Call of Cthulhu HP Lovecraft - Audio Book - With WordsClosed Captions

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was manifested, perhaps, in shapes and forms long since withdrawn before the tide of advancing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....

Part 1:
The Horror in Clay. The most merciful thing in the world, I think,
is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island
of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should
voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us
little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such
terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go
mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark
age.

Theosophists have guessed at the
awesome grandeur of the cosmic cycle wherein our world and human race form transient incidents.
They have hinted at strange survivals in terms which would freeze the blood if not masked
by a bland optimism. But it is not from them that there came the single glimpse of forbidden
aeons which chills me when I think of it and maddens me when I dream of it. That glimpse,
like all dread glimpses of truth, flashed out from an accidental piecing together of
separated thingsin this case an old newspaper item and the notes of a dead professor. I
hope that no one else will accomplish this piecing out; certainly, if I live, I shall
never knowingly supply a link in so hideous a chain.

I think that the professor, too,
intended to keep silent regarding the part he knew, and that he would have destroyed
his notes had not sudden death seized him. My knowledge of the thing began
in the winter of 192627 with the death of my grand-uncle George Gammell Angell, Professor
Emeritus of Semitic Languages in Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island. Professor Angell
was widely known as an authority on ancient inscriptions, and had frequently been resorted
to by the heads of prominent museums; so that his passing at the age of ninety-two may be
recalled by many. Locally, interest was intensified by the obscurity of the cause of death.

The
professor had been stricken whilst returning from the Newport boat; falling suddenly, as
witnesses said, after having been jostled by a nautical-looking negro who had come from
one of the queer dark courts on the precipitous hillside which formed a short cut from the
waterfront to the deceaseds 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 wonderand more than wonder. As my grand-uncles heir and
executor, for he died a childless widower, I was expected to go over his papers with
some thoroughness; and for that purpose moved his entire set of files and boxes to my quarters
in Boston.

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

The bas-relief was a rough rectangle
less than an inch thick and about five by six inches in area; obviously of modern origin.
Its designs, however, were far from modern in atmosphere and suggestion; for although
the vagaries of cubism and futurism are many and wild, they do not often reproduce that
cryptic regularity which lurks in prehistoric writing. And writing of some kind the bulk
of these designs seemed certainly to be; though my memory, despite much familiarity with the
papers and collections of my uncle, failed in any way to identify this particular species,
or even to hint at its remotest affiliations. Above these apparent hieroglyphics
was a figure of evidently pictorial intent, though its impressionistic execution forbade
a very clear idea of its nature. It seemed to be a sort of monster, or symbol representing
a monster, of a form which only a diseased fancy could conceive.

If I say that my somewhat
extravagant imagination yielded simultaneous pictures of an octopus, a dragon, and a human
caricature, I shall not be unfaithful to the spirit of the thing. A pulpy, tentacled head
surmounted a grotesque and scaly body with rudimentary wings; but it was the general
outline of the whole which made it most shockingly frightful. Behind the figure was a vague suggestion
of a Cyclopean architectural background. The writing accompanying this
oddity was, aside from a stack of press cuttings, in Professor Angells most recent hand;
and made no pretence to literary style.

What seemed to be the main document was headed
CTHULHU CULT in characters painstakingly printed to avoid the erroneous reading of
a word so unheard-of. The manuscript was divided into two sections, the first of which was
headed 1925Dream 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.

Webbs Acct. The other manuscript
papers were all brief notes, some of them accounts of the queer dreams of different
persons, some of them citations from theosophical books and magazines (notably W. Scott-Elliots
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 Frazers Golden Bough and Miss Murrays Witch-Cult in Western Europe. The cuttings
largely alluded to outr mental illnesses and outbreaks of group folly or mania in the
spring of 1925.

The first half of the principal
manuscript told a very peculiar tale. It appears that on March 1st, 1925, a thin, dark young
man of neurotic and excited aspect had called upon Professor Angell bearing the singular
clay bas-relief, which was then exceedingly damp and fresh. His card bore the name of
Henry Anthony Wilcox, and my uncle had recognised him as the youngest son of an excellent family
slightly known to him, who had latterly been studying sculpture at the Rhode Island School
of Design and living alone at the Fleur-de-Lys Building near that institution. Wilcox was
a precocious youth of known genius but great eccentricity, and had from childhood excited
attention through the strange stories and odd dreams he was in the habit of relating.
He called himself psychically hypersensitive, but the staid folk of the ancient commercial
city dismissed him as merely queer.

Never mingling much with his kind, he had
dropped gradually from social visibility, and was now known only to a small group of
aesthetes from other towns. Even the Providence Art Club, anxious to preserve its conservatism,
had found him quite hopeless. On the occasion of the visit,
ran the professors manuscript, the sculptor abruptly asked for the benefit of his hosts
archaeological knowledge in identifying the hieroglyphics on the bas-relief. He spoke
in a dreamy, stilted manner which suggested pose and alienated sympathy; and my uncle
shewed some sharpness in replying, for the conspicuous freshness of the tablet implied
kinship with anything but archaeology.

Young Wilcoxs 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 Wilcoxs imagination had been keenly affected.

Upon
retiring, he had had an unprecedented dream of great Cyclopean cities of titan blocks
and sky-flung monoliths, all dripping with green ooze and sinister with latent horror.
Hieroglyphics had covered the walls and pillars, and from some undetermined point below had
come a voice that was not a voice; a chaotic sensation which only fancy could transmute
into sound, but which he attempted to render by the almost unpronounceable jumble of letters,
Cthulhu fhtagn. This verbal jumble was the key
to the recollection which excited and disturbed Professor Angell. He questioned the sculptor
with scientific minuteness; and studied with almost frantic intensity the bas-relief on
which the youth had found himself working, chilled and clad only in his night-clothes,
when waking had stolen bewilderingly over him. My uncle blamed his old age, Wilcox afterward
said, for his slowness in recognising both hieroglyphics and pictorial design.

Many of
his questions seemed highly out-of-place to his visitor, especially those which tried
to connect the latter with strange cults or societies; and Wilcox could not understand
the repeated promises of silence which he was offered in exchange for an admission of
membership in some widespread mystical or paganly religious body. When Professor Angell
became convinced that the sculptor was indeed ignorant of any cult or system of cryptic
lore, he besieged his visitor with demands for future reports of dreams. This bore regular
fruit, for after the first interview the manuscript records daily calls of the young man, during
which he related startling fragments of nocturnal imagery whose burden was always some terrible
Cyclopean vista of dark and dripping stone, with a subterrene voice or intelligence shouting
monotonously in enigmatical sense-impacts uninscribable save as gibberish. The two sounds
most frequently repeated are those rendered by the letters Cthulhu and Rlyeh.
On March 23d, the manuscript continued, Wilcox failed to appear; and inquiries at
his quarters revealed that he had been stricken with an obscure sort of fever and taken to
the home of his family in Waterman Street.

He had cried out in the night, arousing several
other artists in the building, and had manifested since then only alternations of unconsciousness
and delirium. My uncle at once telephoned the family, and from that time forward kept
close watch of the case; calling often at the Thayer Street office of Dr. Tobey, whom
he learned to be in charge. The youths 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 mans
subsidence into lethargy. His temperature, oddly enough, was not greatly above normal;
but his whole condition was otherwise such as to suggest true fever rather than mental
disorder.

On April 2nd at about 3 p.M. Every
trace of Wilcoxs malady suddenly ceased. He sat upright in bed, astonished to find
himself at home and completely ignorant of what had happened in dream or reality since
the night of March 22nd. Pronounced well by his physician, he returned to his quarters
in three days; but to Professor Angell he was of no further assistance.

All traces of
strange dreaming had vanished with his recovery, and my uncle kept no record of his night-thoughts
after a week of pointless and irrelevant accounts of thoroughly usual visions.
Here the first part of the manuscript ended, but references to certain of the scattered
notes gave me much material for thoughtso much, in fact, that only the ingrained scepticism
then forming my philosophy can account for my continued distrust of the artist. The notes
in question were those descriptive of the dreams of various persons covering the same
period as that in which young Wilcox had had his strange visitations. My uncle, it seems,
had quickly instituted a prodigiously far-flung body of inquiries amongst nearly all the friends
whom he could question without impertinence, asking for nightly reports of their dreams,
and the dates of any notable visions for some time past. The reception of his request seems
to have been varied; but he must, at the very least, have received more responses than any
ordinary man could have handled without a secretary.

This original correspondence was
not preserved, but his notes formed a thorough and really significant digest. Average people
in society and businessNew Englands traditional salt of the earthgave
an almost completely negative result, though scattered cases of uneasy but formless nocturnal
impressions appear here and there, always between March 23d and April 2ndthe period
of young Wilcoxs delirium. Scientific men were little more affected, though four cases
of vague description suggest fugitive glimpses of strange landscapes, and in one case there
is mentioned a dread of something abnormal. It was from the artists and poets
that the pertinent answers came, and I know that panic would have broken loose had they
been able to compare notes.

As it was, lacking their original letters, I half suspected the
compiler of having asked leading questions, or of having edited the correspondence in
corroboration of what he had latently resolved to see. That is why I continued to feel that
Wilcox, somehow cognisant of the old data which my uncle had possessed, had been imposing
on the veteran scientist. These responses from aesthetes told a disturbing tale. From
February 28th to April 2nd a large proportion of them had dreamed very bizarre things, the
intensity of the dreams being immeasurably the stronger during the period of the sculptors
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 Wilcoxs seizure, and
expired several months later after incessant screamings to be saved from some escaped denizen
of hell. Had my uncle referred to these cases by name instead of merely by number, I should
have attempted some corroboration and personal investigation; but as it was, I succeeded
in tracing down only a few.

All of these, however, bore out the notes in full. I have
often wondered if all the objects of the professors questioning felt as puzzled as did this fraction.
It is well that no explanation shall ever reach them.
The press cuttings, as I have intimated, touched on cases of panic, mania,
and eccentricity during the given period. Professor Angell must have employed a cutting
bureau, for the number of extracts was tremendous and the sources scattered throughout the globe.
Here was a nocturnal suicide in London, where a lone sleeper had leaped from a window after
a shocking cry. Here likewise a rambling letter to the editor of a paper in South America,
where a fanatic deduces a dire future from visions he has seen.

A despatch from California
describes a theosophist colony as donning white robes en masse for some glorious
fulfilment which never arrives, whilst items from India speak guardedly of serious
native unrest toward the end of March. Voodoo orgies multiply in Hayti, and African outposts
report ominous mutterings. American officers in the Philippines find certain tribes bothersome
about this time, and New York policemen are mobbed by hysterical Levantines on the night
of March 2223. 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.
Part 2: The Tale of Inspector Legrasse. The older matters which had made the sculptors
dream and bas-relief so significant to my uncle formed the subject of the second half
of his long manuscript.

Once before, it appears, Professor Angell had seen the hellish outlines
of the nameless monstrosity, puzzled over the unknown hieroglyphics, and heard the ominous
syllables which can be rendered only as Cthulhu; and all this in so stirring and horrible a
connexion that it is small wonder he pursued young Wilcox with queries and demands for
data. The earlier experience had come
in 1908, seventeen years before, when the American Archaeological Society held its annual
meeting in St. Louis. Professor Angell, as befitted one of his authority and attainments,
had had a prominent part in all the deliberations; and was one of the first to be approached
by the several outsiders who took advantage of the convocation to offer questions for
correct answering and problems for expert solution.
The chief of these outsiders, and in a short time the focus of interest
for the entire meeting, was a commonplace-looking middle-aged man who had travelled all the
way from New Orleans for certain special information unobtainable from any local source.

His name
was John Raymond Legrasse, and he was by profession an Inspector of Police. With him he bore the
subject of his visit, a grotesque, repulsive, and apparently very ancient stone statuette
whose origin he was at a loss to determine. It must not be fancied that Inspector Legrasse
had the least interest in archaeology. On the contrary, his wish for enlightenment was
prompted by purely professional considerations.

The statuette, idol, fetish, or whatever it
was, had been captured some months before in the wooded swamps south of New Orleans
during a raid on a supposed voodoo meeting; and so singular and hideous were the rites
connected with it, that the police could not but realise that they had stumbled on a dark
cult totally unknown to them, and infinitely more diabolic than even the blackest of the
African voodoo circles. Of its origin, apart from the erratic and unbelievable tales extorted
from the captured members, absolutely nothing was to be discovered; hence the anxiety of
the police for any antiquarian lore which might help them to place the frightful symbol,
and through it track down the cult to its fountain-head.
Inspector Legrasse was scarcely prepared for the sensation which his offering
created. One sight of the thing had been enough to throw the assembled men of science into
a state of tense excitement, and they lost no time in crowding around him to gaze at
the diminutive figure whose utter strangeness and air of genuinely abysmal antiquity hinted
so potently at unopened and archaic vistas. No recognised school of sculpture had animated
this terrible object, yet centuries and even thousands of years seemed recorded in its
dim and greenish surface of unplaceable stone.

The figure, which was finally
passed slowly from man to man for close and careful study, was between seven and eight
inches in height, and of exquisitely artistic workmanship. It represented a monster of vaguely
anthropoid outline, but with an octopus-like head whose face was a mass of feelers, a scaly,
rubbery-looking body, prodigious claws on hind and fore feet, and long, narrow wings
behind. This thing, which seemed instinct with a fearsome and unnatural malignancy,
was of a somewhat bloated corpulence, and squatted evilly on a rectangular block or
pedestal covered with undecipherable characters. The tips of the wings touched the back edge
of the block, the seat occupied the centre, whilst the long, curved claws of the doubled-up,
crouching hind legs gripped the front edge and extended a quarter of the way down toward
the bottom of the pedestal.

The cephalopod head was bent forward, so that the ends of
the facial feelers brushed the backs of huge fore paws which clasped the crouchers 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 civilisations
youthor 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 worlds 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 Inspectors problem, there was one man in that gathering who suspected a touch of
bizarre familiarity in the monstrous shape and writing, and who presently told with some
diffidence of the odd trifle he knew. This person was the late William Channing Webb,
Professor of Anthropology in Princeton University, and an explorer of no slight note. Professor
Webb had been engaged, forty-eight years before, in a tour of Greenland and Iceland in search
of some Runic inscriptions which he failed to unearth; and whilst high up on the West
Greenland coast had encountered a singular tribe or cult of degenerate Esquimaux whose
religion, a curious form of devil-worship, chilled him with its deliberate bloodthirstiness
and repulsiveness. It was a faith of which other Esquimaux knew little, and which they
mentioned only with shudders, saying that it had come down from horribly ancient aeons
before ever the world was made.

Besides nameless rites and human sacrifices there were certain
queer hereditary rituals addressed to a supreme elder devil or tornasuk; and of this Professor
Webb had taken a careful phonetic copy from an aged angekok or wizard-priest, expressing
the sounds in Roman letters as best he knew how. But just now of prime significance was
the fetish which this cult had cherished, and around which they danced when the aurora
leaped high over the ice cliffs. It was, the professor stated, a very crude bas-relief
of stone, comprising a hideous picture and some cryptic writing. And so far as he could
tell, it was a rough parallel in all essential features of the bestial thing now lying before
the meeting.

This data, received with suspense
and astonishment by the assembled members, proved doubly exciting to Inspector Legrasse;
and he began at once to ply his informant with questions. Having noted and copied an
oral ritual among the swamp cult-worshippers his men had arrested, he besought the professor
to remember as best he might the syllables taken down amongst the diabolist Esquimaux.
There then followed an exhaustive comparison of details, and a moment of really awed silence
when both detective and scientist agreed on the virtual identity of the phrase common
to two hellish rituals so many worlds of distance apart. What, in substance, both the Esquimau
wizards and the Louisiana swamp-priests had chanted to their kindred idols was something
very like thisthe word-divisions being guessed at from traditional breaks in the
phrase as chanted aloud: Phnglui mglwnafh Cthulhu
Rlyeh wgahnagl 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 Rlyeh 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 Lafittes men, were in the grip of stark terror from an unknown
thing which had stolen upon them in the night. It was voodoo, apparently, but voodoo of a
more terrible sort than they had ever known; and some of their women and children had disappeared
since the malevolent tom-tom had begun its incessant beating far within the black haunted
woods where no dweller ventured.

There were insane shouts and harrowing screams, soul-chilling
chants and dancing devil-flames; and, the frightened messenger added, the people could
stand it no more. So a body of twenty police, filling
two carriages and an automobile, had set out in the late afternoon with the shivering squatter
as a guide. At the end of the passable road they alighted, and for miles splashed on in
silence through the terrible cypress woods where day never came. Ugly roots and malignant
hanging nooses of Spanish moss beset them, and now and then a pile of dank stones or
fragment of a rotting wall intensified by its hint of morbid habitation a depression
which every malformed tree and every fungous islet combined to create.

At length the squatter
settlement, a miserable huddle of huts, hove in sight; and hysterical dwellers ran out
to cluster around the group of bobbing lanterns. The muffled beat of tom-toms was now faintly
audible far, far ahead; and a curdling shriek came at infrequent intervals when the wind
shifted. A reddish glare, too, seemed to filter through the pale undergrowth beyond endless
avenues of forest night. Reluctant even to be left alone again, each one of the cowed
squatters refused point-blank to advance another inch toward the scene of unholy worship, so
Inspector Legrasse and his nineteen colleagues plunged on unguided into black arcades of
horror that none of them had ever trod before.

The region now entered by the
police was one of traditionally evil repute, substantially unknown and untraversed by white
men. There were legends of a hidden lake unglimpsed by mortal sight, in which dwelt a huge, formless
white polypous thing with luminous eyes; and squatters whispered that bat-winged devils
flew up out of caverns in inner earth to worship it at midnight. They said it had been there
before DIberville, 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 Legrasses men as they ploughed on through the black
morass toward the red glare and the muffled tom-toms. There are vocal qualities peculiar
to men, and vocal qualities peculiar to beasts; and it is terrible to hear the one when the
source should yield the other.

Animal fury and orgiastic licence here whipped themselves
to daemoniac heights by howls and squawking ecstasies that tore and reverberated through
those nighted woods like pestilential tempests from the gulfs of hell. Now and then the less
organised ululation would cease, and from what seemed a well-drilled chorus of hoarse
voices would rise in sing-song chant that hideous phrase or ritual:
Phnglui mglwnafh Cthulhu Rlyeh wgahnagl 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 acres
extent, clear of trees and tolerably dry.

On this now leaped and twisted a more indescribable
horde of human abnormality than any but a Sime or an Angarola could paint. Void of clothing,
this hybrid spawn were braying, bellowing, and writhing about a monstrous ring-shaped
bonfire; in the centre of which, revealed by occasional rifts in the curtain of flame,
stood a great granite monolith some eight feet in height; on top of which, incongruous
with its diminutiveness, rested the noxious carven statuette. From a wide circle of ten
scaffolds set up at regular intervals with the flame-girt monolith as a centre hung,
head downward, the oddly marred bodies of the helpless squatters who had disappeared.
It was inside this circle that the ring of worshippers jumped and roared, the general
direction of the mass motion being from left to right in endless Bacchanal between the
ring of bodies and the ring of fire. It may have been only imagination
and it may have been only echoes which induced one of the men, an excitable Spaniard, to
fancy he heard antiphonal responses to the ritual from some far and unillumined spot
deeper within the wood of ancient legendry and horror.

This man, Joseph D. Galvez, I
later met and questioned; and he proved distractingly imaginative. He indeed went so far as to hint
of the faint beating of great wings, and of a glimpse of shining eyes and a mountainous
white bulk beyond the remotest treesbut I suppose he had been hearing too much native
superstition. Actually, the horrified pause
of the men was of comparatively brief duration.

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

The image on the monolith, of course, was carefully
removed and carried back by Legrasse. Examined at headquarters after
a trip of intense strain and weariness, the prisoners all proved to be men of a very low,
mixed-blooded, and mentally aberrant type. Most were seamen, and a sprinkling of negroes
and mulattoes, largely West Indians or Brava Portuguese from the Cape Verde Islands, gave
a colouring of voodooism to the heterogeneous cult. But before many questions were asked,
it became manifest that something far deeper and older than negro fetichism was involved.
Degraded and ignorant as they were, the creatures held with surprising consistency to the central
idea of their loathsome faith.

They worshipped, so they said,
the Great Old Ones who lived ages before there were any men, and who came to the young world
out of the sky. Those Old Ones were gone now, inside the earth and under the sea; but their
dead bodies had told their secrets in dreams to the first men, who formed a cult which
had never died. This was that cult, and the prisoners said it had always existed and always
would exist, hidden in distant wastes and dark places all over the world until the time
when the great priest Cthulhu, from his dark house in the mighty city of Rlyeh 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 secretthat was
never spoken aloud, only whispered. The chant meant only this: In his house at Rlyeh
dead Cthulhu waits dreaming. Only two of the prisoners were
found sane enough to be hanged, and the rest were committed to various institutions.

All
denied a part in the ritual murders, and averred that the killing had been done by Black Winged
Ones which had come to them from their immemorial meeting-place in the haunted wood. But of
those mysterious allies no coherent account could ever be gained. What the police did
extract, came mainly from an immensely aged mestizo named Castro, who claimed to have
sailed to strange ports and talked with undying leaders of the cult in the mountains of China.
Old Castro remembered bits of hideous legend that paled the speculations
of theosophists and made man and the world seem recent and transient indeed. There had
been aeons when other Things ruled on the earth, and They had had great cities.

Remains
of Them, he said the deathless Chinamen had told him, were still to be found as Cyclopean
stones on islands in the Pacific. They all died vast epochs of time before men came,
but there were arts which could revive Them when the stars had come round again to the
right positions in the cycle of eternity. They had, indeed, come themselves from the
stars, and brought Their images with Them. These Great Old Ones, Castro continued,
were not composed altogether of flesh and blood.

They had shapefor 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 Rlyeh, preserved by the spells of mighty Cthulhu
for a glorious resurrection when the stars and the earth might once more be ready for
Them.

But at that time some force from outside must serve to liberate Their bodies. The spells
that preserved Them intact likewise prevented Them from making an initial move, and They
could only lie awake in the dark and think whilst uncounted millions of years rolled
by. They knew all that was occurring in the universe, but Their mode of speech was transmitted
thought. Even now They talked in Their tombs.

When, after infinities of chaos, the first
men came, the Great Old Ones spoke to the sensitive among them by moulding their dreams;
for only thus could Their language reach the fleshly minds of mammals.
Then, whispered Castro, those first men formed the cult around small idols
which the Great Ones shewed them; idols brought in dim aeras from dark stars. That cult would
never die till the stars came right again, and the secret priests would take great Cthulhu
from His tomb to revive His subjects and resume His rule of earth. The time would be easy
to know, for then mankind would have become as the Great Old Ones; free and wild and beyond
good and evil, with laws and morals thrown aside and all men shouting and killing and
revelling in joy. Then the liberated Old Ones would teach them new ways to shout and kill
and revel and enjoy themselves, and all the earth would flame with a holocaust of ecstasy
and freedom.

Meanwhile the cult, by appropriate rites, must keep alive the memory of those
ancient ways and shadow forth the prophecy of their return.
In the elder time chosen men had talked with the entombed Old Ones in dreams,
but then something had happened. The great stone city Rlyeh, with its monoliths and
sepulchres, had sunk beneath the waves; and the deep waters, full of the one primal mystery
through which not even thought can pass, had cut off the spectral intercourse. But memory
never died, and high-priests said that the city would rise again when the stars were
right. Then came out of the earth the black spirits of earth, mouldy and shadowy, and
full of dim rumours picked up in caverns beneath forgotten sea-bottoms.

But of them old Castro
dared not speak much. He cut himself off hurriedly, and no amount of persuasion or subtlety could
elicit more in this direction. The size of the Old Ones, too, he curiously declined to
mention. Of the cult, he said that he thought the centre lay amid the pathless deserts of
Arabia, where Irem, the City of Pillars, dreams hidden and untouched.

It was not allied to
the European witch-cult, and was virtually unknown beyond its members. No book had ever
really hinted of it, though the deathless Chinamen said that there were double meanings
in the Necronomicon of the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred which the initiated might read as
they chose, especially the much-discussed couplet:
That is not dead which can eternal lie,
And with strange aeons even death may die. Legrasse, deeply impressed and
not a little bewildered, had inquired in vain concerning the historic affiliations of the
cult. Castro, apparently, had told the truth when he said that it was wholly secret.

The
authorities at Tulane University could shed no light upon either cult or image, and now
the detective had come to the highest authorities in the country and met with no more than the
Greenland tale of Professor Webb. The feverish interest aroused
at the meeting by Legrasses 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 latters death it was returned to him and remains in his possession, where I
viewed it not long ago.

It is truly a terrible thing, and unmistakably akin to the dream-sculpture
of young Wilcox. That my uncle was excited by the
tale of the sculptor I did not wonder, for what thoughts must arise upon hearing, after
a knowledge of what Legrasse had learned of the cult, of a sensitive young man who had
dreamed not only the figure and exact hieroglyphics of the swamp-found image and the Greenland
devil tablet, but had come in his dreams upon at least three of the precise words of the
formula uttered alike by Esquimau diabolists and mongrel Louisianans? Professor Angells
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 uncles expense.
The dream-narratives and cuttings collected by the professor were, of course, strong corroboration;
but the rationalism of my mind and the extravagance of the whole subject led me to adopt what
I thought the most sensible conclusions. So, after thoroughly studying the manuscript again
and correlating the theosophical and anthropological notes with the cult narrative of Legrasse,
I made a trip to Providence to see the sculptor and give him the rebuke I thought proper for
so boldly imposing upon a learned and aged man.
Wilcox still lived alone in the Fleur-de-Lys Building in Thomas Street, a
hideous Victorian imitation of seventeenth-century Breton architecture which flaunts its stuccoed
front amidst the lovely colonial houses on the ancient hill, and under the very shadow
of the finest Georgian steeple in America. I found him at work in his rooms, and at once
conceded from the specimens scattered about that his genius is indeed profound and authentic.
He will, I believe, some time be heard from as one of the great decadents; for he has
crystallised in clay and will one day mirror in marble those nightmares and phantasies
which Arthur Machen evokes in prose, and Clark Ashton Smith makes visible in verse and in
painting.

Dark, frail, and somewhat unkempt
in aspect, he turned languidly at my knock and asked me my business without rising. When
I told him who I was, he displayed some interest; for my uncle had excited his curiosity in
probing his strange dreams, yet had never explained the reason for the study. I did
not enlarge his knowledge in this regard, but sought with some subtlety to draw him
out. In a short time I became convinced of his absolute sincerity, for he spoke of the
dreams in a manner none could mistake.

They and their subconscious residuum had influenced
his art profoundly, and he shewed me a morbid statue whose contours almost made me shake
with the potency of its black suggestion. He could not recall having seen the original
of this thing except in his own dream bas-relief, but the outlines had formed themselves insensibly
under his hands. It was, no doubt, the giant shape he had raved of in delirium. That he
really knew nothing of the hidden cult, save from what my uncles 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 stonewhose geometry, he oddly said, was all wrongand 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 Cthulhus dream-vigil
in his stone vault at Rlyeh, and I felt deeply moved despite my rational beliefs.
Wilcox, I was sure, had heard of the cult in some casual way, and had soon forgotten
it amidst the mass of his equally weird reading and imagining. Later, by virtue of its sheer
impressiveness, it had found subconscious expression in dreams, in the bas-relief, and
in the terrible statue I now beheld; so that his imposture upon my uncle had been a very
innocent one. The youth was of a type, at once slightly affected and slightly ill-mannered,
which I could never like; but I was willing enough now to admit both his genius and his
honesty. I took leave of him amicably, and wish him all the success his talent promises.
The matter of the cult still remained to fascinate me, and at times I had visions
of personal fame from researches into its origin and connexions.

I visited New Orleans,
talked with Legrasse and others of that old-time raiding-party, saw the frightful image, and
even questioned such of the mongrel prisoners as still survived. Old Castro, unfortunately,
had been dead for some years. What I now heard so graphically at first-hand, though it was
really no more than a detailed confirmation of what my uncle had written, excited me afresh;
for I felt sure that I was on the track of a very real, very secret, and very ancient
religion whose discovery would make me an anthropologist of note. My attitude was still
one of absolute materialism, as I wish it still were, and I discounted with almost inexplicable
perversity the coincidence of the dream notes and odd cuttings collected by Professor Angell.
One thing I began to suspect, and which I now fear I know, is that my uncles
death was far from natural.

He fell on a narrow hill street leading up from an ancient waterfront
swarming with foreign mongrels, after a careless push from a negro sailor. I did not forget
the mixed blood and marine pursuits of the cult-members in Louisiana, and would not be
surprised to learn of secret methods and poison needles as ruthless and as anciently known
as the cryptic rites and beliefs. Legrasse and his men, it is true, have been let alone;
but in Norway a certain seaman who saw things is dead. Might not the deeper inquiries of
my uncle after encountering the sculptors 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.
Part 3: 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 uncles research.
I had largely given over my inquiries into what Professor Angell called the Cthulhu
Cult, and was visiting a learned friend in Paterson, New Jersey; the curator of a
local museum and a mineralogist of note.

Examining one day the reserve specimens roughly set
on the storage shelves in a rear room of the museum, my eye was caught by an odd picture
in one of the old papers spread beneath the stones. It was the Sydney Bulletin I have
mentioned, for my friend has wide affiliations in all conceivable foreign parts; and the
picture was a half-tone cut of a hideous stone image almost identical with that which Legrasse
had found in the swamp. Eagerly clearing the sheet of
its precious contents, I scanned the item in detail; and was disappointed to find it
of only moderate length. What it suggested, however, was of portentous significance to
my flagging quest; and I carefully tore it out for immediate action.

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

Inquiry to Follow. The Morrison Co.S freighter Vigilant, bound
from Valparaiso, arrived this morning at its wharf in Darling Harbour, having in tow the
battled and disabled but heavily armed steam yacht Alert of Dunedin, N. Z., Which was sighted
April 12th in S. Latitude 34 21', W.

Longitude 152 17' with one living and one dead man
aboard. The Vigilant left Valparaiso March
25th, and on April 2nd was driven considerably south of her course by exceptionally heavy
storms and monster waves. On April 12th the derelict was sighted; and though apparently
deserted, was found upon boarding to contain one survivor in a half-delirious condition
and one man who had evidently been dead for more than a week. The living man was clutching
a horrible stone idol of unknown origin, about a foot in height, regarding whose nature authorities
at Sydney University, the Royal Society, and the Museum in College Street all profess complete
bafflement, and which the survivor says he found in the cabin of the yacht, in a small
carved shrine of common pattern.

This man, after recovering his
senses, told an exceedingly strange story of piracy and slaughter. He is Gustaf Johansen,
a Norwegian of some intelligence, and had been second mate of the two-masted schooner
Emma of Auckland, which sailed for Callao February 20th with a complement of eleven
men. The Emma, he says, was delayed and thrown widely south of her course by the great storm
of March 1st, and on March 22nd, in S. Latitude 49 51', W.

Longitude 128 34', encountered
the Alert, manned by a queer and evil-looking crew of Kanakas and half-castes. Being ordered
peremptorily to turn back, Capt. Collins refused; whereupon the strange crew began to fire savagely
and without warning upon the schooner with a peculiarly heavy battery of brass cannon
forming part of the yachts equipment. The Emmas men shewed fight, says the survivor,
and though the schooner began to sink from shots beneath the waterline they managed to
heave alongside their enemy and board her, grappling with the savage crew on the yachts
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 Emmas 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.

Bridens 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 Emmas crew had died, and about which the mate Johansen was so secretive? What had
the vice-admiraltys 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 1stour February 28th
according to the International Date Linethe earthquake and storm had come. From Dunedin
the Alert and her noisome crew had darted eagerly forth as if imperiously summoned,
and on the other side of the earth poets and artists had begun to dream of a strange, dank
Cyclopean city whilst a young sculptor had moulded in his sleep the form of the dreaded
Cthulhu.

March 23d the crew of the Emma landed on an unknown island and left six men dead;
and on that date the dreams of sensitive men assumed a heightened vividness and darkened
with dread of a giant monsters malign pursuit, whilst an architect had gone mad and a sculptor
had lapsed suddenly into delirium! And what of this storm of April 2ndthe date on which
all dreams of the dank city ceased, and Wilcox emerged unharmed from the bondage of strange
fever? What of all thisand 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 mans 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 mankinds soul.
That evening, after a day of hurried cabling and arranging, I bade my host adieu
and took a train for San Francisco. In less than a month I was in Dunedin; where, however,
I found that little was known of the strange cult-members who had lingered in the old sea-taverns.
Waterfront scum was far too common for special mention; though there was vague talk about
one inland trip these mongrels had made, during which faint drumming and red flame were noted
on the distant hills. In Auckland I learned that Johansen had returned with yellow hair
turned white after a perfunctory and inconclusive questioning at Sydney, and had thereafter
sold his cottage in West Street and sailed with his wife to his old home in Oslo. Of
his stirring experience he would tell his friends no more than he had told the admiralty
officials, and all they could do was to give me his Oslo address.
After that I went to Sydney and talked profitlessly with seamen and members
of the vice-admiralty court.

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

Shaken with such a mental revolution
as I had never before known, I now resolved to visit Mate Johansen in Oslo. Sailing for
London, I rembarked at once for the Norwegian capital; and one autumn day landed at the
trim wharves in the shadow of the Egeberg. Johansens address, I discovered, lay in
the Old Town of King Harold Haardrada, which kept alive the name of Oslo during all the
centuries that the greater city masqueraded as Christiana. I made the brief trip
by taxicab, and knocked with palpitant heart at the door of a neat and ancient building
with plastered front.

A sad-faced woman in black answered my summons, and I was stung
with disappointment when she told me in halting English that Gustaf Johansen was no more.
He had not survived his return, said his wife, for the doings at sea in 1925
had broken him. He had told her no more than he had told the public, but had left a long
manuscriptof technical matters as he saidwritten in English, evidently in
order to safeguard her from the peril of casual perusal. During a walk through a narrow lane
near the Gothenburg dock, a bundle of papers falling from an attic window had knocked him
down. Two Lascar sailors at once helped him to his feet, but before the ambulance could
reach him he was dead.

Physicians found no adequate cause for the end, and laid it to
heart trouble and a weakened constitution. I now felt gnawing at my vitals
that dark terror which will never leave me till I, too, am at rest; accidentally
or otherwise. Persuading the widow that my connexion with her husbands 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 thinga naive sailors
effort at a post-facto diaryand strove to recall day by day that last awful voyage.
I cannot attempt to transcribe it verbatim in all its cloudiness and redundance, but
I will tell its gist enough to shew why the sound of the water against the vessels
sides became so unendurable to me that I stopped my ears with cotton.
Johansen, thank God, did not know quite all, even though he saw the city and
the Thing, but I shall never sleep calmly again when I think of the horrors that lurk
ceaselessly behind life in time and in space, and of those unhallowed blasphemies from elder
stars which dream beneath the sea, known and favoured by a nightmare cult ready and eager
to loose them on the world whenever another earthquake shall heave their monstrous stone
city again to the sun and air.

Johansens 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 mens 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 mates 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 Johansens
command, the men sight a great stone pillar sticking out of the sea, and in S. Latitude
47 9', W. Longitude 126 43' come upon a coast-line of mingled mud, ooze, and weedy
Cyclopean masonry which can be nothing less than the tangible substance of earths supreme
terrorthe nightmare corpse-city of Rlyeh, that was built in measureless aeons behind
history by the vast, loathsome shapes that seeped down from the dark stars.

There lay
great Cthulhu and his hordes, hidden in green slimy vaults and sending out at last, after
cycles incalculable, the thoughts that spread fear to the dreams of the sensitive and called
imperiously to the faithful to come on a pilgrimage of liberation and restoration. All this Johansen
did not suspect, but God knows he soon saw enough!
I suppose that only a single mountain-top, the hideous monolith-crowned citadel whereon
great Cthulhu was buried, actually emerged from the waters. When I think of the extent
of all that may be brooding down there I almost wish to kill myself forthwith. Johansen and
his men were awed by the cosmic majesty of this dripping Babylon of elder daemons, and
must have guessed without guidance that it was nothing of this or of any sane planet.
Awe at the unbelievable size of the greenish stone blocks, at the dizzying height of the
great carven monolith, and at the stupefying identity of the colossal statues and bas-reliefs
with the queer image found in the shrine on the Alert, is poignantly visible in every
line of the mates frightened description.

Without knowing what futurism
is like, Johansen achieved something very close to it when he spoke of the city; for
instead of describing any definite structure or building, he dwells only on broad impressions
of vast angles and stone surfacessurfaces too great to belong to any thing right or
proper for this earth, and impious with horrible images and hieroglyphs. I mention his talk
about angles because it suggests something Wilcox had told me of his awful dreams. He
had said that the geometry of the dream-place he saw was abnormal, non-Euclidean, and loathsomely
redolent of spheres and dimensions apart from ours. Now an unlettered seaman felt the same
thing whilst gazing at the terrible reality.

Johansen and his men landed at
a sloping mud-bank on this monstrous Acropolis, and clambered slipperily up over titan oozy
blocks which could have been no mortal staircase. The very sun of heaven seemed distorted when
viewed through the polarising miasma welling out from this sea-soaked perversion, and twisted
menace and suspense lurked leeringly in those crazily elusive angles of carven rock where
a second glance shewed concavity after the first shewed convexity.
Something very like fright had come over all the explorers before anything
more definite than rock and ooze and weed was seen. Each would have fled had he not
feared the scorn of the others, and it was only half-heartedly that they searchedvainly,
as it provedfor 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 mouldingthat is, one would call it climbing if the thing
was not after all horizontaland the men wondered how any door in the universe could
be so vast. Then, very softly and slowly, the acre-great panel began to give inward
at the top; and they saw that it was balanced. Donovan slid or somehow propelled himself
down or along the jamb and rejoined his fellows, and everyone watched the queer recession of
the monstrously carven portal. In this phantasy of prismatic distortion it moved anomalously
in a diagonal way, so that all the rules of matter and perspective seemed upset.
The aperture was black with a darkness almost material.

That tenebrousness
was indeed a positive quality; for it obscured such parts of the inner walls as ought to
have been revealed, and actually burst forth like smoke from its aeon-long imprisonment,
visibly darkening the sun as it slunk away into the shrunken and gibbous sky on flapping
membraneous wings. The odour arising from the newly opened depths was intolerable, and
at length the quick-eared Hawkins thought he heard a nasty, slopping sound down there.
Everyone listened, and everyone was listening still when It lumbered slobberingly into sight
and gropingly squeezed Its gelatinous green immensity through the black doorway into the
tainted outside air of that poison city of madness.
Poor Johansens 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 describedthere 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 ngstrom. 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 shouldnt have been there; an angle which
was acute, but behaved as if it were obtuse. So only Briden and Johansen reached the boat,
and pulled desperately for the Alert as the mountainous monstrosity flopped down the slimy
stones and hesitated floundering at the edge of the water.
Steam had not been suffered to go down entirely, despite the departure of
all hands for the shore; and it was the work of only a few moments of feverish rushing
up and down between wheel and engines to get the Alert under way.

Slowly, amidst the distorted
horrors of that indescribable scene, she began to churn the lethal waters; whilst on the
masonry of that charnel shore that was not of earth the titan Thing from the stars slavered
and gibbered like Polypheme cursing the fleeing ship of Odysseus. Then, bolder than the storied
Cyclops, great Cthulhu slid greasily into the water and began to pursue with vast wave-raising
strokes of cosmic potency. Briden looked back and went mad, laughing shrilly as he kept
on laughing at intervals till death found him one night in the cabin whilst Johansen
was wandering deliriously. But Johansen had not given out
yet.

Knowing that the Thing could surely overtake the Alert until steam was fully up, he resolved
on a desperate chance; and, setting the engine for full speed, ran lightning-like on deck
and reversed the wheel. There was a mighty eddying and foaming in the noisome brine,
and as the steam mounted higher and higher the brave Norwegian drove his vessel head
on against the pursuing jelly which rose above the unclean froth like the stern of a daemon
galleon. The awful squid-head with writhing feelers came nearly up to the bowsprit of
the sturdy yacht, but Johansen drove on relentlessly. There was a bursting as of an exploding bladder,
a slushy nastiness as of a cloven sunfish, a stench as of a thousand opened graves, and
a sound that the chronicler would not put on paper.

For an instant the ship was befouled
by an acrid and blinding green cloud, and then there was only a venomous seething astern;
whereGod 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 rescuethe 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 tellthey 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 minethis
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 comebut 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..