At the Mountains of Madness

At the Mountains of Madness
by H. P. Lovecraft
Written Feb-22 Mar 1931
Published February-April 1936 in Astounding Stories, Vol. 16, No. 6 (February 1936), p.
8-32; Vol. 17, No. 1 (March 1936), p. 125-55; Vol. 17, No. 2 (April 1936), p. 132-50.
I
I am forced into speech because men of science have refused to follow my advice
without knowing why. It is altogether against my will that I tell my reasons for
opposing this contemplated invasion of the antarctic - with its vast fossil hunt and its
wholesale boring and melting of the ancient ice caps. And I am the more reluctant
because my warning may be in vain.
Doubt of the real facts, as I must reveal them, is inevitable; yet, if I suppressed what
will seem extravagant and incredible, there would be nothing left. The hitherto withheld
photographs, both ordinary and aerial, will count in my favor, for they are damnably
vivid and graphic. Still, they will be doubted because of the great lengths to which
clever fakery can be carried. The ink drawings, of course, will be jeered at as obvious
impostures, notwithstanding a strangeness of technique which art experts ought to
remark and puzzle over.
In the end I must rely on the judgment and standing of the few scientific leaders who
have, on the one hand, sufficient independence of thought to weigh my data on its own
hideously convincing merits or in the light of certain primordial and highly baffling
myth cycles; and on the other hand, sufficient influence to deter the exploring world in
general from any rash and over-ambitious program in the region of those mountains of
madness. It is an unfortunate fact that relatively obscure men like myself and my
associates, connected only with a small university, have little chance of making an
impression where matters of a wildly bizarre or highly controversial nature are
concerned.
It is further against us that we are not, in the strictest sense, specialists in the fields
which came primarily to be concerned. As a ge ologist, my object in leading the
Miskatonic University Expedition was wholly that of securing deep-level specimens of
rock and soil from various parts of the antarctic continent, aided by the remarkable drill
devised by Professor Frank H. Pabodie of our engineering department. I had no wish to
be a pioneer in any other field than this, but I did hope that the use of this new
mechanical appliance at different points along previously explored paths would bring to
light materials of a sort hitherto unreached by the ordinary methods of collection.
Pabodie’s drilling apparatus, as the public already knows from our reports, was unique
and radical in its lightness, portability, and capacity to combine the ordinary artesian
drill principle with the principle of the small circular rock drill in such a way as to cope
quickly with strata of varying hardness. Steel head, jointed rods, gasoline motor,
collapsible wooden derrick, dynamiting paraphernalia, cording, rubbish-removal auger,
and sectional piping for bores five inches wide and up to one thousand feet deep all
formed, with needed accessories, no greater load than three seven-dog sledges could
carry. This was made possible by the clever aluminum alloy of which most of the metal
objects were fashioned. Four large Dornier aeroplanes, designed especially for the
tremendous altitude flying necessary on the antarctic plateau and with added
fuel-warming and quick-starting devices worked out by Pabodie, could transport our
entire expedition from a base at the edge of the great ice barrier to various suitable
inland points, and from these points a sufficient quota of dogs would serve us.
We planned to cover as great an area as one antarctic season - or longer, if absolutely
necessary - would permit, operating mostly in the mountain ranges and on the plateau
south of Ross Sea; regions explored in varying degree by Shackleton, Amundsen, Scott,
and Byrd. With frequent changes of camp, made by aeroplane and involving distances
great enough to be of geological significance, we expected to unearth a quite
unprecedented amount of material-especially in the pre-Cambrian strata of which so
narrow a range of antarctic specimens had previously been secured. We wished also to
obtain as great as possible a variety of the upper fossiliferous rocks, since the primal life
history of this bleak realm of ice and death is of the highest importance to our
knowledge of the earth’s past. That the antarctic continent was once temperate and even
tropical, with a teeming vegetable and animal life of which the lichens, marine fauna,
arachnida, and penguins of the northern edge are the only survivals, is a matter of
common information; and we hoped to expand that information in variety, accuracy,
and detail. When a simple boring revealed fossiliferous signs, we would enlarge the
aperture by blasting, in order to get specimens of suitable size and condition.
Our borings, of varying depth according to the promise held out by the upper soil or
rock, were to be confined to exposed, or nearly exposed, land surfaces - these inevitably
being slopes and ridges because of the mile or two-mile thickness of solid ice overlying
the lower levels. We could not afford to waste drilling the depth of any considerable
amount of mere glaciation, though Pabodie had worked out a plan for sinking copper
electrodes in thick clusters of borings and melting off limited areas of ice with current
from a gasoline-driven dynamo. It is this plan - which we could not put into effect
except experimentally on an expedition such as ours - that the coming
Starkweather-Moore Expedition proposes to follow, despite the warnings I have issued
since our return from the antarctic.
The public knows of the Miskatonic Expedition through our frequent wireless reports to
the Arkham Advertiser and Associated Press, and through the later articles of Pabodie
and myself. We consisted of four men from the University - Pabodie, Lake of the
biology department, Atwood of the physics department - also a meteorologist - and
myself, representing geology and having nominal command - besides sixteen assistants:
seven graduate students from Miskatonic and nine skilled mechanics. Of these sixteen,
twelve were qualified aeroplane pilots, all but two of whom were competent wireless
operators. Eight of them understood navigation with compass and sextant, as did
Pabodie, Atwood, and I. In addition, of course, our two ships - wooden ex-whalers,
reinforced for ice conditions and having auxiliary steam - were fully manned.
The Nathaniel Derby Pickman Foundation, aided by a few special contributions,
financed the expedition; hence our preparations were extremely thorough, despite the
absence of great publicity. The dogs, sledges, machines, camp materials, and
unassembled parts of our five planes were delivered in Boston, and there our ships were
loaded. We were marvelously well-equipped for our specific purposes, and in all
matters pertaining to supplies, regimen, transportation, and camp construction we
profited by the excellent example of our many recent and exceptionally brilliant
predecessors. It was the unusual number and fame of these predecessors which made
our own expedition - ample though it was - so little noticed by the world at large.
As the newspapers told, we sailed from Boston Harbor on September 2nd, 1930, taking
a leisurely course down the coast and through the Panama Canal, and stopping at Samoa
and Hobart, Tasmania, at which latter place we took on final supplies. None of our
exploring party had ever been in the polar regions before, hence we all relied greatly on
our ship captains - J. B. Douglas, commanding the brig Arkham, and serving as
commander of the sea party, and Georg Thorflnnssen, 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 - tablelike 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 Ross Island shortly after midnight
on the morning of the 9th, carrying a line of cable from each of the ships and preparing
to unload supplies by means of a breeches-buoy arrangement. Our sensations on first
treading Antarctic soil were poiguant 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
preCambrian - 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 subexpedition 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 preCam brian slate with
other strata mixed in. Queer skyline effects - regular sections of cubes
clinging to highest peaks. Whole thing marvelous in red-gold light of low
sun. Like land of mystery in a dream or gateway to forbidden world of
untrodden wonder. Wish you were here to study."
Though it was technically sleeping time, not one of us listeners thought for a moment of
retiring. It must have been a good deal the same at McMurdo Sound, where the supply
cache and the Arkham were also getting the messages; for Captain Douglas gave out a
call congratulating everybody on the important find, and Sherman, the cache operator,
seconded his sentiments. We were sorry, of course, about the damaged aeroplane, but
hoped it could be easily mended. Then, at 11 P.M., came another call from Lake:
"Up with Carroll over highest foothills. Don’t dare try really tall peaks in
present weather, but shall later. Frightful work climbing, and hard going
at this altitude, but worth it. Great range fairly solid, hence can’t get any
glimpses beyond. Main summits exceed Himalayas, and very queer.
Range looks like pre-Cambrian slate, with plain signs of many other
upheaved strata. Was wrong about volcanism. Goes farther in either
direction than we can see. Swept clear of snow above about twenty-one
thousand feet. "Odd formations on slopes of highest mountains. Great
low square blocks with exactly vertical sides, and rectangular lines of low,
vertical ramparts, like the old Asian castles clinging to steep mountains
in Roerich’s paintings. Impressive from distance. Flew close to some, and
Carroll thought they were formed of smaller separate pieces, but that is
probably weathering. Most edges crumbled and rounded off as if exposed
to storms and climate changes for millions of years. "Parts, especially
upper parts, seem to be of lighter-colored rock than any visible strata on
slopes proper, hence of evidently crystalline origin. Close flying shows
many cave mouths, some unusually regular in outline, square or
semicircular. You must come and investigate. Think I saw rampart
squarely on top of one peak. Height seems about thirty thousand to
thirty-five thousand feet. Am up twenty-one thousand, five hundred
myself, in devilish, gnawing cold. Wind whistles and pipes through
passes and in and out of caves, but no flying danger so far."
From then on for another half hour Lake kept up a running fire of comment, and
expressed his intention of climbing some of the peaks on foot. I replied that I would join
him as soon as he could send a plane, and that Pabodie and I would work out the best
gasoline plan-just where and how to concentrate our supply in view of the expedition’s
altered character. Obviously, Lake’s boring operations, as well as his aeroplane
activities, would require a great deal for the new base which he planned to establish at
the foot of the mountains; and it was possible that the eastward flight might not be made,
after all, this season. In connection with this business I called Captain Douglas and
asked him to get as much as possible out of the ships and up the barrier with the single
dog team we had left there. A direct route across the unknown region between Lake and
McMurdo Sound was what we really ought to establish.
Lake called me later to say that he had decided to let the camp stay where Moulton’s
plane had been forced down, and where repairs had already progressed somewhat. The
ice sheet was very thin, with dark ground here and there visible, and he would sink
some borings and blasts at that very point before making any sledge trips or climbing
expeditions. He spoke of the ineffable majesty of the whole scene, and the queer state of
his sensations at being in the lee of vast, silent pinnacles whose ranks shot up like a wall
reaching the sky at the world’s rim. Atwood’s theodolite observations had placed the
height of the five tallest peaks at from thirty thousand to thirty-four thousand feet. The
windswept nature of the terrain clearly disturbed Lake, for it argued the occasional
existence of prodigious gales, violent beyond anything we had so far encountered. His
camp lay a little more than five miles from where the higher foothills rose abruptly. I
could almost trace a note of subconscious alarm in his words-flashed across a glacial
void of seven hundred miles - as he urged that we all hasten with the matter and get the
strange, new region disposed of as soon as possible. He was about to rest now, after a
continuous day’s work of almost unparalleled speed, strenuousness, and results.
In the morning I had a three-cornered wireless talk with Lake and Captain Douglas at
their widely separated bases. It was agreed that one of Lake’s planes would come to my
base for Pabodie, the five men, and myself, as well as for all the fuel it could carry. The
rest of the fuel question, depending on our decision about an easterly trip, could wait for
a few days, since Lake had enough for immediate camp heat and borings. Eventually the
old southern base ought to be restocked, but if we postponed the easterly trip we would
not use it till the next summer, and, meanwhile, Lake must send a plane to explore a
direct route between his new mountains and McMurdo Sound.
Pabodie and I prepared to close our base for a short or long period, as the case might be.
If we wintered in the antarctic we would probably fly straight from Lake’s base to the
Arkham without returning to this spot. Some of our conical tents had already been
reinforced by blocks of hard snow, and now we decided to complete the job of making a
permanent village. Owing to a very liberal tent supply, Lake had with him all that his
base would need, even after our arrival. I wirelessed that Pabodie and I would be ready
for the northwestward move after one day’s work and one night’s rest.
Our labors, however, were not very steady after 4 P.M., for about that time Lake began
sending in the most extraordinary and excited messages. His working day had started
unpropitiously, since an aeroplane survey of the nearly-exposed rock surfaces showed
an entire absence of those Archaean and primordial strata for which he was looking, and
which formed so great a part of the colossal peaks that loomed up at a tantalizing
distance from the camp. Most of the rocks glimpsed were apparently Jurassic and
Comanchian sandstones and Permian and Triassic schists, with now and then a glossy
black outcropping suggesting a hard and slaty coal. This rather discouraged Lake,
whose plans all hinged on unearthing specimens more than five hundred million years
older. It was clear to him that in order to recover the Archaean slate vein in which he
had found the odd markings, he would have to make a long sledge trip from these
foothills to the steep slopes of the gigantic mountains themselves.
He had resolved, nevertheless, to do some local boring as part of the expedition’s
general program; hence he set up the drill and put five men to work with it while the
rest finished settling the camp and repairing the damaged aeroplane. The softest visible
rock - a sandstone about a quarter of a mile from the camp - had been chosen for the
first sampling; and the drill made excellent progress without much supplementary
blasting. It was about three hours afterward, following the first really heavy blast of the
operation, that the shouting of the drill crew was heard; and that young Gedney - the
acting foreman - rushed into the camp with the startling news.
They had struck a cave. Early in the boring the sandstone had given place to a vein of
Comanchian limestone, full of minute fossil cephalopods, corals, echini, and spirifera,
and with occasional suggestions of siliceous sponges and marine vertebrate bones-the
latter probably of teleosts, sharks, and ganoids. This, in itself, was important enough, as
affording the first vertebrate fossils the expedition had yet secured; but when shortly
afterward the drill head dropped through the stratum into apparent vacancy, a wholly
new and doubly intense wave of excitement spread among the excavators. A good-sized
blast had laid open the subterrene secret; and now, through a jagged aperture perhaps
five feet across and three feet thick, there yawned before the avid searchers a section of
shallow limestone hollowing worn more than fifty million years ago by the trickling
ground waters of a bygone tropic world.
The hollowed layer was not more than seven or eight feet deep but extended off
indefinitely in all directions and had a fresh, slightly moving air which suggested its
membership in an extensive subterranean system. Its roof and floor were abundantly
equipped with large stalactites and stalagmites, some of which met in columnar form:
but important above all else was the vast deposit of shells and bones, which in places
nearly choked the passage. Washed down from unknown jungles of Mesozoic tree ferns
and fungi, and forests of Tertiary cycads, fan palms, and primitive angiosperms, this
osseous medley contained representatives of more Cretaceous, Eocene, and other animal
species than the greatest paleontologist could have counted or classified in a year.
Mollusks, crustacean armor, fishes, amphibians, reptiles, birds, and early mammals great and small, known and unknown. No wonder Gedney ran back to the camp
shouting, and no wonder everyone else dropped work and rushed headlong through the
biting cold to where the tall derrick marked a new-found gateway to secrets of inner
earth and vanished aeons.
When Lake had satisfied the first keen edge of his curiosity, he scribbled a message in
his notebook and had young Moulton run back to the camp to dispatch it by wireless.
This was my first word of the discovery, and it told of the identification of early shells,
bones of ganoids and placoderms, remnants of labyrinthodonts and thecodonts, great
mosasaur skull fragments, dinosaur vertebrae and armor plates, pterodactyl teeth and
wing bones, Archaeopteryx debris, Miocene sharks’ teeth, primitive bird skulls, and
other bones of archaic mammals such as palaeotheres, Xiphodons, Eohippi, Oreodons,
and titanotheres. There was nothing as recent as a mastodon, elephant, true camel, deer,
or bovine animal; hence Lake concluded that the last deposits had occurred during the
Oligocene Age, and that the hollowed stratum had lain in its present dried, dead, and
inaccessible state for at least thirty million years.
On the other hand, the prevalence of very early life forms was singular in the highest
degree. Though the limestone formation was, on the evidence of such typical imbedded
fossils as ventriculites, positively and unmistakably Comanchian and not a particle
earlier, the free fragments in the hollow space included a surprising proportion from
organisms hitherto considered as peculiar to far older periods - even rudimentary fishes,
mollusks, and corals as remote as the Silunan or Ordovician. The inevitable inference
was that in this part of the world there had been a remarkable and unique degree of
continuity between the life of over three hundred million years ago and that of only
thirty million years ago. How far this continuity had extended beyond the Oligocene
Age when the cavern was closed was of course past all speculation. In any event, the
coming of the frightful ice in the Pleistocene some five hundred thousand years ago - a
mere yesterday as compared with the age of this cavity - must have put an end to any of
the primal forms which had locally managed to outlive their common terms.
Lake was not content to let his first message stand, but had another bulletin written and
dispatched across the snow to the camp before Moulton could get back. After that
Moulton stayed at the wireless in one of the planes, transmitting to me - and to the
Arkham for relaying to the outside world - the frequent postscripts which Lake sent him
by a succession of messengers. Those who followed the newspapers will remember the
excitement created among men of science by that afternoon’s reports - reports which
have finally led, after all these years, to the organization of that very
Starkweather-Moore Expedition which I am so anxious to dissuade from its purposes. I
had better give the messages literally as Lake sent them, and as our base operator
McTighe translated them from the pencil shorthand:
"Fowler makes discovery of highest importance in sandstone and
limestone fragments from blasts. Several distinct triangular striated
prints like those in Archaean slate, proving that source survived from
over six hundred million years ago to Comanchian times without more
than moderate morphological changes and decrease in average size,
Comanchian prints apparently more primitive or decadent, if anything,
than older ones. Emphasize importance of discovery in press. Will mean
to biology what Einstein has meant to mathematics and physics. Joins up
with my previous work and amplifies conclusions.
"Appears to indicate, as I suspected, that earth has seen whole cycle or
cycles of organic life before known one that begins with Archaeozoic
cells. Was evolved and specialized not later than a thousand million
years ago, when planet was young and recently uninhabitable for any
life forms or normal protoplasmic structure. Question arises when,
where, and how development took place."
"La ter. 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
su.rface. 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 toot hlike 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 mem branous 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 pro jections 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 vegeta blelike,
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 crytogams,
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 ultradimensionality. 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 Dan-forth 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 actually 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 preCambrian 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 car-touches containing oddly patterned groups of dots
would be sunk along one of the arabesque bands.
The technique, we soon saw, was mature, accomplished, and aesthetically evolved to
the highest degree of civilized mastery, though utterly alien in every detail to any
known art tradition of the human race. In delicacy of execution no sculpture I have ever
seen could approach it. The minutest details of elaborate vegetation, or of animal life,
were rendered with astonishing vividness despite the bold scale of the carvings; whilst
the conventional designs were marvels of skillful intricacy. The arabesques displayed a
profound use of mathematical principles, and were made up of obscurely symmetrical
curves and angles based on the quantity of five. The pictorial bands followed a highly
formalized tradition, and involved a peculiar treatment of perspective, but had an artistic
force that moved us profoundly, notwithstanding the intervening gulf of vast geologic
periods. Their method of design hinged on a singular juxtaposition of the cross section
with the two-dimensional silhouette, and embodied an analytical psychology beyond
that of any known race of antiquity. It is useless to try to compare this art with any
represented in our museums. Those who see our photographs will probably find its
closest analogue in certain grotesque conceptions of the most daring futurists.
The arabesque tracery consisted altogether of depressed lines, whose depth on
unweathered walls varied from one to two inches. When cartouches with dot groups
appeared - evidently as inscriptions in some unknown and primordial language and
alphabet - the depression of the smooth surface was perhaps an inch and a half, and of
the dots perhaps a half inch more. The pictorial bands were in countersunk low relief,
their background being depressed about two inches from the original wall surface. In
some specimens marks of a former coloration could be detected, though for the most
part the untold aeons had disintegrated and banished any pigments which may have
been applied. The more one studied the marvelous technique, the more one admired the
things. Beneath their strict conventionalization one could grasp the minute and accurate
observation and graphic skill of the artists; and indeed, the very conventions themselves
served to symbolize and accentuate the real essence or vital differentiation of every
object delineated. We felt, too, that besides these recognizable excellences there were
others lurking beyond the reach of our perceptions. Certain touches here and there gave
vague hints of latent symbols and stimuli which another mental and emotional
background, and a fuller or different sensory equipment, might have made of profound
and poignant significance to us.
The subject matter of the sculptures obviously came from the life of the vanished epoch
of their creation, and contained a large proportion of evident history. It is this abnormal
historic-mindedness of the primal race - a chance circumstance operating, through
coincidence, miraculously in our favor - which made the carvings so awesomely
informative to us, and which caused us to place their photography and transcription
above all other considerations. In certain rooms the dominant arrangement was varied
by the presence of maps, astronomical charts, and other scientific designs of an enlarged
scale - these things giving a naive and terrible corroboration to what we gathered from
the pictorial friezes and dadoes. In hinting at what the whole revealed, I can only hope
that my account will not arouse a curiosity greater than sane caution on the part of those
who believe me at all. It would be tragic if any were to be allured to that realm of death
and horror by the very warning meant to discourage them.
Interrupting these sculptured walls were high windows and massive twelve-foot
doorways; both now and then retaining the petrified wooden planks - elaborately carved
and polished-of the actual shutters and doors. All metal fixtures had long ago vanished,
but some of the doors remained in place and had to be forced aside as we progressed
from room to room. Window frames with odd transparent panes - mostly elliptical survived here and there, though in no considerable quantity. There were also frequent
niches of great magnitude, generally empty, but once in a while containing some bizarre
object carved from green soapstone which was either broken or perhaps held too
inferior to warrant removal. Other apertures were undoubtedly connected with bygone
mechanical facilities - heating, lighting, and the like-of a sort suggested in many of the
carvings. Ceilings tended to be plain, but had sometimes been inlaid with green
soapstone or other tiles, mostly fallen now. Floors were also paved with such tiles,
though plain stonework predominated.
As I have said, all furniture and other movables were absent; but the sculptures gave a
clear idea of the strange devices which had once filled these tomblike, echoing rooms.
Above the glacial sheet the floors were generally thick with detritus, litter, and debris,
but farther down this condition decreased. In some of the lower chambers and corridors
there was little more than gritty dust or ancient incrustations, while occasional areas had
an uncanny air of newly swept immaculateness. Of course, where rifts or collapses had
occurred, the lower levels were as littered as the upper ones. A central court - as in other
structures we had seen from the air - saved the inner regions from total darkness; so that
we seldom had to use our electric torches in the upper rooms except when studying
sculptured details. Below the ice cap, however, the twilight deepened; and in many parts
of the tangled ground level there was an approach to absolute blackness.
To form even a rudimentary idea of our thoughts and feelings as we penetrated this
aeon-silent maze of unhuman masonry, one must correlate a hopelessly bewildering
chaos of fugitive moods, memories, and impressions. The sheer appalling antiquity and
lethal desolation of the place were enough to overwhelm almost any sensitive person,
but added to these elements were the recent unexplained horror at the camp, and the
revelations all too soon effected by the terrible mural sculptures around us. The moment
we came upon a perfect section of carving, where no ambiguity of interpretation could
exist, it took only a brief study to give us the hideous truth - a truth which it would be
naive to claim Danforth and I had not independently suspected before, though we had
carefully refrained from even hinting it to each other. There could now be no further
merciful doubt about the nature of the beings which had built and inhabited this
monstrous dead city millions of years ago, when man’s ancestors were primitive archaic
mammals, and vast dinosaurs roamed the tropical steppes of Europe and Asia.
We had previously clung to a desperate alternative and insisted - each to himself - that
the omnipresence of the five-pointed motifs meant only some cultural or religious
exaltation of the Archaean natural object which had so patently embodied the quality of
five-pointedness; as the decorative motifs of Minoan Crete exalted the sacred bull, those
of Egypt the scarabaeus, those of Rome the wolf and the eagle, and those of various
savage tribes some chosen totem animal. But this lone refuge was now stripped from us,
and we were forced to face definitely the reason-shaking realization which the reader of
these pages has doubtless long ago anticipated. I can scarcely bear to write it down in
black and white even now, but perhaps that will not be necessary.
The things once rearing and dwelling in this frightful masonry in the age of dinosaurs
were not indeed dinosaurs, but far worse. Mere dinosaurs were new and almost
brainless objects - but the builders of the city were wise and old, and had left certain
traces in rocks even then laid down well nigh a thousand million years - rocks laid down
before the true life of earth had advanced beyond plastic groups of cells - rocks laid
down before the true life of earth had existed at all. They were the makers and enslavers
of that life, and above all doubt the originals of the fiendish elder myths which things
like the Pnakotic Manuscripts and the Necronomicon affrightedly hint about. They were
the great "Old Ones" that had filtered down from the stars when earth was young - the
beings whose substance an alien evolution had shaped, and whose powers were such as
this planet had never bred. And to think that only the day before Danforth and I had
actually looked upon fragments of their millennially fossilized substance - and that poor
Lake and his party had seen their complete outlines - It is of course impossible for me to
relate in proper order the stages by which we picked up what we know of that
monstrous chapter of prehuman life. After the first shock of the certain revelation, we
had to pause a while to recuperate, and it was fully three o’clock before we got started
on our actual tour of systematic research. The sculptures in the building we entered
were of relatively late date - perhaps two million years ago-as checked up by geological,
biological, and astronomical features - and embodied an art which would be called
decadent in comparison with that of specimens we found in older buildings after
crossing bridges under the glacial sheet. One edifice hewn from the solid rock seemed
to go back forty or possibly even fifty million years - to the lower Eocene or upper
Cretaceous - and contained bas-reliefs of an artistry surpassing anything else, with one
tremendous exception, that we encountered. That was, we have since agreed, the oldest
domestic structure we traversed.
Were it not for the support of those flashlights soon to be made public, I would refrain
from telling what I found and inferred, lest I be confined as a madman. Of course, the
infinitely early parts of the patchwork tale - representing the preterrestrial life of the
star-headed beings on other planets, in other galaxies, and in other universes - can
readily be interpreted as the fantastic mythology of those beings themselves; yet such
parts sometimes involved designs and diagrams so uncannily close to the latest findings
of mathematics and astrophysics that I scarcely know what to think. Let others judge
when they see the photographs I shall publish.
Naturally, no one set of carvings which we encountered told more than a fraction of any
connected story, nor did we even begin to come upon the various stages of that story in
their proper order. Some of the vast rooms were independent units so far as their
designs were concerned, whilst in other cases a continuous chronicle would be carried
through a series of rooms and corridors. The best of the maps and diagrams were on the
walls of a frightful abyss below even the ancient ground level - a cavern perhaps two
hundred feet square and sixty feet high, which had almost undoubtedly been an
educational center of some sort. There were many provoking repetitions of the same
material in different rooms and buildings, since certain chapters of experience, and
certain summaries or phases of racial history, had evidently been favorites with different
decorators or dwellers. Sometimes, though, variant versions of the same theme proved
useful in settling debatable points and filling up gaps.
I still wonder that we deduced so much in the short time at our disposal. Of course, we
even now have only the barest outline - and much of that was obtained later on from a
study of the photographs and sketches we made. It may be the effect of this later study the revived memories and vague impressions acting in conjunction with his general
sensitiveness and with that final supposed horror-glimpse whose essence he will not
reveal even to me - which has been the immediate source of Danforth’s present
breakdown. But it had to be; for we could not issue our warning intelligently without
the fullest possible information, and the issuance of that warning is a prime necessity.
Certain lingering influences in that unknown antarctic world of disordered time and
alien natural law make it imperative that further exploration be discouraged.
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
basreliefs could not make clear to us. The beings moved in the sea partly by swimming using the lateral crinoid arms - and partly by wriggling with the lower tier of tentacles
containing the pseudofeet. Occasionally they accomplished long swoops with the
auxiliary use of two or more sets of their fanlike folding wings. On land they locally
used the pseudofeet, but now and then flew to great heights or over long distances with
their wings. The many slender tentacles into which the crinoid arms branched were
infinitely delicate, flexible, strong, and accurate in muscular-nervous coordination ensuring the utmost skill and dexterity in all artistic and other manual operations.
The toughness of the things was almost incredible. Even the terrific pressure of the
deepest sea bottoms appeared powerless to harm them. Very few seemed to die at all
except by violence, and their burial places were very limited. The fact that they covered
their vertically inhumed dead with five-pointed inscribed mounds set up thoughts in
Danforth and me which made a fresh pause and recuperation necessary after the
sculptures revealed it. The beings multiplied by means of spores - like vegetable
pteridophytes, as Lake had suspected - but, owing to their prodigious toughness and
longevity, and consequent lack of replacement needs, they did not encourage the
large-scale development of new prothallia except when they had new regions to
colonize. The young matured swiftly, and received an education evidently beyond any
standard we can imagine. The prevailing intellectual and aesthetic life was highly
evolved, and produced a tenaciously enduring set of customs and institutions which I
shall describe more fully in my coming monograph. These varied slightly according to
sea or land residence, but had the same foundations and essentials.
Though able, like vegetables, to derive nourishment from inorganic substances, they
vastly preferred organic and especially animal food. They ate uncooked marine life
under the sea, but cooked their viands on land. They hunted game and raised meat herds
- slaughtering with sharp weapons whose odd marks on certain fossil bones our
expedition had noted. They resisted all ordinary temperatures marvelously, and in their
natural state could live in water down to freezing. When the great chill of the
Pleistocene drew on, however - nearly a million years ago-the land dwellers had to
resort to special measures, including artificial heating - until at last the deadly cold
appears to have driven them back into the sea. For their prehistoric flights through
cosmic space, legend said, they absorbed certain chemicals and became almost
independent of eating, breathing, or heat conditions - but by the time of the great cold
they had lost track of the method. In any case they could not have prolonged the
artificial state indefinitely without harm.
Being nonpairing and semivegetable in structure, the Old Ones had no biological basis
for the family phase of mammal life, but seemed to organize large households on the
principles of comfortable space-utility and - as we deduced 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
saunan livestock were nearly all dead, and the mammals were standing it none too well.
To keep on with the work of the upper world it had become necessary to adapt some of
the amorphous and curiously cold-resistant Shoggoths to land life - a thing the Old Ones
had formerly been reluctant to do. The great river was now lifeless, and the upper sea
had lost most of its denizens except the seals and whales. All the birds had flown away,
save only the great, grotesque penguins.
What had happened afterward we could only guess. How long had the new sea-cavern
city survived? Was it still down there, a stony corpse in eternal blackness? Had the
subterranean waters frozen at last? To what fate had the ocean-bottom cities of the outer
world been delivered? Had any of the Old Ones shifted north ahead of the creeping ice
cap? Existing geology shows no trace of their presence. Had the frightful Mi-Go been
still a menace in the outer land world of the north? Could one be sure of what might or
might not linger, even to this day, in the lightless and unplumbed abysses of earth’s
deepest waters? Those things had seemingly been able to withstand any amount of
pressure - and men of the sea have fished up curious objects at times. And has the
killer-whale theory really explained the savage and mysterious scars on antarctic seals
noticed a generation ago by Borchgrevingk?
The specimens found by poor Lake did not enter into these guesses, for their geologic
setting proved them to have lived at what must have been a very early date in the land
city’s history. They were, according to their location, certainly not less than thirty
million years old, and we reflected that in their day the sea-cavern city, and indeed the
cavern itself, had had no existence. They would have remembered an older scene, with
lush Tertiary vegetation everywhere, a younger land city of flourishing arts around them,
and a great river sweeping northward along the base of the mighty mountains toward a
far-away tropic ocean.
And yet we could not help thinking about these specimens - especially about the eight
perfect ones that were missing from Lake’s hideously ravaged camp. There was
something abnormal about that whole business - the strange things we had tried so hard
to lay to somebody’s madness - those frightful graves - the amount and nature of the
missing material - Gedney - the unearthly toughness of those archaic monstrosities, and
the queer vital freaks the sculptures now showed the race to have - Danforth and I had
seen a good deal in the last few hours, and were prepared to believe and keep silent
about many appalling and incredible secrets of primal nature.
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.
Alfer 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 t-ried to
increase their meat supply? We doubted whether that pungent odor which the dogs had
hated could cause an equal antipathy in these penguins, since their ancestors had
obviously lived on excellent terms with the Old Ones - an amicable relationship which
must have survived in the abyss below as long as any of the Old Ones remained.
Regretting - in a flare-up of the old spirit of pure science - that we could not photograph
these anomalous creatures, we shortly left them to their squawking and pushed on
toward the abyss whose openness was now so positively proved to us, and whose exact
direction occasional penguin tracks made clear.
Not long afterward a steep descent in a long, low, doorless, and peculiarly sculptureless
corridor led us to believe that we were approaching the tunnel mouth at last. We had
passed two more penguins, and heard others immediately ahead. Then the corridor
ended in a prodigious open space which made us gasp involuntarily - a perfect inverted
hemisphere, obviously deep underground; fully a hundred feet in diameter and fifty feet
high, with low archways opening around all parts of the circumference but one, and that
one yawning cavernously 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. Alter a short distance the masonry gave place to solid rock, though the
tunnel kept the same proportions and presented the same aspect of carved regularity.
Occasionally its varying grade became so steep that grooves were cut in the floor.
Several times we noted the mouths of small lateral galleries not recorded in our
diagrams; none of them such as to complicate the problem of our return, and all of them
welcome as possible refuges in case we met unwelcome entities on their way back from
the abyss. The nameless scent of such things was very distinct. Doubtless it was
suicidally foolish to venture into that tunnel under the known conditions, but the lure of
the unplumbed is stronger in certain persons than most suspect - indeed, it was just such
a lure which had brought us to this unearthly polar waste in the first place. We saw
several penguins as we passed along, and speculated on the distance we would have to
traverse. The carvings had led us to expect a steep downhill walk of about a mile to the
abyss, but our previous wanderings had shown us that matters of scale were not wholly
to be depended on.
Alter about a quarter of a mile that nameless scent became greatly accentuated, and we
kept very careful track of the various lateral openings we passed. There was no visible
vapor as at the mouth, but this was doubtless due to the lack of contrasting cooler air.
The temperature was rapidly ascending, and we were not surprised to come upon a
careless heap of material shudderingly familiar to us. It was composed of furs and tent
cloth taken from Lake’s camp, and we did not pause to study the bizarre forms into
which the fabrics had been slashed. Slightly beyond this point we noticed a decided
increase in the size and number of the side galleries, and concluded that the densely
honeycombed region beneath the higher foothills must now have been reached. The
nameless scent was now curiously mixed with another and scarcely less offensive odor of what nature we could not guess, though we thought of decaying organisms and
perhaps unknown subterranean fungi. Then came a startling expansion of the tunnel for
which the carvings had not prepared us - a broadening and rising into a lofty,
natural-looking elliptical cavern with a level floor, some seventy-five feet long and fifty
broad, and with many immense side passages leading away into cryptical darkness.
Though this cavern was natural in appearance, an inspection with both torches
suggested that it had been formed by the artificial destruction of several walls between
adjacent 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 car-touches of the earlier sections, but the height of the reliefs did not
reach the level of the general surface. Danforth had the idea that it was a second carving
- a sort of palimpsest formed after the obliteration of a previous design. In nature it was
wholly decorative and conventional, and consisted of crude spirals and angles roughly
following the quintile mathematical tradition of the Old Ones, yet seemingly more like a
parody than a perpetuation of that tradition. We could not get it out of our minds that
some subtly but profoundly alien element had been added to the aesthetic feeling behind
the technique - an alien element, Danforth guessed, that was responsible for the
laborious substitution. It was like, yet disturbingly unlike, what we had come to
recognize as the Old Ones’ art; and I was persistently reminded of such hybrid things as
the ungainly Palmyrene sculptures fashioned in the Roman manner. That others had
recently noticed this belt of carving was hinted by the presence of a used flashlight
battery on the floor in front of one of the most characteristic cartouches.
Since we could not afford to spend any considerable time in study, we resumed our
advance after a cursory look; though frequently casting beams over the walls to see if
any further decorative changes developed. Nothing of the sort was perceived, though the
carvings were in places rather sparse because of the numerous mouths of
smooth-floored lateral tunnels. We saw and heard fewer penguins, but thought we
caught a vague suspicion of an infinitely distant chorus of them somewhere deep within
the earth. The new and inexplicable odor was abominably strong, and we could detect
scarcely a sign of that other nameless scent. Puffs of visible vapor ahead bespoke
increasing contrasts in temperature, and the relative nearness of the sunless sea cliffs of
the great abyss. Then, quite unexpectedly, we saw certain obstructions on the polished
floor ahead - obstructions which were quite definitely not penguins - and turned on our
second torch after making sure that the objects were quite stationary.
XI
Still another time have I come to a place where it is very difficult to proceed. I ought to
be hardened by this stage; but there are some experiences and intimations which scar
too deeply to permit of healing, and leave only such an added sensitiveness that memory
reinspires all the original horror. We saw, as I have said, certain obstructions on the
polished floor ahead; and I may add that our nostrils were assailed almost
simultaneously by a very curious intensification 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! Alter all, they were not evil things of
their kind. They were the men of another age and another order of being. Nature had
played a hellish jest on them - as it will on any others that human madness, callousness,
or cruelty may hereafter dig up in that hideously dead or sleeping polar waste - and this
was their tragic homecoming. They had not been even savages-for what indeed had they
done? That awful awakening in the cold of an unknown epoch - perhaps an attack by the
furry, frantically barking quadrupeds, and a dazed defense against them and the equally
frantic white simians with the queer wrappings and paraphernalia ... poor Lake, poor
Gedney... and poor Old Ones! Scientists to the last - what had they done that we would
not have done in their place? God, what intelligence and persistence! What a facing of
the incredible, just as those carven kinsmen and forbears had faced things only a little
less incredible! Radiates, vegetables, monstrosities, star spawn - whatever they had been,
they were men!
They had crossed the icy peaks on whose templed slopes they had once worshipped and
roamed among the tree ferns. They had found their dead city brooding under its curse,
and had read its carven latter days as we had done. They had tried to reach their living
fellows in fabled depths of blackness they had never seen - and what had they found?
All this flashed in unison through the thoughts of Danforth and me as we looked from
those headless, slime-coated shapes to the loathsome palimpsest sculptures and the
diabolical dot groups of fresh slime on the wall beside them - looked and understood
what must have triumphed and survived down there in the Cyclopean water city of that
nighted, penguin-fringed abyss, whence even now a sinister curling mist had begun to
belch pallidly as if in answer to Danforth’s hysterical scream.
The shock of recognizing that monstrous slime and headlessness had frozen us into
mute, motionless statues, and it is only through later conversations that we have learned
of the complete identity of our thoughts at that moment. It seemed aeons that we stood
there, but actually it could not have been more than ten or fifteen seconds. That hateful,
pallid mist curled forward as if veritably driven by some remoter advancing bulk-and
then came a sound which upset much of what we had just decided, and in so doing
broke the spell and enabled us to run like mad past squawking, confused penguins over
our former trail back to the city, along ice-sunken megalithic corridors to the great open
circle, and up that archaic spiral ramp in a frenzied, automatic plunge for the sane outer
air and light of day.
The new sound, as I have intimated, upset much that we had decided; because it was
what poor Lake’s dissection had led us to attribute to those we had judged dead. It was,
Danforth later told me, precisely what he had caught in infinitely muffled form when at
that spot beyond the alley corner above the glacial level; and it certainly had a shocking
resemblance to the wind pipings we had both heard around the lofty mountain caves. At
the risk of seeming puerile I will add another thing, too, if only because of the
surprising way Danforth’s impressions chimed with mine. Of course common reading is
what prepared us both to make the interpretation, though Danforth has hinted at queer
notions about unsuspected and forbidden sources to which Poe may have had access
when writing his Arthur Gordon Pym a century ago. It will be remembered that in that
fantastic tale there is a word of unknown but terrible and prodigious significance
connected with the antarctic and screamed eternally by the gigantic spectrally snowy
birds of that malign region’s core. "Tekeli-li! Tekeli-li!" That, I may admit, is exactly
what we thought we heard conveyed by that sudden sound behind the advancing white
mist-that insidious musical piping over a singularly wide range.
We were in full flight before three notes or syllables had been uttered, though we knew
that the swiftness of the Old Ones would enable any scream-roused and pursuing
survivor of the slaughter to overtake us in a moment if it really wished to do so. We had
a vague hope, however, that nonaggressive conduct and a display of kindred reason
might cause such a being to spare us in case of capture, if only from scientific curiosity.
Alter all, if such an one had nothing to fear for itself, it would have no motive in
harming us. Concealment being futile at this juncture, we used our torch for a running
glance behind, and perceived that the mist was thinning. Would we see, at last, a
complete and living specimen of those others? Again came that insidious musical
piping- "Tekeli-li! Tekeli-li!" Then, noting that we were actually gaining on our pursuer,
it occurred to us that the entity might be wounded. We could take no chances, however,
since it was very obviously approaching in answer to Danforth’s scream, rather than in
flight from any other entity. The timing was too close to admit of doubt. Of the
whereabouts of that less conceivable and less mentionable nightmare - that fetid,
unglimpsed mountain of slime-spewing protoplasm whose race had conquered the abyss
and sent land pioneers to recarve and squirm through the burrows of the hills - we could
form no guess; and it cost us a genuine pang to leave this probably crippled Old
One-perhaps a lone survivor - to the peril of recapture and a nameless fate.
Thank Heaven we did not slacken our run. The curling mist had thickened again, and
was driving ahead with increased speed; whilst the straying penguins in our rear were
squawking and screaming and displaying signs of a panic really surprising in view of
their relatively minor confusion when we had passed them. Once more came that
sinister, wide-ranged piping - "Tekeli-li! Tekeli-li!" We had been wrong. The thing was
not wounded, but had merely paused on encountering the bodies of its fallen kindred
and the hellish slime inscription above them. We could never know what that demon
message was - but those burials at Lake’s camp had shown how much importance the
beings attached to their dead. Our recklessly used torch now revealed ahead of us the
large open cavern where various ways converged, and we were glad to be leaving those
morbid palimpsest sculptures - almost felt even when scarcely seen-behind. Another
thought which the advent of the cave inspired was the possibility of losing our pursuer
at this bewildering focus of large galleries. There were several of the blind albino
penguins in the open space, and it seemed clear that their fear of the oncoming entity
was extreme to the point of unaccountability. If at that point we dimmed our torch to the
very lowest limit of traveling need, keeping it strictly in front of us, the frightened
squawking motions of the huge birds in the mist might muffle our footfalls, screen our
true course, and somehow set up a false lead. Amidst the churning, spiraling fog, the
littered and unglistening floor of the main tunnel beyond this point, as differing from the
other morbidly polished burrows, could hardly form a highly distinguishing feature;
even, so far as we could conjecture, for those indicated special senses which made the
Old Ones partly, though imperfectly, independent of light in emergencies. In fact, we
were somewhat apprehensive lest we go astray ourselves in our haste. For we had, of
course, decided to keep straight on toward the dead city; since the consequences of loss
in those unknown foothill honeycombings would be unthinkable.
The fact that we survived and emerged is sufficient proof that the thing did take a wrong
gallery whilst we providentially hit on the right one. The penguins alone could not have
saved us, but in conjunction with the mist they seem to have done so. Only a benign fate
kept the curling vapors thick enough at the right moment, for they were constantly
shifting and threatening to vanish. Indeed, they did lift for a second just before we
emerged from the nauseously resculptured tunnel into the cave; so that we actually
caught one first and only half glimpse of the oncoming entity as we cast a final,
desperately fearful glance backward before dimming the torch and mixing with the
penguins in the hope of dodging pursuit. If the fate which screened us was benign, that
which gave us the half glimpse was infinitely the opposite; for to that flash of
semivision can be traced a full half of the horror which has ever since haunted us.
Our exact motive in looking back again was perhaps no more than the immemorial
instinct of the pursued to gauge the nature and course of its pursuer; or perhaps it was an
automatic attempt to answer a subconscious question raised by one of our senses. In the
midst of our flight, with all our faculties centered on the problem of escape, we were in
no condition to observe and analyze details; yet even so, our latent brain cells must have
wondered at the message brought them by our nostrils. Alterward we realized what it
was-that our retreat from the fetid slime coating on those headless obstructions, and the
coincident approach of the pursuing entity, had not brought us the exchange of stenches
which logic called for. In the neighborhood of the prostrate things that new and lately
unexplainable fetor had been wholly dominant; but by this time it ought to have largely
given place to the nameless stench associated with those others. This it had not done for instead, the newer and less bearable smell was now virtually undiluted, and growing
more and more poisonously insistent each second.
So we glanced back simultaneously, it would appear; though no doubt the incipient
motion of one prompted the imitation of the other. As we did so we flashed both torches
full strength at the momentarily thinned mist; either from sheer primitive anxiety to see
all we could, or in a less primitive but equally unconscious effort to dazzle the entity
before we dimmed our light and dodged among the penguins of the labyrinth center
ahead. Unhappy act! Not Orpheus himself, or Lot’s wife, paid much more dearly for a
backward glance. And again came that shocking, wide-ranged piping - "Tekeli-li!
Tekeli-li!"
I might as well be frank - even if I cannot bear to be quite direct - in stating what we
saw; though at the time we felt that it was not to be admitted even to each other. The
words reaching the reader can never even suggest the awfulness of the sight itself. It
crippled our consciousness so completely that I wonder we had the residual sense to
dim our torches as planned, and to strike the right tunnel toward the dead city. Instinct
alone must have carried us through - perhaps better than reason could have done; though
if that was what saved us, we paid a high price. Of reason we certainly had little enough
left.
Danforth was totally unstrung, and the first thing I remember of the rest of the journey
was hearing him lightheadedly chant an hysterical formula in which I alone of mankind
could have found anything but insane irrelevance. It reverberated in falsetto echoes
among the squawks of the penguins; reverberated through the vaultings ahead,
and-thank God-through the now empty vaultings behind. He could not have begun it at
once - else we would not have been alive and blindly racing. I shudder to think of what
a shade of difference in his nervous reactions might have brought.
"South Station Under - Washington Under - Park Street Under-Kendall - Central Harvard - " The poor fellow was chanting the familiar stations of the Boston-Cambridge
tunnel that burrowed through our peaceful native soil thousands of miles away in New
England, yet to me the ritual had neither irrelevance nor home feeling. It had only
horror, because I knew unerringly the monstrous, nefandous analogy that had suggested
it. We had expected, upon looking back, to see a terrible and incredible moving entity if
the mists were thin enough; but of that entity we had formed a clear idea. What we did
see - for the mists were indeed all too maliguly 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!"
:
Azathoth
by H. P. Lovecraft
Written June 1922
Published 1938 in Leaves, Vol. 2: p. 107.
When age fell upon the world, and wonder went out of the minds of men; when grey
cities reared to smoky skies tall towers grim and ugly, in whose shadow none might
dream of the sun or of Spring's flowering meads; when learning stripped the Earth of
her mantle of beauty and poets asang 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
worlds 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 dispair. 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 rom 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 aroud 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 calanders the tides of far spheres that bore him gently to join
the course of other cycles that tenderly left him sleeping on a green sunrise shore, a
green shore fragrant with lotus blossums and starred by red camalates...
:
Beyond the Wall of Sleep
by H. P. Lovecraft
Written 1919
Published October 1919 in Pine Cones, Vol. 1, No. 6, p. 2-10
I have often wondered if the majority of mankind ever pause to reflect upon the
occasionally titanic significance of dreams, and of the obscure world to which they
belong. Whilst the greater number of our nocturnal visions are perhaps no more than
faint and fantastic reflections of our waking experiences - Freud to the contrary with his
puerile symbolism - there are still a certain remainder whose immundane and ethereal
character permit of no ordinary interpretation, and whose vaguely exciting and
disquieting effect suggests possible minute glimpses into a sphere of mental existence
no less important than physical life, yet separated from that life by an all but impassable
barrier. From my experience I cannot doubt but that man, when lost to terrestrial
consciousness, is indeed sojourning in another and uncorporeal life of far different
nature from the life we know, and of which only the slightest and most indistinct
memories linger after waking. From those blurred and fragmentary memories we may
infer much, yet prove little. We may guess that in dreams life, matter, and vitality, as the
earth knows such things, are not necessarily constant; and that time and space do not
exist as our waking selves comprehend them. Sometimes I believe that this less material
life is our truer life, and that our vain presence on the terraqueous globe is itself the
secondary or merely virtual phenomenon.
It was from a youthful revery filled with speculations of this sort that I arose one
afternoon in the winter of 1900-01, when to the state psychopathic institution in which I
served as an intern was brought the man whose case has ever since haunted me so
unceasingly. His name, as given on the records, was Joe Slater, or Slaader, and his
appearance was that of the typical denizen of the Catskill Mountain region; one of those
strange, repellent scions of a primitive Colonial peasant stock whose isolation for nearly
three centuries in the hilly fastnesses of a little-traveled countryside has caused them to
sink to a kind of barbaric degeneracy, rather than advance with their more fortunately
placed brethren of the thickly settled districts. Among these odd folk, who correspond
exactly to the decadent element of "white trash" in the South, law and morals are
non-existent; and their general mental status is probably below that of any other section
of native American people.
Joe Slater, who came to the institution in the vigilant custody of four state policemen,
and who was described as a highly dangerous character, certainly presented no evidence
of his perilous disposition when I first beheld him. Though well above the middle
stature, and of somewhat brawny frame, he was given an absurd appearance of harmless
stupidity by the pale, sleepy blueness of his small watery eyes, the scantiness of his
neglected and never-shaven growth of yellow beard, and the listless drooping of his
heavy nether lip. His age was unknown, since among his kind neither family records nor
permanent family ties exist; but from the baldness of his head in front, and from the
decayed condition of his teeth, the head surgeon wrote him down as a man of about
forty.
From the medical and court documents we learned all that could be gathered of his case:
this man, a vagabond, hunter and trapper, had always been strange in the eyes of his
primitive associates. He had habitually slept at night beyond the ordinary time, and
upon waking would often talk of unknown things in a manner so bizarre as to inspire
fear even in the hearts of an unimaginative populace. Not that his form of language was
at all unusual, for he never spoke save in the debased patois of his environment; but the
tone and tenor of his utterances were of such mysterious wildness, that none might
listen without apprehension. He himself was generally as terrified and baffled as his
auditors, and within an hour after awakening would forget all that he had said, or at
least all that had caused him to say what he did; relapsing into a bovine, hall-amiable
normality like that of the other hilldwellers.
As Slater grew older, it appeared, his matutinal aberrations had gradually increased in
frequency and violence; till about a month before his arrival at the institution had
occurred the shocking tragedy which caused his arrest by the authorities. One day near
noon, after a profound sleep begun in a whiskey debauch at about five of the previous
afternoon, the man had roused himself most suddenly, with ululations so horrible and
unearthly that they brought several neighbors to his cabin - a filthy sty where he dwelt
with a family as indescribable as himself. Rushing out into the snow, he had flung his
arms aloft and commenced a series of leaps directly upward in the air; the while
shouting his determination to reach some "big, big cabin with brightness in the roof and
walls and floor and the loud queer music far away." As two men of moderate size
sought to restrain him, he had struggled with maniacal force and fury, screaming of his
desire and need to find and kill a certain "thing that shines and shakes and laughs." At
length, after temporarily felling one of his detainers with a sudden blow, he had flung
himself upon the other in a demoniac ecstasy of blood-thirstiness, shrieking fiendishly
that he would "jump high in the air and burn his way through anything that stopped
him."
Family and neighbors had now fled in a panic, and when the more courageous of them
returned, Slater was gone, leaving behind an unrecognizable pulp-like thing that had
been a living man but an hour before. None of the mountaineers had dared to pursue
him, and it is likely that they would have welcomed his death from the cold; but when
several mornings later they heard his screams from a distant ravine they realized that he
had somehow managed to survive, and that his removal in one way or another would be
necessary. Then had followed an armed searching-party, whose purpose (whatever it
may have been originally) became that of a sheriff's posse after one of the seldom
popular state troopers had by accident observed, then questioned, and finally joined the
seekers.
On the third day Slater was found unconscious in the hollow of a tree, and taken to the
nearest jail, where alienists from Albany examined him as soon as his senses returned.
To them he told a simple story. He had, he said, gone to sleep one afternoon about
sundown after drinking much liquor. He had awakened to find himself standing
bloody-handed in the snow before his cabin, the mangled corpse of his neighbor Peter
Slader at his feet. Horrified, he had taken to the woods in a vague effort to escape from
the scene of what must have been his crime. Beyond these things he seemed to know
nothing, nor could the expert questioning of his interrogators bring out a single
additional fact.
That night Slater slept quietly, and the next morning he awakened with no singular
feature save a certain alteration of expression. Doctor Barnard, who had been watching
the patient, thought he noticed in the pale blue eyes a certain gleam of peculiar quality,
and in the flaccid lips an all but imperceptible tightening, as if of intelligent
determination. But when questioned, Slater relapsed into the habitual vacancy of the
mountaineer, and only reiterated what he had said on the preceding day.
On the third morning occurred the first of the man's mental attacks. After some show of
uneasiness in sleep, he burst forth into a frenzy so powerful that the combined efforts of
four men were needed to bind him in a straightjacket. The alienists listened with keen
attention to his words, since their curiosity had been aroused to a high pitch by the
suggestive yet mostly conflicting and incoherent stories of his family and neighbors.
Slater raved for upward of fifteen minutes, babbling in his backwoods dialect of green
edifices of light, oceans of space, strange music, and shadowy mountains and valleys.
But most of all did he dwell upon some mysterious blazing entity that shook and
laughed and mocked at him. This vast, vague personality seemed to have done him a
terrible wrong, and to kill it in triumphant revenge was his paramount desire. In order to
reach it, he said, he would soar through abysses of emptiness, burning every obstacle
that stood in his way. Thus ran his discourse, until with the greatest suddenness he
ceased. The fire of madness died from his eyes, and in dull wonder he looked at his
questioners and asked why he was bound. Dr. Barnard unbuckled the leather harness
and did not restore it till night, when he succeeded in persuading Slater to don it of his
own volition, for his own good. The man had now admitted that he sometimes talked
queerly, though he knew not why.
Within a week two more attacks appeared, but from them the doctors learned little. On
the source of Slater's visions they speculated at length, for since he could neither read
nor write, and had apparently never heard a legend or fairy-tale, his gorgeous imagery
was quite inexplicable. That it could not come from any known myth or romance was
made especially clear by the fact that the unfortunate lunatic expressed himself only in
his own simple manner. He raved of things he did not understand and could not
interpret; things which he claimed to have experienced, but which he could not have
learned through any normal or connected narration. The alienists soon agreed that
abnormal dreams were the foundation of the trouble; dreams whose vividness could for
a time completely dominate the waking mind of this basically inferior man. With due
formality Slater was tried for murder, acquitted on the ground of insanity, and
committed to the institution wherein I held so humble a post.
I have said that I am a constant speculator concerning dream-life, and from this you may
judge of the eagerness with which I applied myself to the study of the new patient as
soon as I had fully ascertained the facts of his case. He seemed to sense a certain
friendliness in me, born no doubt of the interest I could not conceal, and the gentle
manner in which I questioned him. Not that he ever recognized me during his attacks,
when I hung breathlessly upon his chaotic but cosmic word-pictures; but he knew me in
his quiet hours, when he would sit by his barred window weaving baskets of straw and
willow, and perhaps pining for the mountain freedom he could never again enjoy. His
family never called to see him; probably it had found another temporary head, after the
manner of decadent mountain folk.
By degrees I commenced to feel an overwhelming wonder at the mad and fantastic
conceptions of Joe Slater. The man himself was pitiably inferior in mentality and
language alike; but his glowing, titanic visions, though described in a barbarous
disjointed jargon, were assuredly things which only a superior or even exceptional brain
could conceive How, I often asked myself, could the stolid imagination of a Catskill
degenerate conjure up sights whose very possession argued a lurking spark of genius?
How could any backwoods dullard have gained so much as an idea of those glittering
realms of supernal radiance and space about which Slater ranted in his furious delirium?
More and more I inclined to the belief that in the pitiful personality who cringed before
me lay the disordered nucleus of something beyond my comprehension; something
infinitely beyond the comprehension of my more experienced but less imaginative
medical and scientific colleagues.
And yet I could extract nothing definite from the man. The sum of all my investigation
was, that in a kind of semi-corporeal dream-life Slater wandered or floated through
resplendent and prodigious valleys, meadows, gardens, cities, and palaces of light, in a
region unbounded and unknown to man; that there he was no peasant or degenerate, but
a creature of importance and vivid life, moving proudly and dominantly, and checked
only by a certain deadly enemy, who seemed to be a being of visible yet ethereal
structure, and who did not appear to be of human shape, since Slater never referred to it
as a man, or as aught save a thing. This thing had done Slater some hideous but
unnamed wrong, which the maniac (if maniac he were) yearned to avenge.
From the manner in which Slater alluded to their dealings, I judged that he and the
luminous thing had met on equal terms; that in his dream existence the man was himself
a luminous thing of the same race as his enemy. This impression was sustained by his
frequent references to flying through space and burning all that impeded his progress.
Yet these conceptions were formulated in rustic words wholly inadequate to convey
them, a circumstance which drove me to the conclusion that if a dream world indeed
existed, oral language was not its medium for the transmission of thought. Could it be
that the dream soul inhabiting this inferior body was desperately struggling to speak
things which the simple and halting tongue of dullness could not utter? Could it be that I
was face to face with intellectual emanations which would explain the mystery if I could
but learn to discover and read them? I did not tell the older physicians of these things,
for middle age is skeptical, cynical, and disinclined to accept new ideas. Besides, the
head of the institution had but lately warned me in his paternal way that I was
overworking; that my mind needed a rest.
It had long been my belief that human thought consists basically of atomic or molecular
motion, convertible into ether waves or radi ant energy like heat, light and electricity.
This belief had early led me to contemplate the possibility of telepathy or mental
communication by means of suitable apparatus, and I had in my college days prepared a
set of transmitting and receiving instruments somewhat similar to the cumbrous devices
employed in wireless telegraphy at that crude, pre-radio period. These I had tested with
a fellow-student, but achieving no result, had soon packed them away with other
scientific odds and ends for possible future use.
Now, in my intense desire to probe into the dream-life of Joe Slater, I sought these
instruments again, and spent several days in repairing them for action. When they were
complete once more I missed no opportunity for their trial. At each outburst of Slater's
violence, I would fit the transmitter to his forehead and the receiver to my own,
constantly making delicate adjustments for various hypothetical wave-lengths of
intellectual energy. I had but little notion of how the thought-impressions would, if
successfully conveyed, arouse an intelligent response in my brain, but I felt certain that I
could detect and interpret them. Accordingly I continued my experiments, though
informing no one of their nature.
It was on the twenty-first of February, 1901, that the thing occurred. As I look back
across the years I realize how unreal it seems, and sometimes wonder if old Doctor
Fenton was not right when he charged it all to my excited imagination. I recall that he
listened with great kindness and patience when I told him, but afterward gave me a
nerve-powder and arranged for the half-year's vacation on which I departed the next
week.
That fateful night I was wildly agitated and perturbed, for despite the excellent care he
had received, Joe Slater was unmistakably dying. Perhaps it was his mountain freedom
that he missed, or perhaps the turmoil in his brain had grown too acute for his rather
sluggish physique; but at all events the flame of vitality flickered low in the decadent
body. He was drowsy near the end, and as darkness fell he dropped off into a troubled
sleep.
I did not strap on the straightjacket as was customary when he slept, since I saw that he
was too feeble to be dangerous, even if he woke in mental disorder once more before
passing away. But I did place upon his head and mine the two ends of my cosmic
"radio," hoping against hope for a first and last message from the dream world in the
brief time remaining. In the cell with us was one nurse, a mediocre fellow who did not
understand the purpose of the apparatus, or think to inquire into my course. As the hours
wore on I saw his head droop awkwardly in sleep, but I did not disturb him. I myself,
lulled by the rhythmical breathing of the healthy and the dying man, must have nodded
a little later.
The sound of weird lyric melody was what aroused me. Chords, vibrations, and
harmonic ecstasies echoed passionately on every hand, while on my ravished sight burst
the stupendous spectacle ultimate beauty. Walls, columns, and architraves of living fire
blazed effulgently around the spot where I seemed to float in air, extending upward to
an infinitely high vaulted dome of indescribable splendor. Blending with this display of
palatial magnificence, or rather, supplanting it at times in kaleidoscopic rotation, were
glimpses of wide plains and graceful valleys, high mountains and inviting grottoes,
covered with every lovely attribute of scenery which my delighted eyes could conceive
of, yet formed wholly of some glowing, ethereal plastic entity, which in consistency
partook as much of spirit as of matter. As I gazed, I perceived that my own brain held
the key to these enchanting metamorphoses; for each vista which appeared to me was
the one my changing mind most wished to behold. Amidst this elysian realm I dwelt not
as a stranger, for each sight and sound was familiar to me; just as it had been for
uncounted eons of eternity before, and would be for like eternities to come.
Then the resplendent aura of my brother of light drew near and held colloquy with me,
soul to soul, with silent and perfect interchange of thought. The hour was one of
approaching triumph, for was not my fellow-being escaping at last from a degrading
periodic bondage; escaping forever, and preparing to follow the accursed oppressor
even unto the uttermost fields of ether, that upon it might be wrought a flaming cosmic
vengeance which would shake the spheres? We floated thus for a little time, when I
perceived a slight blurring and fading of the objects around us, as though some force
were recalling me to earth - where I least wished to go. The form near me seemed to
feel a change also, for it gradually brought its discourse toward a conclusion, and itself
prepared to quit the scene, fading from my sight at a rate somewhat less rapid than that
of the other objects. A few more thoughts were exchanged, and I knew that the
luminous one and I were being recalled to bondage, though for my brother of light it
would be the last time. The sorry planet shell being well-nigh spent, in less than an hour
my fellow would be free to pursue the oppressor along the Milky Way and past the
hither stars to the very confines of infinity.
A well-defined shock separates my final impression of the fading scene of light from
my sudden and somewhat shamefaced awakening and straightening up in my chair as I
saw the dying figure on the couch move hesitantly. Joe Slater was indeed awaking,
though probably for the last time. As I looked more closely, I saw that in the sallow
cheeks shone spots of color which had never before been present. The lips, too, seemed
unusual, being tightly compressed, as if by the force of a stronger character than had
been Slater's. The whole face finally began to grow tense, and the head turned restlessly
with closed eyes.
I did not rouse the sleeping nurse, but readjusted the slightly disarranged headband of
my telepathic "radio," intent to catch any parting message the dreamer might have to
deliver. All at once the head turned sharply in my direction and the eyes fell open,
causing me to stare in blank amazement at what I beheld. The man who had been Joe
Slater, the Catskill decadent, was gazing at me with a pair of luminous, expanding eyes
whose blue seemed subtly to have deepened. Neither mania nor degeneracy was `visible
in that gaze, and I felt beyond a doubt that I was viewing a face behind which lay an
active mind of high order.
At this juncture my brain became aware of a steady external influence operating upon it.
I closed my eyes to concentrate my thoughts more profoundly and was rewarded by the
positive knowledge that my long-sought mental message had come at last. Each
transmitted idea formed rapidly in my mind, and though no actual language was
employed, my habitual association of conception and expression was so great that I
seemed to be receiving the message in ordinary English.
"Joe Slater is dead," came the soul-petrifying voice of an agency from beyond the wall
of sleep. My opened eyes sought the couch of pain in curious horror, but the blue eyes
were still calmly gazing, and the countenance was still intelligently animated. "He is
better dead, for he was unfit to bear the active intellect of cosmic entity. His gross body
could not undergo the needed adjustments between ethereal life and planet life. He was
too much an animal, too little a man; yet it is through his deficiency that you have come
to discover me, for the cosmic and planet souls rightly should never meet. He has been
in my torment and diurnal prison for forty-two of your terrestrial years.
"I am an entity like that which you yourself become in the freedom of dreamless sleep. I
am your brother of light, and have floated with you in the effulgent valleys. It is not
permitted me to tell your waking earth-self of your real self, but we are all roamers of
vast spaces and travelers in many ages. Next year I may be dwelling in the Egypt which
you call ancient, or in the cruel empire of Tsan Chan which is to come three thousand
years hence. You and I have drifted to the worlds that reel about the red Arcturus, and
dwelt in the bodies of the insect-philosophers that crawl proudly over the fourth moon
of Jupiter. How little does the earth self know life and its extent! How little, indeed,
ought it to know for its own tranquility!
"Of the oppressor I cannot speak. You on earth have unwittingly felt its distant presence
- you who without knowing idly gave the blinking beacon the name of Algol, the
Demon-Star It is to meet and conquer the oppressor that I have vainly striven for eons,
held back by bodily encumbrances. Tonight I go as a Nemesis bearing just and
blazingly cataclysmic vengeance. Watch me in the sky close by the Demon-Star.
"I cannot speak longer, for the body of Joe Slater grows cold and rigid, and the coarse
brains are ceasing to vibrate as I wish. You have been my only friend on this planet - the
only soul to sense and seek for me within the repellent form which lies on this couch.
We shall meet again - perhaps in the shining mists of Orion's Sword, perhaps on a bleak
plateau in prehistoric Asia, perhaps in unremembered dreams tonight, perhaps in some
other form an eon hence, when the solar system shall have been swept away."
At this point the thought-waves abruptly ceased, the pale eyes of the dreamer - or can I
say dead man? - commenced to glaze fishily. In a half-stupor I crossed over to the couch
and felt of his wrist, but found it cold, stiff, and pulseless. The sallow cheeks paled
again, and the thick lips fell open, disclosing the repulsively rotten fangs of the
degenerate Joe Slater. I shivered, pulled a blanket over the hideous face, and awakened
the nurse. Then I left the cell and went silently to my room. I had an instant and
unaccountable craving for a sleep whose dreams I should not remember.
The climax? What plain tale of science can boast of such a rhetorical effect? I have
merely set down certain things appealing to me as facts, allowing you to construe them
as you will. As I have already admitted, my superior, old Doctor Fenton, denies the
reality of everything I have related. He vows that I was broken down with nervous
strain, and badly in need of a long vacation on full pay which he so generously gave me.
He assures me on his professional honor that Joe Slater was but a low-grade paranoiac,
whose fantastic notions must have come from the crude hereditary folk-tales which
circulated in even the most decadent of communities. All this he tells me - yet I cannot
forget what I saw in the sky on the night after Slater died. Lest you think me a biased
witness, another pen must add this final testimony, which may perhaps supply the
climax you expect. I will quote the following account of the star Nova Persei verbatim
from the pages of that eminent astronomical authority, Professor Garrett P. Serviss:
"On February 22, 1901, a marvelous new star was discovered by Doctor Anderson of
Edinburgh, not very far from Algol. No star had been visible at that point before. Within
twenty-four hours the stranger had become so bright that it outshone Capella. In a week
or two it had visibly faded, and in the course of a few months it was hardly discernible
with the naked eye."
:
Celephais
by H. P. Lovecraft
Written early Nov 1920
Published May 1922 in The Rainbow, No. 2, p. 10-12.
In a dream Kuranes saw the city in the valley, and the seacoast beyond, and the snowy
peak overlooking the sea, and the gaily painted galleys that sail out of the harbour
toward distant regions where the sea meets the sky. In a dream it was also that he came
by his name of Kuranes, for when awake he was called by another name. Perhaps it was
natural for him to dream a new name; for he was the last of his family, and alone among
the indifferent millions of London, so there were not many to speak to him and to
remind him who he had been. His money and lands were gone, and he did not care for
the ways of the people about him, but preferred to dream and write of his dreams. What
he wrote was laughed at by those to whom he showed it, so that after a time he kept his
writings to himself, and finally ceased to write. The more he withdrew from the world
about him, the more wonderful became his dreams; and it would have been quite futile
to try to describe them on paper. Kuranes was not modern, and did not think like others
who wrote. Whilst they strove to strip from life its embroidered robes of myth and to
show in naked ugliness the foul thing that is reality, Kuranes sought for beauty alone.
When truth and experience failed to reveal it, he sought it in fancy and illusion, and
found it on his very doorstep, amid the nebulous memories of childhood tales and
dreams.
There are not many persons who know what wonders are opened to them in the stories
and visions of their youth; for when as children we listen and dream, we think but
half-formed thoughts, and when as men we try to remember, we are dulled and prosaic
with the poison of life. But some of us awake in the night with strange phantasms of
enchanted hills and gardens, of fountains that sing in the sun, of golden cliffs
overhanging murmuring seas, of plains that stretch down to sleeping cities of bronze
and stone, and of shadowy companies of heroes that ride caparisoned white horses
along the edges of thick forests; and then we know that we have looked back through
the ivory gates into that world of wonder which was ours before we were wise and
unhappy.
Kuranes came very suddenly upon his old world of childhood. He had been dreaming of
the house where he had been born; the great stone house covered with ivy, where
thirteen generations of his ancestors had lived, and where he had hoped to die. It was
moonlight, and he had stolen out into the fragrant summer night, through the gardens,
down the terraces, past the great oaks of the park, and along the long white road to the
village. The village seemed very old, eaten away at the edge like the moon which had
commenced to wane, and Kuranes wondered whether the peaked roofs of the small
houses hid sleep or death. In the streets were spears of long grass, and the
window-panes on either side broken or ifimily 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 unit 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 Man swaying in the sea-breeze. But this time he was not
snatched away, and like a winged being settled gradually over a grassy hillside till
finally his feet rested gently on the turf. He had indeed come back to the Valley of
Ooth-Nargai and the splendid city of Celephais.
Down the hill amid scented grasses and brilliant flowers walked Kuranes, over the
bubbling Naraxa on the small wooden bridge where he had carved his name so many
years ago, and through the whispering grove to the great stone bridge by the city gate.
All was as of old, nor were the marble walls discoloured, nor the polished bronze
statues upon them tarnished. And Kuranes saw that he need not tremble lest the things
he knew be vanished; for even the sentries on the ramparts were the same, and still as
young as he remembered them. When he entered the city, past the bronze gates and over
the onyx pavements, the merchants and camel-drivers greeted him as if he had never
been away; and it Was the same at the turquoise temple of Nath-Horthath, where the
orchid-wreathed priests told him that there is no time in Ooth-Nargai, but only perpetual
youth. Then Kuranes walked through the Street of Pillars to the seaward wall, where
gathered the traders and sailors, and strange men from the regions where the sea meets
the sky. There he stayed long, gazing out over the bright harbour where the ripples
sparkled beneath an unknown sun, and where rode lightly the galleys from far places
over the water. And he gazed also upon Mount Man rising regally from the shore, its
lower slopes green with swaying trees and its white summit touching the sky.
More than ever Kuranes wished to sail in a galley to the far places of which he had
heard so many strange tales, and he sought again the captain who had agreed to carry
him so long ago. He found the man, Athib, sitting on the same chest of spice he had sat
upon before, and Athib seemed not to realize that any time had passed. Then the two
rowed to a galley in the harbour, and giving orders to the oarmen, commenced to sail
out into the billowy Cerenarian Sea that leads to the sky. For several days they glided
undulatingly over the water, till finally they came to the horizon, where the sea meets
the sky. Here the galley paused not at all, but floated easily in the blue of the sky among
fleecy clouds tinted with rose. And far beneath the keel Kuranes could see strange lands
and rivers and cities of surpassing beauty, spread indolently in the sunshine which
seemed never to lessen or disappear. At length Athib told him that their journey was
near its end, and that they would soon enter the harbour of Serannian, the pink marble
city of the clouds, which is built on that ethereal coast where the west wind flows into
the sky; but as the highest of the city’s carven towers came into sight there was a sound
somewhere in space, and Kuranes awaked in his London garret.
For many months after that Kuranes sought the marvellous city of Celephais and its
sky-bound galleys in vain; and though his dreams carried him to many gorgeous and
unheard-of places, no one whom he met could tell him how to find Ooth-Nargai beyond
the Tanarian Hills. One night he went flying over dark mountains where there were faint,
lone campfires at great distances apart, and strange, shaggy herds with tinkling bells on
the leaders, and in the wildest part of this hilly country, so remote that few men could
ever have seen it, he found a hideously ancient wall or causeway of stone zigzagging
along the ridges and valleys; too gigantic ever to have risen by human hands, and of
such a length that neither end of it could be seen. Beyond that wall in the grey dawn he
came to a land of quaint gardens and cherry trees, and when the sun rose he beheld such
beauty of red and white flowers, green foliage and lawns, white paths, diamond brooks,
blue lakelets, carven bridges, and red-roofed pagodas, that he for a moment forgot
Celephais in sheer delight. But he remembered it again when he walked down a white
path toward a red-roofed pagoda, and would have questioned the people of this land
about it, had he not found that there were no people there, but only birds and bees and
butterflies. On another night Kuranes walked up a damp stone spiral stairway endlessly,
and came to a tower window overlooking a mighty plain and river lit by the full moon;
and in the silent city that spread away from the river bank he thought he beheld some
feature or arrangement which he had known before. He would have descended and
asked the way to OothNargai 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.
:
THE ROAD TO MADNESS: THE TRANSITION OF
H. P. LOVECRAFT
by H. P. Lovecraft
Publication date: October 1996 in trade paperback
Compilation copyright © 1996 by Arkham House Publishers, Inc.
Permission to download this sample for personal use only is hereby granted by Del Rey
Books. It is illegal to reproduce or transmit in any form or by any means, electronic or
mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and
retrieval system, any part of this copyrighted text without permission in writing from
the publisher.
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 teaming 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 Muñoz," 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. Muñoz 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. Muñoz 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. Muñoz, 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. Muñoz in that blast of cool air, I felt a repugnance which
nothing in his aspect could justify. Only his lividly inclined complexion and coldness of
touch could have afforded a physical basis for this feeling, and even these things should
have been excusable considering the man's known invalidism. It might, too, have been
the singular cold that alienated me; for such chilliness was abnormal on so hot a day,
and the abnormal always excites aversion, distrust, and fear.
But repugnance was soon forgotten in admiration, for the strange physician's extreme
skill at once became manifest despite the ice-coldness and shakiness of his
bloodless-looking hands. He clearly understood my needs at a glance, and ministered to
them with a master's deftness; the while reassuring me in a finely modulated though
oddly hollow and timbreless voice that he was the bitterest of sworn enemies to death,
and had sunk his fortune and lost all his friends in a lifetime of bizarre experiment
devoted to its bafflement and extirpation. Something of the benevolent fanatic seemed
to reside in him, and he rambled on almost garrulously as he sounded my chest and
mixed a suitable draught of drugs fetched from the smaller laboratory room. Evidently
he found the society of a well-born man a rare novelty in this dingy environment, and
was moved to unaccustomed speech as memories of better days surged over him.
His voice, if queer, was at least soothing; and I could not even perceive that he breathed
as the fluent sentences rolled urbanely out. He sought to distract my mind from my own
seizure by speaking of his theories and experiments; and I remember his tactfully
consoling me about my weak heart by insisting that will and consciousness are stronger
than organic life itself, so that if a bodily frame be but originally healthy and carefully
preserved, it may through a scientific enhancement of these qualities retain a kind of
nervous animation despite the most serious impairments, defects, or even absences in
the battery of specific organs. He might, he half jestingly said, some day teach me to
live--or at least to possess some kind of conscious existence--without any heart at all!
For his part, he was afflicted with a complication of maladies requiring a very exact
regimen which included constant cold. Any marked rise in temperature might, if
prolonged, affect him fatally; and the frigidity of his habitation--some 55 or 56 degrees
Fahrenheit--was maintained by an absorption system of ammonia cooling, the gasoline
engine of whose pumps I had often heard in my own room below.
Relieved of my seizure in a marvellously short while, I left the shivery place a disciple
and devotee of the gifted recluse. After that I paid him frequent overcoated calls;
listening while he told of secret researches and almost ghastly results, and trembling a
bit when I examined the unconventional and astonishingly ancient volumes on his
shelves. I was eventually, I may add, almost cured of my disease for all time by his
skillful ministrations. It seems that he did not scorn the incantations of the mediaevalists,
since he believed these cryptic formulae to contain rare psychological stimuli which
might conceivably have singular effects on the substance of a nervous system from
which organic pulsations had fled. I was touched by his account of the aged Dr. Torres
of Valencia, who had shared his earlier experiments and nursed him through the great
illness of eighteen years before, whence his present disorders proceeded. No sooner had
the venerable practitioner saved his colleague than he himself succumbed to the grim
enemy he had fought. Perhaps the strain had been too great; for Dr. Muñoz 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. Muñoz
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."
Back to Del Rey's sample chapter list
Cool Air
by H. P. Lovecraft
Written March 1926
Published March 1928 in Tales of Magic and Mystery, Vol. 1, No. 4, 29-34.
You ask me to explain why I am afraid of a draught of cool air; why I shiver more than
others upon entering a cold room, and seem nauseated and repelled when the chill of
evening creeps through the heat of a mild autumn day. There are those who say I
respond to cold as others do to a bad odour, and I am the last to deny the impression.
What I will do is to relate the most horrible circumstance I ever encountered, and leave
it to you to judge whether or not this forms a suitable explanation of my peculiarity.
It is a mistake to fancy that horror is associated inextricably with darkness, silence, and
solitude. I found it in the glare of mid-afternoon, in the clangour of a metropolis, and in
the teaming 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 Muñoz," 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. Muñoz 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. Muñoz 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. Muñoz, 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. Muñoz in that blast of cool air, I felt a repugnance which
nothing in his aspect could justify. Only his lividly inclined complexion and coldness of
touch could have afforded a physical basis for this feeling, and even these things should
have been excusable considering the man's known invalidism. It might, too, have been
the singular cold that alienated me; for such chilliness was abnormal on so hot a day,
and the abnormal always excites aversion, distrust, and fear.
But repugnance was soon forgotten in admiration, for the strange physician's extreme
skill at once became manifest despite the ice-coldness and shakiness of his
bloodless-looking hands. He clearly understood my needs at a glance, and ministered to
them with a master's deftness; the while reassuring me in a finely modulated though
oddly hollow and timbreless voice that he was the bitterest of sworn enemies to death,
and had sunk his fortune and lost all his friends in a lifetime of bizarre experiment
devoted to its bafflement and extirpation. Something of the benevolent fanatic seemed
to reside in him, and he rambled on almost garrulously as he sounded my chest and
mixed a suitable draught of drugs fetched from the smaller laboratory room. Evidently
he found the society of a well-born man a rare novelty in this dingy environment, and
was moved to unaccustomed speech as memories of better days surged over him.
His voice, if queer, was at least soothing; and I could not even perceive that he breathed
as the fluent sentences rolled urbanely out. He sought to distract my mind from my own
seizure by speaking of his theories and experiments; and I remember his tactfully
consoling me about my weak heart by insisting that will and consciousness are stronger
than organic life itself, so that if a bodily frame be but originally healthy and carefully
preserved, it may through a scientific enhancement of these qualities retain a kind of
nervous animation despite the most serious impairments, defects, or even absences in
the battery of specific organs. He might, he half jestingly said, some day teach me to
live--or at least to possess some kind of conscious existence--without any heart at all!
For his part, he was afflicted with a complication of maladies requiring a very exact
regimen which included constant cold. Any marked rise in temperature might, if
prolonged, affect him fatally; and the frigidity of his habitation--some 55 or 56 degrees
Fahrenheit--was maintained by an absorption system of ammonia cooling, the gasoline
engine of whose pumps I had often heard in my own room below.
Relieved of my seizure in a marvellously short while, I left the shivery place a disciple
and devotee of the gifted recluse. After that I paid him frequent overcoated calls;
listening while he told of secret researches and almost ghastly results, and trembling a
bit when I examined the unconventional and astonishingly ancient volumes on his
shelves. I was eventually, I may add, almost cured of my disease for all time by his
skillful ministrations. It seems that he did not scorn the incantations of the mediaevalists,
since he believed these cryptic formulae to contain rare psychological stimuli which
might conceivably have singular effects on the substance of a nervous system from
which organic pulsations had fled. I was touched by his account of the aged Dr. Torres
of Valencia, who had shared his earlier experiments and nursed him through the great
illness of eighteen years before, whence his present disorders proceeded. No sooner had
the venerable practitioner saved his colleague than he himself succumbed to the grim
enemy he had fought. Perhaps the strain had been too great; for Dr. Muñoz 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. Muñoz
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
by H. P. Lovecraft
Written Jul 1917
Published November 1919 in The Vagrant, No. 11, 23-29.
I am writing this under an appreciable mental strain, since by tonight I shall be no more.
Penniless, and at the end of my supply of the drug which alone, makes life endurable, I
can bear the torture no longer; and shall cast myself from this garret window into the
squalid street below. Do not think from my slavery to morphine that I am a weakling or
a degenerate. When you have read these hastily scrawled pages you may guess, though
never fully realise, why it is that I must have forgetfulness or death.
It was in one of the most open and least frequented parts of the broad Pacific that the
packet of which I was supercargo fell a victim to the German sea-raider. The great war
was then at its very beginning, and the ocean forces of the Hun had not completely sunk
to their later degradation; so that our vessel was made a legitimate prize, whilst we of
her crew were treated with all the fairness and consideration due us as naval prisoners.
So liberal, indeed, was the discipline of our captors, that five days after we were taken I
managed to escape alone in a small boat with water and provisions for a good length of
time.
When I finally found myself adrift and free, I had but little idea of my surroundings.
Never a competent navigator, I could only guess vaguely by the sun and stars that I was
somewhat south of the equator. Of the longitude I knew nothing, and no island or
coastline was in sight. The weather kept fair, and for uncounted days I drifted aimlessly
beneath the scorching sun; waiting either for some passing ship, or to be cast on the
shores of some habitable land. But neither ship nor land appeared, and I began to
despair in my solitude upon the heaving vastness of unbroken blue.
The change happened whilst I slept. Its details I shall never know; for my slumber,
though troubled and dream-infested, was continuous. When at last I awakened, it was to
discover myself half sucked into a slimy expanse of hellish black mire which extended
about me in monotonous undulations as far as I could see, and in which my boat lay
grounded some distance away.
Though one might well imagine that my first sensation would be of wonder at so
prodigious and unexpected a transformation of scenery, I was in reality more horrified
than astonished; for there was in the air and in the rotting soil a sinister quality which
chilled me to the very core. The region was putrid with the carcasses of decaying fish,
and of other less describable things which I saw protruding from the nasty mud of the
unending plain. Perhaps I should not hope to convey in mere words the unutterable
hideousness that can dwell in absolute silence and barren immensity. There was nothing
within hearing, and nothing in sight save a vast reach of black slime; yet the very
completeness of the stillness and the homogeneity of the landscape oppressed me with a
nauseating fear.
The sun was blazing down from a sky which seemed to me almost black in its cloudless
cruelty; as though reflecting the inky marsh beneath my feet. As I crawled into the
stranded boat I realised that only one theory could explain my position. Through some
unprecedented volcanic upheaval, a portion of the ocean floor must have been thrown to
the surface, exposing regions which for innumerable millions of years had lain hidden
under unfathomable watery depths. So great was the extent of the new land which had
risen beneath me, that I could not detect the faintest noise of the surging ocean, strain
my ears as I might. Nor were there any sea-fowl to prey upon the dead things.
For several hours I sat thinking or brooding in the boat, which lay upon its side and
afforded a slight shade as the sun moved across the heavens. As the day progressed, the
ground lost some of its stickiness, and seemed likely to dry sufficiently for travelling
purposes in a short time. That night I slept but little, and the next day I made for myself
a pack containing food and water, preparatory to an overland journey in search of the
vanished sea and possible rescue.
On the third morning I found the soil dry enough to walk upon with ease. The odour of
the fish was maddening; but I was too much concerned with graver things to mind so
slight an evil, and set out boldly for an unknown goal. All day I forged steadily
westward, guided by a far-away hummock which rose higher than any other elevation
on the rolling desert. That night I encamped, and on the following day still travelled
toward the hummock, though that object seemed scarcely nearer than when I had first
espied it. By the fourth evening I attained the base of the mound, which turned out to be
much higher than it had appeared from a distance, an intervening valley setting it out in
sharper relief from the general surface. Too weary to ascend, I slept in the shadow of the
hill.
I know not why my dreams were so wild that night; but ere the waning and fantastically
gibbous moon had risen far above the eastern plain, I was awake in a cold perspiration,
determined to sleep no more. Such visions as I had experienced were too much for me
to endure again. And in the glow of the moon I saw how unwise I had been to travel by
day. Without the glare of the parching sun, my journey would have cost me less energy;
indeed, I now felt quite able to perform the ascent which had deterred me at sunset.
Picking up my pack, I started for the crest of the eminence.
I have said that the unbroken monotony of the rolling plain was a source of vague
horror to me; but I think my horror was greater when I gained the summit of the mound
and looked down the other side into an immeasurable pit or canyon, whose black
recesses the moon had not yet soared high enough to illumine. I felt myself on the edge
of the world, peering over the rim into a fathomless chaos of eternal night. Through my
terror ran curious reminiscences of Paradise Lost, and Satan's hideous climb through the
unfashioned realms of darkness.
As the moon climbed higher in the sky, I began to see that the slopes of the valley were
not quite so perpendicular as I had imagined. Ledges and outcroppings of rock afforded
fairly easy footholds for a descent, whilst after a drop of a few hundred feet, the
declivity became very gradual. Urged on by an impulse which I cannot definitely
analyse, I scrambled with difficulty down the rocks and stood on the gentler slope
beneath, gazing into the Stygian deeps where no light had yet penetrated.
All at once my attention was captured by a vast and singular object on the opposite
slope, which rose steeply about a hundred yards ahead of me; an object that gleamed
whitely in the newly bestowed rays of the ascending moon. That it was merely a
gigantic piece of stone, I soon assured myself; but I was conscious of a distinct
impression that its contour and position were not altogether the work of Nature. A
closer scrutiny filled me with sensations I cannot express; for despite its enormous
magnitude, and its position in an abyss which had yawned at the bottom of the sea since
the world was young, I perceived beyond a doubt that the strange object was a
well-shaped monolith whose massive bulk had known the workmanship and perhaps the
worship of living and thinking creatures.
Dazed and frightened, yet not without a certain thrill of the scientist's or archaeologist's
delight, I examined my surroundings more closely. The moon, now near the zenith,
shone weirdly and vividly above the towering steeps that hemmed in the chasm, and
revealed the fact that a far-flung body of water flowed at the bottom, winding out of
sight in both directions, and almost lapping my feet as I stood on the slope. Across the
chasm, the wavelets washed the base of the Cyclopean monolith, on whose surface I
could now trace both inscriptions and crude sculptures. The writing was in a system of
hieroglyphics unknown to me, and unlike anything I had ever seen in books, consisting
for the most part of conventionalised aquatic symbols such as fishes, eels, octopi,
crustaceans, molluscs, whales and the like. Several characters obviously represented
marine things which are unknown to the modern world, but whose decomposing forms I
had observed on the ocean-risen plain.
It was the pictorial carving, however, that did most to hold me spellbound. Plainly
visible across the intervening water on account of their enormous size was an array of
bas-reliefs whose subjects would have excited the envy of a Dore. I think that these
things were supposed to depict men -- at least, a certain sort of men; though the
creatures were shown disporting like fishes in the waters of some marine grotto, or
paying homage at some monolithic shrine which appeared to be under the waves as well.
Of their faces and forms I dare not speak in detail, for the mere remembrance makes me
grow faint. Grotesque beyond the imagination of a Poe or a Bulwer, they were
damnably human in general outline despite webbed hands and feet, shockingly wide and
flabby lips, glassy, bulging eyes, and other features less pleasant to recall. Curiously
enough, they seemed to have been chiselled badly out of proportion with their scenic
background; for one of the creatures was shown in the act of killing a whale represented
as but little larger than himself. I remarked, as I say, their grotesqueness and strange
size; but in a moment decided that they were merely the imaginary gods of some
primitive fishing or seafaring tribe; some tribe whose last descendant had perished eras
before the first ancestor of the Piltdown or Neanderthal Man was born. Awestruck at
this unexpected glimpse into a past beyond the conception of the most daring
anthropologist, I stood musing whilst the moon cast queer reflections on the silent
channel before me.
Then suddenly I saw it. With only a slight churning to mark its rise to the surface, the
thing slid into view above the dark waters. Vast, Polyphemus-like, and loathsome, it
darted like a stupendous monster of nightmares to the monolith, about which it flung its
gigantic scaly arms, the while it bowed its hideous head and gave vent to certain
measured sounds. I think I went mad then.
Of my frantic ascent of the slope and cliff, and of my delirious journey back to the
stranded boat, I remember little. I believe I sang a great deal, and laughed oddly when I
was unable to sing. I have indistinct recollections of a great storm some time after I
reached the boat; at any rate, I knew that I heard peals of thunder and other tones which
Nature utters only in her wildest moods.
When I came out of the shadows I was in a San Francisco hospital; brought thither by
the captain of the American ship which had picked up my boat in mid-ocean. In my
delirium I had said much, but found that my words had been given scant attention. Of
any land upheaval in the Pacific, my rescuers knew nothing; nor did I deem it necessary
to insist upon a thing which I knew they could not believe. Once I sought out a
celebrated ethnologist, and amused him with peculiar questions regarding the ancient
Philistine legend of Dagon, the Fish-God; but soon perceiving that he was hopelessly
conventional, I did not press my inquiries.
It is at night, especially when the moon is gibbous and waning, that I see the thing. I
tried morphine; but the drug has given only transient surcease, and has drawn me into
its clutches as a hopeless slave. So now I am to end it all, having written a full account
for the information or the contemptuous amusement of my fellow-men. Often I ask
myself if it could not all have been a pure phantasm -- a mere freak of fever as I lay
sun-stricken and raving in the open boat after my escape from the German man-of-war.
This I ask myself, but ever does there come before me a hideously vivid vision in reply.
I cannot think of the deep sea without shuddering at the nameless things that may at this
very moment be crawling and floundering on its slimy bed, worshipping their ancient
stone idols and carving their own detestable likenesses on submarine obelisks of
water-soaked granite. I dream of a day when they may rise above the billows to drag
down in their reeking talons the remnants of puny, war-exhausted mankind -- of a day
when the land shall sink, and the dark ocean floor shall ascend amidst universal
pandemonium.
The end is near. I hear a noise at the door, as of some immense slippery body lumbering
against it. It shall not find me. God, that hand! The window! The window!
Dreams in the Witch-House
by H. P. Lovecraft
Written Jan-28 Feb 1932
Published July 1933 in Weird Tales, Vol. 22, No. 1, 86-111.
Whether the dreams brought on the fever or the fever brought on the dreams Walter
Gilman did not know. Behind everything crouched the brooding, festering horror of the
ancient town, and of the mouldy, unhallowed garret gable where he wrote and studied
and wrestled with flgures 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 pandernonium. The darkness always teemed
with unexplained sound -- and yet he sometimes shook with fear lest the noises he heard
should subside and allow him to hear certain other fainter noises which he suspected
were lurking behind them.
He was in the changeless, legend-haunted city of Arkham, with its clustering gambrel
roofs that sway and sag over attics where witches hid from the King's men in the dark,
olden years of the Province. Nor was any spot in that city more steeped in macabre
memory than the gable room which harboured him -- for it was this house and this room
which had likewise harboured old Keziah Mason, whose flight from Salem Gaol at the
last no one was ever able to explain. That was in 1692 -- the gaoler had gone mad and
babbled of a small white-fanged furry thing which scuttled out of Keziah's cell, and not
even Cotton Mather could explain the curves and angles smeared on the grey stone
walls with some red, sticky fluid.
Possibly Gilman ought not to have studied so hard. Non-Euclidean calculus and
quantum physics are enough to stretch any brain, and when one mixes them with
folklore, and tries to trace a strange background of multi-dimensional reality behind the
ghoulish hints of the Gothic tales and the wild whispers of the chimney-corner, one can
hardly expect to be wholly free from mental tension. Gilman came from Haverhill, but
it was only after he had entered college in Arkham that he began to connect his
mathematics with the fantastic legends of elder magic. Something in the air of the hoary
town worked obscurely on his imagination. The professors at Miskatonic had urged him
to slacken up, and had voluntarily cut down his course at several points. Moreover, they
had stopped him from consulting the dubious old books on forbidden secrets that were
kept under lock and key in a vault at the university library. But all these precautions
came late in the day, so that Gilman had some terrible hints from the dreaded
Necronomicon of Abdul Alhazred, the fragmentary Book of Eibon, and the suppressed
Unaussprechlicken Kulten of von Junzt to correlate with his abstract formulae on the
properties of space and the linkage of dimensions known and unknown.
He knew his room was in the old Witch-House -- that, indeed, was why he had taken it.
There was much in the Essex County records about Keziah Mason's trial, and what she
had admitted under pressure to the Court of Oyer and Terminer had fascinated Gilman
beyond all reason. She had told Judge Hathorne of lines and curves that could he made
to point out directions leading through the walls of space to other spaces beyond, and
had implied that such lines and curves were frequently used at certain midnight
meetings in the dark valley of the white stone beyond Meadow Hill and on the
unpeopled island in the river. She had spoken also of the Black Man, of her oath, and of
her new secret name of Nahab. Then she had drawn those devices on the walls of her
cell and vanished.
Gilman believed strange things about Keziah, and had felt a queer thrill on learning that
her dwelling was still standing after more than two hundred and thirty-five years. When
he heard the hushed Arkham whispers about Keziah's persistent presence in the old
house and the narrow streets, about the irregular human tooth-marks left on certain
sleepers in that and other houses, about the childish cries heard near May-Eve, and
Hallowmass, about the stench often noted in the old house's attic just after those dreaded
seasons, and about the small, furry, sharp-toothed thing which haunted the mouldering
structure and the town and nuzzled people curiously in the black hours before dawn, he
resolved to live in the place at any cost. A room was easy to secure, for the house was
unpopular, hard to rent, and long given over to cheap lodgings. Gilman could not have
told what he expected to find there, but he knew he wanted to be in the building where
some circumstance had more or less suddenly given a mediocre old woman of the
Seventeenth Century an insight into mathematical depths perhaps beyond the utmost
modern delvings of Planck, Heisenberg, Einstein, and de Sitter.
He studied the timber and plaster walls for traces of cryptic designs at every accessible
spot where the paper had peeled, and within a week managed to get the eastern attic
room where Keziah was held to have practised her spells. It had been vacant from the
first -- for no one had ever been willing to stay there long -- but the Polish landlord had
grown wary about renting it. Yet nothing whatever happened to Gilman till about the
time of the fever. No ghostly Keziah flitted through the sombre halls and chambers, no
small furry thing crept into his dismal eyrie to nuzzle him, and no record of the witch's
incantations rewarded his constant search. Sometimes he would take walks through
shadowy tangles of unpaved musty-smelling lanes where eldritch brown houses of
unknown age leaned and tottered and leered mockingly through narrow, small-paned
windows. Here he knew strange things had happened once, and there was a faint
suggestion behind the surface that everything of that monstrous past might not -- at least
in the darkest, narrowest, and most intricately crooked alleys -- have utterly perished.
He also rowed out twice to the ill-regarded island in the river, and made a sketch of the
singular angles described by the moss-grown rows of grey standing stones whose origin
was so obscure and immemorial.
Gilman's room was of good size but queerly irregular shape; the north wall slating
perceptibly inward from the outer to the inner end, while the low ceiling slanted gently
downward in the same direction. Aside from an obvious rat-hole and the signs of other
stopped-up ones, there was no access -- nor any appearance of a former avenue of
access -- to the space which must have existed between the slanting wall and the straight
outer wall on the house's north side, though a view from the exterior showed where a
window had heen boarded up at a very remote date. The loft above the ceiling -- which
must have had a slanting floor -- was likewise inaccessible. When Gilman climbed up a
ladder to the cob-webbed level loft above the rest of the attic he found vestiges of a
bygone aperture tightly and heavily covered with ancient planking and secured by the
stout wooden pegs common in Colonial carpentry. No amount of persuasion, however,
could induce the stolid landlord to let him investigate either of these two closed spaces.
As time wore along, his absorption in the irregular wall and ceiling of his room
increased; for he began to read into the odd angles a mathematical significance which
seemed to offer vague clues regarding their pnrpose. Old Keziah, he reflected, might
have had excellent reasons for living in a room with peculiar angles; for was it not
through certain angles that she claimed to have gone outside the boundaries of the world
of space we know? His interest gradually veered away from the unplumbed voids
beyond the slanting surfaces, since it now appeared that the purpose of those surfaces
concerned the side he was on.
The touch of brain-fever and the dreams began early in February. For some time,
apparently, the curious angles of Gilman's room had been having a strange, almost
hypnotic effect on him; and as the bleak winter advanced he had found himself staring
more and more intently at the corner where the down-slanting ceiling met the
inward-slanting wall. About this period his inability to concentrate on his formal studies
worried him considerably, his apprehensions about the mid-year examinations being
very acute. But the exaggerated sense of bearing was scarcely less annoying. Life had
become an insistent and almost unendurable cacophony, and there was that constant,
terrifying impression of other sounds -- perhaps from regions beyond life -- trembling
on the very brink of audibility. So far as concrete noises went, the rats in the ancient
partitions were the worst. Sometimes their scratching seemed not only furtive but
deliberate. When it came from beyond the slanting north wall it was mixed with a sort
of dry rattling; and when it came from the century-closed loft above the slanting ceiling
Gilman always braced himself as if expecting some horror which only bided its time
before descending to engulf him utterly.
The dreams were wholly beyond the pale of sanity, and Gilman fell that they must be a
result, jointly, of his stndies 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 expenence -- and the descriptions of the
darting little furry object which served as her familiar were so painfully realistic despite
their incredible details.
That object -- no larger than a good-sized rat and quaintly called by the townspeople
"Brown Jenkins -- seemed to have been the fruit of a remarkable case of sympathetic
herd-delusion, for in 1692 no less than eleven persons had testified to glimpsing it.
There were recent rumours, too, with a baffling and disconcerting amount of agreement.
Witnesses said it had long hair and the shape of a rat, but that its sharp-toothed, bearded
face was evilly human while its paws were like tiny human hands. It took messages
betwixt old Keziah and the devil, and was nursed on the witch's blood, which it sucked
like a vampire. Its voice was a kind of loathsome titter, and it could speak all languages.
Of all the bizarre monstrosities in 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 twiliglit and baffingly disordered sound; abysses whose material and
gravitational properties, and whose relation to his own entity, he could not even begin to
explain. He did not walk or climb, fly or swim, crawl or wriggle; yet always
experienced a mode of motion partly voluntary and partly involuntary. Of his own
condition he could not well judge, for sight of his arms, legs, and torso seemed always
cut off by some odd disarrangement of perspective; but he felt that his physical
organization and faculties were somehow marvellously transmuted and obliquely
projected -- though not without a certain grotesque relationship to his normal
proportions and properties.
The abysses were by no means vacant, being crowded with indescribably angled masses
of alien-hued substance, some of which appeared to be organic while others seemed
inorganic. A few of the organic objects tended to awake vague memories in the back of
his mind, though he could form no conscious idea of what they mockingly resembled or
suggested. In the later dreams he began to distinguish separate categories into which the
organic objects appeared to be divided, and which seemed to involve in each case a
radically different species of conduct-pattern and basic motivation. Of these categories
one seemed to him to include objects slightly less illogical and irrelevant in their
motions than the members of the other categories.
All the objects -- organic and inorganic alike -- were totally beyond description or even
comprehension. Gilman sometimes compared the inorganic matter to prisms, labyrinths,
clusters of cubes and planes, and Cyclopean buildings; and the organic things struck
him variously as groups of bubbles, octopi, centipedes, living Hindoo idols, and
intricate arabesques roused into a kind of ophidian animation. Everything he saw was
unspeakably menacing and horrible; and whenever one of the organic entities appeared
by its motions to be noticing him, he felt a stark, hideous fright which generally jolted
him awake. Of how the organic entities moved, he could tell no more than of how he
moved himself. In time he observed a further mystery -- the tendency of certain entities
to appear suddenly out 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
stndies 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 specifc points in the cosmic pattern.
Such a step, he said, would require only two stages; first, a passage out of the
three-dimensional sphere we know, and second, a passage back to the three-dimensional
sphere at another point, perhaps one of infinite remoteness. That this could be
accomplished without loss of life was in many cases conceivable. Any being from any
part of three-dimensional space could probably survive in the fourth dimension; and its
survival of the second stage would depend upon what alien part of three-dimensional
space it might select for its re-entry. Denizens of some planets might be able to live on
certain others -- even planets belonging to other galaxies, or to similar dimensional
phases of other space-time continua -- though of course there must be vast numbers of
mutually uninhabitable even though mathematically juxtaposed bodies or zones of
space.
It was also possible that the inhabitants of a given dimensional realm could survive
entry to many unknown and incomprehensible realms of additional or indefinitely
multiplied dimensions -- be they within or outside the given space-time continuum -and that the converse would be likewise true. This was a matter for speculation, though
one could be fairly certain that the type of mutation involved in a passage from any
given dimensional plane to the next higher one would not be destructive of biological
integrity as we understand it. Gilman could not be very clear about his reasons for this
last assumption, but his haziness here was more than overbalanced by his clearness on
other complex points. Professor Upham especially liked his demonstration of the
kinship of higher mathematics to certain phases of magical lore transmitted down the
ages from an ineffable antiquity -- human or pre-human -- whose knowledge of the
cosmos and its laws was greater than ours.
Around 1 April Gilman worried cosiderably because his slow fever did not abate. He
was also troubled by what some of his fellow lodgers said about his sleep-walking. It
seened that he was often absent from his bed and that the creaking of his floor at certain
hours of the night was remarked by the man in the room below. This fellow also spoke
of hearing the tread of shod feet in the night; but Gilman was sure he must have been
mistaken in this, since shoes as well as other apparel were always precisely in place in
the morning. One could develop all sorts of aural delusions in this morbid old house -for did not Gilman himself, even in daylight, now feel certain that noises other than
rat-scratching came from the black voids beyond the slanting wall and above the
slanting ceiling? His pathologically sensitive ears began to listen for faint footfalls in
the immemorially sealed loft overhead, and sometimes the illusion of such things was
agonizingly realistic.
However, he knew that he had actually become a somnambulist; for twice at night his
room had been found vacant, though with all his clothing in place. Of this he had been
assured by Frank Elwood, the one fellow-student whose poverty forced him to room in
this 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 locking 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 lime in Arkham, even though the fine folks up in Miskatonic
Avenue and High and Saltonstall Streets pretended to know nothing about it. There
would be bad doings, and a child or two would probably be missing. Joe knew about
such things, for his grandmother in the old country had heard tales from her
grandmother. It was wise to pray and count one's beads at this season. For three months
Keziah and Brown Jenkin had not been near Joe's room, nor near Paul Choynski's room,
nor anywhere else -- and it meant no good when they held off like that. They must be up
to something.
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-fonns 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 changd 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 draged 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
noving, 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 caim 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 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 yonng 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 gow 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 Gilnan 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 delinum 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 about 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 blistening glare from a
poly-chromatic sky. Looking upward he saw three stupendous disks of flame, each of a
different hue, and at a different height above an infinitely distant curving horizon of low
mountains. Behind him tiers of higher terraces towered aloft as far as he could see. The
city below stretched away to the limits of vision, and he hoped that no sound would well
up from it.
The pavement from which he easily raised himself was a veined polished stone beyond
his power to identify, and the tiles were cut in bizarre-angled shapes which struck himm
as less asymmetrical than based on some unearthly symmetry whose laws he could not
comprehend. The balustrade was chest-high, delicate, and fantastically wrought, while
along the rail were ranged at short intervals little figures of grotesque design and
exquisite workmanship. They, like the whole balustrade, seemed to be made of some
sort of shining metal whose colour could not be guessed in the chaos of mixed
effulgences, and their nature utterly defied conjecture. They represented some ridged
barrel-shaped objects with thin horizontal arms radiating spoke-like from a central ring
and with vertical knobs or bulbs projecting from the head and base of the barrel. Each of
these knobs was the hub of a system of five long, flat, triangularly tapering arms
arranged around it like the arms of a starfish -- nearly horizontal, but curving slightly
away from the central barrel. The base of the bottom knob was fused to the long railing
with so delicate a point of contact that several figures had been broken off and were
missing. The figures were about four and a half inches in height, while the spiky arms
gave them a maximum diameter of about two and a half inches.
When Gilman stood up, the tiles felt hot to his bare feet. He was wholly alone, and his
first act was to walk to the balustrade and look dizzily down at the endless, Cyclopean
city almost two thousand feet below. As he listened he thought a rhythmic confusion of
faint musical pipings covering a wide tonal range welled up from the narrow streets
beneath, and he wished he might discern the denizens of the place. The sight turned him
giddy after a while, so that he would have fallen to the pavement had he not clutched
instinctively at the lustrous balustrade. His right hand fell on one of the projecting
figures, the touch seeming to steady him slightly. It was too much, however, for the
exotic delicacy of the metal-work, and the spiky figure snapped off under his grasp. Still
half dazed, he continued to clutch it as his other hand seized a vacant space on the
smooth railing.
But now his over-sensitive ears caught something behind him, and he looked back
across the level terrace. Approaching him softly though without apparent furtiveness
were five figures, two of which were the sinister old woman and the fanged, furry little
animal. The other three were what sent him unconscious; for they were living entities
about eight feet high, shaped precisely like the spiky images on the balustrade, and
propelling themselves by a spider-like wriggling of their lower set of starfish-arms.
Gilman awoke in his bed, drenched by a cold perspiration and with a smarting sensation
in his face, hands and feet. Springing to the floor, he washed and dressed in frantic haste,
as if it were necessary for him to get out of the house as quickly as possible. He did not
know where he wished to go, but felt that once more he would have to sacrifice his
classes. The odd pull toward that spot in the sky between Hydra and Argo had abated,
but another of even greater strength had taken its place. Now he felt that he must go
north -- infinitely north. He dreaded to cross the bridge that gave a view of the desolate
island in the Miskatonic, so went over the Peabody Avenue bridge. Very often he
stumbled, for his eyes and ears were chained to an extremely lofty point in the blank
blue sky.
After about an hour he got himself under better control, and saw that he was far from
the city. All around him stretched the bleak emptiness of salt marshes, while the narrow
road ahead led to Innsmouth -- that ancient, half-deserted town which Arkham people
were so curiously unwilling to visit. Though the northward pull had not diminished, he
resisted it as he had resisted the other pull, and finally found that he could almost
balance the one against the other. Plodding back to town and getting some coffee at a
soda fountain, he dragged himself into the public library and browsed aimlessly among
the lighter magazines. Once he met some friends who remarked how oddly sunburned
he looked, but he did not tell them of his walk. At three o'clock he took some lunch at a
restaurant, noting meanwhile that the pull had either lessened or divided itself. After
that he killed the time at a cheap cinema show, seeing the inane performance over and
over again without paying any attention to it.
About nine at night he drifted homeward and shuffled into the ancient house Joe
Mazurewicz was whining unintelligible prayers, and Gilman hastened up to his own
garret chamber without pausing to see if Elwood was in. It was when he turned on the
feeble electric light that the shock came. At once he saw there was something on the
table which did not belong there, and a second look left no room for doubt. Lying on its
side -- for it could not stand up alone -- was the exotic spiky figure which in his
monstrous dream he had broken off the fantastic balustrade. No detail was missing. The
ridged, barrel-shaped center, the thin radiating arms, the knobs at each end, and the flat,
slightly outward-curving starfish-arms spreading from those knobs -- all were there. In
the electric light the colour seemed to be a kind of iridescent grey veined with green;
and Gilman could see amidst his horror and bewilderment that one of the knobs ended
in a jagged break, corresponding to its former point of attachment to the dream-railing.
Only his tendency toward a dazed stupor prevented him from screaming aloud. This
fusion of dream and reality was too much to bear. Still dazed, he clutched at the spiky
thing and staggered downstairs to Landlord Dombrowski's quarters. The whining
prayers of the superstitious loom-fixer were still sounding through the mouldy halls, but
Gilman did not mind them now. The landlord was in, and greeted him pleasantly. No,
he had not seen that thing before and did not know anything about it. But his wife had
said she found a funny tin thing in one of the teds when she fixed the rooms at noon,
and maybe that was it. Dombrowski called her, and she waddled in. Yes, that was tine
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 outré thing? He did not recall
seeing it in any museum in Arkham. It must have been somewhere, though; and the
sight of it as he snatched it in his sleep must have caused the odd dream-picture of the
balustraded terrace. Next day he would make some very guarded inquiries -- and
perhaps see the nerve specialist.
Meanwhile he would try to keep track of his somnambulism. As he went upstairs and
across the garret hall he sprinkled about some flour which he had borrowed -- with a
frank admission as to its purpose -- from the landlord. He had stopped at Etwood's door
on the way, but had found all dark within. Entering his room, he placed the spiky thing
on the table, and lay down in complete mental and physical exhaustion without pausing
to undress. From the closed loft above the slating ceiling he thought he heard a faint
scratching and padding, but he was too disorganized even to mind it. That cryptical pull
from the north was getting very strong again, though it seemed now to come from a
lower place in the sky.
In the dazzling violet light of dream the old woman and the fanged, furry thing came
again and with a greater distinctness than on any former occasion. This time they
actually reached him, and he felt the crone's withered claws clutching at him. He was
pulled out of bed and into empty space, and for a moment he heard a rhythmic roaring
and saw the twilight amorphousness of the vague abysses seething around him. But that
moment was very brief, for presently he was in a crude, windowless little space with
rough beams and planks rising to a peak just above his head, and with a curious slanting
floor underfoot. Propped level on that floor were low cases full of books of every degree
of antiquity and disintegration, and in the centre were a table and bench, both apparently
fastened in place. Small objects of unknown shape and nature were ranged on the tops
of the cases, and in the flaming violet light Gilman thought he saw a counterpart of the
spiky image which had puzzled him so horribly. On the left the floor fell abruptly away,
leaving a black triangular gulf out of which, after a second's dry rattling, there presently
climbed the hateful little furry thing with the yellow fangs and bearded human face.
The evilly-grinning beldame still clutched him, and beyond the table stood a figure he
had never seen before -- a tall, lean man of dead black colouration but without the
slightest sign of negroid features: wholly devoid of either hair or beard, and wearing as
his only garment a shapeless robe of some heavy black fabric. His feet were
indistinguishable because of the table and bench, but he must have been shod, since
there was a clicking whenever he changed position. The man did not speak, and bore no
trace of expression on his small, regular features. He merely pointed to a book of
prodigious size which lay open on the table, while the beldame thrust a huge grey quill
into Gilman's right hand. Over everything was a pall of intensely maddening fear, and
the climax was reached when the furry thing ran up the dreamer's clothing to his
shoulders and then down his left arm, finally biting him sharply in the wrist just below
his cuff. As the blood spurted from this wound Gilman lapsed into a faint.
He awaked on the morning of the twenty-second with a pain in his left wrist, and saw
that his cuff was brown with dried blood. His recollections were very confused, but the
scene with the black man in the unknown space stood out vividly. The rats must have
bitten him as he slept, giving rise to the climax of that frightful dream. Opening the door,
he saw that the flour on the corridor floor was undisturbed except for the huge prints of
the loutish fellow who roomed at the other end of the garret. So he had not been
sleep-walking this time. But something would have to be done about those rats. He
would speak to the landlord about them. Again he tried to stop up the hole at the base of
the slanting wall, wedging in a candlestick which seemed of about the right size. His
ears were ringing horribly, as if with the residual echoes of some horrible noise heard in
dreams.
As he bathed and changed clothes he tried to recall what he had dreamed after the scene
in the violet-litten space, but nothing definite would crystallize in his mind. That scene
itself must have corresponded to the sealed loft overhead, which had begun to attack his
imagination so violently, but later impressions were faint and hazy. There were
suggestions of the vague, twilight abysses, and of still vaster, blacker abysses beyond
them -- abysses in which all fixed suggestions were absent. He had been taken there by
the bubble-congeries and the little polyhedron which always dogged him; but they, like
himself, had changed to wisps of mist in this farther void of ultimate blackness.
Something else had gone on ahead -- a larger wisp which now and then condensed into
nameless approximations of form -- and he thought that their progress had not been in a
straight line, but rather along the alien curves and spirals of some ethereal vortex which
obeyed laws unknown to the physics and mathematics of any conceivable cosmos.
Eventually there had been a hint of vast, leaping shadows, of a monstrous, half-acoustic
pulsing, and of the thin, monotonous piping of an unseen flute -- but that was all.
Gilman decided he had picked up that last conception from what he had read in the
Necronomicon about the mindless entity Azathoth, which rules all time and space from
a black throne at the centre of Chaos.
When the blood was washed away the wrist wound proved very slight, and Gilman
puzzled over the location of the two tiny punctures. It occurred to him that there was no
blood on the bedspread where he had lain -- which was very curious in view of the
amount on his skin and cuff. Had he been sleep-walking within his room, and had the
rat bitten him as he sat in some chair or paused in some less rational position? He
looked in every corner for brownish drops or stains, but did not find any. He had better,
he thought, spinkle flour within the room as well as outside the door -- though after all
no further proof of his sleep-walking was needed. He knew he did walk and the thing to
do now was to stop it. He must ask Frank Elwood for help. This morning the strange
pulls from space seemed lessened, though they were replaced by another sensation even
more inexplicable. It was a vague, insistent impulse to fly away from his present
situation, but held not a hint of the specific direction in which he wished to fly. As he
picked up the strange spiky image on the table he thought the older northward pull grew
a trifle stronger. but even so, it was wholly overruled by the newer and more
bewildering urge.
He took the spiky image down to Elwood's room, steeling himself against the whines of
the loom-fixer which welled up from the ground floor. Elwood was in, thank heaven,
and appeared to be stirring about. There was time for a little conversation before leaving
for breakfast and college, so Gilman hurriedly poured forth an account of his recent
dreams and fears. His host was very sympathetic, and agreed that something ought to be
done. He was shocked by his guest's drawn, haggard aspect, and noticed the queer,
abnormal-looking sunburn which others had remarked during the past week.
There was not much, though, that he could say. He had not seen Gilman on any
sleep-walking expedition, and had no idea what the curious image could be. He had,
though, heard the French~Canadian who lodged just under Gilman talking to
Mazurewicz one evening. They were telling each other how badly they dreaded the
coming of Walpurgis Night, now only a few days off; and were exchanging pitying
comments about the poor, doomed young gentleman. Desrochers, the fellow under
Gilman's room, had spoken of nocturnal footsteps shod and unshod, and of the violet
light he saw one night when he had stolen fearfully up to peer through Gilman's keyhole.
He had not dared to peer, he told Mazurewicz, after he had glimpsed that light through
the cracks around the door. There had been soft talking, too -- and as he began to
describe it his voice had sunk to an inaudible whisper.
Elwood could not imagine what had set these superstitious creatures gossiping, but
supposed their imaginations had been roused by Gilman's late hours and somnolent
walking and talking on the one hand, and by the nearness of traditionally-feared May
Eve on the other hand. That 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 slating that it had been found in a public
rubbish-can. Also, Dombrowski must attend to the poisoning of those rats in the walls.
Braced up by Elwood's companionship, Gilman attended classes that day. Strange urges
still tugged at him, but he could sidetrack them with considerable success. During a free
period he showed the queer image to several professors, all of whom were intensely
interested, though none of them could shed any light upon its nature or origin. That
night he slept on a couch which Elwood had had the landlord bring to the second-storey
room, and for the first time in weeks was wholly free from disquieting dreams. But the
feverishness still hung on, and the whines of the loom-fixer were an unnerving
influence.
During the next few days Gilman enjoyed an almost perfect immunity from morbid
manifestations. He had, Elwood said, showed no tendency to talk or rise in his sleep;
and meanwhile the landlord was putting rat-poison everywhere. The only disturbing
element was the talk among the superstitious foreigners, whose imaginations had
become highly excited. Mazurewicz was always trying to make him get a crucifix, and
finally forced one upon him which he said had been blessed by the good Father
Iwanicki. Desrochers, too, had something to say; in fact, he insisted that cautious steps
had sounded in the now vacant room above him on the first and second nights of
Gilinan's absence from it. Paul Choynski thought he heard sounds in the halls and on the
stairs at night, and claimed that his door had been softly tried, while Mrs. Dombrowski
vowed she had seen Brown Jenkin for the first time since All-Hallows. But such naïve
reports could mean very little, and Gilman let the cheap metal crucifix hang idly from a
knob on his host's dresser.
For three days Gilman and Elwood canvassed the local museums in an effort to identify
the strange spiky image, but always without success. In every quarter, however, interest
was intense; for the utter alienage of the thing was a tremendous challenge to scientific
curiosity. One of the small radiating arms was broken off and subjected to chemical
analysis. Professor Ellery found platinum, iron and tellurium in the strange alloy; but
mixed with these were at least three other apparent elements of high atomic weight
which chemistry was absolutely powerless to classify. Not only did they fail to
correspond with any known element, but they did not even fit the vacant places reserved
for probable elements in the periodic system. The mystery remains unsolved to this day,
though the image is on exhibition at the museum of Miskatonic University.
On the morning of April twenty-seventh a fresh rat-bole appeared in the room where
Gilman was a guest, but Dombrowski tinned it up during the day. The poison was not
having much effect, for scratchings and scurryings in the walls were virtually
undiminished.
Elwood was out late that night, and Gilman waited up for him. He did not wish to go to
sleep in a room alone -- especially since he thought he had glimpsed in the evening
twilight the repellent old woman whose image had become so horribly transferred to his
dreams. He wondered who she was, and what had been near her rattling the tin can in a
rubbish-heap at the mouth of a squalid courtyard. The crone had seemed to notice him
and leer evilly at him -- though perhaps this was merely his imagination.
The next day both youths felt very tired, and knew they would sleep like logs when
night came. In the evening they drowsily discussed the mathematical studies which had
so completely and perhaps harmfully engrossed Gilman, and speculated about the
linkage with ancient magic and folklore which seemed so darkly probable. They spoke
of old Keziah Mason, and Elwood agreed that Gilman had good scientific grounds for
thinking she might have stumbled on strange and significant information. The hidden
cults to which these witches belonged often guarded and handed down surprising
secrets from elder, forgotten eons; and it was by no means impossible that Keziah had
actually mastered the art of passing through dimensional gates. Tradition emphasizes
the uselessness of material barriers in halting a witch's notions, and who can say what
underlies the old tales of broomstick rides through the night?
Whether a modern student could ever gain similar powers from mathematical research
alone, was still to be seen. Suceess, Gilman added, might lead to dangerous and
unthinkable situations, for who could foretell the conditions pervading an adjacent but
normally inaccessible dimension? On the other hand, the picturesque possibilities were
enormous. Time could not exist in certain belts of space, and by entering and remaining
in such a belt one might preserve one's 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 Gilinan 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 Oilman as he staggered to the door and saw that there were no muddy
prints outside. The more he remembered of his hideous dream the more terrified he felt,
and it added to his desperation to hear Joe Mazurewicz chanting mournfully two floors
below.
Descending to Elwood's room he roused his still-sleeping host and began telling of how
he had found himself, but Elwood could form no idea of what might really have
happened. Where Gilman could have been, how he got back to his room without
making tracks in the hall, and how the muddy, furniture-like prints came to be mixed
with his in the garret chamber, were wholly beyond conjecture. Then there were those
dark, livid marks on his throat, as if he had tried to strangle himself. He put his hands up
to them, but found that they did not even approximately fit. While they were talking,
Desrochers dropped in to say that he had heard a terrific clattering overhead in the dark
small hours. No, there had been no one on the stairs after midnight, though just before
midnight he had heard faint footfalls in the garret, and cautiously descending steps he
did not like. It was, he added, a very bad time of year for Arkham. The young
gentleman had better be sure to wear the circifix Joe Mazurewicz had given him. Even
the daytime was not safe, for after dawn there had been strange sounds in the house -especially a thin, childish wail hastily choked off.
Gilman mechanically attended classes that morning, but was wholly unable to fix his
mind on his studies. A mood of hideous apprehension and expectancy had seized him,
and he seemed to be awaiting the fall of some annihilating blow. At noon he lunched at
the University spa, picking up a paper from the next seat as he waited for dessert. But he
never ate that dessert; for an item on the paper's first page left him limp, wild-eyed, and
able only to pay his check and stagger back to Elwood's room.
There had been a strange kidnapping the night before in Orne's Gangway, and the
two-year-old child of a clod-like laundry worker named Anastasia Wolejko had
completely vanished from sight. The mother, it appeared, had feared the event for some
time; but the reasons she assigned for her fear were so grotesque that no one took them
seriously. She had, she said, seen Brown Jenkin about the place now and then ever since
early in March, and knew from its grimaces and titterings that little Ladislas must be
marked for sacrifice at the awful Sabbat on Walpurgis Night. She had asked her
neighbour Mary Czanek to sleep in the room and try to protect the child, but Mary had
not dared. She could not tell the police, for they never believed such things. Children
had been taken that way every year ever since she could remember. And her friend Pete
Stowacki would not help because he wanted the child out of the way.
But what threw Gilman into a cold perspiration was the report of a pair of revellers who
had been walking past the mouth of the gangway just after midnight. They admitted
they had been drunk, but both vowed they had seen a crazily dressed trio furtively
entering the dark passageway. There had, they said, been a huge robed negro, a little old
woman in rags, and a young white man in his night-clothes. The old woman had been
dragging the youth, while around the feet of the negro a tame rat was rubbing and
weaving in the brown mud.
Gilman sat in a daze all the afternoon, and Elwood -- who had meanwhile seen the
papers and formed terrible conjectures from them -- found him thus when he came
home. This time neither could doubt but that something hideously serious was closing
in around them. Between the phantasms of nightmare and the realities of the objective
world a monstrous and unthinkable relationship was crystallizing, and only stupendous
vigilance could avert still more direful developments. Gilman must see a specialist
sooner or later, but not just now, when all the papers were full of this kidnapping
business.
Just what had really happened was maddeningly obscure, and for a moment both
Gilman and Elwood exchanged whispered theories of the wildest kind. Had Gilman
unconsciously succeeded better than he knew in his studies of space and its dimensions?
Had he actually slipped outside our sphere to points unguessed and unimaginable?
Where -- if anywhere -- had he been on those nights of demoniac alienage? The roaring
twilight abysses -- the green hillside -- the blistering terrace -- the pulls from the stars -the ultimate black vortex - the black man -- the muddy alley and the stairs -- the old
witch and the fanged, furry horror -- the bubble-congeries and the little polyhedron -the strange sunburn -- the wrist-wound -- the unexplained image -- the muddy feet -- the
throat marks -- the tales and fears of the superstitious foreigners -- what did all this
mean? To what extent could the laws of sanity apply to such a case?
There was no sleep for either of them that night, but next day they both cut classes and
drowsed. This was April thirtieth, and with the dusk would come the hellish
Sabbat-time which all the foreigners and the superstitious old folk feared. Mazurewicz
came home at six o'clock and said people at the mill were whispering that the Walpurgis
revels would be held in the dark ravine beyond Meadow Hill where the old white stone
stands in a place queerly devoid of all plant-life. Some of them had even told the police
and advised them to look there for the missing Wolejko child, but they did not believe
anything would be done. Joe insisted that the poor young gentleman wear his
nickel-chained crucifix, and Gilman put it on and dropped it inside his shirt to humour
the fellow.
Late at night the two youths sat drowsing in their chairs, lulled by the praying of the
loom-fixer on the floor below. Gilman listened as he nodded, his preternaturally
sharpened hearing seeming to strain for some subtle, dreaded murmur beyond the noises
in the ancient house. Unwholesome recollections of things in the Necronomicon and the
Black Book welled up, and he found himself swaying to infandous rhythms said to
pertain to the blackest ceremonies of the Sabbat and to have an origin outside the time
and space we comprehend.
Presently he realized what he was listening for -- the hellish chant of the celebrants in
the distant black valley. How did he know so much about what they expected? How did
he know the time when Nahab and her acolyte were due to bear the brimming bowl
which would follow the black cock and the black goat? He saw that Elwood had
dropped asleep, and tried to call out and waken him. Something, however, closed his
throat. He was not his own master. Had he signed the black man's book after all?
Then his fevered, abnormal bearing 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 monstrons burst of
Walpurgis-rhythm in whose cosmic timbre would be coneentrated all the primal,
ultimate space-time seethings which lie behind the massed spheres of matter and
sometimes break forth in measured reverberations that penetrate faintly to every layer of
entity and give hideous significance throughout the worlds to certain dreaded periods.
But all this vanished in a second. He was again in the cramped, violet-litten peaked
space with the slanting floor, the low cases of ancient books, the bench and table, the
queer objects, and the triangular gulf at one side. On the table lay a small white figure -an infant boy, unclothed and unconscious -- while on the other side stood the monstrous,
leering old woman with a gleaming, grotesque-hafted knife in her right hand, and a
queerly proportioned pale metal bowl covered with curiously chased designs and having
delicate lateral handles in her left. She was intoning some croaking ritual in a language
which Gilman could not understand, but which seemed like something guardedly
quoted in the Necronomicon.
As the scene grew clearer he saw the ancient crone bend forward and extend the empty
bowl across the table -- and unable to control his own emotions, he reached far forward
and took it in both hands, noticing as he did so its comparative lightness. At the same
moment the disgusting form of Brown Jenkin scrambled up over the brink of the
triangular black gulf on his left. The crone now motioned him to hold the bowl in a
certain position while she raised the huge, grotesque knife above the small white victim
as high as her right hand could reach. The fanged, furry thing began tittering a
continuation of the unknown ritual, while the witch croaked loathsome responses.
Gilman felt a gnawing poignant abhorrence shoot through his mental and emotional
paralysis, and the light metal bowl shook in his grasp. A second later the downward
motion of the knife broke the spell conpletely, and he dropped the bowl with a
resounding bell-like clangour while his hands darted out frantically to stop the
monstrous deed.
In an instant he had edged up the slanting floor around the end of the table and
wrenched the knife from the old woman's claws; sending it clattering over the brink of
the narrow triangular gulf. In another instant, however, matters were reversed; for those
murderous claws had locked themselves tightly around his own throat, while the
wrinkled face was twisted with insane fury. He felt the chain of the cheap crucifix
grinding into his neck, and in his peril wondered how the sight of the object itself would
affect the evil creature. Her strength was altogether superhuman, but as she continued
her choking he reached feebly in his skirt and drew out the metal symbol, snapping the
chain and pulling it free.
At sight of the device the witch seemed struck with panic, and her grip relaxed long
enough to give Gilman a chance to break it entirely. He pulled the steel-like claws from
his neck, and would have dragged the beldame over the edge of the gulf had not the
claws received a fresh access of strength and closed in again. This time he resolved to
reply in kind, and his own hands reached out for the creature's throat. Before she saw
what he was doing he had the chain of the crucifix twisted about her neck, and a
moment later he had tightened it enough to cut off her breath. During her last struggle
he felt something bite at his ankle, and saw that Brown Jenkin had come to her aid.
With one savage kick he sent the morbidity over the edge of the gulf and heard it
whimper on some level far below.
Whether he had killed the ancient crone he did not know, but he let her rest on the floor
where she had fallen. Then, as he turned away, he saw on the table a sight which nearly
snapped the last thread of his reason. Brown Jenkin, tough of sinew and with four tiny
hands of demoniac dexterity, had been busy while the witch was throttling him, and his
efforts had been in vain. What he had prevented the knife from doing to the victim's
chest, the yellow fangs of the furry blasphemy had done to a wrist -- and the bowl so
lately on the floor stood full beside the small lifeless body.
In his dream-delirium Gilman heard the hellish alien-rhythmed chant of the Sabbat
coming from an infinite distance, and knew the black man must be there. Confused
memories mixed themselves with his mathematics, and he believed his subconscious
mind held the angles which he needed to guide him back to the normal world alone and
unaided for the first time. He felt sure he was in the immemorially sealed loft above his
own room, but whether he could ever escape through the slanting floor or the
long-stooped egress he doubted greatly. Besides, would not an escape from a dream-loft
bring him merely into a dream-house -- an abnormal projection of the actual place he
sought? He was wholly bewildered as to the relation betwixt dream and reality in all his
experiences.
The passage through the vague abysses would be frightful, for the Walpurgis-rhythm
would be vibrating, and at last he would have to hear that hitherto-veiled cosmic pulsing
which he so mortally dreaded. Even now he could detect a low, monstrous shaking
whose tempo he suspected all too well. At Sabbat-time it always mounted and reached
through to the worlds to summon the initiate to nameless rites. Half the chants of the
Sabbat were patterned on this faintly overheard pulsing which no earthly ear could
endure in its unveiled spatial fulness. Gilman wondered, too, whether he could trust his
instincts to take him back to the right part of space. How could he be sure he would not
land on that green-litten hillside of a far planet, on the tessellated terrace above the city
of tentacled monsters somewhere beyond the galaxy or in the spiral black vortices of
that ultimate void of Chaos where reigns the mindless demon-sultan Azathoth?
Just before he made the plunge the violet light went out and left him in utter blackness.
The witch -- old Keziah -- Nahab -- that must have meant her death. And mixed with the
distant chant of the Sabbat and the whimpers of Brown Jenkin in the gulf below he
thought he heard another and wilder whine from unknown depths. Joe Mazurewicz -the prayers against the Crawling Chaos now turning to an inexplicably triumphant
shriek worlds of sardonic actuality impinging on vortices of febrile dream -- Iä!
Shub-Niggurath! The Goat with a Thonsand 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 superstitions 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 Haflowmass.
The neighbours acquiesced in the inertia -- but the foetor none the less formed an
additional count against the place. Toward the last the house was condemned as a
habitation by the building inspector.
Gilman's dreams and their attendant circumstances have never been explained. Elwood,
whose thoughts on the entire episode are sometimes almost maddening, came back to
college the next autumn and was graduated in the following June. He found the spectral
gossip of the town much disminished, and it is indeed a fact that -- notwithstanding
certain reports of a ghostly tittering in the deserted house which lasted almost as long as
that edifice itself -- no fresh appearances either of Old Keziah or of Brown Jenkin have
been mutered of since Gilman's death. It is rather fortunate that Elwood was not in
Arkham in that later year when certain events abruptly renewed the local whispers about
elder horrors. Of course he heard about the matter afterward and suffered untold
torments of black and bewildered speculation; but even that was not as bad as actual
nearness and several possible sights would have been.
In March, 1931, a gale wrecked the roof and great chimney of the vacant Witch-House,
so that a chaos of crumbling bricks, blackened, moss-grown shingles, and rotting planks
and timbers crashed down into the loft and broke through the floor beneath. The whole
attic storey was choked with debris from above, but no one took the trouble to touch the
mess before the inevitable razing of the decrepit structure. That ultimate step came in
the following December, and it was when Gilman's old room was cleared out by
reluctant, apprehensive workmen that the gossip began.
Among the rubbish which had crashed through the ancient slanting ceiling were several
things which made the workmen pause and call in the police. Later the police in turn
called in the coroner and several professors from the university. There were bones -badly crushed and splintered, but clearly recognizable as human -- whose manifestly
modern date conflicted puzzlingly with the remote period at which their only possible
lurking place, the low, slant-floored loft overhead, had supposedly been sealed from all
human access. The coroner's physician decided that some belonged to a small child,
while certain others -- found mixed with shreds of rotten brownish cloth -- belonged to a
rather undersized, bent female of advanced years. Careful sifting of debris also
disclosed many tiny bones of rats caught in the collapse, as well as older rat-bones
gnawed by small fangs in a fashion now and then highly productive of controversy and
reflection.
Other objects found included the mangled fragments of many books and papers,
together with a yellowish dust left from the total disintegration of still older books and
papers. All, without exception, appeared to deal with black magic in its most advanced
and horrible forms; and the evidently recent date of certain items is still a mystery as
unsolved as that of the modern human bones. An even greater mystery is the absolute
homogeneity of the crabbed, archaic writing found on a wide range of papers whose
conditions and watermarks suggest age differences of at least one hundred and fifty to
two hundred years. To some, though, the greatest mystery of all is the variety of utterly
inexplicable objects -- objects whose shapes, materials, types of workmanship, and
purposes baffle all conjecture -- found scattered amidst the wreckage in evidently
diverse states of injury. One of these things -- which excited several Miskatonie
professors profoundly is a badly damaged monstrosity plainly resembling the strange
image which 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 Lovecraft Library wishes to extend its gratitude to Eulogio García Recalde for transcribing this text.
:
Cats And Dogs
by H. P. Lovecraft
Written November 23, 1926
Published in Something About Cats and Other Pieces, Arkham House, 1949
Being told of the cat-and-dog fight about to occur in your literary club, I cannot resist
contributing a few Thomastic yowls and sibilants upon my side of the dispute, though
conscious that the word of a venerable ex-member can scarcely have much weight
against the brilliancy of such still active adherents as may bark upon the other side.
Aware of my ineptitude at argument, a valued correspondent has supplied me with the
records of a similar controversy in the New York Tribune, in which Mr. Carl van Doran
is on my side and Mr. Albert Payson Terhune on that of the canine tribe. From this I
would be glad to plagiarise such data as I need; but my friend, with genuinely
Machiavellian subtlety, has furnished me with only a part of the feline section whilst
submitting the doggish brief in full. No doubt he imagines that this arrangement, in
view of my own emphatic bias, makes for something like ultimate fairness; but for me it
is exceedingly inconvenient, since it will force me to be more or less original in several
parts of the ensuing remarks.
Between dogs and cats my degree of choice is so great that it would never occur to me
to compare the two. I have no active dislike for dogs, any more than I have for monkeys,
human beings, tradesmen, cows, sheep, or pterodactyls; but for the cat I have
entertained a particular respect and affection ever since the earliest days of my infancy.
In its flawless grace and superior self-sufficiency I have seen a symbol of the perfect
beauty and bland impersonality of the universe itself, objectively considered, and in its
air of silent mystery there resides for me all the wonder and fascination of the unknown.
The dog appeals to cheap and facile emotions; the cat to the deepest founts of
imagination and cosmic perception in the human mind. It is no accident that the
contemplative Egyptians, together with such later poetic spirits as Poe, Gautier,
Baudelaire and Swinburne, were all sincere worshippers of the supple grimalkin.
Naturally, one's preference in the matter of cats and dogs depends wholly upon one's
temperament and point of view. The dog would appear to me to be the favorite of
superficial, sentimental, and emotional people -- people who feel rather than think, who
attach importance to mankind and the popular conventional emotions of the simple, and
who find their greatest consolation in the fawning and dependent attachments of a
gregarious society. Such people live in a limited world of imagination; accepting
uncritically the values of common folklore, and always preferring to have their naive
beliefs, feelings, and prejudices tickled, rather than to enjoy a purely aesthetic and
philosophic pleasure arising from discrimination, contemplation, and the recognition of
austere, absolute beauty. This is not to say that the cheaper elements do not also reside
in the average cat-lover's love of cats, but merely to point out that in ailurophily there
exists a basis of true aestheticism which kynophily does not possess. The real lover of
cats is one who demands a clearer adjustment to the universe than ordinary household
platitudes provide; one who refuses to swallow the sentimental notion that all good
people love dogs, children, and horses while all bad people dislike and are disliked by
such. He is unwilling to set up himself and his cruder feelings as a measure of universal
values, or to allow shallow ethical notions to warp his judgment. In a word, he had
rather admire and respect than effuse and dote; and does not fall into the fallacy that
pointless sociability and friendliness, or slavering devotion and obedience, constitute
anything intrinsically admirable or exalted. Dog-lovers base their whole case on these
commonplace, servile, and plebeian qualities, and amusingly judge the intelligence of a
pet by its degree of conformity to their own wishes. Cat-lovers escape this delusion,
repudiate the idea that cringing subservience and sidling companionship to man are
supreme merits, and stand free to worship aristocratic independence, self-respect, and
individual personality joined to extreme grace and beauty as typified by the cool, lithe,
cynical and unconquered lord of the housetops.
Persons of commonplace ideas -- unimaginative worthy burghers who are satisfied with
the daily round of things and who subscribe to the popular credo of sentimental values
-- will always be dog-lovers. To them nothing will ever be more important than
themselves and their own primitive feelings, and they will never cease to esteem and
glorify the fellow-animal who best typifies these. Such persons are submerged in the
vortex of Oriental idealism and abasement which ruined classic civilisation in the Dark
Ages, and live in a bleak world of abstract sentimental values wherein the mawkish
illusions of meekness, gentleness, brotherhood, and whining humility are magnified into
supreme virtues, and a whole false ethic and philosophy erected on the timid reactions
of the flexor system of muscles. This heritage, ironically foisted on us when Roman
politics raised the faith of a whipped and broken people to supremacy in the later empire,
has naturally kept a strong hold over the weak and sentimentally thoughtless; and
perhaps reached its culmination in the insipid nineteenth century, when people were
wont to praise dogs "because they are so human" (as if humanity were any valid
standard of merit!), and honest Edwin Landseer painted hundreds of smug Fidoes and
Carlos and Rovers with all the anthropoid triviality, pettiness, and "cuteness" of eminent
Victorians.
But amidst this chaos of intellectual and emotional groveling a few free souls have
always stood out for the old civilised realities which mediaevalism eclipsed -- the stern
classic loyalty to truth, strength, and beauty given a clear mind and uncowed spirit to
the full-living Western Aryan confronted by Nature's majesty, loveliness, and aloofness.
This is the virile aesthetic and ethic of the extensor muscles -- the bold, buoyant,
assertive beliefs and preferences of proud, dominant, unbroken and unterrified
conquerors, hunters, and warriors -- and it has small use for the shams and whimperings
of the brotherly, affection- slobbering peacemaker and cringer and sentimentalist.
Beauty and sufficiency -- twin qualities of the cosmos itself -- are the gods of this
unshackled and pagan type; to the worshipper of such eternal things the supreme virtue
will not be found in lowliness, attachment, obedience, and emotional messiness. This
sort of worshipper will look for that which best embodies the loveliness of the stars and
the worlds and the forests and the seas and the sunsets, and which best acts out the
blandness, lordliness, accuracy, self-sufficiency, cruelty, independence, and
contemptuous and capricious impersonality of the all governing Nature. Beauty -coolness -- aloofness -- philosophic repose -- self-sufficiency -- untamed mastery -where else can we find these things incarnated with even half the perfection and
completeness that mark their incarnation in the peerless and softly gliding cat, which
performs its mysterious orbit with the relentless and obtrusive certainty of a planet in
infinity?
That dogs are dear to the unimaginative peasant-burgher whilst cats appeal to the
sensitive poet-aristocrat- philosopher will be clear in a moment when we reflect on the
matter of biological association. Practical plebeian folk judge a thing only by its
immediate touch, taste, and smell; while more delicate types form their estimates from
the linked images and ideas which the object calls up in their minds. Now when dogs
and cats are considered, the stolid churl sees only the two animals before him, and bases
his favour on their relative capacity to pander to his sloppy, uniformed ideas of ethics
and friendship and flattering subservience. On the other hand the gentleman and thinker
sees each in all its natural affiliations, and cannot fail to notice that in the great
symmetries of organic life dogs fall in with slovenly wolves and foxes and jackals and
coyotes and dingoes and painted hyaenas, whilst cats walk proudly with the jungle's
lords, and own the haughty lion, the sinuous leopard, the regal tiger, and the shapely
panther and jaguar as their kin. Dogs are the hieroglyphs of blind emotion, inferiority,
servile attachment, and gregariousness -- the attributes of commonplace, stupidly
passionate, and intellectually and imaginatively underdeveloped men. Cats are the runes
of beauty, invincibility, wonder, pride, freedom, coldness, self-sufficiency, and dainty
individuality -- the qualities of sensitive, enlightened, mentally developed, pagan,
cynical, poetic, philosophic, dispassionate, reserved, independent, Nietzschean,
unbroken, civilised, master-class men. The dog is a peasant and the cat is a gentleman.
We may, indeed, judge the tone and bias of a civilisation by its relative attitude toward
dogs and cats. The proud Egypt wherein Pharaoh was Pharaoh and pyramids rose in
beauty at the wish of him who dreamed them bowed down to the cat, and temples were
built to its goddess at Bubastis. In imperial Rome the graceful leopard adorned most
homes of quality, lounging in insolent beauty in the atrium with golden collar and chain;
while after the age of the Antonines the actual cat was imported from Egypt and
cherished as a rare and costly luxury. So much for the dominant and enlightened
peoples. When, however, we come to the groveling Middle Ages with their superstitions
and ecstasies and monasticisms and maunderings over saints and their relics, we find
the cool and impersonal loveliness of the felidae in very low esteem; and behold a sorry
spectacle of hatred and cruelty shown toward the beautiful little creature whose mousing
virtues alone gained it sufferance amongst the ignorant churls who resented its
self-respecting coolness and feared its cryptical and elusive independence as something
akin to the dark powers of witchcraft. These boorish slaves of eastern darkness could
not tolerate what did not serve their own cheap emotions and flimsy purposes. They
wished a dog to fawn and hunt and fetch and carry, and had no use for the cat's gift of
eternal disinterested beauty to feed the spirit. One can imagine how they must have
resented Pussy's magnificent reposefulness, unhurriedness, relaxation, and scorn for
trivial human aims and concernments. Throw a stick, and the servile dog wheezes and
pants and stumbles to bring it to you. Do the same before a cat, and he will eye you with
coolly polite and somewhat bored amusement. And just as inferior people prefer the
inferior animal which scampers excitedly because someone else wants something, so do
superior people respect the superior animal which lives its own life and knows that the
puerile stick-throwings of alien bipeds are none of its business and beneath its notice.
The dog barks and begs and tumbles to amuse you when you crack the whip. That
pleases a meekness-loving peasant who relishes a stimulus to his self importance. The
cat, on the other hand, charms you into playing for its benefit when it wishes to be
amused; making you rush about the room with a paper on a string when it feels like
exercise, but refusing all your attempts to make it play when it is not in the humour.
That is personality and individuality and self-respect -- the calm mastery of a being
whose life is its own and not yours -- and the superior person recognises and appreciates
this because he too is a free soul whose position is assured, and whose only law is his
own heritage and aesthetic sense. Altogether, we may see that the dog appeals to those
primitive emotional souls whose chief demands on the universe are for meaningless
affection, aimless companionship, and flattering attention and subservience; whilst the
cat reigns among those more contemplative and imaginative spirits who ask of the
universe only the objective sight of poignant, ethereal beauty and the animate
symbolisation of Nature's bland, relentless, reposeful, unhurried and impersonal order
and sufficiency. The dog gives, but the cat is.
Simple folk always overstress the ethical element in life, and it is quite natural that they
should extend it to the realm of their pets. Accordingly, we hear many inane dicta in
favour of dogs on the ground that they are faithful, whilst cats are treacherous. Now just
what does this really mean? Where are the points of reference? Certainly, the dog has so
little imagination and individuality that it knows no motives but its master's; but what
sophisticated mind can descry a positive virtue in this stupid abnegation of its
birthright? Discrimination must surely award the palm to the superior cat, which has too
much natural dignity to accept any scheme of things but its own, and which
consequently cares not one whit what any clumsy human thinks or wishes or expects of
it. It is not treacherous, because it has never acknowledged any allegiance to anything
outside its own leisurely wishes; and treachery basically implies a departure from some
covenant explicitly recognised. The cat is a realist, and no hypocrite. He takes what
pleases him when he wants it, and gives no promises. He never leads you to expect
more from him than he gives, and if you choose to be stupidly Victorian enough to
mistake his purrs and rubbings of self-satisfaction for marks of transient affection
toward you, that is no fault of his. He would not for a moment have you believe that he
wants more of you than food and warmth and shelter and amusement -- and he is
certainly justified in criticising your aesthetic and imaginative development if you fail
to find his grace, beauty, and cheerful decorative influence an aboundingly sufficient
repayment for all you give him. The cat-lover need not be amazed at another's love for
dogs -- indeed, he may also possess this quality himself; for dogs are often very comely,
and as lovable in a condescending way as a faithful old servant or tenant in the eyes of a
master -- but he cannot help feeling astonished at those who do not share his love for
cats. The cat is such a perfect symbol of beauty and superiority that it seems scarcely
possible for any true aesthete and civilised cynic to do other than worship it. We call
ourselves a dog's "master" -- but who ever dared call himself the "master" of a cat? We
own a dog -- he is with us as a slave and inferior because we wish him to be. But we
entertain a cat -- he adorns our hearth as a guest, fellow-lodger, and equal because he
wishes to be there. It is no compliment to be the stupidly idolised master of a dog whose
instinct it is to idolise, but it is a very distinct tribute to be chosen as the friend and
confidant of a philosophic cat who is wholly his own master and could easily choose
another companion if he found such a one more agreeable and interesting. A trace, I
think, of this great truth regarding the higher dignity of the cat has crept into folklore in
the use of the names "cat" and "dog" as terms of opprobrium. Whilst "cat" has never
been applied to any sort of offender more than the mildly spiteful and innocuously sly
female gossip and commentator, the words "dog" and "cur" have always been linked
with vileness, dishonor, and degradation of the gravest type. In the crystallisation of this
nomenclature there has undoubtedly been present in the popular mind some dim,
half-unconscious realisation that there are depths of slinking, whining, fawning, and
servile ignobility which no kith of the lion and the leopard could ever attain. The cat
may fall low, but he is always unbroken. He is, like the Nordic among men, one of those
who govern their own lives or die.
We have but to glance analytically at the two animals to see the points pile up in favour
of the cat. Beauty, which is probably the only thing of any basic significance in all the
cosmos, ought to be our chief criterion; and here the cat excels so brilliantly that all
comparisons collapse. Some dogs, it is true, have beauty in a very ample degree; but
even the highest level of canine beauty falls far below the feline average. The cat is
classic whilst the dog is Gothic -- nowhere in the animal world can we discover such
really Hellenic perfection of form, with anatomy adapted to function, as in the felidae.
Puss is a Doric temple -- an Ionic colonnade -- in the utter classicism of its structural
and decorative harmonies. And this is just as true kinetically as statically, for art has no
parallel for the bewitching grace of the cat's slightest motion. The sheer, perfect
aestheticism of kitty's lazy stretchings, industrious face-washings, playful rollings, and
little involuntary shiftings in sleep is something as keen and vital as the best pastoral
poetry or genre painting; whilst the unerring accuracy of his leaping and springing,
running and hunting, has an art-value just as high in a more spirited way but it is his
capacity for leisure and repose which makes the cat preeminent. Mr. Carl Van Vechten,
in "Peter Whiffle," holds up the timeless restfulness of the cat as a model for life's
philosophy, and Prof. William Lyon Phelps has very effectively captured the secret of
felinity when he says that the cat does not merely lie down, but "pours his body out on
the floor like a glass of water". What other creature has thus merged the aestheticism of
mechanics and hydraulics? Contrast this with the inept panting, wheezing, fumbling,
drooling, scratching, and general clumsiness of the average dog with his false and
wasted motions. And in the details of neatness the fastidious cat is of course
immeasurably ahead. We always love to touch a cat, but only the insensitive can
uniformly welcome the frantic and humid nuzzlings and pawings of a dusty and perhaps
not inodorous canine which leaps and fusses and writhes about in awkward feverishness
for no particular reason save that blind nerve-centres have been spurred by certain
meaningless stimuli. There is a wearying excess of bad manners in all this doggish fury
-- well-bred people don't paw and maul one, and surely enough we invariably find the
cat gentle and reserved in his advances, and delicate even when he glides gracefully into
your lap with cultivated purrs, or leaps whimsical on the table where you are writing to
play with your pen in modulated, seriocomic pats. I do not wonder that Mahomet, that
sheik of perfect manners, loved cats for their urbanity and disliked dogs for their
boorishness; or that cats are the favorites in the polite Latin countries whilst dogs take
the lead in heavy, practical, and beer-drinking Central Europe. Watch a cat eat, and then
watch a dog. The one is held in check by an inherent and inescapable daintiness, and
lends a kind of grace to one of the most ungraceful of all processes. The dog, on the
other hand, is wholly repulsive in his bestial and insatiate greediness; living up to his
forest kinship of "wolfing" most openly and unashamedly. Returning to beauty of line -is it not significant that while many normal breeds of dogs are conspicuously and
admittedly ugly, no healthy and well-developed feline of any species whatsoever is
other than beautiful? There are, of course, many ugly cats; but these are always
individual cases of mongrelism, malnutrition, deformity, or injury. No breed of cats in
its proper condition can by any stretch of the imagination be thought of as even slightly
ungraceful -- a record against which must be pitted the depressing spectacle of
impossibly flattened bulldogs, grotesquely elongated dachshunds, hideously shapeless
and shaggy Airedales, and' the like. Of course, it may be said that no aesthetic standard
is other than relative -- but we always work with such standards as we empirically have,
and in comparing cats and dogs under the Western European aesthetic we cannot be
unfair to either. If any undiscovered tribe in Tibet finds Airedales beautiful and Persian
cats ugly, we will not dispute them on their own territory -- but just now we are dealing
with ourselves and our territory, and here the verdict would not admit of much doubt
even from the most ardent kynophile. Such an one usually passes the problem off in an
epigrammatic paradox, and says that "Snookums is so homely, he's pretty!" This is the
childish penchant for the grotesque and tawdrily "cute" which we see likewise
embodied in popular cartoons, freak dolls, and all the malformed decorative trumpery of
the "Billikin" or "Krazy Kat" order found in the "dens" and "cosy corners" of the
would-be-sophisticated yokelry.
In the matter of intelligence we find the caninites making amusing claims -- amusing
because they so naively measure what they conceive to be an animal's intelligence by its
degree of subservience to the human will. A dog will retrieve, a cat will not; therefore
(sic!) the dog is the more intelligent. Dogs can be more elaborately trained for the circus
and vaudeville acts than cats, therefore (O Zeus, O Royal Mount!) they are cerebrally
superior. Now of course this is all the sheerest nonsense. We would not call a
weak-spirited man more intelligent than an independent citizen because we can make
him vote as we wish whereas we can't influence the independent citizen, yet countless
persons apply an exactly parallel argument in appraising the grey matter of dogs and
cats. Competition in servility is something to which no self-respecting Thomas or
Tabitha ever stooped, and it is plain that any really effective estimate of canine and
feline intelligence must proceed from a careful observation of dogs and cats in a
detached state -- uninfluenced by human beings -- as they formulate certain objectives
of their own and use their own mental equipment in achieving them. When we do this,
we arrive at a very wholesome respect for our purring hearthside friend who makes so
little display about his wishes and business methods; for in every conception and
calculation he shows a steel--cold and deliberate union of intellect, will, and sense of
proportion which puts utterly to shame the emotional sloppings-over and docilely
acquired artificial tricks of the "clever" and "faithful" pointer or sheep-dog. Watch a cat
decide to move through a door, and see how patiently he waits for his opportunity,
never losing sight of his purpose even when he finds it expedient to feign other interests
in the interim. Watch him in the thick of the chase, and compare his calculating patience
and quite study of his terrain with the noisy floundering and pawing of his canine rival.
It is not often that he returns empty-handed. He knows what he wants, and means to get
it in the most effective way, even at the sacrifice of time -- which he philosophically
recognises as unimportant in the aimless cosmos. There is no turning him aside or
distracting his attention -- and we. know that among humans this is the quality of mental
tenacity, this ability to carry a single thread through complex distractions, is considered
a pretty good sign of intellectual vigour and maturity. Children, old crones, peasants,
and dogs ramble, cats and philosophers stick to their point. In resourcefulness, too, the
cat attests his superiority. Dogs can be well trained to do a single thing, but
psychologists tell us that these responses to an automatic memory instilled from outside
are of little worth as indices of real intelligence. To judge the abstract development of a
brain, confront it with new and unfamiliar conditions and see how well its own strength
enables it to achieve its object by sheer reasoning without blazed trails. Here the cats
can silently devise a dozen mysterious and successful alternatives whilst poor Fido is
barking in bewilderment and wondering what it is all about. Granted that Rover the
retriever may make a greater bid for popular sentimental regard by going into the
burning house and saving the baby in traditional cinema fashion, it remains a fact that
whiskered and purring Nig is a higher-grade biological organism -- something
physiologically and psychologically nearer a man because of his very freedom from
man's orders, and as such entitled to a higher respect from those who judge by purely
philosophic and aesthetic standards. We can respect a cat as we cannot respect a dog, no
matter which personally appeals the more to our mere doting fancy; and if we be
aesthetes and analysts rather than commonplace-lovers and emotionalists, the scales
must inevitably turn completely in kitty's favour.
It may be added, moreover, that even the aloof and sufficient cat is by no means devoid
of sentimental appeal. Once we get rid of the uncivilised ethical bias -- the
"treacherous" and "horrid bird-catcher" prejudice -- we find in the "harmless cat" the
very apex of happy domestic symbolism; whilst small kittens become objects to adore,
idealise, and celebrate in the most rhapsodic of dactyls and anapaests, iambics and
trochaics. I, in my own senescent mellowness, confess to an inordinate and wholly
unphilosophic predilection for tiny coal-black kittens with large yellow eyes, and could
no more pass one without petting him than Dr. Johnson could pass a sidewalk post
without striking it. There is, likewise, in many cats quite analogous to the reciprocal
fondness so loudly extolled in dogs, human beings, horses, and the like. Cats come to
associate certain persons with acts continuously contributing to their pleasure, and
acquire for them a recognition and attachment which manifests itself in pleasant
excitement at their approach -- whether or not bearing food and drink -- and a certain
pensiveness at their protracted absence. A cat with whom I was on intimate terms
reached the point of accepting food from no hand but one, and would actually go
hungry rather than touch the least morsel from a kindly neighbour source. He also had
distinct affections amongst the other cats of that idyllic household; voluntarily offering
food to one of his whiskered friends, whilst disputing most savagely the least glance
which his coal-black rival "Snowball" would bestow upon his plate. If it be argued that
these feline fondnesses are essentially "selfish" and "practical" in their ultimate
composition, let us inquire in return how many human fondnesses, apart from those
springing directly upon primitive brute instinct, have any other basis. After the returning
board has brought in the grand total of zero we shall be better able to refrain from
ingenuous censure of the "selfish" cat.
The superior imaginative inner life of the cat, resulting in superior self-possession, is
well known. A dog is a pitiful thing, depending wholly on companionship, and utterly
lost except in packs or by the side of his master. Leave him alone and he does not know
what to do except bark and howl and trot about till sheer exhaustion forces him to sleep.
A cat, however, is never without the potentialities of contentment. Like a superior man,
he knows how to be alone and happy. Once he looks about and finds no one to amuse
him, he settles down to the task of amusing himself; and no one really knows cats
without having occasionally peeked stealthily at some lively and well- balanced kitten
which believes itself to be alone. Only after such a glimpse of unaffected tail-chasing
grace and unstudied purring can one fully understand the charm of those lines which
Coleridge wrote with reference to the human rather than the feline young -- page eleven
".... a limber elf,
Singing, dancing to itself."
But whole volumes could be written on the playing of cats, since the varieties and
aesthetic aspects of such sportiveness are infinite. Be it sufficient to say that in such
pastimes cats have exhibited traits and actions which psychologists authentically declare
to be motivated by genuine humour and whimsicality in its purest sense; so that the task
of "making a cat laugh" may not be so impossible a thing even outside the borders of
Cheshire. In short, a dog is an incomplete thing. Like an inferior man, he needs
emotional stimuli from outside, and must set something artificial up as a god and motive.
The cat, however, is perfect in himself. Like the human philosopher, he is a selfsufficient entity and microcosm. He is a real and integrated being because he thinks and
feels himself to be such, whereas the dog can conceive of himself only in relation to
something else. Whip a dog and he licks your hand -frauth! The beast has no idea of
himself except as an inferior part of an organism whereof you are the superior part -- he
would no more think of striking back at you than you would think of pounding your
own head when it punishes you with a headache. But whip a cat and watch it glare and
move backward hissing in outraged dignity and self-respect! One more blow, and it
strikes you in return; for it is a gentleman and your equal, and will accept no
infringement on its personality and body of privileges. It is only in your house anyway
because it wishes to be, or perhaps even as a condescending favour to yourself. It is the
house, not you, it likes; for philosophers realise that human beings are at best only
minor adjuncts to scenery. Go one step too far, and it leaves you altogether. You have
mistaken your relationship to it and imagined you are its master, and no real cat can
tolerate that breach of good manners. Henceforward it will seek companions of greater
discrimination and clearer perspective. Let anaemic persons who believe in "turning the
other cheek" console themselves with cringing dogs -- for the robust pagan with the
blood of Nordic twilights in his veins there is no beast like the cat; intrepid steed of
Freya, who can boldly look even Thor and Odin full in the face and stare with great
round eyes of undimmed yellow or green.
In these observations I believe I have outlined with some fullness the diverse reasons
why, in my opinion and in the smartly timed title-phrase of Mr. Van Doren, "gentlemen
prefer cats." The reply of Mr.Terhune in a subsequent issue of the Tribune appears to
me beside the point; insomuch as it is less a refutation of facts than a mere personal
affirmation of the author's membership in that conventional "very human" majority who
take affection and companionship seriously, enjoy being important to something alive,
hate a "parasite" on mere ethical ground without consulting the right of beauty to exist
for its own sake, and therefore love man's noblest and most faithful friend, the
perennial dog. I suppose Mr.Terhune loves horses and babies also, for the three go
conventionally together in the great hundred-per-center's credo as highly essential
likings for every good and lovable he-man of the Arrow Collar and Harold Bell Wright
hero school, even though the automobile and Margaret Sanger have done much to
reduce the last two items.
Dogs, then, are peasants and the pets of peasants, cats are gentlemen and the pets of
gentlemen. The dog is for him who places crude feeling and outgrown ethic and
humanocentricity above austere and disinterested beauty; who just loves "folks and
folksiness" and doesn't mind sloppy clumsiness if only something will truly care for him.
(Tableau of dog across master's grave -- cf. Lanseer, "The Old Shepherd's Chief
Mourner.") The guy who isn't much for highbrow stuff, but is always on the square and
don't (sic) often find the Saddypost or the N.Y. World too deep for him; who hadn't
much use for Valentino, but thinks Doug Fairbanks is just about right for an evening's
entertainment. Wholesome -- constructive -- non-morbid -- civic-minded -- domestic -(I forgot to mention the radio) normal -- that's the sort of go-getter that ought to go in
for dogs.
The cat is for the aristocrat -- whether by birth or inclinations or both - who admires his
fellow-aristocrats. He is for the man who appreciates beauty as the one living force in a
blind and purposeless universe, and who worships that beauty in all its forms without
regard for the sentimental and ethical illusions of the moment. For the man who knows
the hollowness of feeling and the emptiness of human objects and aspirations, and who
therefore clings solely to what is real -- as beauty is real because it pretends to a
significance beyond the emotion which it excites and is. For the man who feels
sufficient in the cosmos, and asks no scruples of conventional prejudice, but loves
repose and strength and freedom and luxury and sufficiency and contemplation; who as
a strong fearless soul wishes something to respect instead of something to lick his face
and accept his alternate blows and strokings; who seeks a proud and beautiful equal in
the peerage of individualism rather than a cowed and cringing satellite in the hierarchy
of fear, subservience, and devolution. The cat is not for the brisk, self-important little
worker with a mission" , but for the enlightened dreaming poet who knows that the
world contains nothing really worth doing. The dilettante -- the connoisseur -- the
decadent, if you will, though in a healthier age than this there were things for such men
to do, so that they were the planners and leader of those glorious pagan times. The cat is
for him who does things not for empty duty but for power, pleasure, splendour, romance,
and glamour -- for the harpist who sings alone in the night of old battles, or the warrior
who goes out to fight such battles for beauty, glory, fame and the splendour of a land
athwart which no shadow of weakness falls. For him who will be lulled by no sops of
prose and usefulness, but demands for his comfort the ease and beauty and ascendancy
and cultivation which make effort worth while. For the man who knows that play, not
work, and leisure, not bustle, are the great things of life; and that the round of striving
merely in order to strive some more is a bitter irony of which the civilised soul accepts
as little as it can.
Beauty, sufficiency, ease, and good manners -- what more can civilisation require? We
have them all in the divine monarch who lounges gloriously on his silken cushion
before the hearth. Loveliness and joy for their own sake -- pride and harmony and
coordination -- spirit, restfulness and completeness -- all here are present, and need but a
sympathetic disillusionment for worship in full measure. What fully civilised soul but
would eagerly serve as high priest of Bast? The star of the cat, I think, is just now in the
ascendant, as we emerge little by little from the dreams of ethics and conformity which
clouded the nineteenth century and raised the grubbing and unlovely dog to the pinnacle
of sentimental regard. Whether a renaissance of power and beauty will restore our
Western civilisation, or whether the forces of disintegration are already too powerful for
any hand to check, none may yet say, but in the present moment of cynical
world-unmasking between the pretence of the eighteen-hundreds and the ominous
mystery of the decades ahead we have at least a flash of the old pagan perspective and
the old pagan clearness and honesty.
And one idol lit up by that flash, seen fair and lovely on a dream-throne of silk and gold
under a chryselephantine dome, is a shape of deathless grace not always given its due
among groping mortals -- the haughty, the unconquered, the mysterious, the luxurious,
the Babylonian, the impersonal, the eternal companion of superiority and art -- the type
of perfect beauty and the brother of poetry -- the bland, grave, compliant, and patrician
cat.
:
History of the Necronomicon
by H.P. Lovecraft
Written 1927
Published 1938
Original title Al Azif -- azif being the word used by Arabs to designate that nocturnal
sound (made by insects) suppos'd to be the howling of daemons.
Composed by Abdul Alhazred, a mad poet of Sanaá, in Yemen, who is said to have
flourished during the period of the Ommiade caliphs, circa 700 A.D. He visited the
ruins of Babylon and the subterranean secrets of Memphis and spent ten years alone in
the great southern desert of Arabia -- the Roba el Khaliyeh or "Empty Space" of the
ancients -- and "Dahna" or "Crimson" desert of the modern Arabs, which is held to be
inhabited by protective evil spirits and monsters of death. Of this desert many strange
and unbelievable marvels are told by those who pretend to have penetrated it. In his last
years Alhazred dwelt in Damascus, where the Necronomicon (Al Azif) was written, and
of his final death or disappearance (738 A.D.) many terrible and conflicting things are
told. He is said by Ebn Khallikan (12th cent. biographer) to have been seized by an
invisible monster in broad daylight and devoured horribly before a large number of
fright-frozen witnesses. Of his madness many things are told. He claimed to have seen
fabulous Irem, or City of Pillars, and to have found beneath the ruins of a certain
nameless desert town the shocking annals and secrets of a race older than mankind. He
was only an indifferent Moslem, worshipping unknown entities whom he called
Yog-Sothoth and Cthulhu.
In A.D. 950 the Azif, which had gained a considerable tho' surreptitious circulation
amongst the philosophers of the age, was secretly translated into Greek by Theodorus
Philetas of Constantinople under the title Necronomicon. For a century it impelled
certain experimenters to terrible attempts, when it was suppressed and burnt by the
patriarch Michael. After this it is only heard of furtively, but (1228) Olaus Wormius
made a Latin translation later in the Middle Ages, and the Latin text was printed twice -once in the fifteenth century in black-letter (evidently in Germany) and once in the
seventeenth (prob. Spanish) -- both editions being without identifying marks, and
located as to time and place by internal typographical evidence only. The work both
Latin and Greek was banned by Pope Gregory IX in 1232, shortly after its Latin
translation, which called attention to it. The Arabic original was lost as early as
Wormius' time, as indicated by his prefatory note; and no sight of the Greek copy -which was printed in Italy between 1500 and 1550 -- has been reported since the
burning of a certain Salem man's library in 1692. An English translation made by Dr.
Dee was never printed, and exists only in fragments recovered from the original
manuscript. Of the Latin texts now existing one (15th cent.) is known to be in the
British Museum under lock and key, while another (17th cent.) is in the Bibliothèque
Nationale at Paris. A seventeenth-century edition is in the Widener Library at Harvard,
and in the library of Miskatonic University at Arkham. Also in the library of the
University of Buenos Ayres. Numerous other copies probably exist in secret, and a
fifteenth-century one is persistently rumoured to form part of the collection of a
celebrated American millionaire. A still vaguer rumour credits the preservation of a
sixteenth-century Greek text in the Salem family of Pickman; but if it was so preserved,
it vanished with the artist R. U. Pickman, who disappeared early in 1926. The book is
rigidly suppressed by the authorities of most countries, and by all branches of organised
ecclesiasticism. Reading leads to terrible consequences. It was from rumours of this
book (of which relatively few of the general public know) that R. W. Chambers is said
to have derived the idea of his early novel The King in Yellow.
Chronology
•
Al Azif written circa 730 A.D. at Damascus by Abdul Alhazred
•
Tr. to Greek 950 A.D. as Necronomicon by Theodorus Philetas
•
Burnt by Patriarch Michael 1050 (i.e., Greek text). Arabic text now lost.
•
Olaus translates Gr. to Latin 1228
•
1232 Latin ed. (and Gr.) suppr. by Pope Gregory IX
•
14... Black-letter printed edition (Germany)
•
15... Gr. text printed in Italy
•
16... Spanish reprint of Latin text
This should be supplemented with a letter written to Clark Ashton Smith on November
27, 1927:
I have had no chance to produce new material this autumn, but have been
classifying notes & synopses in preparation for some monstrous tales
later on. In particular I have drawn up some data on the celebrated &
unmentionable Necronomicon of the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred! It seems
that this shocking blasphemy was produced by a native of Sanaá, in
Yemen, who flourished about 700 A.D. & made many mysterious
pilgrimages to Babylon's ruins, Memphis's catacombs, & the
devil-haunted & untrodden wastes of the great southern deserts of Arabia
-- the Roba el Khaliyeh, where he claimed to have found records of
things older than mankind, & to have learnt the worship of Yog-Sothoth
& Cthulhu. The book was a product of Abdul's old age, which was spent
in Damascus, & the original title was Al Azif -- azif (cf. Henley's notes to
Vathek) being the name applied to those strange night noises (of insects)
which the Arabs attribute to the howling of daemons. Alhazred died -- or
disappeared -- under terrible circumstances in the year 738. In 950 Al
Azif was translated into Greek by the Byzantine Theodorus Philetas
under the title Necronomicon, & a century later it was burnt at the order
of Michael, Patriarch of Constantinople. It was translated into Latin by
Olaus in 1228, but placed on the Index Expurgatorius by Pope Gregory
IX in 1232. The original Arabic was lost before Olaus' time, & the last
known Greek copy perished in Salem in 1692. The work was printed in
the 15th, 16th, & 17th centuries, but few copies are extant. Wherever
existing, it is carefully guarded for the sake of the world's welfare &
sanity. Once a man read through the copy in the library of Miskatonic
University at Arkham -- read it through & fled wild-eyed into the hills...
but that is another story!
In yet another letter (to James Blish and William Miller, 1936), Lovecraft says:
You are fortunate in securing copies of the hellish and abhorred
Necronomicon. Are they the Latin texts printed in Germany in the
fifteenth century, or the Greek version printed in Italy in 1567, or the
Spanish translation of 1623? Or do these copies represent different texts?
Supernatural Horror In Literature
by H. P. Lovecraft
Written 1926-27, Revised 1933
Published in The Recluse in 1927
I. Introduction
The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind
of fear is fear of the unknown. These facts few psychologists will dispute, and their
admitted truth must establish for all time the genuineness and dignity of the weirdly
horrible tale as a literary form. Against it are discharged all the shafts of a materialistic
sophistication which clings to frequently felt emotions and external events, and of a
naïvely insipid idealism which deprecates the æsthetic motive and calls for a didactic
literature to "uplift" the reader toward a suitable degree of smirking optimism. But in
spite of all this opposition the weird tale has survived, developed, and attained
remarkable heights of perfection; founded as it is on a profound and elementary
principle whose appeal, if not always universal, must necessarily be poignant and
permanent to minds of the requisite sensitiveness.
The appeal of the spectrally macabre is generally narrow because it demands from the
reader a certain degree of imagination and a capacity for detachment from everyday life.
Relatively few are free enough from the spell of the daily routine to respond to tappings
from outside, and tales of ordinary feelings and events, or of common sentimental
distortions of such feelings and events, will always take first place in the taste of the
majority; rightly, perhaps, since of course these ordinary matters make up the greater
part of human experience. But the sensitive are always with us, and sometimes a curious
streak of fancy invades an obscure corner of the very hardest head; so that no amount of
rationalisation, reform, or Freudian analysis can quite annul the thrill of the
chimney-corner whisper or the lonely wood. There is here involved a psychological
pattern or tradition as real and as deeply grounded in mental experience as any other
pattern or tradition of mankind; coeval with the religious feeling and closely related to
many aspects of it, and too much a part of our innermost biological heritage to lose keen
potency over a very important, though not numerically great, minority of our species.
Man's first instincts and emotions formed his response to the environment in which he
found himself. Definite feelings based on pleasure and pain grew up around the
phenomena whose causes and effects he understood, whilst around those which he did
not understand -- and the universe teemed with them in the early days -- were naturally
woven such personifications, marvelous interpretations, and sensations of awe and fear
as would be hit upon by a race having few and simple ideas and limited experience. The
unknown, being likewise the unpredictable, became for our primitive forefathers a
terrible and omnipotent source of boons and calamities visited upon mankind for cryptic
and wholly extra-terrestrial reasons, and thus clearly belonging to spheres of existence
whereof we know nothing and wherein we have no part. The phenomenon of dreaming
likewise helped to build up the notion of an unreal or spiritual world; and in general, all
the conditions of savage dawn -- life so strongly conduced toward a feeling of the
supernatural, that we need not wonder at the thoroughness with which man's very
hereditary essence has become saturated with religion and superstition. That saturation
must, as a matter of plain scientific fact, be regarded as virtually permanent so far as the
subconscious mind and inner instincts are concerned; for though the area of the
unknown has been steadily contracting for thousands of years, an infinite reservoir of
mystery still engulfs most of the outer cosmos, whilst a vast residuum of powerful
inherited associations clings round all the objects and processes that were once
mysterious; however well they may now be explained. And more than this, there is an
actual physiological fixation of the old instincts in our nervous tissue, which would
make them obscurely operative even were the conscious mind to be purged of all
sources of wonder.
Because we remember pain and the menace of death more vividly than pleasure, and
because our feelings toward the beneficent aspects of the unknown have from the first
been captured and formalised by conventional religious rituals, it has fallen to the lot of
the darker and more maleficent side of cosmic mystery to figure chiefly in our popular
supernatural folklore. This tendency, too, is naturally enhanced by the fact that
uncertainty and danger are always closely allied; thus making any kind of an unknown
world a world of peril and evil possibilities. When to this sense of fear and evil the
inevitable fascination of wonder and curiosity is superadded, there is born a composite
body of keen emotion and imaginative provocation whose vitality must of necessity
endure as long as the human race itself. Children will always be afraid of the dark, and
men with minds sensitive to hereditary impulse will always tremble at the thought of the
hidden and fathomless worlds of strange life which may pulsate in the gulfs beyond the
stars, or press hideously upon our own globe in unholy dimensions which only the dead
and the moonstruck can glimpse.
With this foundation, no one need wonder at the existence of a literature of cosmic fear.
It has always existed, and always will exist; and no better evidence of its tenacious
vigour can be cited than the impulse which now and then drives writers of totally
opposite leanings to try their hands at it in isolated tales, as if to discharge from their
minds certain phantasmal shapes which would otherwise haunt them. Thus Dickens
wrote several eerie narratives; Browning, the hideous poem Childe Roland; Henry
James, The Turn of the Screw; Dr. Holmes, the subtle novel Elsie Venner; F. Marion
Crawford, The Upper Berth and a number of other examples; Mrs. Charlotte Perkins
Gilman, social worker, The Yellow Wall Paper; whilst the humorist, W. W. Jacobs,
produced that able melodramatic bit called The Monkey's Paw.
This type of fear-literature must not be confounded with a type externally similar but
psychologically widely different; the literature of mere physical fear and the mundanely
gruesome. Such writing, to be sure, has its place, as has the conventional or even
whimsical or humorous ghost story where formalism or the author's knowing wink
removes the true sense of the morbidly unnatural; but these things are not the literature
of cosmic fear in its purest sense. The true weird tale has something more than secret
murder, bloody bones, or a sheeted form clanking chains according to rule. A certain
atmosphere of breathless and unexplainable dread of outer, unknown forces must be
present; and there must be a hint, expressed with a seriousness and portentousness
becoming its subject, of that most terrible conception of the human brain -- a malign
and particular suspension or defeat of those fixed laws of Nature which are our only
safeguard against the assaults of chaos and the dæmons of unplumbed space.
Naturally we cannot expect all weird tales to conform absolutely to any theoretical
model. Creative minds are uneven, and the best of fabrics have their dull spots.
Moreover, much of the choicest weird work is unconscious; appearing in memorable
fragments scattered through material whose massed effect may be of a very different
cast. Atmosphere is the all-important thing, for the final criterion of authenticity is not
the dovetailing of a plot but the creation of a given sensation. We may say, as a general
thing, that a weird story whose intent is to teach or produce a social effect, or one in
which the horrors are finally explained away by natural means, is not a genuine tale of
cosmic fear; but it remains a fact that such narratives often possess, in isolated sections,
atmospheric touches which fulfill every condition of true supernatural horror-literature.
Therefore we must judge a weird tale not by the author's intent, or by the mere
mechanics of the plot; but by the emotional level which it attains at its least mundane
point. If the proper sensations are excited, such a "high spot" must be admitted on its
own merits as weird literature, no matter how prosaically it is later dragged down. The
one test of the really weird is simply this -- whether of not there be excited in the reader
a profound sense of dread, and of contact with unknown spheres and powers; a subtle
attitude of awed listening, as if for the beating of black wings or the scratching of
outside shapes and entities on the known universe's utmost rim. And of course, the more
completely and unifiedly a story conveys this atmosphere the better it is as a work of art
in the given medium.
II. The Dawn Of The Horror Tale
As may naturally be expected of a form so closely connected with primal emotion, the
horror-tale is as old as human thought and speech themselves.
Cosmic terror appears as an ingredient of the earliest folklore of all races, and is
crystallised in the most archaic ballads, chronicles, and sacred writings. It was, indeed, a
prominent feature of the elaborate ceremonial magic, with its rituals for the evocation of
dæmons and spectres, which flourished from prehistoric times, and which reached its
highest development in Egypt and the Semitic nations. Fragments like the Book of
Enoch and the Claviculae of Solomon well illustrate the power of the weird over the
ancient Eastern mind, and upon such things were based enduring systems and traditions
whose echoes extend obscurely even to the present time. Touches of this transcendental
fear are seen in classic literature, and there is evidence of its still greater emphasis in a
ballad literature which paralleled the classic stream but vanished for lack of a written
medium. The Middle Ages, steeped in fanciful darkness, gave it an enormous impulse
toward expression; and East and West alike were busy preserving and amplifying the
dark heritage, both of random folklore and of academically formulated magic and
cabalism, which had descended to them. Witch, werewolf, vampire, and ghoul brooded
ominously on the lips of bard and grandam, and needed but little encouragement to take
the final step across the boundary that divides the chanted tale or song from the formal
literary composition. In the Orient, the weird tale tended to assume a gorgeous
colouring and sprightliness which almost transmuted it into sheer phantasy. In the West,
where the mystical Teuton had come down from his black boreal forests and the Celt
remembered strange sacrifices in Druidic groves, it assumed a terrible intensity and
convincing seriousness of atmosphere which doubled the force of its half-told,
half-hinted horrors.
Much of the power of Western horror-lore was undoubtedly due to the hidden but often
suspected presence of a hideous cult of nocturnal worshippers whose strange customs -descended from pre-Aryan and pre-agricultural times when a squat race of Mongoloids
roved over Europe with their flocks and herds -- were rooted in the most revolting
fertility-rites of immemorial antiquity. Ibis secret religion, stealthily handed down
amongst peasants for thousands of years despite the outward reign of the Druidic,
Graeco-Roman, and Christian faiths in the regions involved, was marked by wild
"Witches' Sabbaths" in lonely woods and atop distant hills on Walpurgis-Night and
Hallowe'en, the traditional breeding-seasons of the goats and sheep and cattle; and
became the source of vast riches of sorcery-legend, besides provoking extensive
witchcraft -- prosecutions of which the Salem affair forms the chief American example.
Akin to it in essence, and perhaps connected with it in fact, was the frightful secret
system of inverted theology or Satan-worship which produced such horrors as the
famous "Black Mass"; whilst operating toward the same end we may note the activities
of those whose aims were somewhat more scientific or philosophical -- the astrologers,
cabalists, and alchemists of the Albertus Magnus or Ramond Lully type, with whom
such rude ages invariably abound. The prevalence and depth of the mediæval
horror-spirit in Europe, intensified by the dark despair which waves of pestilence
brought, may be fairly gauged by the grotesque carvings slyly introduced into much of
the finest later Gothic ecclesiastical work of the time; the dæmoniac gargoyles of Notre
Dame and Mont St. Michel being among the most famous specimens. And throughout
the period, it must be remembered, there existed amongst educated and uneducated alike
a most unquestioning faith in every form of the supernatural; from the gentlest doctrines
of Christianity to the most monstrous morbidities of witchcraft and black magic. It was
from no empty background that the Renaissance magicians and alchemists -Nostradamus, Trithemius, Dr. John Dee, Robert Fludd, and the like -- were born.
In this fertile soil were nourished types and characters of sombre myth and legend
which persist in weird literature to this day, more or less disguised or altered by modern
technique. Many of them were taken from the earliest oral sources, and form part of
mankind's permanent heritage. The shade which appears and demands the burial of its
bones, the dæmon lover who comes to bear away his still living bride, the death-fiend or
psychopomp riding the night-wind, the man-wolf, the sealed chamber, the deathless
sorcerer -- all these may be found in that curious body of mediæval lore which the late
Mr. Baring-Gould so effectively assembled in book form. Wherever the mystic
Northern blood was strongest, the atmosphere of the popular tales became most intense;
for in the Latin races there is a touch of basic rationality which denies to even their
strangest superstitions many of the overtones of glamour so characteristic of our own
forest-born and ice-fostered whisperings.
Just as all fiction first found extensive embodiment in poetry, so is it in poetry that we
first encounter the permanent entry of the weird into standard literature. Most of the
ancient instances, curiously enough, are in prose; as the werewolf incident in Petronius,
the gruesome passages in Apuleius, the brief but celebrated letter of Pliny the Younger
to Sura, and the odd compilation On Wonderful Events by the Emperor Hadrian's Greek
freedman, Phlegon. It is in Phlegon that we first find that hideous tale of the
corpse-bride, Philinnion and Machates, later related by Proclus and in modem times
forming the inspiration of Goethe's Bride of Corinth and Washington Irving's German
Student. But by the time the old Northern myths take literary form, and in that later time
when the weird appears as a steady element in the literature of the day, we find it mostly
in metrical dress; as indeed we find the greater part of the strictly imaginative writing of
the Middle Ages and Renaissance. The Scandinavian Eddas and Sagas thunder with
cosmic horror, and shake with the stark fear of Ymir and his shapeless spawn; whilst
our own Anglo-Saxon Beowulf and the later Continental Nibelung tales are full of
eldritch weirdness. Dante is a pioneer in the classic capture of macabre atmosphere, and
in Spenser's stately stanzas will be seen more than a few touches of fantastic terror in
landscape, incident, and character. Prose literature gives us Malory's Morte d'Arthur, in
which are presented many ghastly situations taken from early ballad sources -- the theft
of the sword and silk from the corpse in Chapel Perilous by Sir Galahad -- whilst other
and cruder specimens were doubtless set forth in the cheap and sensational "chapbooks"
vulgarly hawked about and devoured by the ignorant. In Elizabethan drama, with its Dr.
Faustus, the witches in Macbeth, the ghost in Hamlet, and the horrible gruesomeness of
Webster we may easily discern the strong hold of the dæmoniac on the public mind; a
hold intensified by the very real fear of living witchcraft, whose terrors, wildest at first
on the Continent, begin to echo loudly in English ears as the witch-hunting crusades of
James the First gain headway. To the lurking mystical prose of the ages is added a long
line of treatises on witchcraft and dæmonology which aid in exciting the imagination of
the reading world.
Through the seventeenth and into the eighteenth century we behold a growing mass of
fugitive legendry and balladry of darksome cast; still, however, held down beneath the
surface of polite and accepted literature. Chapbooks of horror and weirdness multiplied,
and we glimpse the eager interest of the people through fragments like Defoe's
Apparition of Mrs. Veal, a homely tale of a dead woman's spectral visit to a distant
friend, written to advertise covertly a badly selling theological disquisition on death.
The upper orders of society were now losing faith in the supernatural, and indulging in a
period of classic rationalism. Then, beginning with the translations of Eastern tales in
Queen Anne's reign and taking definite form toward the middle of the century, comes
the revival of romantic feeling -- the era of new joy in nature, and in the radiance of past
times, strange scenes, bold deeds, and incredible marvels. We feel it first in the poets,
whose utterances take on new qualities of wonder, strangeness, and shuddering. And
finally, after the timid appearance of a few weird scenes in the novels of the day -- such
as Smollett's Adventures of Ferdinand, Count Fathom -- the release instinct precipitates
itself in the birth of a new school of writing; the "Gothic" school of horrible and
fantastic prose fiction, long and short, whose literary posterity is destined to become so
numerous, and in many cases so resplendent in artistic merit. It is, when one reflects
upon it, genuinely remarkable that weird narration as a fixed and academically
recognized literary form should have been so late of final birth. The impulse and
atmosphere are as old as man, but the typical weird tale of standard literature is a child
of the eighteenth century.
III. The Early Gothic Novel
The shadow-haunted landscapes of Ossian, the chaotic visions of William Blake, the
grotesque witch dances in Burns's Tam O'Shanter, the sinister dæmonism of Coleridge's
Christobel and Ancient Mariner, the ghostly charm of James Hogg's Kilmeny, and the
more restrained approaches to cosmic horror in Lamia and many of Keats's other poems,
are typical British illustrations of the advent of the weird to formal literature. Our
Teutonic cousins of the Continent were equally receptive to the rising flood, and
Burger's Wild Huntsman and the even more famous dæmon-bridegroom ballad of
Lenore -- both imitated in English by Scott, whose respect for the supernatural was
always great -- are only a taste of the eerie wealth which German song had commenced
to provide. Thomas Moore adapted from such sources the legend of the ghoulish
statue-bride (later used by Prosper Merimée in The Venus of Ille, and traceable back to
great antiquity) which echoes so shiveringly in his ballad of The Ring; whilst Goethe's
deathless masterpiece Faust, crossing from mere balladry into the classic, cosmic
tragedy of the ages, may be held as the ultimate height to which this German poetic
impulse arose.
But it remained for a very sprightly and worldly Englishman -- none other than Horace
Walpole himself -- to give the growing impulse definite shape and become the actual
founder of the literary horror-story as a permanent form. Fond of mediæval romance
and mystery as a dilettante's diversion, and with a quaintly imitated Gothic castle as his
abode at Strawberry Hill, Walpole in 1764 published The Castle of Otranto; a tale of
the supernatural which, though thoroughly unconvincing and mediocre in itself, was
destined to exert an almost unparalleled influence on the literature of the weird. First
venturing it only as a "translation" by one "William Marshal, Gent." from the Italian of
a mythical "Onuphrio Muralto," the author later acknowledged his connection with the
book and took pleasure in its wide and instantaneous popularity -- a popularity which
extended to many editions, early dramatization, and wholesale imitation both in
England and in Germany.
The story -- tedious, artificial, and melodramatic -- is further impaired by a brisk and
prosaic style whose urbane sprightliness nowhere permits the creation of a truly weird
atmosphere. It tells of Manfred, an unscrupulous and usurping prince determined to
found a line, who after the mysterious sudden death of his only son Conrad on the
latter's bridal morn, attempts to put away his wife Hippolita and wed the lady destined
for the unfortunate youth -- the lad, by the way, having been crushed by the
preternatural fall of a gigantic helmet in the castle courtyard. Isabella, the widowed
bride, flees from his design; and encounters in subterranean crypts beneath the castle a
noble young preserver, Theodore, who seems to be a peasant yet strangely resembles
the old lord Alfonso who ruled the domain before Manfred's time. Shortly thereafter
supernatural phenomena assail the castle in diverse ways; fragments of gigantic armour
being discovered here and there, a portrait walking out of its frame, a thunderclap
destroying the edifice, and a colossal armoured spectre of Alfonso rising out of the rains
to ascend through parting clouds to the bosom of St. Nicholas. Theodore, having wooed
Manfred's daughter Matilda and lost her through death -- for she is slain by her father by
mistake -- is discovered to be the son of Alfonso and rightful heir to the estate. He
concludes the tale by wedding Isabella and preparing to live happily ever after, whilst
Manfred -- whose usurpation was the cause of his son's supernatural death and his own
supernatural harassings -- retires to a monastery for penitence; his saddened wife
seeking asylum in a neighbouring convent.
Such is the tale; flat, stilted, and altogther devoid of the true cosmic horror which makes
weird literature. Yet such was the thirst of the age for those touches of strangeness and
spectral antiquity which it reflects, that it was seriously received by the soundest readers
and raised in spite of its intrinsic ineptness to a pedestal of lofty importance in literary
history. What it did above all else was to create a novel type of scene, puppet-characters,
and incidents; which, handled to better advantage by writers more naturally adapted to
weird creation, stimulated the growth of an imitative Gothic school which in turn
inspired the real weavers of cosmic terror -- the line of actual artists beginning with Poe.
This novel dramatic paraphernalia consisted first of all of the Gothic castle, with its
awesome antiquity, vast distances and ramblings, deserted or ruined wings, damp
corridors, unwholesome hidden catacombs, and galaxy of ghosts and appalling legends,
as a nucleus of suspense and dæmoniac fright. In addition, it included the tyrannical and
malevolent nobleman as villain; the saintly, long-persecuted, and generally insipid
heroine who undergoes the major terrors and serves as a point of view and focus for the
reader's sympathies; the valorous and immaculate hero, always of high birth but often in
humble disguise; the convention of high-sounding foreign names, mostly Italian, for the
characters; and the infinite array of stage properties which includes strange lights, damp
trap-doors, extinguished lamps, mouldy hidden manuscripts, creaking hinges, shaking
arras, and the like. All this paraphernalia reappears with amusing sameness, yet
sometimes with tremendous effect, throughout the history of the Gothic novel; and is by
no means extinct even today, though subtler technique now forces it to assume a less
naive and obvious form. An harmonious milieu for a new school had been found, and
the writing world was not slow to grasp the opportunity.
German romance at once responded to the Walpole influence, and soon became a
byword for the weird and ghastly. In England one of the first imitators was the
celebrated Mrs. Barbauld, then Miss Aikin, who in 1773 published an unfinished
fragment called Sir Bertrand, in which the strings of genuine terror were truly touched
with no clumsy hand. A nobleman on a dark and lonely moor, attracted by a tolling bell
and distant light, enters a strange and ancient turreted castle whose doors open and close
and whose bluish will-o'-the-wisps lead up mysterious staircases toward dead hands and
animated black statues. A coffin with a dead lady, whom Sir Bertrand kisses, is finally
reached; and upon the kiss the scene dissolves to give place to a splendid apartment
where the lady, restored to life, holds a banquet in honor of her rescuer. Walpole
admired this tale, though he accorded less respect to an even more prominent offspring
of his Otranto -- The Old English Baron, by Clara Reeve, published in 1777. Truly
enough, this tale lacks the real vibration to the note of outer darkness and mystery
which distinguishes Mrs. Barbauld's fragment; and though less crude than Walpole's
novel, and more artistically economical of horror in its possession of only one spectral
figure, it is nevertheless too definitely insipid for greatness. Here again we have the
virtuous heir to the castle disguised as a peasant and restored to his heritage through the
ghost of his father; and here again we have a case of wide popularity leading to many
editions, dramatization, and ultimate translation into French. Miss Reeve wrote another
weird novel, unfortunately unpublished and lost.
The Gothic novel was now settled as a literary form, and instances multiply
bewilderingly as the eighteenth century draws toward its close. The Recess, written in
1785 by Mrs. Sophia Lee, has the historic element, revolving round the twin daughters
of Mary, Queen of Scots; and though devoid of the supernatural, employs the Walpole
scenery and mechanism with great dexterity. Five years later, and all existing lamps are
paled by the rising of a fresh luminary order -- Mrs. Ann Radcliffe (1764-1823), whose
famous novels made terror and suspense a fashion, and who set new and higher
standards in the domain of macabre and fear-inspiring atmosphere despite a provoking
custom of destroying her own phantoms at the last through labored mechanical
explanations. To the familiar Gothic trappings of her predecessors Mrs. Radcliffe added
a genuine sense of the unearthly in scene and incident which closely approached genius;
every touch of setting and action contributing artistically to the impression of illimitable
frightfulness which she wished to convey. A few sinister details like a track of blood on
castle stairs, a groan from a distant vault, or a weird song in a nocturnal forest can with
her conjure up the most powerful images of imminent horror; surpassing by far the
extravagant and toilsome elaborations of others. Nor are these images in themselves any
the less potent because they are explained away before the end of the novel. Mrs.
Radcliffe's visual imagination was very strong, and appears as much in her delightful
landscape touches -- always in broad, glamorously pictorial outline, and never in close
detail -- as in her weird phantasies. Her prime weaknesses, aside from the habit of
prosaic disillusionment, are a tendency toward erroneous geography and history and a
fatal predilection for bestrewing her novels with insipid little poems, attributed to one or
another of the characters.
Mrs. Radcliffe wrote six novels; The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne (1789), A Sicilian
Romance (1790), The Romance of the Forest (1792), The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794),
The Italian (1797), and Gaston de Blondeville, composed in 1802 but first published
posthumously in 1826. Of these Udolpho is by far the most famous, and may be taken
as a type of the early Gothic tale at its best. It is the chronicle of Emily, a young
Frenchwoman transplanted to an ancient and portentous castle in the Apennines through
the death of her parents and the marriage of her aunt to the lord of the castle -- the
scheming nobleman, Montoni. Mysterious sounds, opened doors, frightful legends, and
a nameless horror in a niche behind a black veil all operate in quick succession to
unnerve the heroine and her faithful attendant, Annette; but finally, after the death of her
aunt, she escapes with the aid of a fellow-prisoner whom she has discovered. On the
way home she stops at a chateau filled with fresh horrors -- the abandoned wing where
the departed chatelaine dwelt, and the bed of death with the black pall -- but is finally
restored to security and happiness with her lover Valancourt, after the clearing-up of a
secret which seemed for a time to involve her birth in mystery. Clearly, this is only
familiar material re-worked; but it is so well re-worked that Udolpho will always be a
classic. Mrs. Radcliffe's characters are puppets, but they are less markedly so than those
of her forerunners. And in atmospheric creation she stands preëminent among those of
her time.
Of Mrs. Radcliffe's countless imitators, the American novelist Charles Brockden Brown
stands the closest in spirit and method. Like her, he injured his creations by natural
explanations; but also like her, he had in uncanny atmospheric power which gives his
horrors a frightful vitality as long as they remain unexplained. He differed from her in
contemptuously discarding the external Gothic paraphernalia and properties and
choosing modern American scenes for his Mysteries; but this repudiation did not extend
to the Gothic spirit and type of incident. Brown's novels involve some memorably
frightful scenes, and excel even Mrs. Radcliffe's in describing the operations of the
perturbed mind. Edgar Hunily starts with a sleep-walker digging a grave, but is later
impaired by touches of Godwinian didacticism. Ormond involves a member of a sinister
secret brotherhood. That and Arthur Mervyn both describe the plague of yellow fever,
which the author had witnessed in Philadelphia and New York. But Brown's most
famous book is Wieland; or, the Transformation (1798), in which a Pennsylvania
German, engulfed by a wave of religious fanaticism, hears "voices" and slays his wife
and children as a sacrifice. His sister Clara, who tells the story, narrowly escapes. The
scene, laid at the woodland estate of Mittingen on the Schuylkill's remote reaches, is
drawn with extreme vividness; and the terrors of Clara, beset by spectral tones,
gathering fears, and the sound of strange footsteps in the lonely house, are all shaped
with truly artistic force. In the end a lame ventriloquial explanation is offered, but the
atmosphere is genuine while it lasts. Carwin, the malign ventriloquist, is a typical villain
of the Manfred or Montoni type.
IV. The Apex Of Gothic Romance
Horror in literature attains a new malignity in the work of Matthew Gregory Lewis
(1773-1818), whose novel The Monk (1796) achieved marvelous popularity and earned
him the nickname "Monk" Lewis. This young author, educated in Germany and
saturated with a body of wild Teuton lore unknown to Mrs. Radcliffe, turned to terror in
forms more violent than his gentle predecessor had ever dared to think of; and produced
as a result a masterpiece of active nightmare whose general Gothic cast is spiced with
added stores of ghoulishness. The story is one of a Spanish monk, Ambrosio, who from
a state of over-proud virtue is tempted to the very nadir of evil by a fiend in the guise of
the maiden Matilda; and who is finally, when awaiting death at the Inquisition's hands,
induced to purchase escape at the price of his soul from the Devil, because he deems
both body and soul already lost. Forthwith the mocking Fiend snatches him to a lonely
place, tells him he has sold his soul in vain since both pardon and a chance for salvation
were approaching at the moment of his hideous bargain, and completes the sardonic
betrayal by rebuking him for his unnatural crimes, and casting his body down a
precipice whilst his soul is borne off for ever to perdition. The novel contains some
appalling descriptions such as the incantation in the vaults beneath the convent cemetery,
the burning of the convent, and the final end of the wretched abbot. In the sub-plot
where the Marquis de las Cisternas meets the spectre of his erring ancestress, The
Bleeding Nun, there are many enormously potent strokes; notably the visit of the
animated corpse to the Marquis's bedside, and the cabalistic ritual whereby the
Wandering Jew helps him to fathom and banish his dead tormentor. Nevertheless The
Monk drags sadly when read as a whole. It is too long and too diffuse, and much of its
potency is marred by flippancy and by an awkwardly excessive reaction against those
canons of decorum which Lewis at first despised as prudish. One great thing may be
said of the author; that he never ruined his ghostly visions with a natural explanation.
He succeeded in breaking up the Radcliffian tradition and expanding the field of the
Gothic novel. Lewis wrote much more than The Monk. His drama, The Castle Spectre,
was produced in 1798, and he later found time to pen other fictions in ballad form -Tales of Terror (1799), The Tales of Wonder (1801), and a succession of translations
from the German. Gothic romances, both English and German, now appeared in
multitudinous and mediocre profusion. Most of them were merely ridiculous in the light
of mature taste, and Miss Austen's famous satire Northanger Abbey was by no means an
unmerited rebuke to a school which had sunk far toward absurdity. This particular
school was petering out, but before its final subordination there arose its last and
greatest figure in the person of Charles Robert Maturin (1782-1824), an obscure and
eccentric Irish clergyman. Out of an ample body of miscellaneous writing which
includes one confused Radcliffian imitation called The Fatal Revenge; or, the Family of
Montorio (1807), Maturin at length envolved the vivid horror-masterpiece of Melmoth,
the Wanderer (1820), in which the Gothic tale climbed to altitudes of sheer spiritual
fright which it had never known before.
Melmoth is the tale of an Irish Gentleman who, in the seventeenth century, obtained a
preternaturally extended life from the Devil at the price of his soul. If he can persuade
another to take the bargain off his hands, and assume his existing state, he can be saved;
but this he can never manage to effect, no matter how assiduously he haunts those
whom despair has made reckless and frantic. The framework of the story is very
clumsy; involving tedious length, digressive episodes, narratives within narratives, and
labored dovetailing and coincidence; but at various points in the endless rambling there
is felt a pulse of power undiscoverable in any previous work of this kind -- a kinship to
the essential truth of human nature, an understanding of the profoundest sources of
actual cosmic fear, and a white heat of sympathetic passion on the writer's part which
makes the book a true document of æsthetic self-expression rather than a mere clever
compound of artifice. No unbiased reader can doubt that with Melmoth an enormous
stride in the evolution of the horror-tale is represented. Fear is taken out of the realm of
the conventional and exalted into a hideous cloud over mankind's very destiny.
Maturin's shudders, the work of one capable of shuddering himself, are of the sort that
convince. Mrs. Radcliffe and Lewis are fair game for the parodist, but it would be
difficult to find a false note in the feverishly intensified action and high atmospheric
tension of the Irishman whose less sophisticated emotions and strain of Celtic
mysticism gave him the finest possible natural equipment for his task. Without a doubt
Maturin is a man of authentic genius, and he was so recognized by Balzac, who grouped
Melmoth with Molière's Don Juan, Gothe's Faust, and Byron's Manfred as the supreme
allegorical figures of modern European literature, and wrote a whimsical piece called
Melmoth Reconciled, in which the Wanderer succeeds in passing his infernal bargain on
to a Parisian bank defaulter, who in turn hands it along a chain of victims until a
reveling gambler dies with it in his possession, and by his damnation ends the curse.
Scott, Rossetti, Thackeray and Baudelaire are the other titans who gave Maturin their
unqualified admiration, and there is much significance in the fact that Oscar Wilde, after
his disgrace and exile, chose for his last days in Paris the assumed name of "Sebastian
Melmoth."
Melmoth contains scenes which even now have not lost their power to evoke dread. It
begins with a deathbed -- an old miser is dying of sheer fright because of something he
has seen, coupled with a manuscript he has read and a family portrait which hangs in an
obscure closet of his centuried home in County Wicklow. He sends to Trinity College,
Dublin, for his nephew John; and the latter upon arriving notes many uncanny things.
The eyes of the portrait in the closet glow horribly, and twice a figure strangely
resembling the portrait appears momentarily at the door. Dread hangs over that house of
the Melmoths, one of whose ancestors, "J. Melmoth, 1646," the portrait represents. The
dying miser declares that this man -- at a date slightly before 1800 -- is alive. Finally the
miser dies, and the nephew is told in the will to destroy both the portrait and a
manuscript to be found in a certain drawer. Reading the manuscript, which was written
late in the seventeenth century by an Englishman named Stanton, young John learns of a
terrible incident in Spain in 1677, when the writer met a horrible fellow-countryman
and was told of how he had stared to death a priest who tried to denounce him as one
filled with fearsome evil. Later, after meeting the man again in London, Stanton is cast
into a madhouse and visited by the stranger, whose approach is heralded by spectral
music and whose eyes have a more than mortal glare. Melmoth the Wanderer -- for such
is the malign visitor -- offers the captive freedom if he will take over his bargain with
the Devil; but like all others whom Melmoth has approached, Stanton is proof against
temptation. Melmoth's description of the horrors of a life in a madhouse, used to tempt
Stanton, is one of the most potent passages of the book. Stanton is at length liberated,
and spends the rest of his life tracking down Melmoth, whose family and ancestral
abode he discovers. With the family he leaves the manuscript, which by young John's
time is badly ruinous and fragmentary. John destroys both portrait and manuscript, but
in sleep is visited by his horrible ancestor, who leaves a black and blue mark on his
wrist.
Young John soon afterward receives as a visitor a shipwrecked Spaniard, Alonzo de
Moncada, who has escaped from compulsory monasticism and from the perils of the
Inquisition. He has suffered horribly -- and the descriptions of his experiences under
torment and in the vaults through which he once essays escape are classic -- but had the
strength to resist Melmoth the Wanderer when approached at his darkest hour in prison.
At the house of a Jew who sheltered him after his escape he discovers a wealth of
manuscript relating other exploits of Melmoth, including his wooing of an Indian island
maiden, Immalee, who later comes into her birthright in Spain and is known as Donna
Isidora; and of his horrible marriage to her by the corpse of a dead anchorite at midnight
in the ruined chapel of a shunned and abhorred monastery. Moncada's narrative to
young John takes up the bulk of Maturin's four-volume book; this disproportion being
considered one of the chief technical faults of the composition.
At last the colloquies of John and Moncada are interrupted by the entrance of Melmoth
the Wanderer himself, his piercing eyes now fading, and decrepitude swiftly overtaking
him. The term of his bargain has approached its end, and he has come home after a
century and a half to meet his fate. Warning all others from the room, no matter what
sounds they may hear in the night, he awaits the end alone. Young John and Moncada
hear frightful ululations, but do not intrude till silence comes toward morning. They
then find the room empty. Clayey footprints lead out a rear door to a cliff overlooking
the sea, and near the edge of the precipice is a track indicating the forcible dragging of
some heavy body. The Wanderer's scarf is found on a crag some distance below the
brink, but nothing further is ever seen or heard of him.
Such is the story, and none can fail to notice the difference between this modulated,
suggestive, and artistically moulded horror and -- to use the words of Professor George
Saintsbury -- "the artful but rather jejune rationalism of Mrs. Radcliffe, and the too
often puerile extravagance, the bad taste, and the sometimes slipshod style of Lewis."
Maturin's style in itself deserves particular praise, for its forcible directness and vitality
lift it altogether above the pompous artificialities of which his predecessors are guilty.
Professor Edith Birkhead, in her history of the Gothic novel, justly observes that "with
all his faults Maturin was the greatest as well as the last of the Goths." Melmoth was
widely read and eventually dramatized, but its late date in the evolution of the Gothic
tale deprived it of the tumultuous popularity of Udolpho and The Monk.
V. The Aftermath Of Gothic Fiction
Meanwhile other hands had not been idle, so that above the dreary plethora of trash like
Marquis von Grosse's Horrid Mysteries (1796), Mrs. Roche's Children of the Abbey
(1798), Mrs. Dacre's Zofloya; or, the Moor (1806), and the poet Shelley's schoolboy
effusions Zastro (1810) and St. Irvine (1811) (both imitations of Zofloya) there arose
many memorable weird works both in English and German. Classic in merit, and
markedly different from its fellows because of its foundation in the Oriental tale rather
than the Walpolesque Gothic novel, is the celebrated History of the Caliph Vathek by
the wealthy dilettante William Beckford, first written in the French language but
published in an English translation before the appearance of the original. Eastern tales,
introduced to European literature early in the eighteenth century through Galland's
French translation of the inexhaustibly opulent Arabian Nights, had become a reigning
fashion; being used both for allegory and for amusement. The sly humour which only
the Eastern mind knows how to mix with weirdness had captivated a sophisticated
generation, till Bagdad and Damascus names became as freely strewn through popular
literature as dashing Italian and Spanish ones were soon to be. Beckford, well read in
Eastern romance, caught the atmosphere with unusual receptivity; and in his fantastic
volume reflected very potently the haughty luxury, sly disillusion, bland cruelty, urbane
treachery, and shadowy spectral horror of the Saracen spirit. His seasoning of the
ridiculous seldom mars the force of his sinister theme, and the tale marches onward with
a phantasmagoric pomp in which the laughter is that of skeletons feasting under
arabesque domes. Vathek is a tale of the grandson of the Caliph Haroun, who, tormented
by that ambition for super-terrestrial power, pleasure and learning which animates the
average Gothic villain or Byronic hero (essentially cognate types), is lured by an evil
genius to seek the subterranean throne of the mighty and fabulous pre-Adamite sultans
in the fiery halls of Eblis, the Mahometan Devil. The descriptions of Vathek's palaces
and diversions, of his scheming soweress-mother Carathis and her witch-tower with the
fifty one-eyed negresses, of his pilgrimage to the haunted ruins of Istakhar (Persepolis)
and of the impish bride Nouronihar whom he treacherously acquired on the way, of
Istakhar's primordial towers and terraces in the burning moonlight of the waste, and of
the terrible Cyclopean halls of Eblis, where, lured by glittering promises, each victim is
compelled to wander in anguish for ever, his right hand upon his blazingly ignited and
eternally burning heart, are triumphs of weird colouring which raise the book to a
permaneat place in English letters. No less notable are the three Episodes of Vathek,
intended for insertion in the tale as narratives of Vathek's fellow-victims in Eblis'
infernal halls, which remained unpublished throughout the author's lifetime and were
discovered as recently as 1909 by the scholar Lewis Melville whilst collecting material
for his Life and Letters of William Beckford. Beckford, however, lacks the essential
mysticism which marks the acutest form of the weird; so that his tales have a certain
knowing Latin hardness and clearness preclusive of sheer panic fright.
But Beckford remained alone in his devotion to the Orient. Other writers, closer to the
Gothic tradition and to European life in general, were content to follow more faithfully
in the lead of Walpole. Among the countless producers of terror-literature in these times
may be mentioned the Utopian economic theorist William Godwin, who followed his
famous but non-supernatural Caleb Williams (1794) with the intendedly weird St. Leon
(1799), in which the theme of the elixir of life, as developed by the imaginary secret
order of "Rosicrucians," is handled with ingeniousness if not with atmospheric
convincingness. This element of Rosicrucianism, fostesed by a wave of popular magical
interest exemplified in the vogue of the charlatan Cagliostro and the publication of
Francis Barrett's The Magus (1801), a curious and compendious treatise on occult
principles and ceremonies, of which a reprint was made as lately as 1896, figures in
Bulwer-Lytton and in many late Gothic novels, especially that remote and enfeebled
posterity which straggled far down into the nineteenth century and was represented by
George W.M. Reynold's Faust and the Demon and Wagner the Wehr-Wolf. Caleb
Williams, though non-supernatural, has many authentic touches of terror. It is the tale of
a servant persecuted by a master whom he has found guilty of murder, and displays an
invention and skill which have kept it alive in a fashion to this day. It was dramatized as
The Iron Chest, and in that form was almost equally celebrated. Godwin, however, was
too much the conscious teacher and prosaic man of thought to create a genuine weird
masterpiece.
His daughter, the wife of Shelley, was much more successful; and her inimitable
Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus (1817) is one of the horror-classics of all
time. Composed in competition with her husband, Lord Byron, and Dr. John William
Polidori in an effort to prove supremacy in horror-making, Mrs. Shelley's Frankenstein
was the only one of the rival narratives to be brought to an elaborate completion; and
criticism has failed to prove that the best parts are due to Shelley rather than to her. The
novel, somewhat tinged but scarcely marred by moral didacticism, tells of the artificial
human being moulded from charnel fragments by Victor Frankenstein, a young Swiss
medical student. Created by its designer "in the mad pride of intellectuality," the
monster possesses full intelligence but owns a hideously loathsome form. It is rejected
by mankind, becomes embittered, and at length begins the successive murder of all
whom Frankenstein loves best, friends and family. It demands that Frankenstein create a
wife for it; and when the student finally refuses in horror lest the world be populated
with such monsters, it departs with a hideous threat "to be with him on his wedding
night." Upon that night the bride is strangled, and from that time on Frankenstein hunts
down the monster, even into the wastes of the Arctic. In the end, whilst seeking shelter
on the ship of the man who tells the story, Frankenstein himself is killed by the
shocking object of his search and creation of his presumptuous pride. Some of the
scenes in Frankenstein are unforgettable, as when the newly animated monster enters its
creator's room, parts the curtains of his bed, and gazes at him in the yellow moonlight
with watery eyes -- "if eyes they may be called." Mrs. Shelley wrote other novels,
including the fairly notable Last Man; but never duplicated the success of her first effort.
It has the true touch of cosmic fear, no matter how much the movement may lag in
places. Dr. Polidori developed his competing idea as a long short story, The Vampyre;
in which we behold a suave villain of the true Gothic or Byronic type, and encounter
some excellent passages of stark fright, including a terrible nocturnal experience in a
shunned Grecian wood.
In this same period Sir Walter Scott frequently concerned himself with the weird,
weaving it into many of his novels and poems, and sometimes producing such
independent bits of narration as The Tapestried Chamber or Wandering Willie's Tale in
Redgauntlet, in the latter of which the force of the spectral and the diabolic is enhanced
by a grotesque homeliness of speech and atmosphere. In 1830 Scott published his
Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft, which still forms one of our best compendia of
European witch-lore. Washington Irving is another famous figure not unconnected with
the weird; for though most of his ghosts are too whimsical and humorous to form
genuinely spectral literature, a distinct inclination in this direction is to be noted in
many of his productions. The German Student in Tales of a Traveler (1824) is a slyly
concise and effective presentation of the old legend of the dead bride, whilst woven into
the cosmic tissue of The Money Diggers in the same volume is more than one hint of
piratical apparitions in the realms which Captain Kidd once roamed. Thomas Moore
also joined the ranks of the macabre artists in the poem Alciphron, which he later
elaborated into the prose novel of The Epicurean (1827). Though merely relating the
adventures of a young Athenian duped by the artifice of cunning Egyptian priests,
Moore manages to infuse much genuine horror into his account of subterranean frights
and wonders beneath the primordial temples of Memphis. De Quincey more than once
revels in grotesque and arabesque terrors, though with a desultoriness and learned pomp
which deny him the rank of specialist.
This era likewise saw the rise of William Harrison Ainsworth, whose romantic novels
teem with the eerie and the gruesome. Capt. Marryat, besides writing such short tales as
The Werewolf, made a memorable contribution in The Phantom Ship (1839), founded
on the legend of the Flying Dutchman, whose spectral and accursed vessel sails for ever
near the Cape of Good Hope. Dickens now rises with occasional weird bits like The
Signalman, a tale of ghastly warning conforming to a very common pattern and touched
with a verisimilitude which allied it as much with the coming psychological school as
with the dying Gothic school. At this time a wave of interest in spiritualistic charlatanry,
mediumism, Hindoo theosophy, and such matters, much like that of the present day,
was flourishing; so that the number of weird tales with a "Psychic" or pseudo-scientific
basis became very considerable. For a number of these the prolific and popular Edward
Bulwer-Lytton was responsible; and despite the large doses of turgid rhetoric and empty
romanticism in his products, his success in the weaving of a certain kind of bizarre
charm cannot be denied.
The House and the Brain, which hints of Rosicrucianism and at a malign and deathless
figure perhaps suggested by Louis XV's mysterious courtier St. Germain, yet survives
as one of the best short haunted-house tales ever written. The novel Zanoni (1842)
contains similar elements more elaborately handled, and introduces a vast unknown
sphere of being pressing on our own world and guarded by a horrible "Dweller of the
Threshold" who haunts those who try to enter and fail. Here we have a benign
brotherhood kept alive from age to age till finally reduced to a single member, and as a
hero an ancient Chaldaean sorcerer surviving in the pristine bloom of youth to perish on
the guillotine of the French Revolution. Though full of the conventional spirit of
romance, marred by a ponderous network of symbolic and didactic meanings, and left
unconvincing through lack of perfect atmospheric realization of the situations hinging
on the spectral world, Zanoni is really an excellent performance as a romantic novel;
and can be read with genuine interest by the not too sophisticated reader. It is amusing
to note that in describing an attempted initiation into the ancient brotherhood the author
cannot escape using the stock Gothic castle of Walpolian lineage.
In A Strange Story (1862) Bulwer-Lytton shows a marked improvement in the creation
of weird images and moods. The novel, despite enormous length, a highly artificial plot
bolstered up by opportune coincidences, and an atmosphere of homiletic pseudo-science
designed to please the matter-of-fact and purposeful Victorian reader, is exceedingly
effective as a narrative; evoking instantaneous and unflagging interest, and furnishing
many potent -- if somewhat melodramatic -- tableaux and climaxes. Again we have the
mysterious user of life's elixir in the person of the soulless magician Margrave, whose
dark exploits stand out with dramatic vividness against the modern background of a
quiet English town and of the Australian bush; and again we have shadowy intimations
of a vast spectral world of the unknown in the very air about us -- this time handled with
much greater power and vitality than in Zanoni. One of the two great incantation
passages, where the hero is driven by a luminous evil spirit to rise at night in his sleep,
take a strange Egyptian wand, and evoke nameless presences in the haunted and
mausoleum-facing pavilion of a famous Renaissance alchemist, truly stands among the
major terror scenes of literature. Just enough is suggested, and just little enough is told.
Unknown words are twice dictated to the sleep-walker, and as he repeats them the
ground trembles, and all the dogs of the countryside begin to bay at half-seen
amorphous shadows that stalk athwart the moonlight. When a third set of unknown
words is prompted, the sleep-walker's spirit suddenly rebels at uttering them, as if the
soul could recognize ultimate abysmal horrors concealed from the mind; and at last an
apparition of an absent sweetheart and good angel breaks the malign spell. This
fragment well illustrates how far Lord Lytton was capable of progressing beyond his
usual pomp and stock romance toward that crystalline essence of artistic fear which
belongs to the domain of poetry. In describing certain details of incantations, Lytton
was greatly indebted to his amusingly serious occult studies, in the course of which he
came in touch with that odd French scholar and cabalist Alphonse Louis Constant
("Eliphas Levy"), who claimed to possess the secrets of ancient magic, and to have
evoked the spectre of the old Grecian wizard Apollonius of Tyana, who lived in Nero's
times.
The romantic, semi-Gothic, quasi-moral tradition here represented was carried far down
the nineteenth century by such authors as Joseph Sheridan LeFanu, Wilkie Collins, the
late Sir H. Rider Haggard (whose She is really remarkably good), Sir A. Conan Doyle,
H. G. Wells, and Robert Louis Stevenson -- the latter of whom, despite an atrocious
tendency toward jaunty mannerisms, created permanent classics in Markheim, The Body
Snatcher, and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Indeed, we may say that this school still
survives; for to it clearly belong such of our contemporary horror-tales as specialise in
events rather than atmospheric details, address the intellect rather than a malign tensity
or psychological verisimilitude, and take a definite stand in sympathy with mankind and
its welfare. It has its undeniable strength, and because of its "human element"
commands a wider audience than does the sheer artistic nightmare. If not quite so potent
as the latter, it is because a diluted product can never achieve the intensity of a
concentrated essence.
Quite alone both as a novel and as a piece of terror-literature stands the famous
Wuthering Heights (1847) by Emily Brontë, with its mad vistas of bleak, windswept
Yorkshire moors and the violent, distorted lives they foster. Though primarily a tale of
life, and of human passions in agony and conflict, its epically cosmic setting affords
room for horror of the most spiritual sort. Heathcliff, the modified Byronic villain-hero,
is a strange dark waif found in the streets as a small child and speaking only a strange
gibberish till adopted by the family he ultimately ruins. That he is in truth a diabolic
spirit rather than a human being is more than once suggested, and the unreal is further
approached in the experience of the visitor who encounters a plaintive child-ghost at a
bough-brushed upper window. Between Heathcliff and Catherine Earnshaw is a tie
deeper and more terrible than human love. After her death he twice disturbs her grave,
and is haunted by an impalpable presence which can be nothing less than her spirit. The
spirit enters his life more and more, and at last he becomes confident of some imminent
mystical reunion. He says he feels a strange change approaching, and ceases to take
nourishment. At night he either walks abroad or opens the casement by his bed. When
he dies the casement is still swinging open to the pouring rain, and a queer smile
pervades the stiffened face. They bury him in a grave beside the mound he has haunted
for eighteen years, and small shepherd boys say that he yet walks with his Catherine in
the churchyard and on the moor when it rains. Their faces, too, are sometimes seen on
rainy nights behind that upper casement at Wuthering Heights. Miss Brontë's eerie
terror is no mere Gothic echoe, but a tense expression of man's shuddering reaction to
the unknown. In this respect, Wuthering Heights becomes the symbol of a literary
transition, and marks the growth of a new and sounder school.
VI. Spectral Literature On The Continent
On the continent literary horror fared well. The celebrated short tales and novels of
Ernst Theodor Wihelm Hoffmann (1776-1822) are a by-word for mellowness of
background and maturity of form, though they incline to levity and extravagance, and
lack the exalted moments of stark, breathless terror which a less sophisticated writer
might have achieved. Generally they convey the grotesque rather than the terrible. Most
artistic of all the continental weird tales is the German classic Undine (1814), by
Friedrich Heinrich Karl, Baron de la Motte Fouqué. In this story of a water-spirit who
married a mortal and gained a human soul there is a delicate fineness of craftsmanship
which makes it notable in any department of literature, and an easy naturalness which
places it close to the genuine folk-myth. It is, in fact, derived from a tale told by the
Renaissance physician and alchemist Paracelsus in his Treatise on Elemental Sprites.
Undine, daughter of a powerful water-prince, was exchanged by her father as a small
child for a fisherman's daughter, in order that she might acquire a soul by wedding a
human being. Meeting the noble youth Huldbrand at the cottage of her fosterfather by
the sea at the edge of a haunted wood, she soon marries him, and accompanies him to
his ancestral castle of Ringstetten. Huldbrand, however, eventually wearies of his wife's
supernatural affiliations, and especially of the appearances of her uncle, the malicious
woodland waterfall-spirit Kuhleborn; a weariness increased by his growing affection for
Bertalda, who turns out to be the fisherman's child for whom Undine was changed. At
length, on a voyage down the Danube, he is provoked by some innocent act of his
devoted wife to utter the angry words which consign her back to her supernatural
element; from which she can, by the laws of her species, return only once -- to kill him,
whether she will or no, if ever he prove unfaithful to her memory. Later, when
Huldbrand is about to be married to Bertalda, Undine returns for her sad duty, and bears
his life away in tears. When he is buried among his fathers in the village churchyard a
veiled, snow-white female figure appears among the mourners, but after the prayer is
seen no more. In her place is seen a little silver spring, which murmurs its way almost
completely around the new grave, and empties into a neighboring lake. The villagers
show it to this day, and say that Undine and her Huldbrand are thus united in death.
Many passages and atmospheric touches in this tale reveal Fouqué as an accomplished
artist in the field of the macabre; especially the descriptions of the haunted wood with
its gigantic snow-white man and various unnamed terrors, which occur early in the
narrative.
Not so well known as Undine, but remarkable for its convincing realism and freedom
from Gothic stock devices, is the Amber Witch of Wilhelm Meinhold, another product
of the German fantastic genius of the earlier nineteenth century. This tale, which is laid
in the time of the Thirty Years' War, purports to be a clergyman's manuscript found in
an old church at Coserow, and centres round the writer's daughter, Maria Schweidler,
who is wrongly accused of witchcraft. She has found a deposit of amber which she
keeps secret for various reasons, and the unexplained wealth obtained from this lends
colour to the accusation; an accusation instigated by the malice of the wolf-hunting
nobleman Wittich Appelmann, who has vainly pursued her with ignoble designs. The
deeds of a real witch, who afterward comes to a horrible supernatural end in prison, are
glibly imputed to the hapless Maria; and after a typical witchcraft trial with forced
confessions under torture she is about to be burned at the stake when saved just in time
by her lover, a noble youth from a neighboring district. Meinhold's great strength is in
his air of casual and realistic verisimilitude, which intensifies our suspense and sense of
the unseen by half persuading us that the menacing events must somehow be either the
truth or very dose to the truth. Indeed, so thorough is this realism that a popular
magazine once published the main points of The Amber Witch as an actual occurrence
of the seventeenth century!
In the present generation German horror-fiction is most notably represented by Hanns
Heinz Ewers, who brings to bear on his dark conceptions an effective knowledge of
modern psychology. Novels like The Sorcerer's Apprentice and Alrune, and short
stories like The Spider, contain distinctive qualities which raise them to a classic level.
But France as well as Germany has been active in the realm of weirdness. Victor Hugo,
in such tales as Hans of Iceland, and Balzac, in The Wild Ass's Skin, Seraphita, and
Louis Lambert, both employ supernaturalism to a greater or less extent; though
generally only as a means to some more human end, and without the sincere and
dæmonic intensity which characterizes the born artist in shadows. It is in Theophile
Gautier that we first seem to find an authentic French sense of the unreal world, and
here there appears a spectral mystery which, though not continuously used, is
recognizable at once as something alike genuine and profound. Short tales like Avatar,
The Foot of the Mummy, and Clarimonde display glimpses of forbidden vistas that
allure, tantalize, and sometime horrify; whilst the Egyptian visions evoked in One of
Cleopatra's Nights are of the keenest and most expressive potency. Gautier captured the
inmost soul of æon-weighted Egypt, with its cryptic life and Cyclopean architecture,
and uttered once and for all the eternal horror of its nether world of catacombs, where to
the end of time millions of stiff, spiced corpses will stare up in the blackness with glassy
eyes, awaiting some awesome and unrelatable summons. Gustave Flaubert ably
continued the tradition of Gautier in orgies of poetic phantasy like The Temptation of St.
Anthony, and but for a strong realistic bias might have been an arch-weaver of tapestried
terrors. Later on we see the stream divide, producing strange poets and fantaisistes of
the symbolic and decadent schools whose dark interests really centre more in
abnormalities of human thought and instinct than in the actual supernatural, and subtle
story-tellers whose thrills are quite directly derived from the night-black wells of
cosmic unreality. Of the former class of "artists in sin" the illustrious poet Baudelaire,
influenced vastly by Poe, is the supreme type; whilst the psychological novelist
Joris-Karl Huysmans, a true child of the eighteen-nineties, is at once the summation and
finale. The latter and purely narrative class is continued by Prosper Merimée, whose
Venus of Ille presents in terse and convincing prose the same ancient statue-bride theme
which Thomas Moore cast in ballad form in The Ring.
The horror-tales of the powerful and cynical Guy de Maupassant, written as his final
madness gradually overtook him, present individualities of their own; being rather the
morbid outpourings of a realistic mind in a pathological state than the healthy
imaginative products of a vision naturally disposed toward phantasy and sensitive to the
normal illusions of the unseen. Nevertheless they are of the keenest interest and
poignancy; suggesting with marvelous force the imminence of nameless terrors, and the
relentless dogging of an ill-starred individual by hideous and menacing representatives
of the outer blackness. Of these stories The Horla is generally regarded as the
masterpiece. Relating the advent to France of an invisible being who lives on water and
milk, sways the minds of others, and seems to be the vanguard of a horde of
extra-terrestrial organisms arrived on earth to subjugate and overwhelm mankind, this
tense narrative is perhaps without a peer in its particular department; notwithstanding its
indebtedness to a tale by the American Fitz-James O'Brien for details in describing the
actual presence of the unseen monster. Other potently dark creations of de Maupassant
are Who Knows?, The Spectre, He, The Diary of a Madman, The White Wolf, On the
River, and the grisly verses entitled Horror.
The collaborators Erckmann-Chatrian enriched French literature with many spectral
fancies like The Man-Wolf, in which a transmitted curse works toward its end in a
traditional Gothic-castle setting. Their power of creating a shuddering midnight
atmosphere was tremendous despite a tendency toward natural explanations and
scientific wonders; and few short tales contain greater horror than The Invisible Eye,
where a malignant old hag weaves nocturnal hypnotic spells which induce the
successive occupants of a certain inn chamber to hang themselves on a cross-beam. The
Owl's Ear and The Waters of Death are full of engulfing darkness and mystery, the
latter embodying the familiar over-grown-spider theme so frequently employed by
weird fictionists. Villiers de l'Isle Adam likewise followed the macabre school; his
Torture by Hope, the tale of a stake-condemned prisoner permitted to escape in order to
feel the pangs of recapture, being held by some to constitute the most harrowing short
story in literature. This type, however, is less a part of the weird tradition than a class
peculiar to itself -- the so-called conte cruel, in which the wrenching of the emotions is
accomplished through dramatic tantalizations, frustrations, and gruesome physical
horrors. Almost wholly devoted to this form is the living writer Maurice Level, whose
very brief episodes have lent themselves so readily to theatrical adaptation in the
"thrillers" of the Grand Guignol. As a matter of fact, the French genius is more naturally
suited to this dark realism than to the suggestion of the unseen; since the latter process
requires, for its best and most sympathetic development on a large scale, the inherent
mysticism of the Northern mind.
A very flourishing, though till recently quite hidden, branch of weird literature is that of
the Jews, kept alive and nourished in obscurity by the sombre heritage of early Eastern
magic, apocalyptic literature, and cabbalism. The Semitic mind, like the Celtic and
Teutonic, seems to possess marked mystical inclinations; and the wealth of underground
horror-lore surviving in ghettoes and synagogues must be much more considerable than
is generally imagined. Cabbalism itself, so prominent during the Middle Ages, is a
system of philosophy explaining the universe as emanations of the Deity, and involving
the existence of strange spiritual realms and beings apart from the visible world of
which dark glimpses may be obtained through certain secret incantations. Its ritual is
bound up with mystical interpretations of the Old Testament, and attributes an esoteric
significance to each letter of the Hebrew alphabet -- a circumstance which has imparted
to Hebrew letters a sort of spectral glamour and potency in the popular literature of
magic. Jewish folklore has preserved much of the terror and mystery of the past, and
when more thoroughly studied is likely to exert considerable influence on weird fiction.
The best examples of its literary use so far are the German novel The Golem, by
Gustave Meyrink, and the drama The Dyhbuk, by the Jewish writer using the
pseudonym "Ansky." The former, with its haunting shadowy suggestions of marvels
and horrors just beyond reach, is laid in Prague, and describes with singular mastery
that city's ancient ghetto with its spectral, peaked gables. The name is derived from a
fabulous artificial giant supposed to be made and animated by mediæval rabbis
according to a certain cryptic formula. The Dyhbuk, translated and produced in America
in 1925, and more recently produced as an opera, describes with singular power the
possession of a living body by the evil soul of a dead man. Both golems and dyhbuks
are fixed types, and serve as frequent ingredients of later Jewish tradition.
VII. Edgar Allan Poe
In the eighteen-thirties occurred a literary dawn directly affecting not only the history of
the weird tale, but that of short fiction as a whole; and indirectly moulding the trends
and fortunes of a great European æsthetic school. It is our good fortune as Americans to
be able to claim that dawn as our own, for it came in the person of our most illustrious
and unfortunate fellow-countryman Edgar Allan Poe. Poe's fame has been subject to
curious undulations, and it is now a fashion amongst the "advanced intelligentsia" to
minimize his importance both as an artist and as an influence; but it would be hard for
any mature and reflective critic to deny the tremendous value of his work and the
persuasive potency of his mind as an opener of artistic vistas. True, his type of outlook
may have been anticipated; but it was he who first realized its possibilities and gave it
supreme form and systematic expression. True also, that subsequent writers may have
produced greater single tales than his; but again we must comprehend that it was only
he who taught them by example and precept the art which they, having the way cleared
for them and given an explicit guide, were perhaps able to carry to greater lengths.
Whatever his limitations, Poe did that which no one else ever did or could have done;
and to him we owe the modern horror-story in its final and perfected state.
Before Poe the bulk of weird writers had worked largely in the dark; without an
understanding of the psychological basis of the horror appeal, and hampered by more or
less of conformity to certain empty literary conventions such as the happy ending, virtue
rewarded, and in general a hollow moral didacticism, acceptance of popular standards
and values, and striving of the author to obtrude his own emotions into the story and
take sides with the partisans of the majority's artificial ideas. Poe, on the other hand,
perceived the essential impersonality of the real artist; and knew that the function of
creative fiction is merely to express and interpret events and sensations as they are,
regardless of how they tend or what they prove -- good or evil, attractive or repulsive,
stimulating or depressing, with the author always acting as a vivid and detached
chronicler rather than as a teacher, sympathizer, or vendor of opinion. He saw clearly
that all phases of life and thought are equally eligible as a subject matter for the artist,
and being inclined by temperament to strangeness and gloom, decided to be the
interpreter of those powerful feelings and frequent happenings which attend pain rather
than pleasure, decay rather than growth, terror rather than tranquility, and which are
fundamentally either adverse or indifferent to the tastes and traditional outward
sentiments of mankind, and to the health, sanity, and normal expansive welfare of the
species.
Poe's spectres thus acquired a convincing malignity possessed by none of their
predecessors, and established a new standard of realism in the annals of literary horror.
The impersonal and artistic intent, moreover, was aided by a scientific attitude not often
found before; whereby Poe studied the human mind rather than the usages of Gothic
fiction, and worked with an analytical knowledge of terror's true sources which doubled
the force of his narratives and emancipated him from all the absurdities inherent in
merely conventional shudder-coining. This example having been set, later authors were
naturally forced to conform to it in order to compete at all; so that in this way a definite
change begin to affect the main stream of macabre writing. Poe, too, set a fashion in
consummate craftsmanship; and although today some of his own work seems slightly
melodramatic and unsophisticated, we can constantly trace his influence in such things
as the maintenance of a single mood and achievement of a single impression in a tale,
and the rigorous paring down of incidents to such as have a direct bearing on the plot
and will figure prominently in the climax. Truly may it be said that Poe invented the
short story in its present form. His elevation of disease, perversity, and decay to the
level of artistically expressible themes was likewise infinitely far-reaching in effect; for
avidly seized, sponsored, and intensified by his eminent French admirer Charles Pierre
Baudelaire, it became the nucleus of the principal æsthetic movements in France, thus
making Poe in a sense the father of the Decadents and the Symbolists.
Poet and critic by nature and supreme attainment, logician and philosopher by taste and
mannerism, Poe was by no means immune from defects and affectations. His pretence
to profound and obscure scholarship, his blundering ventures in stilted and laboured
pseudo-humor, and his often vitriolic outbursts of critical prejudice must all be
recognized and forgiven. Beyond and above them, and dwarfing them to insignificance,
was a master's vision of the terror that stalks about and within us, and the worm that
writhes and slavers in the hideously close abyss. Penetrating to every festering horror in
the gaily painted mockery called existence, and in the solemn masquerade called human
thought and feeling, that vision had power to project itself in blackly magical
crystallisations and transmutations; till there bloomed in the sterile America of the
thirties and forties such a moon-nourished garden of gorgeous poison fungi as not even
the nether slopes of Saturn might boast. Verses and tales alike sustain the burthen of
cosmic panic. The raven whose noisome beak pierces the heart, the ghouls that toll iron
bells in pestilential steeples, the vault of Ulalume in the black October night, the
shocking spires and domes under the sea, the "wild, weird clime that lieth, sublime, out
of Space -- out of Time" -- all these things and more leer at us amidst maniacal rattlings
in the seething nightmare of the poetry. And in the prose there yawn open for us the
very jaws of the pit -- inconceivable abnormalities slyly hinted into a horrible
half-knowledge by words whose innocence we scarcely doubt till the cracked tension of
the speaker's hollow voice bids us fear their nameless implications; dæmoniac patterns
and presences slumbering noxiously till waked for one phobic instant into a shrieking
revelation that cackles itself to sudden madness or explodes in memorable and
cataclysmic echoes. A Witches' Sabbath of horror flinging off decorous robes is flashed
before us -- a sight the more monstrous because of the scientific skill with which every
particular is marshaled and brought into an easy apparent relation to the known
gruesomeness of material life.
Poe's tales, of course, fall into several classes; some of which contain a purer essence of
spiritual horror than others. The tales of logic and ratiocination, forerunners of the
modern detective story, are not to be included at all in weird literature; whilst certain
others, probably influenced considerably by Hoffmann, possess an extravagance which
relegates them to the borderline of the grotesque. Still a third group deal with abnormal
psychology and monomania in such a way as to express terror but not weirdness. A
substantial residuum, however, represent the literature of supernatural horror in its
acutest form; and give their author a permanent and unassailable place as deity and
fountainhead of all modern diabolic fiction. Who can forget the terrible swollen ship
poised on the billow-chasm's edge in MS. Found in a Bottle -- the dark intimations of
her unhallowed age and monstrous growth, her sinister crew of unseeing greybeards,
and her frightful southward rush under full sail through the ice of the Antarctic night,
sucked onward by some resistless devil-current toward a vortex of eldritch
enlightenment which must end in destruction?
Then there is the unutterable M. Valdemar, kept together by hypnotism for seven
months after his death, and uttering frantic sounds but a moment before the breaking of
the spell leaves him "a nearly liquid mass of loathsome, of detestable putrescence." In
the Narrative of A. Gordon Pym the voyagers reach first a strange south polar land of
murderous savages where nothing is white and where vast rocky ravines have the form
of titanic Egyptian letters spelling terrible primal arcana of earth; and thereafter a still
more mysterious realm where everything is white, and where shrouded giants and
snowy-plumed birds guard a cryptic cataract of mist which empties from immeasurable
celestial heights into a torrid milky sea. Metzengerstein horrifies with its malign hints of
a monstrous metempsychosis -- the mad nobleman who burns the stable of his
hereditary foe; the colossal unknown horse that issues from the blazing building after
the owner has perished therein; the vanishing bit of ancient tapestry where was shown
the giant horse of the victim's ancestor in the Crusades; the madman's wild and constant
riding on the great horse, and his fear and hatred of the steed; the meaningless
prophecies that brood obscurely over the warring houses; and finally, the burning of the
madman's palace and the death therein of the owner, borne helpless into the flames and
up the vast staircase astride the beast he had ridden so strangely. Afterward the rising
smoke of the ruins take the form of a gigantic horse. The Man of the Crowd, telling of
one who roams day and night to mingle with streams of people as if afraid to be alone,
has quieter effects, but implies nothing less of cosmic fear. Poe's mind was never far
from terror and decay, and we see in every tale, poem, and philosophical dialogue a
tense eagerness to fathom unplumbed wells of night, to pierce the veil of death, and to
reign in fancy as lord of the frightful mysteries of time and space.
Certain of Poe's tales possess an almost absolute perfection of artistic form which makes
them veritable beacon-lights in the province of the short story. Poe could, when he
wished, give to his prose a richly poetic cast; employing that archaic and Orientalised
style with jeweled phrase, quasi-Biblical repetition, and recurrent burthen so
successfully used by later writers like Oscar Wilde and Lord Dunsany; and in the cases
where he has done this we have an effect of lyrical phantasy almost narcotic in essence
-- an opium pageant of dream in the language of dream, with every unnatural colour and
grotesque image bodied forth in a symphony of corresponding sound. The Masque of
the Red Death, Silence, a Fable, and Shadow, a Parable, are assuredly poems in every
sense of the word save the metrical one, and owe as much of their power to aural
cadence as to visual imagery. But it is in two of the less openly poetic tales, Ligeia and
The Fall of the House of Usher -- especially the latter -- that one finds those very
summits of artistry whereby Poe takes his place at the head of fictional miniaturists.
Simple and straightforward in plot, both of these tales owe their supreme magic to the
cunning development which appears in the selection and collocation of every least
incident. Ligeia tells of a first wife of lofty and mysterious origin, who after death
returns through a preternatural force of will to take possession of the body of a second
wife; imposing even her physical appearance on the temporary reanimated corpse of her
victim at the last moment. Despite a suspicion of prolixity and topheaviness, the
narrative reaches its terrific climax with relentless power. Usher, whose superiority in
detail and proportion is very marked, hints shudderingly of obscure life in inorganic
things, and displays an abnormally linked trinity of entities at the end of a long and
isolated family history -- a brother, his twin sister, and their incredibly ancient house all
sharing a single soul and meeting one common dissolution at the same moment.
These bizarre conceptions, so awkward in unskillful hands, become under Poe's spell
living and convincing terrors to haunt our nights; and all because the author understood
so perfectly the very mechanics and physiology of fear and strangeness -- the essential
details to emphasise, the precise incongruities and conceits to select as preliminaries or
concomitants to horror, the exact incidents and allusions to throw out innocently in
advance as symbols or prefigurings of each major step toward the hideous dénouement
to come, the nice adjustments of cumulative force and the unerring accuracy in linkage
of parts which make for faultless unity throughout and thunderous effectiveness at the
climactic moment, the delicate nuances of scenic and landscape value to select in
establishing and sustaining the desired mood and vitalising the desired illusion -principles of this kind, and dozens of obscurer ones too elusive to be described or even
fully comprehended by any ordinary commentator. Melodrama and unsophistication
there may be -- we are told of one fastidious Frenchman who could not bear to read Poe
except in Baudelaire's urbane and Gallically modulated translation -- but all traces of
such things are wholly overshadowed by a potent and inborn sense of the spectral, the
morbid, and the horrible which gushed forth from every cell of the artist's creative
mentality and stamped his macabre work with the ineffaceable mark of supreme genius.
Poe's weird tales are alive in a manner that few others can ever hope to be.
Like most fantaisistes, Poe excels in incidents and broad narrative effects rather than in
character drawing. His typical protagonist is generally a dark, handsome, proud,
melancholy, intellectual, highly sensitive, capricious, introspective, isolated, and
sometimes slightly mad gentleman of ancient family and opulent circumstances; usually
deeply learned in strange lore, and darkly ambitious of penetrating to forbidden secrets
of the universe. Aside from a high-sounding name, this character obviously derives little
from the early Gothic novel; for he is clearly neither the wooden hero nor the diabolical
villain of Radcliffian or Ludovician romance. Indirectly, however, he does possess a
sort of genealogical connection; since his gloomy, ambitious and anti-social qualities
savour strongly of the typical Byronic hero, who in turn is definitely an offspring,of the
Gothic Manfreds, Montonis, and Ambrosios. More particular qualities appear to be
derived from the psychology of Poe himself, who certainly possessed much of the
depression, sensitiveness, mad aspiration, loneliness, and extravagant freakishness
which he attributes to his haughty and solitary victims of Fate.
VIII. The Weird Tradition In America
The public for whom Poe wrote, though grossly unappreciative of his art, was by no
means accustomed to the horrors with which he dealt. America, besides inheriting the
usual dark folk-lore of Europe, had an additional fund of weird associations to draw
upon; so that spectral legends had already been recognised as fruitful subject-matter for
literature. Charles Brockden Brown had achieved phenomenal fame with his Radcliffian
romances, and Washington Irving's lighter treatment of eerie themes had quickly
become classic. This additional fund proceeded, as Paul Elmer More has pointed out,
from the keen spiritual and theological interests of the first colonists, plus the strange
and forbidding nature of the scene into which they were plunged. The vast and gloomy
virgin forests in whose perpetual twilight all terrors might well lurk; the hordes of
coppery Indians whose strange, saturnine visages and violent customs hinted strongly at
traces of infernal origin; the free rein given tinder the influence of Puritan theocracy to
all manner of notions respecting man's relation to the stern and vengeful God of the
Calvinists, and to the sulphureous Adversary of that God, about whom so much was
thundered in the pulpits each Sunday; and the morbid introspection developed by an
isolated backwoods life devoid of normal amusements and of the recreational mood,
harassed by commands for theological self-examination, keyed to unnatural emotional
repression, and forming above all a mere grim struggle for survival -- all these things
conspired to produce an environment in which the black whisperings of sinister
grandams were heard far beyond the chimney corner, and in which tales of witchcraft
and unbelievable secret monstrosities lingered long after the dread days of the Salem
nightmare.
Poe represents the newer, more disillusioned, and more technically finished of the weird
schools that rose out of this propitious milieu. Another school -- the tradition of moral
values, gentle restraint, and mild, leisurely phantasy tinged more or less with the
whimsical -- was represented by another famous, misunderstood, and lonely figure in
American letters -- the shy and sensitive Nathaniel Hawthorne, scion of antique Salem
and great-grandson of one of the bloodiest of the old witchcraft judges. In Hawthorne
we have none of the violence, the daring, the high colouring, the intense dramatic sense,
the cosmic malignity, and the undivided and impersonal artistry of Poe. Here, instead, is
a gentle soul cramped by the Puritanism of early New England; shadowed and wistful,
and grieved at an unmoral universe which everywhere transcends the conventional
patterns thought by our forefathers to represent divine and immutable law. Evil, a very
real force to Hawthorne, appears on every hand as a lurking and conquering adversary;
and the visible world becomes in his fancy a theatre of infinite tragedy and woe, with
unseen half-existent influences hovering over it and through it, battling for supremacy
and moulding the destinies of the hapless mortals who form its vain and self-deluded
population. The heritage of American weirdness was his to a most intense degree, and
he saw a dismal throng of vague specters behind the common phenomena of life; but he
was not disinterested enough to value impressions, sensations, and beauties of narration
for their own sake. He must needs weave his phantasy into some quietly melancholy
fabric of didactic or allegorical cast, in which his meekly resigned cynicism may display
with naive moral appraisal the perfidy of a human race which he cannot cease to cherish
and mourn despite his insight into its hypocrisy. Supernatural horror, then, is never a
primarily object with Hawthorne; though its impulses were so deeply woven into his
personality that he cannot help suggesting it with the force of genius when he calls upon
the unreal world to illustrate the pensive sermon he wishes to preach.
Hawthorne's intimations of the weird, always gentle, elusive, and restrained, may be
traced throughout his work. The mood that produced them found one delightful vent in
the Teutonised retelling of classic myths for children contained in A Wonder Book and
Tanglewood Tales, and at other times exercised itself in casting a certain strangeness
and intangible witchery or malevolence over events not meant to be actually
supernatural; as in the macabre posthumous novel Dr. Grimshawe's Secret, which
invests with a peculiar sort of repulsion a house existing to this day in Salem, and
abutting on the ancient Charter Street Burying Ground. In The Marble Faun, whose
design was sketched out in an Italian villa reputed to be haunted, a tremendous
background of genuine phantasy and mystery palpitates just beyond the common
reader's sight; and glimpses of fabulous blood in mortal veins are hinted at during the
course of a romance which cannot help being interesting despite the persistent incubus
of moral allegory, anti-Popery propaganda, and a Puritan prudery which has caused the
modern writer D. H. Lawrence to express a longing to treat the author in a highly
undignified manner. Septimius Felton, a posthumous novel whose, idea was to have
been elaborated and incorporated into the unfinished Dolliver Romance, touches on the
Elixir of Life in a more or less capable fashion whilst the notes for a never-written tale
to be called The Ancestral Footstep show what Hawthorne would have done with an
intensive treatment of an old English superstition -- that of an ancient and accursed line
whose members left footprints of blood as they walked-which appears incidentally in
both Septimius Felton and Dr. Grimshawe's Secret.
Many of Hawthorne's shorter tales exhibit weirdness, either of atmosphere or of incident,
to a remarkable degree. Edward Randolph's Portrait, in Legends of the Province House,
has its diabolic moments. The Minister's Black Veil (founded on an actual incident) and
The Ambitious Guest imply much more than they state, whilst Ethan Grand -- a
fragment of a longer work never completed -- rises to genuine heights of cosmic fear
with its vignette of the wild hill country and the blazing, desolate lime-kilns, and its
delineation of the Byronic "unpardonable sinner," whose troubled life ends with a peal
of fearful laughter in the night as he seeks rest amidst the flames of the furnace. Some of
Hawthorne's notes tell of weird tales he would have written had he lived longer -- an
especially vivid plot being that concerning a baffling stranger who appeared now and
then in public assemblies, and who was at last followed and found to come and go from
a very ancient grave.
But foremost as a finished, artistic unit among all our author's weird material is the
famous and exquisitely wrought novel, The House of the Seven Gables, in which the
relentless working out of an ancestral curse is developed with astonishing power against
the sinister background of a very ancient Salem house -- one of those peaked Gothic
affairs which formed the first regular building-up of our New England coast towns but
which gave way after the seventeenth century to the more familiar gambrel-roofed or
classic Georgian types now known as "Colonial." Of these old gabled Gothic houses
scarcely a dozen are to be seen today in their original condition throughout the United
States, but one well known to Hawthorne still stands in Turner Street, Salem, and is
pointed out with doubtful authority as the scene and inspiration of the romance. Such an
edifice, with its spectral peaks, its clustered chimneys, its overhanging second story, its
grotesque corner-brackets, and its diamond-paned lattice windows, is indeed an object
well calculated to evoke sombre reflections; typifying as it does the dark Puritan age of
concealed horror and witch-whispers which preceded the beauty, rationality, and
spaciousness of the eighteenth century. Hawthorne saw many in his youth, and knew the
black tales connected with some of them. He heard, too, many rumours of a curse upon
his own line as the result of his great-grandfather's severity as a witchcraft judge in
1692.
From this setting came the immortal tale -- New England's greatest contribution to
weird literature -- and we can feel in an instant the authenticity of the atomosphere
presented to us. Stealthy horror and disease lurk within the weather-blackened,
moss-crusted, and elm-shadowed walls of the archaic dwelling so vividly displayed, and
we grasp the brooding malignity of the place when we read that its builder -- old
Colonel Pyncheon -- snatched the land with peculiar ruthlessness from its original
settler, Matthew Maule, whom he condemned to the gallows as a wizard in the year of
the panic. Maule died cursing old Pyncheon -- "God will give him blood to drink" -- and
the waters of the old well on the seized land turned bitter. Maule's carpenter son
consented to build the great gabled house for his fathet's triumphant enemy, but the old
Colonel died strangely on the day of its dedication. Then followed generations of odd
vicissitudes, with queer whispers about the dark powers of the Maules, and sometimes
terrible ends befalling the Pyncheons.
The overshadowing malevolence of the ancient house -- almost as alive as Poe's House
of Usher, though in a subtler way -- pervades the tale as a recurrent motif pervades in
operatic tragedy; and when the main story is reached, we behold the modern Pyncheons
in a pitiable state of decay. Poor old Hepzibah, the eccentric reduced gentlewoman;
childlike, unfortunate Clifford, just released from undeserved imprisonment; sly and
treacherous judge Pyncheon, who is the old Colonel an over again -- all these figures are
tremendous symbols, and are well matched by the stunted vegetation and anæmic fowls
in the garden. It was almost a pity to supply a fairly happy ending, with a union of
sprightly Phœbe, cousin and last scion of the Pyncheons, to the prepossessing young
man who turns out to be the last of the Maules. This union, presumably, ends the curse.
Hawthorne avoids all violence of diction or movement, and keeps his implications of
terror well in the background; but occasional glimpses amply serve to sustain the mood
and redeem the work from pure allegorical aridity. Incidents like the bewitching of
Alice Pyncheon in the early eighteenth century, and the spectral music of her
harpsichord which precedes a death in the family -- the latter a variant of an
immemorial type of Aryan myth -- link the action directly with the supernatural; whilst
the dead nocturnal vigil of old judge Pyncheon in the ancient parlour, with his
frightfully ticking watch, is stark horror of the most poignant and genuine sort. The way
in which the judge's death is first adumbrated by the motions and sniffing of a strange
cat outside the window, long before the fact is suspected by the reader or by any of the
characters, is a stroke of genius which Poe could not have surpassed. Later the strange
cat watches intently outside that same window in the night and on the next day, for -something. It is clearly the psychopomp of primeval myth, fitted and adapted with
infinite deftness to its latter-day setting.
But Hawthorne left no well-defined literary posterity. His mood and attitude belonged
to the age which closed with him, and it is the spirit of Poe -- who so clearly and
realistically understood the natural basis of the horror-appeal and the correct mechanics
of its achievement -- which survived and blossomed. Among the earliest of Poe's
disciples may be reckoned the brilliant young Irishman Fitz James O'Brien (1828-1862),
who became naturalised as an American and perished honourably in the Civil War. It is
he who gave us What Was It?, the first well-shaped short story of a tangible but
invisible being, and the prototype of de Maupassant's Horla; he also who created the
inimitable Diamond Lens, in which a young microscopist falls in love with a maiden of
in infinitesimal world which he has discovered in a drop of water. O'Brien's early death
undoubtedly deprived us of some masterful tales of strangeness and terror, though his
genius was not, properly speaking, of the same titan quality which characterised Poe
and Hawthorne.
Closer to real greatness was the eccentric and saturnine journalist Ambrose Bierce, born
in 1842; who likewise entered the Civil War, but survived to write some immortal tales
and to disappear in 1913 in as great a cloud of mystery as any he ever evoked from his
nightmare fancy. Bierce was a satirist and pamphleteer of note, but the bulk of his
artistic reputation must rest upon his grim and savage short stories; a large number of
which deal with the Civil War and form the most vivid and realistic expression which
that conflict has yet received in fiction. Virtually all of Bierce's tales are tales of horror;
and whilst many of them treat only of the physical and psychological horrors within
Nature, a substantial proportion admit the malignly supernatural and form a leading
element in America's fund of weird literature. Mr. Samuel Loveman, a living poet and
critic who was personally acquainted with Bierce, thus sums up the genius of the great
"shadow-maker" in the preface to some of his letters:
In Bierce the evocation of horror becomes for the first time not so much
the prescription or perversion of Poe and Maupassant, but an atmosphere
definite and uncannily precise. Words, so simple that one would be prone
to ascribe them to the limitations of a literary hwk, take on an unholy
horror, a new and unguessed transformation. In Poe one finds it a tour de
force, in Maupassant a nervous engagement of the flagellated climax. To
Bierce, simply and sincerely, diabolism held in its tormented death a
legitimate and reliant means to the end. Yet a tacit confirmation with
Nature is in every instance insisted upon.
In The Death of Halpin Frayser flowers, verdure, and the boughs and
leaves of trees are magnificently placed as an opposing foil to unnatural
malignity. Not the accustomed golden world, but a world pervaded with
the mystery of blue and the breathless recalcitrance of dreams is Bierces.
Yet, curiously, inhumanity is not altogether absent.
The "inhumanity" mentioned by Mr. Loveman finds vent in a rare strain of sardonic
comedy and graveyard humour, and a kind of delight in images of cruelty and
tantalising disappointment. The former quality is well illustrated by some of the
subtitles in the darker narratives; such as "One does not always eat what is on the table",
describing a body laid out for a coroner's inquest, and "A man though naked may be in
rags," referring to a frightfully mangled corpse.
Bierce's work is in general somewhat uneven. Many of the stories are obviously
mechanical, and marred by a jaunty and commonplacely artificial style derived from
journalistic models; but the grim malevolence stalking through all of them is
unmistakable, and several stand out as permanent mountain-peaks of American weird
writing. The Death of Halpin Frayser, called by Frederic Taber Cooper the most
fiendishly ghastly tale in the literature of the Anglo-Saxon race, tells of a body skulking
by night without a soul in a weird and horribly ensanguined wood, and of a man beset
by ancestral memories who met death at the claws of that which had been his fervently
loved mother. The Damned Thing, frequently copied in popular anthologies, chronicles
the hideous devastations of an invisible entity that waddles and flounders on the hills
and in the wheatfields by night and day. The Suitable Surroundings evoke's with
singular subtlety yet apparent simplicity a piercing sense of the terror which may reside
in the written word. In the story the weird author Colston says to his friend Marsh, "You
are brave enough to read me in a street-car, but -- in a deserted house -- alone -- in the
forest -- at night! Bah! I have a manuscript in my pocket that would kill you!" Marsh
reads the manuscript in "the suitable surroundings -- and it does kill him. The Middle
Toe of the Right Foot is clumsily developed, but has a powerful climax. A man named
Manton has horribly killed his two children and his wife, the latter of whom lacked the
middle toe of the right foot. Ten years later he returns much altered to the
neighbourhood; and, being secretly recognised, is provoked into a bowie-knife duel in
the dark, to be held in the now abandond house where his crime was committed. When
the moment of the duel arrives a trick is played upon him; and he is left without an
antagonist, shut in a night-black ground floor room of the reputedly haunted edifice,
with the thick dust of a decade on every hand. No knife is drawn against him, for only a
thorough scare is intended; but on the next day he is found crouched in a corner with
distorted face, dead of sheer fright at something he has seen. The only clue visible to the
discoverers is one having terrible implications: "In the dust of years that lay thick upon
the floor -- leading from the door by which they had entered, straight across the room to
within a yard of Manton's crouching corpse -- were three parallel lines of footprints -light but definite impressions of bare feet, the outer ones those of small children, the
inner a woman's. From the point at which they ended they did not return; they pointed
all one way." And, of course, the woman's prints showed a lack of the middle toe of the
right foot. The Spook House, told with a severely homely air of journalistic
verisimilitude, conveys terrible hints of shocking mystery. In 1858 an entire family of
seven persons disappears suddenly and unaccountably from a plantation house in
eastern Kentucky, leaving all its possessions untouched -- furniture, clothing, food
supplies, horses, cattle, and slaves. About a year later two men of high standing are
forced by a storm to take shelter in the deserted dwelling, and in so doing stumble into a
strange subterranean room lit by an unaccountable greenish light and having an iron
door which cannot be opened from within. In this room lie the decayed corpses of all
the missing family; and as one of the discoverers rushes forward to embrace a body he
seems to recognise, the other is so overpowered by a strange foetor that he accidentally
shuts his companion in the vault and loses consciousness. Recovering his senses six
weeks later, the survivor is unable to find the hidden room; and the house is burned
during the Civil War. The imprisoned discoverer is never seen or heard of again.
Bierce seldom realises the atmospheric possibilities of his themes as vividly as Poe; and
much of his work contains a certain touch of naiveté, prosaic angularity, or
early-American provincialism which contrasts somewhat with the efforts of later
horror-masters. Nevertheless the genuineness and artistry of his dark intimations are
always unmistakable, so that his greatness is in no danger of eclipse. As arranged in his
definitively collected works, Bierce's weird tales occur mainly in two volumes, Can
Such Things Be? and In the Midst of Life. The former, indeed, is almost wholly given
over to, the supernatural.
Much of the best in American horror-literature has come from pens not mainly devoted
to that medium. Oliver Wendell Holmes's historic Elsie Venner suggests with admirable
restraint an unnatural ophidian element in a young woman prenatally influenced, and
sustains the atmosphere with finely discriminating landscape touches. In The Turn of the
Screw Henry James triumphs over his inevitable pomposity and prolixity sufficiently
well to create a truly potent air of sinister menace; depicting the hideous influence of
two dead and evil servants, Peter Quint and the governess, Miss Jessel, over a small boy
and girl who had been under their care. James is perhaps too diffuse, too unctuously
urbane, and too much addicted to subtleties of speech to realise fully all the wild and
devastating horror in his situations; but for all that there is a rare and mounting tide of
fright, culminating in the death of the little boy, which gives the novelette a permanent
place in its special class.
F. Marion Crawford produced several weird tales of varying quality, now collected in a
volume entitled Wandering Ghosts. For the Blood Is the Life touches powerfully on a
case of moon-cursed vampirism near an ancient tower on the rocks of the lonely South
Italian seacoast. The Dead Smile treats of family horrors in an old house and an
ancestral vault in Ireland, and introduces the banshee with considerable force. The
Upper Berth, however, is Crawford's weird masterpiece; and is one of the most
tremendous horror-stories in all literature. In this tale of a suicide-haunted stateroom
such things as the spectral saltwater dampness, the strangely open porthole, and the
nightmare struggle with the nameless object are handled with incomparable dexterity.
Very genuine, though not without the typical mannered extravagance of the
eighteen-nineties, is the strain of horror in the early work of Robert W. Chambers, since
renowned for products of a very different quality. The King in Yellow, a series of
vaguely connected short stories having as a background a monstrous and suppressed
book whose perusal brings fright, madness, and spectral tragedy, really achieves notable
heights of cosmic fear in spite of uneven interest and a somewhat trivial and affected
cultivation of the Gallic studio atmosphere made popular by Du Maurier's Trilby. The
most powerful of its tales, perhaps, is The Yellow Sign, in which is introduced a silent
and terrible churchyard watchman with a face like a puffy grave-worm's. A boy,
describing a tussle he has had with this creature, shivers and sickens as he relates a
certain detail. "Well, it's Gawd's truth that when I 'it 'im 'e grabbed me wrists, Sir, and
when I twisted 'is soft, mushy fist one of 'is fingers come off in me 'and." An artist, who
after seeing him has shared with another a strange dream of a nocturnal hearse, is
shocked by the voice with which the watchman accosts him. The fellow emits a
muttering sound that fills the head "like thick oily smoke from a fat-rendering vat or an
odour of noisome decay." What he mumbles is merely this: "Have you found the
Yellow Sign?"
A weirdly hieroglyphed onyx talisman, picked up on the street by the sharer of his
dream, is shortly given the artist; and after stumbling queerly upon the hellish and
forbidden book of horrors the two learn, among other hideous things which no sane
mortal should know, that this talisman is indeed the nameless Yellow Sign handed
down from the accursed cult of Hastur -- from primordial Carcosa, whereof the volume
treats, and some nightmare memory of which seeks to lurk latent and ominous at the
back of all men's minds. Soon they hear the rumbling of the black-plumed hearse driven
by the flabby and corpse-faced watchman. He enters the night-shrouded house in quest
of the Yellow Sign, all bolts and bars rotting at his touch. And when the people rush in,
drawn by a scream that no human throat could utter, they find three forms on the floor -two dead and one dying. One of the dead shapes is far gone in decay. It is the
churchyard watchman, and the doctor exclaims, "That man must have been dead for
months." It is worth observing that the author derives most of the names and allusions
connected with his eldritch land of primal memory from the tales of Ambrose Bierce.
Other early works of Mr. Chambers displaying the outré and macabre element are The
Maker of Moons and In Search of the Unknown. One cannot help regretting that he did
not further develop a vein in which he could so easily have become a recognised master.
Horror material of authentic force may be found in the work of the New England realist
Mary E. Wilkins, whose volume of short tales, The Wind in the Rosebush, contains a
number of noteworthy achievements. In The Shadows on the Wall we are shown with
consummate skill the response of a staid New England household to uncanny tragedy;
and the sourceless shadow of the poisoned brother well prepares us for the climactic
moment when the shadow of the secret murderer, who has killed himself in a
neighbouring city, suddenly appears beside it. Charlotte Perkins Gilman, in The Yellow
Wall Paper, rises to a classic level in subtly delineating the madness which crawls over
a woman dwelling in the hideously papered room where a madwoman was once
confined.
In The Dead Valley the eminent architect and mediævalist Ralph Adams Cram achieves
a memorably potent degree of vague regional horror through subtleties of atmosphere
and description.
Still further carrying on our spectral tradition is the gifted and versatile humourist Irvin
S. Cobb, whose work both early and recent contains some finely weird specimens.
Fishhead, an early achievement, is banefully effective in its portrayal of unnatural
affinities between a hybrid idiot and the strange fish of an isolated lake, which at the last
avenge their biped kinsman's murder. Later work of Mr. Cobb introduces an element of
possible science, as in the tale of hereditary memory where a modern man with a
negroid strain utters words in African jungle speech when run down by a train under
visual and aural circumstances recalling the maiming of his black ancestor by a
rhinoceros a century before.
Extremely high in artistic stature is the novel The Dark Chamber (1927) by the late
Leonard Cline. This is the tale of a man who -- with the characteristic ambition of the
Gothic or Byronic hero-villain -- seeks to defy nature and recapture every moment of
his past life through the abnormal stimulation of memory. To this end he employs
endless notes, records, mnemonic objects, and pictures -- and finally odours, music, and
exotic drugs. At last his ambition goes beyond his personal life and readies toward the
black abysses of hereditary memory -- even back to pre-human days amidst the
steaming swamps of the carboniferous age, and to still more unimaginable deeps of
primal time and entity. He calls for madder music and takes stranger drugs, and finally
his great dog grows oddly afraid of him. A noxious animal stench encompasses him,
and he grows vacant-faced and subhuman. In the end he takes to the woods, howling at
night beneath windows. He is finally found in a thicket, mangled to death. Beside him is
the mangled corpse of his dog. They have killed each other. The atmosphere of this
novel is malevolently potent, much attention being paid to the central figure's sinister
home and household.
A less subtle and well-balanced but nevertheless highly effective creation is Herbert S.
Gorman's novel, The Place Called Dagon, which relates the dark history of a western
Massachusetts back-water where the descendants of refugees from the Salem witchcraft
still keep alive the morbid and degenerate horrors of the Black Sabbat.
Sinister House, by Leland Hall, has touches of magnificent atmosphere but is marred by
a somewhat mediocre romanticism.
Very notable in their way are some of the weird conceptions of the novelist and
short-story writer Edward Lucas White, most of whose themes arise from actual dreams.
The Song of The Siren has a very persuasive strangeness, while such things as Lukundoo
and The Snout arouse darker apprehensions. Mr. White imparts a very peculiar quality
to his tales -- an oblique sort of glamour which has its own distinctive type of
convincingness.
Of younger Americans, none strikes the note of cosmic horror so well as the California
poet, artist and fictionist Clark Ashton Smith, whose bizarre writing, drawings,
paintings and stories are the delight of a sensitive few. Mr. Smith has for his
background a universe of remote and paralysing fright-jungles of poisonous and
iridescent blossoms on the moons of Saturn, evil and grotesque temples in Atlantis,
Lemuria, and forgotten elder worlds, and dank morasses of spotted death-fungi in
spectral countries beyond earth's rim. His longest and most ambitious poem, The
Hashish-Eater, is in pentameter blank verse; and opens up chaotic and incredible vistas
of kaleidoscopic nightmare in the spaces between the stars. In sheet dæmonic
strangeness and fertility of conception, Mr. Smith is perhaps unexcelled by, any, other
writer dead or living. Who else has seen such gorgeous, luxuriant, and feverishly
distorted visions of infinite spheres and multiple dimensions and lived to tell the tale?
His short stories deal powerfully with other galaxies, worlds, and dimensions, as well as
with strange regions and æons on the earth. He tells of primal Hyperborea and its black
amorphous god Tsathoggua; of the lost continent Zothique, and of the fabulous,
Vampire-curst land of Averoigne in mediæval France. Some of Mr. Smith's best work
can be found in the brochure entitled The Double Shadow and Other Fantasies (1933).
IX. The Weird Tradition In The British Isles
Recent British literature, besides including the three or four greatest fantaisistes of the
present age, has been gratifyingly fertile in the element of the weird. Rudyard Kipling
has often approached it, and has, despite the omnipresent mannerisms, handled it with
indubitable mastery in such tales as The Phantom Rickshaw, The Finest Story in the
World, The Recrudescence of Imray, and The Mark of the Beast. This latter is of
particular poignancy; the pictures of the naked leper-priest who mewed like an otter, of
the spots which appeared on the chest of the man that priest cursed, of the growing
carnivorousness of the victim and of the fear which horses began to display toward him,
and of the eventually half-accomplished transformation of that victim into a leopard,
being things which no reader is ever likely to forget. The final defeat of the malignant
sorcery does not impair the force of the tale or the validity of its mystery.
Lafcadio Hearn, strange, wandering, and exotic, departs still farther from the realm of
the real; and with the supreme artistry of a sensitive poet weaves phantasies impossible
to an author of the solid roast beef type. His Fantastics, written in America, contains
some of the most impressive ghoulishness in all literature; whilst his Kwaidan, written
in Japan, crystallises with matchless skill and delicacy the eerie lore and whispered
legends of that richly colourful nation. Still more of Helm's wizardry of language is
shown in some of his translations from the French, especially from Gautier and Flaubert.
His version of the latter's Temptation of St. Anthony is a classic of fevered and riotous
imagery clad in the magic of singing words.
Oscar Wilde may likewise be given a place amongst weird writers, both for certain of
his exquisite fairy tales, and for his vivid Picture of Dorian Gray, in which a marvellous
portrait for years assumes the duty of aging and coarsening instead of its original, who
meanwhile plunges into every excess of vice and crime without the outward loss of
youth, beauty, and freshness. There is a sudden and potent climax when Dorian Gray, at
last become a murderer, seeks to destroy the painting whose changes testify to his moral
degeneracy. He stabs it with a knife, and a hideous cry and crash are heard; but when
the servants enter they find it in all its pristine loveliness. "Lying on the floor was a
dead man, in evening dress, with a knife in his heart. He was withered, wrinkled, and
loathsome of visage. It was not until they had examined the rings that they recognised
who he was."
Matthew Phipps Shiel, author of many weird, grotesque, and adventurous novels and
tales, occasionally attains a high level of horrific magic. Xelucha is a noxiously hideous
fragment, but is excelled by Mr. Shiel's undoubted masterpiece, The House of Sounds,
floridly written in the "yellow nineties," and recast with more artistic restraint in the
early twentieth century. Ibis story, in final form, deserves a place among the foremost
things of its kind. It tells of a creeping horror and menace trickling down the centuries
on a sub-arctic island off the coast of Norway; where, amidst the sweep of daemon
winds and the ceaseless din of hellish waves and cataracts, a vengeful dead man built a
brazen tower of terror. It is vaguely like, yet infinitely unlike, Poe's Fall of the House of
Usher. In the novel The Purple Cloud Mr. Shiel describes with tremendous power a
curse which came out of the arctic to destroy mankind, and which for a time appears to
have left but a single inhabitant on our planet. The sensations of this lone survivor as he
realises his position, and roams through the corpse-littered and treasure-strewn cities of
the world as their absolute master, are delivered with a skill and artistry falling little
short of actual majesty. Unfortunately the second half of the book, with its
conventionally romantic element, involves a distinct letdown.
Better known than Shiel is the ingenious Bram Stoker, who created many starkly
horrific conceptions in a series of novels whose poor technique sadly impairs their net
effect. The Lair of the White Worm, dealing with a gigantic primitive entity that lurks in
a vault beneath an ancient castle, utterly ruins a magnificent idea by a development
almost infantile. The Jewel of Seven Stars, touching on a strange Egyptian resurrection,
is less crudely written. But best of all is the famous Dracula, which has become almost
the standard modern exploitation of the frightful vampire myth. Count Dracula, a
vampire, dwells in a horrible castle in the Carpathians, but finally migrates to England
with the design of populating the country with fellow vampires. How an Englishman
fares within Dracula's stronghold of terrors, and how the dead fiend's plot for
domination is at last defeated, are elements which unite to form a tale now justly
assigned a permanent place in English letters. Dracula evoked many similar novels of
supernatural horror, among which the best are perhaps The Beetle, by Richard Marsh,
Brood of the Witch-Queen, by "Sax Rohmer" (Arthur Sarsfield Ward), and The Door of
the Unreal, by Gerald Bliss. The latter handles quite dexterously the standard werewolf
superstition. Much subtler and more artistic, and told with singular skill through the
juxtaposed narratives of the several characters, is the novel Cold Harbour, by Francis
Brett Young, in which an ancient house of strange malignancy is powerfully delineated.
The mocking and well-nigh omnipotent fiend Humphrey Furnival holds echoes of the
Manfred-Montoni type of early Gothic "villain," but is redeemed from triteness by
many clever individualities. Only the slight diffuseness of explanation at the close, and
the somewhat too free use of divination as a plot factor, keep this tale from approaching
absolute perfection.
In the novel Witch Wood John Buchan depicts with tremendous force a survival of the
evil Sabbat in a lonely district of Scotland. The description of the black forest with the
evil stone, and of the terrible cosmic adumbrations when the horror is finally extirpated,
will repay one for wading through the very gradual action and plethora of Scottish
dialect. Some of Mr. Buchan's short stories are also extremely vivid in their spectral
intimations; The Green Wildebeest, a tale of African witchcraft, The Wind in the Portico,
with its awakening of dead Britanno-Roman horrors, and Skule Skerry, with its touches
of sub-arctic fright, being especially remarkable.
Clemence Housman, in the brief novelette The Werewolf, attains a high degree of
gruesome tension and achieves to some extent the atmosphere of authentic folklore. In
The Elixir of Life Arthur Ransome attains some darkly excellent effects despite a
general naiveté of plot, while H. B. Drake's The Shadowy Thing summons up strange
and terrible vistas. George Macdonald's Lilith has a compelling bizarrerie all its own,
the first and simpler of the two versions being perhaps the more effective.
Deserving of distinguished notice as a forceful craftsman to whom an unseen mystic
world is, ever a dose and vital reality is the poet Walter de la Mare, whose haunting
verse and exquisite prose alike bear consistent traces of a strange vision reaching deeply
into veiled spheres of beauty and terrible and forbidden dimensions of being. In the
novel The Return we see the soul of a dead man reach out of its grave of two centuries
and fasten itself upon the flesh of the living, so that even the face of the victim becomes
that which had long ago returned to dust. Of the shorter tales, of which several volumes
exist, many are unforgettable for their command of fear's and sorcery's darkest
ramifications; notably Seaton's Aunt, in which there lowers a noxious background of
malignant vampirism; The Tree, which tells of a frightful vegetable growth in the yard
of a starving artist; Out of the Deep, wherein we are given leave to imagine what thing
answered the summons of a dying wastrel in a dark lonely house when he pulled a
long-feared bell-cord in the attic of his dread-haunted boyhood; A Recluse, which hints
at what sent a chance guest flying from a house in the night; Mr. Kempe, which shows
us a mad clerical hermit in quest of the human soul, dwelling in a frightful sea-cliff
region beside an archaic abandoned chapel; and All-Hallows, a glimpse of dæmoniac
forces besieging a lonely mediaeval church and miraculously restoring the rotting
masonry. De la Mare does not make fear the sole or even the dominant element of most
of his tales, being apparently more interested in the subtleties of character involved.
Occasionally he sinks to sheer whimisical phantasy of the Barrie order. Still he is
among the very few to whom unreality is a vivid, living presence; and as such he is able
to put into his occasional fear-studies a keen potency which only a rare master can
achieve. His poem The Listeners restores the Gothic shudder to modern verse.
The weird short story has fared well of late, an important contributor being the versatile
E. F. Benson, whose The Man Who Went Too Far breathes whisperingly of a house at
the edge of a dark wood, and of Pan's hoof-mark on the breast of a dead man. Mr.
Benson's volume, Visible and Invisible, contains several stories of singular power;
notably Negotiam Perambulans, whose unfolding reveals an abnormal monster from an
ancient ecclesiastical panel which performs an act of miraculous vengeance in a lonely
village on the Cornish coast, and The Horror-Horn, through which lopes a terrible
half-human survival dwelling on unvisited Alpine peaks. The Face, in another
collection, is lethally potent, in its relentless aura of doom. H. R. Wakefield, in his
collections, They Return at Evening and Others Who Return, manages now and then to
achieve great heights of horror despite a vitiating air of sophistication. The most notable
stories are The Red Lodge with its slimy acqueous evil, He Cometh and He Passeth By,
And He Shall Sing, The Cairn, Look Up There, Blind Man's Buff, and that bit of lurking
millennial horror, The Seventeenth Hole at Duncaster. Mention has been made of the
weird work of H.G. Wells and A. Conan Doyle. The former, in The Ghost of Fear,
reaches a very high level while all the items in Thirty Strange Stories have strong
fantastic implications. Doyle now and then struck a powerfully spectral note, as in The
Captain of the Pole-Star, a tale of arctic ghostliness, and Lot No. 249, wherein the
reanimated mummy theme is used with more than ordinary skill. Hugh Walpole, of the
same family as the founder of Gothic fiction, has sometimes approached the bizarre
with much success, his short story Mrs. Lunt carrying a very poignant shudder. John
Metcalfe, in the collection published as The Smoking Leg, attains now and then a rare
pitch of potency, the tale entitled The Bad Lands, containing graduations of horror that
strongly savour of genius. More whimiscial and inclined toward the amiable and
innocuous phantasy of Sir J. M. Barrie are the short tales of E.M. Forster, grouped
under the title of The Celestial Omnibus. Of these only one, dealing with a glimpse of
Pan and his aura of fright, may be said to hold the true element of cosmic horror. Mrs.
H.D. Everett, though adhering to very old and conventional models, occasionally
reaches singular heights of spiritual terror in her collection of short stories, The Death
Mask. L. P. Hartley is notable for his incisive and extremely ghastly tale, A Visitor from
Down Under, May Sinclair's Uncanny Stories contain more of traditional "occultism"
than of that creative treatment of fear which marks mastery in this field, and are inclined
to lay more stress on human emotions and psychological delving than upon the stark
phenomena of a cosmos utterly unreal. It may be well to remark here that occult
believers are probably less effective than materialists in delineating the spectral and the
fantastic, since to them the phantom world is so commonplace a reality that they tend to
refer to it with less awe, remoteness, and impressiveness thin do those who see in it an
absolute and stupendous violation of the natural order.
Of rather uneven stylistic quality, but vast occasional power in its suggestion of lurking
worlds and beings behind the ordinary surface of life, is the work of William Hope
Hodgson, known today far less than it deserves to be. Despite a tendency toward
conventionally sentimental conceptions of the universe, and of man's relation to it and
to his fellows, Mr. Hodgson is perhaps second only to Algernon Blackwood in his
serious treatment of unreality. Few can equal him in adumbrating the nearness of
nameless forces and monstrous besieging entities through casual hints and insignificant
details, or in conveying feelings of the spectral and the abnormal in connection with
regions or buildings.
In The Boats of the Glen Carrig (1907) we are shown a variety of malign marvels and
accursed unknown lands as encountered by the survivors of a sunken ship. The
brooding menace in the earlier parts of the book is impossible to surpass, though a
letdown in the direction of ordinary romance and adventure occurs toward the end. An
inaccurate and pseudo-romantic attempt to reproduce eighteenth-century prose detracts
from the general effect, but the really profound nautical erudition everywhere displayed
is a compensating factor.
The House on the Borderland (1908) -- perhaps the greatest of all Mr. Hodgson's works
-- tells of a lonely and evilly regarded house in Ireland which forms a focus for hideous
otherworld forces and sustains a siege by blasphemous hybrid anomalies from a hidden
abyss below. The wanderings of the Narrator's spirit through limitless light-years of
cosmic space and Kalpas of eternity, and its witnessing of the solar system's final
destruction, constitute something almost unique in standard literature. And everywhere
there is manifest the author's power to suggest vague, ambushed horrors in natural
scenery. But for a few touches of commonplace sentimentality this book would be a
classic of the first water.
The Ghost Pirates (1909), regarded by Mr. Hodgson as rounding out a trilogy with the
two previously mentioned works, is a powerful account of a doomed and haunted ship
on its last voyage, and of the terrible sea-devils (of quasi-human aspect, and perhaps the
spirits of bygone buccaneers) that besiege it and finally drag it down to an unknown fate.
With its command of maritime knowledge, and its clever selection of hints and
incidents suggestive of latent horrors in nature, this book at times reaches enviable
peaks of power.
The Night Land (1912) is a long-extended (538 pp.) tale of the earth's infinitely remote
future-billions of billions of years ahead, after the death of the sun. It is told in a rather
clumsy fashion, as the dreams of a man in the seventeenth century, whose mind merges
with its own future incarnation; and is seriously marred by painful verboseness,
repetitiousness, artificial and nauseously sticky romantic sentimentality, and an attempt
at archaic language even more grotesque and absurd than that in Glen Carrig.
Allowing for all its faults, it is yet one of the most potent pieces of macabre imagination
ever written. The picture of a night-black, dead planet, with the remains of the human
race concentrated in a stupendously vast mental pyramid and besieged by monstrous,
hybrid, and altogether unknown forces of the darkness, is something that no reader can
ever forget: Shapes and entities of an altogether non-human and inconceivable sort -the prowlers of the black, man-forsaken, and unexplored world outside the pyramid -are suggested and partly described with ineffable potency; while the night-land
landscape with its chasms and slopes and dying volcanism takes on an almost sentient
terror beneath the author's touch.
Midway in the book the central figure ventures outside the pyramid on a quest through
death-haunted realms untrod by man for millions of years -- and in his slow, minutely
described, day-by-day progress over unthinkable leagues of immemorial blackness there
is a sense of cosmic alienage, breathless mystery, and terrified expectancy unrivalled in
the whole range of literature. The last quarter of the book drags woefully, but fails to
spoil the tremendous power of the whole. Mr. Hodgson's later volume, Carnacki, the
Ghost-Finder, consists of several longish short stories published many years before in
magazines. In quality it falls conspicuously below the level of the other books. We here
find a more or less conventional stock figure of the "infallible detective" type -- the
progeny of M. Dupin and Sherlock Holmes, and the close kin of Algernon Blackwood's
John Silence -- moving through scenes and events badly marred by an atmosphere of
professional "occultism." A few of the episodes, however, are of undeniable power, and
afford glimpses of the peculiar genius characteristic of the author.
Naturally it is impossible in brief sketch to trace out all the classic modern uses of the
terror element. The ingredient must of necessity enter into all work, both prose and
verse, treating broadly of life; and we are therefore not surprised to find a share in such
writers as the poet Browning, whose Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came is instinct
with hideous menace, or the novelist Joseph Conrad, who often wrote of the dark
secrets within the sea, and of the dæmoniac driving power of Fate as influencing the
lives of lonely and maniacally resolute men. Its trail is one of infinite ramifications; but
we must here confine ourselves to its appearance in a relatively unmixed state, where it
determines and dominates the work of art containing it.
Somewhat separate from the main British stream is that current of weirdness in Irish
literature which came to the fore in the Celtic Renaissance of the later nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries. Ghost and fairy lore have always been of great prominence in
Ireland, and for over a hundred years have been recorded by a line of such faithful
transcribers and translators as William Carleton, T. Crofton Croker, Lady Wilde -mother of Oscar Wilde -- Douglas Hyde, and W.B. Yeats. Brought to notice by the
modern movement, this body of myth has been carefully collected and studied; and its
salient features reproduced in the work of later figures like Yeats, J. M. Synge, "A. E.,"
Lady Gregory, Padraic Colum, James Stephens and their colleagues.
Whilst on the whole more whimsically fantastic than terrible, such folklore and its
consciously artistic counterparts contain much that falls truly within the domain of
cosmic horror. Tales of burials in sunken churches beneath haunted lakes, accounts of
death-heralding banshees and sinister changelings, ballads of spectres and "the unholy
creatures of the Raths" -- all these have their poignant and definite shivers, and mark a
strong and distinctive element in weird literature. Despite homely grotesqueness and
absolute naiveté, there is genuine nightmare in the class of narrative represented by the
yarn of Teig O'Kane, who in punishment for his wild life was ridden all night by a
hideous corpse that demanded burial and drove him from churchyard to churchyard as
the dead rose up loathsomely in each one and refused to accommodate the newcomer
with a berth. Yeats, undoubtedly the greatest figure of the Irish revival if not the greatest
of all living poets, has accomplished notable things both in original work and in the
codification of old legends.
X. The Modern Masters
The best horror-tales of today, profiting by the long evolution of the type, possess a
naturalness, convincingness, artistic smoothness, and skilful intensity of appeal quite
beyond comparison with anything in the Gothic work of a century or more ago.
Technique, craftsmanship, experience, and psychological knowledge have advanced
tremendously with the passing years, so that much of the older work seems naive and
artificial; redeemed, when redeemed at all, only by a genius which conquers heavy
limitations. The tone of jaunty and inflated romance, full of false motivation and
investing every conceivable event with a counterfeit significance and carelessly
inclusive glamour, is now confined to lighter and more whimiscal phases of
supernatural writing. Serious weird stories are either made realistically intense by dose
consistency and perfect fidelity to Nature except in the one supernatural direction which
the author allows himself, or else cast altogether in the realm of phantasy, with
atmosphere cunningly adapted to the visualisation of a delicately exotic world of
unreality beyond space and time, in which almost anything may happen if it but happen
in true accord with certain types of imagination and illusion normal to the sensitive
human brain. This, at least, is the dominant tendency; though of course many great
contemporary writers slip occasionally into some of the flashy postures of immature
romanticism or into bits of the equally empty and absurd jargon of pseudo-scientific
"occultism," now at one of its periodic high tides.
Of living creators of cosmic fear raised to its most artistic pitch, few if any can hope to
equal the versatile Arthur Machen, author of some dozen tales long and short, in which
the elements of hidden horror and brooding fright attain an almost incomparable
substance and realistic acuteness. Mr. Machen, a general man of letters and master of an
exquisitely lyrical and expressive prose style, has perhaps put more conscious effort into
his picaresque Chronicles of Clemendy, his refreshing essays, his vivid autobiographical
volumes, his fresh and spirited translations, and above all his memorable epic of the
sensitive æsthetic mind, The Hill of Dreams, in which the youthful hero responds to the
magic of that ancient Welsh environment which is the author's own, and lives a
dream-life in the Roman city of Isca Silurum, now shrunk to the relic-strown village of
Caerleon-on-Usk. But the fact remains that his powerful horror-material of the nineties
and earlier nineteen-hundreds stands alone in its class, and marks a distinct epoch in the
history of this literary form.
Mr. Machen, with an impressionable Celtic heritage linked to keen youthful memories
of the wild domed hills, archaic forests, and cryptical Roman ruins of the Gwent
countryside, has developed an imaginative life of rare beauty, intensity, and historic
background. He has absorbed the mediaeval mystery of dark woods and ancient
customs, and is a champion of the Middle Ages in all things -- including the Catholic
faith. He has yielded, likewise, to the spell of the Britanno-Roman life which once
surged over his native region; and finds strange magic in the fortified camps, tessellated
pavements, fragments of statues, and kindred things which tell of the day when
classicism reigned and Latin was the language of the country. A young American poet,
Frank Belknap Long, has well summarised this dreamer's rich endowments and
wizardry of expression in the sonnet On Reading Arthur Machen:
There is a glory in the autumn wood,
The ancient lanes of England wind and climb
Past wizard oaks and gorse and tangled thyme
To where a fort of mighty empire stood:
There is a glamour in the autumn sky;
The reddened clouds are writhing in the glow
Of some great fire, and there are glints below
Of tawny yellow where the embers die.
I wait, for he will show me, clear and cold,
High-rais'd in splendour, sharp against the North,
The Roman eagles, and through mists of gold
The marching legions as they issue forth:
I wait, for I would share with him again
The ancient wisdom, and the ancient pain.
Of Mr. Machen's horror-tales the most famous is perhaps The Great God Pan (1894)
which tells of a singular and terrible experiment and its consequences. A young woman,
through surgery of the brain-cells, is made to see the vast and monstrous deity of Nature,
and becomes an idiot in consequence, dying less than a year later. Years afterward a
strange, ominous, and foreign-looking child named Helen Vaughan is placed to board
with a family in rural Wales, and haunts the woods in unaccountable fashion. A little
boy is thrown out of his mind at sight of someone or something he spies with her, and a
young girl comes to a terrible end in similar fashion. All this mystery is strangely
interwoven with the Roman rural deities of the place, as sculptured in antique fragments.
After another lapse of years, a woman of strangely exotic beauty appears in society,
drives her husband to horror and death, causes an artist to paint unthinkable paintings of
Witches' Sabbaths, creates an epidemic of suicide among the men of her acquaintance,
and is finally discovered to be a frequenter of the lowest dens of vice in London, where
even the most callous degenerates are shocked at her enormities. Through the clever
comparing of notes on the part of those who have had word of her at various stages of
her career, this woman is discovered to be the girl Helen Vaughan, who is the child -by no mortal father -- of the young woman on whom the brain experiment was made.
She is a daughter of hideous Pan himself, and at the last is put to death amidst horrible
transmutations of form involving changes of sex and a descent to the most primal
manifestations of the life-principle.
But the charm of the tale is in the telling. No one could begin to describe the cumulative
suspense and ultimate horror with which every paragraph abounds without following
fully the precise order in which Mr. Machen unfolds his gradual hints and revelations.
Melodrama is undeniably present, and coincidence is stretched to a length which
appears absurd upon analysis; but in the malign witchery of the tale as a whole these
trifles are forgotten, and the sensitive reader reaches the end with only an appreciative
shudder and a tendency to repeat the words of one of the characters: "It is too incredible,
too monstrous; such things can never be in this quiet world.... Why, man, if such a case
were possible, our earth would be a nightmare."
Less famous and less complex in plot than The Great God Pan, but definitely finer in
atmosphere and general artistic value, is the curious and dimly disquieting chronicle
called The White People, whose central portion purports to be the diary or notes of a
little girl whose nurse has introduced her to some of the forbidden magic and
soul-blasting traditions of the noxious witch-cult -- the cult whose whispered lore was
handed down long lines of peasantry throughout Western Europe, and whose members
sometimes stole forth at night, one by one, to meet in black woods and lonely places for
the revolting orgies of the Witches' Sabbath. Mr. Machen's narrative, a triumph of
skilful selectiveness and restraint, accumulates enormous power as it flows on in a
stream of innocent childish prattle, introducing allusions to strange "nymphs," "Dols,"
"voolas," "white, green, and scarlet ceremonies," "Aklo letters," "Chian language,"
"Mao games," and the like. The rites learned by the nurse from her witch grandmother
are taught to the child by the time she is three years old, and her artless accounts of the
dangerous secret revelations possess a lurking terror generously mixed with pathos. Evil
charms well known to anthropologists are described with juvenile naiveté, and finally
there comes a winter afternoon journey into the old Welsh hills, performed under an
imaginative spell which lends to the wild scenery an added weirdness, strangeness, and
suggestion of grotesque sentience. The details of this journey are given with marvellous
vividness, and form to the keen critic a masterpiece of fantastic writing, with almost
unlimited power in the intimation of potent hideousness and cosmic aberration. At
length the child -- whose age is then thirteen -- comes upon a cryptic and banefully
beautiful thing in the midst of a dark and inaccessible wood. In the end horror overtakes
her in a manner deftly prefigured by an anecdote in the prologue, but she poisons herself
in time. Like the mother of Helen Vaughan in The Great God Pan, she has seen that
frightful deity. She is discovered dead in the dark wood beside the cryptic thing she
found; and that thing -- a whitely luminous statue of Roman workmanship about which
dire mediæval rumours had clustered -- is affrightedly hammered into dust by the
searchers.
In the episodic novel of The Three Impostors, a work whose, merit as a whole is
somewhat marred by an imitation of the jaunty Stevenson manner, occur certain tales
which perhaps represent the highwater mark of Machen's skill as a terror-weaver. Here
we find in its most artistic form a favourite weird conception of the author's; the notion
that beneath the mounds and rocks of the wild Welsh hills dwell subterraneously that
squat primitive race whose vestiges gave rise to our common folk legends of fairies,
elves, and the "little people," and whose acts are even now responsible for certain
unexplained disappearances, and occasional substitutions of strange dark "changelings"
for normal infants. This theme receives its finest treatment in the episode entitled The
Novel Of The Black Seal; where a professor, having discovered a singular identity
between certain characters scrawled on Welsh limestone rocks and those existing in a
prehistoric black seal from Babylon, sets out on a course of discovery which leads him
to unknown and terrible things. A queer passage in the ancient geographer Solinus, a
series of mysterious disappearances in the lonely reaches of Wales, a strange idiot son
born to a rural mother after a fright in which her inmost faculties were shaken; all these
things suggest to the professor a hideous connection and a condition revolting to any
friend and respecter of the human race. He hires the idiot boy, who jabbers strangely at
times in a repulsive hissing voice, and is subject to odd epileptic seizures. Once, after
such a seizure in the professor's study by night, disquieting odours and evidences of
unnatural presences are found; and soon after that the professor leaves a bulky
document and goes into the weird hills with feverish expectancy and strange terror in
his heart. He never returns, but beside a fantastic stone in the wild country are found his
watch, money, and ring, done up with catgut in a parchment bearing the same terrible
characters as those on the black Babylonish seal and the rock in the Welsh mountains.
The bulky document explains enough to bring up the most hideous vistas. Professor
Gregg, from the massed evidence presented by the Welsh disappearances, the rock
inscription, the accounts of ancient geographers, and the black seal, has decided that a
frightful race of dark primal beings of immemorial antiquity and wide former diffusion
still dwell beneath the hills of unfrequented Wales. Further research has unriddled the
message of the black seal, and proved that the idiot boy, a son of some father more
terrible than mankind, is the heir of monstrous memories and possibilities. That strange
night in the study the professor invoked "the awful transmutation of the hills" by the aid
of the black seal, and aroused in the hybrid idiot the horrors of his shocking paternity.
He "saw his body swell and become distended as a bladder, while the face
blackened. . . ." And then the supreme effects of the invocation appeared, and Professor
Gregg knew the stark frenzy of cosmic panic in its darkest form. He knew the abysmal
gulfs of abnormality that he had opened, and went forth into the wild hills prepared and
resigned. He would meet the unthinkable "Little People" -- and his document ends with
a rational observation: "If unhappily I do not return from my journey, there is no need to
conjure up here a picture of the awfulness of my fate."
Also in The Three Imposters is the Novel of the White Powder, which approaches the
absolute culmination of loathsome fright. Francis Leicester, a young law student
nervously worn out by seclusion and overwork, has a prescription filled by an old
apothecary none too careful about the state of his drugs. The substance, it later turns out,
is an unusual salt which time and varying temperature have accidentally changed to
something very strange and terrible; nothing less, in short, than the mediæval vinum
sabbati, whose consumption at the horrible orgies of the Witches' Sabbath gave rise to
shocking transformations and -- if injudiciously used -- to unutterable consequences.
Innocently enough, the youth regularly imbibes the powder in a glass of water after
meals; and at first seems substantially benefited. Gradually, however, his improved
spirits take the form of dissipation; he is absent from home a great deal, and appears to
have undergone a repellent psychological change. One day an odd livid spot appears on
his right hand, and he afterward returns to his seclusion; finally keeping himself shut
within his room and admitting none of the household. The doctor calls for an interview,
and departs in a palsy of horror, saying that he can do no more in that house. Two
weeks later the patient's sister, walking outside, sees a monstrous thing at the sickroom
window; and servants report that food left at the locked door is no longer touched.
Summons at the door bring only a sound of shuffling and a demand in a thick gurgling
voice to be let alone. At last an awful happening is reported by a shuddering housemaid.
The ceiling of the room below Leicester's is stained with a hideous black fluid, and a
pool of viscid abomination has dripped to the bed beneath. Dr. Haberden, now
persuaded to return to the house, breaks down the young man's door and strikes again
and again with an iron bar at the blasphemous semiliving thing he finds there. It is "a
dark and putrid mass, seething with corruption and hideous rottenness, neither liquid
nor solid, but melting and changing." Burning points like eyes shine out of its midst,
and before it is dispatched it tries to lift what might have been an arm. Soon afterward
the physician, unable to endure the memory of what he has beheld, dies at sea while
bound for a new life in America. Mr. Machen returns to the dæmoniac "Little People" in
The Red Hand and The Shining Pyramid; and in The Terror, a wartime story, he treats
with very potent mystery the effect of man's modern repudiation of spirituality on the
beasts of the world, which are thus led to question his supremacy and to unite for his
extermination. Of utmost delicacy, and passing from mere horror into true mysticism, is
The Great Return, a story of the Graal, also a product of the war period. Too well
known to need description here is the tale of The Bowmen; which, taken for authentic
narration, gave rise to the widespread legend of the "Angels of Mons" -- ghosts of the
old English archers of Crecy and Agincourt who fought in 1914 beside the hard-pressed
ranks of England's glorious "Old Contemptibles."
Less intense than Mr. Machen in delineating the extremes of stark fear, yet infinitely
more closely wedded to the idea of an unreal world constantly pressing upon ours is the
inspired and prolific Algernon Blackwood, amidst whose voluminous and uneven work
may be found some of the finest spectral literature of this or any age. Of the quality of
Mr. Blackwood's genius there can be no dispute; for no one has even approached the
skill, seriousness, and minute fidelity with which he records the overtones of
strangeness in ordinary things and experiences, or the preternatural insight with which
he builds up detail by detail the complete sensations and perceptions leading from
reality into supernormal life or vision. Without notable command of the poetic witchery
of mere words, he is the one absolute and unquestioned master of weird atmosphere;
and can evoke what amounts almost to a story from a simple fragment of humourless
psychological description. Above all others he understands how fully some sensitive
minds dwell forever on the borderland of dream, and how relatively slight is the
distinction betwixt those images formed from actual objects and those excited by the
play of the imagination.
Mr. Blackwood's lesser work is marred by several defects such as ethical didacticism,
occasional insipid whimsicality, the flatness of benignant supernaturalism, and a too
free use of the trade jargon of modem "occultism." A fault of his more serious efforts is
that diffuseness and long-windedness which results from an excessively elaborate
attempt, under the handicap of a somewhat bald and journalistic style devoid of intrinsic
magic, colour, and vitality, to visualise precise sensations and nuances of uncanny
suggestion. But in spite of all this, the major products of Mr. Blackwood attain a
genuinely classic level, and evoke as does nothing else in literature in awed convinced
sense of the imminence of strange spiritual spheres of entities.
The well-nigh endless array of Mr. Blackwood's fiction includes both novels and shorter
tales, the latter sometimes independent and sometimes arrayed in series. Foremost of all
must be reckoned The Willows, in which the nameless presences on a desolate Danube
island are horribly felt and recognised by a pair of idle voyagers. Here art and restraint
in narrative reach their very highest development, and an impression of lasting
poignancy is produced without a, single strained passage or a single false note. Another
amazingly potent though less artistically finished tale is The Wendigo, where we are
confronted by horrible evidences of a vast forest dæmon about which North Woods
lumbermen whisper at evening. The manner in which certain footprints tell certain
unbelievable things is really a marked triumph in craftsmanship. In An Episode in a
Lodging House we behold frightful presences summoned out of black space by a
sorcerer, and The Listener tells of the awful psychic residuum creeping about an old
house where a leper died. In the volume titled Incredible Adventures occur some of the
finest tales which the author has yet produced, leading the fancy to wild rites on
nocturnal hills, to secret and terrible aspects lurking behind stolid scenes, and to
unimaginable vaults of mystery below the sands and pyramids of Egypt; all with a
serious finesse and delicacy that convince where a cruder or lighter treatment would
merely amuse. Some of these accounts are hardly stories at all, but rather studies in
elusive impressions and half-remembered snatches of dream. Plot is everywhere
negligible, and atmosphere reigns untrammelled.
John Silence -- Physician Extraordinary is a book of five related tales, through which a
single character runs his triumphant course. Marred only by traces of the popular and
conventional detective-story atmosphere -- for Dr. Silence is one of those benevolent
geniuses who employ their remarkable powers to aid worthy fellow-men in difficulty -these narratives contain some of the author's best work, and produce an illusion at once
emphatic and lasting. The opening tale, A Psychical Invasion, relates what befell a
sensitive author in a house once the scene of dark deeds, and how a legion of fiends was
exorcised. Ancient Sorceries, perhaps the finest tale in the book, gives an almost
hypnotically vivid account of an old French town where once the unholy Sabbath was
kept by all the people in the form of cats. In The Nemesis of Fire a hideous elemental is
evoked by new-spilt blood, whilst Secret Worship tells of a German school where
Satanism held sway, and where long afterward an evil aura remained. The Camp of the
Dog is a werewolf tale, but is weakened by moralisation and professional "occultism."
Too subtle, perhaps, for definite classification as horror-tales, yet possibly more truly
artistic in an absolute sense, are such delicate phantasies as Jimbo or The Centaur. Mr.
Blackwood achieves in these novels a close and palpitant approach to the inmost
substance of dream, and works enormous havoc with the conventional barriers between
reality and imagination.
Unexcelled in the sorcery of crystalline singing prose, and supreme in the creation of a
gorgeous and languorous world of iridescently exotic vision, is Edward John Moreton
Drax Plunkett, Eighteenth Baron Dunsany, whose tales and short plays form an almost
unique element in our literature. Inventor of a new mythology and weaver of surprising
folklore, Lord Dunsany stands dedicated to a strange world of fantastic beauty, and
pledged to eternal warfare against the coarseness and ugliness of diurnal reality. His
point of view is the most truly cosmic of any held in the literature of any period. As
sensitive as Poe to dramatic values and the significance of isolated words and details,
and far better equipped rhetorically through a simple lyric style based on the prose of
the King James Bible, this author draws with tremendous effectiveness on nearly every
body of myth and legend within the circle of European culture; producing a composite
or eclectic cycle of phantasy in which Eastern colour, Hellenic form, Teutonic
sombreness and Celtic wistfulness are so superbly blended that each sustains and
supplements the rest without sacrifice or perfect congruity and homogeneity. In most
cases Dunsany's lands are fabulous -- "beyond the East," or "at the edge of the world."
His system of original personal and place names, with roots drawn from classical,
Oriental, and other sources, is a marvel of versatile inventiveness and poetic
discrimination; as one may see from such specimens as "Argimenes," "Bethmoora,"
"Poltarnees," "Camorak," "Iluriel," or "Sardathrion."
Beauty rather than terror is the keynote of Dunsany's work. He loves the vivid green of
jade and of copper domes, and the delicate flush of sunset on the ivory minarets of
impossible dream-cities. Humour and irony, too, are often present to impart a gentle
cynicism and modify what might otherwise possess a naïve intensity. Nevertheless, as is
inevitable in a master of triumphant unreality, there are occasional touches of cosmic
fright which come well within the authentic tradition. Dunsany loves to hint slyly and
adroitly of monstrous things and incredible dooms, as one hints in a fairy tale. In The
Book of Wonder we read of Hlo-Hlo, the gigantic spider-idol which does not always
stay at home; of what the Sphinx feared in the forest; of Slith, the thief who jumps over
the edge of the world after seeing a certain light lit and knowing who lit it; of the
anthropophagous; Gibbelins, who inhabit an evil tower and guard a treasure; of the
Gnoles, who live in the forest and from whom it is not well to steal; of the City of Never,
and the eyes that watch in the Under Pits; and of kindred things of darkness. A
Dreamer's Tales tells of the mystery that sent forth all men from Bethmoora in the
desert; of the vast gate of Perdondaris, that was carved from a single piece of ivory; and
of the voyage of poor old Bill, whose captain cursed the crew and paid calls on
nasty-looking isles new-risen from the sea, with low thatched cottages having evil,
obscure windows.
Many of Dunsany's short plays are replete with spectral fear. In The Gods of the
Mountain seven beggars impersonate the seven green idols on a distant hill, and enjoy
ease and honour in a city of worshippers until they hear that the real idols are missing
from their wonted seats. A very ungainly sight in the dusk is reported to them -- "rock
should not walk in the evening" -- and at last, as they sit awaiting the arrival of a troop
of dancers, they note that the approaching footsteps are heavier than those of good
dancers ought to be. Then things ensue, and in the end the presumptuous blasphemers
are turned to green jade statues by the very walking statues whose sanctity they
outraged. But mere plot is the very least merit of this marvellously effective play. The
incidents and developments are those of a supreme master, so that the whole forms one
of the most important contributions of the present age not only to drama, but to
literature in general. A Night at an Inn tells of four thieves who have stolen the emerald
eye of Klesh, a monstrous Hindoo god. They lure to their room and succeed in slaying
the three priestly avengers who are on their track, but in the night Mesh comes
gropingly for his eye; and having gained it and departed, calls each of the despoilers out
into the darkness for an unnamed punishment. In The Laughter of the Gods there is a
doomed city at the jungle's edge, and a ghostly lutanist heard only by those about to die
(cf. Alice's spectral harpsichord in Hawthorne's House of the Seven Gables); whilst The
Queen's Enemies retells the anecdote of Herodotus in which a vengeful princess invites
her foes to a subterranean banquet and lets in the Nile to drown them. But no amount of
mere description can convey more than a fraction of Lord Dunsany's pervasive charm.
His prismatic cities and unheard of rites are touched with a sureness which only mastery
can engender, and we thrill with a sense of actual participation in his secret mysteries.
To the truly imaginative he is a talisman and a key unlocking rich storehouses of dream
and fragmentary memory; so that we may think of him not only as a poet, but as one
who makes each reader a poet as well.
At the opposite pole of genius from Lord Dunsany, and gifted with an almost diabolic
power of calling horror by gentle steps from the midst of prosaic daily life, is the
scholarly Montague Rhodes James, Provost of Eton College, antiquary of note, and
recognized authority on mediæval manuscripts and cathedral history. Dr. James, long
fond of telling spectral tales at Christmastide, has become by slow degrees a literary
weird fictionist of the very first rank; and has developed a distinctive style and method
likely to serve as models for an enduring line of disciples.
The art of Dr. James is by no means haphazard, and in the preface to one of his
collections he has formulated three very sound rules for macabre composition. A ghost
story, he believes, should have a familiar setting in the modem period, in order to
approach closely the reader's sphere of experience. Its spectral phenomena, moreover,
should be malevolent rather than beneficent; since fear is the emotion primarily to be
excited. And finally, the technical patois of "occultism" or pseudo-science ought
carefully to be avoided; lest the charm of casual verisimilitude be smothered in
unconvincing pedantry.
Dr. James, practicing what he preaches, approaches his themes in a light and often
conversational way. Creating the illusion of every-day events, he introduces his
abnormal phenomena cautiously and gradually; relieved at every turn by touches of
homely and prosaic detail, and sometimes spiced with a snatch or two of antiquarian
scholarship. Conscious of the dose relation between present weirdness and accumulated
tradition, he generally provides remote historical antecedents for his incidents; thus
being able to utilise very aptly his exhaustive knowledge of the past, and his ready and
convincing command of archaic diction and colouring. A favourite scene for a James
tale is some centuried cathedral, which the author can describe with all the familiar
minuteness of a specialist in that field.
Sly humourous vignettes and bits of lifelike genre portraiture and characterisation are
often to be found in Dr. James's narratives, and serve in his skilled hands to augment the
general effect rather than to spoil it, as the same qualities would tend to do with a lesser
craftsman. In inventing a new type of ghost, he has departed considerably from the
conventional Gothic tradition; for where the older stock ghosts were pale and stately,
and apprehended chiefly through the sense of sight, the average James ghost is lean,
dwarfish, and hairy -- a sluggish, hellish night -- abomination midway betwixt beast and
man -- and usually touched before it is seen. Sometimes the spectre is of still more
eccentric composition; a roll of flannel with spidery eyes, or an invisible entity which
moulds itself in bedding and shows a face of crumpled linen. Dr. James has, it is clear,
an intelligent and scientific knowledge of human nerves and feelings; and knows just
how to apportion statement, imagery, and subtle suggestions in order to secure the best
results with his readers. He is an artist in incident and arrangement rather than in
atmosphere, and reaches the emotions more often through the intellect than directly.
This method, of course, with its occasional absences of sharp climax, has its drawbacks
as well as its advantages; and many will miss the thorough atmospheric tension which
writers like Machen are careful to build up with words and scenes. But only a few of the
tales are open to the charge of tameness. Generally the laconic unfolding of abnormal
events in adroit order is amply sufficient to produce the desired effect of cumulative
horror.
The short stories of Dr. James are contained in four small collections, entitled
respectively Ghost Stories of an Antiquary, More Ghost Stories of an Antiquary, A Thin
Ghost and Others, and A Warning to the Curious. There is also a delightful juvenile
phantasy, The Five Jars, which has its spectral adumbrations. Amidst this wealth of
material it is hard to select a favourite or especially typical tale, though each reader will
no doubt have such preferences as his temperament may determine.
Count Magnus is assuredly one of the best, forming as it does a veritable Golconda of
suspense and suggestion. Mr. Wraxall is an English traveller of the middle nineteenth
century, sojourning in Sweden to secure material for a book. Becoming interested in the
ancient family of De La Gardie, near the village of Raback, he studies its records; and
finds particular fascination in the builder of the existing Manor-house, one Count
Magnus, of whom strange and terrible things are whispered. The Count, who flourished
early in the seventeenth century, was a stern landlord, and famous for his severity
toward poachers and delinquent tenants. His cruel punishments were bywords, and there
were dark rumours of influences which even survived his interment in the great
mausoleum he built near the church -- as in the case of the two peasants who hunted on
his preserves one night a century after his death. There were hideous screams in the
woods, and near the tomb of Count Magnus an unnatural laugh and the clang of a great
door. Next morning the priest found the two men; one a maniac, and the other dead,
with the flesh of his face sucked from the bones.
Mr. Wraxall hears all these tales, and stumbles on more guarded references to a Black
Pilgrimage once taken by the Count, a pilgrimage to Chorazin in Palestine, one of the
cities denounced by Our Lord in the Scriptures, and in which old priests say that
Antichrist is to be born. No one dares to hint just what that Black Pilgrimage was, or
what strange being or thing the Count brought back as a companion. Meanwhile Mr.
Wraxall is increasingly anxious to explore the mausoleum of Count Magnus, and finally
secures permission to do so, in the company of a deacon. He finds several monuments
and three copper sarcophagi, one of which is the Count's. Round the edge of this latter
are several bands of engraved scenes, including a singular and hideous delineation of a
pursuit -- the pursuit of a frantic man through a forest by a squat muffled figure with a
devil-fish's tentacle, directed by a tall cloaked man on a neighbouring hillock. The
sarcophagus has three massive steel padlocks, one of which is lying open on the floor,
reminding the traveller of a metallic clash he heard the day before when passing the
mausoleum and wishing idly that he might see Count Magnus.
His fascination augmented, and the key being accessible, Mr. Wraxall pays the
mausoleum a second and solitary visit and finds another padlock unfastened. The next
day, his last in Raback, he again goes alone to bid the long-dead Count farewell. Once
more queerly impelled to utter a whimsical wish for a meeting with the buried
nobleman, he now sees to his disquiet that only one of the padlocks remains on the great
sarcophagus. Even as he looks, that last lock drops noisily to the floor, and there comes
a sound as of creaking hinges. Then the monstrous lid appears very slowly to rise, and
Mr. Wraxall flees in panic fear without refastening the door of the mausoleum.
During his return to England the traveller feels a curious uneasiness about his
fellow-passengers on the canal-boat which he employs for the earlier stages. Cloaked
figures make him nervous, and he has a sense of being watched and followed. Of
twenty-eight persons whom he counts, only twenty-six appear at meals; and the missing
two are always a tall cloaked man and a shorter muffled figure. Completing his water
travel at Harwich, Mr. Wraxall takes frankly to flight in a closed carriage, but sees two
cloaked figures at a crossroad. Finally he lodges at a small house in a village and spends
the time making frantic notes. On the second morning he is found dead, and during the
inquest seven jurors faint at sight of the body. The house where he stayed is never again
inhabited, and upon its demolition half a century later his manuscript is discovered in a
forgotten cupboard.
In The Treasure of Abbot Thomas a British antiquary unriddles a cipher on some
Renaissance painted windows, and thereby discovers a centuried hoard of gold in a
niche halfway down a well in the courtyard of a German abbey. But the crafty depositor
had set a guardian over that treasure, and something in the black well twines its arms
around the searcher's neck in such a manner that the quest is abandoned, and a
clergyman sent for. Each night after that the discoverer feels a stealthy presence and
detects a horrible odour of mould outside the door of his hotel room, till finally the
clergyman makes a daylight replacement of the stone at the mouth of the treasure-vault
in the well -- out of which something had come in the dark to avenge the disturbing of
old Abbot Thomas's gold. As he completes his work the cleric observes a curious
toad-like carving on the ancient well-head, with the Latin motto "Depositum custodi -keep that which is committed to thee."
Other notable James tales are The Stalls of Barchester Cathedral, in which a grotesque
carving comes curiously to life to avenge the secret and subtle murder of an old Dean by
his ambitious successor: Oh, Whistle, and I'll Come to You, which tells of the horror
summoned by a strange metal whistle found in a mediævel church ruin; and An Episode
of Cathedral History, where the dismantling of a pulpit uncovers an archaic tomb whose
lurking daemon spreads panic and pestilence. Dr. James, for all his light touch, evokes
fright and hideousness in their most shocking form, and will certainly stand as one of
the few really creative masters in his darksome province.
For those who relish speculation regarding the future, the tale of supernatural horror
provides an interesting field. Combated by a mounting wave of plodding realism,
cynical flippancy, and sophisticated disillusionment, it is yet encouraged by a parallel
tide of growing mysticism, as developed both through the fatigued reaction of
"occultists" and religious fundamentalists against materialistic discovery and through
the stimulation of wonder and fancy by such enlarged vistas and broken barriers as
modern science has given us with its intra-atomic chemistry, advancing astrophysics,
doctrines of relativity, and probings into biology and human thought. At the present
moment the favouring forces would appear to have somewhat of an advantage; since
there is unquestionably more cordiality shown toward weird writings than when, thirty
years ago, the best of Arthur Machen's work fell on the stony ground of the smart and
cocksure 'nineties. Ambrose Bierce, almost unknown in his own time, has now reached
something like general recognition.
Startling mutations, however, are not to be looked for in either direction. In any case an
approximate balance of tendencies will continue to exist; and while we may justly
expect a further subtilisation of technique, we have no reason to think that the general
position of the spectral in literature will be altered. It is a narrow though essential
branch of human expression, and will chiefly appeal as always to a limited audience
with keen special sensibilities. Whatever universal masterpiece of tomorrow may be
wrought from phantasm or terror will owe its acceptance rather to a supreme
workmanship than to a sympathetic theme. Yet who shall declare the dark theme a
positive handicap? Radiant with beauty, the Cup of the Ptolemies was carven of onyx.
:
Ex Oblivione
by H. P. Lovecraft
Written 1920
Published March 1921 in The United Amateur, Vol. 20, No. 4, p. 59-60.
When the last days were upon me, and the ugly trifles of existence began to drive me to
madness like the small drops of water that torturers let fall ceaselessly upon one spot of
their victims body, I loved the irradiate refuge of sleep. In my dreams I found a little of
the beauty I had vainly sought in life, and wandered through old gardens and enchanted
woods.
Once when the wind was soft and scented I heard the south calling, and sailed endlessly
and languorously under strange stars.
Once when the gentle rain fell I glided in a barge down a sunless stream under the earth
till I reached another world of purple twilight, iridescent arbours, and undying roses.
And once I walked through a golden valley that led to shadowy groves and ruins, and
ended in a mighty wall green with antique vines, and pierced by a little gate of bronze.
Many times I walked through that valley, and longer and longer would I pause in the
spectral half-light where the giant trees squirmed and twisted grotesquely, and the grey
ground stretched damply from trunk to trunk, some times disclosing the mould-stained
stones of buried temples. And alway the goal of my fancies was the mighty vine-grown
wall with the little gate of bronze therein.
After a while, as the days of waking became less and less bearable from their greyness
and sameness, I would often drift in opiate peace through the valley and the shadowy
groves, and wonder how I might seize them for my eternal dwelling-place, so that I
need no more crawl back to a dull world stript of interest and new colours. And as I
looked upon the little gate in the mighty wall, I felt that beyond it lay a dream-country
from which, once it was entered, there would be no return.
So each night in sleep I strove to find the hidden latch of the gate in the ivied antique
wall, though it was exceedingly well hidden. And I would tell myself that the realm
beyond the wall was not more lasting merely, but more lovely and radiant as well.
Then one night in the dream-city of Zakarion I found a yellowed papyrus filled with the
thoughts of dream-sages who dwelt of old in that city, and who were too wise ever to be
born in the waking world. Therein were written many things concerning the world of
dream, and among them was lore of a golden valley and a sacred grove with temples,
and a high wall pierced by a little bronze gate. When I saw this lore, I knew that it
touched on the scenes I had haunted, and I therefore read long in the yellowed papyrus.
Some of the dream-sages wrote gorgeously of the wonders beyond the irrepassable gate,
but others told of horror and disappointment. I knew not which to believe, yet longed
more and more to cross for ever into the unknown land; for doubt and secrecy are the
lure of lures, and no new horror can be more terrible than the daily torture of the
commonplace. So when I learned of the drug which would unlock the gate and drive me
through, I resolved to take it when next I awaked.
Last night I swallowed the drug and floated dreamily into the golden valley and the
shadowy groves; and when I came this time to the antique wall, I saw that the small gate
of bronze was ajar. From beyond came a glow that weirdly lit the giant twisted trees and
the tops of the buried temples, and I drifted on songfully, expectant of the glories of the
land from whence I should never return.
But as the gate swung wider and the sorcery of the drug and the dream pushed me
through, I knew that all sights and glories were at an end; for in that new realm was
neither land nor sea, but only the white void of unpeopled and illimitable space. So,
happier than I had ever dared hope to be, I dissolved again into that native infinity of
crystal oblivion from which the daemon Life had called me for one brief and desolate
hour.
:
Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His
Family
by H. P. Lovecraft
Written 1920
Published March 1921 in The Wolverine, No. 9, p. 3-11.
I
Life is a hideous thing, and from the background behind what we know of it peer
daemoniacal hints of truth which make it sometimes a thousandfold more hideous.
Science, already oppressive with its shocking revelations, will perhaps be the ultimate
exterminator of our human species—if separate species we be—for its reserve of
unguessed horrors could never be borne by mortal brains if loosed upon the world. If we
knew what we are, we should do as Sir Arthur Jermyn did; and Arthur Jermyn soaked
himself in oil and set fire to his clothing one night. No one placed the charred fragments
in an urn or set a memorial to him who had been; for certain papers and a certain boxed
object were found which made men wish to forget. Some who knew him do not admit
that he ever existed.
Arthur Jermyn went out on the moor and burned himself after seeing the boxed object
which had come from Africa. It was this object, and not his peculiar personal
appearance, which made him end his life. Many would have disliked to live if possessed
of the peculiar features of Arthur Jermyn, but he had been a poet and scholar and had
not minded. Learning was in his blood, for his great-grandfather, Sir Robert Jermyn, Bt.,
had been an anthropologist of note, whilst his great-great-great-grandfather, Sir Wade
Jermyn, was one of the earliest explorers of the Congo region, and had written eruditely
of its tribes, animals, and supposed antiquities. Indeed, old Sir Wade had possessed an
intellectual zeal amounting almost to a mania; his bizarre conjectures on a prehistoric
white Congolese civilisation earning him much ridicule when his book, Observation on
the Several Parts of Africa, was published. In 1765 this fearless explorer had been
placed in a madhouse at Huntingdon.
Madness was in all the Jermyns, and people were glad there were not many of them.
The line put forth no branches, and Arthur was the last of it. If he had not been, one can
not say what he would have done when the object came. The Jermyns never seemed to
look quite right—something was amiss, though Arthur was the worst, and the old family
portraits in Jermyn House showed fine faces enough before Sir Wade’s time. Certainly,
the madness began with Sir Wade, whose wild stories of Africa were at once the delight
and terror of his few 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 s.tuffed 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
by H. P. Lovecraft
Written 1920
Published June 1934 in The Fantasy Fan, 1, No. 10, 147-51, 160.
Horrible beyond conception was the change which had taken place in my best friend,
Crawford Tillinghast. I had not seen him since that day, two months and a half before,
when he told me toward what goal his physical and metaphysical researches were
leading; when he had answered my awed and almost frightened remonstrances by
driving me from his laboratory and his house in a burst of fanatical rage. I had known
that he now remained mostly shut in the attic laboratory with that accursed electrical
machine, eating little and excluding even the servants, but I had not thought that a brief
period of ten weeks could so alter and disfigure any human creature. It is not pleasant to
see a stout man suddenly grown thin, and it is even worse when the baggy skin becomes
yellowed or grayed, the eyes sunken, circled, and uncannily glowing, the forehead
veined and corrugated, and the hands tremulous and twitching. And if added to this
there be a repellent unkemptness, a wild disorder of dress, a bushiness of dark hair
white at the roots, and an unchecked growth of white beard on a face once clean-shaven,
the cumulative effect is quite shocking. But such was the aspect of Crawford
Tilllinghast on the night his half coherent message brought me to his door after my
weeks of exile; such was the specter that trembled as it admitted me, candle in hand, and
glanced furtively over its shoulder as if fearful of unseen things in the ancient, lonely
house set back from Benevolent Street.
That Crawford Tilinghast should ever have studied science and philosophy was a
mistake. These things should be left to the frigid and impersonal investigator for they
offer two equally tragic alternatives to the man of feeling and action; despair, if he fail
in his quest, and terrors unutterable and unimaginable if he succeed. Tillinghast had
once been the prey of failure, solitary and melancholy; but now I knew, with nauseating
fears of my own, that he was the prey of success. I had indeed warned him ten weeks
before, when he burst forth with his tale of what he felt himself about to discover. He
had been flushed and excited then, talking in a high and unnatural, though always
pedantic, voice.
"What do we know," he had said, "of the world and the universe about us? Our means
of receiving impressions are absurdly few, and our notions of surrounding objects
infinitely narrow. We see things only as we are constructed to see them, and can gain no
idea of their absolute nature. With five feeble senses we pretend to comprehend the
boundlessly complex cosmos, yet other beings with wider, stronger, or different range
of senses might not only see very differently the things we see, but might see and study
whole worlds of matter, energy, and life which lie close at hand yet can never be
detected with the senses we have. I have always believed that such strange, inaccessible
worlds exist at our very elbows, and now I believe I have found a way to break dawn the
barriers. I am not joking. Within twenty-four hours that machine near the table will
generate waves acting on unrecognized sense organs that exist in us as atrophied or
rudimentary vestiges. Those waves will open up to us many vistas unknown to man and
several unknown to anything we consider organic life. We shall see that at which dogs
howl in the dark, and that at which cats prick up their ears after midnight. We shall see
these things, and other things which no breathing creature has yet seen. We shall
overleap time, space, and dimensions, and without bodily motion peer to the bottom of
creation."
When Tillinghast said these things I remonstrated, for I knew him well enough to be
frightened rather than amused; but he was a fanatic, and drove me from the house. Now
he was no less a fanatic, but his desire to speak had conquered his resentment, and he
had written me imperatively in a hand I could scarcely recognize. As I entered the abode
of the friend so suddenly metamorphosed to a shivering gargoyle, I became infected
with the terror which seemed stalking in all the shadows. The words and beliefs
expressed ten weeks before seemed bodied forth in the darkness beyond the small circle
of candle light, and I sickened at the hollow, altered voice of my host. I wished the
servants were about, and did not like it when he said they had all left three days
previously. It seemed strange that old Gregory, at least, should desert his master without
telling as tried a friend as I. It was he who had given me all the information I had of
Tillinghast after I was repulsed in rage.
Yet I soon subordinated all my fears to my growing curiosity and fascination. Just what
Crawford Tillinghast now wished of me I could only guess, but that he had some
stupendous secret or discovery to impart, I could not doubt. Before I had protested at his
unnatural pryings into the unthinkable; now that he had evidently succeeded to some
degree I almost shared his spirit, terrible though the cost of victory appeared. Up
through the dark emptiness of the house I followed the bobbing candle in the hand of
this shaking parody on man. The electricity seemed to be turned off, and when I asked
my guide he said it was for a definite reason.
"It would he too much... I would not dare," he continued to mutter. I especially noted
his new habit of muttering, for it was not like him to talk to himself. We entered the
laboratory in the attic, and I observed that detestable electrical machine, glowing with a
sickly, sinister violet luminosity. It was connected with a powerful chemical battery, but
seemed to be receiving no current; for I recalled that in its experimental stage it had
sputtered and purred when in action. In reply to my question Tillinghast mumbled that
this permanent glow was not electrical in any sense that I could understand.
He now seated me near the machine, so that it was on my right, and turned a switch
somewhere below the crowning cluster of glass bulbs. The usual sputtering began,
turned to a whine, and terminated in a drone so soft as to suggest a return to silence.
Meanwhile the luminosity increased, waned again, then assumed a pale, outrè colour or
blend of colours which I could neither place nor describe. Tillinghast had been watching
me, and noted my puzzled expression.
"Do you know what that is?" he whispered, "That is ultra-violet." He chuckled oddly at
my surprise. "You thought ultra-violet was invisible, and so it is - but you can see that
and many other invisible things now.
"Listen to me! The waves from that thing are waking a thousand sleeping senses in us;
senses which we inherit from aeons of evolution from the state of detached electrons to
the state of organic humanity. I have seen the truth, and I intend to show it to you. Do
you wonder how it will seem? I will tell you." Here Trninghast seated himself directly
opposite me, blowing out his candle and staring hideously into my eyes. "Your existing
sense-organs - ears first, I think - will pick up many of the impressions, for they are
closely connected with the dormant organs. Then there will be others. You have heard
of the pineal gland? I laugh at the shallow endocrinologist, fellow-dupe and
fellow-parvenu of the Freudian. That gland is the great sense organ of organs - I have
found out. It is like sight in the end, and transmits visual pictures to the brain. If you are
normal, that is the way you ought to get most of it... I mean get most of the evidence
from beyond."
I looked about the immense attic room with the sloping south wall, dimly lit by rays
which the every day eye cannot see. The far corners were all shadows and the whole
place took on a hazy unreality which obscured its nature and invited the imagination to
symbolism and phantasm. During the interval that Tillinghast was long silent I fancied
myself in some vast incredible temple of long-dead gods; some vague edifice of
innumerable black stone columns reaching up from a floor of damp slabs to a cloudy
height beyond the range of my vision. The picture was very vivid for a while, but
gradually gave way to a more horrible conception; that of utter, absolute solitude in
infinite, sightless, soundless space. There seemed to a void, and nothing more, and I felt
a childish fear which prompted me to draw from my hip pocket the revolver I carried
after dark since the night I was held up in East Providence. Then from the farthermost
regions of remoteness, the sound softly glided into existence. It was infinitely faint,
subtly vibrant, and unmistakably musical, but held a quality of surpassing wildness
which made its impact feel 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 daemons from the stars... I have harnessed the shadows that stride from world to
world to sow death and madness... Space belongs to me, do you hear? Things are
hunting me now - the things that devour and dissolve - but I know how to elude them. It
is you they will get, as they got the servants... Stirring, dear sir? I told you it was
dangerous to move, I have saved you so far by telling you to keep still - saved you to
see more sights and to listen to me. If you had moved, they would have been at you long
ago. Don't worry, they won't hurt you. They didn't hurt the servants - it was the seeing
that made the poor devils scream so. My pets are not pretty, for they come out of places
where aesthetic standards are - very different. Disintegration is quite painless, I assure
you -- but I want you to see them. I almost saw them, but I knew how to stop. You are
curious? I always knew you were no scientist. Trembling, eh. Trembling with anxiety to
see the ultimate things I have discovered. Why don't you move, then? Tired? Well, don't
worry, my friend, for they are coming... Look, look, curse you, look... it's just over your
left shoulder..."
What remains to be told is very brief, and may be familiar to you from the newspaper
accounts. The police heard a shot in the old Tillinghast house and found us there Tillinghast dead and me unconscious. They arrested me because the revolver was in my
hand, but released me in three hours, after they found it was apoplexy which had
finished Tillinghast and saw that my shot had been directed at the noxious machine
which now lay hopelessly shattered on the laboratory floor. I did not tell very much of
what I had seen, for I feared the coroner would be skeptical; but from the evasive
outline I did give, the doctor told me that I had undoubtedly been hypnotized by the
vindictive and homicidal madman.
I wish I could believe that doctor. It would help my shaky nerves if I could dismiss what
I now have to think of the air and the sky about and above me. I never feel alone or
comfortable, and a hideous sense of pursuit sometimes comes chillingly on me when I
am weary. What prevents me from believing the doctor is one simple fact - that the
police never found the bodies of those servants whom they say Crawford Tillinghast
murdered.
The Lovecraft Library wishes to extend its gratitude to Eulogio García Recalde for transcribing this text.
:
He
by H. P. Lovecraft
Written 11 Aug 1925
Published September 1926 in Weird Tales, Vol. 8, No. 3, P. 373-80.
I saw him on a sleepless night when I was walking desperately to save my soul and my
vision. My coming to New York had been a mistake; for whereas I had looked for
poignant wonder and inspiration in the teeming labyrinths of ancient streets that twist
endlessly from forgotten courts and squares and waterfronts to courts and squares and
waterfronts equally forgotten, and in the Cyclopean modern towers and pinnacles that
rise blackly Babylonian under waning moons, I had found instead only a sense of horror
and oppression which threatened to master, paralyze, and annihilate me.
The disillusion had been gradual. Coming for the first time upon the town, I had seen it
in the sunset from a bridge, majestic above its waters, its incredible peaks and pyramids
rising flowerlike and delicate from pools of violet mist to play with the flaming clouds
and the first stars of evening. Then it had lighted up window by window above the
shimmering tides where lanterns nodded and glided and deep horns bayed weird
harmonies, and had itself become a starry firmament of dream, redolent of faery music,
and one with the marvels of Carcassonne and Samarcand and El Dorado and all glorious
and half-fabulous cities. Shortly afterward I was taken through those antique ways so
dear to my fancy-narrow, curving alleys and passages where rows of red Georgian brick
blinked with small-paned dorrners 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 all
enage 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 lile. 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 befere 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 musf 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 tahle 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 raffles to knee-breeches, silk hose, and the buckled shoes I had not previously
noticed. Now slowly sinking into a lyre-back chair, he commenced to eye me intently.
Without his hat he took on an aspect of extreme age which was scarcely visible before,
and I wondered if this unperceived mark of singular longevity were not one of the
sources of my disquiet. When he spoke at length, his soft, hollow, and carefully muffled
voice not infrequently quavered; and now and then I had great difficulty in following
him as I listened with a thrill of amazement and half- disavowed alarm which grew each
instant.
"You behold, Sir," my host began, "a man of very eccentrical habits for whose costume
no apology need be offered to one with your wit and inclinations. Reflecting upon better
times, I have not scrupled to ascertain their ways, and adopt their dress and manners; an
indulgence which offends none if practised without ostentation. It hath been my good
fortune to retain the rural seat of my ancestors, swallowed though it was by two towns,
first Greenwich, which built up hither after 1800, then New York, which joined on near
1830. There were many reasons for the close keeping of this place in my family, and I
have not been remiss in discharging such obligations. The squire who succeeded to it in
1768 studied sartain arts and made sartain discoveries, all connected with influences
residing in this particular plot of ground, and eminently desarving of the strongest
guarding. Some curious effects of these arts and discoveries I now purpose to show you,
under the strictest secrecy; and I believe I may rely on my judgement of men enough to
have no distrust of either your interest or your fidelity."
He paused, but I could only nod my head. I have said that I was alarmed, yet to my soul
nothing was more deadly than the material daylight world of New York, and whether
this man were a harmless eccentric or a wielder of dangerous arts, I had no choice save
to follow him and slake my sense of wonder on whatever he might have to offer. So I
listened.
"To - my ancestor," he softly continued, "there appeared to reside some very remarkable
qualities in the will of mankind; qualities having a little-suspected dominance not only
over the acts of one's self and of others, but over every variety of force and substance in
Nature, and over many elements and dimensions deemed more universal than Nature
herself. May I say that he flouted the sanctity of things as great as space and time and
that he put to strange uses the rites of sartain half-breed red Indians once encamped
upon this hill? These Indians showed choler when the place was built, and were plaguey
pestilent in asking to visit the grounds at the full of the moon. For years they stole over
the wall each month when they could, and by stealth performed sartain acts. Then, in '68,
the new squire catched them at their doings, and stood still at what he saw. Thereafter
he bargained with them and exchanged the free access of his grounds for the exact
inwardness of what they did, larning that their grandfathers got part of their custom
from red ancestors and part from an old Dutchman in the time of the States-General.
Arid pox on him, I'm afeared the squire must have sarved them monstrous bad rum whether or not by intent - for a week after he larnt the secret he was the only man living
that knew it. You, Sir, are the first outsider to be told there is a secret, and split me if I'd
have risked tampering that much with - the powers - had ye not been so hot after bygone
things."
I shuddered as the man grew colloquial - and with the familiar speech of another day.
He went on.
"But you must know, Sir, that what - the squire - got from those mongrel savages was
but a small part of the larning he came to have. He had not been at Oxford for nothing,
nor talked to no account with an ancient chymist and astrologer in Paris. He was, in fine,
made sensible that all the world is but the smoke of our intellects; past the bidding of
the vulgar, but by the wise to be puffed out and drawn in like any cloud of prime
Virginia tobacco. What we want, we may make about us; and what we don't want, we
may sweep away. I won't say that all this is wholly true in body, but 'tis sufficient true to
furnish a very pretty spectacle now and then. You, I conceive, would be tickled hy a
better sight of sartain other years than your fancy affords you; so be pleased to hold
back any fright at what I design to show. Come to the window and be quiet."
My host now took my hand to draw me to one of the two windows on the long side of
the malodorous room, and at the first touch of his ungloved fingers I turned cold. His
flesh, though dry and firm, was of the quality of ice; and I almost shrank away from his
pulling. But again I thought of the emptiness and horror of reality, and boldly prepared
to follow whithersoever I might be led. Once at the window, the man drew apart the
yellow silk curtains and directed my stare into the blackness outside. For a moment I
saw nothing save a myriad of tiny dancing lights, far, far before me. Then, as if in
response to an insidious motion of my host's hand, a flash of heat-lightning played over
the scene, and I looked out upon a sea of luxuriant foliage - foliage unpolluted, and not
the sea of roofs to be expected by any normal mind. On my right the Hudson glittered
wickedly, and in the distance ahead I saw the unhealthy shimmer of a vast salt marsh
constellated with nervous fireflies. The flash died, and an evil smile illumined the waxy
face of the aged necromancer.
"That was before my time - before the new squire's time. Pray let us try again."
I was faint, even fainter than the hateful modernity of that accursed city had made me.
"Good God!" I whispered, "can you do that for any time?" And as he nodded, and bared
the black stumps of what had once been yellow fangs, I clutched at the curtains to
prevent myself from falling. But he steadied me with that terrible, ice-cold claw, and
once more made his insidious gesture.
Again the lightning flashed - but this time upon a scene not wholly strange. It was
Greenwich, the Greenwich that used to be, with here and there a roof or row of houses
as we see it now, yet with lovely green lanes and fields and bits of grassy common. The
marsh still glittered beyond, but in the farther distance I saw the steeples of what was
then all of New York; Trinity and St. Paul's and the Brick Church dominating their
sisters, and a faint haze of wood smoke hovering over the whole. I breathed hard, hut
not so much from the sight itself as from the possibilities my imagination terrifiedly
conjured up.
"Can you - dare you - go far?" I spoke with awe and I think he shared it for a second,
but the evil grin returned.
"Far? What I have seen would blast ye to a mad statue of stone! Back, back - forward,
forward - look ye puling lackwit!"
And as he snarled the phrase under his breath he gestured anew bringing to the sky a
flash more blinding than either which had come before. For full three seconds I could
glimpse that pandemoniac sight, and in those seconds I saw a vista which will ever
afterward torment me in dreams. I saw the heavens verminous with strange flying things,
and beneath them a hellish black city of giant stone terraces with impious pyramids
flung savagely to the moon, and devil-lights burning from unnumbered windows. Arid
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
by H. P. Lovecraft
Written Sep 1921-mid 1922
Published in five parts, February-July 1922 in Home Brew, Vol. 1, Nos. 1-6.
I. From The Dark
Published Februrary 1922 in Home Brew Vol. 1, No. 1, p. 19-25.
Of Herbert West, who was my friend in college and in after life, I can speak only with
extreme terror. This terror is not due altogether to the sinister manner of his recent
disappearance, but was engendered by the whole nature of his life-work, and first
gained its acute form more than seventeen years ago, when we were in the third year of
our course at the Miskatonic University Medical School in Arkham. While he was with
me, the wonder and diabolism of his experiments fascinated me utterly, and I was his
closest companion. Now that he is gone and the spell is broken, the actual fear is greater.
Memories and possibilities are ever more hideous than realities.
The first horrible incident of our acquaintance was the greatest shock I ever experienced,
and it is only with reluctance that I repeat it. As I have said, it happened when we were
in the medical school1 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 sign5; 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 beyoiid 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.
II. The Plague-Daemon
Published March 1922 in Home Brew Vol. 1, No. 2, p. 45-50.
I shall never forget that hideous summer sixteen years ago, when like a noxious afrite
from the halls of Eblis typhoid stalked leeringly through Arkham. It is by that satanic
scourge that most recall the year, for truly terror brooded with bat-wings over the piles
of coffins in the tombs of Christchurch Cemetery; yet for me there is a greater horror in
that time -- a horror known to me alone now that Herbert West has disappeared.
West and I were doing post-graduate work in summer classes at the medical school of
Miskatonic University, and my friend had attained a wide notoriety because of his
experiments leading toward the revivification of the dead. After the scientific slaughter
of uncounted small animals the freakish work had ostensibly stopped by order of our
sceptical dean, Dr. Allan Halsey; though West had continued to perform certain secret
tests in his dingy boarding-house room, and had on one terrible and unforgettable
occasion taken a human body from its grave in the potter’s field to a deserted farmhouse
beyond Meadow Hill.
I was with him on that odious occasion, and saw him inject into the still veins the elixir
which he thought would to some extent restore life’s chemical and physical processes. It
had ended horribly -- in a delirium of fear which we gradually came to attribute to our
own overwrought nerves -- and West had never afterward been able to shake off a
maddening sensation of being haunted and hunted. The body had not been quite fresh
enough; it is obvious that to restore normal mental attributes a body must be very fresh
indeed; and the burning of the old house had prevented us from burying the thing. It
would have been better if we could have known it was underground.
After that experience West had dropped his researches for some time; but as the zeal of
the born scientist slowly returned, he again became importunate with the college faculty,
pleading for the use of the dissecting-room and of fresh human specimens for the work
he regarded as so overwhelmingly important. His pleas, however, were wholly in vain;
for the decision of Dr. Halsey was inflexible, and the other professors all endorsed the
verdict of their leader. In the radical theory of reanimation they saw nothing but the
immature vagaries of a youthful enthusiast whose slight form, yellow hair, spectacled
blue eyes, and soft voice gave no hint of the supernormal -- almost diabolical -- power
of the cold brain within. I can see him now as he was then -- and I shiver. He grew
sterner of face, but never elderly. And now Sefton Asylum has had the mishap and West
has vanished.
West clashed disagreeably with Dr. Halsey near the end of our last undergraduate term
in a wordy dispute that did less credit to him than to the kindiy dean in point of courtesy.
He felt that he was needlessly and irrationally retarded in a supremely great work; a
work which he could of course conduct to suit himself in later years, but which he
wished to begin while still possessed of the exceptional facilities of the university. That
the tradition-bound elders should ignore his singular results on animals, and persist in
their denial of the possibility of reanimation, was inexpressibly disgusting and almost
incomprehensible to a youth of West’s logical temperament. Only greater maturity
could help him understand the chronic mental limitations of the "professor-doctor" type
-- the product of generations of pathetic Puritanism; kindly, conscientious, and
sometimes gentle and amiable, yet always narrow, intolerant, custom-ridden, and
lacking in perspective. Age has more charity for these incomplete yet high-souled
characters, whose worst real vice is timidity, and who are ultimately punished by
general ridicule for their intellectual sins -- sins like Ptolemaism, Calvinism,
anti-Darwinism, anti-Nietzscheism, and every sort of Sabbatarianism and sumptuary
legislation. West, young despite his marvellous scientific acquirements, had scant
patience with good Dr. Halsey and his erudite colleagues; and nursed an increasing
resentment, coupled with a desire to prove his theories to these obtuse worthies in some
striking and dramatic fashion. Like most youths, he indulged in elaborate daydreams of
revenge, triumph, and final magnanimous forgiveness.
And then had come the scourge, grinning and lethal, from the nightmare caverns of
Tartarus. West and I had graduated about the time of its beginning, but had remained for
additional work at the summer school, so that we were in Arkham when it broke with
full daemoniac fury upon the town. Though not as yet licenced physicians, we now had
our degrees, and were pressed frantically into public service as the numbers of the
stricken grew. The situation was almost past management, and deaths ensued too
frequently for the local undertakers fully to handle. Burials without embalming were
made in rapid succession, and even the Christchurch Cemetery receiving tomb was
crammed with coffins of the unembalmed dead. This circumstance was not without
effect on West, who thought often of the irony of the situation -- so many fresh
specimens, yet none for his persecuted researches! We were frightfully overworked, and
the terrific mental and nervous strain made my friend brood morbidly.
But West’s gentle enemies were no less harassed with prostrating duties. College had all
but closed, and every doctor of the medical faculty was helping to fight the typhoid
plague. Dr. Halsey in particular had distinguished himself in sacrificing service,
applying his extreme skill with whole-hearted energy to cases which many others
shunned because of danger or apparent hopelessness. Before a month was over the
fearless dean had become a popular hero, though he seemed unconscious of his fame as
he struggled to keep from collapsing with physical fatigue and nervous exhaustion.
West could not withhold admiration for the fortitude of his foe, but because of this was
even more determined to prove to him the truth of his amazing doctrines. Taking
advantage of the disorganisation of both college work and municipal health regulations,
he managed to get a recently deceased body smuggled into the university
dissecting-room one night, and in my presence injected a new modification of his
solution. The thing actually opened its eyes, but only stared at the ceiling with a look of
soul-petrifying horror before collapsing into an inertness from which nothing could
rouse it. West said it was not fresh enough -- the hot summer air does not favour corpses.
That time we were almost caught before we incinerated the thing, and West doubted the
advisability of repeating his daring misuse of the college laboratory.
The peak of the epidemic was reached in August. West and I were almost dead, and Dr.
Halsey did die on the 14th. The students all attended the hasty funeral on the 15th, and
bought an impressive wreath, though the latter was quite overshadowed by the tributes
sent by wealthy Arkham citizens and by the municipality itself. It was almost a public
affair, for the dean had surely been a public benefactor. After the entombment we were
all somewhat depressed, and spent the afternoon at the bar of the Commercial House;
where West, though shaken by the death of his chief opponent, chilled the rest of us
with references to his notorious theories. Most of the students went home, or to various
duties, as the evening advanced; but West persuaded me to aid him in "making a night
of it" West’s landlady saw us arrive at his room about two in the morning, with a third
man between us; and told her husband that we had all evidently dined and wined rather
well.
Apparently this acidulous matron was right; for about 3 a.m. the whole house was
aroused by cries coming from West’s room, where when they broke down the door,
they found the two of us unconscious on the blood-stained carpet, beaten, scratched, and
mauled, and with the broken remnants of West’s bottles and instruments around us.
Only an open window told what had become of our assailant, and many wondered how
he himself had fared after the terrific leap from the second story to the lawn which he
must have made. There were some strange garments in the room, but West upon
regaining consciousness said they did not belong to the stranger, but were specimens
collected for bacteriological analysis in the course of investigations on the transmission
of germ diseases. He ordered them burnt as soon as possible in the capacious fireplace.
To the police we both declared ignorance of our late companion’s identity. He was,
West nervously said, a congenial stranger whom we had met at some downtown bar of
uncertain location. We had all been rather jovial, and West and I did not wish to have
our pugnacious companion hunted down.
That same night saw the beginning of the second Arkham horror -- the horror that to me
eclipsed the plague itself. Christ-church Cemetery was the scene of a terrible killing; a
watchman having been clawed to death in a manner not only too hideous for description,
but raising a doubt as to the human agency of the deed. The victim had been seen alive
considerably after midnight -- the dawn revealed the unutterable thing. The manager of
a circus at the neighbouring town of Bolton was questioned, but he swore that no beast
had at any time escaped from its cage. Those who found the body noted a trail of blood
leading to the receiving tomb, where a small pool of red lay on the concrete just outside
the gate. A fainter trail led away toward the woods, but it soon gave out.
The next night devils danced on the roofs of Arkham, and unnatural madness howled in
the wind. Through the fevered town had crept a curse which some said was greater than
the plague, and which some whispered was the embodied daemon-soul of the plague
itself. Eight houses were entered by a nameless thing which strewed red death in its
wake -- in all, seventeen maimed and shapeless remnants of bodies were left behind by
the voiceless, sadistic monster that crept abroad. A few persons had half seen it in the
dark, and said it was white and like a malformed ape or anthropomorphic fiend. It had
not left behind quite all that it had attacked, for sometimes it had been hungry. The
number it had killed was fourteen; three of the bodies had been in stricken homes and
had not been alive.
On the third night frantic bands of searchers, led by the police, captured it in a house on
Crane Street near the Miskatonic campus. They had organised the quest with care,
keeping in touch by means of volunteer telephone stations, and when someone in the
college district had reported hearing a scratching at a shuttered window, the net was
quickly spread. On account of the general alarm and precautions, there were only two
more victims, and the capture was effected without major casualties. The thing was
finally stopped by a bullet, though not a fatal one, and was rushed to the local hospital
amidst universal excitement and loathing.
For it had been a man. This much was clear despite the nauseous eyes, the voiceless
simianism, and the daemoniac savagery. They dressed its wound and carted it to the
asylum at Sefton, where it beat its head against the walls of a padded cell for sixteen
years -- until the recent mishap, when it escaped under circumstances that few like to
mention. What had most disgusted the searchers of
Arkham was the thing they noticed when the monster’s face was cleaned -- the mocking,
unbelievable resemblance to a learned and self-sacrificing martyr who had been
entombed but three days before -- the late Dr. Allan Halsey, public benefactor and dean
of the medical school of Miskatonic University.
To the vanished Herbert West and to me the disgust and horror were supreme. I shudder
tonight as I think of it; shudder even more than I did that morning when West muttered
through his bandages, "Damn it, it wasn’t quite fresh enough!"
III. Six Shots by 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.
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 Miskatonic
University Medical School in Arkham, vividly conscious for the first time of the
thoroughly mechanical nature of life. That was seven years before, but West looked
scarcely a day older now -- he was small, blond, clean-shaven, soft-voiced, and
spectacled, with only an occasional flash of a cold blue eye to tell of the hardening and
growing fanaticism of his character under the pressure of his terrible investigations. Our
experiences had often been hideous in the extreme; the results of defective reanimation,
when lumps of graveyard clay had been galvanised into morbid, unnatural, and
brainless motion by various modifications of the vital solution.
One thing had uttered a nerve-shattering scream; another had risen violently, beaten us
both to unconsciousness, and run amuck in a shocking way before it could be placed
behind asylum bars; still another, a loathsome African monstrosity, had clawed out of
its shallow grave and done a deed -- West had had to shoot that object. We could not get
bodies fresh enough to shew any trace of reason when reanimated, so had perforce
created nameless horrors. It was disturbing to think that one, perhaps two, of our
monsters still lived -- that thought haunted us shadowingly, till finally West disappeared
under frightful circumstances. But at the time of the scream in the cellar laboratory of
the isolated Bolton cottage, our fears were subordinate to our anxiety for extremely
fresh specimens. West was more avid than I, so that it almost seemed to me that he
looked half-covetously at any very healthy living physique.
It was in July, 1910, that the bad luck regarding specimens began to turn. I had been on
a long visit to my parents in Illinois, and upon my return found West in a state of
singular elation. He had, he told me excitedly, in all likelihood solved the problem of
freshness through an approach from an entirely new angle -- that of artificial
preservation. I had known that he was working on a new and highly unusual embalming
compound, and was not surprised that it had turned Out well; but until he explained the
details I was rather puzzled as to how such a compound could help in our work, since
the objectionable staleness of the specimens was largely due to delay occurring before
we secured them. This, I now saw, West had clearly recognised; creatuig 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!"
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 neverdying, artificially nourished tissue obtained from
the nearly hatched eggs of an indescribably tropical reptile. Two biological points he
was exceedingly anxious to settle -- first, whether any amount of consciousness and
rational action be possible without the brain, proceeding from the spinal cord and
various nerve-centres; and second, whether any kind of ethereal, intangible relation
distinct from the material cells may exist to link the surgically separated parts of what
has previously been a single living organism. All this research work required a
prodigious supply of freshly slaughtered human flesh -- and that was why Herbert West
had entered the Great War.
The phantasmal, unmentionable thing occurred one midnight late in March, 1915, in a
field hospital behind the lines of St. Eloi. I wonder even now if it could have been other
than a daemoniac dream of delirium. West had a private laboratory in an east room of
the barn-like temporary edifice, assigned him on his plea that he was devising new and
radical methods for the treatment of hitherto hopeless cases of maiming. There he
worked like a butcher in the midst of his gory wares -- I could never get used to the
levity with which he handled and classified certain things. At times he actually did
perform marvels of surgery for the soldiers; but his chief delights were of a less public
and philanthropic kind, requiring many explanations of sounds which seemed peculiar
even amidst that babel of the damned. Among these sounds were frequent
revolver-shots -- surely not uncommon on a battlefield, but distinctly uncommon in an
hospital. Dr. West’s reanimated specimens were not meant for long existence or a large
audience. Besides human tissue, West employed much of the reptile embryo tissue
which he had cultivated with such singular results. It was better than human material for
maintaining life in organless fragments, and that was now my friend’s chief activity. In
a dark corner of the laboratory, over a queer incubating burner, he kept a large covered
vat full of this reptilian cell-matter; which multiplied and grew puffily and hideously.
On the night of which I speak we had a splendid new specimen -- a man at once
physically powerful and of such high mentality that a sensitive nervous system was
assured. It was rather ironic, for he was the officer who had helped West to his
commission, and who was now to have been our associate. Moreover, he had in the past
secretly studied the theory of reanimation to some extent under West. Major Sir Eric
Moreland Clapham-Lee, D.S.O., was the greatest surgeon in our division, and had been
hastily assigned to the St. Eloi sector when news of the heavy fighting reached
headquarters. He had come in an aeroplane piloted by the intrepid Lieut. Ronald Hill,
only to be shot down when directly over his destination. The fall had been spectacular
and awful; Hill was unrecognisable afterward, but the wreck yielded up the great
surgeon in a nearly decapitated but otherwise intact condition. West had greedily seized
the lifeless thing which had once been his friend and fellow-scholar; and I shuddered
when he finished severing the head, placed it in his hellish vat of pulpy reptile-tissue to
preserve it for future experiments, and proceeded to treat the decapitated body .on the
operating table. He injected new blood, joined certain veins, arteries, and nerves at the
headless neck, and closed the ghastly aperture with engrafted skin from an unidentified
specimen which had borne an officer’s uniform. I knew what he wanted -- to see if this
highly organised body could exhibit, without its head, any of the signs of mental life
which had distinguished Sir Eric Moreland Clapham-Lee. Once a student of
reanimation, this silent trunk was now gruesomely called upon to exemplify it.
I can still see Herbert West under the sinister electric light as he injected his reanimating
solution into the arm of the headless body. The scene I cannot describe -- I should faint
if I tried it, for there is madness in a room full of classified charnel things, with blood
and lesser human debris almost ankle-deep on the slimy floor, and with hideous
reptilian abnormalities sprouting, bubbling, and baking over a winking bluish-green
spectre of dim flame in a far corner of black shadows.
The specimen, as West repeatedly observed, had a splendid nervous system. Much was
expected of it; and as a few twitching motions began to appear, I could see the feverish
interest on West’s face. He was ready, I think, to see proof of his increasingly strong
opinion that consciousness, reason, and personality can exist independently of the brain
-- that man has no central connective spirit, but is merely a machine of nervous matter,
each section more or less complete in itself. In one triumphant demonstration West was
about to relegate the mystery of life to the category of myth. The body now twitched
more vigorously, and beneath our avid eyes commenced to heave in a frightful way. The
arms stirred disquietingly, the legs drew up, and various muscles contracted in a
repulsive kind of writhing. Then the headless thing threw out its arms in a gesture which
was unmistakably one of desperation -- an intelligent desperation apparently sufficient
to prove every theory of Herbert West. Certainly, the nerves were recalling the man’s
last act in life; the struggle to get free of the falling aeroplane.
What followed, I shall never positively know. It may have been wholly an hallucination
from the shock caused at that instant by the sudden and complete destruction of the
building in a cataclysm of German shell-fire -- who can gainsay it, since West and I
were the only proved survivors? West liked to think that before his recent disappearance,
but there were times when he could not; for it was queer that we both had the same
hallucination. The hideous occurrence itself was very simple, notable only for what it
implied.
The body on the table had risen with a blind and terrible groping, and we had heard a
sound. I should not call that sound a voice, for it was too awful. And yet its timbre was
not the most awful thing about it. Neither was its message -- it had merely screamed,
"Jump, Ronald, for God’s sake, jump!" The awful thing was its source.
For it had come from the large covered vat in that ghoulish corner of crawling black
shadows.
VI. The Tomb-Legions
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 ammation. These were the usual results, for in order to reawaken the
mind it was necessary to have specimens so absolutely fresh that no decay could
possibly affect the delicate brain-cells.
This need for very fresh corpses had been West’s moral undoing. They were hard to get,
and one awful day he had secured his specimen while it was still alive and vigorous. A
struggle, a needle, and a powerful alkaloid had transformed it to a very fresh corpse, and
the experiment had succeeded for a brief and memorable moment; but West had
emerged with a soul calloused and seared, and a hardened eye which sometimes glanced
with a kind of hideous and calculating appraisal at men of especially sensitive brain and
especially vigorous physique. Toward the last I became acutely afraid of West, for he
began to look at me that way. People did not seem to notice his glances, but they
noticed my fear; and after his disappearance used that as a basis for some absurd
suspicions.
West, in reality, was more afraid than I; for his abominable pursuits entailed a life of
furtiveness and dread of every shadow. Partly it was the police he feared; but sometimes
his nervousness was deeper and more nebulous, touching on certain indescribable things
into which he had injected a morbid life, and from which he had not seen that life depart.
He usually finished his experiments with a revolver, but a few times he had not been
quick enough. There was that first specimen on whose rifled grave marks of clawing
were later seen. There was also that Arkham professor’s body which had done cannibal
things before it had been captured and thrust unidentified into a madhouse cell at Sefton,
where it beat the walls for sixteen years. Most of the other possibly surviving results
were things less easy to speak of -- for in later years West’s scientific zeal had
degenerated to an unhealthy and fantastic mania, and he had spent his chief skill in
vitalising not entire human bodies but isolated parts of bodies, or parts joined to organic
matter other -than human. It had become fiendishly disgusting by the time he
disappeared; many of the experiments could not even be hinted at in print. The Great
War, through which both of us served as surgeons, had intensified this side of West.
In saying that West’s fear of his specimens was nebulous, I have in mind particularly its
complex nature. Part of it came merely from knowing of the existence of such nameless
monsters, while another part arose from apprehension of the bodily harm they might
under certain circumstances do him. Their disappearance added horror to the situation -of them all, West knew the whereabouts of only one, the pitiful asylum thing. Then
there was a- more subtle fear -- a very fantastic sensation resulting from a curious
experiment in the Canadian army in 1915. West, in the midst of a severe battle, had
reanimated Major Sir Eric Moreland Clapham-Lee, D.S.O., a fellow-physician who
knew about his experiments and could have duplicated them. The head had been
removed, so that the possibilities of quasi-intelligent life in the trunk might be
investigated. Just as the building was wiped out by a German shell, there had been a
success. The trunk had moved intelligently; and, unbelievable to relate, we were both
sickeningly sure that articulate sounds had come from the detached head as it lay in a
shadowy corner of the laboratory. The shell had been merciful, in a way -- but West
could never feel as certain as he wished, that we two were the only survivors. He used
to make shuddering conjectures about the possible actions of a headless physician with
the power of reanimating the dead.
West’s last quarters were in a venerable house of much elegance, overlooking one of the
oldest burying-grounds in Boston. He had chosen the place for purely symbolic and
fantastically aesthetic reasons, since most of the interments were of the colonial period
and therefore of little use to a scientist seeking very fresh bodies. The laboratory was in
a sub-cellar secretly constructed by imported workmen, and contained a huge
incinerator for the quiet and complete disposal of such bodies, or fragments and
synthetic mockeries of bodies, as might remain from the morbid experiments and
unhallowed amusements of the owner. During the excavation of this cellar the workmen
had struck some exceedingly ancient masonry; undoubtedly connected with the old
burying-ground, yet far too deep to correspond with any known sepulchre therein. After
a number of calculations West decided that it represented some secret chamber beneath
the tomb of the Averills, where the last interment had been made in 1768. I was with
him when he studied the nitrous, dripping walls laid bare by the spades and mattocks of
the men, and was prepared for the gruesome thrill which would attend the uncovering of
centuried grave-secrets; but for the first time West’s new timidity conquered his natural
curiosity, and he betrayed his degenerating fibre by ordering the masonry left intact and
plastered over. Thus it remained till that final hellish night; part of the walls of the
secret laboratory. I speak of West’s decadence, but must add that it was a purely mental
and intangible thing. Outwardly he was the same to the last -- calm, cold, slight, and
yellow-haired, with spectacled blue eyes and a general aspect of youth which years and
fears seemed never to change. He seemed calm even when he thought of that clawed
grave and looked over his shoulder; even when he thought of the carnivorous thing that
gnawed and pawed at Sefton bars.
The end of Herbert West began one evening in our joint study when he was dividing his
curious glance between the newspaper and me. A strange headline item had struck at
him from the crumpled pages, and a nameless titan claw had seemed to reach down
through sixteen years. Something fearsome and incredible had happened at Sefton
Asylum fifty miles away, stunning the neighbourhood and baffling the police. In the
small hours of the morning a body of silent men had entered the grounds, and their
leader had aroused the attendants. He was a menacing military figure who talked
without moving his lips and whose voice seemed almost ventriloquially connected with
an immense black case he carried. His expressionless face was handsome to the point of
radiant beauty, but had shocked the superintendent when the hall light fell on it -- for it
was a wax face with eyes of painted glass. Some nameless accident had befallen this
man. A larger man guided his steps; a repellent hulk whose bluish face seemed half
eaten away by some unknown malady. The speaker had asked for the custody of the
cannibal monster committed from Arkham sixteen years before; and upon being refused,
gave a signal which precipitated a shocking riot. The fiends had beaten, trampled, and
bitten every attendant who did not flee; killing four and finally succeeding in the
liberation of the monster. Those victims who could recall the event without hysteria
swore that the creatures had acted less like men than like unthinkable automata guided
by the wax-faced leader. By the time help could be summoned, every trace of the men
and of their mad charge had vanished.
From the hour of reading this item until midmght, West sat almost paralysed. At
midnight the doorbell rang, startling him fearfully. All the servants were asleep in the
attic, so I answered the bell. As I have told the police, there was no wagon in the street,
but only a group of strange-looking figures bearing a large square box which they
deposited in the hallway after one of them had grunted in a highly unnatural voice,
"Express -- prepaid." They filed out of the house with a jerky tread, and as I watched
them go I had an odd idea that they were turning toward the ancient cemetery on which
the back of the house abutted. When I slammed the door after them West came
downstairs and looked at the box. It was about two feet square, and bore West’s correct
name and present address. It also bore the inscription, "From Eric Moreland
Clapham-Lee, St. Eloi, Flanders." Six years before, in Flanders, a shelled hospital had
fallen upon the headless reanimated trunk of Dr. Clapham-Lee, and upon the detached
head which -- perhaps -- had uttered articulate sounds.
West was not even excited now. His condition was more ghastly. Quickly he said, "It’s
the finish -- but let’s incinerate -- this." We carried the thing down to the laboratory -listening. I do not remember many particulars -- you can imagine my state of mind -but it is a vicious lie to say it was Herbert West’s body which I put into the incinerator.
We both inserted the whole unopened wooden box, closed the door, and started the
electricity. Nor did any sound come from the box, after all.
It was West who first noticed the falling plaster on that part of the wall where the
ancient tomb masonry had been covered up. I was going to run, but he stopped me.
Then I saw a small black aperture, felt a ghoulish wind of ice, and smelled the charnel
bowels of a putrescent earth. There was no sound, but just then the electric lights went
out and I saw outlined against some phosphorescence of the nether world a horde of
silent toiling things which only insanity -- or worse -- could create. Their outlines were
human, semi-human, fractionally human, and not human at all -- the horde was
grotesquely heterogeneous. They were removing the stones quietly, one by one, from
the centuried wall. And then, as the breach became large enough, they came out into the
laboratory in single file; led by a talking thing with a beautiful head made of wax. A
sort of mad-eyed monstrosity behind the leader seized on Herbert West. West did not
resist or utter a sound. Then they all sprang at him and tore him to pieces before my
eyes, bearing the fragments away into that subterranean vault of fabulous abominations.
West’s head was carried off by the wax-headed leader, who wore a Canadian officer’s
uniform. As it disappeared I saw that the blue eyes behind the spectacles were hideously
blazing with their first touch of frantic, visible emotion.
Servants found me unconscious in the morning. West was gone. The incinerator
contained only unidentifiable ashes. Detectives have questioned me, but what can I say?
The Sef ton 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
by H. P. Lovecraft
Written Mar 1922
Published May 1923 in The National Amateur, Vol. 45, No. 5, pages 1-3.
Apropos of sleep, that sinister adventure of all our nights, we may say
that men go to bed daily with an audacity that would be
incomprehensible if we did not know that it is the result of ignorance of
the danger.
- Baudelaire
May the merciful gods, if indeed there be such, guard those hours when no power of the
will, or drug that the cunning of man devises, can keep me from the chasm of sleep.
Death is merciful, for there is no return therefrom, but with him who has come back out
of the nethermost chambers of night, haggard and knowing, peace rests nevermore. Fool
that I was to plunge with such unsanctioned phrensy into mysteries no man was meant
to penetrate; fool or god that he was-my only friend, who led me and went before me,
and who in the end passed into terrors which may yet be mine!
We met, I recall, in a railway station, where he was the center of a crowd of the vulgarly
curious. He was unconscious, having fallen in a kind of convulsion which imparted to
his slight black-clad body a strange rigidity. I think he was then approaching forty years
of age, for there were deep lines in the face, wan and hollow-cheeked, but oval and
actually beautiful; and touches of gray in the thick, waving hair and small full beard
which had once been of the deepest raven black. His brow was white as the marble of
Pentelicus, and of a height and breadth almost god-like.
I said to myself, with all the ardor of a sculptor, that this man was a faun's statue out of
antique Hellas, dug from a temple's ruins and brought somehow to life in our stifling
age only to feel the chill and pressure of devastating years. And when he opened his
immense, sunken, and wildly luminous black eyes I knew he would be thence-forth 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 daemon could have aspired to discoveries and conquest
like those which we planned in whispers. I shiver as I speak of them, and dare not be
explicit; though I will say that my friend once wrote on paper a wish which he dared not
utter with his tongue, and which made me burn the paper and look affrightedly out of
the window at the spangled night sky. I will hint-only hint- that he had designs which
involved the rulership of the visible universe and more; designs whereby the earth and
the stars would move at his command, and the destinies of all living things be his. I
affirm-I swear-that I had no share in these extreme aspirations. Anything my friend may
have said or written to the contrary must be erroneous, for I am no man of strength to
risk the unmentionable spheres by which alone one might achieve success.
There was a night when winds from unknown spaces whirled us irresistibly into
limitless vacua beyond all thought and entity. Perceptions of the most maddeningly
untransmissible sort thronged upon us; perceptions of infinity which at the time
convulsed us with joy, yet which are now partly lost to my memory and partly incapable
of presentation to others. Viscous obstacles were clawed through in rapid succession,
and at length I felt that we had been borne to realms of greater remoteness than any we
had previously known.
My friend was vastly in advance as we plunged into this awesome ocean of virgin
aether, and I could see the sinister exultation on his floating, luminous, too-youthful
memory-face. Suddenly that face became dim and quickly disappeared, and in a brief
space I found myself projected against an obstacle which I could not penetrate. It was
like the others, yet incalculably denser; a sticky clammy mass, if such terms can be
applied to analogous qualities in a non-material sphere.
I had, I felt, been halted by a barrier which my friend and leader had successfully passed.
Struggling anew, I came to the end of the drug-dream and opened my physical eyes to
the tower studio in whose opposite corner reclined the pallid and still unconscious form
of my fellow dreamer, weirdly haggard and wildly beautiful as the moon shed
gold-green light on his marble features.
Then, after a short interval, the form in the corner stirred; and may pitying heaven keep
from my sight and sound another thing like that which took place before me. I cannot
tell you how he shrieked, or what vistas of unvisitable hells gleamed for a second in
black eyes crazed with fright. I can only say that I fainted, and did not stir till he himself
recovered and shook me in his phrensy for someone to keep away the horror and
desolation.
That was the end of our voluntary searchings in the caverns of dream. Awed, shaken,
and portentous, my friend who had been beyond the barrier warned me that we must
never venture within those realms again. What he had seen, he dared not tell me; but he
said from his wisdom that we must sleep as little as possible, even if drugs were
necessary to keep us awake. That he was right, I soon learned from the unutterable fear
which engulfed me whenever consciousness lapsed.
After each short and inevitable sleep I seemed older, whilst my friend aged with a
rapidity almost shocking. It is hideous to see wrinkles form and hair whiten almost
before one's eyes. Our mode of life was now totally altered. Heretofore a recluse so far
as I know-his true name and origin never having passed his lips-my friend now became
frantic in his fear of solitude. At night he would not be alone, nor would the company of
a few persons calm him. His sole relief was obtained in revelry of the most general and
boisterous sort; so that few assemblies of the young and gay were unknown to us.
Our appearance and age seemed to excite in most cases a ridicule which I keenly
resented, but which my friend considered a lesser evil than solitude. Especially was he
afraid to be out of doors alone when the stars were shining, and if forced to this
condition he would often glance furtively at the sky as if hunted by some monstrous
thing therein. He did not always glance at the same place in the sky-it seemed to be a
different place at different times. On spring evenings it would be low in the northeast. In
the summer it would be nearly overhead. In the autumn it would be in the northwest. In
winter it would be in the east, but mostly if in the small hours of morning.
Midwinter evenings seemed least dreadful to him. Only after two years did I connect
this fear with anything in particular; but then I began to see that he must be looking at a
special spot on the celestial vault whose position at different times corresponded to the
direction of his glance-a spot roughly marked by the constellation Corona Borealis.
We now had a studio in London, never separating, but never discussing the days when
we had sought to plumb the mysteries of the unreal world. We were aged and weak
from our drugs, dissipations, and nervous overstrain, and the thinning hair and beard of
my friend had become snow-white. Our freedom from long sleep was surprising, for
seldom did we succumb more than an hour or two at a time to the shadow which had
now grown so frightful a menace.
Then came one January of fog and rain, when money ran low and drugs were hard to
buy. My statues and ivory heads were all sold, and I had no means to purchase new
materials, or energy to fashion them even had I possessed them. We suffered terribly,
and on a certain night my friend sank into a deep-breathing sleep from which I could
not awaken him. I can recall the scene now-the desolate, pitch-black garret studio under
the eaves with the rain beating down; the ticking of our lone clock; the fancied ticking
of our watches as they rested on the dressing-table; the creaking of some swaying
shutter in a remote part of the house; certain distant city noises muffled by fog and
space; and, worst of all, the deep, steady, sinister breathing of my friend on the couch-a
rhythmical breathing which seemed to measure moments of supernal fear and agony for
his spirit as it wandered in spheres forbidden, unimagined, and hideously remote.
The tension of my vigil became oppressive, and a wild train of trivial impressions and
associations thronged through my almost unhinged mind. I heard a clock strike
somewhere-not ours, for that was not a striking clock-and my morbid fancy found in
this a new starting-point for idle wanderings. Clocks-time-space-infinity- and then my
fancy reverted to the locale as I reflected that even now, beyond the roof and the fog and
the rain and the atmosphere, Corona Borealis was rising in the northeast. Corona
Borealis, which my friend had appeared to dread, and whose scintillant semicircle of
stars must even now be glowing unseen through the measureless abysses of aether. All
at once my feverishly sensitive ears seemed to detect a new and wholly distinct
component in the soft medley of drug-magnified sounds-a low and damnably insistent
whine from very far away; droning, clamoring, mocking, calling, from the northeast.
But it was not that distant whine which robbed me of my faculties and set upon my soul
such a seal of fright as may never in life be removed; not that which drew the shrieks
and excited the convulsions which caused lodgers and police to break down the door. It
was not what I heard, but what I saw; for in that dark, locked, shuttered, and curtained
room there appeared from the black northeast corner a shaft of horrible red-gold light-a
shaft which bore with it no glow to disperse the darkness, but which streamed only upon
the recumbent head of the troubled sleeper, bringing out in hideous duplication the
luminous and strangely youthful memory-face as I had known it in dreams of abysmal
space and unshackled time, when my friend had pushed behind the barrier to those
secret, innermost and forbidden caverns of nightmare.
And as I looked, I beheld the head rise, the black, liquid, and deep-sunken eyes open in
terror, and the thin, shadowed lips part as if for a scream too frightful to be uttered.
There dwelt in that ghastly and flexible face, as it shone bodiless, luminous, and
rejuvenated in the blackness, more of stark, teeming, brain-shattering fear than all the
rest of heaven and earth has ever revealed to me.
No word was spoken amidst the distant sound that grew nearer and nearer, but as I
followed the memory-face's mad stare along that cursed shaft of light to its source, the
source whence also the whining came, I, too, saw for an instant what it saw, and fell
with ringing ears in that fit of shrieking epilepsy which brought the lodgers and the
police. Never could I tell, try as I might, what it actually was that I saw; nor could the
still face tell, for although it must have seen more than I did, it will never speak again.
But always I shall guard against the mocking and insatiate Hypnos, lord of sleep,
against the night sky, and against the mad ambitions of knowledge and philosophy.
Just what happened is unknown, for not only was my own mind unseated by the strange
and hideous thing, but others were tainted with a forgetfulness which can mean nothing
if not madness. They have said, I know not for what reason, that I never had a friend;
but that art, philosophy, and insanity had filled all my tragic life. The lodgers and police
on that night soothed me, and the doctor administered something to quiet me, nor did
anyone see what a nightmare event had taken place. My stricken friend moved them to
no pity, but what they found on the couch in the studio made them give me a praise
which sickened me, and now a fame which I spurn in despair as I sit for hours, bald,
gray-bearded, shriveled, palsied, drug-crazed, and broken, adoring and praying to the
object they found.
For they deny that I sold the last of my statuary, and point with ecstasy at the thing
which the shining shaft of light left cold, petrified, and unvocal. It is all that remains of
my friend; the friend who led me on to madness and wreckage; a godlike head of such
marble as only old Hellas could yield, young with the youth that is outside time, and
with beauteous bearded face, curved, smiling lips, Olympian brow, and dense locks
waving and poppy-crowned. They say that that haunting memory-face is modeled from
my own, as it was at twenty-five; but upon the marble base is carven a single name in
the letters of Attica-HYPNOS.
In The Vault
by H. P. Lovecraft
Written 18 Sep 1925
Published November 1925 in The Tryout, Vol. 10, No. 6, p. 3-17.
There is nothing more absurd, as I view it, than that conventional association of the
homely and the wholesome which seems to pervade the psychology of the multitude.
Mention a bucolic Yankee setting, a bungling and thick-fibred village undertaker, and a
careless mishap in a tomb, and no average reader can be brought to expect more than a
hearty albeit grotesque phase of comedy. God knows, though, that the prosy tale which
George Birch's death permits me to tell has in it aspects beside which some of our
darkest tragedies are light.
Birch acquired a limitation and changed his business in 1881, yet never discussed the
case when he could avoid it. Neither did his old physician Dr. Davis, who died years
ago. It was generally stated that the affliction and shock were results of an unlucky slip
whereby Birch had locked himself for nine hours in the receiving tomb of Peck Valley
Cemetery, escaping only by crude and disastrous mechanical means; but while this
much was undoubtedly true, there were other and blacker things which the man used to
whisper to me in his drunken delirium toward the last. He confided in me because I was
his doctor, and because he probably felt the need of confiding in someone else after
Davis died. He was a bachelor, wholly without relatives.
Birch, before 1881, had been the village undertaker of Peck Valley; and was a very
calloused and primitive specimen even as such specimens go. The practices I heard
attributed to him would be unbelievable today, at least in a city; and even Peck Valley
would have shuddered a bit had it known the easy ethics of its mortuary artist in such
debatable matters as the ownership of costly "laying-out" apparel invisible beneath the
casket's lid, and the degree of dignity to be maintained in posing and adapting the
unseen members of lifeless tenants to containers not always calculated with sublimest
accuracy. Most distinctly Birch was lax, insensitive, and professionally undesirable; yet
I still think he was not an evil man. He was merely crass of fibre and functionthoughtless, 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 mote flagrantly the needs of the rusty lock on the tomb door which he
slammed open and shut with such nonchalant abandon.
At last the spring thaw came, and graves were laboriously prepared for the nine silent
harvests of the grim reaper which waited in the tomb. Birch, though dreading the bother
of removal and interment, began his task of transference one disagreeable April
morning, but ceased before noon because of a heavy rain that seemed to irritate his
horse, after having laid but one mortal tenement to its permanent rest. That was Darius
Peck, the nonagenarian, whose grave was not far from the tomb. Birch decided that he
would begin the next day with little old Matthew 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 rnight 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 lust as he had recognised old Matt's coffin that the door slammed to in the wind,
leaving him in a dusk even deeper thanbefore. 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
btick 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 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 undated 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 sureabsolutely 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. shew those wounds! The body was
pretty badly gone, but if ever saw vindictiveness on any face- or former face... You
know what a fiend he was for revenge- how he ruined old Raymond thirty years after
their boundary suit, and how he stepped on the puppy that snapped at him a year ago
last August... He was the devil incarnate, Birch, and I believe his eye-for-an-eye fury
could beat old Father Death himself. God, what a rage! I'd hate to have it aimed at me!
"Why did you do it, Birch? He was a scoundrel, and I don't blame you for giving him a
cast-aside coffin, but you always did go too damned far! Well enough to skimp on the
thing some way, but you knew what a little man old Fenner was.
"I'll never get the picture out of my head as long as I live. You kicked hard, for Asaph's
coffin was on the floor. His head was broken in, and everything was tumbled about. I've
seen sights before, but there was one thing too much here. An eye for an eye! Great
heavens, Birch, but you got what you deserved. The skull turned my stomach, but the
other was worse- those ankles cut neatly off to fit Matt Fenner's cast-aside coffin!"
Memory
by H. P. Lovecraft
Written 1919
Published May 1923 in The National Amateur, Vol. 45, No. p. 5, 9.
In the valley of Nis the accursed waning moon shines thinly, tearing a path for its light
with feeble horns through the lethal foliage of a great upas-tree. And within the depths
of the valley, where the light reaches not, move forms not meant to be beheld. Rank is
the herbage on each slope, where evil vines and creeping plants crawl amidst the stones
of ruined palaces, twining tightly about broken columns and strange monoliths, and
heaving up marble pavements laid by forgotten hands. And in trees that grow gigantic in
crumbling courtyards leap little apes, while in and out of deep treasure-vaults writhe
poison serpents and scaly things without a name. Vast are the stones which sleep
beneath coverlets of dank moss, and mighty were the walls from which they fell. For all
time did their builders erect them, and in sooth they yet serve nobly, for beneath them
the grey toad makes his habitation.
At the very bottom of the valley lies the river Than, whose waters are slimy and filled
with weeds. From hidden springs it rises, and to subterranean grottoes it flows, so that
the Daemon of the Valley knows not why its waters are red, nor whither they are bound.
The Genie that haunts the moonbeams spake to the Daemon of the Valley, saying, "I am
old, and forget much. Tell me the deeds and aspect and name of them who built these
things of Stone." And the Daemon replied, "I am Memory, and am wise in lore of the
past, but I too am old. These beings were like the waters of the river Than, not to be
understood. Their deeds I recall not, for they were but of the moment. Their aspect I
recall dimly, it was like to that of the little apes in the trees. Their name I recall clearly,
for it rhymed with that of the river. These beings of yesterday were called Man."
So the Genie flew back to the thin horned moon, and the Daemon looked intently at a
little ape in a tree that grew in a crumbling courtyard.
Nyarlathotep
by H. P. Lovecraft
Written early Dec 1920
Published November 1920 in The United Amateur, Vol. 20, No. 2, p. 19-21.
Nyarlathotep... the crawling chaos... I am the last... I will tell the audient void...
I do not recall distinctly when it began, but it was months ago. The general tension was
horrible. To a season of political and social upheaval was added a strange and brooding
apprehension of hideous physical danger; a danger widespread and all-embracing, such
a danger as may be imagined only in the most terrible phantasms of the night. I recall
that the people went about with pale and worried faces, and whispered warnings and
prophecies which no one dared consciously repeat or acknowledge to himself that he
had heard. A sense of monstrous guilt was upon the land, and out of the abysses
between the stars swept chill currents that made men shiver in dark and lonely places.
There was a demoniac alteration in the sequence of the seasons the autumn heat lingered
fearsomely, and everyone felt that the world and perhaps the universe had passed from
the control of known gods or forces to that of gods or forces which were unknown.
And it was then that Nyarlathotep came out of Egypt. Who he was, none could tell, but
he was of the old native blood and looked like a Pharaoh. The fellahin knelt when they
saw him, yet could not say why. He said he had risen up out of the blackness of
twenty-seven centuries, and that he had heard messages from places not on this planet.
Into the lands of civilisation came Nyarlathotep, swarthy, slender, and sinister, always
buying strange instruments of glass and metal and combining them into instruments yet
stranger. He spoke much of the sciences of electricity and psychology and gave
exhibitions of power which sent his spectators away speechless, yet which swelled his
fame to exceeding magnitude. Men advised one another to see Nyarlathotep, and
shuddered. And where Nyarlathotep went, rest vanished, for the small hours were rent
with the screams of nightmare. Never before had the screams of nightmare been such a
public problem; now the wise men almost wished they could forbid sleep in the small
hours, that the shrieks of cities might less horribly disturb the pale, pitying moon as it
glimmered on green waters gliding under bridges, and old steeples crumbling against a
sickly sky.
I remember when Nyarlathotep came to my city the great, the old, the terrible city of
unnumbered crimes. My friend had told me of him, and of the impelling fascination and
allurement of his revelations, and I burned with eagerness to explore his uttermost
mysteries. My friend said they were horrible and impressive beyond my most fevered
imaginings; and what was thrown on a screen in the darkened room prophesied things
none but Nyarlathotep dared prophesy, and in the sputter of his sparks there was taken
from men that which had never been taken before yet which 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
by H. P. Lovecraft
Written 1926
Published October 1927 in Weird Tales, Vol. 10, No. 4, p. 505-14.
You needn't think I'm crazy, Eliot - plenty of others have queerer prejudices than this.
Why don't you laugh at Oliver's grandfather, who won't ride in a motor? If I don't like
that damned subway, it's my own business; and we got here more quickly anyhow in the
taxi. We'd have had to walk up the hill from Park Street if we'd taken the car.
I know I'm more nervous than I was when you saw me last year, but you don't need to
hold a clinic over it. There's plenty of reason, God knows, and I fancy I'm lucky to be
sane at all. Why the third degree? You didn't use to be so inquisitive.
Well, if you must hear it, I don't know why you shouldn't. Maybe you ought to, anyhow,
for you kept writing me like a grieved parent when you heard I'd begun to cut the Art
Club and keep away from Pickman. Now that he's disappeared I go round to the club
once in a while, but my nerves aren't what they were.
No, I don't know what's become of Pickman, and I don't like to guess. You might have
surmised I had some inside information when I dropped him - and that's why I don't
want to think where he's gone. Let the police find what they can - it won't be much,
judging from the fact that they don't know yet of the old North End place he hired under
the name of Peters.
I'm not sure that I could find it again myself - not that I'd ever try, even in broad
daylight!
Yes, I do know, or am afraid I know, why he maintained it. I'm coming to that. And I
think you'll understand before I'm through why I don't tell the police. They would ask
me to guide them, but I couldn't go back there even if I knew the way. There was
something there - and now I can't use the subway or (and you may as well have your
laugh at this, too) go down into cellars any more.
I should think you'd have known I didn't drop Pickman for the same silly reasons that
fussy old women like Dr. Reid or Joe Minot or Rosworth did. Morbid art doesn't shock
me, and when a man has the genius Pickman had I feel it an honour to know him, no
matter what direction his work takes. Boston never had a greater painter than Richard
Upton Pickman. I said it at first and I say it still, and I never swenved an inch, either,
when he showed that 'Ghoul Feeding'. That, you remember, was when Minot cut him.
You know, it takes profound art and profound insight into Nature to turn out stuff like
Pickman's. Any magazine-cover hack can splash paint around wildly and call it a
nightmare or a Witches' Sabbath or a portrait of the devil, but only a great painter can
make such a thing really scare or ring true. That's because only a real artist knows the
actual anatomy of the terrible or the physiology of fear - the exact sort of lines and
proportions that connect up with latent instincts or hereditary memories of fright, and
the proper colour contrasts and lighting effects to stir the dormant sense of strangeness.
I don't have to tell you why a Fuseli really brings a shiver while a cheap ghost-story
frontispiece merely makes us laugh. There's something those fellows catch - beyond life
- that they're able to make us catch for a second. Doré 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. Gad, I wouldn't be alive if I'd ever seen
what that man - if he was a man - saw !
You recall that Pickman's forte was faces. I don't believe anybody since Goya could put
so much of sheer hell into a set of features or a twist of expression. And before Goya
you have to go back to the mediaeval chaps who did the gargoyles and chimaeras on
Notre Dame and Mont Saint-Michel. They believed all sorts of things - and maybe they
saw all sorts of things, too, for the Middle Ages had some curious phases I remember
your asking Pickman yourself once, the year before you went away, wherever in
thunder he got such ideas and visions. Wasn't that a nasty laugh he gave you? It was
partly because of that laugh that Reid dropped him. Reid, you know, had just taken up
comparative pathology, and was full of pompous 'inside stuff' about the biological or
evolutionary significance of this or that mental or physical symptom. He said Pickman
repelled him more and more every day, and almost frightened him towards the last - that
the fellow's features and expression were slowly developing in a way he didn't like; in a
way that wasn't human. He had a lot of talk about diet, and mid Pickman must be
abnormal and eccentric to the last degree. I suppose you told Reid, if you and he had
any correspondence over it, that he'd let Pickman's paintings get on his nerves or harrow
up his imagination. I know I told him that myself - then.
But keep in mind that I didn't drop Pickman for anything like this. On the contrary, my
admiration for him kept growing; for that 'Ghoul Feeding' was a tremendous
achievement. As you know, the club wouldn't exhibit it, and the Museum of Fine Arts
wouldn't accept it as a gift; and I can add that nobody would buy it, so Pickman had it
right in his house till he went. Now his father has it in Salem - you know Pickman
comes of old Salem stock, and had a witch ancestor hanged in 1692.
I got into the habit of calling on Pickman quite often, especially after I began making
notes for a monograph on weird art. Probably it was his work which put the idea into
my head, and anyhow, I found him a mine of data and suggestions when I came to
develop it. He showed me all the paintings and drawings he had about; including some
pen-and-ink sketches that would, I verily believe, have got him kicked out of the club if
many of the members had seen them. Before long I was pretty nearly a devotee, and
would listen for hours like a schoolboy to art theories and philosophic speculations wild
enough to qualify him for the Danvers asylum. My hero-worship, coupled with the fact
that people generally were commencing to have less and less to do with him, made him
get very confidential with me; and one evening he hinted that if I were fairly
close-mouthed and none too squeamish, he might show me something rather unusual something a bit stronger than anything he had in the house.
'You know,' he said, 'there are things that won't do for Newbury Street - things that are
out of place here, and that can't be conceived here, anyhow. It's my business to catch the
overtones of the soul, and you won't find those in a parvenu set of artificial streets on
made land. Back Bay isn't Boston - it isn't anything yet, because it's had no time to pick
up memories and attract local spirits. If there are any ghosts here, they're the tame
ghosts of a salt marsh and a shallow cove; and I want human ghosts - the ghosts of
beings highly organized enough to have looked on hell and known the meaning of what
they saw.
'The place for an artist to live is the North End. If any aesthete were sincere, he'd put up
with the slums for the sake of the massed traditions. God, man! Don't you realize that
places like that weren't merely made, but actually grew? Generation after generation
lived and felt and died there, and in days when people weren't afraid to live and fed and
die. Don't you know there was a mill on Copp's Hill in 1632, and that half the present
streets were laid out by 1650? I can show you houses that have stood two centuries and
a half and more; houses that have witnessed what would make a modern house crumble
into powder. What do moderns know of life and the forces behind it? You call the
Salem witchcraft a delusion, but I'll wager my four-times-great-grandmother could have
told you things. They hanged her on Gallows Hill, with Cotton Mather looking
sanctimoniously on. Mather, damn him, was afraid somebody might succeed in kicking
free of this accursed cage of monotony - I wish someone had laid a spell on him or
sucked his blood in the night!
'I can show you a house he lived in, and I can show you another one he was afraid to
enter in spite of all his fine bold talk. He knew things he didn't dare put into that stupid
Magnalia or that puerile Wonders of the Invisible World. Look here, do you know the
whole North End once had a set of tunnels that kept certain people in touch with each
other's houses, and the burying ground, and the sea? Let them prosecute and persecute
above ground - things went on every day that they couldn't reach, and voices laughed at
night that they couldn't place!
'Why, man, out of ten surviving houses built before 1700 and not moved since I'll wager
that in eight I can show you something queer in the cellar. There's hardly a month that
you don't read of workmen finding bricked-up arches and wells leading nowhere in this
or that old place as it comes down - you could see one near Henchman Street from the
elevated last year. There were witches and what their spells summoned; pirates and
what they brought in from the sea; smugglers; privateers - and I tell you, people knew
how to live, and how to enlarge the bounds of life, in the old time! This wasn't the only
world a bold and wise man could know - faugh! And to think of today in contrast, with
such pale-pink brains that even a club of supposed artists gets shudders and convulsions
if a picture goes beyond the feelings of a Beacon Street tea-table!
'The only saving grace of the present is that it's too damned stupid to question the past
very closely. What do maps and records and guide-books really tell of the North End?
Bah! At a guess I'll guarantee to lead you to thirty or forty alleys and networks of alleys
north of Prince Street that aren't suspected by ten living beings outside of the foreigners
that swarm them. And what do those Dagoes know of their meaning? No, Thurber,
these ancient places are dreaming gorgeously and over-flowing with wonder and terror
and escapes from the commonplace, and yet there's not a living soul to understand or
profit by them. Or rather, there's only one living soul - for I haven't been digging around
in the past for nothing !
'See here, you're interested in this sort of thing. What if I told you that I've got another
studio up there, where I can catch the night-spirit of antique horror and paint things that
I couldn't even think of in Newbury Street? Naturally I don't tell those cursed old maids
at the club - with Reid, damn him, whispering even as it is that I'm a sort of monster
bound down the toboggan of reverse evolution. Yes, Thurber, I decided long ago that
one must paint terror as well as beauty from life, so I did some exploring in places
where I had reason to know terror lives.
'I've got a place that I don't believe three living Nordic men besides myself have ever
seen. It isn't so very far from the elevated as distance goes, but it's centuries away as the
soul goes. I took it because of the queer old brick well in the cellar - one of the sort I
told you about. The shack's almost tumbling down so that nobody else would live there,
and I'd hate to tell you how little I pay for it. The windows are boarded up, but I like
that all the better, since I don't want daylight for what I do. I paint in the cellar, where
the inspiration is thickest, but I've other rooms furnished on the ground floor. A Sicilian
owns it, and I've hired it under the name of Peters.
'Now, if you're game, I'll take you there tonight. I think you'd enjoy the pictures, for, as
I said, I've let myself go a bit there. It's no vast tour - I sometimes do it on foot, for I
don't want to attract attention with a taxi in such a place. We can take the shuttle at the
South Station for Battery Street, and after that the wall 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 daemoniac 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 annexe 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!
Gad, 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 Boylston 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 sense in an unknown
vault, where scores of the beasts crowded about one who hod 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 daemons 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 comer 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 suspen-sion 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 night-mare 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 unaccus-tomed 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 dis-charge 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 hirn? 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!
The Lovecraft Library wishes to extend its gratitude to Eulogio García Recalde for transcribing this text.
Poetry and the Gods
by H. P. Lovecraft and Anna Helen Crofts
Written 1920
Published September 1920 in The United Amateur, Vol. 20, No. 1, p. 1-4.
A damp gloomy evening in April it was, just after the close of the Great War, when
Marcia found herself alone with strange thoughts and wishes, unheard-of yearnings
which floated out of the spacious twentieth-century drawing room, up the deeps of the
air, and eastward to olive groves in distant Arcady which she had seen only in her
dreams. She had entered the room in abstraction, turned off the glaring chandeliers, and
now reclined on a soft divan by a solitary lamp which shed over the reading table a
green glow as soothing as moonlight when it issued through the foliage about an antique
shrine.
Attired simply, in a low-cut black evening dress, she appeared outwardly a typical
product of modern civilization; but tonight she felt the immeasurable gulf that separated
her soul from all her prosaic surroundings. Was it because of the strange home in which
she lived, that abode of coldness where relations were always strained and the inmates
scarcely more than strangers? Was it that, or was it some greater and less explicable
misplacement in time and space, whereby she had been born too late, too early, or too
far away from the haunts of her spirit ever to harmonize with the unbeautiful things of
contemporary reality? To dispel the mood which was engulfing her more and more
deeply each moment, she took a magazine from the table and searched for some healing
bit of poetry. Poetry had always relieved her troubled mind better than anything else,
though many things in the poetry she had seen detracted from the influence. Over parts
of even the sublimest verses hung a chill vapor of sterile ugliness and restraint, like dust
on a window-pane through which one views a magnificent sunset.
Listlessly turning the magazine’s pages, as if searching for an elusive treasure, she
suddenly came upon something which dispelled her languor. An observer could have
read her thoughts and told that she had discovered some image or dream which brought
her nearer to her unattained goal than any image or dream she had seen before. It was
only a bit of vers libre, that pitiful compromise of the poet who overleaps prose yet falls
short of the divine melody of numbers; but it had in it all the unstudied music of a bard
who lives and feels, who gropes ecstatically for unveiled beauty. Devoid of regularity, it
yet had the harmony of winged, spontaneous words, a harmony missing from the formal,
convention-bound verse she had known. As she read on, her surroundings gradually
faded, and soon there lay about her only the mists of dream, the purple, star-strewn
mists beyond time, where only Gods and dreamers walk.
Moon over Japan,
White butterfly moon!
Where the heavy-lidded Buddhas dream
To the sound of the cuckoo’s call...
The white wings of moon butterflies
Flicker down the streets of the city,
Blushing into silence the useless wicks of sound-lanterns in the hands of girls
Moon over the tropics,
A white-curved bud
Opening its petals slowly in the warmth of heaven...
The air is full of odours
And languorous warm sounds...
A flute drones its insect music to the night
Below the curving moon-petal of the heavens.
Moon over China,
Weary moon on the river of the sky,
The stir of light in the willows is like the flashing of a thousand silver minnows
Through dark shoals;
The tiles on graves and rotting temples flash like ripples,
The sky is flecked with clouds like the scales of a dragon.
Amid the mists of dream the reader cried to the rhythmical stars, of her delight at the
coming of a new age of song, a rebirth of Pan. Half closing her eyes, she repeated words
whose melody lay hidden like crystals at the bottom of a stream before dawn, hidden
but to gleam effulgently at the birth of day.
Moon over Japan,
White butterfly moon!
Moon over the tropics,
A white curved bud
Opening its petals slowly in the warmth of heaven.
The air is full of odours
And languorous warm sounds...
Moon over China,
Weary moon on the river of the sky...
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:
Write, write, that from the bloody course of war,
My dearest master, your dear son, may hie;
Bless him at home in peace, whilst I from far,
His name with zealous fervour sanctify.
Accents still more familiar arose as Milton, blind no more, declaimed immortal
harmony:
Or let thy lamp at midnight hour
Be seen in some high lonely tower,
Where I might oft outwatch the Bear
With thrice-great Hermes, or unsphere
The spirit of Plato, to unfold
What worlds or what vast regions hold
The immortal mind, that hath forsook
Her mansion in this fleshy nook.
*****
Sometime let gorgeous tragedy
In sceptered pall come sweeping by,
Presenting Thebes, or Pelop’s line,
Or the tale of Troy divine.
Last of all came the young voice of Keats, closest of all the messengers to the
beauteous faun-folk:
Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard
Are sweeter, therefore, yet sweep pipes, play on...
*****
When old age shall this generation waste,
Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe
Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say’st
"Beauty is truth -- truth beauty" -- that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.
As the singer ceased, there came a sound in the wind blowing from far Egypt, where at
night Aurora mourns by the Nile for her slain Memnon. To the feet of the Thunderer
flew the rosy-fingered Goddess and, kneeling, cried, "Master, it is time I unlocked the
Gates of the East.” And Phoebus, handing his lyre to Calliope, his bride among the
Muses, prepared to depart for the jewelled and column-raised Palace of the Sun, where
fretted the steeds already harnessed to the golden car of Day. So Zeus descended from
his caryen throne and placed his hand upon the head of Marcia, saying:
"Daughter, the dawn is nigh, and it is well that thou shouldst return before the
awakening of mortals to thy home. Weep not at the bleakness of thy life, for the shadow
of false faiths will soon be gone and the Gods shall once more walk among men. Search
thou unceasingly for our messenger, for in him wilt thou find peace and comfort. By his
word shall thy steps be guided to happiness, and in his dreams of beauty shall thy spirit
find that which it craveth.” As Zeus ceased, the young Hermes gently seized the maiden
and bore her up toward the fading stars, up and westward over unseen seas.
***
Many years have passed since Marcia dreamt of the Gods and of their Parnassus
conclave. Tonight she sits in the same spacious drawing-room, but she is not alone.
Gone is the old spirit of unrest, for beside her is one whose name is luminous with
celebrity: the young poet of poets at whose feet sits all the world. He is reading from a
manuscript words which none has ever heard before, but which when heard will bring to
men the dreams and the fancies they lost so many centuries ago, when Pan lay down to
doze in Arcady, and the great Gods withdrew to sleep in lotos-gardens beyond the lands
of the Hesperides. In the subtle cadences and hidden melodies of the bard the spirit of
the maiden had found rest at last, for there echo the divinest notes of Thracian Orpheus,
notes that moved the very rocks and trees by Hebrus’ banks. The singer ceases, and with
eagerness asks a verdict, yet what can Marcia say but that the strain is "fit for the
Gods"?
And as she speaks there comes again a vision of Parnassus and the far-off sound of a
mighty voice saying, “By his word shall thy steps be guided to happiness, and in his
dreams of beauty shall thy spirit find all that it craveth."
Astrophobos
by H. P. Lovecraft
Written 1918?
Published July 1918 in The United Amateur
In the Midnight heaven's burning
Through the ethereal deeps afar
Once I watch'd with restless yearning
An alluring aureate star;
Ev'ry eve aloft returning
Gleaming nigh the Arctic Car.
Mystic waves of beauty blended
With the gorgeous golden rays
Phantasies of bliss descended
In a myrrh'd Elysian haze.
In the lyre-born chords extended
Harmonies of Lydian lays.
And (thought I) lies scenes of pleasure,
Where the free and blessed dwell,
And each moment bears a treasure,
Freighted with the lotos-spell,
And there floats a liquid measure
From the lute of Israfel.
There (I told myself) were shining
Worlds of happiness unknown,
Peace and Innocence entwining
By the Crowned Virtue's throne;
Men of light, their thoughts refining
Purer, fairer, than my own.
Thus I mus'd when o'er the vision
Crept a red delirious change;
Hope dissolving to derision,
Beauty to distortion strange;
Hymnic chords in weird collision,
Spectral sights in endless range....
Crimson burn'd the star of madness
As behind the beams I peer'd;
All was woe that seem'd but gladness
Ere my gaze with Truth was sear'd;
Cacodaemons, mir'd with madness,
Through the fever'd flick'ring leer'd....
Now I know the fiendish fable
The the golden glitter bore;
Now I shun the spangled sable
That I watch'd and lov'd before;
But the horror, set and stable,
Haunts my soul forevermore!
Death
by Jonathan E. Hoag
attributed to H. P. Lovecraft
Written ?
Published ?
Think not that Death malignly waits,
A weapon of the hostile Fates,
To stike the sinner down;
'Tis but a link in Nature's plan
To join succeding growths of man,
And life complete to crown.
All finite things unfailing tend
From a beginning to an end,
For what is Time but Change?
What goal of growth could Life possess,
If stretch'd out into emptiness,
With bleak unbounded range?
What bard with grace could ever sing
The cloying charm of endless Spring,
Or Praise eternal day?
Since man is tun'd to Time alone,
The wise in Death a friend must own,
And bow to Nature's way!
Festival
by H.P. Lovecraft
Written
Published December 1926 in Weird Tales
There is snow on the ground,
And the valleys are cold,
And a midnight profound
Blackly squats o'er the wold;
But a light on the hilltops half-seen hints of
feastings unhallowed and old.
There is death in the clouds,
There is fear in the night,
For the dead in their shrouds
Hail the sun's turning flight.
And chant wild in the woods as they dance
round a Yule-altar fungous and white.
To no gale of Earth's kind
Sways the forest of oak,
Where the thick boughs entwined
By mad mistletoes choke,
For these pow'rs are the pow'rs of the dark,
from the graves of the lost Druid-folk.
And mayst thou to such deeds
Be an abbot and priest,
Singing cannibal greeds
At each devil-wrought feast,
And to all the incredulous world
shewing dimly the sign of the beast.
Fungi from Yuggoth
by H.P. Lovecraft
Written 1929-30
Published
I. The Book
The place was dark and dusty and half-lost
In tangles of old alleys near the quays,
Reeking of strange things brought in from the seas,
And with queer curls of fog that west winds tossed.
Small lozenge panes, obscured by smoke and frost,
Just shewed the books, in piles like twisted trees,
Rotting from floor to roof - congeries
Of crumbling elder lore at little cost.
I entered, charmed, and from a cobwebbed heap
Took up the nearest tome and thumbed it through,
Trembling at curious words that seemed to keep
Some secret, monstrous if one only knew.
Then, looking for some seller old in craft,
I could find nothing but a voice that laughed.
II. Pursuit
I held the book beneath my coat, at pains
To hide the thing from sight in such a place;
Hurrying through the ancient harbor lanes
With often-turning head and nervous pace.
Dull, furtive windows in old tottering brick
Peered at me oddly as I hastened by,
And thinking what they sheltered, I grew sick
For a redeeming glimpse of clean blue sky.
No one had seen me take the thing - but still
A blank laugh echoed in my whirling head,
And I could guess what nighted worlds of ill
Lurked in that volume I had coveted.
The way grew strange - the walls alike and madding And far behind me, unseen feet were padding.
III. The Key
I do not know what windings in the waste
Of those strange sea-lanes brought me home once more,
But on my porch I trembled, white with haste
To get inside and bolt the heavy door.
I had the book that told the hidden way
Across the void and through the space-hung screens
That hold the undimensioned worlds at bay,
And keep lost aeons to their own demesnes.
At last the key was mine to those vague visions
Of sunset spires and twilight woods that brood
Dim in the gulfs beyond this earth's precisions,
Lurking as memories of infinitude.
The key was mine, but as I sat there mumbling,
The attic window shook with a faint fumbling.
IV. Recognition
The day had come again, when as a child
I saw - just once - that hollow of old oaks,
Grey with a ground-mist that enfolds and chokes
The slinking shapes which madness has defiled.
It was the same - an herbage rank and wild
Clings round an altar whose carved sign invokes
That Nameless One to whom a thousand smokes
Rose, aeons gone, from unclean towers up-piled.
I saw the body spread on that dank stone,
And knew those things which feasted were not men;
I knew this strange, grey world was not my own,
But Yuggoth, past the starry voids - and then
The body shrieked at me with a dead cry,
And all too late I knew that it was I!
V. Homecoming
The daemon said that he would take me home
To the pale, shadowy land I half recalled
As a high place of stair and terrace, walled
With marble balustrades that sky-winds comb,
While miles below a maze of dome on dome
And tower on tower beside a sea lies sprawled.
Once more, he told me, I would stand enthralled
On those old heights, and hear the far-off foam.
All this he promised, and through sunset's gate
He swept me, past the lapping lakes of flame,
And red-gold thrones of gods without a name
Who shriek in fear at some impending fate.
Then a black gulf with sea-sounds in the night:
"Here was your home," he mocked, "when you had sight!"
VI. The Lamp
We found the lamp inside those hollow cliffs
Whose chiseled sign no priest in Thebes could read,
And from whose caverns frightened hieroglyphs
Warned every living creature of earth's breed.
No more was there - just that one brazen bowl
With traces of a curious oil within;
Fretted with some obscurely patterned scroll,
And symbols hinting vaguely of strange sin.
Little the fears of forty centuries meant
To us as we bore off our slender spoil,
And when we scanned it in our darkened tent
We struck a match to test the ancient oil.
It blazed - great God!... But the vast shapes we saw
In that mad flash have seared our lives with awe.
VII. Zaman's Hill
The great hill hung close over the old town,
A precipice against the main street's end;
Green, tall, and wooded, looking darkly down
Upon the steeple at the highway bend.
Two hundred years the whispers had been heard
About what happened on the man-shunned slope Tales of an oddly mangled deer or bird,
Or of lost boys whose kin had ceased to hope.
One day the mail-man found no village there,
Nor were its folk or houses seen again;
People came out from Aylesbury to stare Yet they all told the mail-man it was plain
That he was mad for saying he had spied
The great hill's gluttonous eyes, and jaws stretched wide.
VIII. The Port
Ten miles from Arkham I had struck the trail
That rides the cliff-edge over Boynton Beach,
And hoped that just at sunset I could reach
The crest that looks on Innsmouth in the vale.
Far out at sea was a retreating sail,
White as hard years of ancient winds could bleach,
But evil with some portent beyond speech,
So that I did not wave my hand or hail.
Sails out of lnnsmouth! echoing old renown
Of long-dead times. But now a too-swift night
Is closing in, and I have reached the height
Whence I so often scan the distant town.
The spires and roofs are there - but look! The gloom
Sinks on dark lanes, as lightless as the tomb!
IX. The Courtyard
It was the city I had known before;
The ancient, leprous town where mongrel throngs
Chant to strange gods, and beat unhallowed gongs
In crypts beneath foul alleys near the shore.
The rotting, fish-eyed houses leered at me
From where they leaned, drunk and half-animate,
As edging through the filth I passed the gate
To the black courtyard where the man would be.
The dark walls closed me in, and loud I cursed
That ever I had come to such a den,
When suddenly a score of windows burst
Into wild light, and swarmed with dancing men:
Mad, soundless revels of the dragging dead And not a corpse had either hands or head!
X. The Pigeon-Flyers
They took me slumming, where gaunt walls of brick
Bulge outward with a viscous stored-up evil,
And twisted faces, thronging foul and thick,
Wink messages to alien god and devil.
A million fires were blazing in the streets,
And from flat roofs a furtive few would fly
Bedraggled birds into the yawning sky
While hidden drums droned on with measured beats.
I knew those fires were brewing monstrous things,
And that those birds of space had been Outside I guessed to what dark planet's crypts they plied,
And what they brought from Thog beneath their wings.
The others laughed - till struck too mute to speak
By what they glimpsed in one bird's evil beak.
XI. The Well
Farmer Seth Atwood was past eighty when
He tried to sink that deep well by his door,
With only Eb to help him bore and bore.
We laughed, and hoped he'd soon be sane again.
And yet, instead, young Eb went crazy, too,
So that they shipped him to the county farm.
Seth bricked the well-mouth up as tight as glue Then hacked an artery in his gnarled left arm.
After the funeral we felt bound to get
Out to that well and rip the bricks away,
But all we saw were iron hand-holds set
Down a black hole deeper than we could say.
And yet we put the bricks back - for we found
The hole too deep for any line to sound.
XII. The Howler
They told me not to take the Briggs' Hill path
That used to be the highroad through to Zoar,
For Goody Watkins, hanged in seventeen-four,
Had left a certain monstrous aftermath.
Yet when I disobeyed, and had in view
The vine-hung cottage by the great rock slope,
I could not think of elms or hempen rope,
But wondered why the house still seemed so new.
Stopping a while to watch the fading day,
I heard faint howls, as from a room upstairs,
When through the ivied panes one sunset ray
Struck in, and caught the howler unawares.
I glimpsed - and ran in frenzy from the place,
And from a four-pawed thing with human face.
XIII. Hesperia
The winter sunset, flaming beyond spires
And chimneys half-detached from this dull sphere,
Opens great gates to some forgotten year
Of elder splendours and divine desires.
Expectant wonders burn in those rich fires,
Adventure-fraught, and not untinged with fear;
A row of sphinxes where the way leads clear
Toward walls and turrets quivering to far lyres.
It is the land where beauty's meaning flowers;
Where every unplaced memory has a source;
Where the great river Time begins its course
Down the vast void in starlit streams of hours.
Dreams bring us close - but ancient lore repeats
That human tread has never soiled these streets.
XIV. Star-Winds
It is a certain hour of twilight glooms,
Mostly in autumn, when the star-wind pours
Down hilltop streets, deserted out-of-doors,
But shewing early lamplight from snug rooms.
The dead leaves rush in strange, fantastic twists,
And chimney-smoke whirls round with alien grace,
Heeding geometries of outer space,
While Fomalhaut peers in through southward mists.
This is the hour when moonstruck poets know
What fungi sprout in Yuggoth, and what scents
And tints of flowers fill Nithon's continents,
Such as in no poor earthly garden blow.
Yet for each dream these winds to us convey,
A dozen more of ours they sweep away!
XV. Antarktos
Deep in my dream the great bird whispered queerly
Of the black cone amid the polar waste;
Pushing above the ice-sheet lone and drearly,
By storm-crazed aeons battered and defaced.
Hither no living earth-shapes take their courses,
And only pale auroras and faint suns
Glow on that pitted rock, whose primal sources
Are guessed at dimly by the Elder Ones.
If men should glimpse it, they would merely wonder
What tricky mound of Nature's build they spied;
But the bird told of vaster parts, that under
The mile-deep ice-shroud crouch and brood and bide.
God help the dreamer whose mad visions shew
Those dead eyes set in crystal gulfs below!
XVI. The Window
The house was old, with tangled wings outthrown,
Of which no one could ever half keep track,
And in a small room somewhat near the back
Was an odd window sealed with ancient stone.
There, in a dream-plagued childhood, quite alone
I used to go, where night reigned vague and black;
Parting the cobwebs with a curious lack
Of fear, and with a wonder each time grown.
One later day I brought the masons there
To find what view my dim forbears had shunned,
But as they pierced the stone, a rush of air
Burst from the alien voids that yawned beyond.
They fled - but I peered through and found unrolled
All the wild worlds of which my dreams had told.
XVII. A Memory
There were great steppes, and rocky table-lands
Stretching half-limitless in starlit night,
With alien campfires shedding feeble light
On beasts with tinkling bells, in shaggy bands.
Far to the south the plain sloped low and wide
To a dark zigzag line of wall that lay
Like a huge python of some primal day
Which endless time had chilled and petrified.
I shivered oddly in the cold, thin air,
And wondered where I was and how I came,
When a cloaked form against a campfire's glare
Rose and approached, and called me by my name.
Staring at that dead face beneath the hood,
I ceased to hope - because I understood.
XVIII. The Gardens of Yin
Beyond that wall, whose ancient masonry
Reached almost to the sky in moss-thick towers,
There would be terraced gardens, rich with flowers,
And flutter of bird and butterfly and bee.
There would be walks, and bridges arching over
Warm lotos-pools reflecting temple eaves,
And cherry-trees with delicate boughs and leaves
Against a pink sky where the herons hover.
All would be there, for had not old dreams flung
Open the gate to that stone-lanterned maze
Where drowsy streams spin out their winding ways,
Trailed by green vines from bending branches hung?
I hurried - but when the wall rose, grim and great,
I found there was no longer any gate.
XIX. The Bells
Year after year I heard that faint, far ringing
Of deep-toned bells on the black midnight wind;
Peals from no steeple I could ever find,
But strange, as if across some great void winging.
I searched my dreams and memories for a clue,
And thought of all the chimes my visions carried;
Of quiet Innsmouth, where the white gulls tarried
Around an ancient spire that once I knew.
Always perplexed I heard those far notes falling,
Till one March night the bleak rain splashing cold
Beckoned me back through gateways of recalling
To elder towers where the mad clappers tolled.
They tolled - but from the sunless tides that pour
Through sunken valleys on the sea's dead floor.
XX. Night-Gaunts
Out of what crypt they crawl, I cannot tell,
But every night I see the rubbery things,
Black, horned, and slender, with membraneous wings,
And tails that bear the bifid barb of hell.
They come in legions on the north wind's swell,
With obscene clutch that titillates and stings,
Snatching me off on monstrous voyagings
To grey worlds hidden deep in nightmare's well.
Over the jagged peaks of Thok they sweep,
Heedless of all the cries I try to make,
And down the nether pits to that foul lake
Where the puffed shoggoths splash in doubtful sleep.
But oh! If only they would make some sound,
Or wear a face where faces should be found!
XXI. Nyarlathotep
And at the last from inner Egypt came
The strange dark One to whom the fellahs bowed;
Silent and lean and cryptically proud,
And wrapped in fabrics red as sunset flame.
Throngs pressed around, frantic for his commands,
But leaving, could not tell what they had heard;
While through the nations spread the awestruck word
That wild beasts followed him and licked his hands.
Soon from the sea a noxious birth began;
Forgotten lands with weedy spires of gold;
The ground was cleft, and mad auroras rolled
Down on the quaking citadels of man.
Then, crushing what he chanced to mould in play,
The idiot Chaos blew Earth's dust away.
XXII. Azathoth
Out in the mindless void the daemon bore me,
Past the bright clusters of dimensioned space,
Till neither time nor matter stretched before me,
But only Chaos, without form or place.
Here the vast Lord of All in darkness muttered
Things he had dreamed but could not understand,
While near him shapeless bat-things flopped and fluttered
In idiot vortices that ray-streams fanned.
They danced insanely to the high, thin whining
Of a cracked flute clutched in a monstrous paw,
Whence flow the aimless waves whose chance combining
Gives each frail cosmos its eternal law.
"I am His Messenger," the daemon said,
As in contempt he struck his Master's head.
XXIII. Mirage
I do not know if ever it existed That lost world floating dimly on Time's stream And yet I see it often, violet-misted,
And shimmering at the back of some vague dream.
There were strange towers and curious lapping rivers,
Labyrinths of wonder, and low vaults of light,
And bough-crossed skies of flame, like that which quivers
Wistfully just before a winter's night.
Great moors led off to sedgy shores unpeopled,
Where vast birds wheeled, while on a windswept hill
There was a village, ancient and white-steepled,
With evening chimes for which I listen still.
I do not know what land it is - or dare
Ask when or why I was, or will be, there.
XXIV. The Canal
Somewhere in dream there is an evil place
Where tall, deserted buildings crowd along
A deep, black, narrow channel, reeking strong
Of frightful things whence oily currents race.
Lanes with old walls half meeting overhead
Wind off to streets one may or may not know,
And feeble moonlight sheds a spectral glow
Over long rows of windows, dark and dead.
There are no footfalls, and the one soft sound
Is of the oily water as it glides
Under stone bridges, and along the sides
Of its deep flume, to some vague ocean bound.
None lives to tell when that stream washed away
Its dream-lost region from the world of clay.
XXV. St. Toad's
"Beware St. Toad's cracked chimes!" I heard him scream
As I plunged into those mad lanes that wind
In labyrinths obscure and undefined
South of the river where old centuries dream.
He was a furtive figure, bent and ragged,
And in a flash had staggered out of sight,
So still I burrowed onward in the night
Toward where more roof-lines rose, malign and jagged.
No guide-book told of what was lurking here But now I heard another old man shriek:
"Beware St.Toad's cracked chimes!" And growing weak,
I paused, when a third greybeard croaked in fear:
"Beware St. Toad's cracked chimes!" Aghast, I fled Till suddenly that black spire loomed ahead.
XXVI. The Familiars
John Whateley lived about a mile from town,
Up where the hills begin to huddle thick;
We never thought his wits were very quick,
Seeing the way he let his farm run down.
He used to waste his time on some queer books
He'd found around the attic of his place,
Till funny lines got creased into his face,
And folks all said they didn't like his looks.
When he began those night-howls we declared
He'd better be locked up away from harm,
So three men from the Aylesbury town farm
Went for him - but came back alone and scared.
They'd found him talking to two crouching things
That at their step flew off on great black wings.
XXVII. The Elder Pharos
From Leng, where rocky peaks climb bleak and bare
Under cold stars obscure to human sight,
There shoots at dusk a single beam of light
Whose far blue rays make shepherds whine in prayer.
They say (though none has been there) that it comes
Out of a pharos in a tower of stone,
Where the last Elder One lives on alone,
Talking to Chaos with the beat of drums.
The Thing, they whisper, wears a silken mask
Of yellow, whose queer folds appear to hide
A face not of this earth, though none dares ask
Just what those features are, which bulge inside.
Many, in man's first youth, sought out that glow,
But what they found, no one will ever know.
XXVIII. Expectancy
I cannot tell why some things hold for me
A sense of unplumbed marvels to befall,
Or of a rift in the horizon's wall
Opening to worlds where only gods can be.
There is a breathless, vague expectancy,
As of vast ancient pomps I half recall,
Or wild adventures, uncorporeal,
Ecstasy-fraught, and as a day-dream free.
It is in sunsets and strange city spires,
Old villages and woods and misty downs,
South winds, the sea, low hills, and lighted towns,
Old gardens, half-heard songs, and the moon's fires.
But though its lure alone makes life worth living,
None gains or guesses what it hints at giving.
XXIX. Nostalgia
Once every year, in autumn's wistful glow,
The birds fly out over an ocean waste,
Calling and chattering in a joyous haste
To reach some land their inner memories know.
Great terraced gardens where bright blossoms blow,
And lines of mangoes luscious to the taste,
And temple-groves with branches interlaced
Over cool paths - all these their vague dreams shew.
They search the sea for marks of their old shore For the tall city, white and turreted But only empty waters stretch ahead,
So that at last they turn away once more.
Yet sunken deep where alien polyps throng,
The old towers miss their lost, remembered song.
XXX. Background
I never can be tied to raw, new things,
For I first saw the light in an old town,
Where from my window huddled roofs sloped down
To a quaint harbour rich with visionings.
Streets with carved doorways where the sunset beams
Flooded old fanlights and small window-panes,
And Georgian steeples topped with gilded vanes These were the sights that shaped my childhood dreams.
Such treasures, left from times of cautious leaven,
Cannot but loose the hold of flimsier wraiths
That flit with shifting ways and muddled faiths
Across the changeless walls of earth and heaven.
They cut the moment's thongs and leave me free
To stand alone before eternity.
XXXI. The Dweller
It had been old when Babylon was new;
None knows how long it slept beneath that mound,
Where in the end our questing shovels found
Its granite blocks and brought it back to view.
There were vast pavements and foundation-walls,
And crumbling slabs and statues, carved to shew
Fantastic beings of some long ago
Past anything the world of man recalls.
And then we saw those stone steps leading down
Through a choked gate of graven dolomite
To some black haven of eternal night
Where elder signs and primal secrets frown.
We cleared a path - but raced in mad retreat
When from below we heard those clumping feet.
XXXII. Alienation
His solid flesh had never been away,
For each dawn found him in his usual place,
But every night his spirit loved to race
Through gulfs and worlds remote from common day.
He had seen Yaddith, yet retained his mind,
And come back safely from the Ghooric zone,
When one still night across curved space was thrown
That beckoning piping from the voids behind.
He waked that morning as an older man,
And nothing since has looked the same to him.
Objects around float nebulous and dim False, phantom trifles of some vaster plan.
His folk and friends are now an alien throng
To which he struggles vainly to belong.
XXXIII. Harbour Whistles
Over old roofs and past decaying spires
The harbour whistles chant all through the night;
Throats from strange ports, and beaches far and white,
And fabulous oceans, ranged in motley choirs.
Each to the other alien and unknown,
Yet all, by some obscurely focussed force
From brooding gulfs beyond the Zodiac's course,
Fused into one mysterious cosmic drone.
Through shadowy dreams they send a marching line
Of still more shadowy shapes and hints and views;
Echoes from outer voids, and subtle clues
To things which they themselves cannot define.
And always in that chorus, faintly blent,
We catch some notes no earth-ship ever sent.
XXXIV. Recapture
The way led down a dark, half-wooded heath
Where moss-grey boulders humped above the mould,
And curious drops, disquieting and cold,
Sprayed up from unseen streams in gulfs beneath.
There was no wind, nor any trace of sound
In puzzling shrub, or alien-featured tree,
Nor any view before - till suddenly,
Straight in my path, I saw a monstrous mound.
Half to the sky those steep sides loomed upspread,
Rank-grassed, and cluttered by a crumbling flight
Of lava stairs that scaled the fear-topped height
In steps too vast for any human tread.
I shrieked - and knew what primal star and year
Had sucked me back from man's dream-transient sphere!
XXXV. Evening Star
I saw it from that hidden, silent place
Where the old wood half shuts the meadow in.
It shone through all the sunset's glories - thin
At first, but with a slowly brightening face.
Night came, and that lone beacon, amber-hued,
Beat on my sight as never it did of old;
The evening star - but grown a thousandfold
More haunting in this hush and solitude.
It traced strange pictures on the quivering air Half-memories that had always filled my eyes Vast towers and gardens; curious seas and skies
Of some dim life - I never could tell where.
But now I knew that through the cosmic dome
Those rays were calling from my far, lost home.
XXXVI. Continuity
There is in certain ancient things a trace
Of some dim essence - more than form or weight;
A tenuous aether, indeterminate,
Yet linked with all the laws of time and space.
A faint, veiled sign of continuities
That outward eyes can never quite descry;
Of locked dimensions harbouring years gone by,
And out of reach except for hidden keys.
It moves me most when slanting sunbeams glow
On old farm buildings set against a hill,
And paint with life the shapes which linger still
From centuries less a dream than this we know.
In that strange light I feel I am not far
From the fixt mass whose sides the ages are.
Hallowe'en in a Suburb
by H. P. Lovecraft
Written
Published March 1926 in The National Amateur Vol. 48 No. 4
The steeples are white in the wild moonlight,
And the trees have a silver glare;
Past the chimneys high see the vampires fly,
And the harpies of upper air,
That flutter and laugh and stare.
For the village dead to the moon outspread
Never shone in the sunset's gleam,
But grew out of the deep that the dead years keep
Where the rivers of madness stream
Down the gulfs to a pit of dream.
A chill wind blows through the rows of sheaves
In the meadows that shimmer pale,
And comes to twine where the headstones shine
And the ghouls of the churchyard wail
For harvests that fly and fail.
Not a breath of the strange grey gods of change
That tore from the past its own
Can quicken this hour, when a spectral power
Spreads sleep o'er the cosmic throne,
And looses the vast unknown.
So here again stretch the vale and plain
That moons long-forgotten saw,
And the dead leap gay in the pallid ray,
Sprung out of the tomb's black maw
To shake all the world with awe.
And all that the morn shall greet forlorn,
The ugliness and the pest
Of rows where thick rise the stones and brick,
Shall some day be with the rest,
And brood with the shades unblest.
Then wild in the dark let the lemurs bark,
And the leprous spires ascend;
For new and old alike in the fold
Of horror and death are penned,
For the hounds of Time to rend.
:
Nathicana
by H.P. Lovecraft
and Alfred Galpin
Written 1920?
Published in the Vagrant in Spring 1927
It was in the pale garden of Zais;
The mist-shrouded gardens of Zais,
Where blossoms the white naphalot,
The redolent herald of midnight.
There slumber the still lakes of crystal,
And streamlets that flow without murm'ring;
Smooth streamlets from caverns of Kathos
Where broodth the calm spirits of twilight.
And over the lakes and the streamlets
Are bridges of pure alabaster,
White bridges all cunningly carven
With figures of fairies and daemons.
Here glimmer strange suns and strange planets,
And strange is the crescent Bnapis
That sets 'yong the ivy-grown ramparts
Where thicken the dusk of the evening.
Here fall the white vapours of Yabon;
And here in the swirl of vapours
I saw the divine Nathicana;
The garlanded, white Nathicana;
The slow-eyed, red-lipped Nathicana;
The silver-voiced, sweet Nathicana;
The pale-rob'd, belov'd Nathicana.
And ever was she my beloved,
From ages when time was unfashioned
Now anything fashion'd but Yabon.
And here dwelt we ever and ever,
The innocent children of Zais,
At peace in the paths and the arbours,
White-crowned with the blest nephalote.
How oft would we float in the twilight
O'er flow'r-cover'd pastures and hillsides
All white with the lowly astalthon;
The lowly yet lovely astalthon,
And dream in a world made of dreaming
The dreams that are fairer than Aidenn;
Bright dreams that are truer than reason!
So dreamed and so lov'd we thro' ages,
Till came the cursed season of Dzannin;
The daemon-damn'd season of Dzannin;
When red shone the suns and the planets,
And red leamed the crescent Banapis,
And red fell the vapours of Yabon.
Then redden'd the blossoms and streamlets
And lakes that lay under the bridges,
And even the calm alabaster
glowed pink with uncanny reflections
Till all the carv'd fairies and daemons
Leer'd redly from the backgrounds of shadow.
Now redden'd my vision, and madly
I strove to peer thro' the dense curtain
And glimpsed the divine Nathicana;
The pure, ever-pale Nathicana;
The lov'd, the unchang'd Nathicana.
But vortex on vortex of madness
Beclouded my labouring vision;
My damnable, reddening vision
That built a new world for my seeing;
Anew world of redness and darkness,
A horrible coma call'd living
So now in this come call'd living
I view the bright phantons of beauty;
The false hollow phantoms of beauty
That cloak all the evils of Dzannin.
I view them with infinite longing,
So like do they seem to my lov'd one:
Yet foul for their eyes shines their evil;
Their cruel and pitilessevil,
More evil than Thaphron and Latgoz,
Twice ill fro its gorgeous concealment.
And only in slumbers of midnight
Appears the lost maid Nathicana,
The pallid, the pure Nathicana
Who fades at the glance of the dreamer.
Again and again do I seek her;
I woo with deep draughts of Plathotis,
Deep draughts brew'd in wine of Astarte
And strengthen'd with tears of long weeping.
I yearn for the gardens of Zais;
The lovely, lost garden of Zais
Where blossoms the white nephalot,
The redolent herald of midnight.
The last potent draught am I brewing;
A draught that the daemons delight ih;
A drught that will banish the redness;
The horrible coma call'd living.
Soon, soon, if I fail not in brewing,
The redness and madness will vanish,
And deep in the worm-people'd darkness
Will rot the base chains that hav bound me.
Once more shall the gardens of Zais
Dawn white on my long-tortur'd vision,
Andthere midst the vapours of Yabon
Will stand the divine Nathicana;
The deathless, restor'd Nathicana
whose like is not met with in living.
In a letter to Donald Wandrei written August 2, 1927, Lovecraft said that this poem was
supposed to be a "parody on those stylistic excesses which really have no basic
meaning". In his response ten days later, Wandrei said "It is a rare and curious kind of
literary freak, a satire too good, so that, instead of parodying, it possesses, the original."
Nemesis
by H. P. Lovecraft
Written October 31 - November 1
Published June 1918 in The Vagrant
Through the ghoul-guarded gateways of slumber,
Past the wan-mooned abysses of night,
I have lived o'er my lives without number,
I have sounded all things with my sight;
And I struggle and shriek ere the daybreak, being driven to madness with fright.
I have whirled with the earth at the dawning,
When the sky was a vaporous flame;
I have seen the dark universe yawning
Where the black planets roll without aim,
Where they roll in their horror unheeded, without knowledge or lustre or name.
I had drifted o'er seas without ending,
Under sinister grey-clouded skies
That the many-forked lightning is rending,
That resound with hysterical cries;
With the moans of invisible daemons that out of the green waters rise.
I have plunged like a deer through the arches
Of the hoary primoridal grove,
Where the oaks feel the presence that marches
And stalks on where no spirit dares rove,
And I flee from a thing that surrounds me, and leers through dead branches above.
I have stumbled by cave-ridden mountains
That rise barren and bleak from the plain,
I have drunk of the fog-foetid fountains
That ooze down to the marsh and the main;
And in hot cursed tarns I have seen things I care not to gaze on again.
I have scanned the vast ivy-clad palace,
I have trod its untenanted hall,
Where the moon rising up from the valleys
Shows the tapestried things on the wall;
Strange figures discordantly woven, that I cannot endure to recall.
I have peered from the casements in wonder
At the mouldering meadows around,
At the many-roofed village laid under
The curse of a grave-girdled ground;
And from rows of white urn-carven marble I listen intently for sound.
I have haunted the tombs of the ages,
I have flown on the pinions of fear
Where the smoke-belching Erebus rages;
Where the jokulls loom snow-clad and drear:
And in realms where the sun of the desert consumes what it never can cheer.
I was old when the pharaohs first mounted
The jewel-decked throne by the Nile;
I was old in those epochs uncounted
When I, and I only, was vile;
And Man, yet untainted and happy, dwelt in bliss on the far Artic isle.
Oh, great was the sin of my spirit,
And great is the reach of its doom;
Not the pity of Heaven can cheer it,
Nor can respite be found in the tomb:
Down the infinite aeons come beating the wings of unmerciful gloom.
Through the ghoul-guarded gateways of slumber,
Past the wan-mooned abysses of night,
I have lived o'er my lives without number,
I have sounded all things with my sight;
And I struggle and shriek ere the daybreak, being driven to madness with fright.
The Cats
by H.P. Lovecraft
Written
Published
Babels of blocks to the high heavens towering
Flames of futility swirling below;
Poisonous fungi in brick and stone flowering,
Lanterns that shudder and death-lights that glow.
Black monstrous bridges across oily rivers,
Cobwebs of cable to nameless things spun;
Catacomb deeps whose dank chaos delivers
Streams of live foetor that rots in the sun.
Colour and splendour, disease and decaying,
Shrieking and ringing and crawling insane,
Rabbles exotic to stranger-gods praying,
Jumbles of odour that stifle the brain.
Legions of cats from the alleys nocturnal.
Howling and lean in the glare of the moon,
Screaming the future with mouthings infernal,
Yelling the Garden of Pluto's red rune.
Tall towers and pyramids ivy'd and crumbling,
Bats that swoop low in the weed-cumber'd streets;
Bleak Arkham bridges o'er rivers whose rumbling
Joins with no voice as the thick horde retreats.
Belfries that buckle against the moon totter,
Caverns whose mouths are by mosses effac'd,
And living to answer the wind and the water,
Only the lean cats that howl in the wastes.
The City
by H. P. Lovecraft
Written DATE
Published DATE
It was golden and splendid,
That City of light;
A vision suspended
In deeps of the night;
A region of wonder and glory, whose temples were marble and white.
I remember the season
It dawn'd on my gaze;
The mad time of unreason,
The brain-numbing days
When Winter, white-sheeted and ghastly, stalks onward to torture and craze.
More lovely than Zion
It shone in the sky
When the beams of Orion
Beclouded my eye,
Bringing sleep that was filled with dim mem'ries of moments obscure and gone by.
Its mansions were stately,
With carvings made fair,
Each rising sedately
On terraces rare,
And the gardens were fragrant and bright with strange miracles blossoming there.
The avenues lur'd me
With vistas sublime;
Tall arches assur'd me
That once on a time
I had wander'd in rapture beneath them, and bask'd in the Halcyon clime.
On the plazas were standing
A sculptur'd array;
Long bearded, commanding,
rave men in their day-But one stood dismantled and broken, its bearded face battered away.
In that city effulgent
No mortal I saw,
But my fancy, indulgent
To memory's law,
Linger'd long on the forms in the plazas, and eyed their stone features with awe.
I fann'd the faint ember
That glow'd in my mind,
And strove to remember
The aeons behind;
To rove thro' infinity freely, and visit the past unconfin'd.
Then the horrible warning
Upon my soul sped
Like the ominous morning
That rises in red,
And in panic I flew from the knowledge of terrors forgotten and dead.
The House
by H. P. Lovecraft
Written July 16, 1919
Published in The Philospher in December, 1920
'Tis a grove-circled dwelling
Set close to a hill,
Where the branches are telling
Strange legends of ill;
Over timbers so old
That they breathe of the dead,
Crawl the vines, green and cold,
By strange nourishment fed;
And no man knows the juices they suck from the depths of their dank slimy bed.
In the gardens are growing
Tall blossoms and fair,
Each pallid bloom throwing
Perfume on the air;
But the afternoon sun
with its shining red rays
Makes the picture loom dun
On the curious gaze,
And above the sween scent of the the blossoms rise odours of numberless days.
The rank grasses are waving
On terrace and lawn,
Dim memories savouring
Of things that have gone;
The stones of the walks
Are encrusted and wet,
And a strange spirit stalks
When the red sun has set.
And the soul of the watcher is fill'd with faint pictures he fain would forget.
It was in the hot Junetime
I stood by that scene,
When the gold rays of noontime
Beat bright on the green.
But I shiver'd with cold,
Groping feebly for light,
As a picture unroll'd And my age-spanning sight
Saw the time I had been there before flash like fulgury out of the night.
This poem is about the house at 135 Benefit Street in Providence that also inspired the
short story "The Shunned House".
The Messenger
by H.P. Lovecraft
Written November 30, 1929
Published December 3, 1929 in the Providence Journal
The thing, he said, would come in the night at three
From the old churchyard on the hill below;
But crouching by an oak fire's wholesome glow,
I tried to tell myself it could not be.
Surely, I mused, it was pleasantry
Devised by one who did not truly know
The Elder Sign, bequeathed from long ago,
That sets the fumbling forms of darkness free.
He had not meant it - no - but still I lit
Another lamp as starry Leo climbed
Out of the Seekonk, and a steeple chimed
Three - and the firelight faded, bit by bit.
Then at the door that cautious rattling came And the mad truth devoured me like a flame!
This was written in response to Bertrand Kelton Hart, author of a daily column called
"The Sideshow" in the Providence Journal, who, upon discovering that Wilcox's
residence in "The Call of Cthulhu" (7 Thomas Street) was his own, published in his
column "...I shall not be happy until, joining league with wraiths and ghouls, I have
plumped down at least one large and abiding ghost by way of reprisal upon
[Lovecraft's] own doorstep in Barnes street... I think I shall teach it to moan in a minor
dissonance every morning at 3 o'clock sharp, with a clinking of chains."
The Poe-et's Nightmare
by H. P. Lovecraft
Written DATE
Published DATE
A Fable
Luxus tumultus semper causa est.
Lucullus Languish, student of the skies,
And connoisseur of rarebits and mince pies,
A bard by choice, a grocer's clerk by trade,
(Grown pessimist through honours long delay'd)
A secret yearning bore, that he might shine
In breathing numbers, and in song divine.
Each day his fountain pen was wont to drop
An ode or dirge or two about the shop,
Yet naught could strike the chord within his heart
That throbb'd for poesy, and cry'd for art.
Each eve he sought his bashful Muse to wake
With overdoses of ice cream and cake,
But though th'ambitious youth a dreamer grew,
Th' Aonian Nymph delcin'd to come to view.
Something at dusk he scour'd the heav'ns afar
Searching for raptures in the evening star;
One night he strove to catch a tale untold
In crystal deeps - but only caught a cold.
So pin'd Lucullus with his lofty woe,
Till one drear day he bought a set of Poe:
Charm'd with the cheerful horrors there display's,
He vow'd with gloom to woo the Heav'nly Maid.
Of Auber's Tarn and Yaanek's slope he dreams,
And weaves an hundred Ravens in his schemes.
Not far from our young hero's peaceful home,
Lies the fair grove wherein he loves to roam.
Though but a stunted copse in vacant lot,
He dubs it Temp-e, and adores the spot;
When shallow puddles dot the wooded plain,
And brim o'er muddy banks with muddy rain,
He calls them limpid lakes or poison pools,
(Depending on which bard his fancy rules.)
'Tis here he comes with Heliconian fire
On Sundays when he smites the Attic lyre;
And here one afternoon he brought his gloom,
Resolv'd to chant a poet's lay of doom.
Roget's Thesaurus, and a book of rhymes,
Provide the rungs whereon his spirit climbs:
With this grave retinue he trod the grove
And pray'd the Fauns he might a Poe-et prove.
But sad to tell, ere Pegasus flew high,
The not unrelish'd supper hour drew nigh;
Our tuneful swain th'imperious call attends,
And soon above the groaning table bends.
Though it were too prosaic to relate
Th' exact particulars of what he ate,
(Such long-drawn lists the hasty reader skips,
Like Homer's well-known catalogue of ships)
This much we swear: that as adjournment near'd,
A monstrous lot of cake had disappear'd!
Soon to his chamber the young bard repairs,
And courts soft Somnus with sweet Lydian airs;
Through open casement scans the star-strown deep,
And 'neath Orion's beams sinks off to sleep.
Now start from airy dell the elfin train
That dance each midnight o'er the sleeping plain,
To bless the just, or cast a warning spell
On those who dine not wisely, but too well.
First Deacon Smith they plague, whose nasal glow
Comes from what Holmes hath call'd "Elixir Pro";
Group'd round the couch his visage they deride,
Whilst through his dreams unnumber'd serpents glide.
Next troop the little folk into the room
Where snore our young Endymion, swath'd in gloom:
A smile lights up his boyish face, whilst he
Dreams of the moon - or what he ate at tea.
The chieftain elf th' unconscious youth surveys,
and on his form a strange enchantment lays:
Those lips, that lately trill'd with frosted cake,
Uneasy sounds in slumbrous fashion make;
At length their owner's fancies they rehearse,
And lisp this awesome Poe-em in blank verse:
Aletheia Phrikodes
Omnia risus et omnia pulvis et omnia nihil.
Demoniac clouds, up-pil'd in chasmy reach
Of soundless heav'n, smother'd the brooding night;
Nor came the wonted whisp'rings of the swamp,
Nor voice of autumn wind along the moor,
Nor mutter'd noises of th' insomnious grove
Whose black recesses never saw the sun.
Within that grove a hideous hollow lies,
Half bare of trees; a pool in centre lurks
That none dares sound; a tarn of murky face,
(Though naught can prove its hue, since light of day,
Affrighted, shuns the forest-shadow's banks.)
Hard by, a yawning hillside grotto breathes
From deeps unvisited, a dull, dank air
That sears the leaves on certain stunted trees
Which stand about, clawing the spectral gloom
With evil boughs. To this accursed dell
Come woodland creatures, seldom to depart:
Once I behold, upon a crumbling stone
Set altar-like before the cave, a thing
I saw not clearly, yet from glimpsing, fled.
In this half-dusk I meditate alone
At many a weary noontide, when without
A world forgets me in its sun-blest mirth.
Here howls by night the werewolves, and the souls
Of those that knew me well in other days.
Yet on this night the grove spake not to me;
Nor spake the swamp, nor wind along the moor
Nor moan'd the wind about the lonely eaves
Of the bleak, haunted pile wherein I lay.
I was afraid to sleep, or quench the spark
Of the low-burning taper by my couch.
I was afraid when through the vaulted space
Of the old tow'r, the clock-ticks died away
Into a silence so profound and chill
That my teeth chatter'd - giving yet no sound.
Then flicker'd low the light, and all dissolv'd
Leaving me floating in the hellish grasp
Of body'd blackness, from whose beating wings
Came ghoulish blasts of charnel-scented mist.
things vague, unseen, unfashion'd, and unnam'd
Jostled each other in the seething void
That gap'd, chaotic, downward to a sea
Of speechless horror, foul with writhing thoughts.
All this I felt, and felt the mocking eyes
Of the curs's universe upon my soul;
Yet naught I saw nor heard, till flash'd a beam
Of lurid lustre through the rotting heav'ns,
Playing on scenes I labour'd not to see.
Methought the nameless tarn, alight at last,
Reflected shapes, and more reveal'd within
Those shocking depths that ne'er were seen before;
Methought from out the cave a demon train,
Grinning and smirking, reel'd in fiendish rout;
Bearing within their reeking paws a load
Of carrion viands for an impious feast.
Methought the stunted trees with hungry arms
Grop'd greedily for things I dare not name;
The while a stifling, wraith-like noisomeness
Fill'd all the dale, and spoke a larger life
Of uncorporeal hideousness awake
In the half-sentient wholeness of the spot.
Now glow'd the ground, and tarn, and cave, and trees,
And moving forms, and things not spoken of,
With such a phosphorescence as men glimpse
In the putrescent thickets of the swamp
Where logs decaying lie, and rankness reigns.
Methought a fire-mist drap'd with lucent fold
The well-remember'd features of the grove,
Whilst whirling ether bore in eddying streams
The hot, unfinish'd stuff of nascent worlds
Hither and thither through infinity
Of light and darkness, strangely intermix'd;
Wherein all entity had consciousness,
Without th' accustom'd outward shape of life.
Of these swift circling currents was my soul,
Free from the flesh, a true constituent part;
Nor felt I less myself, for want of form.
Then clear'd the mist, and o'er a star-strown scene
Divine and measureless, I gaz'd in awe.
Alone in space, I view'd a feeble fleck
Of silvern light, marking the narrow ken
Which mortals call the boundless universe.
On ev'ry side, each as a tiny star,
Shone more creations, vaster than our own,
And teeming with unnumber'd forms of life;
Though we as life would recognize it not,
Being bound to earthy thoughts of human mould.
As on a moonless night the Milky Way
In solid sheen displays its countless orbs
To weak terrestrial eyes, each orb a sun;
So beam'd the prospect on my wond'ring soul;
A spangled curtain, rich with twinkling gems,
Yet each a mighty universe of suns.
But as I gaz'd, I sens'd a spirit voice
In speech didactic, though no voice it was,
Save as it carried thought. It bade me mark
That all the universes in my view
Form'd but an atom in infinity;
Whose reaches pass the ether-laden realms
Of heat and light, extending to far fields
Where flourish worlds invisible and vague,
Fill'd with strange wisdom and uncanny life,
And yet beyond; to myriad spheres of light,
To spheres of darkness, to abysmal voids
That know the pulses of disorder'd force.
Big with these musings, I survey'd the surge
Of boundless being, yet I us'd not eyes,
For spirit leans not on the props of sense.
The docent presence swell'd my strength of soul;
All things I knew, but knew with mind alone.
Time's endless vista spread before my thought
With its vast pageant of unceasing change
And sempiternal strife of force and will;
I saw the ages flow in stately stream
Past rise and fall of universe and life;
I saw the birth of suns and worlds, their death,
Their transmutation into limpid flame,
Their second birth and second death, their course
Perpetual through the aeons' termless flight,
Never the same, yet born again to serve
The varying purpose of omnipotence.
And whilst I watch'd, I knew each second's space
Was greater than the lifetime of our world.
Then turn'd my musings to that speck of dust
Whereon my form corporeal took its rise;
That speck, born but a second, which must die
In one brief second more; that fragile earth;
That crude experiment; that cosmic sport
Which holds our proud, aspiring race of mites
And moral vermin; those presuming mites
Whom ignorance with empty pomp adorns,
And misinstructs in specious dignity;
Those mites who, reas'ning outward, vaunt themselves
As the chief work of Nature, and enjoy
In fatuous fancy the particular care
Of all her mystic, super-regnant pow'r.
And as I strove to vision the sad sphere
Which lurk'd, lost in ethereal vortices;
Methough my soul, tun'd to the infinite,
Refus'd to glimpse that poor atomic blight;
That misbegotten accident of space;
That globe of insignificance, whereon
(My guide celestial told me) dwells no part
Of empyreal virtue, but where breed
The coarse corruptions of divine disease;
The fest'ring ailments of infinity;
The morbid matter by itself call'd man:
Such matter (said my guide) as oft breaks forth
On broad Creation's fabric, to annoy
For a brief instant, ere assuaging death
Heal up the malady its birth provok'd.
Sicken'd, I turn'd my heavy thoughts away.
Then spake th' ethereal guide with mocking mien,
Upbraiding me for searching after Truth;
Visiting on my mind the searing scorn
Of mind superior; laughing at the woe
Which rent the vital essence of my soul.
Methought he brought remembrance of the time
When from my fellows to the grove I stray'd,
In solitude and dusk to meditate
On things forbidden, and to pierce the veil
Of seeming good and seeming beauteousness
That covers o'er the tragedy of Truth,
Helping mankind forget his sorry lot,
And raising Hope where Truth would crush it down.
He spake, and as he ceas'd, methought the flames
Of fuming Heav'n revolv'd in torments dire;
Whirling in maelstroms of revellious might,
Yet ever bound by laws I fathom'd not.
Cycles and epicycles of such girth
That each a cosmos seem'd, dazzled my gaze
Till all a wild phantasmal flow became.
Now burst athwart the fulgent formlessness
A rift of purer sheen, a sight supernal,
Broader that all the void conceiv'd by man,
Yet narrow here. A glimpse of heav'ns beyond;
Of weird creations so remote and great
That ev'n my guide assum'd a tone of awe.
Borne on the wings of stark immensity,
A touch of rhythm celestial reach'd my soul;
Thrilling me more with horror than with joy.
Again the spirit mock'd my human pangs,
And deep revil'd me for presumptuous thoughts;
Yet changing now his mien, he bade me scan
The wid'ning rift that clave the walls of space;
He bade me search it for the ultimate;
He bade me find the truth I sought so long;
He bade me brave th' unutterable Thing,
The final Truth of moving entity.
All this he bade and offer'd - but my soul,
Clinging to life, fled without aim or knowledge,
Shrieking in silence through the gibbering deeps.
******
Thus shriek'd the young Lucullus, as he fled
Through gibbering deeps - and tumbled out of bed;
Within the room the morning sunshine gleams,
Whilst the poor youth recalls his troubled dreams.
He feels his aching limbs, whose woeful pain
Informs his soul his body lives again,
And thanks his stars - or cosmoses - or such That he survives the noxious nightmare's clutch.
Thrill'd with the music of th' eternal spheres,
(Or is it the alarm-clock that he hears?)
He vows to all the Pantheon, high and low,
No more to feed on cake, or pie, or Poe.
And now his gloomy spirits seem to rise,
As he the world beholds with clearer eyes;
The cup he thought too full of dregs to quaff,
Affords him wine enough to raise a laugh.
(All this is metaphor - you must not think
Our late Endymion prone to stronger drink!)
With brighter visage and with lighter heart,
He turns his fancies to the grocer's mart;
And strange to say, at last he seems to find
His daily duties worthy of his mind.
Since Truth prov'd such a high and dang'rous goal,
Our bard seeks one less trying to his soul;
With deep-drawn breath he flouts his dreary woes,
And a good clerk from a bad poet grows!
Now close attend my lay, ye scribbling crew
That bay the moon in numbers strange and new;
That madly for the spark celestial bawl
In metres short or long, or none at all;
Curb your rash force, in numbers or at tea,
Nor over-zealous for high fancies be;
Reflect, ere ye the draught Pierian take,
What worthy clerks or plumbers ye might make;
Wax not too frenzied in the leaping line
That neither sense nor measure can confine,
Lest ye, like young Lucullus Launguish, groan
Beneath Poe-etic nightmares of your own!
:
Where Once Poe Walked
by H.P. Lovecraft
Written
Published
Eternal brood the shadows on this ground,
Dreaming of centuries that have gone before;
Great elms rise solemnly by slab and mound,
Arched high above a hidden world of yore.
Round all the scene a light of memory plays,
And dead leaves whisper of departed days,
Longing for sights and sounds that are no more.
Lonely and sad, a specter glides along
Aisles where of old his living footsteps fell;
No common glance discerns him, though his song
Peals down through time with a mysterious spell.
Only the few who sorcery's secret know,
Espy amidst these tombs the shade of Poe.
:
Polaris
by H. P. Lovecraft
Written 1918
Published December 1920 in The Philosopher, Vol. 1, No. 1 , p. 3-5.
Into the North Window of my chamber glows the Pole Star with uncanny light. All
through the long hellish hours of blackness it shines there. And in the autumn of the
year, when the winds from the north curse and whine, and the red-leaved trees of the
swamp mutter things to one another in the small hours of the morning under the horned
waning moon, I sit by the casement and watch that star. Down from the heights reels the
glittering Cassiopeia as the hours wear on, while Charles' Wain lumbers up from behind
the vapour-soaked swamp trees that sway in the night wind. Just before dawn Arcturus
winks ruddily from above the cemetary on the low hillock, and Coma Berenices
shimmers weirdly afar off in the mysterious east; but still the Pole Star leers down from
the same place in the black vault, winking hideously like an insane watching eye which
strives to convey some strange message, yet recalls nothing save that it once had a
message to convey. Sometimes, when it is cloudy, I can sleep.
Well do I remember the night of the great Aurora, when over the swamp played the
shocking corruscations of the 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) valiently
and victoriously swept aside the hairly, long-armed, cannibal Gnophkehs that stood in
their way. To me Alos denied the warriors part, for I was feeble and given to strange
faintings when subjected to stress and hardships. But my eyes were the keenest in the
city, despite the long hours I gave each day to the study of the Pnakotic manuscripts and
the wisdom of the Zobnarian Fathers; so my friend, desiring not to doom me to inaction,
rewarded me with that duty which was second to nothing in importance. To the
watchtower of Thapnen he sent me, there to serve as the eyes of our army. Should the
Inutos attempt to gain the citadel by the narrow pass behind the peak Noton and thereby
surprise the garrison, I was to give the signal of fire which would warn the waiting
soldiers and save the town from immediate disaster.
Alone I mounted the tower, for every man of stout body was needed in the passes below.
My brain was sore dazed with excitement and fatigue, for I had not slept in many days;
yet was my purpose firm, for I loved my native land of Lomar, and the marble city
Olathoe that lies betwixt the peaks Noton and Kadiphonek.
But as I stood in the tower's topmost chamber, I beheld the horned waning moon, red
and sinister, quivering through the vapours that hovered over the distant valley of Banof.
And through an opening in the roof glittered the pale Pole Star, fluttering as if alive, and
leering like a fiend and tempter. Methought its spirit whispered evil counsel, soothing
me to traitorous somnolence with a damnable rhythmical promise which it repeated
over and over:
Slumber, watcher, till the spheres,
Six 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 Alchemist
by H. P. Lovecraft
Written 1908
Published November 1916 in The United Amateur, Vol. 16, No. 4, p. 53-57.
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 tht 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 they 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
maintaing the foul provisions of his vengeful curse. At this point I was left to imagine
the solution of the greatest mystery of all, how the curse had been fulfilled since that
time when Charles Le Sorcier must in the course of nature have died, for the man
digressed into an account of the deep alchemical studies of the two wizards, father and
son, speaking most particularly of the researches of Charles Le Sorcier concerning the
elixir which should grant to him who partook of it eternal life and youth.
His enthusiasm had seemed for the moment to remove from his terrible eyes the black
malevolence that had first so haunted me, but suddenly the fiendish glare returned and,
with a shocking sound like the hissing of a serpent, the stranger raised a glass phial with
the evident intent of ending my life as had Charles Le Sorcier, six hundred years before,
ended that of my ancestor. Prompted by some preserving instinct of self-defense, I
broke through the spell that had hitherto held me immovable, and flung my now dying
torch at the creature who menaced my existence. I heard the phial break harmlessly
against the stones of the passage as the tunic of the strange man caught fire and lit the
horrid scene with a ghastly radiance. The shriek of fright and impotent malice emitted
by the would-be assassin proved too much for my already shaken nerves, and I fell
prone upon the slimy floor in a total faint.
When at last my senses returned, all was frightfully dark, and my mind, remembering
what had occurred, shrank from the idea of beholding any more; yet curiosity
over-mastered all. Who, I asked myself, was this man of evil, and how came he within
the castle walls? Why should he seek to avenge the death of Michel Mauvais, and how
bad the curse been carried on through all the long centuries since the time of Charles Le
Sorcier? The dread of years was lifted from my shoulder, for I knew that he whom I had
felled was the source of all my danger from the curse; and now that I was free, I burned
with the desire to learn more of the sinister thing which had haunted my line for
centuries, and made of my own youth one long-continued nightmare. Determined upon
further exploration, I felt in my pockets for flint and steel, and lit the unused torch
which I had with me.
First of all, new light revealed the distorted and blackened form of the mysterious
stranger. The hideous eyes were now closed. Disliking the sight, I turned away and
entered the chamber beyond the Gothic door. Here I found what seemed much like an
alchemist's laboratory. In one corner was an immense pile of shining yellow metal that
sparkled gorgeously in the light of the torch. It may have been gold, but I did not pause
to examine it, for I was strangely affected by that which I had undergone. At the farther
end of the apartment was an opening leading out into one of the many wild ravines of
the dark hillside forest. Filled with wonder, yet now realizing how the man had obtained
access to the chauteau, I proceeded to return. I had intended to pass by the remains of
the stranger with averted face but, as I approached the body, I seemed to hear emanating
from it a faint sound,. as though life were not yet wholly extinct. Aghast, I turned to
examine the charred and shrivelled figure on the floor.
Then all at once the horrible eyes, blacker even than the seared face in which they were
set, opened wide with an expression which I was unable to interpret. The cracked lips
tried to frame words which I could not well understand. Once I caught the name of
Charles Le Sorcier, and again I fancied that the words `years' and `curse' issued from the
twisted mouth. Still I was at a loss to gather the purport of his disconnnected speech. At
my evident ignorance of his meaning, the pitchy eyes once more flashed malevolently at
me, until, helpless as I saw my opponent to be, I trembled as I watched him.
Suddenly the wretch, animated with his last burst of strength, raised his piteous head
from the damp and sunken pavement. Then, as I remained, paralyzed with fear, he
found his voice and in his dying breath screamed forth those words which have ever
afterward haunted my days and nights. `Fool!' he shrieked, `Can you not guess my
secret? Have you no brain whereby you may recognize the will which has through six
long centuries fulfilled the dreadful curse upon the house? Have I not told you of the
great elixir of eternal life? Know you not how the secret of Alchemy was solved? I tell
you, it is I! I! I! that have lived for six hundred years to maintain my revenge, for I am
Charles Le Sorcier!'
The Beast in the Cave
by H. P. Lovecraft
Written April 21, 1905
Published June 1918 in The Vagrant, No. 7, p. 113-20.
The horrible conclusion which had been gradually obtruding itself upon my confused
and reluctant mind was now an awful certainty. I was lost, completely, hopelessly lost
in the vast and labyrinthine recess of the Mammoth Cave. Turn as I might, In no
direction could my straining vision seize on any object capable of serving as a guidepost
to set me on the outward path. That nevermore should I behold the blessed light of day,
or scan the pleasant bills and dales of the beautiful world outside, my reason could no
longer entertain the slightest unbelief. Hope had departed. Yet, indoctrinated as I was by
a life of philosophical study, I derived no small measure of satisfaction from my
unimpassioned demeanour; for although I had frequently read of the wild frenzies into
which were thrown the victims of similar situation, 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 moat 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 inhalation. and expirations, whence I realised that I had no more than
wounded the creature. And now all desire to examine the thing ceased. At last
something allied to groundless, superstitious fear had entered my brain, and I did not
approach the body, nor did I continue to cast stones at it in order to complete the
extinction of its life. Instead, I ran at full speed in what was, as nearly as I could
estimate in my frenzied condition, the direction from which I had come. Suddenly I
heard a sound or rather, a regular succession of sounds. In another Instant they had
resolved themselves into a series of sharp, metallic clicks. This time there was no doubt.
It was the guide. And then I shouted, yelled, screamed, even shrieked with joy as I
beheld in the vaulted arches above the faint and glimmering effulgence which I knew to
be the reflected light of an approaching torch. I ran to meet the flare, and before I could
completely understand what had occurred, was lying upon the ground at the feet of the
guide, embracing his boots and gibbering. despite my boasted reserve, in a most
meaningless and idiotic manner, pouring out my terrible story, and at the same time
overwhelming my auditor with protestations of gratitude. At length, I awoke to
something like my normal consciousness. The guide had noted my absence upon the
arrival of the party at the entrance of the cave, and had, from his own intuitive sense of
direction, proceeded to make a thorough canvass of by-passages just ahead of where he
had last spoken to me, locating my whereabouts after a quest of about four hours.
By the time he had related this to me, I, emboldened by his torch and his company,
began to reflect upon the strange beast which I had wounded but a short distance back in
the darkness, and suggested that we ascertain, by the flashlight's aid, what manner of
creature was my victim. Accordingly I retraced my steps, this time with a courage born
of companionship, to the scene of my terrible experience. Soon we descried a white
object upon the floor, an object whiter even than the gleaming limestone itself.
Cautiously advancing, we gave vent to a simultaneous ejaculation of wonderment, for
of all the unnatural monsters either of us had in our lifetimes beheld, this was in
surpassing degree the strangest. It appeared to be an anthropoid ape of large proportions,
escaped, perhaps, from some itinerant menagerie. Its hair was snow-white, a thing due
no doubt to the bleaching action of a long existence within the inky confines of the cave,
but it was also surprisingly thin, being indeed largely absent save on the head, where it
was of such length and abundance that it fell over the shoulders in considerable
profusion. The face was turned away from us, as the creature lay almost directly upon it.
The inclination of the limbs was very singular, explaining, however, the alternation in
their use which I bad before noted, whereby the beast used sometimes all four, and on
other occasions but two for its progress. From the tips of the fingers or toes, long
rat-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 coatsleeve 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 Call of Cthulhu
by H. P. Lovecraft
Written Summer 1926
Published February 1928 in Weird Tales, Vol. 11, No. 2, p. 159-78, 287.
Of such great powers or beings there may be conceivably a survival... a
survival of a hugely remote period when... consciousness was manifested,
perhaps, in shapes and forms long since withdrawn before the tide of
advancing humanity... forms of which poetry and legend alone have
caught a flying memory and called them gods, monsters, mythical beings
of all sorts and kinds...
- Algernon Blackwood
I. The Horror In Clay
The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to
correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black
seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each
straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing
together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of
our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee
from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.
Theosophists have guessed at the awesome grandeur of the cosmic cycle wherein our
world and human race form transient incidents. They have hinted at strange survivals in
terms which would freeze the blood if not masked by a bland optimism. But it is not
from them that there came the single glimpse of forbidden eons which chills me when I
think of it and maddens me when I dream of it. That glimpse, like all dread glimpses of
truth, flashed out from an accidental piecing together of separated things - in this case
an old newspaper item and the notes of a dead professor. I hope that no one else will
accomplish this piecing out; certainly, if I live, I shall never knowingly supply a link in
so hideous a chain. I think that the professor, too intented to keep silent regarding the
part he knew, and that he would have destroyed his notes had not sudden death seized
him.
My knowledge of the thing began in the winter of 1926-27 with the death of my
great-uncle, George Gammell Angell, Professor Emeritus of Semitic Languages in
Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island. Professor Angell was widely known as an
authority on ancient inscriptions, and had frequently been resorted to by the heads of
prominent museums; so that his passing at the age of ninety-two may be recalled by
many. Locally, interest was intensified by the obscurity of the cause of death. The
professor had been stricken whilst returning from the Newport boat; falling suddenly; as
witnesses said, after having been jostled by a nautical-looking negro who had come
from one of the queer dark courts on the precipitous hillside which formed a short cut
from the waterfront to the deceased's home in Williams Street. Physicians were unable
to find any visible disorder, but concluded after perplexed debate that some obscure
lesion of the heart, induced by the brisk ascent of so steep a hill by so elderly a man,
was responsible for the end. At the time I saw no reason to dissent from this dictum, but
latterly I am inclined to wonder - and more than wonder.
As my great-uncle's heir and executor, for he died a childless widower, I was expected
to go over his papers with some thoroughness; and for that purpose moved his entire set
of files and boxes to my quarters in Boston. Much of the material which I correlated
will be later published by the American Archaeological Society, but there was one box
which I found exceedingly puzzling, and which I felt much averse from showing to
other eyes. It had been locked and I did not find the key till it occurred to me to examine
the personal ring which the professor carried in his pocket. Then, indeed, I succeeded in
opening it, but when I did so seemed only to be confronted by a greater and more
closely locked barrier. For what could be the meaning of the queer clay bas-relief and
the disjointed jottings, ramblings, and cuttings which I found? Had my uncle, in his
latter years become credulous of the most superficial impostures? I resolved to search
out the eccentric sculptor responsible for this apparent disturbance of an old man's peace
of mind.
The bas-relief was a rough rectangle less than an inch thick and about five by six inches
in area; obviously of modern origin. Its designs, however, were far from modern in
atmosphere and suggestion; for, although the vagaries of cubism and futurism are many
and wild, they do not often reproduce that cryptic regularity which lurks in prehistoric
writing. And writing of some kind the bulk of these designs seemed certainly to be;
though my memory, despite much the papers and collections of my uncle, failed in any
way to identify this particular species, or even hint at its remotest affiliations.
Above these apparent hieroglyphics was a figure of evident pictorial intent, though its
impressionistic execution forbade a very clear idea of its nature. It seemed to be a sort
of monster, or symbol representing a monster, of a form which only a diseased fancy
could conceive. If I say that my somewhat extravagant imagination yielded
simultaneous pictures of an octopus, a dragon, and a human caricature, I shall not be
unfaithful to the spirit of the thing. A pulpy, tentacled head surmounted a grotesque and
scaly body with rudimentary wings; but it was the general outline of the whole which
made it most shockingly frightful. Behind the figure was a vague suggestions of a
Cyclopean architectural background.
The writing accompanying this oddity was, aside from a stack of press cuttings, in
Professor Angell's most recent hand; and made no pretense to 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 outré mental illness and outbreaks of group folly
or mania in the spring of 1925.
The first half of the principal manuscript told a very particular tale. It appears that on
March 1st, 1925, a thin, dark young man of neurotic and excited aspect had called upon
Professor Angell bearing the singular clay bas-relief, which was then exceedingly damp
and fresh. His card bore the name of Henry Anthony Wilcox, and my uncle had
recognized him as the youngest son of an excellent family slightly known to him, who
had latterly been studying sculpture at the Rhode Island School of Design and living
alone at the Fleur-de-Lys Building near that institution. Wilcox was a precocious youth
of known genius but great eccentricity, and had from chidhood excited attention through
the strange stories and odd dreams he was in the habit of relating. He called himself
"psychically hypersensitive", but the staid folk of the ancient commercial city dismissed
him as merely "queer." Never mingling much with his kind, he had dropped gradually
from social visibility, and was now known only to a small group of esthetes from other
towns. Even the Providence Art Club, anxious to preserve its conservatism, had found
him quite hopeless.
On the ocassion of the visit, ran the professor's manuscript, the sculptor abruptly asked
for the benefit of his host's archeological knowledge in identifying the hieroglyphics of
the bas-relief. He spoke in a dreamy, stilted manner which suggested pose and alienated
sympathy; and my uncle showed some sharpness in replying, for the conspicuous
freshness of the tablet implied kinship with anything but archeology. Young Wilcox's
rejoinder, which impressed my uncle enough to make him recall and record it verbatim,
was of a fantastically poetic cast which must have typified his whole conversation, and
which I have since found highly characteristic of him. He said, "It is new, indeed, for I
made it last night in a dream of strange cities; and dreams are older than brooding Tyre,
or the contemplative Sphinx, or garden-girdled Babylon."
It was then that he began that rambling tale which suddenly played upon a sleeping
memory and won the fevered interest of my uncle. There had been a slight earthquake
tremor the night before, the most considerable felt in New England for some years; and
Wilcox's imagination had been keenly affected. Upon retiring, he had had an
unprecedented dream of great Cyclopean cities of Titan blocks and sky-flung monoliths,
all dripping with green ooze and sinister with latent horror. Hieroglyphics had covered
the walls and pillars, and from some undetermined point below had come a voice that
was not a voice; a chaotic sensation which only fancy could transmute into sound, but
which he attempted to render by the almost unpronounceable jumble of letters: "Cthulhu
fhtagn."
This verbal jumble was the key to the recollection which excited and disturbed
Professor Angell. He questioned the sculptor with scientific minuteness; and studied
with frantic intensity the bas-relief on which the youth had found himself working,
chilled and clad only in his night clothes, when waking had stolen bewilderingly over
him. My uncle blamed his old age, Wilcox afterwards said, for his slowness in
recognizing both hieroglyphics and pictorial design. Many of his questions seemed
highly out of place to his visitor, especially those which tried to connect the latter with
strange cults or societies; and Wilcox could not understand the repeated promises of
silence which he was offered in exchange for an admission of membership in some
widespread mystical or paganly religious body. When Professor Angell became
convinced that the sculptor was indeed ignorant of any cult or system of cryptic lore, he
besieged his visitor with demands for future reports of dreams. This bore regular fruit,
for after the first interview the manuscript records daily calls of the young man, during
which he related startling fragments of nocturnal imaginery whose burden was always
some terrible Cyclopean vista of dark and dripping stone, with a subterrene voice or
intelligence shouting monotonously in enigmatical sense-impacts uninscribable save as
gibberish. The two sounds frequently repeated are those rendered by the letters
"Cthulhu" and "R'lyeh."
On March 23, the manuscript continued, Wilcox failed to appear; and inquiries at his
quarters revealed that he had been stricken with an obscure sort of fever and taken to the
home of his family in Waterman Street. He had cried out in the night, arousing several
other artists in the building, and had manifested since then only alternations of
unconsciousness and delirium. My uncle at once telephoned the family, and from that
time forward kept close watch of the case; calling often at the Thayer Street office of Dr.
Tobey, whom he learned to be in charge. The youth's febrile mind, apparently, was
dwelling on strange things; and the doctor shuddered now and then as he spoke of them.
They included not only a repetition of what he had formerly dreamed, but touched
wildly on a gigantic thing "miles high" which walked or lumbered about.
He at no time fully described this object but occasional frantic words, as repeated by Dr.
Tobey, convinced the professor that it must be identical with the nameless monstrosity
he had sought to depict in his dream-sculpture. Reference to this object, the doctor
added, was invariably a prelude to the young man's subsidence into lethargy. His
temperature, oddly enough, was not greatly above normal; but the whole condition was
otherwise such as to suggest true fever rather than mental disorder.
On April 2 at about 3 P.M. every trace of Wilcox's malady suddenly ceased. He sat
upright in bed, astonished to find himself at home and completely ignorant of what had
happened in dream or reality since the night of March 22. Pronounced well by his
physician, he returned to his quarters in three days; but to Professor Angell he was of no
further assistance. All traces of strange dreaming had vanished with his recovery, and
my uncle kept no record of his night-thoughts after a week of pointless and irrelevant
accounts of thoroughly usual visions.
Here the first part of the manuscript ended, but references to certain of the scattered
notes gave me much material for thought - so much, in fact, that only the ingrained
skepticism then forming my philosophy can account for my continued distrust of the
artist. The notes in question were those descriptive of the dreams of various persons
covering the same period as that in which young Wilcox had had his strange visitations.
My uncle, it seems, had quickly instituted a prodigiously far-flung body of inquires
amongst nearly all the friends whom he could question without impertinence, asking for
nightly reports of their dreams, and the dates of any notable visions for some time past.
The reception of his request seems to have varied; but he must, at the very least, have
received more responses than any ordinary man could have handled without a secretary.
This original correspondence was not preserved, but his notes formed a thorough and
really significant digest. Average people in society and business - New England's
traditional "salt of the earth" - gave an almost completely negative result, though
scattered cases of uneasy but formless nocturnal impressions appear here and there,
always between March 23 and and April 2 - the period of young Wilcox's delirium.
Scientific men were little more affected, though four cases of vague description suggest
fugitive glimpses of strange landscapes, and in one case there is mentioned a dread of
something abnormal.
It was from the artists and poets that the pertinent answers came, and I know that panic
would have broken loose had they been able to compare notes. As it was, lacking their
original letters, I half suspected the compiler of having asked leading questions, or of
having edited the correspondence in corroboration of what he had latently resolved to
see. That is why I continued to feel that Wilcox, somehow cognizant of the old data
which my uncle had possessed, had been imposing on the veteran scientist. These
responses from esthetes told disturbing tale. From February 28 to April 2 a large
proportion of them had dreamed very bizarre things, the intensity of the dreams being
immeasurably the stronger during the period of the sculptor's delirium. Over a fourth of
those who reported anything, reported scenes and half-sounds not unlike those which
Wilcox had described; and some of the dreamers confessed acute fear of the gigantic
nameless thing visible toward the last. One case, which the note describes with
emphasis, was very sad. The subject, a widely known architect with leanings toward
theosophy and occultism, went violently insane on the date of young Wilcox's seizure,
and expired several months later after incessant screamings to be saved from some
escaped denizen of hell. Had my uncle referred to these cases by name instead of merely
by number, I should have attempted some corroboration and personal investigation; but
as it was, I succeeded in tracing down only a few. All of these, however, bore out the
notes in full. I have often wondered if all the the objects of the professor's questioning
felt as puzzled as did this fraction. It is well that no explanation shall ever reach them.
The press cuttings, as I have intimated, touched on cases of panic, mania, and
eccentricity during the given period. Professor Angell must have employed a cutting
bureau, for the number of extracts was tremendous, and the sources scattered throughout
the globe. Here was a nocturnal suicide in London, where a lone sleeper had leaped
from a window after a shocking cry. Here likewise a rambling letter to the editor of a
paper in South America, where a fanatic deduces a dire future from visions he has seen.
A dispatch from California describes a theosophist colony as donning white robes en
masse for some "glorious fulfiment" which never arrives, whilst items from India speak
guardedly of serious native unrest toward the end of March 22-23.
The west of Ireland, too, is full of wild rumour and legendry, and a fantastic painter
named Ardois-Bonnot hangs a blasphemous Dream Landscape in the Paris spring salon
of 1926. And so numerous are the recorded troubles in insane asylums that only a
miracle can have stopped the medical fraternity from noting strange parallelisms and
drawing mystified conclusions. A weird bunch of cuttings, all told; and I can at this date
scarcely envisage the callous rationalism with which I set them aside. But I was then
convinced that young Wilcox had known of the older matters mentioned by the
professor.
II. The Tale of Inspector Legrasse.
The older matters which had made the sculptor's dream and bas-relief so significant to
my uncle formed the subject of the second half of his long manuscript. Once before, it
appears, Professor Angell had seen the hellish outlines of the nameless monstrosity,
puzzled over the unknown hieroglyphics, and heard the ominous syllables which can be
rendered only as "Cthulhu"; and all this in so stirring and horrible a connexion that it is
small wonder he pursued young Wilcox with queries and demands for data.
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 clown toward the
bottom of the pedestal. The cephalopod head was bent forward, so that the ends of the
facial feelers brushed the backs of huge fore paws which clasped the croucher's elevated
knees. The aspect of the whole was abnormally life-like, and the more subtly fearful
because its source was so totally unknown. Its vast, awesome, and incalculable age was
unmistakable; yet not one link did it shew with any known type of art belonging to
civilisation's youth - or indeed to any other time. Totally separate and apart, its very
material was a mystery; for the soapy, greenish-black stone with its golden or iridescent
flecks and striations resembled nothing familiar to geology or mineralogy. The
characters along the base were equally baffling; and no member present, despite a
representation of half the world's expert learning in this field, could form the least
notion of even their remotest linguistic kinship. They, like the subject and material,
belonged to something horribly remote and distinct from mankind as we know it.
something frightfully suggestive of old and unhallowed cycles of life in which our
world and our conceptions have no part.
And yet, as the members severally shook their heads and confessed defeat at the
Inspector's problem, there was one man in that gathering who suspected a touch of
bizarre familiarity in the monstrous shape and writing, and who presently told with
some diffidence of the odd trifle he knew. This person was the late William Channing
Webb, Professor of Anthropology in Princeton University, and an explorer of no slight
note. Professor Webb had been engaged, forty-eight years before, in a tour of Greenland
and Iceland in search of some Runic inscriptions which he failed to unearth; and whilst
high up on the West Greenland coast had encountered a singular tribe or cult of
degenerate Esquimaux whose religion, a curious form of devil-worship, chilled him
with its deliberate bloodthirstiness and repulsiveness. It was a faith of which other
Esquimaux knew little, and which they mentioned only with shudders, saying that it had
come down from horribly ancient aeons before ever the world was made. Besides
nameless rites and human sacrifices there were certain queer hereditary rituals
addressed to a supreme elder devil or tornasuk; and of this Professor Webb had taken a
careful phonetic copy from an aged angekok or wizard-priest, expressing the sounds in
Roman letters as best he knew how. But just now of prime significance was the fetish
which this cult had cherished, and around which they danced when the aurora leaped
high over the ice 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 surrection when the stars and the earth might once more be ready for Them.
But at that time some force from outside must serve to liberate Their bodies. The spells
that preserved them intact likewise prevented Them from making an initial move, and
They could only lie awake in the dark and think whilst uncounted millions of years
rolled by. They knew all that was occurring in the universe, for Their mode of speech
was transmitted thought. Even now They talked in Their tombs. When, after infinities of
chaos, the first men came, the Great Old Ones spoke to the sensitive among them by
moulding their dreams; for only thus could Their language reach the fleshly minds of
mammals.
Then, whispered Castro, those first men formed the cult around tall idols which the
Great Ones shewed them; idols brought in dim eras from dark stars. That cult would
never die till the stars came right again, and the secret priests would take great Cthulhu
from His tomb to revive His subjects and resume His rule of earth. The time would be
easy to know, for then mankind would have become as the Great Old Ones; free and
wild and beyond good and evil, with laws and morals thrown aside and all men shouting
and killing and revelling in joy. Then the liberated Old Ones would teach them new
ways to shout and kill and revel and enjoy themselves, and all the earth would flame
with a holocaust of ecstasy and freedom. Meanwhile the cult, by appropriate rites, must
keep alive the memory of those ancient ways and shadow forth the prophecy of their
return.
In the elder time chosen men had talked with the entombed Old Ones in dreams, but
then something happened. The great stone city R'lyeh, with its monoliths and sepulchres,
had sunk beneath the waves; and the deep waters, full of the one primal mystery
through which not even thought can pass, had cut off the spectral intercourse. But
memory never died, and the high-priests said that the city would rise again when the
stars were right. Then came out of the earth the black spirits of earth, mouldy and
shadowy, and full of dim rumours picked up in caverns beneath forgotten sea-bottoms.
But of them old Castro dared not speak much. He cut himself off hurriedly, and no
amount of persuasion or subtlety could elicit more in this direction. The size of the Old
Ones, too, he curiously declined to mention. Of the cult, he said that he thought the
centre lay amid the pathless desert of Arabia, where Irem, the City of Pillars, dreams
hidden and untouched. It was not allied to the European witch-cult, and was virtually
unknown beyond its members. No book had ever really hinted of it, though the
deathless Chinamen said that there were double meanings in the Necronomicon of the
mad Arab Abdul Alhazred which the initiated might read as they chose, especially the
much-discussed couplet:
That is not dead which can eternal lie,
And with strange aeons even death may die.
Legrasse, deeply impressed and not a little bewildered, had inquired in vain concerning
the historic affiliations of the cult. Castro, apparently, had told the truth when he said
that it was wholly secret. The authorities at Tulane University could shed no light upon
either cult or image, and now the detective had come to the highest authorities in the
country and met with no more than the Greenland tale of Professor Webb.
The feverish interest aroused at the meeting by Legrasse's tale, corroborated as it was by
the statuette, is echoed in the subsequent correspondence of those who attended;
although scant mention occurs in the formal publications of the society. Caution is the
first care of those accustomed to face occasional charlatanry and imposture. Legrasse
for some time lent the image to Professor Webb, but at the latter's death it was returned
to him and remains in his possession, where I viewed it not long ago. It is truly a terrible
thing, and unmistakably akin to the dream-sculpture of young Wilcox.
That my uncle was excited by the tale of the sculptor I did not wonder, for what
thoughts must arise upon hearing, after a knowledge of what Legrasse had learned of
the cult, of a sensitive young man who had dreamed not only the figure and exact
hieroglyphics of the swamp-found image and the Greenland devil tablet, but had come
in his dreams upon at least three of the precise words of the formula uttered alike by
Esquimaux diabolists and mongrel Louisianans?. Professor Angell's instant start on an
investigation of the utmost thoroughness was eminently natural; though privately I
suspected young Wilcox of having heard of the cult in some indirect way, and of having
invented a series of dreams to heighten and continue the mystery at my uncle's expense.
The dream-narratives and cuttings collected by the professor were, of course, strong
corroboration; but the rationalism of my mind and the extravagance of the whole subject
led me to adopt what I thought the most sensible conclusions. So, after thoroughly
studying the manuscript again and correlating the theosophical and anthropological
notes with the cult narrative of Legrasse, I made a trip to Providence to see the sculptor
and give him the rebuke I thought proper for so boldly imposing upon a learned and
aged man.
Wilcox still lived alone in the Fleur-de-Lys Building in Thomas Street, a hideous
Victorian imitation of seventeenth century Breton Architecture which flaunts its
stuccoed front amidst the lovely olonial houses on the ancient hill, and under the very
shadow of the finest Georgian steeple in America, I found him at work in his rooms,
and at once conceded from the specimens scattered about that his genius is indeed
profound and authentic. He will, I believe, some time be heard from as one of the great
decadents; for he has crystallised in clay and will one day mirror in marble those
nightmares and phantasies which Arthur Machen evokes in prose, and Clark Ashton
Smith makes visible in verse and in painting.
Dark, frail, and somewhat unkempt in aspect, he turned languidly at my knock and
asked me my business without rising. Then I told him who I was, he displayed some
interest; for my uncle had excited his curiosity in probing his strange dreams, yet had
never explained the reason for the study. I did not enlarge his knowledge in this regard,
but sought with some subtlety to draw him out. In a short time I became convinced ofhis
absolute sincerity, for he spoke of the dreams in a manner none could mistake. They and
their subconscious residuum had influenced his art profoundly, and he shewed me a
morbid statue whose contours almost made me shake with the potency of its black
suggestion. He could not recall having seen the original of this thing except in his own
dream bas-relief, but the outlines had formed themselves insensibly under his hands. It
was, no doubt, the giant shape he had raved of in delirium. That he really knew nothing
of the hidden cult, save from what my uncle's relentless catechism had let fall, he soon
made clear; and again I strove to think of some way in which he could possibly have
received the weird impressions.
He talked of his dreams in a strangely poetic fashion; making me see with terrible
vividness the damp Cyclopean city of slimy green stone - whose geometry, he oddly
said, was all wrong - and hear with frightened expectancy the ceaseless, half-mental
calling from underground: "Cthulhu fhtagn", "Cthulhu fhtagn."
These words had formed part of that dread ritual which told of dead Cthulhu's
dream-vigil in his stone vault at R'lyeh, and I felt deeply moved despite my rational
beliefs. Wilcox, I was sure, had heard of the cult in some casual way, and had soon
forgotten it amidst the mass of his equally weird reading and imagining. Later, by virtue
of its sheer impressiveness, it had found subconscious expression in dreams, in the
bas-relief, and in the terrible statue I now beheld; so that his imposture upon my uncle
had been a very innocent one. The youth was of a type, at once slightly affected and
slightly ill-mannered, which I could never like, but I was willing enough now to admit
both his genius and his honesty. I took leave of him amicably, and wish him all the
success his talent promises.
The matter of the cult still remained to fascinate me, and at times I had visions of
personal fame from researches into its origin and connexions. I visited New Orleans,
talked with Legrasse and others of that old-time raiding-party, saw the frightful image,
and even questioned such of the mongrel prisoners as still survived. Old Castro,
unfortunately, had been dead for some years. What I now heard so graphically at
first-hand, though it was really no more than a detailed confirmation of what my uncle
had written, excited me afresh; for I felt sure that I was on the track of a very real, very
secret, and very ancient religion whose discovery would make me an anthropologist of
note. My attitude was still one of absolute materialism, as l 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 34°21', W. Longitude
152°17', with one living and one dead man aboard.
The Vigilant left Valparaiso March 25th, and on April 2nd was driven
considerably south of her course by exceptionally heavy storms and
monster waves. On April 12th the derelict was sighted; and though
apparently deserted, was found upon boarding to contain one survivor in
a half-delirious condition and one man who had evidently been dead for
more than a week. The living man was clutching a horrible stone idol of
unknown origin, about foot in height, regarding whose nature authorities
at Sydney University, the Royal Society, and the Museum in College
Street all profess complete bafflement, and which the survivor says he
found in the cabin of the yacht, in a small carved shrine of common
pattern.
This man, after recovering his senses, told an exceedingly strange story
of piracy and slaughter. He is Gustaf Johansen, a Norwegian of some
intelligence, and had been second mate of the two-masted schooner
Emma of Auckland, which sailed for Callao February 20th with a
complement of eleven men. The Emma, he says, was delayed and thrown
widely south of her course by the great storm of March 1st, and on
March 22nd, in S. Latitude 49°51' W. Longitude 128°34', encountered
the Alert, manned by a queer and evil-looking crew of Kanakas and
half-castes. Being ordered peremptorily to turn back, Capt. Collins
refused; whereupon the strange crew began to fire savagely and without
warning upon the schooner with a peculiarly heavy battery of brass
cannon forming part of the yacht's equipment. The Emma's men shewed
fight, says the survivor, and though the schooner began to sink from
shots beneath the water-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 for San Francisco. In less than a month I was in Dunedin; where, however, I
found that little was known of the strange cult-members who had lingered in the old
sea-taverns. Waterfront scum was far too common for special mentnon; though there
was vague talk about one inland trip these mongrels had made, during which faint
drumming and red flame were noted on the distant hills. In Auckland I learned that
Johansen had returned with yellow hair turned white after a perfunctory and
inconclusive questioning at Sydney, and had thereafter sold his cottage in West Street
and sailed with his wife to his old home in Oslo. Of his stirring experience he would tell
his friends no more than he had told the admiralty officials, and all they could do was to
give me his Oslo address.
After that I went to Sydney and talked profitlessly with seamen and members of the
vice-admiralty court. I saw the Alert, now sold and in commercial use, at Circular Quay
in Sydney Cove, but gained nothing from its non-committal bulk. The crouching image
with its cuttlefish head, dragon body, scaly wings, and hieroglyphed pedestal, was
preserved in the Museum at Hyde Park; and I studied it long and well, finding it a thing
of balefully exquisite workmanship, and with the same utter mystery, terrible antiquity,
and unearthly strangeness of material which I had noted in Legrasse's smaller specimen.
Geologists, the curator told me, had found it a monstrous puzzle; for they vowed that
the world held no rock like it. Then I thought with a shudder of what Old Castro had
told Legrasse about the Old Ones; "They had come from the stars, and had brought
Their images with Them."
Shaken with such a mental revolution as I had never before known, I now resolved to
visit Mate Johansen in Oslo. Sailing for London, I reembarked at once for the
Norwegian capital; and one autumn day landed at the trim wharves in the shadow of the
Egeberg. Johansen's address, I discovered, lay in the Old Town of King Harold
Haardrada, which kept alive the name of Oslo during all the centuries that the greater
city masqueraded as "Christiana." I made the brief trip by taxicab, and knocked with
palpitant heart at the door of a neat and ancient building with plastered front. A
sad-faced woman in black answered my summons, and I was stung th disappointment
when she told me in halting English that Gustaf Johansen was no more.
He had not long survived his return, said his wife, for the doings sea in 1925 had broken
him. He had told her no more than he told the public, but had left a long manuscript - of
"technical matters" as he said - written in English, evidently in order to guard her from
the peril of casual perusal. During a walk rough a narrow lane near the Gothenburg dock,
a bundle of papers falling from an attic window had knocked him down. Two Lascar
sailors at once helped him to his feet, but before the ambulance could reach him he was
dead. Physicians found no adequate cause the end, and laid it to heart trouble and a
weakened constitution. I now felt gnawing at my vitals that dark terror which will never
leave me till I, too, am at rest; "accidentally" or otherwise. Persuad-g the widow that my
connexion with her husband's "technical matters" was sufficient to entitle me to his
manuscript, I bore the document away and began to read it on the London boat.
It was a simple, rambling thing - a naive sailor's effort at a post-facto diary - and strove
to recall day by day that last awful voyage. I cannot attempt to transcribe it verbatim in
all its cloudiness and redundance, but I will tell its gist enough to shew why the sound
the water against the vessel's sides became so unendurable to me that I stopped my ears
with cotton.
Johansen, thank God, did not know quite all, even though he saw the city and the Thing,
but I shall never sleep calmly again when I think of the horrors that lurk ceaselessly
behind life in time and in space, and of those unhallowed blasphemies from elder stars
which dream beneath the sea, known and favoured by a nightmare cult ready and eager
to loose them upon the world whenever another earthquake shall heave their monstrous
stone city again to the sun and air.
Johansen's voyage had begun just as he told it to the vice-admiralty. The Emma, in
ballast, had cleared Auckland on February 20th, and had felt the full force of that
earthquake-born tempest which must have heaved up from the sea-bottom the horrors
that filled men's dreams. Once more under control, the ship was making good progress
when held up by the Alert on March 22nd, and I could feel the mate's regret as he wrote
of her bombardment and sinking. Of the swarthy cult-fiends on the Alert he speaks with
significant horror. There was some peculiarly abominable quality about them which
made their destruction seem almost a duty, and Johansen shews ingenuous wonder at
the charge of ruthlessness brought against his party during the proceedings of the court
of inquiry. Then, driven ahead by curiosity in their captured yacht under Johansen's
command, the men sight a great stone pillar sticking out of the sea, and in S. Latitude
47°9', W. Longitude l23°43', come upon a coastline of mingled mud, ooze, and weedy
Cyclopean masonry which can be nothing less than the tangible substance of earth's
supreme terror - the nightmare corpse-city of R'lyeh, that was built in measureless aeons
behind history by the vast, loathsome shapes that seeped down from the dark stars.
There lay great Cthulhu and his hordes, hidden in green slimy vaults and sending out at
last, after cycles incalculable, the thoughts that spread fear to the dreams of the sensitive
and called imperiously to the faithfull to come on a pilgrimage of liberation and
restoration. All this Johansen did not suspect, but God knows he soon saw enough!
I suppose that only a single mountain-top, the hideous monolith-crowned citadel
whereon great Cthulhu was buried, actually emerged from the waters. When I think of
the extent of all that may be brooding down there I almost wish to kill myself forthwith.
Johansen and his men were awed by the cosmic majesty of this dripping Babylon of
elder daemons, and must have guessed without guidance that it was nothing of this or of
any sane planet. Awe at the unbelievable size of the greenish stone blocks, at the
dizzying height of the great carven monolith, and at the stupefying identity of the
colossal statues and bas-reliefs with the queer image found in the shrine on the Alert, is
poignantly visible in every line of the mates frightened description.
Without knowing what futurism is like, Johansen achieved something very close to it
when he spoke of the city; for instead of describing any definite structure or building, he
dwells only on broad impressions of vast angles and stone surfaces - surfaces too great
to belong to anything right or proper for this earth, and impious with horrible images
and hieroglyphs. I mention his talk about angles because it suggests something Wilcox
had told me of his awful dreams. He said that the geometry of the dream-place he saw
was abnormal, non-Euclidean, and loathsomely redolent of spheres and dimensions
apart from ours. Now an unlettered seaman felt the same thing whilst gazing at the
terrible reality.
Johansen and his men landed at a sloping mud-bank on this monstrous Acropolis, and
clambered slipperily up over titan oozy blocks which could have been no mortal
staircase. The very sun of heaven seemed distorted when viewed through the polarising
miasma welling out from this sea-soaked perversion, and twisted menace and suspense
lurked leeringly in those crazily elusive angles of carven rock where a second glance
shewed concavity after the first shewed convexity.
Something very 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 balauced
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 Lovecraft Library wishes to extend its gratitude to Eulogio García Recalde for transcribing this text.
:
The Case of Charles Dexter Ward
by H. P. Lovecraft
Written January 1 to March, 1927
Published May and July 1941 in Weird Tales, Vol. 35, No. 9 (May 1941), 8-40; Vol. 35,
No. 10 (July 1941), 84-121.
'The essential Saltes of Animals may be so prepared and preserved, that an ingenious
Man may have the whole Ark of Noah in his own Studie, and raise the fine Shape of an
Animal out of its Ashes at his Pleasure; and by the lyke Method from the essential
Saltes of humane Dust, a Philosopher may, without any criminal Necromancy, call up
the Shape of any dead Ancestour from the Dust whereinto his Bodie has been
incinerated.'
- Borellus
I. A Result and a Prologe
1
From a private hospital for the insane near Providence, Rhode Island, there recently
disappeared an exceedingly singular person. He bore the name of Charles Dexter Ward,
and was placed under restraint most reluctantly by the grieving father who had watched
his aberration grow from a mere eccentricity to a dark mania involving both a
possibility of murderous tendencies and a profound and peculiar change in the apparent
contents of his mind. Doctors confess themselves quite baffled by his case, since it
presented oddities of a general physiological as well as psychological character.
In the first place, the patient seemed oddly older than his twenty-six years would
warrant. Mental disturbance, it is true, will age one rapidly; but the face of this young
man had taken on a subtle cast which only the very aged normally acquire. In the
second place, his organic processes shewed a certain queerness of proportion which
nothing in medical experience can parallel. Respiration and heart action had a baffling
lack of symmetry; the voice was lost, so that no sounds above a whisper were possible;
digestion was incredibly prolonged and minimised, and neural reactions to standard
stimuli bore no relation at all to anything heretofore recorded, either normal or
pathological. The skin had a morbid chill and dryness, and the cellular structure of the
tissue seemed exaggeratedly coarse and loosely knit. Even a large olive birthmark on
the right hip had disappeared, whilst there had formed on the chest a very peculiar mole
or blackish spot of which no trace existed before. In general, all physicians agree that in
Ward the processes of metabolism had become retarded to a degree beyond precedent.
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 Moses Brown School, which lies very near his home. The old main building,
erected in 1819, had always charmed his youthful antiquarian sense; and the spacious
park in which the academy is set appealed to his sharp eye for landscape. His social
activities were few; and his hours were spent mainly at home, in rambling walks, in his
classes and drills, and in pursuit of antiquarian and genealogical data at the City Hall,
the State House, the Public Library, the Athenaeum, the Historical Society, the John
Carter Brown and John Hay Libraries of Brown University, and the newly opened
Shepley Library in Benefit Street. One may picture him yet as he was in those days; tall,
slim, and blond, with studious eyes and a slight droop, dressed somewhat carelessly,
and giving a dominant impression of harmless awkwardness rather than attractiveness.
His walks were always adventures in antiquity, during which he managed to recapture
from the myriad relics of a glamorous old city a vivid and connected picture of the
centuries before. His home was a great Georgian mansion atop the well-nigh precipitous
hill that rises just east of the river; and from the rear windows of its rambling wings he
could look dizzily out over all the clustered spires, domes, roofs, and skyscraper
summits of the lower town to the purple hills of the countryside beyond. Here he was
born, and from the lovely classic porch of the double-bayed brick facade his nurse had
first wheeled him in his carriage; past the little white farmhouse of two hundred years
before that the town had long ago overtaken, and on toward the stately colleges along
the shady, sumptuous street, whose old square brick mansions and smaller wooden
houses with narrow, heavy-columned Doric porches dreamed solid and exclusive amidst
their generous yards and gardens.
He had been wheeled, too, along sleepy Congdon Street, one tier lower down on the
steep hill, and with all its eastern homes on high terraces. The small wooden houses
averaged a greater age here, for it was up this hill that the growing town had climbed;
and in these rides he had imbibed something of the colour of a quaint colonial village.
The nurse used to stop and sit on the benches of Prospect Terrace to chat with
policemen; and one of the child's first memories was of the great westward sea of hazy
roofs and domes and steeples and far hills which he saw one winter afternoon from that
great railed embankment, and violet and mystic against a fevered, apoc