliness, with steepled towns nestling in verdant
valleys, and with the golden domes of gigantic cities glittering on the infinitely distant horizon. And I
viewed by moonlight the sparkling sea, the crystal headlands, and the placid harbor wherein lay
anchored the White Ship.
It was against the full moon one night in the immemorial year of Tharp that I saw outlined the
beckoning form of the celestial bird, and felt the first stirrings of unrest. Then I spoke with the
bearded man, and told him of my new yearnings to depart for remote Cathuria, which no man hath
seen, but which all believe to lie beyond the basalt pillars of the West. It is the Land of Hope, and in
it shine the perfect ideals of all that we know elsewhere; or at least so men relate. But the bearded
man said to me, "Beware of those perilous seas wherein men say Cathuria lies. In Sona-Nyl there is
no pain or death, but who can tell what lies beyond the basalt pillars of the West?" Natheless at the
next full moon I boarded the White Ship, and with the reluctant bearded man left the happy harbor for
untraveled seas.
And the bird of heaven flew before, and led us toward the basalt pillars of the West, but this time
the oarsmen sang no soft songs under the full moon. In my mind I would often picture the unknown
Land of Cathuria with its splendid groves and palaces, and would wonder what new delights there
awaited me. "Cathuria," I would say to myself, "is the abode of gods and the land of unnumbered
cities of gold. Its forests are of aloe and sandalwood, even as the fragrant groves of Camorin, and
among the trees flutter gay birds sweet with song. On the green and flowery mountains of Cathuria
stand temples of pink marble, rich with carven and painted glories, and having in their courtyards cool
fountains of silver, where purr with ravishing music the scented waters that come from the grotto-
born river Narg. And the cities of Cathuria are cinctured with golden walls, and their pavements also
are of gold. In the gardens of these cities are strange orchids, and perfumed lakes whose beds are of
coral and amber. At night the streets and the gardens are lit with gay lanthorns fashioned from the
three--colored shell of the tortoise, and here resound the soft notes of the singer and the lutanist.
And the houses of the cities of Cathuria are all palaces, each built over a fragrant canal bearing the
waters of the sacred Narg. Of marble and porphyry are the houses, and roofed with glittering gold
that reflects the rays of the sun and enhances the splendor of the cities as blissful gods view them
from the distant peaks. Fairest of all is the palace of the great monarch Dorieb, whom some say to be
a demi-god and others a god. High is the palace of Dorieb, and many are the turrets of marble upon
its walls. In its wide halls many multitudes assemble, and here hang the trophies of the ages. And the
roof is of pure gold, set upon tall pillars of ruby and azure, and having such carven figures of gods
and heroes that he who looks up to those heights seems to gaze upon the living Olympus. And the
floor of the palace is of glass, under which flow the cunningly lighted waters of the Narg, gay with
gaudy fish not known beyond the bounds of lovely Cathuria."
Thus would I speak to myself of Cathuria, but ever would the bearded man warn me to turn back
to the happy shore of Sona-Nyl; for Sona-Nyl is known of men, while none hath ever beheld
Cathuria.
And on the thirty-first day that we followed the bird, we beheld the basalt pillars of the West.
Shrouded in mist they were, so that no man might peer beyond them or see their summits--which
indeed some say reach even to the heavens. And the bearded man again implored me to turn back, but I
heeded him not; for from the mists beyond the basalt pillars I fancied there came the notes of singers
and lutanists; sweeter than the sweetest songs of Sona-Nyl, and sounding mine own praises; the
praises of me, who had voyaged far from the full moon and dwelt in the Land of Fancy. So to the
sound of melody the White Ship sailed into the mist betwixt the basalt pillars of the West. And when
the music ceased and the mist lifted, we beheld not the Land of Cathuria, but a swift-rushing
resistless sea, over which our helpless barque was borne toward some unknown goal. Soon to our
ears came the distant thunder of falling waters, and to our eyes appeared on the far horizon ahead the
titanic spray of a monstrous cataract, wherein the oceans of the world drop down to abysmal
nothingness. Then did the bearded man say to me, with tears on his cheek, "We have rejected the
beautiful Land of Sona-Nyl, which we may never behold again. The gods are greater than men, and
they have conquered."And I closed my eyes before the crash that I knew would come, shutting out
the sight of the celestial bird which flapped its mocking blue wings over the brink of the torrent.
Out of that crash came darkness, and I heard the shrieking of men and of things which were not
men. From the East tempestuous winds arose, and chilled me as I crouched on the slab of damp stone
which had risen beneath my feet. Then as I heard another crash I opened my eyes and beheld myself
upon the platform of that lighthouse whence I had sailed so many aeons ago. In the darkness below
there loomed the vast blurred outlines of a vessel breaking up on the cruel rocks, and as I glanced out
over the waste I saw that the light had failed for the first time since my grandfather had assumed its
care.
And in the later watches of the night, when I went within the tower, I saw on the wall a calendar
which still remained as when I had left it at the hour I sailed away. With the dawn I descended the
tower and looked for wreckage upon the rocks, but what I found was only this: a strange dead bird
whose hue was as of the azure sky, and a single shattered spar, of a whiteness greater than that of the
wave-tips or of the mountain snow.
And thereafter the ocean told me its secrets no more; and though many times since has the moon
shone full and high in the heavens, the White Ship from the South came never again.

THROUGH THE GATES OF THE SILVER KEY
Chapter One
In a vast room hung with strangely figured arras and carpeted with Bonkhata rugs of impressive
age and workmanship, four men were sitting around a document-strewn table. From the far corners,
where odd tripods of wrought iron were now and then replenished by an incredibly aged Negro in
somber livery, came the hypnotic fumes of olibanum; while in a deep niche on one side there ticked a
curious, coffin--shaped clock whose dial bore baffling hieroglyphs and whose four hands did not
move in consonance with any time system known on this planet. It was a singular and disturbing room,
but well fitted to the business then at hand. For there, in the New Orleans home of this continent's
greatest mystic, mathematician and orientalist, there was being settled at last the estate of a scarcely
less great mystic, scholar, author and dreamer who had vanished from the face of the earth four years
before.
Randolph Carter, who had all his life sought to escape from the tedium and limitations of waking
reality in the beckoning vistas of dreams and fabled avenues of other dimensions, disappeared from
the sight of man on the seventh of October, 1928, at the age of fifty-four. His career had been a
strange and lonely one, and there were those who inferred from his curious novels many episodes
more bizarre than any in his recorded history. His association with Harley Warren, the South
Carolina mystic whose studies in the primal Naacal language of the Himalayan priests had led to such
outrageous conclusions, had been close. Indeed, it was he who--one mist-mad, terrible night in an
ancient graveyard--had seen Warren descend into a dank and nitrous vault, never to emerge. Carter
lived in Boston, but it was from the wild, haunted hills behind hoary and witch-accursed Arkham that
all his forebears had come. And it was amid these ancient, cryptically brooding hills that he had
ultimately vanished.
His old servant, Parks--who died early in 1930--had spoken of the strangely aromatic and
hideously carven box he had found in the attic, and of the indecipherable parchments and queerly
figured silver key which that box had contained: matters of which Carter had also written to others.
Carter, he said, had told him that this key had come down from his ancestors, and that it would help
him to unlock the gates to his lost boyhood, and to strange dimensions and fantastic realms which he
had hitherto visited only in vague, brief, and elusive dreams. Then one day Carter took the box and its
contents and rode away in his car, never to return.
Later on, people found the car at the side of an old, grass-grown road in the hills behind
crumbling Arkham--the hills where Carter's forebears had once dwelt, and where the ruined cellar of
the great Carter homestead still gaped to the sky. It was in a grove of tall elms nearby that another of
the Carters had mysteriously vanished in 1781, and not far away was the half-rotted cottage where
Goody Fowler, the witch, had brewed her ominous potions still earlier. The region had been settled
in 1692 by fugitives from the witchcraft trials in Salem, and even now it bore a name for vaguely
ominous things scarcely to be envisaged. Edmund Carter had fled from the shadow of Gallows Hill
just in time, and the tales of his sorceries were many. Now, it seemed, his lone descendant had gone
somewhere to join him!
In the car they found the hideously carved box of fragrant wood, and the parchment which no man
could read. The silver key was gone--presumably with Carter. Further than that there was no certain
clue. Detectives from Boston said that the fallen timbers of the old Carter place seemed oddly
disturbed, and somebody found a handkerchief on the rock-ridged, sinisterly wooded slope behind
the ruins near the dreaded cave called the Snake Den.
It was then that the country legends about the Snake Den gained a new vitality. Farmers whispered
of the blasphemous uses to which old Edmund Carter the wizard had put that horrible grotto, and
added later tales about the fondness which Randolph Carter himself had had for it when a boy. In
Carter's boyhood the venerable gambrel-roofed homestead was still standing and tenanted by his
great-uncle Christopher. He had visited there often, and had talked singularly about the Snake Den.
People remembered what he had said about a deep fissure and an unknown inner cave beyond, and
speculated on the change he had shown after spending one whole memorable day in the cavern when
he was nine. That was in October, too--and ever after that he had seemed to have a uncanny knack at
prophesying future events.
It had rained late in the night that Carter vanished, and no one was quite able to trace his footprints
from the car. Inside the Snake Den all was amorphous liquid mud, owing to the copious seepage.
Only the ignorant rustics whispered about the prints they thought they spied where the great elms
overhang the road, and on the sinister hillside near the Snake Den, where the handkerchief was found.
Who could pay attention to whispers that spoke of stubby little tracks like those which Randolph
Carter's square-toed boots made when he was a small boy? It was as crazy a notion as that other
whisper--that the tracks of old Benijah Corey's peculiar heelless boots had met the stubby little
tracks in the road. Old Benijah had been the Carters' hired man when Randolph was young; but he had
died thirty years ago.
It must have been these whispers plus Carter's own statement to Parks and others that the queerly
arabesqued silver key would help him unlock the gates of his lost boyhood--which caused a number
of mystical students to declare that the missing man had actually doubled back on the trail of time and
returned through forty-five years to that other October day in 1883 when he had stayed in the Snake
Den as a small boy. When he came out that night, they argued, he had somehow made the whole trip
to 1928 and back; for did he not thereafter know of things which were to happen later? And yet he had
never spoken of anything to happen after 1928.
One student--an elderly eccentric of Providence, Rhode Island, who had enjoyed a long and close
correspondence with Carter--had a still more elaborate theory, and believed that Carter had not only
returned to boyhood, but achieved a further liberation, roving at will through the prismatic vistas of
boyhood dream. After a strange vision this man published a tale of Carter's vanishing in which he
hinted that the lost one now reigned as king on the opal throne of Ilek-Vad, that fabulous town of
turrets atop the hollow cliffs of glass overlooking the twilight sea wherein the bearded and finny
Gniorri build their singular labyrinths.
It was this old man, Ward Phillips, who pleaded most loudly against the apportionment of Carter's
estate to his heirs--all distant cousins--on the ground that he was still alive in another time--
dimension and might well return some day. Against him was arrayed the legal talent of one of the
cousins, Ernest K. Aspinwall of Chicago, a man ten years Carter's senior, but keen as a youth in
forensic battles. For four years the contest had raged, but now the time for apportionment had come,
and this vast, strange room in New Orleans was to be the scene of the arrangement.
It was the home of Carter's literary and financial executor--the distinguished Creole student of
mysteries and Eastern antiquities, Etienne-Laurent de Marigny. Carter had met de Marigny during the
war, when they both served in the French Foreign Legion, and had at once cleaved to him because of
their similar tastes and outlook. When, on a memorable joint furlough, the learned young Creole had
taken the wistful Boston dreamer to Bayonne, in the south of France, and had shown him certain
terrible secrets in the nighted and immemorial crypts that burrow beneath that brooding, eon-
weighted city, the friendship was forever sealed. Carter's will had named de Marigny as executor,
and now that avid scholar was reluctantly presiding over the settlement of the estate. It was sad work
for him, for like the old Rhode Islander he did not believe that Carter was dead. But what weight had
the dreams of mystics against the harsh wisdom of the world?
Around the table in that strange room in the old French Quarter sat the men who claimed an
interest in the proceedings. There had been the usual legal advertisements of the conference in
papers wherever Carter's heirs were thought to live; yet only four now sat listening to the abnormal
ticking of that coffin-shaped clock which told no earthly time, and to the bubbling of the courtyard
fountain beyond half-curtained, fan-lighted windows. As the hours wore on, the faces of the four
were half shrouded in the curling fumes from the tripods, which, piled recklessly with fuel, seemed
to need less and less attention from the silently gliding and increasingly nervous old Negro.
There was Etienne de Marigny himself--slim, dark, handsome, mustached, and still young.
Aspinwall, representing the heirs, was white-haired, apoplectic-faced, side-whiskered, and portly.
Phillips, the Providence mystic, was lean, gray, long-nosed, clean-shaven, and stoop--shouldered.
The fourth man was non-committal in age--lean, with a dark, bearded, singularly immobile face of
very regular contour, bound with the turban of a high-caste Brahman and having night-black, burning,
almost irisless eyes which seemed to gaze out from a vast distance behind the features. He had
announced himself as the Swami Chandraputra, an adept from Benares, with important information to
give; and both de Marigny and Phillips--who had corresponded with him--had been quick to
recognize the genuineness of his mystical pretensions. His speech had an oddly forced, hollow,
metallic quality, as if the use of English taxed his vocal apparatus; yet his language was as easy,
correct and idiomatic as any native Anglo-Saxon's. In general attire he was the normal European
civilian, but his loose clothes sat peculiarly badly on him, while his bushy black beard, Eastern
turban, and large, white mittens gave him an air of exotic eccentricity.
De Marigny, fingering the parchment found in Carter's car, was speaking.
"No, I have not been able to make anything of the parchment. Mr. Phillips, here, also gives it up.
Colonel Churchward declares it is not Naacal, and it looks nothing at all like the hieroglyphics on
that Easter Island war-club. The carvings on that box, though, do strangely suggest Easter Island
images. The nearest thing I can recall to these parchment characters--notice how all the letters seem
to hang down from horizontal word-bar--is the writing in a book poor Harley Warren once had. It
came from India while Carter and I were visiting him in 1919, and he never would tell us anything
about it--said it would be better if we didn't know, and hinted that it might have come originally from
some place other than the Earth. He took it with him in December, when he went down into the vault
in that old graveyard--but neither he nor the book ever came to the surface again. Some time ago I
sent our friend here--the Swami Chandraputra--a memory-sketch of some of those letters, and also a
photostatic copy of the Carter parchment. He believes he may be able to shed light on them after
certain references and consultations.
"But the key--Carter sent me a photograph of that. Its curious arabesques were not letters, but
seem to have belonged to the same culture-tradition as the parchment. Carter always spoke of being
on the point of solving the mystery, though he never gave details. Once he grew almost poetic about
the whole business. That antique silver key, he said, would unlock the successive doors that bar our
free march down the mighty corridors of space and time to the very Border which no man has
crossed since Shaddad with his terrific genius built and concealed in the sands of Arabia Pettraea the
prodigious domes and uncounted minarets of thousand-pillared Irem. Half-starved dervishes--wrote
Carter--and thirst-crazed nomads have returned to tell of that monumental portal, and of the hand that
is sculptured above the keystone of the arch, but no man has passed and retraced his steps to say that
his footprints on the garnet-strewn sands within bear witness to his visit. The key, he surmised, was
that for which the cyclopean sculptured hand vainly grasps.
"Why Carter didn't take the parchment as well as the key, we can not say. Perhaps he forgot it--or
perhaps he forbore to take it through recollection of one who had taken a book of like characters into
a vault and never returned. Or perhaps it was really immaterial to what he wished to do."
As de Marigny paused, old Mr. Phillips spoke a harsh, shrill voice.
"We can know of Randolph Carter's wandering only what we dream. I have been to many strange
places in dreams, and have heard many strange and significant things in Ulthar, beyond the River Skai.
It does not appear that the parchment was needed, for certainly Carter reentered the world of his
boyhood dreams, and is now a king in Ilek-Vad."
Mr. Aspinwall grew doubly apoplectic-looking as he sputtered: "Can't somebody shut the old
fool up? We've had enough of these moonings. The problem is to divide the property, and it's about
time we got to it."
For the first time Swami Chandraputra spoke in his queerly alien voice.
"Gentlemen, there is more to this matter than you think. Mr. Aspinwall does not do well to laugh at
the evidence of dreams. Mr. Phillips has taken an incomplete view--perhaps because he has not
dreamed enough. I, myself, have done much dreaming. We in India have always done that, just as all
the Carters seem to have done it. You, Mr. Aspinwall, as a maternal cousin, are naturally not a Carter.
My own dreams, and certain other sources of information, have told me a great deal which you still
find obscure. For example, Randolph Carter forgot that parchment which he couldn't decipher--yet it
would have been well for him had he remembered to take it. You see, I have really learned pretty
much what happened to Carter after he left his car with the silver key at sunset on that seventh of
October, four years ago."
Aspinwall audibly sneered, but the others sat up with heightened interest. The smoke from the
tripods increased, and the crazy ticking of that coffin-shaped clock seemed to fall into bizarre
patterns like the dots and dashes of some alien and insoluble telegraph message from outer space.
The Hindoo leaned back, half closed his eyes, and continued in that oddly labored yet idiomatic
speech, while before his audience there began to float a picture of what had happened to Randolph
Carter.
Chapter Two
The hills beyond Arkham are full of a strange magic--something, perhaps, which the old wizard
Edmund Carter called down from the stars and up from the crypts of nether earth when he fled there
from Salem in 1692. As soon as Randolph Carter was back among them he knew that he was close to
one of the gates which a few audacious, abhorred and alien-souled men have blasted through titan
walls betwixt the world and the outside absolute. Here, he felt, and on this day of the year, he could
carry out with success the message he had deciphered months before from the arabesques of that
tarnished and incredibly ancient silver key. He knew now how it must be rotated, and how it must be
held up to the setting sun, and what syllables of ceremony must be intoned into the void at the ninth
and last turning. In a spot as close to a dark polarity and induced gate as this, it could not fail in its
primary functions. Certainly, he would rest that night in the lost boyhood for which he had never
ceased to mourn.
He got out of the car with the key in his pocket, walking up-hill deeper and deeper into the
shadowy core of that brooding, haunted countryside of winding road, vine-grown stone wall, black
woodland, gnarled, neglected orchard, gaping-windowed, deserted farm-house, and nameless nun. At
the sunset hour, when the distant spires of Kingsport gleamed in the ruddy blaze, he took out the key
and made the needed turnings and intonations. Only later did he realize how soon the ritual had taken
effect.
Then in the deepening twilight he had heard a voice out of the past: Old Benijah Corey, his great-
uncle's hired man. Had not old Benijah been dead for thirty years? Thirty years before when. What
was time? Where had he been? Why was it strange that Benijah should be calling him on this seventh
of October 1883? Was he not out later than Aunt Martha had told him to stay? What was this key in his
blouse pocket, where his little telescope--given him by his father on his ninth birthday, two months
before--ought to be? Had he found it in the attic at home? Would it unlock the mystic pylon which his
sharp eye had traced amidst the jagged rocks at the back of that inner cave behind the Snake Den on
the hill? That was the place they always coupled with old Edmund Carter the wizard. People wouldn't
go there, and nobody but him had ever noticed or squirmed through the root-choked fissure to that
great black inner chamber with the pylon. Whose hands had carved that hint of a pylon out of the
living rock? Old Wizard Edmund's--or others that he had conjured up and commanded?
That evening little Randolph ate supper with Uncle Chris and Aunt Martha in the old gambrel-
roofed farm-house.
Next morning he was up early and out through the twisted-boughed apple orchard to the upper
timber lot where the mouth of the Snake Den lurked black and forbidding amongst grotesque,
overnourished oaks. A nameless expectancy was upon him, and he did not even notice the loss of his
handkerchief as he fumbled in his blouse pocket to see if the queer silver key was safe. He crawled
through the dark orifice with tense, adventurous assurance, lighting his way with matches taken from
the sitting-room. In another moment he had wriggled through the root--choked fissure at the farther
end, and was in the vast, unknown inner grotto whose ultimate rock wall seemed half like a monstrous
and consciously shapen pylon. Before that dank, dripping wall he stood silent and awestruck, lighting
one match after another as he gazed. Was that stony bulge above the keystone of the imagined arch
really a gigantic sculptured hand? Then he drew forth the silver key, and made motions and
intonations whose source he could only dimly remember. Was anything forgotten? He knew only that
he wished to cross the barrier to the untrammeled land of his dreams and the gulfs where all
dimensions dissolved in the absolute.
Chapter Three
What happened then is scarcely to be described in words. It is full of those paradoxes,
contradictions and anomalies which have no place in waking life, but which fill our more fantastic
dreams and are taken as matters of course till we return to our narrow, rigid, objective world of
limited causation and tri-dimensional logic. As the Hindoo continued his tale, he had difficulty in
avoiding what seemed--even more than the notion of a man transferred through the years to boyhood-
-an air of trivial, puerile extravagance. Mr. Aspinwall, in disgust, gave an apoplectic snort and
virtually stopped listening.
For the rite of the silver key, as practiced by Randolph Carter in that black, haunted cave within a
cave, did not prove unavailing. From the first gesture and syllable an aura of strange, awesome
mutation was apparent--a sense of incalculable disturbance and confusion in time and space, yet one
which held no hint of what we recognize as motion and duration. Imperceptibly, such things as age
and location ceased to have any significance whatever. The day before, Randolph Carter had
miraculously leaped a gulf of years. Now there was no distinction between boy and man. There was
only the entity Randolph Carter, with a certain store of images which had lost all connection with
terrestrial scenes and circumstances of acquisition. A moment before, there had been an inner cave
with vague suggestions of a monstrous arch and gigantic sculptured hand on the farther wall. Now
there was neither cave nor absence of cave; neither wall nor absence of wall. There was only a flux
of impressions not so much visual as cerebral, amidst which the entity that was Randolph Carter
experienced perceptions or registrations of all that his mind revolved on, yet without any clear
consciousness of the way in which he received them.
By the time the rite was over, Carter knew that he was in no region whose place could be told by
Earth's geographers, and in no age whose date history could fix; for the nature of what was
happening was not wholly unfamiliar to him. There were hints of it in the cryptical Pnakotic
fragments, and a whole chapter in the forbidden Necronomicon of the mad Arab, Abdul Alhazred, had
taken on significance when he had deciphered the designs graven on the silver key. A gate had been
unlocked--not, indeed, the Ultimate Gate, but one leading from Earth and time to that extension of
Earth which is outside time, and from which in turn the Ultimate Gate leads fearsomely and
perilously to the last Void which is outside all earths, all universes, and all matter.
There would be a Guide--and a very terrible one; a Guide who had been an entity of Earth
millions of years before, when man was undreamed of, and when forgotten shapes moved on a
steaming planet building strange cities among whose last, crumbling ruins the first mammals were to
play. Carter remembered what the monstrous Necronomicon had vaguely and disconcertingly
adumbrated concerning that Guide:
"And while there are those," the mad Arab had written, "who have dared to seek glimpses beyond
the Veil, and to accept HIM as guide, they would have been more prudent had they avoided
commerce with HIM; for it is written in the Book of Thoth how terrific is the price of a single
glimpse. Nor may those who pass ever return, for in the vastnesses transcending our world are
shapes of darkness that seize and bind. The Affair that shambleth about in the night, the evil that
defieth the Elder Sign, the Herd that stand watch at the secret portal each tomb is known to have and
that thrive on that which groweth out of the tenants thereof:--all these Blacknesses are lesser than HE
WHO guardeth the Gateway: HE WHO will guide the rash one beyond all the worlds into the Abyss
of unnamable devourers. For He is 'UMR AT-TAWIL, the Most Ancient One, which the scribe
rendereth as THE PROLONGED OF LIFE."
Memory and imagination shaped dim half-pictures with uncertain outlines amidst the seething
chaos, but Carter knew that they were of memory and imagination only. Yet he felt that it was not
chance which built these things in his consciousness, but rather some vast reality, ineffable and
undimensioned, which surrounded him and strove to translate itself into the only symbols he was
capable of grasping. For no mind of Earth may grasp the extensions of shape which interweave in the
oblique gulfs outside time and the dimensions we know.
There floated before Carter a cloudy pageantry of shapes and scenes which he somehow linked
with Earth's primal, eon-forgotten past. Monstrous living things moved deliberately through vistas of
fantastic handiwork that no sane dream ever held, and landscapes bore incredible vegetation and cliffs
and mountains and masonry of no human pattern. There were cities under the sea, and denizens
thereof; and towers in great deserts where globes and cylinders and nameless winged entities shot
off into space, or hurtled down out of space. All this Carter grasped, though the images bore no
fixed relation to one another or to him. He himself had no stable form or position, but only such
shifting hints of form and position as his whirling fancy supplied.
He had wished to find the enchanted regions of his boyhood dreams, where galleys sail up the
river Oukranos past the gilded spires of Thran, and elephant caravans tramp through perfumed
jungles in Kied, beyond forgotten palaces with veined ivory columns that sleep lovely and unbroken
under the moon. Now, intoxicated with wider visions, he scarcely knew what he sought. Thoughts of
infinite and blasphemous daring rose in his mind, and he knew he would face the dreaded Guide
without fear, asking monstrous and terrible things of him.
All at once the pageant of impressions seemed to achieve a vague kind of stabilization. There
were great masses of towering stone, carven into alien and incomprehensible designs and disposed
according to the laws of some unknown, inverse geometry. Light filtered from a sky of no assignable
colour in baffling, contradictory directions, and played almost sentiently over what seemed to be a
curved line of gigantic hieroglyphed pedestals more hexagonal than otherwise, and surmounted by
cloaked, ill-defined shapes.
There was another shape, too, which occupied no pedestal, but which seemed to glide or float
over the cloudy, floor-like lower level. It was not exactly permanent in outline, but held transient
suggestions of something remotely preceding or paralleling the human form, though half as large
again as an ordinary man. It seemed to be heavily cloaked, like the shapes on the pedestals, with some
neutral-coloured fabric; and Carter could not detect any eye-holes through which it might gaze.
Probably it did not need to gaze, for it seemed to belong to an order of beings far outside the merely
physical in organization and faculties.
A moment later Carter knew that this was so, for the Shape had spoken to his mind without sound
or language. And though the name it uttered was a dreaded and terrible one, Randolph Carter did not
flinch in fear.
Instead, he spoke back, equally without sound or language, and made those obeisances which the
hideous Necronomicon had taught him to make. For this shape was nothing less than that which all the
world has feared since Lomar rose out of the sea, and the Children of the Fire Mist came to Earth to
teach the Elder Lore to man. It was indeed the frightful Guide and Guardian of the Gate--'UMR AT-
TAWIL, the ancient one, which the scribe rendereth the PROLONGED OF LIFE.
The Guide knew, as he knew all things, of Carter's quest and coming, and that this seeker of
dreams and secrets stood before him unafraid. There was no horror or malignity in what he radiated,
and Carter wondered for a moment whether the mad Arab's terrific blasphemous hints came from
envy and a baffled wish to do what was now about to be done. Or perhaps the Guide reserved his
horror and malignity for those who feared. As the radiations continued, Carter eventually interpreted
them in the form of words.
"I am indeed that Most Ancient One," said the Guide, "of whom you know. We have awaited you--
the Ancient Ones and I. You are welcome, even though long delayed. You have the key, and have
unlocked the First Gate. Now the Ultimate Gate is ready for your trial. If you fear, you need not
advance. You may still go back unharmed, the way you came. But if you chose to advance--"
The pause was ominous, but the radiations continued to be friendly. Carter hesitated not a moment,
for a burning curiosity drove him on.
"I will advance," he radiated back, "and I accept you as my Guide."
At this reply the Guide seemed to make a sign by certain motions of his robe which may or may
not have involved the lifting of an arm or some homologous member. A second sign followed, and
from his well-learned lore Carter knew that he was at last very close to the Ultimate Gate. The light
now changed to another inexplicable colour, and the shapes on the quasi-hexagonal pedestals became
more clearly defined. As they sat more erect, their outlines became more like those of men, though
Carter knew that they could not be men. Upon their cloaked heads there now seemed to rest tall,
uncertainly coloured miters, strangely suggestive of those on certain nameless figures chiseled by a
forgotten sculptor along the living cliffs of a high, forbidden mountain in Tartary; while grasped in
certain folds of their swathings were long sceptres whose carven heads bodied forth a grotesque
and archaic mystery.
Carter guessed what they were and whence they came, and Whom they served; and guessed, too,
the price of their service. But he was still content, for at one mighty venture he was to learn all.
Damnation, he reflected, is but a word bandied about by those whose blindness leads them to
condemn all who can see, even with a single eye. He wondered at the vast conceit of those who had
babbled of the malignant Ancient Ones, as if They could pause from their everlasting dreams to
wreak a wrath on mankind. As well, he might a mammoth pause to visit frantic vengeance on an
angleworm. Now the whole assemblage on the vaguely hexagonal pillars was greeting him with a
gesture of those oddly carven sceptres and radiating a message which he understood:
"We salute you, Most Ancient One, and you, Randolph Carter, whose daring has made you one of
us."
Carter saw now that one of the pedestals was vacant, and a gesture of the Most Ancient One told
him it was reserved for him. He saw also another pedestal, taller than the rest, and at the center of the
oddly curved line--neither semicircle nor ellipse, parabola nor hyperbola--which they formed, This,
he guessed, was the Guide's own throne. Moving and rising in a manner hardly definable, Carter took
his seat; and as he did so he saw that the Guide had seated himself.
Gradually and mistily it became apparent that the Most Ancient One was holding something--some
object clutched in the outflung folds of his robe as if for the sight, or what answered for sight, of the
cloaked Companions. It was a large sphere, or apparent sphere, of some obscurely iridescent metal,
and as the Guide put it forward a low, pervasive half-impression of sound began to rise and fall in
intervals which seemed to be rhythmic even though they followed no rhythm of Earth. There was a
suggestion of chanting or what human imagination might interpret as chanting. Presently the quasi-
sphere began to grow luminous, and as it gleamed up into a cold, pulsating light of unassignable
colour, Carter saw that its flickerings conformed to the alien rhythm of the chant. Then all the
mitered, scepter-bearing Shapes on the pedestals commenced a slight, curious swaying in the same
inexplicable rhythm, while nimbuses of unclassifiable light--resembling that of the quasi-sphere--
played around their shrouded heads.
The Hindoo paused in his tale and looked curiously at the tall, coffin-shaped clock with the four
hands and hieroglyphed dial, whose crazy ticking followed no known rhythm of Earth.
"You, Mr. de Marigny," he suddenly said to his learned host, "do not need to be told the
particularly alien rhythm to which those cowled Shapes on the hexagonal pillars chanted and nodded.
You are the only one else--in America--who has had a taste of the Outer Extension. That clock--I
suppose it was sent to you by the Yogi poor Harley Warren used to talk about--the seer who said that
he alone of living men had been to Yian-Ho, the hidden legacy of eon-old Leng, and had borne
certain things away from that dreadful and forbidden city. I wonder how many of its subtler
properties you know? If my dreams and readings be correct, it was made by those who knew much of
the First Gateway. But let me go on with my tale."
At last, continued the Swami, the swaying and the suggestion of chanting ceased, the lambent
nimbuses around the now drooping and motionless heads faded, while the cloaked shapes slumped
curiously on their pedestals. The quasi-sphere, however, continued to pulsate with inexplicable
light. Carter felt that the Ancient Ones were sleeping as they had been when he first saw them, and he
wondered out of what cosmic dreams his coming had aroused them. Slowly there filtered into his
mind the truth that this strange chanting ritual had been one of instruction, and that the Companions had
been chanted by the Most Ancient One into a new and peculiar kind of sleep in order that their dreams
might open the Ultimate Gate to which the silver key was a passport. He knew that in the profundity
of this deep sleep they were contemplating unplumbed vastnesses of utter and absolute outsideness,
and that they were to accomplish that which his presence had demanded.
The Guide did not share this sleep, but seemed still to be giving instructions in some subtle,
soundless way. Evidently he was implanting images of those things which he wished the Companions
to dream: and Carter knew that as each of the Ancient Ones pictured the prescribed thought, there
would be born the nucleus of a manifestation visible to his earthly eyes. When the dreams of all the
Shapes had achieved a oneness, that manifestation would occur, and everything he required be
materialized, through concentration. He had seen such things on Earth--in India, where the combined,
projected will of a circle of adepts can make a thought take tangible substance, and in hoary Atlaanat,
of which few even dare speak.
Just what the Ultimate Gate was, and how it was to be passed, Carter could not be certain; but a
feeling of tense expectancy surged over him. He was conscious of having a kind of body, and of
holding the fateful silver key in his hand. The masses of towering stone opposite him seemed to
possess the evenness of a wall, toward the centre of which his eyes were irresistibly drawn. And
then suddenly he felt the mental currents of the Most Ancient One cease to flow forth.
For the first time Carter realized how terrific utter silence, mental and physical, may be. The
earlier moments had never failed to contain some perceptible rhythm, if only the faint, cryptical pulse
of the Earth's dimensional extension, but now the hush of the abyss seemed to fall upon everything.
Despite his intimations of body, he had no audible breath, and the glow of 'Umr at-Tawil's quasi-
sphere had grown petrifiedly fixed and unpulsating. A potent nimbus, brighter than those which had
played round the heads of the Shapes, blazed frozenly over the shrouded skull of the terrible Guide.
A dizziness assailed Carter, and his sense of lost orientation waxed a thousandfold. The strange
lights seemed to hold the quality of the most impenetrable blacknesses heaped upon blacknesses
while about the Ancient Ones, so close on their pseudo-hexagonal thrones, there hovered an air of
the most stupefying remoteness. Then he felt himself wafted into immeasurable depths, with waves
of perfumed warmth lapping against his face. It was as if he floated in a torrid, rose-tinctured sea; a
sea of drugged wine whose waves broke foaming against shores of brazen fire. A great fear
clutched him as he half saw that vast expanse of surging sea lapping against its far off coast. But the
moment of silence was broken--the surgings were speaking to him in a language that was not of
physical sound or articulate words.
"The Man of Truth is beyond good and evil," intoned the voice that was not a voice. 'The Man of
Truth has ridden to All-Is-One. The Man of Truth has learned that Illusion is the One Reality, and that
Substance is the Great Impostor."
And now, in that rise of masonry to which his eyes had been so irresistibly drawn, there appeared
the outline of a titanic arch not unlike that which he thought he had glimpsed so long ago in that cave
within a cave, on the far, unreal surface of the three-dimensioned Earth. He realized that he had been
using the silver key--moving it in accord with an unlearned and instinctive ritual closely akin to that
which had opened the Inner Gate. That rose-drunken sea which lapped his cheeks was, he realized,
no more or less than the adamantine mass of the solid wall yielding before his spell, and the vortex of
thought with which the Ancient Ones had aided his spell. Still guided by instinct and blind
determination, he floated forward--and through the Ultimate Gate.
Chapter Four
Randolph Carter's advance through the cyclopean bulk of masonry was like a dizzy precipitation
through the measureless gulfs between the stars. From a great distance he felt triumphant, godlike
surges of deadly sweetness, and after that the rustling of great wings, and impressions of sound like
the chirpings and murmurings of objects unknown on Earth or in the solar system. Glancing backward,
he saw not one gate alone but a multiplicity of gates, at some of which clamoured Forms he strove
not to remember.
And then, suddenly, he felt a greater terror than that which any of the Forms could give--a terror
from which he could not flee because it was connected with himself. Even the First Gateway had
taken something of stability from him, leaving him uncertain about his bodily form and about his
relationship to the mistily defined objects around him, but it had not disturbed his sense of unity. He
had still been Randolph Carter, a fixed point in the dimensional seething. Now, beyond the Ultimate
Gateway, he realized in a moment of consuming fright that he was not one person, but many persons.
He was in many places at the same time. On Earth, on October 7, 1883, a little boy named
Randolph Carter was leaving the Snake Den in the hushed evening light and running down the rocky
slope, and through the twisted-boughed orchard toward his Uncle Christopher's house in the hills
beyond Arkham; yet at that same moment, which was also somehow in the earthly year of 1928, a
vague shadow not less Randolph Carter was sitting on a pedestal among the Ancient Ones in Earth's
transdimensional extension. Here, too, was a third Randolph Carter, in the unknown and formless
cosmic abyss beyond the Ultimate Gate. And elsewhere, in a chaos of scenes whose infinite
multiplicity and monstrous diversity brought him close to the brink of madness, were a limitless
confusion of beings which he knew were as much himself as the local manifestation now beyond the
Ultimate Gate.
There were Carters in settings belonging to every known and suspected age of Earth's history,
and to remoter ages of earthly entity transcending knowledge, suspicion, and credibility; Carters of
forms both human and non-human, vertebrate and invertebrate, conscious and mindless, animal and
vegetable. And more, there were Carters having nothing in common with earthly life, but moving
outrageously amidst backgrounds of other planets and systems and galaxies and cosmic continua;
spores of eternal life drifting from world to world, universe to universe, yet all equally himself.
Some of the glimpses recalled dreams--both faint and vivid, single and persistent--which he had had
through the long years since he first began to dream; and a few possessed a haunting, fascinating and
almost horrible familiarity which no earthly logic could explain.
Faced with this realization, Randolph Carter reeled in the clutch of supreme horror--horror such
as had not been hinted even at the climax of that hideous night when two had ventured into an ancient
and abhorred necropolis under a waning moon and only one had emerged. No death, no doom, no
anguish can arouse the surpassing despair which flows from a loss of identity. Merging with
nothingness is peaceful oblivion; but to be aware of existence and yet to know that one is no longer a
definite being distinguished from other beings--that one no longer has a self--that is the nameless
summit of agony and dread.
He knew that there had been a Randolph Carter of Boston, yet could not be sure whether he--the
fragment or facet of an entity beyond the Ultimate Gate--had been that one or some other. His self
had been annihilated; and yet he--if indeed there could, in view of that utter nullity of individual
existence, be such a thing as he--was equally aware of being in some inconceivable way a legion of
selves. It was as though his body had been suddenly transformed into one of those many--limbed and
many-headed effigies sculptured in Indian temples, and he contemplated the aggregation in a
bewildered attempt to discern which was the original and which the additions--if indeed (supremely
monstrous thought!) there were any original as distinguished from other embodiments.
Then, in the midst of these devastating reflections, Carter's beyond--the-gate fragment was hurled
from what had seemed the nadir of horror to black, clutching pits of a horror still more profound.
This time it was largely external--a force of personality which at once confronted and surrounded
and pervaded him, and which in addition to its local presence, seemed also to be a part of himself, and
likewise to be co--existent with all time and conterminous with all space. There was no visual image,
yet the sense of entity and the awful concept of combined localism and identity and infinity lent a
paralyzing terror beyond anything which any Carter-fragment had hitherto deemed capable of
existing.
In the face of that awful wonder, the quasi-Carter forgot the horror of destroyed individuality. It
was an All-in-One and One-in-All of limitless being and self--not merely a thing of one space-time
continuum, but allied to the ultimate animating essence of existence's whole unbounded sweep--the
last, utter sweep which has no confines and which outreaches fancy and mathematics alike. It was
perhaps that which certain secret cults of Earth had whispered of as Yog-Sothoth, and which has
been a deity under other names; that which the crustaceans of Yuggoth worship as the Beyond-One,
and which the vaporous brains of the spiral nebulae know by an untranslatable sign--yet in a flash the
Carter-facet realized how slight and fractional all these conceptions are.
And now the Being was addressing the Carter-facet in prodigious waves that smote and burned
and thundered--a concentration of energy that blasted its recipient with well-nigh unendurable
violence, and that paralleled in an unearthly rhythm the curious swaying of the Ancient Ones, and the
flickering of the monstrous lights, in that baffling region beyond the First Gate. It was as though suns
and worlds and universes had converged upon one point whose very position in space they had
conspired to annihilate with an impact of resistless fury. But amidst the greater terror one lesser
terror was diminished; for the searing waves appeared somehow to isolate the Beyond-the-Gate
Carter from his infinity of duplicates--to restore, as it were, a certain amount of the illusion of
identity. After a time the hearer began to translate the waves into speech-forms known to him, and his
sense of horror and oppression waned. Fright became pure awe, and what had seemed blasphemously
abnormal seemed now only ineffably majestic.
"Randolph Carter," it seemed to say, "my manifestations on your planet's extension, the Ancient
Ones, have sent you as one who would lately have returned to small lands of dream which he had
lost, yet who with greater freedom has risen to greater and nobler desires and curiosities. You
wished to sail up golden Oukranos, to search out forgotten ivory cities in orchid-heavy Kied, and to
reign on the opal throne of Ilek-Vad, whose fabulous towers and numberless domes rise mighty
toward a single red star in a firmament alien to your Earth and to all matter. Now, with the passing of
two Gates, you wish loftier things. You would not flee like a child from a scene disliked to a dream
beloved, but would plunge like a man into that last and inmost of secrets which lies behind all scenes
and dreams.
"What you wish, I have found good; and I am ready to grant that which I have granted eleven times
only to beings of your planet--five times only to those you call men, or those resembling them. I am
ready to show you the Ultimate Mystery, to look on which is to blast a feeble spirit. Yet before you
gaze full at that last and first of secrets you may still wield a free choice, and return if you will
through the two Gates with the Veil still unrent before our eyes."
Chapter Five
A sudden shutting-off of the waves left Carter in a chilling and awesome silence full of the spirit
of desolation. On every hand pressed the illimitable vastness of the void; yet the seeker knew that the
Being was still there. After a moment he thought of words whose mental substance he flung into the
abyss: "I accept. I will not retreat."
The waves surged forth again, and Carter knew that the Being had heard. And now there poured
from that limitless Mind a flood of knowledge and explanation which opened new vistas to the
seeker, and prepared him for such a grasp of the cosmos as he had never hoped to possess. He was
told how childish and limited is the notion of a tri-dimensional world, and what an infinity of
directions there are besides the known directions of up-down, forward-backward, right-left. He was
shown the smallness and tinsel emptiness of the little Earth gods, with their petty, human interests and
connections--their hatreds, rages, loves and vanities; their craving for praise and sacrifice, and their
demands for faiths contrary to reason and nature.
While most of the impressions translated themselves to Carter as words there were others to
which other senses gave interpretation. Perhaps with eyes and perhaps with imagination he perceived
that he was in a region of dimensions beyond those conceivable to the eye and brain of man. He saw
now, in the brooding shadows of that which had been first a vortex of power and then an illimitable
void, a sweep of creation that dizzied his senses. From some inconceivable vantagepoint he looked
upon prodigious forms whose multiple extensions transcended any conception of being, size and
boundaries which his mind had hitherto been able to hold, despite a lifetime of cryptical study. He
began to understand dimly why there could exist at the same time the little boy Randolph Carter in the
Arkham farm-house in 1883, the misty form on the vaguely hexagonal pillar beyond the First Gate,
the fragment now facing the Presence in the limitless abyss, and all the other Carters his fancy or
perception envisaged.
Then the waves increased in strength and sought to improve his understanding, reconciling him to
the multiform entity of which his present fragment was an infinitesimal part. They told him that every
figure of space is but the result of the intersection by a plane of some corresponding figure of one
more dimension--as a square is cut from a cube, or a circle from a sphere. The cube and sphere, of
three dimensions, are thus cut from corresponding forms of four dimensions, which men know only
through guesses and dreams; and these in turn are cut from forms of five dimensions, and so on up to
the dizzy and reachless heights of archetypal infinity. The world of men and of the gods of men is
merely an infinitesimal phase of an infinitesimal thing--the three-dimensional phase of that small
wholeness reached by the First Gate, where 'Umr at-Tawil dictates dreams to the Ancient Ones.
Though men hail it as reality, and brand thoughts of its many-dimensioned original as unreality, it is in
truth the very opposite. That which we call substance and reality is shadow and illusion, and that
which we call shadow and illusion is substance and reality.
Time, the waves went on, is motionless, and without beginning or end. That it has motion and is
the cause of change is an illusion. Indeed, it is itself really an illusion, for except to the narrow sight
of beings in limited dimensions there are no such things as past, present and future. Men think of time
only because of what they call change, yet that too is illusion. All that was, and is, and is to be, exists
simultaneously.
These revelations came with a god-like solemnity which left Carter unable to doubt. Even though
they lay almost beyond his comprehension, he felt that they must be true in the light of that final
cosmic reality which belies all local perspectives and narrow partial views; and he was familiar
enough with profound speculations to be free from the bondage of local and partial conceptions. Had
his whole quest not been based upon a faith in the unreality of the local and partial?
After an impressive pause the waves continued, saying that what the denizens of few-dimensioned
zones call change is merely a function of their consciousness, which views the external world from
various cosmic angles. As the Shapes produced by the cutting of a cone seem to vary with the angles
of cutting--being circle, ellipse, parabola or hyperbola according to that angle, yet without any
change in the cone itself--so do the local aspects of an unchanged--and endless reality seem to
change with the cosmic angle of regarding. To this variety of angles of consciousness the feeble
beings of the inner worlds are slaves, since with rare exceptions they can not learn to control them.
Only a few students of forbidden things have gained inklings of this control, and have thereby
conquered time and change. But the entities outside the Gates command all angles, and view the
myriad parts of the cosmos in terms of fragmentary change-involving perspective, or of the
changeless totality beyond perspective, in accordance with their will.
As the waves paused again, Carter began to comprehend, vaguely and terrifiedly, the ultimate
background of that riddle of lost individuality which had at first so horrified him. His intuition
pieced together the fragments of revelation, and brought him closer and closer to a grasp of the
secret. He understood that much of the frightful revelation would have come upon him--splitting up
his ego amongst myriads of earthly counterparts inside the First Gate, had not the magic of 'Umr at-
Tawil kept it from him in order that he might use the silver key with precision for the Ultimate Gate's
opening. Anxious for clearer knowledge, he sent out waves of thought, asking more of the exact
relationship between his various facets--the fragment now beyond the Ultimate Gate, the fragment
still on the quasi-hexagonal pedestal beyond the First Gate, the boy of 1883, the man of 1928, the
various ancestral beings who had formed his heritage and the bulwark of his ego, amid the nameless
denizens of the other eons and other worlds which that first hideous flash ultimate perception had
identified with him. Slowly the waves of the Being surged out in reply, trying to make plain what was
almost beyond the reach of an earthly mind.
All descended lines of beings of the finite dimensions, continued the waves, and all stages of
growth in each one of these beings, are merely manifestations of one archetypal and eternal being in
the space outside dimensions. Each local being--son, father, grandfather, and so on--and each stage
of individual being--infant, child, boy, man--is merely one of the infinite phases of that same
archetypal and eternal being, caused by a variation in the angle of the consciousness-plane which
cuts it. Randolph Carter at all ages; Randolph Carter and all his ancestors, both human and pre-human,
terrestrial and pre-terrestrial; all these were only phases of one ultimate, eternal "Carter" outside
space and time--phantom projections differentiated only by the angle at which the plane of
consciousness happened to cut the eternal archetype in each case.
A slight change of angle could turn the student of today into the child of yesterday; could turn
Randolph Carter into that wizard, Edmund Carter who fled from Salem to the hills behind Arkham in
1692, or that Pickman Carter who in the year 2169 would use strange means in repelling the Mongol
hordes from Australia; could turn a human Carter into one of those earlier entities which had dwelt in
primal Hyperborea and worshipped black, plastic Tsathoggua after flying down from Kythamil, the
double planet that once revolved around Arcturus; could turn a terrestrial Carter to a remotely
ancestral and doubtfully shaped dweller on Kythamil itself, or a still remoter creature of trans-
galactic Stronti, or a four-dimensioned gaseous consciousness in an older space-time continuum, or a
vegetable brain of the future on a dark, radioactive comet of inconceivable orbit--so on, in endless
cosmic cycle.
The archetype, throbbed the waves, are the people of the Ultimate Abyss--formless, ineffable,
and guessed at only by rare dreamers on the low-dimensioned worlds. Chief among such was this
informing Being itself...which indeed was Carter's own archetype. The gutless zeal of Carter and all
his forebears for forbidden cosmic secrets was a natural result of derivation from the Supreme
Archetype. On every world all great wizards, all great thinkers, all great artists, are facets of It.
Almost stunned with awe, and with a kind of terrifying delight, Randolph Carter's consciousness
did homage to that transcendent Entity from which it was derived. As the waves paused again he
pondered in the mighty silence, thinking of strange tributes, stranger questions, and still stranger
requests. Curious concepts flowed conflictingly through a brain dazed with unaccustomed vistas and
unforeseen disclosures. It occurred to him that, if these disclosures were literally true, he might
bodily visit all those infinitely distant ages and parts of the universe which he had hitherto known
only in dreams, could he but command the magic to change the angle of his consciousness-plane. And
did not the silver key supply that magic? Had it not first changed him from a man in 1928 to a boy in
1883, and then to something quite outside time? Oddly, despite his present apparent absence of body;
he knew that the key was still with him.
While the silence still lasted, Randolph Carter radiated forth the thoughts and questions which
assailed him. He knew that in this ultimate abyss he was equidistant from every facet of his
archetype--human or non-human, terrestrial or extra-terrestrial, galactic or trans-galactic; and his
curiosity regarding the other phases of his being--especially those phases which were farthest from
an earthly 1928 in time and space, or which had most persistently haunted his dreams throughout life-
-was at fever heat He felt that his archetypal Entity could at will send him bodily to any of these
phases of bygone and distant life by changing his consciousness-plane and despite the marvels he had
undergone he burned for the further marvel of walking in the flesh through those grotesque and
incredible scenes which visions of the night had fragmentarily brought him.
Without definite intention he was asking the Presence for access to a dim, fantastic world whose
five multi-coloured suns, alien constellations, dizzily black crags, clawed, tapir-snouted denizens,
bizarre metal towers, unexplained tunnels, and cryptical floating cylinders had intruded again and
again upon his slumbers. That world, he felt vaguely, was in all the conceivable cosmos the one most
freely in touch with others; and he longed to explore the vistas whose beginnings he had glimpsed,
and to embark through space to those still remoter worlds with which the clawed, snouted denizens
trafficked. There was no time for fear. As at all crises of his strange life, sheer cosmic curiosity
triumphed over everything else.
When the waves resumed their awesome pulsing, Carter knew that his terrible request was
granted. The Being was telling him of the nighted gulfs through which he would have to pass of the
unknown quintuple star in an unsuspected galaxy around which the alien world revolved, and of the
burrowing inner horrors against which the clawed, snouted race of that world perpetually fought. It
told him, too, of how the angle of his personal consciousness-plane, and the angle of his
consciousness-plane regarding the space-time elements of the sought--for world, would have to be
tilted simultaneously in order to restore to that world the Carter-facet which had dwelt there.
The Presence wanted him to be sure of his symbols if he wished ever to return from the remote
and alien world he had chosen, and he radiated back an impatient affirmation; confident that the silver
key, which he felt was with him and which he knew had tilted both world and personal planes in
throwing him back to 1883, contained those symbols which were meant. And now the Being, grasping
his impatience signified its readiness to accomplish the monstrous precipitation. The waves abruptly
ceased, and there supervened a momentary stillness tense with nameless and dreadful expectancy.
Then, without warning, came a whirring and drumming that swelled to a terrific thundering. Once
again Carter felt himself the focal point of an intense concentration of energy which smote and
hammered and seared unbearably in the now-familiar rhythm of outer space, and which he could not
classify as either the blasting heat of a blazing star, or the all-petrifying cold of the ultimate abyss.
Bands and rays of colour utterly foreign to any spectrum of our universe played and wove and
interlaced before him, and he was conscious of a frightful velocity of motion. He caught one
fleeting glimpse of a figure sitting alone upon a cloudy throne more hexagonal than otherwise...
Chapter Six
As the Hindoo paused in his story he saw that de Marigny and Phillips were watching him
absorbedly. Aspinwall pretended to ignore the narrative and kept his eyes ostentatiously on the
papers before him. The alien-rhythmed ticking of the coffin-shaped clock took on a new and
portentous meaning, while the fumes from the choked, neglected tripods wove themselves into
fantastic and inexplicable shapes, and formed disturbing combinations with the grotesque figures of
the draft-swayed tapestries. The old Negro who had tended them was gone--perhaps some growing
tension had frightened him out of the house. An almost apologetic hesitancy hampered the speaker as
he resumed in his oddly labored yet idiomatic voice.
"You have found these things of the abyss hard to believe," he said, "but you will find the
tangible and material things ahead still barer. That is the way of our minds. Marvels are doubly
incredible when brought into three dimensions from the vague regions of possible dream. I shall not
try to tell you much--that would be another and very different story. I will tell only what you
absolutely have to know."
Carter, after that final vortex of alien and polychromatic rhythm, had found himself in what for a
moment he thought was his old insistent dream. He was, as many a night before, walking amidst
throngs of clawed, snouted beings through the streets of a labyrinth of inexplicably fashioned metal
under a plate of diverse solar colour; and as he looked down he saw that his body was like those of
the others--rugose, partly squamous, and curiously articulated in a fashion mainly insect-like yet not
without a caricaturish resemblance to the human outline. The silver key was still in his grasp, though
held by a noxious-looking claw.
In another moment the dream-sense vanished, and he felt rather as one just awakened from a dream.
The ultimate abyss--the Being--the entity of absurd, outlandish race called Randolph Carter on a
world of the future not yet born--some of these things were parts of the persistent recurrent dreams
of the wizard Zkauba on the planet Yaddith. They were too persistent--they interfered with his duties
in weaving spells to keep the frightful Dholes in their burrows, and became mixed up with his
recollections of the myriad real worlds he had visited in light--beam envelopes. And now they had
become quasi-real as never before. This heavy, material silver key in his right upper claw, exact
image of one he had dreamt about meant no good. He must rest and reflect, and consult the tablets of
Nhing for advice on what to do. Climbing a metal wall in a lane off the main concourse, he entered
his apartment and approached the rack of tablets.
Seven day-fractions later Zkauba squatted on his prism in awe and half despair, for the truth had
opened up a new and conflicting set of memories. Nevermore could he know the peace of being one
entity. For all time and space he was two: Zkauba the wizard of Yaddith, disgusted with the thought of
the repellent earth-mammal Carter that he was to be and had been, and Randolph Carter, of Boston on
the Earth, shivering with fright at the clawed, mantel thing which he had once been, and had become
again.
The time units spent on Yaddith, croaked the Swami--whose laboured voice was beginning to
show signs of fatigue--made a tale in themselves which could not be related in brief compass. There
were trips to Stronti and Mthura and Kath, and other worlds in the twenty-eight galaxies accessible to
the light-beam envelopes of the creatures of Yaddith, and trips back and forth through eons of time
with the aid of the silver key and various other symbols known to Yaddith's wizards. There were
hideous struggles with the bleached viscous Dholes in the primal tunnels that honeycombed the
planet. There were awed sessions in libraries amongst the massed lore of ten thousand worlds living
and dead. There were tense conferences with other minds of Yaddith, including that of the Arch-
Ancient Buo. Zkauba told no one of what had befallen his personality, but when the Randolph Carter
facet was uppermost he would study furiously every possible means of returning to the Earth and to
human form, and would desperately practice human speech with the alien throat-organs so ill adapted
to it.
The Carter-facet had soon learned with horror that the silver key was unable to effect his return
to human form. It was, as he deduced too late from things he remembered, things he dreamed, and
things he inferred from the lore of Yaddith, a product of Hyperborea on Earth; with power over the
personal consciousness-angles of human beings alone. It could, however, change the planetary angle
and send the user at will through time in an unchanged body. There had been an added spell which
gave it limitless powers it otherwise lacked; but this, too, was a human discovery--peculiar to a
spatially unreachable region, and not to be duplicated by the wizards of Yaddith. It had been written
on the undecipherable parchment in the hideously carven box with the silver key, and Carter bitterly
lamented that he had left it behind. The now inaccessible Being of the abyss had warned him to be
sure of his symbols, and had doubtless thought he lacked nothing.
As time wore on he strove harder and harder to utilize the monstrous lore of Yaddith in finding a
way back to the abyss and the omnipotent Entity. With his new knowledge he could have done much
toward reading the cryptic parchment; but that power, under present conditions, was merely ironic.
There were times, however, when the Zkauba-facet was uppermost and when he strove to erase the
conflicting Carter-memories which troubled him.
Thus long spaces of time wore on--ages longer than the brain of man could grasp, since the
beings of Yaddith die only after prolonged cycles. After many hundreds of revolutions the Carter-
facet seemed to gain on the Zkauba-facet, and would spend vast periods calculating the distance of
Yaddith in space and time from the human Earth that was to be. The figures were staggering eons of
light-years beyond counting but the immemorial lore of Yaddith fitted Carter to grasp such things. He
cultivated the power of dreaming himself momentarily Earthward, and learned many things about our
planet that he had never known before. But he could not dream the needed formula on the missing
parchment.
Then at last he conceived a wild plan of escape from Yaddith--which began when he found a drug
that would keep his Zkauba-facet always dormant, yet with out dissolution of the knowledge and
memories of Zkauba. He thought that his calculations would let him perform a voyage with a light-
wave envelope such as no being of Yaddith had ever performed--a bodily voyage through nameless
eons and across incredible galactic reaches to the solar system and the Earth itself.
Once on Earth, though in the body of a clawed, snouted thing, he might be able somehow to find
and finish deciphering the strangely hieroglyphed parchment he had left in the car at Arkham; and
with its aid--and the key's--resume his normal terrestrial semblance.
He was not blind to the perils of the attempt. He knew that when he had brought the planet-angle
to the right (a thing impossible to do while hurtling through space), Yaddith would be a dead world
dominated by triumphant Dholes, and that his escape in the light-wave envelope would be a matter of
grave doubt. Likewise was he aware of how he must achieve suspended animation, in the manner of
an adept, to endure the eon-long flight through fathomless abysses. He knew, too, that--assuming his
voyage succeeded--he must immunize himself to the bacterial and other earthly conditions hostile to
a body from Yaddith. Furthermore, he must provide a way of feigning human shape on Earth until he
might recover and decipher the parchment and resume that shape in truth. Otherwise he would
probably be discovered and destroyed by the people in horror as a thing that should not be. And there
must be some gold--luckily obtainable on Yaddith--to tide him over that period of quest.
Slowly Carter's plans went forward. He prepared a light-wave envelope of abnormal toughness,
able to stand both the prodigious time--transition and the unexampled flight through space. He tested
all his calculations, and sent forth his Earthward dreams again and again, bringing them as close as
possible to 1928. He practiced suspended animation with marvelous success. He discovered just the
bacterial agent he needed, and worked out the varying gravity-stress to which he must become used.
He artfully fashioned a waxen mask and loose costume enabling him to pass among men as a human
being of a sort, and devised a doubly potent spell with which to hold back the Dholes at the moment
of his starting from the dead, black Yaddith of the inconceivable future. He took care, too, to
assemble a large supply of the drugs--unobtainable on Earth--which would keep his Zkauba-facet in
abeyance till he might shed the Yaddith body, nor did he neglect a small store of gold for earthly use.
The starting-day was a time of doubt and apprehension. Carter climbed up to his envelope-
platform, on the pretext of sailing for the triple star Nython, and crawled into the sheath of shining
metal. He had just room to perform the ritual of the silver key, and as he did so he slowly started the
levitation of his envelope. There was an appalling seething and darkening of the day, and hideous
racking of pain. The cosmos seemed to reel irresponsibly, and the other constellations danced in a
black sky.
All at once Carter felt a new equilibrium. The cold of interstellar gulfs gnawed at the outside of
his envelope, and he could see that he floated free in space--the metal building from which he had
started having decayed years before. Below him the ground was festering with gigantic Dholes; and
even as he looked, one reared up several hundred feet and leveled a bleached, viscous end at him.
But his spells were effective, and in another moment he was falling away from Yaddith, unharmed.
Chapter Seven
In that bizarre room in New Orleans, from which the old black servant had instinctively fled, the
odd voice of Swami Chandraputra grew hoarser still.
"Gentlemen," he continued, "I will not ask you to believe these things until I have shown you
special proof. Accept it, then, as a myth, when I tell you of the thousands of light-years--thousands
of years of time, and uncounted billions of miles that Randolph Carter hurtled through space as a
nameless, alien entity in a thin envelope of electron-activated metal. He timed his period of
suspended animation with utmost care, planning to have it end only a few years before the time of
landing on the Earth in or near 1928.
"He will never forget that awakening. Remember, gentlemen, that before that eon-long sleep he
had lived consciously for thousands of terrestrial years amidst the alien and horrible wonders of
Yaddith. There was a hideous gnawing of cold, a cessation of menacing dreams, and a glance
through the eye-plates of the envelope. Stars, clusters, nebulae, on every hand--and at last their
outline bore some kinship to the constellations of Earth that he knew.
"Some day his descent into the solar system may be told. He saw Kynath and Yuggoth on the rim,
passed close to Neptune and glimpsed the hellish white fungi that spot it, learned an untellable secret
from the close-glimpsed mists of Jupiter, and saw the horror on one of the satellites, and gazed at the
cyclopean ruins that sprawl over Mars' ruddy disc. When the Earth drew near he saw it as a thin
crescent which swelled alarmingly in size. He slackened speed, though his sensations of
homecoming made him wish to lose not a moment. I will not try to tell you of these sensations as I
learned them from Carter.
"Well, toward the last Carter hovered about in the Earth's upper air waiting till daylight came
over the Western Hemisphere. He wanted to land where he had left--near the Snake Den in the hills
behind Arkham. If any of you have been away from home long--and I know one of you has--I leave it
to you how the sight of New England's rolling hills and great elms and gnarled orchards and ancient
stone walls must have affected him.
"He came down at dawn in the lower meadow of the old Carter place, and was thankful for the
silence and solitude. It was autumn, as when he had left, and the smell of the hills was balm to his
soul. He managed to drag the metal envelope up the slope of the timber lot into the Snake Den,
though it would not go through the weed-choked fissure to the inner cave. It was there also that he
covered his alien body with the human clothing and waxen mask which would be necessary. He kept
the envelope here for over a year, till certain circumstances made a new hiding-place necessary.
"He walked to Arkham--incidentally practicing the management of his body in human posture and
against terrestrial gravity--and had his gold changed to money at a bank. He also made some
inquiries--posing as a foreigner ignorant of much English--and found that the year was 1930, only
two years after the goal he had aimed at.
"Of course, his position was horrible. Unable to assert his identity, forced to live on guard every
moment, with certain difficulties regarding food, and with a need to conserve the alien drug which
kept his Zkauba-facet dormant, he felt that he must act as quickly as possible. Going to Boston and
taking a room in the decaying West End, where he could live cheaply and inconspicuously, he at once
established inquiries concerning Randolph Carter's estate and effects. It was then that he learned how
anxious Mr. Aspinwall, here, was to have the estate divided, and how valiantly Mr. de Marigny and
Mr. Phillips strove to keep it intact."
The Hindoo bowed, though no expression crossed his dark, tranquil, and thickly bearded face.
"Indirectly," he continued, "Carter secured a good copy of the missing parchment and began
working on its deciphering. I am glad to say that I was able to help in all this--for he appealed to me
quite early, and through me came in touch with other mystics throughout the world. I went to live
with him in Boston--a wretched place in Chambers Street. As for the parchment--I am pleased to help
Mr. de Marigny in his perplexity. To him let me say that the language of those hieroglyphics is not
Naacal, but R'lyehian, which was brought to Earth by the spawn of Cthulhu countless ages ago. It is,
of coarse, a translation--there was an Hyperborean original millions of years earlier in the primal
tongue of Tsath-yo.
"There was more to decipher than Carter had looked for, but at no time did he give up hope.
Early this year he made great strides through a book he imported from Nepal, and there is no
question but that he will win before long. Unfortunately, however, one handicap has developed--the
exhaustion of the alien drug which keeps the Zkauba-facet dormant. This is not, however, as great a
calamity as was feared. Carter's personality is gaining in the body, and when Zkauba comes
uppermost--for shorter and shorter periods, and now only when evoked by some unusual excitement-
-he is generally too dazed to undo any of Carter's work. He can not find the metal envelope that
would take him back to Yaddith, for although he almost did, once, Carter hid it anew at a time when
the Zkanba-facet was wholly latent. All the harm he has done is to frighten a few people and create
certain nightmare rumors among the Poles and Lithuanians of Boston's West End. So far, he had never
injured the careful disguise prepared by the Carter-facet, though he sometimes throws it off so that
parts have to be replaced. I have seen what lies beneath--and it is not good to see.
"A month ago Carter saw the advertisement of this meeting, and knew that he must act quickly to
save his estate. He could not wait to decipher the parchment and resume his human form.
Consequently he deputed me to act for him.
"Gentlemen, I say to you that Randolph Carter is not dead; that he is temporarily in an anomalous
condition, but that within two or three months at the outside he will be able to appear in proper form
and demand the custody of his estate. I am prepared to offer proof if necessary. Therefore I beg that
you will adjourn this meeting for an indefinite period."
Chapter Eight
De Marigny and Phillips stared at the Hindoo as if hypnotized, while Aspinwall emitted a series
of snorts and bellows. The old attorney's disgust had by now surged into open rage and he pounded
the table with an apoplectically veined fist. When he spoke, it was in a kind of bark.
"How long is this foolery to be borne? I've listened an hour to this madman--this faker--and now
he has the damned effrontery to say Randolph Carter is alive--to ask us to postpone the settlement for
no good reason! Why don't you throw the scoundrel out, de Marigny? Do you mean to make us all the
butts of a charlatan or idiot?"
De Marigny quietly raised his hand and spoke softly.
"Let us think slowly and dearly. This has been a very singular tale, and there are things in it which
I, as a mystic not altogether ignorant, recognize as far from impossible. Furthermore--since 1930 I
have received letters from the Swami which tally with his account."
As he paused, old Mr. Phillips ventured a word.
"Swami Chandraputra spoke of proofs. I, too, recognize much that is significant in this story, and I
have myself had many oddly corroborative letters from the Swami during the last two years; but some
of these statements are very extreme. Is there not something tangible which can be shown?"
At last the impassive-faced Swami replied, slowly and hoarsely, and drawing an object from the
pocket of his loose coat as he spoke.
"While none of you here has ever seen the silver key itself, Messrs. de Marigny and Phillips
have seen photographs of it. Does this look familiar to you?"
He fumblingly laid on the table, with his large, white-mittened hand, a heavy key of tarnished
silver--nearly five inches long, of unknown and utterly exotic workmanship, and covered from end to
end with hieroglyphs of the most bizarre description. De Marigny and Phillips gasped.
"That's it!" cried de Marigny. "The camera doesn't lie. I couldn't be mistaken!"
But Aspinwall had already launched a reply.
"Fools! What does it prove? If that's really the key that belonged to my cousin, it's up to this
foreigner--this damned nigger--to explain how he got it! Randolph Carter vanished with the key four
years ago. How do we know he wasn't robbed and murdered? He was half crazy himself, and in touch
with still crazier people.
"Look here, you nigger--where did you get that key? Did you kill Randolph Carter?"
The Swami's features, abnormally placid, did not change; but the remote, irisless black eyes
behind them blazed dangerously. He spoke with great difficulty.
"Please control yourself, Mr. Aspinwall. There is another form of proof that I could give, but its
effect upon everybody would not be pleasant. Let us be reasonable. Here are some papers obviously
written since 1930, and in the unmistakable style of Randolph Carter."
He clumsily drew a long envelope from inside his loose coat and handed it to the sputtering
attorney as de Marigny and Phillips watched with chaotic thoughts and a dawning feeling of supernal
wonder.
"Of course the handwriting is almost illegible--but remember that Randolph Carter now has no
hands well adapted to forming human script."
Aspinwall looked through the papers hurriedly, and was visibly perplexed, but he did not change
his demeanor. The room was tense with excitement and nameless dread and the alien rhythm of the
coffin--shaped clock had an utterly diabolic sound to de Marigny and Phillips, though the lawyer
seemed affected not at all.
Aspinwall spoke again. "These look like clever forgeries. If they aren't, they may mean that
Randolph Carter has been brought under the control of people with no good purpose. There's only
one thing to do--have this faker arrested. De Marigny, will you telephone for the police?"
"Let us wait," answered their host. "I do not think this case calls for the police. I have a certain
idea. Mr. Aspinwall, this gentleman is a mystic of real attainments. He says he is in the confidence of
Randolph Carter. Will it satisfy you if he can answer certain questions which could be answered only
by one in such confidence? I know Carter, and can ask such questions. Let me get a book which I think
will make a good test."
He turned toward the door to the library, Phillips dazedly following in a kind of automatic way.
Aspinwall remained where he was, studying closely the Hindoo who confronted him with abnormally
impassive face. Suddenly, as Chandraputra clumsily restored the silver key to his pocket the lawyer
emitted a guttural shout.
"Hey, by Heaven I've got it! This rascal is in disguise. I don't believe he's an East Indian at all.
That face--it isn't a face, but a mask! I guess his story put that into my head, but it's true. It never
moves, and that turban and beard hide the edges. This fellow's a common crook! He isn't even a
foreigner--I've been watching his language. He's a Yankee of some sort. And look at those mittens--
he knows his fingerprints could be spotted. Damn you, I'll pull that thing off--"
"Stop!" The hoarse, oddly alien voice of the Swami held a tone beyond all mere earthly fright "I
told you there was another form of proof which I could give if necessary, and I warned you not to
provoke me to it. This red-faced old meddler is right; I'm not really an East Indian. This face is a
mask, and what it covers is not human. You others have guessed--I felt that minutes ago. It wouldn't be
pleasant if I took that mask off--let it alone. Ernest, I may as well tell you that I am Randolph Carter."
No one moved. Aspinwall snorted and made vague motions. De Marigny and Phillips, across the
room, watched the workings of the red face and studied the back of the turbaned figure that
confronted him. The clock's abnormal ticking was hideous and the tripod fumes and swaying arras
danced a dance of death. The half-choking lawyer broke the silence.
"No you don't, you crook--you can't scare me! You've reasons of your own for not wanting that
mask off. Maybe we'd know who you are. Off with it--"
As he reached forward, the Swami seized his hand with one of his own clumsily mittened
members, evoking a curious cry of mixed pain and surprise. De Marigny started toward the two, but
paused confused as the pseudo-Hindoo's shout of protest changed to a wholly inexplicable rattling
and buzzing sound. Aspinwall's red face was furious, and with his free hand he made another lunge at
his opponent's bushy beard. This time he succeeded in getting a hold, and at his frantic tug the whole
waxen visage came loose from the turban and clung to the lawyer's apoplectic fist.
As it did so, Aspinwall uttered a frightful gurgling cry, and Phillips and de Marigny saw his face
convulsed with a wilder, deep and more hideous epilepsy of stark panic than ever they had seen on
human countenance before. The pseudo-Swami had meanwhile released his other hand and was
standing as if dazed, making buzzing noises of a most abnormal quality. Then the turbaned figure
slumped oddly into a posture scarcely human, and began a curious, fascinated sort of shuffle toward
the coffin-shaped clock that ticked out its cosmic and abnormal rhythm. His now uncovered face was
turned away, and de Marigny and Phillips could not see what the lawyer's act had disclosed. Then
their attention was turned to Aspinwall, who was sinking ponderously to the floor. The spell was
broken--but when they reached the old man he was dead.
Turning quickly to the shuffling Swami's receding back, de Marigny saw one of the great white
mittens drop listlessly off a dangling arm. The fumes of the olibanum were thick, and all that could be
glimpsed of the revealed hand was something long and black...Before the Creole could reach the
retreating figure, old Mr. Phillips laid a hand on his shoulder.
"Don't!" he whispered, "We don't know what we're up against. That other facet, you know--
Zkauba, the wizard of Yaddith..."
The turbaned figure had now reached the abnormal clock, and the watchers saw though the dense
fumes a blurred black claw fumbling with the tall, hieroglyphed door. The fumbling made a queer,
clicking sound. Then the figure entered the coffin-shaped case and pulled the door shut after it.
De Marigny could no longer be restrained, but when he reached and opened the clock it was
empty. The abnormal ticking went on, beating out the dark, cosmic rhythm which underlies all
mystical gate-openings. On the floor the great white mitten, and the dead man with a bearded mask
clutched in his hand, had nothing further to reveal.
A year passed, and nothing has been heard of Randolph Carter. His estate is still unsettled. The
Boston address from which one "Swami Chandraputra" sent inquiries to various mystics in 1930-31-
32 was indeed tenanted by a strange Hindoo, but he left shortly before the date of the New Orleans
conference and has never been seen since. He was said to be dark, expressionless, and bearded, and
his landlord thinks the swarthy mask--which was duly exhibited--looked very much like him. He was
never, however, suspected of any connection with the nightmare apparitions whispered of by local
Slavs. The hills behind Arkham were searched for the "metal envelope," but nothing of the sort was
ever found. However, a clerk in Arkham's First National Bank does recall a queer turbaned man who
cashed an odd bit of gold bullion in October, 1930.
De Marigny and Phillips scarcely know what to make of the business. After all, what was proved?
There was a story. There was a key which might have been forged from one of the pictures
Carter had freely distributed in 1928. There were papers--all indecisive. There was a masked
stranger, but who now living saw behind the mask? Amidst the strain and the olibanum fumes that act
of vanishing in the clock might easily have been a dual hallucination. Hindoos know much of
hypnotism. Reason proclaims the "Swami" a criminal with designs on Randolph Carter's estate. But
the autopsy said that Aspinwall had died of shock. Was it rage alone which caused it? And some
things in that story...
In a vast room hung with strangely figured arras and filled with olibanum fumes, Etienne Laurent
de Marigny often sits listening with vague sensations to the abnormal rhythm of that hieroglyphed,
coffin-shaped clock.

WHAT THE MOON BRINGS
It was in the spectral summer when the moon shone down on the old garden where I wandered; the
spectral summer of narcotic flowers and humid seas of foliage that bring wild and many-coloured
dreams. And as I walked by the shallow crystal stream I saw unwonted ripples tipped with yellow
light, as if those placid waters were drawn on in resistless currents to strange oceans that are not in
the world. Silent and sparkling, bright and baleful, those moon-cursed waters hurried I knew not
whither; whilst from the embowered banks white lotos-blossoms fluttered one by one in the opiate
night-wind and dropped despairingly into the stream, swirling away horribly under the arched, carven
bridge, and staring back with the sinister resignation of calm, dead faces.
And as I ran along the shore, crushing sleeping flowers with heedless feet and maddened ever by
the fear of unknown things and the lure of the dead faces, I saw that the garden had no end under that
moon; for where by day the walls were, there stretched now only new vistas of trees and paths,
flowers and shrubs, stone idols and pagodas, and bendings of the yellow-litten stream past grassy
banks and under grotesque bridges of marble. And the lips of the dead lotos-faces whispered sadly,
and bade me follow, nor did I cease my steps till the stream became a river, and joined amidst marshes
of swaying reeds and beaches of gleaming sand the shore of a vast and nameless sea.
Upon that sea the hateful moon shone, and over its unvocal waves weird perfumes breeded. And
as I saw therein the lotos-faces vanish, I longed for nets that I might capture them and learn from them
the secrets which the moon had brought upon the night. But when that moon went over to the west and
the still tide ebbed from the sullen shore, I saw in that light old spires that the waves almost
uncovered, and white columns gay with festoons of green seaweed. And knowing that to this sunken
place all the dead had come, I trembled and did not wish again to speak with the lotos-faces.
Yet when I saw afar out in the sea a black condor descend from the sky to seek rest on a vast reef,
I would fain have questioned him, and asked him of those whom I had known when they were alive.
This I would have asked him had he not been so far away, but he was very far, and could not be seen
at all when he drew nigh that gigantic reef.
So I watched the tide go out under that sinking moon, and saw gleaming the spires, the towers, and
the roofs of that dead, dripping city. And as I watched, my nostrils tried to close against the perfume-
-conquering stench of the world's dead; for truly, in this unplaced and forgotten spot had all the flesh
of the churchyards gathered for puffy sea-worms to gnaw and glut upon.
Over these horrors the evil moon now hung very low, but the puffy worms of the sea need no
moon to feed by. And as I watched the ripples that told of the writhing of worms beneath, I felt a new
chill from afar out whither the condor had flown, as if my flesh had caught a horror before my eyes
had seen it.
Nor had my flesh trembled without cause, for when I raised my eyes I saw that the waters had
ebbed very low, shewing much of the vast reef whose rim I had seen before. And when I saw that the
reef was but the black basalt crown of a shocking eikon whose monstrous forehead now shown in the
dim moonlight and whose vile hooves must paw the hellish ooze miles below, I shrieked and
shrieked lest the hidden face rise above the waters, and lest the hidden eyes look at me after the
slinking away of that leering and treacherous yellow moon.
And to escape this relentless thing I plunged gladly and unhesitantly into the stinking shallows
where amidst weedy walls and sunken streets fat sea-worms feast upon the world's dead.

POLARIS
Into the North Window of my chamber glows the Pole Star with uncanny light. All through the
long hellish hours of blackness it shines there. And in the autumn of the year, when the winds from
the north curse and whine, and the red-leaved trees of the swamp mutter things to one another in the
small hours of the morning under the horned waning moon, I sit by the casement and watch that star.
Down from the heights reels the glittering Cassiopeia as the hours wear on, while Charles' Wain
lumbers up from behind the vapour-soaked swamp trees that sway in the night wind. Just before dawn
Arcturus winks ruddily from above the cemetery on the low hillock, and Coma Berenices shimmers
weirdly afar off in the mysterious east; but still the Pole Star leers down from the same place in the
black vault, winking hideously like an insane watching eye which strives to convey some strange
message, yet recalls nothing save that it once had a message to convey. Sometimes, when it is cloudy,
I can sleep.
Well do I remember the night of the great Aurora, when over the swamp played the shocking
corruscations of the daemon light. After the beam came clouds, and then I slept.
And it was under a horned waning moon that I saw the city for the first time. Still and somnolent
did it lie, on a strange plateau in a hollow between strange peaks. Of ghastly marble were its walls
and its towers, its columns, domes, and pavements. In the marble streets were marble pillars, the
upper parts of which were carven into the images of grave bearded men. The air was warm and
stirred not. And overhead, scarce ten degrees from the zenith, glowed that watching Pole Star. Long
did I gaze on the city, but the day came not. When the red Aldebaran, which blinked low in the sky but
never set, had crawled a quarter of the way around the horizon, I saw light and motion in the houses
and the streets. Forms
strangely robed, but at once noble and familiar, walked abroad and under the horned waning moon
men talked wisdom in a tongue which I understood, though it was unlike any language which I had
ever known. And when the red Aldebaran had crawled more than half-way around the horizon, there
were again darkness and silence.
When I awaked, I was not as I had been. Upon my memory was graven the vision of the city, and
within my soul had arisen another and vaguer recollection, of whose nature I was not then certain.
Thereafter, on the cloudy nights when I could not sleep, I saw the city often; sometimes under the
hot, yellow rays of a sun which did not set, but which wheeled low in the horizon. And on the clear
nights the Pole Star leered as never before.
Gradually I came to wonder what might be my place in that city on the strange plateau betwixt
strange peaks. At first content to view the scene as an all-observant uncorporeal presence, I now
desired to define my relation to it, and to speak my mind amongst the grave men who conversed each
day in the public squares. I said to myself, "This is no dream, for by what means can I prove the
greater reality of that other life in the house of stone and brick south of the sinister swamp and the
cemetery on the low hillock, where the Pole Star peeps into my north window each night?"
One night as I listened to the discourses in the large square containing many statues, I felt a
change; and perceived that I had at last a bodily form. Nor was I a stranger in the streets of Olathoe,
which lies on the plateau of Sarkia, betwixt the peaks of Noton and Kadiphonek. It was my friend
Alos who spoke, and his speech was one that pleased my soul, for it was the speech of a true man and
patriot. That night had the news come of Daikos' fall, and of the advance of the Inutos; squat, hellish
yellow fiends who five years ago had appeared out of the unknown west to ravage the confines of
our kingdom, and to besiege many of our towns. Having taken the fortified places at the foot of the
mountains, their way now lay open to the plateau, unless every citizen could resist with the strength
of ten men. For the squat creatures were mighty in the arts of war, and knew not the scruples of
honour which held back our tall, grey-eyed men of Lomar from ruthless conquest.
Alos, my friend, was commander of all the forces on the plateau, and in him lay the last hope of
our country. On this occasion he spoke of the perils to be faced and exhorted the men of Olathoe,
bravest of the Lomarians, to sustain the traditions of their ancestors, who when forced to move
southward from Zobna before the advance of the great ice sheet (even as our descendents must some
day flee from the land of Lomar) valiantly and victoriously swept aside the hairy, long-armed,
cannibal Gnophkehs that stood in their way. To me Alos denied the warriors part, for I was feeble
and given to strange faintings when subjected to stress and hardships. But my eyes were the keenest
in the city, despite the long hours I gave each day to the study of the Pnakotic manuscripts and the
wisdom of the Zobnarian Fathers; so my friend, desiring not to doom me to inaction, rewarded me
with that duty which was second to nothing in importance. To the watchtower of Thapnen he sent me,
there to serve as the eyes of our army. Should the Inutos attempt to gain the citadel by the narrow
pass behind the peak Noton and thereby surprise the garrison, I was to give the signal of fire which
would warn the waiting soldiers and save the town from immediate disaster.
Alone I mounted the tower, for every man of stout body was needed in the passes below. My
brain was sore dazed with excitement and fatigue, for I had not slept in many days; yet was my
purpose firm, for I loved my native land of Lomar, and the marble city Olathoe that lies betwixt the
peaks Noton and Kadiphonek.
But as I stood in the tower's topmost chamber, I beheld the horned waning moon, red and sinister,
quivering through the vapours that hovered over the distant valley of Banof. And through an opening
in the roof glittered the pale Pole Star, fluttering as if alive, and leering like a fiend and tempter.
Methought its spirit whispered evil counsel, soothing me to traitorous somnolence with a damnable
rhythmical promise which it repeated over and over:
Slumber, watcher, till the spheres.
Six and twenty thousand years
Have revolv'd, and I return
To the spot where now I burn.
Other stars anon shall rise
To the axis of the skies;
Stars that soothe and stars that bless
With a sweet forgetfulness:
Only when my round is o'er
Shall the past disturb thy door.
Vainly did I struggle with my drowsiness, seeking to connect these strange words with some lore
of the skies which I had learnt from the Pnakotic manuscripts. My head, heavy and reeling, drooped to
my breast, and when next I looked up it was in a dream, with the Pole Star grinning at me through a
window from over the horrible and swaying trees of a dream swamp. And I am still dreaming. In my
shame and despair I sometimes scream frantically, begging the dream-creatures around me to waken
me ere the Inutos steal up the pass behind the peak Noton and take the citadel by surprise; but these
creatures are daemons, for they laugh at me and tell me I am not dreaming. They mock me whilst I
sleep, and whilst the squat yellow foe may be creeping silently upon us. I have failed in my duties and
betrayed the marble city of Olathoe; I have proven false to Alos, my friend and commander. But still
these shadows of my dreams deride me. They say there is no land of Lomar, save in my nocturnal
imaginings that in these realms where the Pole Star shines high, and red Aldebaran crawls low
around the horizon, there has been naught save ice and snow for thousands of years of years, and
never a man save squat, yellow creatures, blighted by the
cold, called "Esquimaux."
And as I writhe in my guilty agony, frantic to save the city whose peril every moment grows, and
vainly striving to shake off this unnatural dream of a house of stone and brick south of a sinister
swamp and a cemetery on a low hillock, the Pole Star, evil and monstrous, leers down from the black
vault, winking hideously like an insane watching eye which strives to convey some message, yet
recalls nothing save that it once had a message to convey.

THE VERY OLD FOLK
From a letter written to "Melmoth" (Donald Wandrei) on Thursday, November 3, 1927
It was a flaming sunset or late afternoon in the tiny provincial town of Pompelo, at the foot of the
Pyrenees in Hispania Citerior. The year must have been in the late republic, for the province was
still ruled by a senatorial proconsul instead of a prtorian legate of Augustus, and the day was the
first before the Kalends of November. The hills rose scarlet and gold to the north of the little town,
and the westering sun shone ruddily and mystically on the crude new stone and plaster buildings of
the dusty forum and the wooden walls of the circus some distance to the east. Groups of citizens--
broad-browed Roman colonists and coarse-haired Romanised natives, together with obvious hybrids
of the two strains, alike clad in cheap woollen togas--and sprinklings of helmeted legionaries and
coarse-mantled, black-bearded tribesmen of the circumambient Vascones--all thronged the few paved
streets and forum; moved by some vague and ill-defined uneasiness.
I myself had just alighted from a litter, which the Illyrian bearers seemed to have brought in some
haste from Calagurris, across the Iberus to the southward. It appeared that I was a provincial qustor
named L. Clius Rufus, and that I had been summoned by the proconsul, P. Scribonius Libo, who had
come from Tarraco some days before. The soldiers were the fifth cohort of the XIIth legion, under
the military tribune Sex. Asellius; and the legatus of the whole region, Cn. Balbutius, had also come
from Calagurris, where the permanent station was.
The cause of the conference was a horror that brooded on the hills. All the townsfolk were
frightened, and had begged the presence of a cohort from Calagurris. It was the Terrible Season of
the autumn, and the wild people in the mountains were preparing for the frightful ceremonies which
only rumour told of in the towns. They were the very old folk who dwelt higher up in the hills and
spoke a choppy language which the Vascones could not understand. One seldom saw them; but a few
times a year they sent down little yellow, squint-eyed messengers (who looked like Scythians) to
trade with the merchants by means of gestures, and every spring and autumn they held the infamous
rites on the peaks, their howlings and altar-fires throwing terror into the villages. Always the same--
the night before the Kalends of Maius and the night before the Kalends of November. Townsfolk
would disappear just before these nights, and would never be heard of again. And there were
whispers that the native shepherds and farmers were not ill-disposed toward the very old folk--that
more than one thatched hut was vacant before midnight on the two hideous Sabbaths.
This year the horror was very great, for the people knew that the wrath of the very old folk was
upon Pompelo. Three months previously five of the little squint-eyed traders had come down from
the hills, and in a market brawl three of them had been killed. The remaining two had gone back
wordlessly to their mountains--and this autumn not a single villager had disappeared. There was
menace in this immunity. It was not like the very old folk to spare their victims at the Sabbath. It was
too good to be normal, and the villagers were afraid.
For many nights there had been a hollow drumming on the hills, and at last the dile Tib. Annus
Stilpo (half native in blood) had sent to Balbutius at Calagurris for a cohort to stamp out the Sabbath
on the terrible night. Balbutius had carelessly refused, on the ground that the villagers' fears were
empty, and that the loathsome rites of hill folk were of no concern to the Roman People unless our
own citizens were menaced. I, however, who seemed to be a close friend of Balbutius, had
disagreed with him; averring that I had studied deeply in the black forbidden lore, and that I believed
the very old folk capable of visiting almost any nameless doom upon the town, which after all was a
Roman settlement and contained a great number of our citizens. The complaining dile's own mother
Helvia was a pure Roman, the daughter of M. Helvius Cinna, who had come over with Scipio's army.
Accordingly I had sent a slave--a nimble little Greek called Antipater--to the proconsul with letters,
and Scribonius had heeded my plea and ordered Balbutius to send his fifth cohort, under Asellius, to
Pompelo; entering the hills at dusk on the eve of November's Kalends and stamping out whatever
nameless orgies he might find-- bringing such prisoners as he might take to Tarraco for the next
proprtor's court. Balbutius, however, had protested, so that more correspondence had ensued. I had
written so much to the proconsul that he had become gravely interested, and had resolved to make a
personal inquiry into the horror.
He had at length proceeded to Pompelo with his lictors and attendants; there hearing enough
rumours to be greatly impressed and disturbed, and standing firmly by his order for the Sabbath's
extirpation. Desirous of conferring with one who had studied the subject, he ordered me to
accompany Asellius' cohort--and Balbutius had also come along to press his adverse advice, for he
honestly believed that drastic military action would stir up a dangerous sentiment of unrest amongst
the Vascones both tribal and settled.
So here we all were in the mystic sunset of the autumn hills--old Scribonius Libo in his toga
prtexta, the golden light glancing on his shiny bald head and wrinkled hawk face, Balbutius with his
gleaming helmet and breastplate, blue-shaven lips compressed in conscientiously dogged opposition,
young Asellius with his polished greaves and superior sneer, and the curious throng of townsfolk,
legionaries, tribesmen, peasants, lictors, slaves, and attendants. I myself seemed to wear a common
toga, and to have no especially distinguishing characteristic. And everywhere horror brooded. The
town and country folk scarcely dared speak aloud, and the men of Libo's entourage, who had been
there nearly a week, seemed to have caught something of the nameless dread. Old Scribonius himself
looked very grave, and the sharp voices of us later comers seemed to hold something of curious
inappropriateness, as in a place of death or the temple of some mystic god.
We entered the prtorium and held grave converse. Balbutius pressed his objections, and was
sustained by Asellius, who appeared to hold all the natives in extreme contempt while at the same
time deeming it inadvisable to excite them. Both soldiers maintained that we could better afford to
antagonise the minority of colonists and civilised natives by inaction, than to antagonise a probable
majority of tribesmen and cottagers by stamping out the dread rites.
I, on the other hand, renewed my demand for action, and offered to accompany the cohort on any
expedition it might undertake. I pointed out that the barbarous Vascones were at best turbulent and
uncertain, so that skirmishes with them were inevitable sooner or later whichever course we might
take; that they had not in the past proved dangerous adversaries to our legions, and that it would ill
become the representatives of the Roman People to suffer barbarians to interfere with a course
which the justice and prestige of the Republic demanded. That, on the other hand, the successful
administration of a province depended primarily upon the safety and good-will of the civilised
element in whose hands the local machinery of commerce and prosperity reposed, and in whose veins
a large mixture of our own Italian blood coursed. These, though in numbers they might form a
minority, were the stable element whose constancy might be relied on, and whose cooperation would
most firmly bind the province to the Imperium of the Senate and the Roman People. It was at once a
duty and an advantage to afford them the protection due to Roman citizens; even (and here I shot a
sarcastic look at Balbutius and Asellius) at the expense of a little trouble and activity, and of a slight
interruption of the draught-playing and cock-fighting at the camp in Calagurris. That the danger to the
town and inhabitants of Pompelo was a real one, I could not from my studies doubt. I had read many
scrolls out of Syria and gyptus, and the cryptic towns of Etruria, and had talked at length with the
bloodthirsty priest of Diana Aricina in his temple in the woods bordering Lacus Nemorensis. There
were shocking dooms that might be called out of the hills on the Sabbaths; dooms which ought not to
exist within the territories of the Roman People; and to permit orgies of the kind known to prevail at
Sabbaths would be but little in consonance with the customs of those whose forefathers, A.
Postumius being consul, had executed so many Roman citizens for the practice of the Bacchanalia--a
matter kept ever in memory by the Senatus Consultum de Bacchanalibus, graven upon bronze and set
open to every eye. Checked in time, before the progress of the rites might evoke anything with
which the iron of a Roman pilum might not be able to deal, the Sabbath would not be too much for the
powers of a single cohort. Only participants need be apprehended, and the sparing of a great number
of mere spectators would considerably lessen the resentment which any of the sympathising country
folk might feel. In short, both principle and policy demanded stern action; and I could not doubt but
that Publius Scribonius, bearing in mind the dignity and obligations of the Roman People, would
adhere to his plan of despatching the cohort, me accompanying, despite such objections as Balbutius
and Asellius---speaking indeed more like provincials than Romans--might see fit to offer and
multiply.
The slanting sun was now very low, and the whole hushed town seemed draped in an unreal and
malign glamour. Then P. Scribonius the proconsul signified his approval of my words, and stationed
me with the cohort in the provisional capacity of a centurio primipilus; Balbutius and Asellius
assenting, the former with better grace than the latter. As twilight fell on the wild autumnal slopes, a
measured, hideous beating of strange drums floated down from afar in terrible rhythm. Some few of
the legionarii shewed timidity, but sharp commands brought them into line, and the whole cohort was
soon drawn up on the open plain east of the circus. Libo himself, as well as Balbutius, insisted on
accompanying the cohort; but great difficulty was suffered in getting a native guide to point out the
paths up the mountain. Finally a young man named Vercellius, the son of pure Roman parents, agreed
to take us at least past the foothills. We began to march in the new dusk, with the thin silver sickle of
a young moon trembling over the woods on our left. That which disquieted us most was the fact that
the Sabbath was to be held at all. Reports of the coming cohort must have reached the hills, and even
the lack of a final decision could not make the rumour less alarming--yet there were the sinister
drums as of yore, as if the celebrants had some peculiar reason to be indifferent whether or not the
forces of the Roman People marched against them. The sound grew louder as we entered a rising
gap in the hills, steep wooded banks enclosing us narrowly on either side, and displaying curiously
fantastic tree-trunks in the light of our bobbing torches. All were afoot save Libo, Balbutius,
Asellius, two or three of the centuriones, and myself, and at length the way became so steep and
narrow that those who had horses were forced to leave them; a squad of ten men being left to guard
them, though robber bands were not likely to be abroad on such a night of terror. Once in a while it
seemed as though we detected a skulking form in the woods nearby, and after a half-hour's climb the
steepness and narrowness of the way made the advance of so great a body of men--over 300, all told-
-exceedingly cumbrous and difficult. Then with utter and horrifying suddenness we heard a frightful
sound from below. It was from the tethered horses--they had screamed, not neighed, but
screamed...and there was no light down there, nor the sound of any human thing, to shew why they
had done so. At the same moment bonfires blazed out on all the peaks ahead, so that terror seemed to
lurk equally well before and behind us. Looking for the youth Vercellius, our guide, we found only a
crumpled heap weltering in a pool of blood. In his hand was a short sword snatched from the belt of
D. Vibulanus, a subcenturio, and on his face was such a look of terror that the stoutest veterans
turned pale at the sight. He had killed himself when the horses screamed... he, who had been born and
lived all his life in that region, and knew what men whispered about the hills. All the torches now
began to dim, and the cries of frightened legionaries mingled with the unceasing screams of the
tethered horses. The air grew perceptibly colder, more suddenly so than is usual at November's
brink, and seemed stirred by terrible undulations which I could not help connecting with the beating
of huge wings. The whole cohort now remained at a standstill, and as the torches faded I watched
what I thought were fantastic shadows outlined in the sky by the spectral luminosity of the Via Lactea
as it flowed through Perseus, Cassiopeia, Cepheus, and Cygnus. Then suddenly all the stars were
blotted from the sky--even bright Deneb and Vega ahead, and the lone Altair and Fomalhaut behind
us. And as the torches died out altogether, there remained above the stricken and shrieking cohort
only the noxious and horrible altar-flames on the towering peaks; hellish and red, and now
silhouetting the mad, leaping, and colossal forms of such nameless beasts as had never a Phrygian
priest or Campanian grandam whispered of in the wildest of furtive tales. And above the nighted
screaming of men and horses that dmonic drumming rose to louder pitch, whilst an ice-cold wind of
shocking sentience and deliberateness swept down from those forbidden heights and coiled about
each man separately, till all the cohort was struggling and screaming in the dark, as if acting out the
fate of Laocon and his sons. Only old Scribonius Libo seemed resigned. He uttered words amidst
the screaming, and they echo still in my ears. "Malitia vetus...malitia vetus est...venit...tandem venit..."
("Wickedness of old...it is wickedness of old...happened...happened at last...")
And then I waked. It was the most vivid dream in years, drawing upon wells of the subconscious
long untouched and forgotten. Of the fate of that cohort no record exists, but the town at least was
saved--for encyclopaedias tell of the survival of Pompelo to this day, under the modern Spanish
name of Pompelona...
Yrs for Gothick Supremacy--
C . IVLIVS . VERVS . MAXIMINVS.
THE END