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Title: The call of Cthulhu

Author: H. P. Lovecraft

Release date: June 10, 2022 [eBook #68283]
Most recently updated: October 18, 2024

Language: English

Original publication: United States: Popular Fiction Publishing Company,
1928

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/68283

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE CALL OF
CTHULHU ***

The CALL of CTHULHU

By H.P. LOVECRAFT

[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Weird Tales, February 1928.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]

"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perhaps, in shapes and forms long since withdrawn before the tide of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.

"The ring of worshipers moved in endless bacchanale between the ring of
bodies and the ring of fire."[1]

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 eons which chills me when I think of it and
maddens me when I dream of it. That glimpse, like all dread glimpses of
truth, flashed out from an accidental piecing together of separated things—
in this case an old newspaper item and the notes of a dead professor. I hope
that no one else will accomplish this piecing out; certainly, if I live, I shall
never knowingly supply a link in so hideous a chain. I think that the
professor, too, intended to keep silent regarding the part he knew, and that
he would have destroyed his notes had not sudden death seized him.
My knowledge of the thing began in the winter of 1926-27 with the death of
my 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 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 granduncle'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 Archeological Society, but there was one box which I found
exceedingly puzzling, and which I felt much averse from showing to other
eyes. It had been locked, and I did not find the key till it occurred to me to
examine the personal ring which the professor carried always in his pocket.
Then, indeed, I succeeded in opening it, but when I did so seemed only to
be confronted by a greater and more closely locked barrier. For what could
be the meaning of the queer clay bas-relief and the disjointed jottings,
ramblings, and cuttings which I found? Had my uncle, in his latter years,
become credulous of the most superficial impostures? I resolved to search
out the eccentric sculptor responsible for this apparent disturbance of an old
man's peace of mind.
The bas-relief was a rough rectangle less than an inch thick and about five
by six inches in area; obviously of modern origin. Its designs, however,
were far from modern in atmosphere and suggestion; for, although the
vagaries of cubism and futurism are many and wild, they do not often
reproduce that cryptic regularity which lurks in prehistoric writing. And
writing of some kind the bulk of these designs seemed certainly to be;
though my memory, despite much familiarity with the papers and
collections of my uncle, failed in any way to identify this particular species,
or even hint at its remotest affiliations.
Above these apparent hieroglyphics was a figure of evidently pictorial
intent, though its impressionistic execution forbade a very clear idea of its
nature. It seemed to be a sort of monster, or symbol representing a monster,
of a form which only a diseased fancy could conceive. If I say that my
somewhat extravagant imagination yielded simultaneous pictures of an
octopus, a dragon, and a human caricature, I shall not be unfaithful to the
spirit of the thing. A pulpy, tentacled head surmounted a grotesque and
scaly body with rudimentary wings; but it was the general outline of the

whole which made it most shockingly frightful. Behind the figure was a
vague suggestion of a Cyclopean architectural background.
The writing accompanying this oddity was, aside from a stack of press
cuttings, in Professor Angell's most recent hand; and made no 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 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-Eliott'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
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 recognized him as the youngest
son of an excellent family slightly known to him, who had latterly been
studying sculpture at the Rhode Island School of Design and living alone at
the Fleur-de-Lys Building near that institution. Wilcox was a precocious
youth of known genius but great eccentricity, and had from childhood
excited attention through the strange stories and odd dreams he was in the
habit of relating. He called himself "psychically hypersensitive", but the
staid folk of the ancient commercial city dismissed him as merely "queer".
Never mingling much with his kind, he had dropped gradually from social
visibility, and was now known only to a small group of esthetes from other

towns. Even the Providence Art Club, anxious to preserve its conservatism,
had found him quite hopeless.
On the occasion of the visit, ran the professor's manuscript, the sculptor
abruptly asked for the benefit of his host's archeological knowledge in
identifying the hieroglyphics on the bas-relief. He spoke in a dreamy, stilted
manner which suggested pose and alienated sympathy; and my uncle
showed some sharpness in replying, for the conspicuous freshness of the
tablet implied kinship with anything but 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 almost frantic intensity the bas-relief on
which the youth had found himself working, chilled and clad only in his
nightclothes, when waking had stolen bewilderingly over him. My uncle
blamed his old age, Wilcox afterward said, for his slowness in recognizing
both hieroglyphics and pictorial design. Many of his questions seemed
highly out of place to his visitor, especially those which tried to connect the
latter with strange cults or societies; and Wilcox could not understand the
repeated promises of silence which he was offered in exchange for an
admission of membership in some widespread mystical or paganly religious

body. When Professor Angell became convinced that the sculptor was
indeed ignorant of any cult or system of cryptic lore, he besieged his visitor
with demands for future reports of dreams. This bore regular fruit, for after
the first interview the manuscript records daily calls of the young man,
during which he related startling fragments of nocturnal imagery whose
burden was always some terrible Cyclopean vista of dark and dripping
stone, with a subterrene voice or intelligence shouting monotonously in
enigmatical sense-impacts uninscribable save as gibberish. The two sounds
most frequently repeated are those rendered by the letters "Cthulhu" and
"R'lyeh".
On March 23rd, 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 2nd 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 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 thought—so much, in fact, that
only the ingrained skepticism then forming my philosophy can account for
my continued distrust of the artist. The notes in question were those
descriptive of the dreams of various persons covering the same period as
that in which young Wilcox had had his strange visitations. My uncle, it
seems, had quickly instituted a prodigiously far-flung body of inquiries
amongst nearly all the friends whom he could question without
impertinence, asking for nightly reports of their dreams, and the dates of
any notable visions for some time past. The reception of his request seems
to have been varied; but he must, at the very least, have received more
responses than any ordinary man could have handled without a secretary.
This original correspondence was not preserved, but his notes formed a
thorough and really significant digest. Average people in society and
business—New England's traditional "salt of the earth"—gave an almost
completely negative result, though scattered cases of uneasy but formless
nocturnal impressions appear here and there, always between March 23rd
and April 2nd—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 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 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 objects of the professor's
questioning felt as puzzled as did this fraction. It is well that no explanation
shall ever reach them.
The press cuttings, as I have intimated, touched on cases of panic, mania,
and eccentricity during the given period. Professor Angell must have
employed a cutting bureau, for the number of extracts was tremendous, and
the sources scattered throughout the globe. Here was a nocturnal suicide in
London, where a lone sleeper had leaped from a window after a shocking
cry. Here likewise a rambling letter to the editor of a paper in South
America, where a fanatic deduces a dire future from visions he has seen. A
dispatch from California describes a theosophist colony as donning white
robes en masse for some "glorious fulfilment" which never arrives, whilst
items from India speak guardedly of serious native unrest toward the end of
March. Voodoo orgies multiply in Haiti, and African outposts report
ominous mutterings. American officers in the Philippines find certain tribes
bothersome about this time, and New York policemen are mobbed by
hysterical Levantines on the night of March 22-23. The west of Ireland, too,
is full of wild rumor 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.

2. The Tale of Inspector Legrasse.
The older matters which had made the sculptor's dream and bas-relief so
significant to my uncle formed the subject of the second half of his long
manuscript. Once before, it appears, Professor Angell had seen the hellish
outlines of the nameless monstrosity, puzzled over the unknown
hieroglyphics, and heard the ominous syllables which can be rendered only
as "Cthulhu"; and all this in so stirring and horrible a connection that it is
small wonder he pursued young Wilcox with queries and demands for data.
This earlier experience had come in 1908, seventeen years before, when the
American Archeological 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
traveled 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
archeology. 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 realize that they had stumbled on a dark cult totally unknown to
them, and infinitely more diabolic than even the blackest of the African
voodoo circles. Of its origin, apart from the erratic and unbelievable tales
extorted from the captured members, absolutely nothing was to be
discovered; hence the anxiety of the police for any antiquarian lore which

might help them to place the frightful symbol, and through it track down the
cult to its fountain-head.
Inspector Legrasse was scarcely prepared for the sensation which his
offering created. One sight of the thing had been enough to throw the
assembled men of science into a state of tense excitement, and they lost no
time in crowding around him to gaze at the diminutive figure whose utter
strangeness and air of genuinely abysmal antiquity hinted so potently at
unopened and archaic vistas. No recognized school of sculpture had
animated this terrible object, yet centuries and even thousands of years
seemed recorded in its dim and greenish surface of unplaceable stone.
The figure, which was finally passed slowly from man to man for close and
careful study, was between seven and eight inches in height, and of
exquisitely artistic workmanship. It represented a monster of vaguely
anthropoid outline, but with an octopuslike 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 center, 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 forepaws which clasped the croucher's elevated knees. The
aspect of the whole was abnormally lifelike, and the more subtly fearful
because its source was so totally unknown. Its vast, awesome, and
incalculable age was unmistakable; yet not one link did it show with any
known type of art belonging to civilization's youth—or indeed to any other
time.
Totally separate and apart, its very material was a mystery; for the soapy,
greenish-black stone with its golden or iridescent flecks and striations
resembled nothing familiar to geology or mineralogy. The characters along
the base were equally baffling; and no member present, despite a
representation of half the world's expert learning in this field, could form
the least notion of even their remotest linguistic kinship. They, like the
subject and material, belonged to something horribly remote and distinct

from mankind as we know it; something frightfully suggestive of old and
unhallowed cycles of life in which our world and our conceptions have no
part.
And yet, as the members severally shook their heads and confessed defeat
at the inspector's problem, there was one man in that gathering who
suspected a touch of bizarre familiarity in the monstrous shape and writing,
and who presently told with some diffidence of the odd trifle he knew. This
person was the late William Channing Webb, professor of anthropology in
Princeton University, and an explorer of no slight note.
Professor Webb had been engaged, forty-eight years before, in a tour of
Greenland and Iceland in search of some Runic inscriptions which he failed
to unearth; and whilst high up on the West Greenland coast had encountered
a singular tribe or cult of degenerate Eskimos whose religion, a curious
form of devil-worship, chilled him with its deliberate bloodthirstiness and
repulsiveness. It was a faith of which other Eskimos knew little, and which
they mentioned only with shudders, saying that it had come down from
horribly ancient eons before ever the world was made. Besides nameless
rites and human sacrifices there were certain queer hereditary rituals
addressed to a supreme elder devil or tornasuk; and of this Professor Webb
had taken a careful phonetic copy from an aged angekok or wizard-priest,
expressing the sounds in Roman letters as best he knew how. But just now
of prime significance was the fetish which this cult had cherished, and
around which they danced when the aurora leaped high over the ice cliffs. It
was, the professor stated, a very crude bas-relief of stone, comprising a
hideous picture and some cryptic writing. And as far as he could tell, it was
a rough parallel in all essential features of the bestial thing now lying before
the meeting.
These data, received with suspense and astonishment by the assembled
members, proved doubly exciting to Inspector Legrasse; and he began at
once to ply his informant with questions. Having noted and copied an oral
ritual among the swamp cult-worshipers his men had arrested, he besought
the professor to remember as best he might the syllables taken down
amongst the diabolist Eskimos. There then followed an exhaustive
comparison of details, and a moment of really awed silence when both
detective and scientist agreed on the virtual identity of the phrase common
to two hellish rituals so many worlds of distance apart. What, in substance,

both the Eskimo wizards and the Louisiana swamp-priests had chanted to
their kindred idols was something very like this—the word-divisions being
guessed at from traditional breaks in the phrase as chanted aloud:
"Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn."
Legrasse had one point in advance of Professor Webb, for several among
his mongrel prisoners had repeated to him what older celebrants had told
them the words meant. This text, as given, ran something like this:
"In his house at R'lyeh dead Cthulhu waits dreaming."

And now, in response to a general urgent demand, Inspector Legrasse
related as fully as possible his experience with the swamp worshipers;
telling a story to which I could see my uncle attached profound
significance. It savored 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 New Orleans police a frantic
summons from the swamp and lagoon country to the south. The squatters
there, mostly primitive but good-natured descendants of Lafitte's men, were
in the grip of stark terror from an unknown thing which had stolen upon
them in the night. It was voodoo, apparently, but voodoo of a more terrible
sort than they had ever known; and some of their women and children had
disappeared since the malevolent tom-tom had begun its incessant beating
far within the black haunted woods where no dweller ventured. There were
insane shouts and harrowing screams, soul-chilling chants and dancing
devil-flames; and, the frightened messenger added, the people could stand it
no more.
So a body of twenty police, filling two carriages and an automobile, had set
out in the late afternoon with the shivering squatter as a guide. At the end of
the passable road they alighted, and for miles splashed on in silence through
the terrible cypress woods where day never came. Ugly roots and malignant
hanging nooses of Spanish moss beset them, and now and then a pile of
dank stones or fragments of a rotting wall intensified by its hint of morbid

habitation a depression which every malformed tree and every fungous islet
combined to create. At length the squatter settlement, a miserable huddle of
huts, hove in sight; and hysterical dwellers ran out to cluster around the
group of bobbing lanterns. The muffled beat of tom-toms was now faintly
audible far, far ahead; and a curdling shriek came at infrequent intervals
when the wind shifted. A reddish glare, too, seemed to filter through the
pale undergrowth beyond endless avenues of forest night. Reluctant even to
be left alone again, each one of the cowed squatters refused point-blank to
advance another inch 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 plowed 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 license here whipped
themselves to demoniac heights by howls and squawking ecstasies that tore
and reverberated through those nighted woods like pestilential tempests
from the gulfs of hell. Now and then the less organized ululations would
cease, and from what seemed a well-drilled chorus of hoarse voices would
rise in singsong chant that hideous phrase or ritual:
"Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn."

Then the men, having reached a spot where the trees were thinner, came
suddenly in sight of the spectacle itself. Four of them reeled, one fainted,
and two were shaken into a frantic cry which the mad cacophony of the
orgy fortunately deadened. Legrasse dashed swamp water on the face of the
fainting man, and all stood trembling and nearly hypnotized with horror.
In a natural glade of the swamp stood a grassy island of perhaps an acre's
extent, clear of trees and tolerably dry. On this now leaped and twisted a
more indescribable horde of human abnormality than any but a Sime or an
Angarola could paint. Void of clothing, this hybrid spawn were braying,
bellowing and writhing about a monstrous ring-shaped bonfire; in the center
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
center hung, head downward, the oddly marred bodies of the helpless
squatters who had disappeared. It was inside this circle that the ring of
worshipers jumped and roared, the general direction of the mass motion
being from left to right in endless bacchanale between the ring of bodies
and the ring of fire.
It may have been only imagination and it may have been only echoes which
induced one of the men, an excitable Spaniard, to fancy he heard antiphonal
responses to the ritual from some far and unillumined spot deeper within
the wood of ancient legendry and horror. This man, Joseph D. Galvez, I
later met and questioned; and he proved distractingly imaginative. He
indeed went so far as to hint of the faint beating of great wings, and of a
glimpse of shining eyes and a mountainous white bulk beyond the remotest
trees—but I suppose he had been hearing too much native superstition.
Actually, the horrified pause of the men was of comparatively brief
duration. Duty came first; and although there must have been nearly a
hundred mongrel celebrants in the throng, the police relied on their firearms
and plunged determinedly into the nauseous rout. For five minutes the
resultant din and chaos were beyond description. Wild blows were struck,
shots were fired, and escapes were made; but in the end Legrasse was able
to count some forty-seven sullen prisoners, whom he forced to dress in
haste and fall into line between two rows of policemen. Five of the
worshipers 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 coloring 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 surprizing consistency to the central idea of
their loathsome faith.
They worshiped, 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 man, who formed a
cult which had never died. This was that cult, and the prisoners said it had
always existed and always would exist, hidden in distant wastes and dark
places all over the world until the time when the great priest Cthulhu, from
his dark house in the mighty city of R'lyeh under the waters, should rise and
bring the earth again beneath his sway. Some day he would call, when the
stars were ready, and the secret cult would always be waiting to liberate
him.
Meanwhile no more must be told. There was a secret which even torture
could not extract. Mankind was not absolutely alone among the conscious
things of earth, for shapes came out of the dark to visit the faithful few. But
these were not the Great Old Ones. No man had ever seen the Old Ones.
The carven idol was great Cthulhu, but none might say whether or not the
others were precisely like him. No one could read the old writing now, but
things were told by word of mouth. The chanted ritual was not the secret—
that was never spoken aloud, only whispered. The chant meant only this:
"In his house at R'lyeh dead Cthulhu waits dreaming."

Only two of the prisoners were found sane enough to be hanged, and the
rest were committed to various institutions. All denied a part in the ritual
murders, and averred that the killing had been done by Black-winged Ones
which had come to them from their immemorial meeting-place in the
haunted wood. But of those mysterious allies no coherent account could
ever be gained. What the police did extract came mainly from an
immensely aged mestizo named Castro, who claimed to have sailed to
strange ports and talked with undying leaders of the cult in the mountains of
China.
Old Castro remembered bits of hideous legend that paled the speculations
of theosophists and made man and the world seem recent and transient
indeed. There had been eons 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 man came,
but there were arts which could revive Them when the stars had come
round again to the right positions in the cycle of eternity. They had, indeed,
come themselves from the stars, and brought Their images with Them.
These Great Old Ones, Castro continued, were not composed altogether of
flesh and blood. They had shape—for did not this star-fashioned image
prove it?—but that shape was not made of matter. When the stars were
right, They could plunge from world to world through the sky; but when the
stars were wrong, They could not live. But although They no longer lived,
They would never really die. They all lay in stone houses in Their great city
of R'lyeh, preserved by the spells of mighty Cthulhu for a glorious
resurrection when the stars and the earth might once more be ready for
Them. But at that time some force from outside must serve to liberate Their
bodies. The spells that preserved Them intact likewise prevented Them
from making an initial move, and They could only lie awake in the dark and
think whilst uncounted millions of years rolled by. They knew all that was
occurring in the universe, for Their mode of speech was transmitted
thought. Even now They talked in Their tombs. When, after infinities of
chaos, the first men came, the Great Old Ones spoke to the sensitive among
them by molding 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 showed them; idols brought in dim eras from dark
stars. That cult would never die till the stars came right again, and the secret
priests would take great Cthulhu from His tomb to revive His subjects and
resume His rule of earth. The time would be easy to know, for then mankind
would have become as the Great Old Ones; free and wild and beyond good
and evil, with laws and morals thrown aside and all men shouting and
killing and reveling in joy. Then the liberated Old Ones would teach them
new ways to shout and kill and revel and enjoy themselves, and all the earth
would flame with a holocaust of ecstasy and freedom. Meanwhile the cult,
by appropriate rites, must keep alive the memory of those ancient ways and
shadow forth the prophecy of their return.
In the elder time chosen men had talked with the entombed Old Ones in
dreams, but then something had happened. The great stone city R'lyeh, with
its monoliths and sepulchers, 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, moldy and shadowy, and full
of dim rumors 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 center 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 eons even death may die."

Legrasse, deeply impressed and not a little bewildered, had inquired in vain
concerning the historic affiliations of the cult. Castro, apparently, had told
the truth when he said that it was wholly secret. The authorities at Tulane

University could shed no light upon either cult or image, and now the
detective had come to the highest authorities in the country and met with no
more than the Greenland tale of Professor Webb.

The feverish interest aroused at the meeting by Legrasse's tale, corroborated
as it was by the statuette, is echoed in the subsequent correspondence of
those who attended, although scant mention occurs in the formal
publication of the society. Caution is the first care of those accustomed to
face occasional charlatanry and imposture. Legrasse for some time lent the
image to Professor Webb, but at the latter's death it was returned to him and
remains in his possession, where I viewed it not long ago. It is truly a
terrible thing, and unmistakably akin to the dream-sculpture of young
Wilcox.
That my uncle was excited by the tale of the sculptor I did not wonder, for
what thoughts must arise upon hearing, after a knowledge of what Legrasse
had learned of the cult, of a sensitive young man who had dreamed not only
the figure and exact hieroglyphics of the swamp-found image and the
Greenland devil tablet, but had come in his dreams upon at least three of the
precise words of the formula uttered alike by Eskimo diabolists and
mongrel Louisianans? Professor Angell's instant start on an investigation of
the utmost thoroughness was eminently natural; though privately I
suspected young Wilcox of having heard of the cult in some indirect way,
and of having invented a series of dreams to heighten and continue the
mystery at my uncle's expense. The dream-narratives and cuttings collected
by the professor were, of course, strong corroboration; but the rationalism
of my mind and the extravagance of the whole subject led me to adopt what
I thought the most sensible conclusions. So, after thoroughly studying the
manuscript again and correlating the theosophical and anthropological notes
with the cult narrative of Legrasse, I made a trip to Providence to see the
sculptor and give him the rebuke I thought proper for so boldly imposing
upon a learned and aged man.
Wilcox still lived alone in the Fleur-de-Lys Building in Thomas Street, a
hideous Victorian imitation of Seventeenth Century Breton architecture
which flaunts its stuccoed front amidst the lovely Colonial houses on the

ancient hill, and under the very shadow of the finest Georgian steeple in
America. I found him at work in his rooms, and at once conceded from the
specimens scattered about that his genius is indeed profound and authentic.
He will, I believe, be heard from sometime as one of the great decadents;
for he has crystallized in clay and will one day mirror in marble those
nightmares and fantasies which Arthur Machen evokes in prose, and Clark
Ashton Smith makes visible in verse and in painting.
Dark, frail, and somewhat unkempt in aspect, he turned languidly at my
knock and asked me my business without rising. When I told him who I
was, he displayed some interest; for my uncle had excited his curiosity in
probing his strange dreams, yet had never explained the reason for the
study. I did not enlarge his knowledge in this regard, but sought with some
subtlety to draw him out.
In a short time I became convinced of his absolute sincerity, for he spoke of
the dreams in a manner none could mistake. They and their subconscious
residuum had influenced his art profoundly, and he showed me a morbid
statue whose contours almost made me shake with the potency of its black
suggestion. He could not recall having seen the original of this thing except
in his own dream bas-relief, but the outlines had formed themselves
insensibly under his hands. It was, no doubt, the giant shape he had raved of
in delirium. That he really knew nothing of the hidden cult, save from what
my uncle's relentless catechism had let fall, he soon made clear; and again I
strove to think of some way in which he could possibly have received the
weird impressions.
He talked of his dreams in a strangely poetic fashion; making me see with
terrible vividness the damp Cyclopean city of slimy green stone—whose
geometry, he oddly said, was all wrong—and hear with frightened
expectancy the ceaseless, half-mental calling from underground: "Cthulhu
fhtagn," "Cthulhu fhtagn."
These words had formed part of that dread ritual which told of dead
Cthulhu's dream-vigil in his stone vault at R'lyeh, and I felt deeply moved
despite my rational beliefs. Wilcox, I was sure, had heard of the cult in
some casual way, and had soon forgotten it amidst the mass of his equally
weird reading and imagining. Later, by virtue of its sheer impressiveness, it
had found subconscious expression in dreams, in the bas-relief, and in the

terrible statue I now beheld; so that his imposture upon my uncle had been a
very innocent one. The youth was of a type, at once slightly affected and
slightly ill-mannered, which I could never like; but I was willing enough
now to admit both his genius and his honesty. I took leave of him amicably,
and wish him all the success his talent promises.
The matter of the cult still remained to fascinate me, and at times I had
visions of personal fame from researches into its origin and connections. I
visited New Orleans, talked with Legrasse and others of that old-time
raiding-party, saw the frightful image, and even questioned such of the
mongrel prisoners as still survived. Old Castro, unfortunately, had been
dead for some years. What I now heard so graphically at first hand, though
it was really no more than a detailed confirmation of what my uncle had
written, excited me afresh; for I felt sure that I was on the track of a very
real, very secret, and very ancient religion whose discovery would make me
an anthropologist of note. My attitude was still one of absolute materialism,
as I wish it still were, and I discounted with almost inexplicable perversity
the coincidence of the dream notes and odd cuttings collected by Professor
Angell.
One thing which I began to suspect, and which I now fear I know, is that my
uncle's death was far from natural. He fell on a narrow hill street leading up
from an ancient waterfront swarming with foreign mongrels, after a careless
push from a negro sailor. I did not forget the mixed blood and marine
pursuits of the cult-members in Louisiana, and would not be surprized to
learn of secret methods and poison needles as ruthless and as anciently
known as the cryptic rites and beliefs. Legrasse and his men, it is true, have
been let alone; but in Norway a certain seaman who saw things is dead.
Might not the deeper inquiries of my uncle after encountering the sculptor's
data have come to sinister ears? I think Professor Angell died because he
knew too much, or because he was likely to learn too much. Whether I shall
go as he did remains to be seen, for I have learned much now.

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,
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 of 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 2d 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 22d, in S. Latitude 49° 51´, W.
Longitude 128° 34´, encountered the Alert, manned by a queer and evil-
looking crew of Kanakas and half-castes. Being ordered peremptorily to
turn back, Capt. Collins refused; whereupon the strange crew began to fire
savagely and without warning upon the schooner with a peculiarly heavy
battery of brass cannon forming part of the yacht's equipment.
The Emma's men showed fight, says the survivor, and though the schooner
began to sink from shots beneath the waterline they managed to heave
alongside their enemy and board her, grappling with the savage crew on the
yacht's deck, and being forced to kill them all, the number being slightly
superior, because of their particularly abhorrent and desperate though rather
clumsy mode of fighting.
Three of the Emma's men, including Capt. Collins and First Mate Green,
were killed; and the remaining eight under Second Mate Johansen
proceeded to navigate the captured yacht, going ahead in their original
direction to see if any reason for their ordering back had existed.

The next day, it appears, they raised and landed on a small island, although
none is known to exist in that part of the ocean; and six of the men
somehow died ashore, though Johansen is queerly reticent about this part of
his story and speaks only of their falling into a rock chasm.
Later, it seems, he and one companion boarded the yacht and tried to
manage her, but were beaten about by the storm of April 2nd.
From that time till his rescue on the 12th, the man remembers little, and he
does not even recall when William Briden, his companion, died. Briden's
death reveals no apparent cause, and was probably due to excitement or
exposure.
Cable advices from Dunedin report that the Alert was well known there as
an island trader, and bore an evil reputation along the waterfront. It was
owned by a curious group of half-castes whose frequent meetings and night
trips to the woods attracted no little curiosity; and it had set sail in great
haste just after the storm and earth tremors of March 1st.
Our Auckland correspondent gives the Emma and her crew an excellent
reputation, and Johansen is described as a sober and worthy man.
The admiralty will institute an inquiry on the whole matter beginning
tomorrow, at which every effort will be made to induce Johansen to speak
more freely than he has done hitherto.

This was all, together with the picture of the hellish image; but what a train
of ideas it started in my mind! Here were new treasuries of data on the
Cthulhu Cult, and evidence that it had strange interests at sea as well as on
land. What motive prompted the hybrid crew to order back the Emma as
they sailed about with their hideous idol? What was the unknown island on
which six of the Emma's crew had died, and about which the mate Johansen
was so secretive? What had the vice-admiralty's investigation brought out,
and what was known of the noxious cult in Dunedin? And most marvelous
of all, what deep and more than natural linkage of dates was this which
gave a malign and now undeniable significance to the various turns of
events so carefully noted by my uncle?

March 1st—our 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 molded in his sleep the
form of the dreaded Cthulhu. March 23rd the crew of the Emma landed on
an unknown island and left six men dead; and on that date the dreams of
sensitive men assumed a heightened vividness and darkened with dread of a
giant monster's malign pursuit, whilst an architect had gone mad and a
sculptor had lapsed suddenly into delirium! And what of this storm of April
2nd—the date on which all dreams of the dank city ceased, and Wilcox
emerged unharmed from the bondage of strange fever? What of all this—
and of those hints of old Castro about the sunken, star-born Old Ones and
their coming reign; their faithful cult and their mastery of dreams? Was I
tottering on the brink of cosmic horrors beyond man's power to bear? If so,
they must be horrors of the mind alone, for in some way the second of April
had put a stop to whatever monstrous menace had begun its siege of
mankind's soul.

That evening, after a day of hurried cabling and arranging, I bade my host
adieu and took a train for San Francisco. In less than a month I was in
Dunedin; where, however, I found that little was known of the strange cult-
members who had lingered in the old sea taverns. Waterfront scum was far
too common for special mention; though there was vague talk about one
inland trip these mongrels had made, during which faint drumming and red
flame were noted on the distant hills.
In Auckland I learned that Johansen had returned with yellow hair turned
white after a perfunctory and inconclusive questioning at Sydney, and had
thereafter sold his cottage in West Street and sailed with his wife to his old
home in Oslo. Of his stirring experience he would tell his friends no more
than he had told the admiralty officials, and all they could do was to give
me his Oslo address.
After that I went to Sydney and talked profitlessly with seamen and
members of the vice-admiralty court. I saw the Alert, now sold and in

commercial use, at Circular Quay in Sydney Cove, but gained nothing from
its non-committal bulk. The crouching image with its cuttlefish head,
dragon body, scaly wings, and hieroglyphed pedestal, was preserved in the
Museum at Hyde Park; and I studied it long and well, finding it a thing of
balefully exquisite workmanship, and with the same utter mystery, terrible
antiquity, and unearthly strangeness of material which I had noted in
Legrasse's smaller specimen. Geologists, the curator told me, had found it a
monstrous puzzle; for they vowed that the world held no rock like it. Then I
thought with a shudder of what old Castro had told Legrasse about the
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 re-embarked
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 "Christiania." I made the brief trip by
taxicab, and knocked with palpitant heart at the door of a neat and ancient
building with plastered front. A sad-faced woman in black answered my
summons, and I was stung with disappointment when she told me in halting
English that Gustaf Johansen was no more.
He had not long survived his return, said his wife, for the doings at sea in
1925 had broken him. He had told her no more than he had told the public,
but had left a long manuscript—of "technical matters" as he said—written
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 connection with her husband's "technical matters" was sufficient to

entitle me to his manuscript, I bore the document away and began to read it
on the London boat.
It was a simple, rambling thing—a naive sailor's effort at a post-facto diary
—and strove to recall day by day that last awful voyage. I can not attempt
to transcribe it verbatim in all its cloudiness and redundance, but I will tell
its gist enough to show why the sound of the water against the vessel's sides
became so unendurable to me that I stopped my ears with cotton.
Johansen, thank God, did not know quite all, even though he saw the city
and the Thing, but I shall never sleep calmly again when I think of the
horrors that lurk ceaselessly behind life in time and in space, and of those
unhallowed blasphemies from elder stars which dream beneath the sea,
known and favored 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.

Johansen's voyage had begun just as he told it to the vice-admiralty. The
Emma, in ballast, had cleared Auckland on February 20th, and had felt the
full force of that earthquake-born tempest which must have heaved up from
the sea-bottom the horrors that filled men's dreams. Once more under
control, the ship was making good progress when held up by the Alert on
March 22nd, and I could feel the mate's regret as he wrote of her
bombardment and sinking. Of the swarthy cult-fiends on the Alert he speaks
with significant horror. There was some peculiarly abominable quality
about them which made their destruction seem almost a duty, and Johansen
shows ingenuous wonder at the charge of ruthlessness brought against his
party during the proceedings of the court of inquiry. Then, driven ahead by
curiosity in their captured yacht under Johansen's command, the men sight a
great stone pillar sticking out of the sea, and in S. Latitude 47° 9', W.
Longitude 126° 43' come upon a coastline of mingled mud, ooze, and
weedy Cyclopean masonry which can be nothing less than the tangible
substance of earth's supreme terror—the nightmare corpse-city of R'lyeh,
that was built in measureless eons 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 demons, and must
have guessed without guidance that it was nothing of this or of any sane
planet. Awe at the unbelievable size of the greenish stone blocks, at the
dizzying height of the great carven monolith, and at the stupefying identity
of the colossal statues and bas-reliefs with the queer image found in the
shrine on the Alert, is poignantly visible in every line of the mate's
frightened description.
Without knowing what futurism is like, Johansen achieved something very
close to it when he spoke of the city; for instead of describing any definite
structure or building, he dwells only on the 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 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 polarizing miasma welling out from this sea-
soaked perversion, and twisted menace and suspense lurked leeringly in
those crazily elusive angles of carven rock where a second glance showed
concavity after the first showed convexity.
Something very like fright had come over all the explorers before anything
more definite than rock and ooze and weed was seen. Each would have fled
had he not feared the scorn of the others, and it was only half-heartedly that

they searched—vainly, as it proved—for some portable souvenir to bear
away.
It was Rodriguez the Portuguese who climbed up the foot of the monolith
and shouted of what he had found. The rest followed him, and looked
curiously at the immense carved door with the now familiar squid-dragon
bas-relief. It was, Johansen said, like a great barn-door; and they all felt that
it was a door because of the ornate lintel, threshold, and jambs around it,
though they could not decide whether it lay flat like a trap-door or slantwise
like an outside cellar-door. As Wilcox would have said, the geometry of the
place was all wrong. One could not be sure that the sea and the ground were
horizontal, hence the relative position of everything else seemed
fantasmally 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 molding—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 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 fantasy 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
eon-long imprisonment, visibly darkening the sun as it slunk away into the
shrunken and gibbous sky on flapping membranous wings. The odor 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 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 can not 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 wheels 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 demon 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; 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 comet's 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 can not 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.

[1] Found among the papers of the late Francis Wayland Thurston, of Boston.

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