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The Call of Cthulhu

by 
H. P. Lovecraft

Written in 1926 

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 The Call of Cthulhu
Of such great powers or beings there may be conceivably a survival... a survival of a
hugely remote period when... consciousness was manifested, perhaps, in shapes and forms
long since withdrawn before the tide of advancing humanity... forms of which poetry and
legend alone have caught a flying memory and called them gods, monsters, mythical beings
of all sorts and kinds...

- Algernon Blackwood

I. The Horror In Clay

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

Theosophists have guessed at the awesome grandeur of the cosmic cycle

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

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