Title:      Collected Stories
Author:     H. P. Lovecraft
eBook No.:  0600031.txt
Edition:    1
Language:   English
Character set encoding:     Latin-1(ISO-8859-1)--8 bit
Date first posted:          January 2006
Date most recently updated: June 2006

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Title:      Collected Stories
Author:     H. P. Lovecraft




CONTENTS:

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


* * * * *




* THE NAMELESS CITY

When I drew nigh the nameless city I knew it was accursed. I was
traveling in a parched and terrible valley under the moon, and afar I
saw it protruding uncannily above the sands as parts of a corpse may
protrude from an ill-made grave. Fear spoke from the age-worn stones of
this hoary survivor of the deluge, this great-grandfather of the eldest
pyramid; and a viewless aura repelled me and bade me retreat from
antique and sinister secrets that no man should see, and no man else
had dared to see..

Remote in the desert of Araby lies the nameless city, crumbling and
inarticulate, its low walls nearly hidden by the sands of uncounted
ages. It must have been thus before the first stones of Memphis were
laid, and while the bricks of Babylon were yet unbaked. There is no
legend so old as to give it a name, or to recall that it was ever
alive; but it is told of in whispers around campfires and muttered
about by grandams in the tents of sheiks so that all the tribes shun it
without wholly knowing why. It was of this place that Abdul Alhazred
the mad poet dreamed of the night before he sang his unexplained
couplet:

That is not dead which can eternal lie,
And with strange aeons death may die.

I should have known that the Arabs had good reason for shunning the
nameless city, the city told of in strange tales but seen by no living
man, yet I defied them and went into the untrodden waste with my camel.
I alone have seen it, and that is why no other face bears such hideous
lines of fear as mine; why no other man shivers so horribly when the
night wind rattles the windows. When I came upon it in the ghastly
stillness of unending sleep it looked at me, chilly from the rays of a
cold moon amidst the desert's heat. And as I returned its look I forgot
my triumph at finding it, and stopped still with my camel to wait for
the dawn.

For hours I waited, till the east grew grey and the stars faded, and
the grey turned to roseate light edged with gold. I heard a moaning and
saw a storm of sand stirring among the antique stones though the sky
was clear and the vast reaches of desert still. Then suddenly above the
desert's far rim came the blazing edge of the sun, seen through the
tiny sandstorm which was passing away, and in my fevered state I
fancied that from some remote depth there came a crash of musical metal
to hail the fiery disc as Memnon hails it from the banks of the Nile.
My ears rang and my imagination seethed as I led my camel slowly across
the sand to that unvocal place; that place which I alone of living men
had seen.

In and out amongst the shapeless foundations of houses and places I
wandered, finding never a carving or inscription to tell of these men,
if men they were, who built this city and dwelt therein so long ago.
The antiquity of the spot was unwholesome, and I longed to encounter
some sign or device to prove that the city was indeed fashioned by
mankind. There were certain proportions and dimensions in the ruins
which I did not like. I had with me many tools, and dug much within the
walls of the obliterated edifices; but progress was slow, and nothing
significant was revealed. When night and the moon returned I felt a
chill wind which brought new fear, so that I did not dare to remain in
the city. And as I went outside the antique walls to sleep, a small
sighing sandstorm gathered behind me, blowing over the grey stones
though the moon was bright and most of the desert still.

I awakened just at dawn from a pageant of horrible dreams, my ears
ringing as from some metallic peal. I saw the sun peering redly through
the last gusts of a little sandstorm that hovered over the nameless
city, and marked the quietness of the rest of the landscape. Once more
I ventured within those brooding ruins that swelled beneath the sand
like an ogre under a coverlet, and again dug vainly for relics of the
forgotten race. At noon I rested, and in the afternoon I spent much
time tracing the walls and bygone streets, and the outlines of the
nearly vanished buildings. I saw that the city had been mighty indeed,
and wondered at the sources of its greatness. To myself I pictured all
the spendours of an age so distant that Chaldaea could not recall it,
and thought of Sarnath the Doomed, that stood in the land of Mnar when
mankind was young, and of Ib, that was carven of grey stone before
mankind existed.

All at once I came upon a place where the bed rock rose stark
through the sand and formed a low cliff; and here I saw with joy what
seemed to promise further traces of the antediluvian people. Hewn
rudely on the face of the cliff were the unmistakable facades of
several small, squat rock houses or temples; whose interiors might
preserve many secrets of ages too remote for calculation, though
sandstorms had long effaced any carvings which may have been outside.

Very low and sand-choked were all the dark apertures near me, but I
cleared on with my spade and crawled through it, carrying a torch to
reveal whatever mysteries it might hold. When I was inside I saw that
the cavern was indeed a temple, and beheld plain signs of the race that
had lived and worshipped before the desert was a desert. Primitive
altars, pillars, and niches, all curiously low, were not absent; and
though I saw no sculptures or frescoes, there were many singular stones
clearly shaped into symbols by artificial means. The lowness of the
chiselled chamber was very strange, for I could hardly kneel upright;
but the area was so great that my torch showed only part of it at a
time. I shuddered oddly in some of the far corners; for certain altars
and stones suggested forgotten rites of terrible, revolting and
inexplicable nature and made me wonder what manner of men could have
made and frequented such a temple. When I had seen all that the place
contained, I crawled out again, avid to find what the temples might
yield.

Night had now approached, yet the tangible things I had seen made
curiosity stronger than fear, so that I did not flee from the long
mooncast shadows that had daunted me when first I saw the nameless
city. In the twilight I cleared another aperture and with a new torch
crawled into it, finding more vague stones and symbols, though nothing
more definite than the other temple had contained the room was just as
low, but much less broad, ending in a very narrow passage crowded with
obscure and cryptical shrines. About these shrines I was prying when
the noise of a wind and my camel outside broke through the stillness
and drew me forth to see what could have frightened the beast.

The moon was gleaming vividly over the primitive ruins, lighting a
dense cloud of sand that seemed blown by a strong but decreasing wind
from some point along the cliff ahead of me. I knew it was this chilly,
sandy wind which had disturbed the camel and was about to lead him to a
place of better shelter when I chanced to glance up and saw that there
was no wind atop the cliff. This astonished me and made me fearful
again, but I immediately recalled the sudden local winds that I had
seen and heard before at sunrise and sunset, and judged it was a normal
thing. I decided it came from some rock fissure leading to a cave, and
watched the troubled sand to trace it to its source; soon perceiving
that it came from the black orifice of a temple a long distance south
of me, almost out of sight. Against the choking sand-cloud I plodded
toward this temple, which as I neared it loomed larger than the rest,
and shewed a doorway far less clogged with caked sand. I would have
entered had not the terrific force of the icy wind almost quenched my
torch. It poured madly out of the dark door, sighing uncannily as it
ruffled the sand and spread among the weird ruins. Soon it grew fainter
and the sand grew more and more still, till finally all was at rest
again; but a presence seemed stalking among the spectral stones of the
city, and when I glanced at the moon it seemed to quiver as though
mirrored in unquiet waters. I was more afraid than I could explain, but
not enough to dull my thirst for wonder; so as soon as the wind was
quite gone I crossed into the dark chamber from which it had come.

This temple, as I had fancied from the outside, was larger than
either of those I had visited before; and was presumably a natural
cavern since it bore winds from some region beyond. Here I could stand
quite upright, but saw that the stones and altars were as low as those
in the other temples. On the walls and roof I beheld for the first time
some traces of the pictorial art of the ancient race, curious curling
streaks of paint that had almost faded or crumbled away; and on two of
the altars I saw with rising excitement a maze of well-fashioned
curvilinear carvings. As I held my torch aloft it seemed to me that the
shape of the roof was too regular to be natural, and I wondered what
the prehistoric cutters of stone had first worked upon. Their
engineering skill must have been vast.

Then a brighter flare of the fantastic flame showed that form which
I had been seeking, the opening to those remoter abysses whence the
sudden wind had blown; and I grew faint when I saw that it was a small
and plainly artificial door chiselled in the solid rock. I thrust my
torch within, beholding a black tunnel with the roof arching low over a
rough flight of very small, numerous and steeply descending steps. I
shall always see those steps in my dreams, for I came to learn what
they meant. At the time I hardly knew whether to call them steps or
mere footholds in a precipitous descent. My mind was whirling with mad
thoughts, and the words and warning of Arab prophets seemed to float
across the desert from the land that men know to the nameless city that
men dare not know. Yet I hesitated only for a moment before advancing
through the portal and commencing to climb cautiously down the steep
passage, feet first, as though on a ladder.

It is only in the terrible phantasms of drugs or delirium that any
other man can have such a descent as mine. The narrow passage led
infinitely down like some hideous haunted well, and the torch I held
above my head could not light the unknown depths toward which I was
crawling. I lost track of the hours and forgot to consult my watch,
though I was frightened when I thought of the distance I must have be
traversing. There were changes of direction and of steepness; and once
I came to a long, low, level passage where I had to wriggle my feet
first along the rocky floor, holding torch at arm's length beyond my
head. The place was not high enough for kneeling. After that were more
of the steep steps, and I was still scrambling down interminably when
my failing torch died out. I do not think I noticed it at the time, for
when I did notice it I was still holding it above me as if it were
ablaze. I was quite unbalanced with that instinct for the strange and
the unknown which had made me a wanderer upon earth and a haunter of
far, ancient, and forbidden places.

In the darkness there flashed before my mind fragments of my
cherished treasury of daemonic lore; sentences from Alhazred the mad
Arab, paragraphs from the apocryphal nightmares of Damascius, and
infamous lines from the delirious Image du Monde of Gauthier de Metz. I
repeated queer extracts, and muttered of Afrasiab and the daemons that
floated with him down the Oxus; later chanting over and over again a
phrase from one of Lord Dunsany's tales--"The unreveberate blackness of
the abyss." Once when the descent grew amazingly steep I recited
something in sing-song from Thomas Moore until I feared to recite more:

A reservoir of darkness, black
As witches' cauldrons are, when fill'd
With moon-drugs in th' eclipse distill'd
Leaning to look if foot might pass
Down thro' that chasm, I saw, beneath,
As far as vision could explore,
The jetty sides as smooth as glass,
Looking as if just varnish'd o'er
With that dark pitch the Seat of Death
Throws out upon its slimy shore.

Time had quite ceased to exist when my feet again felt a level
floor, and I found myself in a place slightly higher than the rooms in
the two smaller temples now so incalculably far above my head. I could
not quite stand, but could kneel upright, and in the dark I shuffled
and crept hither and thither at random. I soon knew that I was in a
narrow passage whose walls were lined with cases of wood having glass
fronts. As in that Palaeozoic and abysmal place I felt of such things
as polished wood and glass I shuddered at the possible implications.
The cases were apparently ranged along each side of the passage at
regular intervals, and were oblong and horizontal, hideously like
coffins in shape and size. When I tried to move two or three for
further examination, I found that they were firmly fastened.

I saw that the passage was a long one, so floundered ahead rapidly
in a creeping run that would have seemed horrible had any eye watched
me in the blackness; crossing from side to side occasionally to feel of
my surroundings and be sure the walls and rows of cases still stretched
on. Man is so used to thinking visually that I almost forgot the
darkness and pictured the endless corridor of wood and glass in its
low-studded monotony as though I saw it. And then in a moment of
indescribable emotion I did see it.

Just when my fancy merged into real sight I cannot tell; but there
came a gradual glow ahead, and all at once I knew that I saw the dim
outlines of a corridor and the cases, revealed by some unknown
subterranean phosphorescence. For a little while all was exactly as I
had imagined it, since the glow was very faint; but as I mechanically
kept stumbling ahead into the stronger light I realised that my fancy
had been but feeble. This hall was no relic of crudity like the temples
in the city above, but a monument of the most magnificent and exotic
art. Rich, vivid, and daringly fantastic designs and pictures formed a
continuous scheme of mural paintings whose lines and colours were
beyond description. The cases were of a strange golden wood, with
fronts of exquisite glass, and containing the mummified forms of
creatures outreaching in grotesqueness the most chaotic dreams of man.

To convey any idea of these monstrosities is impossible. They were
of the reptile kind, with body lines suggestion sometimes the
crocodile, sometimes the seal, but more often nothing of which either
the naturalist or the palaeontologist ever heard. In size they
approximated a small man, and their fore-legs bore delicate and evident
feet curiously like human hands and fingers. But strangest of all were
their heads, which presented a contour violating all known biological
principles. To nothing can such things be well compared--in one flash I
thought of comparisons as varied as the cat, the bullfrog, the mythic
Satyr, and the human being. Not Jove himself had had so colossal and
protuberant a forehead, yet the horns and the noselessness and the
alligator-like jaw placed things outside all established categories. I
debated for a time on the reality of the mummies, half suspecting they
were artificial idols; but soon decided they were indeed some
palaeogean species which had lived when the nameless city was alive. To
crown their grotesqueness, most of them were gorgeously enrobed in the
costliest of fabrics, and lavishly laden with ornaments of gold,
jewels, and unknown shining metals.

The importance of these crawling creatures must have been vast, for
they held first place among the wild designs on the frescoed walls and
ceiling. With matchless skill had the artist drawn them in a world of

their own, wherein they had cities and gardens fashioned to suit their
dimensions; and I could not help but think that their pictured history
was allegorical, perhaps showing the progress of the race that
worshipped them. These creatures, I said to myself, were to men of the
nameless city what the she-wolf was to Rome, or some totem-beast is to
a tribe of Indians.

Holding this view, I could trace roughly a wonderful epic of the
nameless city; the tale of a mighty seacoast metropolis that ruled the
world before Africa rose out of the waves, and of its struggles as the
sea shrank away, and the desert crept into the fertile valley that held
it. I saw its wars and triumphs, its troubles and defeats, and
afterwards its terrible fight against the desert when thousands of its
people--here represented in allegory by the grotesque reptiles--were
driven to chisel their way down through the rocks in some marvellous
manner to another world whereof their prophets had told them. It was
all vividly weird and realistic, and its connection with the awesome
descent I had made was unmistakable. I even recognized the passages.

As I crept along the corridor toward the brighter light I saw later
stages of the painted epic--the leave-taking of the race that had
dwelt in the nameless city and the valley around for ten million years;
the race whose souls shrank from quitting scenes their bodies had known
so long where they had settled as nomads in the earth's youth, hewing
in the virgin rock those primal shrines at which they had never ceased
to worship. Now that the light was better I studied the pictures more
closely and, remembering that the strange reptiles must represent the
unknown men, pondered upon the customs of the nameless city. Many
things were peculiar and inexplicable. The civilization, which included
a written alphabet, had seemingly risen to a higher order than those
immeasurably later civilizations of Egypt and Chaldaea, yet there were
curious omissions. I could, for example, find no pictures to represent
deaths or funeral customs, save such as were related to wars, violence,
and plagues; and I wondered at the reticence shown concerning natural
death. It was as though an ideal of immortality had been fostered as a
cheering illusion.

Still nearer the end of the passage was painted scenes of the utmost
picturesqueness and extravagance: contrasted views of the nameless city
in its desertion and growing ruin, and of the strange new realm of
paradise to which the race had hewed its way through the stone. In
these views the city and the desert valley were shewn always by
moonlight, golden nimbus hovering over the fallen walls, and
half-revealing the splendid perfection of former times, shown
spectrally and elusively by the artist. The paradisal scenes were
almost too extravagant to be believed, portraying a hidden world of
eternal day filled with glorious cities and ethereal hills and valleys.
At the very last I thought I saw signs of an artistic anticlimax. The
paintings were less skillful, and much more bizarre than even the
wildest of the earlier scenes. They seemed to record a slow decadence
of the ancient stock, coupled with a growing ferocity toward the
outside world from which it was driven by the desert. The forms of the
people--always represented by the sacred reptiles--appeared to be
gradually wasting away, through their spirit was shewn hovering above
the ruins by moonlight gained in proportion. Emaciated priests,
displayed as reptiles in ornate robes, cursed the upper air and all who
breathed it; and one terrible final scene shewed a primitive-looking
man, perhaps a pioneer of ancient Irem, the City of Pillars, torn to
pieces by members of the elder race. I remember how the Arabs fear the
nameless city, and was glad that beyond this place the grey walls and
ceiling were bare.

As I viewed the pageant of mural history I had approached very
closely to the end of the low-ceiled hall, and was aware of a gate
through which came all of the illuminating phosphorescence. Creeping up
to it, I cried aloud in transcendent amazement at what lay beyond; for
instead of other and brighter chambers there was only an illimitable
void of uniform radiance, such one might fancy when gazing down from the
peak of Mount Everest upon a sea of sunlit mist. Behind me was a
passage so cramped that I could not stand upright in it; before me was
an infinity of subterranean effulgence.

Reaching down from the passage into the abyss was the head of a
steep flight of steps--small numerous steps like those of black
passages I had traversed--but after a few feet the glowing vapours
concealed everything. Swung back open against the left-hand wall of the
passage was a massive door of brass, incredibly thick and decorated
with fantastic bas-reliefs, which could if closed shut the whole inner
world of light away from the vaults and passages of rock. I looked at
the step, and for the nonce dared not try them. I touched the open
brass door, and could not move it. Then I sank prone to the stone
floor, my mind aflame with prodigious reflections which not even a
death-like exhaustion could banish.

As I lay still with closed eyes, free to ponder, many things I had
lightly noted in the frescoes came back to me with new and terrible
significance--scenes representing the nameless city in its heyday--
the vegetations of the valley around it, and the distant lands with
which its merchants traded. The allegory of the crawling creatures
puzzled me by its universal prominence, and I wondered that it would be
so closely followed in a pictured history of such importance. In the
frescoes the nameless city had been shewn in proportions fitted to the
reptiles. I wondered what its real proportions and magnificence had
been, and reflected a moment on certain oddities I had noticed in the
ruins. I thought curiously of the lowness of the primal temples and of
the underground corridor, which were doubtless hewn thus out of
deference to the reptile deities there honoured; though it perforce
reduced the worshippers to crawling. Perhaps the very rites here
involved crawling in imitation of the creatures. No religious theory,
however, could easily explain why the level passages in that awesome
descent should be as low as the temples--or lower, since one could not
even kneel in it. As I thought of the crawling creatures, whose hideous
mummified forms were so close to me, I felt a new throb of fear. Mental
associations are curious, and I shrank from the idea that except for
the poor primitive man torn to pieces in the last painting, mine was
the only human form amidst the many relics and symbols of the
primordial life.

But as always in my strange and roving existence, wonder soon drove
out fear; for the luminous abyss and what it might contain presented a
problem worthy of the greatest explorer that a weird world of mystery
lay far down that flight of peculiarly small steps I could not doubt,
and I hoped to find there those human memorials which the painted
corridor had failed to give. The frescoes had pictured unbelievable
cities, and valleys in this lower realm, and my fancy dwelt on the rich
and colossal ruins that awaited me.

My fears, indeed, concerned the past rather than the future. Not
even the physical horror of my position in that cramped corridor of
dead reptiles and antediluvian frescoes, miles below the world I knew
and faced by another world of eery light and mist, could match the
lethal dread I felt at the abysmal antiquity of the scene and its soul.
An ancientness so vast that measurement is feeble seemed to leer down
from the primal stones and rock-hewn temples of the nameless city,
while the very latest of the astounding maps in the frescoes shewed
oceans and continents that man has forgotten, with only here and there
some vaguely familiar outlines. Of what could have happened in the
geological ages since the paintings ceased and the death-hating race
resentfully succumbed to decay, no man might say. Life had once teemed
in these caverns and in the luminous realm beyond; now I was alone with
vivid relics, and I trembled to think of the countless ages through
which these relics had kept a silent deserted vigil.

Suddenly there came another burst of that acute fear which had
intermittently seized me ever since I first saw the terrible valley and
the nameless city under a cold moon, and despite my exhaustion I found
myself starting frantically to a sitting posture and gazing back along
the black corridor toward the tunnels that rose to the outer world. My
sensations were like those which had made me shun the nameless city at
night, and were as inexplicable as they were poignant. In another
moment, however, I received a still greater shock in the form of a
definite sound--the first which had broken the utter silence of these
tomb-like depths. It was a deep, low moaning, as of a distant throng of
condemned spirits, and came from the direction in which I was staring.
Its volume rapidly grew, till it soon reverberated rightfully through
the low passage, and at the same time I became conscious of an
increasing draught of old air, likewise flowing from the tunnels and
the city above. The touch of this air seemed to restore my balance, for
I instantly recalled the sudden gusts which had risen around the mouth
of the abyss each sunset and sunrise, one of which had indeed revealed
the hidden tunnels to me. I looked at my watch and saw that sunrise was
near, so bracing myself to resist the gale that was sweeping down to
its cavern home as it had swept forth at evening. My fear again waned
low, since a natural phenomenon tends to dispel broodings over the
unknown.

More and more madly poured the shrieking, moaning night wind into
the gulf of the inner earth. I dropped prone again and clutched vainly
at the floor for fear of being swept bodily through the open gate into
the phosphorescent abyss. Such fury I had not expected, and as I grew
aware of an actual slipping of my form toward the abyss I was beset by
a thousand new terrors of apprehension and imagination. The malignancy
of the blast awakened incredible fancies; once more I compared myself
shudderingly to the only human image in that frightful corridor, the
man who was torn to pieces by the nameless race, for in the fiendish
clawing of the swirling currents there seemed to abide a vindictive
rage all the stronger because it was largely impotent. I think I
screamed frantically near the last--I was almost mad--of the howling
wind-wraiths. I tried to crawl against the murderous invisible torrent,
but I could not even hold my own as I was pushed slowly and inexorably
toward the unknown world. Finally reason must have wholly snapped; for
I fell babbling over and over that unexplainable couplet of the mad
Arab Alhazred, who dreamed of the nameless city:

That is not dead which can eternal lie,
And with strange aeons even death may die.

Only the grim brooding desert gods know what really took place--what
indescribable struggles and scrambles in the dark I endured or what
Abaddon guided me back to life, where I must always remember and shiver
in the night wind till oblivion--or worse--claims me. Monstrous,
unnatural, colossal, was the thing--too far beyond all the ideas of man
to be believed except in the silent damnable small hours of the morning
when one cannot sleep.

I have said that the fury of the rushing blast was infernal--
cacodaemoniacal--and that its voices were hideous with the pent-up
viciousness of desolate eternities. Presently these voices, while still
chaotic before me, seemed to my beating brain to take articulate form
behind me; and down there in the grave of unnumbered aeon-dead
antiquities, leagues below the dawn-lit world of men, I heard the
ghastly cursing and snarling of strange-tongued fiends. Turning, I saw
outlined against the luminous aether of the abyss that could not be
seen against the dusk of the corridor--a nightmare horde of rushing
devils; hate distorted, grotesquely panoplied, half transparent devils of
a race no man might mistake--the crawling reptiles of the nameless
city.

And as the wind died away I was plunged into the ghoul-pooled
darkness of earth's bowels; for behind the last of the creatures the
great brazen door clanged shut with a deafening peal of metallic music
whose reverberations swelled out to the distant world to hail the
rising sun as Memnon hails it from the banks of the Nile.



* THE FESTIVAL

Efficiut Daemones, ut quae non sunt, sic tamen quasi sint,
conspicienda hominibus exhibeant.

--Lacantius

(Devils so work that things which are not appear to men
as if they were real.)


I was far from home, and the spell of the eastern sea was upon me.
In the twilight I heard it pounding on the rocks, and I knew it lay
just over the hill where the twisting willows writhed against the
clearing sky and the first stars of evening. And because my fathers had
called me to the old town beyond, I pushed on through the shallow,
new-fallen snow along the road that soared lonely up to where Aldebaran
twinkled among the trees; on toward the very ancient town I had never
seen but often dreamed of.

It was the Yuletide, that men call Christmas though they know in
their hearts it is older than Bethlehem and Babylon, older than Memphis
and mankind. It was the Yuletide, and I had come at last to the ancient
sea town where my people had dwelt and kept festival in the elder time
when festival was forbidden; where also they had commanded their sons
to keep festival once every century, that the memory of primal secrets
might not be forgotten. Mine were an old people, and were old even when
this land was settled three hundred years before. And they were
strange, because they had come as dark furtive folk from opiate
southern gardens of orchids, and spoken another tongue before they
learnt the tongue of the blue-eyed fishers. And now they were
scattered, and shared only the rituals of mysteries that none living
could understand. I was the only one who came back that night to the
old fishing town as legend bade, for only the poor and the lonely
remember.

Then beyond the hill's crest I saw Kingsport outspread frostily in
the gloaming; snowy Kingsport with its ancient vanes and steeples,
ridgepoles and chimney-pots, wharves and small bridges, willow-trees
and graveyards; endless labyrinths of steep, narrow, crooked streets,
and dizzy church-crowned central peak that time durst not touch;
ceaseless mazes of colonial houses piled and scattered at all angles
and levels like a child's disordered blocks; antiquity hovering on grey
wings over winter-whitened gables and gambrel roofs; fanlights and
small-paned windows one by one gleaming out in the cold dusk to join
Orion and the archaic stars. And against the rotting wharves the sea
pounded; the secretive, immemorial sea out of which the people had come
in the elder time.

Beside the road at its crest a still higher summit rose, bleak and
windswept, and I saw that it was a burying-ground where black
gravestones stuck ghoulishly through the snow like the decayed
fingernails of a gigantic corpse. The printless road was very lonely,
and sometimes I thought I heard a distant horrible creaking as of a
gibbet in the wind. They had hanged four kinsmen of mine for witchcraft
in 1692, but I did not know just where.

As the road wound down the seaward slope I listened for the merry
sounds of a village at evening, but did not hear them. Then I thought
of the season, and felt that these old Puritan folk might well have
Christmas customs strange to me, and full of silent hearthside prayer.
So after that I did not listen for merriment or look for wayfarers,
kept on down past the hushed lighted farmhouses and shadowy stone walls
to where the signs of ancient shops and sea taverns creaked in the salt
breeze, and the grotesque knockers of pillared doorways glistened along
deserted unpaved lanes in the light of little, curtained windows.

I had seen maps of the town, and knew where to find the home of my
people. It was told that I should be known and welcomed, for village
legend lives long; so I hastened through Back Street to Circle Court,
and across the fresh snow on the one full flagstone pavement in the
town, to where Green Lane leads off behind the Market House. The old
maps still held good, and I had no trouble; though at Arkham they must
have lied when they said the trolleys ran to this place, since I saw
not a wire overhead. Snow would have hid the rails in any case. I was
glad I had chosen to walk, for the white village had seemed very
beautiful from the hill; and now I was eager to knock at the door of my
people, the seventh house on the left in Green Lane, with an ancient
peaked roof and jutting second storey, all built before 1650.

There were lights inside the house when I came upon it, and I saw
from the diamond window-panes that it must have been kept very close to
its antique state. The upper part overhung the narrow grass-grown
street and nearly met the over-hanging part of the house opposite, so
that I was almost in a tunnel, with the low stone doorstep wholly free
from snow. There was no sidewalk, but many houses had high doors
reached by double flights of steps with iron railings. It was an odd
scene, and because I was strange to New England I had never known its
like before. Though it pleased me, I would have relished it better if
there had been footprints in the snow, and people in the streets, and a
few windows without drawn curtains.

When I sounded the archaic iron knocker I was half afraid. Some fear
had been gathering in me, perhaps because of the strangeness of my
heritage, and the bleakness of the evening, and the queerness of the
silence in that aged town of curious customs. And when my knock was
answered I was fully afraid, because I had not heard any footsteps
before the door creaked open. But I was not afraid long, for the
gowned, slippered old man in the doorway had a bland face that
reassured me; and though he made signs that he was dumb, he wrote a
quaint and ancient welcome with the stylus and wax tablet he carried.

He beckoned me into a low, candle-lit room with massive exposed
rafters and dark, stiff, sparse furniture of the seventeenth century.
The past was vivid there, for not an attribute was missing. There was a
cavernous fireplace and a spinning-wheel at which a bent old woman in
loose wrapper and deep poke-bonnet sat back toward me, silently
spinning despite the festive season. An indefinite dampness seemed upon
the place, and I marvelled that no fire should be blazing. The
high-backed settle faced the row of curtained windows at the left, and
seemed to be occupied, though I was not sure. I did not like everything
about what I saw, and felt again the fear I had had. This fear grew
stronger from what had before lessened it, for the more I looked at the
old man's bland face the more its very blandness terrified me. The eyes
never moved, and the skin was too much like wax. Finally I was sure it
was not a face at all, but a fiendishly cunning mask. But the flabby
hands, curiously gloved, wrote genially on the tablet and told me I
must wait a while before I could be led to the place of the festival.

Pointing to a chair, table, and pile of books, the old man now left
the room; and when I sat down to read I saw that the books were hoary
and mouldy, and that they included old Morryster's wild Marvels of
Science, the terrible Saducismus Triumphatus of Joseph Glanvil,
published in 1681, the shocking Daemonolatreja of Remigius, printed in
1595 at Lyons, and worst of all, the unmentionable Necronomicon of the
mad Arab Abdul Alhazred, in Olaus Wormius' forbidden Latin translation;
a book which I had never seen, but of which I had heard monstrous
things whispered. No one spoke to me, but I could hear the creaking of
signs in the wind outside, and the whir of the wheel as the bonneted
old woman continued her silent spinning, spinning. I thought the room
and the books and the people very morbid and disquieting, but because
an old tradition of my fathers had summoned me to strange feastings, I
resolved to expect queer things. So I tried to read, and soon became
tremblingly absorbed by something I found in that accursed
Necronomicon; a thought and a legend too hideous for sanity or
consciousness, but I disliked it when I fancied I heard the closing of
one of the windows that the settle faced, as if it had been stealthily
opened. It had seemed to follow a whirring that was not of the old
woman's spinning-wheel. This was not much, though, for the old woman
was spinning very hard, and the aged clock had been striking. After
that I lost the feeling that there were persons on the settle, and was
reading intently and shudderingly when the old man came back booted and
dressed in a loose antique costume, and sat down on that very bench, so
that I could not see him. It was certainly nervous waiting, and the
blasphemous book in my hands made it doubly so. When eleven struck,
however, the old man stood up, glided to a massive carved chest in a
corner, and got two hooded cloaks; one of which he donned, and the
other of which he draped round the old woman, who was ceasing her
monotonous spinning. Then they both started for the outer door; the
woman lamely creeping, and the old man, after picking up the very book
I had been reading, beckoning me as he drew his hood over that unmoving
face or mask.

We went out into the moonless and tortuous network of that
incredibly ancient town; went out as the lights in the curtained
windows disappeared one by one, and the Dog Star leered at the throng
of cowled, cloaked figures that poured silently from every doorway and
formed monstrous processions up this street and that, past the creaking
sigus and antediluvian gables, the thatched roofs and diamond-paned
windows; threading precipitous lanes where decaying houses overlapped
and crumbled together; gliding across open courts and churchyards where
the bobbing lanthorns made eldritch drunken constellations.

Amid these hushed throngs I followed my voiceless guides; jostled by
elbows that seemed preternaturally soft, and pressed by chests and
stomachs that seemed abnormally pulpy; but seeing never a face and
hearing never a word. Up, up, up, the eery columns slithered, and I saw
that all the travellers were converging as they flowed near a sort of
focus of crazy alleys at the top of a high hill in the centre of the
town, where perched a great white church. I had seen it from the road's
crest when I looked at Kingsport in the new dusk, and it had made me
shiver because Aldebaran had seemed to balance itself a moment on the
ghostly spire.

There was an open space around the church; partly a churchyard with
spectral shafts, and partly a half-paved square swept nearly bare of
snow by the wind, and lined with unwholesomely archaic houses having
peaked roofs and overhanging gables. Death-fires danced over the tombs,
revealing gruesome vistas, though queerly failing to cast any shadows.
Past the churchyard, where there were no houses, I could see over the
hill's summit and watch the glimmer of stars on the harbour, though the
town was invisible in the dark. Only once in a while a lantern bobbed
horribly through serpentine alleys on its way to overtake the throng
that was now slipping speechlessly into the church. I waited till the
crowd had oozed into the black doorway, and till all the stragglers had
followed. The old man was pulling at my sleeve, but I was determined to
be the last. Crossing the threshold into the swarming temple of unknown
darkness, I turned once to look at the outside world as the churchyard
phosphorescence cast a sickly glow on the hilltop pavement. And as I
did so I shuddered. For though the wind had not left much snow, a few
patches did remain on the path near the door; and in that fleeting
backward look it seemed to my troubled eyes that they bore no mark of
passing feet, not even mine.

The church was scarce lighted by all the lanthorns that had entered
it, for most of the throng had already vanished. They had streamed up
the aisle between the high pews to the trap-door of the vaults which
yawned loathsomely open just before the pulpit, and were now squirming
noiselessly in. I followed dumbly down the foot-worn steps and into the
dark, suffocating crypt. The tail of that sinuous line of
night-marchers seemed very horrible, and as I saw them wriggling into a
venerable tomb they seemed more horrible still. Then I noticed that the
tomb's floor had an aperture down which the throng was sliding, and in
a moment we were all descending an ominous staircase of rough-hewn
stone; a narrow spiral staircase damp and peculiarly odorous, that
wound endlessly down into the bowels of the hill past monotonous walls
of dripping stone blocks and crumbling mortar. It was a silent,
shocking descent, and I observed after a horrible interval that the
walls and steps were changing in nature, as if chiselled out of the
solid rock. What mainly troubled me was that the myriad footfalls made
no sound and set up no echoes. After more aeons of descent I saw some
side passages or burrows leading from unknown recesses of blackness to
this shaft of nighted mystery. Soon they became excessively numerous,
like impious catacombs of nameless menace; and their pungent odour of
decay grew quite unbearable. I knew we must have passed down through
the mountain and beneath the earth of Kingsport itself, and I shivered
that a town should be so aged and maggoty with subterraneous evil.

Then I saw the lurid shimmering of pale light, and heard the
insidious lapping of sunless waters. Again I shivered, for I did not
like the things that the night had brought, and wished bitterly that no
forefather had summoned me to this primal rite. As the steps and the
passage grew broader, I heard another sound, the thin, whining mockery
of a feeble flute; and suddenly there spread out before me the
boundless vista of an inner world--a vast fungous shore litten by a
belching column of sick greenish flame and washed by a wide oily river
that flowed from abysses frightful and unsuspected to join the blackest
gulfs of immemorial ocean.

Fainting and gasping, I looked at that unhallowed Erebus of titan
toadstools, leprous fire and slimy water, and saw the cloaked throngs
forming a semicircle around the blazing pillar. It was the Yule-rite,
older than man and fated to survive him; the primal rite of the
solstice and of spring's promise beyond the snows; the rite of fire and
evergreen, light and music. And in the stygian grotto I saw them do the
rite, and adore the sick pillar of flame, and throw into the water
handfuls gouged out of the viscous vegetation which glittered green in
the chlorotic glare. I saw this, and I saw something amorphously
squatted far away from the light, piping noisomely on a flute; and as
the thing piped I thought I heard noxious muffled flutterings in the
foetid darkness where I could not see. But what frightened me most was
that flaming column; spouting volcanically from depths profound and
inconceivable, casting no shadows as healthy flame should, and coating
the nitrous stone with a nasty, venomous verdigris. For in all that
seething combustion no warmth lay, but only the clamminess of death and
corruption.

The man who had brought me now squirmed to a point directly beside
the hideous flame, and made stiff ceremonial motions to the semi-circle
he faced. At certain stages of the ritual they did grovelling
obeisance, especially when he held above his head that abhorrent
Necronomicon he had taken with him; and I shared all the obeisances
because I had been summoned to this festival by the writings of my
forefathers. Then the old man made a signal to the half-seen
flute-player in the darkness, which player thereupon changed its feeble
drone to a scarce louder drone in another key; precipitating as it did
so a horror unthinkable and unexpected. At this horror I sank nearly to
the lichened earth, transfixed with a dread not of this or any world,
but only of the mad spaces between the stars.

Out of the unimaginable blackness beyond the gangrenous glare of
that cold flame, out of the tartarean leagues through which that oily
river rolled uncanny, unheard, and unsuspected, there flopped
rhythmically a horde of tame, trained, hybrid winged things that no
sound eye could ever wholly grasp, or sound brain ever wholly remember.
They were not altogether crows, nor moles, nor buzzards, nor ants, nor
vampire bats, nor decomposed human beings; but something I cannot and
must not recall. They flopped limply along, half with their webbed feet
and half with their membranous wings; and as they reached the throng of
celebrants the cowled figures seized and mounted them, and rode off one
by one along the reaches of that unlighted river, into pits and
galleries of panic where poison springs feed frightful and
undiscoverable cataracts.

The old spinning woman had gone with the throng, and the old man
remained only because I had refused when he motioned me to seize an
animal and ride like the rest. I saw when I staggered to my feet that
the amorphous flute-player had rolled out of sight, but that two of the
beasts were patiently standing by. As I hung back, the old man produced
his stylus and tablet and wrote that he was the true deputy of my
fathers who had founded the Yule worship in this ancient place; that it
had been decreed I should come back, and that the most secret mysteries
were yet to be performed. He wrote this in a very ancient hand, and
when I still hesitated he pulled from his loose robe a seal ring and a
watch, both with my family arms, to prove that he was what he said. But
it was a hideous proof, because I knew from old papers that that watch
had been buried with my great-great-great-great-grandfather in 1698.

Presently the old man drew back his hood and pointed to the family
resemblance in his face, but I only shuddered, because I was sure that
the face was merely a devilish waxen mask. The flopping animals were
now scratching restlessly at the lichens, and I saw that the old man
was nearly as restless himself. When one of the things began to waddle
and edge away, he turned quickly to stop it; so that the suddenness of
his motion dislodged the waxen mask from what should have been his
head. And then, because that nightmare's position barred me from the
stone staircase down which we had come, I flung myself into the oily
underground river that bubbled somewhere to the caves of the sea; flung
myself into that putrescent juice of earth's inner horrors before the
madness of my screams could bring down upon me all the charnel legions
these pest-gulfs might conceal.

At the hospital they told me I had been found half-frozen in
Kingsport Harbour at dawn, clinging to the drifting spar that accident
sent to save me. They told me I had taken the wrong fork of the hill
road the night before, and fallen over the cliffs at Orange Point; a
thing they deduced from prints found in the snow. There was nothing I
could say, because everything was wrong. Everything was wrong, with the
broad windows showing a sea of roofs in which only about one in five
was ancient, and the sound of trolleys and motors in the streets below.
They insisted that this was Kingsport, and I could not deny it. When I
went delirious at hearing that the hospital stood near the old
churchyard on Central Hill, they sent me to St. Mary's Hospital in
Arkham, where I could have better care. I liked it there, for the
doctors were broad-minded, and even lent me their influence in
obtaining the carefully sheltered copy of Alhazred's objectionable
Necronomicon from the library of Miskatonic University. They said
something about a "psychosis" and agreed I had better get any harassing
obsessions off my mind.

So I read that hideous chapter, and shuddered doubly because it was
indeed not new to me. I had seen it before, let footprints tell what
they might; and where it was I had seen it were best forgotten. There
was no one--in waking hours--who could remind me of it; but my dreams
are filled with terror, because of phrases I dare not quote. I dare
quote only one paragraph, put into such English as I can make from the
awkward Low Latin.

"The nethermost caverns," wrote the mad Arab, "are not for the
fathoming of eyes that see; for their marvels are strange and terrific.
Cursed the ground where dead thoughts live new and oddly bodied, and
evil the mind that is held by no head. Wisely did Ibn Schacabao say,
that happy is the tomb where no wizard hath lain, and happy the town at
night whose wizards are all ashes. For it is of old rumour that the
soul of the devil-bought hastes not from his charnel clay, but fats and
instructs the very worm that gnaws; till out of corruption horrid life
springs, and the dull scavengers of earth wax crafty to vex it and
swell monstrous to plague it. Great holes secretly are digged where
earth's pores ought to suffice, and things have learnt to walk that
ought to crawl."



* THE COLOUR OUT OF SPACE

West of Arkham the hills rise wild, and there are valleys with deep
woods that no axe has ever cut. There are dark narrow glens where the
trees slope fantastically, and where thin brooklets trickle without
ever having caught the glint of sunlight. On the gentle slopes there
are farms, ancient and rocky, with squat, moss-coated cottages brooding
eternally over old New England secrets in the lee of great ledges; but
these are all vacant now, the wide chimneys crumbling and the shingled
sides bulging perilously beneath low gambrel roofs.

The old folk have gone away, and foreigners do not like to live
there. French-Canadians have tried it, Italians have tried it, and the
Poles have come and departed. It is not because of anything that can be
seen or heard or handled, but because of something that is imagined.
The place is not good for imagination, and does not bring restful
dreams at night. It must be this which keeps the foreigners away, for
old Ammi Pierce has never told them of anything he recalls from the
strange days. Ammi, whose head has been a little queer for years, is
the only one who still remains, or who ever talks of the strange days;
and he dares to do this because his house is so near the open fields
and the travelled roads around Arkham.

There was once a road over the hills and through the valleys, that
ran straight where the blasted heath is now; but people ceased to use
it and a new road was laid curving far toward the south. Traces of the
old one can still be found amidst the weeds of a returning wilderness,
and some of them will doubtless linger even when half the hollows are
flooded for the new reservoir. Then the dark woods will be cut down and
the blasted heath will slumber far below blue waters whose surface will
mirror the sky and ripple in the sun. And the secrets of the strange
days will be one with the deep's secrets; one with the hidden lore of
old ocean, and all the mystery of primal earth.

When I went into the hills and vales to survey for the new reservoir
they told me the place was evil. They told me this in Arkham, and
because that is a very old town full of witch legends I thought the
evil must be something which grandams had whispered to children through
centuries. The name "blasted heath" seemed to me very odd and
theatrical, and I wondered how it had come into the folklore of a
Puritan people. Then I saw that dark westward tangle of glens and
slopes for myself, and ceased to wonder at anything beside its own
elder mystery. It was morning when I saw it, but shadow lurked always
there. The trees grew too thickly, and their trunks were too big for
any healthy New England wood. There was too much silence in the dim
alleys between them, and the floor was too soft with the dank moss and
mattings of infinite years of decay.

In the open spaces, mostly along the line of the old road, there
were little hillside farms; sometimes with all the buildings standing,
sometimes with only one or two, and sometimes with only a lone chimney
or fast-filling cellar. Weeds and briers reigned, and furtive wild
things rustled in the undergrowth. Upon everything was a haze of
restlessness and oppression; a touch of the unreal and the grotesque,
as if some vital element of perspective or chiaroscuro were awry. I did
not wonder that the foreigners would not stay, for this was no region
to sleep in. It was too much like a landscape of Salvator Rosa; too
much like some forbidden woodcut in a tale of terror.

But even all this was not so bad as the blasted heath. I knew it the
moment I came upon it at the bottom of a spacious valley; for no other
name could fit such a thing, or any other thing fit such a name. It was
as if the poet had coined the phrase from having seen this one
particular region. It must, I thought as I viewed it, be the outcome of
a fire; but why had nothing new ever grown over these five acres of
grey desolation that sprawled open to the sky like a great spot eaten
by acid in the woods and fields? It lay largely to the north of the
ancient road line, but encroached a little on the other side. I felt an
odd reluctance about approaching, and did so at last only because my
business took me through and past it. There was no vegetation of any
kind on that broad expanse, but only a fine grey dust or ash which no
wind seemed ever to blow about. The trees near it were sickly and
stunted, and many dead trunks stood or lay rotting at the rim. As I
walked hurriedly by I saw the tumbled bricks and stones of an old
chimney and cellar on my right, and the yawning black maw of an
abandoned well whose stagnant vapours played strange tricks with the
hues of the sunlight. Even the long, dark woodland climb beyond seemed
welcome in contrast, and I marvelled no more at the frightened whispers
of Arkham people. There had been no house or ruin near; even in the old
days the place must have been lonely and remote. And at twilight,
dreading to repass that ominous spot, I walked circuitously back to the
town by the curious road on the south. I vaguely wished some clouds
would gather, for an odd timidity about the deep skyey voids above had
crept into my soul.

In the evening I asked old people in Arkham about the blasted heath,
and what was meant by that phrase "strange days" which so many
evasively muttered. I could not, however, get any good answers except
that all the mystery was much more recent than I had dreamed. It was
not a matter of old legendry at all, but something within the lifetime
of those who spoke. It had happened in the 'eighties, and a family had
disappeared or was killed. Speakers would not be exact; and because
they all told me to pay no attention to old Ammi Pierce's crazy tales,
I sought him out the next morning, having heard that he lived alone in
the ancient tottering cottage where the trees first begin to get very
thick. It was a fearsomely ancient place, and had begun to exude the
faint miasmal odour which clings about houses that have stood too long.
Only with persistent knocking could I rouse the aged man, and when he
shuffled timidly to the door I could tell he was not glad to see
me. He was not so feeble as I had expected; but his eyes drooped in a
curious way, and his unkempt clothing and white beard made him seem
very worn and dismal.

Not knowing just how he could best be launched on his tales, I
feigned a matter of business; told him of my surveying, and asked vague
questions about the district. He was far brighter and more educated
than I had been led to think, and before I knew it had grasped quite as
much of the subject as any man I had talked with in Arkham. He was not
like other rustics I had known in the sections where reservoirs were to
be. From him there were no protests at the miles of old wood and
farmland to be blotted out, though perhaps there would have been had
not his home lain outside the bounds of the future lake. Relief was all
that he showed; relief at the doom of the dark ancient valleys through
which he had roamed all his life. They were better under water now--
better under water since the strange days. And with this opening his
husky voice sank low, while his body leaned forward and his right
forefinger began to point shakily and impressively.

It was then that I heard the story, and as the rambling voice
scraped and whispered on I shivered again and again spite the summer
day. Often I had to recall the speaker from ramblings, piece out
scientific points which he knew only by a fading parrot memory of
professors' talk, or bridge over gaps, where his sense of logic and
continuity broke down. When he was done I did not wonder that his mind
had snapped a trifle, or that the folk of Arkham would not speak much
of the blasted heath. I hurried back before sunset to my hotel,
unwilling to have the stars come out above me in the open; and the next
day returned to Boston to give up my position. I could not go into
that dim chaos of old forest and slope again, or face another time that
grey blasted heath where the black well yawned deep beside the tumbled
bricks and stones. The reservoir will soon be built now, and all those
elder secrets will be safe forever under watery fathoms. But even then
I do not believe I would like to visit that country by night--at least
not when the sinister stars are out; and nothing could bribe me to
drink the new city water of Arkham.

It all began, old Ammi said, with the meteorite. Before that time
there had been no wild legends at all since the witch trials, and even
then these western woods were not feared half so much as the small
island in the Miskatonic where the devil held court beside a curious
lone altar older than the Indians. These were not haunted woods, and
their fantastic dusk was never terrible till the strange days. Then
there had come that white noontide cloud, that string of explosions in
the air, and that pillar of smoke from the valley far in the wood. And
by night all Arkham had heard of the great rock that fell out of the
sky and bedded itself in the ground beside the well at the Nahum
Gardner place. That was the house which had stood where the blasted
heath was to come--the trim white Nahum Gardner house amidst its
fertile gardens and orchards.

Nahum had come to town to tell people about the stone, and dropped
in at Ammi Pierce's on the way. Ammi was forty then, and all the queer
things were fixed very strongly in his mind. He and his wife had gone
with the three professors from Miskatonic University who hastened out
the next morning to see the weird visitor from unknown stellar space,
and had wondered why Nahum had called it so large the day before. It
had shrunk, Nahum said as he pointed out the big brownish mound above
the ripped earth and charred grass near the archaic well-sweep in his
front yard; but the wise men answered that stones do not shrink. Its
heat lingered persistently, and Nahum declared it had glowed faintly in
the night. The professors tried it with a geologist's hammer and found
it was oddly soft. It was, in truth, so soft as to be almost plastic;
and they gouged rather than chipped a specimen to take back to the
college for testing. They took it in an old pail borrowed from Nahum's
kitchen, for even the small piece refused to grow cool. On the trip
back they stopped at Ammi's to rest, and seemed thoughtful when Mrs.
Pierce remarked that the fragment was growing smaller and burning the
bottom of the pail. Truly, it was not large, but perhaps they had taken
less than they thought.

The day after that--all this was in June of '82--the professors had
trooped out again in a great excitement. As they passed Ammi's they
told him what queer things the specimen had done, and how it had faded
wholly away when they put it in a glass beaker. The beaker had gone,
too, and the wise men talked of the strange stone's affinity for
silicon. It had acted quite unbelievably in that well-ordered
laboratory; doing nothing at all and showing no occluded gases when
heated on charcoal, being wholly negative in the borax bead, and soon
proving itself absolutely non-volatile at any producible temperature,
including that of the oxy-hydrogen blowpipe. On an anvil it appeared
highly malleable, and in the dark its luminosity was very marked.
Stubbornly refusing to grow cool, it soon had the college in a state of
real excitement; and when upon heating before the spectroscope it
displayed shining bands unlike any known colours of the normal spectrum
there was much breathless talk of new elements, bizarre optical
properties, and other things which puzzled men of science are wont to
say when faced by the unknown.

Hot as it was, they tested it in a crucible with all the proper
reagents. Water did nothing. Hydrochloric acid was the same. Nitric
acid and even aqua regia merely hissed and spattered against its torrid
invulnerability. Ammi had difficulty in recalling all these things, but
recognized some solvents as I mentioned them in the usual order of use.
There were ammonia and caustic soda, alcohol and ether, nauseous carbon
disulphide and a dozen others; but although the weight grew steadily
less as time passed, and the fragment seemed to be slightly cooling,
there was no change in the solvents to show that they had attacked the
substance at all. It was a metal, though, beyond a doubt. It was
magnetic, for one thing; and after its immersion in the acid solvents
there seemed to be faint traces of the Widmanstatten figures found on
meteoric iron. When the cooling had grown very considerable, the
testing was carried on in glass; and it was in a glass beaker that they
left all the chips made of the original fragment during the work. The
next morning both chips and beaker were gone without trace, and only a
charred spot marked the place on the wooden shelf where they had been.

All this the professors told Ammi as they paused at his door, and
once more he went with them to see the stony messenger from the stars,
though this time his wife did not accompany him. It had now most
certainly shrunk, and even the sober professors could not doubt the
truth of what they saw. All around the dwindling brown lump near the
well was a vacant space, except where the earth had caved in; and
whereas it had been a good seven feet across the day before, it was now
scarcely five. It was still hot, and the sages studied its surface
curiously as they detached another and larger piece with hammer and
chisel. They gouged deeply this time, and as they pried away the
smaller mass they saw that the core of the thing was not quite
homogeneous.

They had uncovered what seemed to be the side of a large coloured
globule embedded in the substance. The colour, which resembled some of
the bands in the meteor's strange spectrum, was almost impossible to
describe; and it was only by analogy that they called it colour at all.
Its texture was glossy, and upon tapping it appeared to promise both
brittleness and hollowness. One of the professors gave it a smart blow
with a hammer, and it burst with a nervous little pop. Nothing was
emitted, and all trace of the thing vanished with the puncturing. It
left behind a hollow spherical space about three inches across, and all
thought it probable that others would be discovered as the enclosing
substance wasted away.

Conjecture was vain; so after a futile attempt to find additional
globules by drilling, the seekers left again with their new specimen
which proved, however, as baffling in the laboratory as its
predecessor. Aside from being almost plastic, having heat, magnetism,
and slight luminosity, cooling slightly in powerful acids, possessing
an unknown spectrum, wasting away in air, and attacking silicon
compounds with mutual destruction as a result, it presented no
identifying features whatsoever; and at the end of the tests the
college scientists were forced to own that they could not place it. It
was nothing of this earth, but a piece of the great outside; and as
such dowered with outside properties and obedient to outside laws.

That night there was a thunderstorm, and when the professors went
out to Nahum's the next day they met with a bitter disappointment. The
stone, magnetic as it had been, must have had some peculiar electrical
property; for it had "drawn the lightning," as Nahum said, with a
singular persistence. Six times within an hour the farmer saw the
lightning strike the furrow in the front yard, and when the storm was
over nothing remained but a ragged pit by the ancient well-sweep,
half-choked with a caved-in earth. Digging had borne no fruit, and the
scientists verified the fact of the utter vanishment. The failure was
total; so that nothing was left to do but go back to the laboratory and
test again the disappearing fragment left carefully cased in lead. That
fragment lasted a week, at the end of which nothing of value had been
learned of it. When it had gone, no residue was left behind, and in
time the professors felt scarcely sure they had indeed seen with waking
eyes that cryptic vestige of the fathomless gulfs outside; that lone,
weird message from other universes and other realms of matter, force,
and entity.

As was natural, the Arkham papers made much of the incident with its
collegiate sponsoring, and sent reporters to talk with Nahum Gardner
and his family. At least one Boston daily also sent a scribe, and Nahum
quickly became a kind of local celebrity. He was a lean, genial person
of about fifty, living with his wife and three sons on the pleasant
farmstead in the valley. He and Ammi exchanged visits frequently, as
did their wives; and Ammi had nothing but praise for him after all
these years. He seemed slightly proud of the notice his place had
attracted, and talked often of the meteorite in the succeeding weeks.
That July and August were hot; and Nahum worked hard at his haying in
the ten-acre pasture across Chapman's Brook; his rattling wain wearing
deep ruts in the shadowy lanes between. The labour tired him more than
it had in other years, and he felt that age was beginning to tell on
him.

Then fell the time of fruit and harvest. The pears and apples slowly
ripened, and Nahum vowed that his orchards were prospering as never
before. The fruit was growing to phenomenal size and unwonted gloss,
and in such abundance that extra barrels were ordered to handle the
future crop. But with the ripening came sore disappointment, for of all
that gorgeous array of specious lusciousness not one single jot was fit
to eat. Into the fine flavour of the pears and apples had crept a
stealthy bitterness and sickishness, so that even the smallest bites
induced a lasting disgust. It was the same with the melons and
tomatoes, and Nahum sadly saw that his entire crop was lost. Quick to
connect events, he declared that the meteorite had poisoned the soil,
and thanked Heaven that most of the other crops were in the upland lot
along the road.

Winter came early, and was very cold. Ammi saw Nahum less often than
usual, and observed that he had begun to look worried. The rest of his
family too, seemed to have grown taciturn; and were far from steady in
their church-going or their attendance at the various social events of
the countryside. For this reserve or melancholy no cause could be
found, though all the household confessed now and then to poorer health
and a feeling of vague disquiet. Nahum himself gave the most definite
statement of anyone when he said he was disturbed about certain
footprints in the snow. They were the usual winter prints of red
squirrels, white rabbits, and foxes, but the brooding farmer professed
to see something not quite right about their nature and arrangement. He
was never specific, but appeared to think that they were not as
characteristic of the anatomy and habits of squirrels and rabbits and
foxes as they ought to be. Ammi listened without interest to this talk
until one night when he drove past Nahum's house in his sleigh on the
way back from Clark's Comer. There had been a moon, and a rabbit had
run across the road, and the leaps of that rabbit were longer than
either Ammi or his horse liked. The latter, indeed, had almost run away
when brought up by a firm rein. Thereafter Ammi gave Nahum's tales more
respect, and wondered why the Gardner dogs seemed so cowed and
quivering every morning. They had, it developed, nearly lost the spirit
to bark.

In February the McGregor boys from Meadow Hill were out shooting
woodchucks, and not far from the Gardner place bagged a very peculiar
specimen. The proportions of its body seemed slightly altered in a
queer way impossible to describe, while its face had taken on an
expression which no one ever saw in a woodchuck before. The boys were
genuinely frightened, and threw the thing away at once, so that only
their grotesque tales of it ever reached the people of the countryside.
But the shying of horses near Nahum's house had now become an
acknowledged thing, and all the basis for a cycle of whispered legend
was fast taking form.

People vowed that the snow melted faster around Nahum's than it did
anywhere else, and early in March there was an awed discussion in
Potter's general store at Clark's Corners. Stephen Rice had driven past
Gardner's in the morning, and had noticed the skunk-cabbages coming up
through the mud by the woods across the road. Never were things of such
size seen before, and they held strange colours that could not be put
into any words. Their shapes were monstrous, and the horse had snorted
at an odour which struck Stephen as wholly unprecedented. That
afternoon several persons drove past to see the abnormal growth, and
all agreed that plants of that kind ought never to sprout in a healthy
world. The bad fruit of the fall before was freely mentioned, and it
went from mouth to mouth that there was poison in Nahum's ground. Of
course it was the meteorite; and remembering how strange the men from
the college had found that stone to be, several farmers spoke about the
matter to them.

One day they paid Nahum a visit; but having no love of wild tales
and folklore were very conservative in what they inferred. The plants
were certainly odd, but all skunk-cabbages are more or less odd in
shape and hue. Perhaps some mineral element from the stone had entered
the soil, but it would soon be washed away. And as for the footprints
and frightened horses--of course this was mere country talk which such
a phenomenon as the aerolite would be certain to start. There was
really nothing for serious men to do in cases of wild gossip, for
superstitious rustics will say and believe anything. And so all through
the strange days the professors stayed away in contempt. Only one of
them, when given two phials of dust for analysis in a police job over a
year and half later, recalled that the queer colour of that
skunk-cabbage had been very like one of the anomalous bands of light
shown by the meteor fragment in the college spectroscope, and like the
brittle globule found imbedded in the stone from the abyss. The samples
in this analysis case gave the same odd bands at first, though later
they lost the property.

The trees budded prematurely around Nahum's, and at night they
swayed ominously in the wind. Nahum's second son Thaddeus, a lad of
fifteen, swore that they swayed also when there was no wind; but even
the gossips would not credit this. Certainly, however, restlessness was
in the air. The entire Gardner family developed the habit of stealthy
listening, though not for any sound which they could consciously name.
The listening was, indeed, rather a product of moments when
consciousness seemed half to slip away. Unfortunately such moments
increased week by week, till it became common speech that "something
was wrong with all Nahum's folks." When the early saxifrage came out it
had another strange colour; not quite like that of the skunk-cabbage,
but plainly related and equally unknown to anyone who saw it. Nahum
took some blossoms to Arkham and showed them to the editor of the
Gazette, but that dignitary did no more than write a humorous article
about them, in which the dark fears of rustics were held up to polite
ridicule. It was a mistake of Nahum's to tell a stolid city man about
the way the great, overgrown mourning-cloak butterflies behaved in
connection with these saxifrages.

April brought a kind of madness to the country folk, and began that
disuse of the road past Nahum's which led to its ultimate abandonment.
It was the vegetation. All the orchard trees blossomed forth in strange
colours, and through the stony soil of the yard and adjacent pasturage
there sprang up a bizarre growth which only a botanist could connect
with the proper flora of the region. No sane wholesome colours were
anywhere to be seen except in the green grass and leafage; but
everywhere were those hectic and prismatic variants of some diseased,
underlying primary tone without a place among the known tints of
earth. The "Dutchman's breeches" became a thing of sinister menace, and
the bloodroots grew insolent in their chromatic perversion. Ammi and
the Gardners thought that most of the colours had a sort of haunting
familiarity, and decided that they reminded one of the brittle globule
in the meteor. Nahum ploughed and sowed the ten-acre pasture and the
upland lot, but did nothing with the land around the house. He knew it
would be of no use, and hoped that the summer's strange growths would
draw all the poison from the soil. He was prepared for almost anything
now, and had grown used to the sense of something near him waiting to
be heard. The shunning of his house by neighbors told on him, of
course; but it told on his wife more. The boys were better off, being
at school each day; but they could not help being frightened by the
gossip. Thaddeus, an especially sensitive youth, suffered the most.

In May the insects came, and Nahum's place became a nightmare of
buzzing and crawling. Most of the creatures seemed not quite usual in
their aspects and motions, and their nocturnal habits contradicted all
former experience. The Gardners took to watching at night--watching in
all directions at random for something--they could not tell what. It
was then that they owned that Thaddeus had been right about the trees.
Mrs. Gardner was the next to see it from the window as she watched the
swollen boughs of a maple against a moonlit sky. The boughs surely
moved, and there was no wind. It must be the sap. Strangeness had come
into everything growing now. Yet it was none of Nahum's family at all
who made the next discovery. Familiarity had dulled them, and what they
could not see was glimpsed by a timid windmill salesman from Bolton who
drove by one night in ignorance of the country legends. What he told in
Arkham was given a short paragraph in the Gazette; and it was there
that all the farmers, Nahum included, saw it first. The night had been
dark and the buggy-lamps faint, but around a farm in the valley which
everyone knew from the account must be Nahum's, the darkness had been
less thick. A dim though distinct luminosity seemed to inhere in all
the vegetation, grass, leaves, and blossoms alike, while at one moment
a detached piece of the phosphorescence appeared to stir furtively in
the yard near the barn.

The grass had so far seemed untouched, and the cows were freely
pastured in the lot near the house, but toward the end of May the milk
began to be bad. Then Nahum had the cows driven to the uplands, after
which this trouble ceased. Not long after this the change in grass and
leaves became apparent to the eye. All the verdure was going grey, and
was developing a highly singular quality of brittleness. Ammi was now
the only person who ever visited the place, and his visits were
becoming fewer and fewer. When school closed the Gardners were
virtually cut off from the world, and sometimes let Ammi do their
errands in town. They were failing curiously both physically and
mentally, and no one was surprised when the news of Mrs. Gardner's
madness stole around.

It happened in June, about the anniversary of the meteor's fall, and
the poor woman screamed about things in the air which she could not
describe. In her raving there was not a single specific noun, but only
verbs and pronouns. Things moved and changed and fluttered, and ears
tingled to impulses which were not wholly sounds. Something was taken
away--she was being drained of something--something was fastening
itself on her that ought not to be--someone must make it keep off--
nothing was ever still in the night--the walls and windows shifted.
Nahum did not send her to the county asylum, but let her wander about
the house as long as she was harmless to herself and others. Even when
her expression changed he did nothing. But when the boys grew afraid of
her, and Thaddeus nearly fainted at the way she made faces at him, he
decided to keep her locked in the attic. By July she had ceased to
speak and crawled on all fours, and before that month was over Nahum
got the mad notion that she was slightly luminous in the dark, as he
now clearly saw was the case with the nearby vegetation.

It was a little before this that the horses had stampeded. Something
had aroused them in the night, and their neighing and kicking in their
stalls had been terrible. There seemed virtually nothing to do to calm
them, and when Nahum opened the stable door they all bolted out like
frightened woodland deer. It took a week to track all four, and when
found they were seen to be quite useless and unmanageable. Something
had snapped in their brains, and each one had to be shot for its own
good. Nahum borrowed a horse from Ammi for his haying, but found it
would not approach the barn. It shied, balked, and whinnied, and in the
end he could do nothing but drive it into the yard while the men used
their own strength to get the heavy wagon near enough the hayloft for
convenient pitching. And all the while the vegetation was turning grey
and brittle. Even the flowers whose hues had been so strange were
greying now, and the fruit was coming out grey and dwarfed and
tasteless. The asters and golden-rod bloomed grey and distorted, and
the roses and zinneas and hollyhocks in the front yard were such
blasphemous-looking things that Nahum's oldest boy Zenas cut them down.
The strangely puffed insects died about that time, even the bees that
had left their hives and taken to the woods.

By September all the vegetation was fast crumbling to a greyish
powder, and Nahum feared that the trees would die before the poison was
out of the soil. His wife now had spells of terrific screaming, and he
and the boys were in a constant state of nervous tension. They shunned
people now, and when school opened the boys did not go. But it was
Ammi, on one of his rare visits, who first realised that the well water
was no longer good. It had an evil taste that was not exactly fetid nor
exactly salty, and Ammi advised his friend to dig another well on
higher ground to use till the soil was good again. Nahum, however,
ignored the warning, for he had by that time become calloused to
strange and unpleasant things. He and the boys continued to use the
tainted supply, drinking it as listlessly and mechanically as they ate
their meagre and ill-cooked meals and did their thankless and
monotonous chores through the aimless days. There was something of
stolid resignation about them all, as if they walked half in another
world between lines of nameless guards to a certain and familiar doom.

Thaddeus went mad in September after a visit to the well. He had
gone with a pail and had come back empty-handed, shrieking and waving
his arms, and sometimes lapsing into an inane titter or a whisper about
"the moving colours down there." Two in one family was pretty bad, but
Nahum was very brave about it. He let the boy run about for a week
until he began stumbling and hurting himself, and then he shut him in
an attic room across the hall from his mother's. The way they screamed
at each other from behind their locked doors was very terrible,
especially to little Merwin, who fancied they talked in some terrible
language that was not of earth. Merwin was getting frightfully
imaginative, and his restlessness was worse after the shutting away of
the brother who had been his greatest playmate.

Almost at the same time the mortality among the livestock commenced.
Poultry turned greyish and died very quickly, their meat being found
dry and noisome upon cutting. Hogs grew inordinately fat, then suddenly
began to undergo loathsome changes which no one could explain. Their
meat was of course useless, and Nahum was at his wit's end. No rural
veterinary would approach his place, and the city veterinary from
Arkham was openly baffled. The swine began growing grey and brittle and
falling to pieces before they died, and their eyes and muzzles
developed singular alterations. It was very inexplicable, for they had
never been fed from the tainted vegetation. Then something struck the
cows. Certain areas or sometimes the whole body would be uncannily
shrivelled or compressed, and atrocious collapses or disintegrations
were common. In the last stages--and death was always the result--
there would be a greying and turning brittle like that which beset the
hogs. There could be no question of poison, for all the cases occurred
in a locked and undisturbed barn. No bites of prowling things could
have brought the virus, for what live beast of earth can pass through
solid obstacles? It must be only natural disease--yet what disease
could wreak such results was beyond any mind's guessing. When the
harvest came there was not an animal surviving on the place, for the
stock and poultry were dead and the dogs had run away. These dogs,
three in number, had all vanished one night and were never heard of
again. The five cats had left some time before, but their going was
scarcely noticed since there now seemed to be no mice, and only Mrs.
Gardner had made pets of the graceful felines.

On the nineteenth of October Nahum staggered into Ammi's house with
hideous news. The death had come to poor Thaddeus in his attic room,
and it had come in a way which could not be told. Nahum had dug a grave
in the railed family plot behind the farm, and had put therein what he
found. There could have been nothing from outside, for the small barred
window and locked door were intact; but it was much as it had been in
the barn. Ammi and his wife consoled the stricken man as best they
could, but shuddered as they did so. Stark terror seemed to cling round
the Gardners and all they touched, and the very presence of one in the
house was a breath from regions unnamed and unnamable. Ammi accompanied
Nahum home with the greatest reluctance, and did what he might to calm
the hysterical sobbing of little Merwin. Zenas needed no calming. He
had come of late to do nothing but stare into space and obey what his
father told him; and Ammi thought that his fate was very merciful. Now
and then Merwin's screams were answered faintly from the attic, and in
response to an inquiring look Nahum said that his wife was getting very
feeble. When night approached, Ammi managed to get away; for not even
friendship could make him stay in that spot when the faint glow of the
vegetation began and the trees may or may not have swayed without wind.
It was really lucky for Ammi that he was not more imaginative. Even as
things were, his mind was bent ever so slightly; but had he been able
to connect and reflect upon all the portents around him he must
inevitably have turned a total maniac. In the twilight he hastened
home, the screams of the mad woman and the nervous child ringing
horribly in his ears.

Three days later Nahum burst into Ammi's kitchen in the early
morning, and in the absence of his host stammered out a desperate tale
once more, while Mrs. Pierce listened in a clutching fright. It was
little Merwin this time. He was gone. He had gone out late at night
with a lantern and pail for water, and had never come back. He'd been
going to pieces for days, and hardly knew what he was about. Screamed
at everything. There had been a frantic shriek from the yard then, but
before the father could get to the door the boy was gone. There was no
glow from the lantern he had taken, and of the child himself no trace.
At the time Nahum thought the lantern and pail were gone too; but when
dawn came, and the man had plodded back from his all-night search of
the woods and fields, he had found some very curious things near the
well. There was a crushed and apparently somewhat melted mass of iron
which had certainly been the lantern; while a bent handle and twisted
iron hoops beside it, both half-fused, seemed to hint at the remnants
of the pail. That was all. Nahum was past imagining, Mrs. Pierce was
blank, and Ammi, when he had reached home and heard the tale, could
give no guess. Merwin was gone, and there would be no use in telling
the people around, who shunned all Gardners now. No use, either, in
telling the city people at Arkham who laughed at everything. Thad was
gone, and now Merwin was gone. Something was creeping and creeping and
waiting to be seen and heard. Nahum would go soon, and he wanted Ammi
to look after his wife and Zenas if they survived him. It must all be a
judgment of some sort; though he could not fancy what for, since he had
always walked uprightly in the Lord's ways so far as he knew.

For over two weeks Ammi saw nothing of Nahum; and then, worried
about what might have happened, he overcame his fears and paid the
Gardner place a visit. There was no smoke from the great chimney, and
for a moment the visitor was apprehensive of the worst. The aspect of
the whole farm was shocking--greyish withered grass and leaves on the
ground, vines falling in brittle wreckage from archaic walls and
gables, and great bare trees clawing up at the grey November sky with a
studied malevolence which Ammi could not but feel had come from some
subtle change in the tilt of the branches. But Nahum was alive, after
all. He was weak, and lying on a couch in the low-ceiled kitchen, but
perfectly conscious and able to give simple orders to Zenas. The room
was deadly cold; and as Ammi visibly shivered, the host shouted huskily
to Zenas for more wood. Wood, indeed, was sorely needed; since the
cavernous fireplace was unlit and empty, with a cloud of soot blowing
about in the chill wind that came down the chimney. Presently Nahum
asked him if the extra wood had made him any more comfortable, and then
Ammi saw what had happened. The stoutest cord had broken at last, and
the hapless farmer's mind was proof against more sorrow.

Questioning tactfully, Ammi could get no clear data at all about the
missing Zenas. "In the well--he lives in the well--" was all that the
clouded father would say. Then there flashed across the visitor's mind
a sudden thought of the mad wife, and he changed his line of inquiry.
"Nabby? Why, here she is!" was the surprised response of poor Nahum,
and Ammi soon saw that he must search for himself. Leaving the harmless
babbler on the couch, he took the keys from their nail beside the door
and climbed the creaking stairs to the attic. It was very close and
noisome up there, and no sound could be heard from any direction. Of
the four doors in sight, only one was locked, and on this he tried
various keys of the ring he had taken. The third key proved the right
one, and after some fumbling Ammi threw open the low white door.

It was quite dark inside, for the window was small and half-obscured
by the crude wooden bars; and Ammi could see nothing at all on the
wide-planked floor. The stench was beyond enduring, and before
proceeding further he had to retreat to another room and return with
his lungs filled with breathable air. When he did enter he saw
something dark in the corner, and upon seeing it more clearly he
screamed outright. While he screamed he thought a momentary cloud
eclipsed the window, and a second later he felt himself brushed as if
by some hateful current of vapour. Strange colours danced before his
eyes; and had not a present horror numbed him he would have thought of
the globule in the meteor that the geologist's hammer had shattered,
and of the morbid vegetation that had sprouted in the spring. As it was
he thought only of the blasphemous monstrosity which confronted him,
and which all too clearly had shared the nameless fate of young
Thaddeus and the livestock. But the terrible thing about the horror was
that it very slowly and perceptibly moved as it continued to crumble.

Ammi would give me no added particulars of this scene, but the shape
in the comer does not reappear in his tale as a moving object. There
are things which cannot be mentioned, and what is done in common
humanity is sometimes cruelly judged by the law. I gathered that no
moving thing was left in that attic room, and that to leave anything
capable of motion there would have been a deed so monstrous as to damn
any accountable being to eternal torment. Anyone but a stolid farmer
would have fainted or gone mad, but Ammi walked conscious through that
low doorway and locked the accursed secret behind him. There would be
Nahum to deal with now; he must be fed and tended, and removed to some
place where he could be cared for.

Commencing his descent of the dark stairs. Ammi heard a thud below
him. He even thought a scream had been suddenly choked off, and
recalled nervously the clammy vapour which had brushed by him in that
frightful room above. What presence had his cry and entry started up?
Halted by some vague fear, he heard still further sounds below.
Indubitably there was a sort of heavy dragging, and a most detestably
sticky noise as of some fiendish and unclean species of suction. With
an associative sense goaded to feverish heights, he thought
unaccountably of what he had seen upstairs. Good God! What eldritch
dream-world was this into which he had blundered? He dared move neither
backward nor forward, but stood there trembling at the black curve of
the boxed-in staircase. Every trifle of the scene burned itself into
his brain. The sounds, the sense of dread expectancy, the darkness, the
steepness of the narrow step--and merciful Heaven!--the faint but
unmistakable luminosity of all the woodwork in sight; steps, sides,
exposed laths, and beams alike.

Then there burst forth a frantic whinny from Ammi's horse outside,
followed at once by a clatter which told of a frenzied runaway. In
another moment horse and buggy had gone beyond earshot, leaving the
frightened man on the dark stairs to guess what had sent them. But that
was not all. There had been another sound out there. A sort of liquid
splash--water--it must have been the well. He had left Hero untied
near it, and a buggy wheel must have brushed the coping and knocked in
a stone. And still the pale phosphorescence glowed in that detestably
ancient woodwork. God! how old the house was! Most of it built before
1670, and the gambrel roof no later than 1730.

A feeble scratching on the floor downstairs now sounded distinctly,
and Ammi's grip tightened on a heavy stick he had picked up in the
attic for some purpose. Slowly nerving himself, he finished his descent
and walked boldly toward the kitchen. But he did not complete the walk,
because what he sought was no longer there. It had come to meet him,
and it was still alive after a fashion. Whether it had crawled or
whether it had been dragged by any external forces, Ammi could not say;
but the death had been at it. Everything had happened in the last
half-hour, but collapse, greying, and disintegration were already far
advanced. There was a horrible brittleness, and dry fragments were
scaling off. Ammi could not touch it, but looked horrifiedly into the
distorted parody that had been a face. "What was it, Nahum--what was
it?" He whispered, and the cleft, bulging lips were just able to
crackle out a final answer.

"Nothin'...nothin'...the colour...it burns...cold an' wet, but
it burns...it lived in the well...I seen it...a kind of smoke...
jest like the flowers last spring...the well shone at night...Thad
an' Merwin an' Zenas...everything alive...suckin' the life out of
everything...in that stone...it must a' come in that stone pizened
the whole place...dun't know what it wants...that round thing them
men from the college dug outen the stone...they smashed it...it was
the same colour...jest the same, like the flowers an' plants...must
a' ben more of 'em...seeds...seeds...they growed...I seen it the
fust time this week...must a' got strong on Zenas...he was a big boy,
full o' life...it beats down your mind an' then gets ye...burns ye
up...in the well water...you was right about that...evil water...
Zenas never come back from the well...can't git away...draws ye...ye
know summ'at's comin' but tain't no use...I seen it time an' agin
senct Zenas was took...whar's Nabby, Ammi?...my head's no good...
dun't know how long sense I fed her...it'll git her ef we ain't
keerful...jest a colour...her face is gittin' to hev that colour
sometimes towards night...an' it burns an' sucks...it come from some
place whar things ain't as they is here...one o' them professors said
so...he was right...look out, Ammi, it'll do suthin' more...sucks
the life out..."

But that was all. That which spoke could speak no more because it
had completely caved in. Ammi laid a red checked tablecloth over what
was left and reeled out the back door into the fields. He climbed the
slope to the ten-acre pasture and stumbled home by the north road and
the woods. He could not pass that well from which his horses had run
away. He had looked at it through the window, and had seen that no
stone was missing from the rim. Then the lurching buggy had not
dislodged anything after all--the splash had been something else--
something which went into the well after it had done with poor Nahum.

When Ammi reached his house the horses and buggy had arrived before
him and thrown his wife into fits of anxiety. Reassuring her without
explanations, he set out at once for Arkham and notified the
authorities that the Gardner family was no more. He indulged in no
details, but merely told of the deaths of Nahum and Nabby, that of
Thaddeus being already known, and mentioned that the cause seemed to be
the same strange ailment which had killed the live-stock. He also
stated that Merwin and Zenas had disappeared. There was considerable
questioning at the police station, and in the end Ammi was compelled to
take three officers to the Gardner farm, together with the coroner, the
medical examiner, and the veterinary who had treated the diseased
animals. He went much against his will, for the afternoon was advancing
and he feared the fall of night over that accursed place, but it was
some comfort to have so many people with him.

The six men drove out in a democrat-wagon, following Ammi's buggy,
and arrived at the pest-ridden farmhouse about four o'clock. Used as
the officers were to gruesome experiences, not one remained unmoved at
what was found in the attic and under the red checked tablecloth on the
floor below. The whole aspect of the farm with its grey desolation was
terrible enough, but those two crumbling objects were beyond all
bounds. No one could look long at them, and even the medical examiner
admitted that there was very little to examine. Specimens could be
analysed, of course, so he busied himself in obtaining them--and here
it develops that a very puzzling aftermath occurred at the college
laboratory where the two phials of dust were finally taken. Under the
spectroscope both samples gave off an unknown spectrum, in which many
of the baffling bands were precisely like those which the strange
meteor had yielded in the previous year. The property of emitting this
spectrum vanished in a month, the dust thereafter consisting mainly of
alkaline phosphates and carbonates.

Ammi would not have told the men about the well if he had thought
they meant to do anything then and there. It was getting toward sunset,
and he was anxious to be away. But he could not help glancing nervously
at the stony curb by the great sweep, and when a detective questioned
him he admitted that Nahum had feared something down there so much so
that he had never even thought of searching it for Merwin or Zenas.
After that nothing would do but that they empty and explore the well
immediately, so Ammi had to wait trembling while pail after pail of
rank water was hauled up and splashed on the soaking ground outside.
The men sniffed in disgust at the fluid, and toward the last held their
noses against the foetor they were uncovering. It was not so long a job
as they had feared it would be, since the water was phenomenally low.
There is no need to speak too exactly of what they found. Merwin and
Zenas were both there, in part, though the vestiges were mainly
skeletal. There were also a small deer and a large dog in about the
same state, and a number of bones of small animals. The ooze and slime
at the bottom seemed inexplicably porous and bubbling, and a man who
descended on hand-holds with a long pole found that he could sink the
wooden shaft to any depth in the mud of the floor without meeting any
solid obstruction.

Twilight had now fallen, and lanterns were brought from the house.
Then, when it was seen that nothing further could be gained from the
well, everyone went indoors and conferred in the ancient sitting-room
while the intermittent light of a spectral half-moon played wanly on
the grey desolation outside. The men were frankly nonplussed by the
entire case, and could find no convincing common element to link the
strange vegetable conditions, the unknown disease of live-stock and
humans, and the unaccountable deaths of Merwin and Zenas in the tainted
well. They had heard the common country talk, it is true; but could not
believe that anything contrary to natural law had occurred. No doubt
the meteor had poisoned the soil, but the illness of persons and
animals who had eaten nothing grown in that soil was another matter.
Was it the well water? Very possibly. It might be a good idea to
analyze it. But what peculiar madness could have made both boys jump
into the well? Their deeds were so similar-and the fragments showed
that they had both suffered from the grey brittle death. Why was
everything so grey and brittle?

It was the coroner, seated near a window overlooking the yard, who
first noticed the glow about the well. Night had fully set in, and all
the abhorrent grounds seemed faintly luminous with more than the fitful
moonbeams; but this new glow was something definite and distinct, and
appeared to shoot up from the black pit like a softened ray from a
searchlight, giving dull reflections in the little ground pools where
the water had been emptied. It had a very queer colour, and as all the
men clustered round the window Ammi gave a violent start. For this
strange beam of ghastly miasma was to him of no unfamiliar hue. He had
seen that colour before, and feared to think what it might mean. He had
seen it in the nasty brittle globule in that aerolite two summers ago,
had seen it in the crazy vegetation of the springtime, and had thought
he had seen it for an instant that very morning against the small
barred window of that terrible attic room where nameless things had
happened. It had flashed there a second, and a clammy and hateful
current of vapour had brushed past him--and then poor Nahum had been
taken by something of that colour. He had said so at the last--said it
was like the globule and the plants. After that had come the runaway in
the yard and the splash in the well and now that well was belching
forth to the night a pale insidious beam of the same demoniac tint.

It does credit to the alertness of Ammi's mind that he puzzled even
at that tense moment over a point which was essentially scientific. He
could not but wonder at his gleaning of the same impression from a
vapour glimpsed in the daytime, against a window opening on the morning
sky, and from a nocturnal exhalation seen as a phosphorescent mist
against the black and blasted landscape. It wasn't right--it was
against Nature--and he thought of those terrible last words of his
stricken friend, "It come from some place whar things ain't as they is
here...one o' them professors said so..."

All three horses outside, tied to a pair of shrivelled saplings by
the road, were now neighing and pawing frantically. The wagon driver
started for the door to do something, but Ammi laid a shaky hand on his
shoulder. "Dun't go out thar," he whispered. "They's more to this nor
what we know. Nahum said somethin' lived in the well that sucks your
life out. He said it must be some'at growed from a round ball like one
we all seen in the meteor stone that fell a year ago June. Sucks an'
burns, he said, an' is jest a cloud of colour like that light out thar
now, that ye can hardly see an' can't tell what it is. Nahum thought it
feeds on everything livin' an' gits stronger all the time. He said he
seen it this last week. It must be somethin' from away off in the sky
like the men from the college last year says the meteor stone was. The
way it's made an' the way it works ain't like no way o' God's world.
It's some'at from beyond."

So the men paused indecisively as the light from the well grew
stronger and the hitched horses pawed and whinnied in increasing
frenzy. It was truly an awful moment; with terror in that ancient and
accursed house itself, four monstrous sets of fragments--two from the
house and two from the well--in the woodshed behind, and that shaft of
unknown and unholy iridescence from the slimy depths in front. Ammi had
restrained the driver on impulse, forgetting how uninjured he himself
was after the clammy brushing of that coloured vapour in the attic
room, but perhaps it is just as well that he acted as he did. No one
will ever know what was abroad that night; and though the blasphemy
from beyond had not so far hurt any human of unweakened mind, there is
no telling what it might not have done at that last moment, and with
its seemingly increased strength and the special signs of purpose it
was soon to display beneath the half-clouded moonlit sky.

All at once one of the detectives at the window gave a short, sharp
gasp. The others looked at him, and then quickly followed his own gaze
upward to the point at which its idle straying had been suddenly
arrested. There was no need for words. What had been disputed in
country gossip was disputable no longer, and it is because of the thing
which every man of that party agreed in whispering later on, that the
strange days are never talked about in Arkham. It is necessary to
premise that there was no wind at that hour of the evening. One did
arise not long afterward, but there was absolutely none then. Even the
dry tips of the lingering hedge-mustard, grey and blighted, and the
fringe on the roof of the standing democrat-wagon were unstirred. And
yet amid that tense godless calm the high bare boughs of all the trees
in the yard were moving. They were twitching morbidly and
spasmodically, clawing in convulsive and epileptic madness at the
moonlit clouds; scratching impotently in the noxious air as if jerked
by some allied and bodiless line of linkage with subterrene horrors
writhing and struggling below the black roots.

Not a man breathed for several seconds. Then a cloud of darker depth
passed over the moon, and the silhouette of clutching branches faded
out momentarily. At this there was a general cry; muffled with awe, but
husky and almost identical from every throat. For the terror had not
faded with the silhouette, and in a fearsome instant of deeper darkness
the watchers saw wriggling at that tree top height a thousand tiny
points of faint and unhallowed radiance, tipping each bough like the
fire of St. Elmo or the flames that come down on the apostles' heads at
Pentecost. It was a monstrous constellation of unnatural light, like a
glutted swarm of corpse-fed fireflies dancing hellish sarabands over an
accursed marsh, and its colour was that same nameless intrusion which
Ammi had come to recognize and dread. All the while the shaft of
phosphorescence from the well was getting brighter and brighter,
bringing to the minds of the huddled men, a sense of doom and
abnormality which far outraced any image their conscious minds could
form. It was no longer shining out; it was pouring out; and as the
shapeless stream of unplaceable colour left the well it seemed to flow
directly into the sky.

The veterinary shivered, and walked to the front door to drop the
heavy extra bar across it. Ammi shook no less, and had to tug and point
for lack of controllable voice when he wished to draw notice to the
growing luminosity of the trees. The neighing and stamping of the
horses had become utterly frightful, but not a soul of that group in
the old house would have ventured forth for any earthly reward. With
the moments the shining of the trees increased, while their restless
branches seemed to strain more and more toward verticality. The wood of
the well-sweep was shining now, and presently a policeman dumbly
pointed to some wooden sheds and bee-hives near the stone wall on the
west. They were commencing to shine, too, though the tethered vehicles
of the visitors seemed so far unaffected. Then there was a wild
commotion and clopping in the road, and as Ammi quenched the lamp for
better seeing they realized that the span of frantic greys had broken
their sapling and run off with the democrat-wagon.

The shock served to loosen several tongues, and embarrassed whispers
were exchanged. "It spreads on everything organic that's been around
here," muttered the medical examiner. No one replied, but the man who
had been in the well gave a hint that his long pole must have stirred
up something intangible. "It was awful," he added. "There was no bottom
at all. Just ooze and bubbles and the feeling of something lurking
under there." Ammi's horse still pawed and screamed deafeningly in the
road outside, and nearly drowned its owner's faint quaver as he mumbled
his formless reflections. "It come from that stone--it growed down
thar--it got everything livin'--it fed itself on 'em, mind and body--Thad
an' Merwin, Zenas an' Nabby--Nahum was the last--they all drunk
the water--it got strong on 'em--it come from beyond, whar things
ain't like they be here--now it's goin' home--"

At this point, as the column of unknown colour flared suddenly
stronger and began to weave itself into fantastic suggestions of shape
which each spectator described differently, there came from poor
tethered Hero such a sound as no man before or since ever heard from a
horse. Every person in that low-pitched sitting room stopped his ears,
and Ammi turned away from the window in horror and nausea. Words could
not convey it--when Ammi looked out again the hapless beast lay
huddled inert on the moonlit ground between the splintered shafts of
the buggy. That was the last of Hero till they buried him next day. But
the present was no time to mourn, for almost at this instant a
detective silently called attention to something terrible in the very
room with them. In the absence of the lamplight it was clear that a
faint phosphorescence had begun to pervade the entire apartment. It
glowed on the broad-planked floor and the fragment of rag carpet, and
shimmered over the sashes of the small-paned windows. It ran up and
down the exposed corner-posts, coruscated about the shelf and mantel,
and infected the very doors and furniture. Each minute saw it
strengthen, and at last it was very plain that healthy living things
must leave that house.

Ammi showed them the back door and the path up through the fields to
the ten-acre pasture. They walked and stumbled as in a dream, and did
not dare look back till they were far away on the high ground. They
were glad of the path, for they could not have gone the front way, by
that well. It was bad enough passing the glowing barn and sheds, and
those shining orchard trees with their gnarled, fiendish contours; but
thank Heaven the branches did their worst twisting high up. The moon
went under some very black clouds as they crossed the rustic bridge
over Chapman's Brook, and it was blind groping from there to the open
meadows.

When they looked back toward the valley and the distant Gardner
place at the bottom they saw a fearsome sight. At the farm was shining
with the hideous unknown blend of colour; trees, buildings, and even
such grass and herbage as had not been wholly changed to lethal grey
brittleness. The boughs were all straining skyward, tipped with tongues
of foul flame, and lambent tricklings of the same monstrous fire were
creeping about the ridgepoles of the house, barn and sheds. It was a
scene from a vision of Fuseli, and over all the rest reigned that riot
of luminous amorphousness, that alien and undimensioned rainbow of
cryptic poison from the well--seething, feeling, lapping, reaching,
scintillating, straining, and malignly bubbling in its cosmic and
unrecognizable chromaticism.

Then without warning the hideous thing shot vertically up toward the
sky like a rocket or meteor, leaving behind no trail and disappearing
through a round and curiously regular hole in the clouds before any man
could gasp or cry out. No watcher can ever forget that sight, and Ammi
stared blankly at the stars of Cygnus, Deneb twinkling above the
others, where the unknown colour had melted into the Milky Way. But his
gaze was the next moment called swiftly to earth by the crackling in
the valley. It was just that. Only a wooden ripping and crackling, and
not an explosion, as so many others of the party vowed. Yet the outcome
was the same, for in one feverish kaleidoscopic instant there burst up
from that doomed and accursed farm a gleamingly eruptive cataclysm of
unnatural sparks and substance; blurring the glance of the few who saw
it, and sending forth to the zenith a bombarding cloudburst of such
coloured and fantastic fragments as our universe must needs disown.
Through quickly reclosing vapours they followed the great morbidity
that had vanished, and in another second they had vanished too. Behind
and below was only a darkness to which the men dared not return, and
all about was a mounting wind which seemed to sweep down in black,
frore gusts from interstellar space. It shrieked and howled, and lashed
the fields and distorted woods in a mad cosmic frenzy, till soon the
trembling party realized it would be no use waiting for the moon to
show what was left down there at Nahum's.

Too awed even to hint theories, the seven shaking men trudged back
toward Arkham by the north road. Ammi was worse than his fellows, and
begged them to see him inside his own kitchen, instead of keeping
straight on to town. He did not wish to cross the blighted,
wind-whipped woods alone to his home on the main road. For he had had
an added shock that the others were spared, and was crushed forever
with a brooding fear he dared not even mention for many years to come.
As the rest of the watchers on that tempestuous hill had stolidly set
their faces toward the road, Ammi had looked back an instant at the
shadowed valley of desolation so lately sheltering his ill-starred
friend. And from that stricken, far-away spot he had seen something
feebly rise, only to sink down again upon the place from which the
great shapeless horror had shot into the sky. It was just a colour--but
not any colour of our earth or heavens. And because Ammi recognized
that colour, and knew that this last faint remnant must still lurk down
there in the well, he has never been quite right since.

Ammi would never go near the place again. It is forty-four years now
since the horror happened, but he has never been there, and will be
glad when the new reservoir blots it out. I shall be glad, too, for I
do not like the way the sunlight changed colour around the mouth of
that abandoned well I passed. I hope the water will always be very deep
--but even so, I shall never drink it. I do not think I shall visit the
Arkham country hereafter. Three of the men who had been with Ammi
returned the next morning to see the ruins by daylight, but there were
not any real ruins. Only the bricks of the chimney, the stones of the
cellar, some mineral and metallic litter here and there, and the rim of
that nefandous well. Save for Ammi's dead horse, which they towed away
and buried, and the buggy which they shortly returned to him,
everything that had ever been living had gone. Five eldritch acres of
dusty grey desert remained, nor has anything ever grown there since. To
this day it sprawls open to the sky like a great spot eaten by acid in
the woods and fields, and the few who have ever dared glimpse it in
spite of the rural tales have named it "the blasted heath."

The rural tales are queer. They might be even queerer if city men
and college chemists could be interested enough to analyze the water
from that disused well, or the grey dust that no wind seems to
disperse. Botanists, too, ought to study the stunted flora on the
borders of that spot, for they might shed light on the country notion
that the blight is spreading--little by little, perhaps an inch a
year. People say the colour of the neighboring herbage is not quite
right in the spring, and that wild things leave queer prints in the
light winter snow. Snow never seems quite so heavy on the blasted heath
as it is elsewhere. Horses--the few that are left in this motor age--
grow skittish in the silent valley; and hunters cannot depend on their
dogs too near the splotch of greyish dust.

They say the mental influences are very bad, too; numbers went queer
in the years after Nahum's taking, and always they lacked the power to
get away. Then the stronger-minded folk all left the region, and only
the foreigners tried to live in the crumbling old homesteads. They
could not stay, though; and one sometimes wonders what insight beyond
ours their wild, weird stories of whispered magic have given them.
Their dreams at night, they protest, are very horrible in that
grotesque country; and surely the very look of the dark realm is enough
to stir a morbid fancy. No traveler has ever escaped a sense of
strangeness in those deep ravines, and artists shiver as they paint
thick woods whose mystery is as much of the spirits as of the eye. I
myself am curious about the sensation I derived from my one lone walk
before Ammi told me his tale. When twilight came I had vaguely wished
some clouds would gather, for an odd timidity about the deep skyey
voids above had crept into my soul.

Do not ask me for my opinion. I do not know--that is all. There was
no one but Ammi to question; for Arkham people will not talk about the
strange days, and all three professors who saw the aerolite and its
coloured globule are dead. There were other globules--depend upon
that. One must have fed itself and escaped, and probably there was
another which was too late. No doubt it is still down the well--I know
there was something wrong with the sunlight I saw above the miasmal
brink. The rustics say the blight creeps an inch a year, so perhaps
there is a kind of growth or nourishment even now. But whatever demon
hatchling is there, it must be tethered to something or else it would
quickly spread. Is it fastened to the roots of those trees that claw
the air? One of the current Arkham tales is about fat oaks that shine
and move as they ought not to do at night.

What it is, only God knows. In terms of matter I suppose the thing
Ammi described would be called a gas, but this gas obeyed the laws that
are not of our cosmos. This was no fruit of such worlds and suns as
shine on the telescopes and photographic plates of our observatories.
This was no breath from the skies whose motions and dimensions our
astronomers measure or deem too vast to measure. It was just a colour
out of space--a frightful messenger from unformed realms of infinity
beyond all Nature as we know it; from realms whose mere existence stuns
the brain and numbs us with the black extra-cosmic gulfs it throws open
before our frenzied eyes.

I doubt very much if Ammi consciously lied to me, and I do not think
his tale was all a freak of madness as the townsfolk had forewarned.
Something terrible came to the hills and valleys on that meteor, and
something terrible--though I know not in what proportion--still
remains. I shall be glad to see the water come. Meanwhile I hope
nothing will happen to Ammi. He saw so much of the thing--and its
influence was so insidious. Why has he never been able to move away?
How clearly he recalled those dying words of Nahum's--"Can't git away
--draws ye--ye know summ'at's comin' but tain't no use--". Ammi is
such a good old man--when the reservoir gang gets to work I must write
the chief engineer to keep a sharp watch on him. I would hate to think
of him as the grey, twisted, brittle monstrosity which persists more
and more in troubling my sleep.



* THE CALL OF CTHULHU

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

--Algernon Blackwood


I. The Horror In Clay

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

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

My knowledge of the thing began in the winter of 1926-27 with the
death of my great-uncle, George Gammell Angell, Professor Emeritus of
Semitic Languages in 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 childhood excited attention through
the strange stories and odd dreams he was in the habit of relating. He
called himself "psychically hypersensitive", but the staid folk of the
ancient commercial city dismissed him as merely "queer." Never mingling
much with his kind, he had dropped gradually from social visibility,
and was now known only to a small group of aesthetes from other towns.
Even the Providence Art Club, anxious to preserve its conservatism, had
found him quite hopeless.

On the occasion of the visit, ran the professor's manuscript, the
sculptor abruptly asked for the benefit of his host's archeological
knowledge in identifying the hieroglyphics of the bas-relief. He spoke
in a dreamy, stilted manner which suggested pose and alienated
sympathy; and my uncle showed some sharpness in replying, for the
conspicuous freshness of the tablet implied kinship with anything but
archeology. Young Wilcox's rejoinder, which impressed my uncle enough
to make him recall and record it verbatim, was of a fantastically
poetic cast which must have typified his whole conversation, and which
I have since found highly characteristic of him. He said, "It is new,
indeed, for I made it last night in a dream of strange cities; and
dreams are older than brooding Tyre, or the contemplative Sphinx, or
garden-girdled Babylon."

It was then that he began that rambling tale which suddenly played
upon a sleeping memory and won the fevered interest of my uncle. There
had been a slight earthquake tremor the night before, the most
considerable felt in New England for some years; and Wilcox's
imagination had been keenly affected. Upon retiring, he had had an
unprecedented dream of great Cyclopean cities of Titan blocks and
sky-flung monoliths, all dripping with green ooze and sinister with
latent horror. Hieroglyphics had covered the walls and pillars, and
from some undetermined point below had come a voice that was not a
voice; a chaotic sensation which only fancy could transmute into sound,
but which he attempted to render by the almost unpronounceable jumble
of letters: "Cthulhu fhtagn."

This verbal jumble was the key to the recollection which excited and
disturbed Professor Angell. He questioned the sculptor with scientific
minuteness; and studied with frantic intensity the bas-relief on which
the youth had found himself working, chilled and clad only in his night
clothes, when waking had stolen bewilderingly over him. My uncle blamed
his old age, Wilcox afterwards said, for his slowness in recognizing
both hieroglyphics and pictorial design. Many of his questions seemed
highly out of place to his visitor, especially those which tried to
connect the latter with strange cults or societies; and Wilcox could
not understand the repeated promises of silence which he was offered in
exchange for an admission of membership in some widespread mystical or
paganly religious body. When Professor Angell became convinced that the
sculptor was indeed ignorant of any cult or system of cryptic lore, he
besieged his visitor with demands for future reports of dreams. This
bore regular fruit, for after the first interview the manuscript
records daily calls of the young man, during which he related startling
fragments of nocturnal imaginery whose burden was always some terrible
Cyclopean vista of dark and dripping stone, with a subterrene voice or
intelligence shouting monotonously in enigmatical sense-impacts
uninscribable save as gibberish. The two sounds frequently repeated are
those rendered by the letters "Cthulhu" and "R'lyeh."

On March 23, the manuscript continued, Wilcox failed to appear; and
inquiries at his quarters revealed that he had been stricken with an
obscure sort of fever and taken to the home of his family in Waterman
Street. He had cried out in the night, arousing several other artists
in the building, and had manifested since then only alternations of
unconsciousness and delirium. My uncle at once telephoned the family,
and from that time forward kept close watch of the case; calling often
at the Thayer Street office of Dr. Tobey, whom he learned to be in
charge. The youth's febrile mind, apparently, was dwelling on strange
things; and the doctor shuddered now and then as he spoke of them. They
included not only a repetition of what he had formerly dreamed, but
touched wildly on a gigantic thing "miles high" which walked or
lumbered about.

He at no time fully described this object but occasional frantic
words, as repeated by Dr. Tobey, convinced the professor that it must
be identical with the nameless monstrosity he had sought to depict in
his dream-sculpture. Reference to this object, the doctor added, was
invariably a prelude to the young man's subsidence into lethargy. His
temperature, oddly enough, was not greatly above normal; but the whole
condition was otherwise such as to suggest true fever rather than
mental disorder.

On April 2 at about 3 P.M. every trace of Wilcox's malady suddenly
ceased. He sat upright in bed, astonished to find himself at home and
completely ignorant of what had happened in dream or reality since the
night of March 22. Pronounced well by his physician, he returned to his
quarters in three days; but to Professor Angell he was of no further
assistance. All traces of strange dreaming had vanished with his
recovery, and my uncle kept no record of his night-thoughts after a
week of pointless and irrelevant accounts of thoroughly usual visions.

Here the first part of the manuscript ended, but references to
certain of the scattered notes gave me much material for thought--so
much, in fact, that only the ingrained skepticism then forming my
philosophy can account for my continued distrust of the artist. The
notes in question were those descriptive of the dreams of various
persons covering the same period as that in which young Wilcox had had
his strange visitations. My uncle, it seems, had quickly instituted a
prodigiously far-flung body of inquires amongst nearly all the friends
whom he could question without impertinence, asking for nightly reports
of their dreams, and the dates of any notable visions for some time
past. The reception of his request seems to have varied; but he must,
at the very least, have received more responses than any ordinary man
could have handled without a secretary. This original correspondence
was not preserved, but his notes formed a thorough and really
significant digest. Average people in society and business--New
England's traditional "salt of the earth"--gave an almost completely
negative result, though scattered cases of uneasy but formless
nocturnal impressions appear here and there, always between March 23
and April 2--the period of young Wilcox's delirium. Scientific men
were little more affected, though four cases of vague description
suggest fugitive glimpses of strange landscapes, and in one case there
is mentioned a dread of something abnormal.

It was from the artists and poets that the pertinent answers came,
and I know that panic would have broken loose had they been able to
compare notes. As it was, lacking their original letters, I half
suspected the compiler of having asked leading questions, or of having
edited the correspondence in corroboration of what he had latently
resolved to see. That is why I continued to feel that Wilcox, somehow
cognizant of the old data which my uncle had possessed, had been
imposing on the veteran scientist. These responses from esthetes told
disturbing tale. From February 28 to April 2 a large proportion of them
had dreamed very bizarre things, the intensity of the dreams being
immeasurably the stronger during the period of the sculptor's delirium.
Over a fourth of those who reported anything, reported scenes and
half-sounds not unlike those which Wilcox had described; and some of
the dreamers confessed acute fear of the gigantic nameless thing
visible toward the last. One case, which the note describes with
emphasis, was very sad. The subject, a widely known architect with
leanings toward theosophy and occultism, went violently insane on the
date of young Wilcox's seizure, and expired several months later after
incessant screamings to be saved from some escaped denizen of hell. Had
my uncle referred to these cases by name instead of merely by number, I
should have attempted some corroboration and personal investigation;
but as it was, I succeeded in tracing down only a few. All of these,
however, bore out the notes in full. I have often wondered if all the
the objects of the professor's questioning felt as puzzled as did this
fraction. It is well that no explanation shall ever reach them.

The press cuttings, as I have intimated, touched on cases of panic,
mania, and eccentricity during the given period. Professor Angell must
have employed a cutting bureau, for the number of extracts was
tremendous, and the sources scattered throughout the globe. Here was a
nocturnal suicide in London, where a lone sleeper had leaped from a
window after a shocking cry. Here likewise a rambling letter to the
editor of a paper in South America, where a fanatic deduces a dire
future from visions he has seen. A dispatch from California describes a
theosophist colony as donning white robes en masse for some "glorious
fulfilment" which never arrives, whilst items from India speak guardedly
of serious native unrest toward the end of March 22-23.

The west of Ireland, too, is full of wild rumour and legendry, and a
fantastic painter named Ardois-Bonnot hangs a blasphemous Dream
Landscape in the Paris spring salon of 1926. And so numerous are the
recorded troubles in insane asylums that only a miracle can have
stopped the medical fraternity from noting strange parallelisms and
drawing mystified conclusions. A weird bunch of cuttings, all told; and
I can at this date scarcely envisage the callous rationalism with which
I set them aside. But I was then convinced that young Wilcox had known
of the older matters mentioned by the professor.



II. The Tale of Inspector Legrasse

The older matters which had made the sculptor's dream and bas-relief
so significant to my uncle formed the subject of the second half of his
long manuscript. Once before, it appears, Professor Angell had seen the
hellish outlines of the nameless monstrosity, puzzled over the unknown
hieroglyphics, and heard the ominous syllables which can be rendered
only as "Cthulhu"; and all this in so stirring and horrible a
connection that it is small wonder he pursued young Wilcox with queries
and demands for data.

This earlier experience had come in 1908, seventeen years before,
when the American Archaeological Society held its annual meeting in St.
Louis. Professor Angell, as befitted one of his authority and
attainments, had had a prominent part in all the deliberations; and was
one of the first to be approached by the several outsiders who took
advantage of the convocation to offer questions for correct answering
and problems for expert solution.

The chief of these outsiders, and in a short time the focus of
interest for the entire meeting, was a commonplace-looking middle-aged
man who had travelled all the way from New Orleans for certain special
information unobtainable from any local source. His name was John
Raymond Legrasse, and he was by profession an Inspector of Police. With
him he bore the subject of his visit, a grotesque, repulsive, and
apparently very ancient stone statuette whose origin he was at a loss
to determine. It must not be fancied that Inspector Legrasse had the
least interest in archaeology. On the contrary, his wish for
enlightenment was prompted by purely professional considerations. The
statuette, idol, fetish, or whatever it was, had been captured some
months before in the wooded swamps south of New Orleans during a raid
on a supposed voodoo meeting; and so singular and hideous were the
rites connected with it, that the police could not but realise that
they had stumbled on a dark cult totally unknown to them, and
infinitely more diabolic than even the blackest of the African voodoo
circles. Of its origin, apart from the erratic and unbelievable tales
extorted from the captured members, absolutely nothing was to be
discovered; hence the anxiety of the police for any antiquarian lore
which might help them to place the frightful symbol, and through it
track down the cult to its fountain-head.

Inspector Legrasse was scarcely prepared for the sensation which his
offering created. One sight of the thing had been enough to throw the
assembled men of science into a state of tense excitement, and they
lost no time in crowding around him to gaze at the diminutive figure
whose utter strangeness and air of genuinely abysmal antiquity hinted
so potently at unopened and archaic vistas. No recognised school of
sculpture had animated this terrible object, yet centuries and even
thousands of years seemed recorded in its dim and greenish surface of
unplaceable stone.

The figure, which was finally passed slowly from man to man for
close and careful study, was between seven and eight inches in height,
and of exquisitely artistic workmanship. It represented a monster of
vaguely anthropoid outline, but with an octopus-like head whose face
was a mass of feelers, a scaly, rubbery-looking body, prodigious claws
on hind and fore feet, and long, narrow wings behind. This thing, which
seemed instinct with a fearsome and unnatural malignancy, was of a
somewhat bloated corpulence, and squatted evilly on a rectangular block
or pedestal covered with undecipherable characters. The tips of the
wings touched the back edge of the block, the seat occupied the centre,
whilst the long, curved claws of the doubled-up, crouching hind legs
gripped the front edge and extended a quarter of the way down toward
the bottom of the pedestal. The cephalopod head was bent forward, so
that the ends of the facial feelers brushed the backs of huge fore paws
which clasped the croucher's elevated knees. The aspect of the whole
was abnormally life-like, and the more subtly fearful because its
source was so totally unknown. Its vast, awesome, and incalculable age
was unmistakable; yet not one link did it shew with any known type of
art belonging to civilisation's youth--or indeed to any other time.
Totally separate and apart, its very material was a mystery; for the
soapy, greenish-black stone with its golden or iridescent flecks and
striations resembled nothing familiar to geology or mineralogy. The
characters along the base were equally baffling; and no member present,
despite a representation of half the world's expert learning in this
field, could form the least notion of even their remotest linguistic
kinship. They, like the subject and material, belonged to something
horribly remote and distinct from mankind as we know it, something
frightfully suggestive of old and unhallowed cycles of life in which
our world and our conceptions have no part.

And yet, as the members severally shook their heads and confessed
defeat at the Inspector's problem, there was one man in that gathering
who suspected a touch of bizarre familiarity in the monstrous shape and
writing, and who presently told with some diffidence of the odd trifle
he knew. This person was the late William Channing Webb, Professor of
Anthropology in 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 resurrection when the stars and the earth might
once more be ready for Them. But at that time some force from outside
must serve to liberate Their bodies. The spells that preserved them
intact likewise prevented Them from making an initial move, and They
could only lie awake in the dark and think whilst uncounted millions of
years rolled by. They knew all that was occurring in the universe, for
Their mode of speech was transmitted thought. Even now They talked in
Their tombs. When, after infinities of chaos, the first men came, the
Great Old Ones spoke to the sensitive among them by moulding their
dreams; for only thus could Their language reach the fleshly minds of
mammals.

Then, whispered Castro, those first men formed the cult around tall
idols which the Great Ones showed them; idols brought in dim eras from
dark stars. That cult would never die till the stars came right again,
and the secret priests would take great Cthulhu from His tomb to revive
His subjects and resume His rule of earth. The time would be easy to
know, for then mankind would have become as the Great Old Ones; free
and wild and beyond good and evil, with laws and morals thrown aside
and all men shouting and killing and revelling in joy. Then the
liberated Old Ones would teach them new ways to shout and kill and
revel and enjoy themselves, and all the earth would flame with a
holocaust of ecstasy and freedom. Meanwhile the cult, by appropriate
rites, must keep alive the memory of those ancient ways and shadow
forth the prophecy of their return.

In the elder time chosen men had talked with the entombed Old Ones
in dreams, but then something happened. The great stone city R'lyeh,
with its monoliths and sepulchres, had sunk beneath the waves; and the
deep waters, full of the one primal mystery through which not even
thought can pass, had cut off the spectral intercourse. But memory
never died, and the high-priests said that the city would rise again
when the stars were right. Then came out of the earth the black spirits
of earth, mouldy and shadowy, and full of dim rumours picked up in
caverns beneath forgotten sea-bottoms. But of them old Castro dared not
speak much. He cut himself off hurriedly, and no amount of persuasion
or subtlety could elicit more in this direction. The size of the Old
Ones, too, he curiously declined to mention. Of the cult, he said that
he thought the centre lay amid the pathless desert of Arabia, where
Irem, the City of Pillars, dreams hidden and untouched. It was not
allied to the European witch-cult, and was virtually unknown beyond its
members. No book had ever really hinted of it, though the deathless
Chinamen said that there were double meanings in the Necronomicon of
the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred which the initiated might read as they
chose, especially the much-discussed couplet:

That is not dead which can eternal lie,
And with strange aeons even death may die.

Legrasse, deeply impressed and not a little bewildered, had inquired
in vain concerning the historic affiliations of the cult. Castro,
apparently, had told the truth when he said that it was wholly secret.
The authorities at 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
colonial houses on the ancient hill, and under the very shadow of the
finest Georgian steeple in America, I found him at work in his rooms,
and at once conceded from the specimens scattered about that his genius
is indeed profound and authentic. He will, I believe, some time be
heard from as one of the great decadents; for he has crystallised in
clay and will one day mirror in marble those nightmares and phantasies
which Arthur Machen evokes in prose, and Clark Ashton Smith makes
visible in verse and in painting.

Dark, frail, and somewhat unkempt in aspect, he turned languidly at
my knock and asked me my business without rising. Then I told him who I
was, he displayed some interest; for my uncle had excited his curiosity
in probing his strange dreams, yet had never explained the reason for
the study. I did not enlarge his knowledge in this regard, but sought
with some subtlety to draw him out. In a short time I became convinced
of his absolute sincerity, for he spoke of the dreams in a manner none
could mistake. They and their subconscious residuum had influenced his
art profoundly, and he shewed me a morbid statue whose contours almost
made me shake with the potency of its black suggestion. He could not
recall having seen the original of this thing except in his own dream
bas-relief, but the outlines had formed themselves insensibly under his
hands. It was, no doubt, the giant shape he had raved of in delirium.
That he really knew nothing of the hidden cult, save from what my
uncle's relentless catechism had let fall, he soon made clear; and
again I strove to think of some way in which he could possibly have
received the weird impressions.


He talked of his dreams in a strangely poetic fashion; making me see
with terrible vividness the damp Cyclopean city of slimy green stone--
whose geometry, he oddly said, was all wrong--and hear with frightened
expectancy the ceaseless, half-mental calling from underground:
"Cthulhu fhtagn", "Cthulhu fhtagn."

These words had formed part of that dread ritual which told of dead
Cthulhu's dream-vigil in his stone vault at R'lyeh, and I felt deeply
moved despite my rational beliefs. Wilcox, I was sure, had heard of the
cult in some casual way, and had soon forgotten it amidst the mass of
his equally weird reading and imagining. Later, by virtue of its sheer
impressiveness, it had found subconscious expression in dreams, in the
bas-relief, and in the terrible statue I now beheld; so that his
imposture upon my uncle had been a very innocent one. The youth was of
a type, at once slightly affected and slightly ill-mannered, which I
could never like, but I was willing enough now to admit both his genius
and his honesty. I took leave of him amicably, and wish him all the
success his talent promises.

The matter of the cult still remained to fascinate me, and at times
I had visions of personal fame from researches into its origin and
connections. I visited New Orleans, talked with Legrasse and others of
that old-time raiding-party, saw the frightful image, and even
questioned such of the mongrel prisoners as still survived. Old Castro,
unfortunately, had been dead for some years. What I now heard so
graphically at first-hand, though it was really no more than a detailed
confirmation of what my uncle had written, excited me afresh; for I
felt sure that I was on the track of a very real, very secret, and very
ancient religion whose discovery would make me an anthropologist of
note. My attitude was still one of absolute materialism, as I wish it
still were, and I discounted with almost inexplicable perversity the
coincidence of the dream notes and odd cuttings collected by Professor
Angell.

One thing I began to suspect, and which I now fear I know, is that
my uncle's death was far from natural. He fell on a narrow hill street
leading up from an ancient waterfront swarming with foreign mongrels,
after a careless push from a Negro sailor. I did not forget the mixed
blood and marine pursuits of the cult-members in Louisiana, and would
not be surprised to learn of secret methods and rites and beliefs.
Legrasse and his men, it is true, have been let alone; but in Norway a
certain seaman who saw things is dead. Might not the deeper inquiries
of my uncle after encountering the sculptor's data have come to
sinister ears? I think Professor Angell died because he knew too much,
or because he was likely to learn too much. Whether I shall go as he
did remains to be seen, for I have learned much now.



III. The Madness from the Sea

If heaven ever wishes to grant me a boon, it will be a total
effacing of the results of a mere chance which fixed my eye on a
certain stray piece of shelf-paper. It was nothing on which I would
naturally have stumbled in the course of my daily round, for it was an
old number of an Australian journal, the Sydney Bulletin for April 18,
1925. It had escaped even the cutting bureau which had at the time of
its issuance been avidly collecting material for my uncle's research.

I had largely given over my inquiries into what Professor Angell
called the "Cthulhu Cult", and was visiting a learned friend in
Paterson, New Jersey; the curator of a local museum and a mineralogist
of note. Examining one day the reserve specimens roughly set on the
storage shelves in a rear room of the museum, my eye was caught by an
odd picture in one of the old papers spread beneath the stones. It was
the Sydney Bulletin I have mentioned, for my friend had wide
affiliations in all conceivable foreign parts; and the picture was a
half-tone cut of a hideous stone image almost identical with that which
Legrasse had found in the swamp.

Eagerly clearing the sheet of its precious contents, I scanned the
item in detail; and was disappointed to find it of only moderate
length. What it suggested, however, was of portentous significance to
my flagging quest; and I carefully tore it out for immediate action. It
read as follows:

MYSTERY DERELICT FOUND AT SEA

Vigilant Arrives With Helpless Armed New Zealand
Yacht in Tow. One Survivor and Dead Man Found Aboard. Tale of Desperate
Battle and Deaths at Sea. Rescued Seaman Refuses Particulars of Strange
Experience. Odd Idol Found in His Possession. Inquiry to Follow.


The Morrison Co.'s freighter Vigilant, bound from
Valparaiso, arrived this morning at its wharf in Darling Harbour,
having in tow the battled and disabled but heavily armed steam yacht
Alert of Dunedin, N.Z., which was sighted April 12th in S. Latitude
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 showed
fight, says the survivor, and though the schooner began to sink from
shots beneath the water-line they managed to heave alongside their
enemy and board her, grappling with the savage crew on the yacht's
deck, and being forced to kill them all, the number being slightly
superior, because of their particularly abhorrent and desperate though
rather clumsy mode of fighting.

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


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

March 1st--or February 28th according to the International Date
Line--the earthquake and storm had come. From Dunedin the Alert and
her noisome crew had darted eagerly forth as if imperiously summoned,
and on the other side of the earth poets and artists had begun to dream
of a strange, dank Cyclopean city whilst a young sculptor had moulded
in his sleep the form of the dreaded Cthulhu. March 23rd the crew of
the Emma landed on an unknown island and left six men dead; and on that
date the dreams of sensitive men assumed a heightened vividness and
darkened with dread of a giant monster's malign pursuit, whilst an
architect had gone mad and a sculptor had lapsed suddenly into
delirium! And what of this storm of April 2nd--the date on which all
dreams of the dank city ceased, and Wilcox emerged unharmed from the
bondage of strange fever? What of all this--and of those hints of old
Castro about the sunken, star-born Old Ones and their coming reign;
their faithful cult and their mastery of dreams? Was I tottering on the
brink of cosmic horrors beyond man's power to bear? If so, they must be
horrors of the mind alone, for in some way the second of April had put
a stop to whatever monstrous menace had begun its siege of mankind's
soul.

That evening, after a day of hurried cabling and arranging, I bade
my host adieu and took a train 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 Old Ones; "They had come
from the stars, and had brought Their images with Them."

Shaken with such a mental resolution as I had never before known, I
now resolved to visit Mate Johansen in Oslo. Sailing for London, I
reembarked at once for the Norwegian capital; and one autumn day landed
at the trim wharves in the shadow of the Egeberg. Johansen's address, I
discovered, lay in the Old Town of King Harold Haardrada, which kept
alive the name of Oslo during all the centuries that the greater city
masqueraded as "Christiana." I made the brief trip by taxicab, and
knocked with palpitant heart at the door of a neat and ancient building
with plastered front. A sad-faced woman in black answered my summons,
and I was stung with disappointment when she told me in halting English
that Gustaf Johansen was no more.

He had not long survived his return, said his wife, for the doings
at sea in 1925 had broken him. He had told her no more than he told the
public, but had left a long manuscript--of "technical matters" as he
said--written in English, evidently in order to guard her from the
peril of casual perusal. During a walk through a narrow lane near the
Gothenburg dock, a bundle of papers falling from an attic window had
knocked him down. Two Lascar sailors at once helped him to his feet,
but before the ambulance could reach him he was dead. Physicians found
no adequate cause the end, and laid it to heart trouble and a weakened
constitution. I now felt gnawing at my vitals that dark terror which
will never leave me till I, too, am at rest; "accidentally" or
otherwise. Persuading the widow that my connection with her husband's
"technical matters" was sufficient to entitle me to his manuscript, I
bore the document away and began to read it on the London boat.

It was a simple, rambling thing--a naive sailor's effort at a
post-facto diary--and strove to recall day by day that last awful
voyage. I cannot attempt to transcribe it verbatim in all its
cloudiness and redundance, but I will tell its gist enough to show why
the sound the water against the vessel's sides became so unendurable to
me that I stopped my ears with cotton.

Johansen, thank God, did not know quite all, even though he saw the
city and the Thing, but I shall never sleep calmly again when I think
of the horrors that lurk ceaselessly behind life in time and in space,
and of those unhallowed blasphemies from elder stars which dream
beneath the sea, known and favoured by a nightmare cult ready and eager
to loose them upon the world whenever another earthquake shall heave
their monstrous stone city again to the sun and air.

Johansen's voyage had begun just as he told it to the
vice-admiralty. The Emma, in ballast, had cleared Auckland on February
20th, and had felt the full force of that earthquake-born tempest which
must have heaved up from the sea-bottom the horrors that filled men's
dreams. Once more under control, the ship was making good progress when
held up by the Alert on March 22nd, and I could feel the mate's regret
as he wrote of her bombardment and sinking. Of the swarthy cult-fiends
on the Alert he speaks with significant horror. There was some
peculiarly abominable quality about them which made their destruction
seem almost a duty, and Johansen shows ingenuous wonder at the charge
of ruthlessness brought against his party during the proceedings of the
court of inquiry. Then, driven ahead by curiosity in their captured
yacht under Johansen's command, the men sight a great stone pillar
sticking out of the sea, and in S. Latitude 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 faithful to come on a
pilgrimage of liberation and restoration. All this Johansen did not
suspect, but God knows he soon saw enough!

I suppose that only a single mountain-top, the hideous
monolith-crowned citadel whereon great Cthulhu was buried, actually
emerged from the waters. When I think of the extent of all that may be
brooding down there I almost wish to kill myself forthwith. Johansen
and his men were awed by the cosmic majesty of this dripping Babylon of
elder daemons, and must have guessed without guidance that it was
nothing of this or of any sane planet. Awe at the unbelievable size of
the greenish stone blocks, at the dizzying height of the great carven
monolith, and at the stupefying identity of the colossal statues and
bas-reliefs with the queer image found in the shrine on the Alert, is
poignantly visible in every line of the mates frightened description.

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

Johansen and his men landed at a sloping mud-bank on this monstrous
Acropolis, and clambered slipperily up over titan oozy blocks which
could have been no mortal staircase. The very sun of heaven seemed
distorted when viewed through the polarising miasma welling out from
this sea-soaked perversion, and twisted menace and suspense lurked
leeringly in those crazily elusive angles of carven rock where a second
glance showed concavity after the first showed convexity.

Something very like fright had come over all the explorers before
anything more definite than rock and ooze and weed was seen. Each would
have fled had he not feared the scorn of the others, and it was only
half-heartedly that they searched--vainly, as it proved--for some
portable souvenir to bear away.

It was Rodriguez the Portuguese who climbed up the foot of the
monolith and shouted of what he had found. The rest followed him, and
looked curiously at the immense carved door with the now familiar
squid-dragon bas-relief. It was, Johansen said, like a great barn-door;
and they all felt that it was a door because of the ornate lintel,
threshold, and jambs around it, though they could not decide whether it
lay flat like a trap-door or slantwise like an outside cellar-door. As
Wilcox would have said, the geometry of the place was all wrong. One
could not be sure that the sea and the ground were horizontal, hence
the relative position of everything else seemed phantasmally variable.

Briden pushed at the stone in several places without result. Then
Donovan felt over it delicately around the edge, pressing each point
separately as he went. He climbed interminably along the grotesque
stone moulding--that is, one would call it climbing if the thing was
not after all horizontal--and the men wondered how any door in the
universe could be so vast. Then, very softly and slowly, the acre-great
lintel began to give inward at the top; and they saw that it was
balanced.

Donovan slid or somehow propelled himself down or along the jamb and
rejoined his fellows, and everyone watched the queer recession of the
monstrously carven portal. In this phantasy of prismatic distortion it
moved anomalously in a diagonal way, so that all the rules of matter
and perspective seemed upset.

The aperture was black with a darkness almost material. That
tenebrousness was indeed a positive quality; for it obscured such parts
of the inner walls as ought to have been revealed, and actually burst
forth like smoke from its aeon-long imprisonment, visibly darkening the
sun as it slunk away into the shrunken and gibbous sky on flapping
membraneous wings. The odour rising from the newly opened depths was
intolerable, and at length the quick-eared Hawkins thought he heard a
nasty, slopping sound down there. Everyone listened, and everyone was
listening still when It lumbered slobberingly into sight and gropingly
squeezed Its gelatinous green immensity through the black doorway into
the tainted outside air of that poison city of madness.

Poor Johansen's handwriting almost gave out when he wrote of this.
Of the six men who never reached the ship, he thinks two perished of
pure fright in that accursed instant. The Thing cannot be described--
there is no language for such abysms of shrieking and immemorial
lunacy, such eldritch contradictions of all matter, force, and cosmic
order. A mountain walked or stumbled. God! What wonder that across the
earth a great architect went mad, and poor Wilcox raved with fever in
that telepathic instant? The Thing of the idols, the green, sticky
spawn of the stars, had awaked to claim his own. The stars were right
again, and what an age-old cult had failed to do by design, a band of
innocent sailors had done by accident. After vigintillions of years
great Cthulhu was loose again, and ravening for delight.

Three men were swept up by the flabby claws before anybody turned.
God rest them, if there be any rest in the universe. They were Donovan,
Guerrera, and Angstrom. Parker slipped as the other three were plunging
frenziedly over endless vistas of green-crusted rock to the boat, and
Johansen swears he was swallowed up by an angle of masonry which
shouldn't have been there; an angle which was acute, but behaved as if
it were obtuse. So only Briden and Johansen reached the boat, and
pulled desperately for the Alert as the mountainous monstrosity flopped
down the slimy stones and hesitated, floundering at the edge of the
water.

Steam had not been suffered to go down entirely, despite the
departure of all hands for the shore; and it was the work of only a few
moments of feverish rushing up and down between wheel and engines to
get the Alert under way. Slowly, amidst the distorted horrors of that
indescribable scene, she began to churn the lethal waters; whilst on
the masonry of that charnel shore that was not of earth the titan Thing
from the stars slavered and gibbered like Polypheme cursing the fleeing
ship of Odysseus. Then, bolder than the storied Cyclops, great Cthulhu
slid greasily into the water and began to pursue with vast wave-raising
strokes of cosmic potency. Briden looked back and went mad, laughing
shrilly as he kept on laughing at intervals till death found him one
night in the cabin whilst Johansen was wandering deliriously.

But Johansen had not given out yet. Knowing that the Thing could
surely overtake the Alert until steam was fully up, he resolved on a
desperate chance; and, setting the engine for full speed, ran
lightning-like on deck and reversed the wheel. There was a mighty
eddying and foaming in the noisome brine, and as the steam mounted
higher and higher the brave Norwegian drove his vessel head on against
the pursuing jelly which rose above the unclean froth like the stern of
a daemon galleon. The awful squid-head with writhing feelers came
nearly up to the bowsprit of the sturdy yacht, but Johansen drove on
relentlessly. There was a bursting as of an exploding bladder, a slushy
nastiness as of a cloven sunfish, a stench as of a thousand opened
graves, and a sound that the chronicler could not put on paper. For an
instant the ship was befouled by an acrid and blinding green cloud, and
then there was only a venomous seething astern; where--God in heaven!
--the scattered plasticity of that nameless sky-spawn was nebulously
recombining in its hateful original form, whilst its distance widened
every second as the Alert gained impetus from its mounting steam.

That was all. After that Johansen only brooded over the idol in the
cabin and attended to a few matters of food for himself and the
laughing maniac by his side. He did not try to navigate after the first
bold flight, for the reaction had taken something out of his soul. Then
came the storm of April 2nd, and a gathering of the clouds about his
consciousness. There is a sense of spectral whirling through liquid
gulfs of infinity, of dizzying rides through reeling universes on a
comets tail, and of hysterical plunges from the pit to the moon and
from the moon back again to the pit, all livened by a cachinnating
chorus of the distorted, hilarious elder gods and the green, bat-winged
mocking imps of Tartarus.

Out of that dream came rescue--the Vigilant, the vice-admiralty
court, the streets of Dunedin, and the long voyage back home to the old
house by the Egeberg. He could not tell--they would think him mad. He
would write of what he knew before death came, but his wife must not
guess. Death would be a boon if only it could blot out the memories.

That was the document I read, and now I have placed it in the tin
box beside the bas-relief and the papers of Professor Angell. With it
shall go this record of mine--this test of my own sanity, wherein is
pieced together that which I hope may never be pieced together again. I
have looked upon all that the universe has to hold of horror, and even
the skies of spring and the flowers of summer must ever afterward be
poison to me. But I do not think my life will be long. As my uncle
went, as poor Johansen went, so I shall go. I know too much, and the
cult still lives.

Cthulhu still lives, too, I suppose, again in that chasm of stone
which has shielded him since the sun was young. His accursed city is
sunken once more, for the Vigilant sailed over the spot after the April
storm; but his ministers on earth still bellow and prance and slay
around idol-capped monoliths in lonely places. He must have been
trapped by the sinking whilst within his black abyss, or else the world
would by now be screaming with fright and frenzy. Who knows the end?
What has risen may sink, and what has sunk may rise. Loathsomeness
waits and dreams in the deep, and decay spreads over the tottering
cities of men. A time will come--but I must not and cannot think! Let
me pray that, if I do not survive this manuscript, my executors may put
caution before audacity and see that it meets no other eye.



* THE DUNWICH HORROR

Gorgons and Hydras, and Chimaeras--dire stories of Celaeno and
the Harpies--may reproduce themselves in the brain of
superstition--but they were there before. They are transcripts,
types--the archetypes are in us, and eternal. How else should the
recital of that which we know in a waking sense to be false come
to affect us all? Is it that we naturally conceive terror from
such objects, considered in their capacity of being able to
inflict upon us bodily injury? O, least of all! These terrors are
of older standing. They date beyond body--or without the body,
they would have been the same...That the kind of fear here
treated is purely spiritual--that it is strong in proportion as
it is objectless on earth, that it predominates in the period of
our sinless infancy--are difficulties the solution of which
might afford some probable insight into our ante-mundane
condition, and a peep at least into the shadowland of
pre-existence.


--Charles Lamb: Witches and Other Night-Fears





I.

When a traveller in north central Massachusetts takes the wrong fork
at the junction of Aylesbury pike just beyond Dean's Corners he comes
upon a lonely and curious country.

The ground gets higher, and the brier-bordered stone walls press
closer and closer against the ruts of the dusty, curving road. The
trees of the frequent forest belts seem too large, and the wild weeds,
brambles and grasses attain a luxuriance not often found in settled
regions. At the same time the planted fields appear singularly few and
barren; while the sparsely scattered houses wear a surprisingly uniform
aspect of age, squalor, and dilapidation.

Without knowing why, one hesitates to ask directions from the
gnarled solitary figures spied now and then on crumbling doorsteps or
on the sloping, rock-strewn meadows. Those figures are so silent and
furtive that one feels somehow confronted by forbidden things, with
which it would be better to have nothing to do. When a rise in the road
brings the mountains in view above the deep woods, the feeling of
strange uneasiness is increased. The summits are too rounded and
symmetrical to give a sense of comfort and naturalness, and sometimes
the sky silhouettes with especial clearness the queer circles of tall
stone pillars with which most of them are crowned.

Gorges and ravines of problematical depth intersect the way, and the
crude wooden bridges always seem of dubious safety. When the road dips
again there are stretches of marshland that one instinctively dislikes,
and indeed almost fears at evening when unseen whippoorwills chatter
and the fireflies come out in abnormal profusion to dance to the
raucous, creepily insistent rhythms of stridently piping bull-frogs.
The thin, shining line of the Miskatonic's upper reaches has an oddly
serpent-like suggestion as it winds close to the feet of the domed
hills among which it rises.

As the hills draw nearer, one heeds their wooded sides more than
their stone-crowned tops. Those sides loom up so darkly and
precipitously that one wishes they would keep their distance, but there
is no road by which to escape them. Across a covered bridge one sees a
small village huddled between the stream and the vertical slope of
Round Mountain, and wonders at the cluster of rotting gambrel roofs
bespeaking an earlier architectural period than that of the
neighbouring region. It is not reassuring to see, on a closer glance,
that most of the houses are deserted and falling to ruin, and that the
broken-steepled church now harbours the one slovenly mercantile
establishment of the hamlet. One dreads to trust the tenebrous tunnel
of the bridge, yet there is no way to avoid it. Once across, it is hard
to prevent the impression of a faint, malign odour about the village
street, as of the massed mould and decay of centuries. It is always a
relief to get clear of the place, and to follow the narrow road around
the base of the hills and across the level country beyond till it
rejoins the Aylesbury pike. Afterwards one sometimes learns that one
has been through Dunwich.

Outsiders visit Dunwich as seldom as possible, and since a certain
season of horror all the signboards pointing towards it have been taken
down. The scenery, judged by an ordinary aesthetic canon, is more than
commonly beautiful; yet there is no influx of artists or summer
tourists. Two centuries ago, when talk of witch-blood, Satan-worship,
and strange forest presences was not laughed at, it was the custom to
give reasons for avoiding the locality. In our sensible age--since the
Dunwich horror of 1928 was hushed up by those who had the town's and
the world's welfare at heart--people shun it without knowing exactly
why. Perhaps one reason--though it cannot apply to uninformed
strangers--is that the natives are now repellently decadent, having
gone far along that path of retrogression so common in many New England
backwaters. They have come to form a race by themselves, with the
well-defined mental and physical stigmata of degeneracy and inbreeding.
The average of their intelligence is woefully low, whilst their annals
reek of overt viciousness and of half-hidden murders, incests, and
deeds of almost unnameable violence and perversity. The old gentry,
representing the two or three armigerous families which came from Salem
in 1692, have kept somewhat above the general level of decay; though
many branches are sunk into the sordid populace so deeply that only
their names remain as a key to the origin they disgrace. Some of the
Whateleys and Bishops still send their eldest sons to Harvard and
Miskatonic, though those sons seldom return to the mouldering gambrel
roofs under which they and their ancestors were born.

No one, even those who have the facts concerning the recent horror,
can say just what is the matter with Dunwich; though old legends speak
of unhallowed rites and conclaves of the Indians, amidst which they
called forbidden shapes of shadow out of the great rounded hills, and
made wild orgiastic prayers that were answered by loud crackings and
rumblings from the ground below. In 1747 the Reverend Abijah Hoadley,
newly come to the Congregational Church at Dunwich Village, preached a
memorable sermon on the close presence of Satan and his imps; in which
he said:

"It must be allow'd, that these Blasphemies of an infernall Train of
Daemons are Matters of too common Knowledge to be deny'd; the cursed
Voices of Azazel and Buzrael, of Beelzebub and Belial, being heard now
from under Ground by above a Score of credible Witnesses now living. I
myself did not more than a Fortnight ago catch a very plain Discourse
of evill Powers in the Hill behind my House; wherein there were a
Rattling and Rolling, Groaning, Screeching, and Hissing, such as no
Things of this Earth could raise up, and which must needs have come
from those Caves that only black Magick can discover, and only the
Divell unlock".

Mr. Hoadley disappeared soon after delivering this sermon, but the
text, printed in Springfield, is still extant. Noises in the hills
continued to be reported from year to year, and still form a puzzle to
geologists and physiographers.

Other traditions tell of foul odours near the hill-crowning circles
of stone pillars, and of rushing airy presences to be heard faintly at
certain hours from stated points at the bottom of the great ravines;
while still others try to explain the Devil's Hop Yard--a bleak,
blasted hillside where no tree, shrub, or grass-blade will grow. Then,
too, the natives are mortally afraid of the numerous whippoorwills
which grow vocal on warm nights. It is vowed that the birds are
psychopomps lying in wait for the souls of the dying, and that they
time their eerie cries in unison with the sufferer's struggling breath.
If they can catch the fleeing soul when it leaves the body, they
instantly flutter away chittering in daemoniac laughter; but if they
fail, they subside gradually into a disappointed silence.

These tales, of course, are obsolete and ridiculous; because they
come down from very old times. Dunwich is indeed ridiculously old--
older by far than any of the communities within thirty miles of it.
South of the village one may still spy the cellar walls and chimney of
the ancient Bishop house, which was built before 1700; whilst the ruins
of the mill at the falls, built in 1806, form the most modern piece of
architecture to be seen. Industry did not flourish here, and the
nineteenth-century factory movement proved short-lived. Oldest of all
are the great rings of rough-hewn stone columns on the hilltops, but
these are more generally attributed to the Indians than to the
settlers. Deposits of skulls and bones, found within these circles and
around the sizeable table-like rock on Sentinel Hill, sustain the
popular belief that such spots were once the burial-places of the
Pocumtucks; even though many ethnologists, disregarding the absurd
improbability of such a theory, persist in believing the remains
Caucasian.



II.

It was in the township of Dunwich, in a large and partly inhabited
farmhouse set against a hillside four miles from the village and a mile
and a half from any other dwelling, that Wilbur Whateley was born at 5
a.m. on Sunday, the second of February, 1913. This date was recalled
because it was Candlemas, which people in Dunwich curiously observe
under another name; and because the noises in the hills had sounded,
and all the dogs of the countryside had barked persistently, throughout
the night before. Less worthy of notice was the fact that the mother
was one of the decadent Whateleys, a somewhat deformed, unattractive
albino woman of thirty-five, living with an aged and half-insane father
about whom the most frightful tales of wizardry had been whispered in
his youth. Lavinia Whateley had no known husband, but according to the
custom of the region made no attempt to disavow the child; concerning
the other side of whose ancestry the country folk might--and did--
speculate as widely as they chose. On the contrary, she seemed
strangely proud of the dark, goatish-looking infant who formed such a
contrast to her own sickly and pink-eyed albinism, and was heard to
mutter many curious prophecies about its unusual powers and tremendous
future.

Lavinia was one who would be apt to mutter such things, for she was
a lone creature given to wandering amidst thunderstorms in the hills
and trying to read the great odorous books which her father had
inherited through two centuries of Whateleys, and which were fast
falling to pieces with age and wormholes. She had never been to school,
but was filled with disjointed scraps of ancient lore that Old Whateley
had taught her. The remote farmhouse had always been feared because of
Old Whateley's reputation for black magic, and the unexplained death by
violence of Mrs Whateley when Lavinia was twelve years old had not
helped to make the place popular. Isolated among strange influences,
Lavinia was fond of wild and grandiose day-dreams and singular
occupations; nor was her leisure much taken up by household cares in a
home from which all standards of order and cleanliness had long since
disappeared.

There was a hideous screaming which echoed above even the hill
noises and the dogs' barking on the night Wilbur was born, but no known
doctor or midwife presided at his coming. Neighbours knew nothing of
him till a week afterward, when Old Whateley drove his sleigh through
the snow into Dunwich Village and discoursed incoherently to the group
of loungers at Osborne's general store. There seemed to be a change in
the old man--an added element of furtiveness in the clouded brain
which subtly transformed him from an object to a subject of fear--
though he was not one to be perturbed by any common family event.
Amidst it all he showed some trace of the pride later noticed in his
daughter, and what he said of the child's paternity was remembered by
many of his hearers years afterward.

'I dun't keer what folks think--ef Lavinny's boy looked like his
pa, he wouldn't look like nothin' ye expeck. Ye needn't think the only
folks is the folks hereabouts. Lavinny's read some, an' has seed some
things the most o' ye only tell abaout. I calc'late her man is as good
a husban' as ye kin find this side of Aylesbury; an' ef ye knowed as
much abaout the hills as I dew, ye wouldn't ast no better church
weddin' nor her'n. Let me tell ye suthin--some day yew folks'll hear a
child o' Lavinny's a-callin' its father's name on the top o' Sentinel
Hill!'

The only person who saw Wilbur during the first month of his life
were old Zechariah Whateley, of the undecayed Whateleys, and Earl
Sawyer's common-law wife, Mamie Bishop. Mamie's visit was frankly one
of curiosity, and her subsequent tales did justice to her observations;
but Zechariah came to lead a pair of Alderney cows which Old Whateley
had bought of his son Curtis. This marked the beginning of a course of
cattle-buying on the part of small Wilbur's family which ended only in
1928, when the Dunwich horror came and went; yet at no time did the
ramshackle Whateley barn seem overcrowded with livestock. There came a
period when people were curious enough to steal up and count the herd
that grazed precariously on the steep hillside above the old
farm-house, and they could never find more than ten or twelve anaemic,
bloodless-looking specimens. Evidently some blight or distemper,
perhaps sprung from the unwholesome pasturage or the diseased fungi and
timbers of the filthy barn, caused a heavy mortality amongst the
Whateley animals. Odd wounds or sores, having something of the aspect
of incisions, seemed to afflict the visible cattle; and once or twice
during the earlier months certain callers fancied they could discern
similar sores about the throats of the grey, unshaven old man and his
slattemly, crinkly-haired albino daughter.

In the spring after Wilbur's birth Lavinia resumed her customary
rambles in the hills, bearing in her misproportioned arms the swarthy
child. Public interest in the Whateleys subsided after most of the
country folk had seen the baby, and no one bothered to comment on the
swift development which that newcomer seemed every day to exhibit.
Wilbur's growth was indeed phenomenal, for within three months of his
birth he had attained a size and muscular power not usually found in
infants under a full year of age. His motions and even his vocal sounds
showed a restraint and deliberateness highly peculiar in an infant, and
no one was really unprepared when, at seven months, he began to walk
unassisted, with falterings which another month was sufficient to
remove.

It was somewhat after this time--on Hallowe'en--that a great blaze
was seen at midnight on the top of Sentinel Hill where the old
table-like stone stands amidst its tumulus of ancient bones.
Considerable talk was started when Silas Bishop--of the undecayed
Bishops--mentioned having seen the boy running sturdily up that hill
ahead of his mother about an hour before the blaze was remarked. Silas
was rounding up a stray heifer, but he nearly forgot his mission when
he fleetingly spied the two figures in the dim light of his lantern.
They darted almost noiselessly through the underbrush, and the
astonished watcher seemed to think they were entirely unclothed.
Afterwards he could not be sure about the boy, who may have had some
kind of a fringed belt and a pair of dark trunks or trousers on. Wilbur
was never subsequently seen alive and conscious without complete and
tightly buttoned attire, the disarrangement or threatened
disarrangement of which always seemed to fill him with anger and alarm.
His contrast with his squalid mother and grandfather in this respect
was thought very notable until the horror of 1928 suggested the most
valid of reasons.

The next January gossips were mildly interested in the fact that
'Lavinny's black brat' had commenced to talk, and at the age of only
eleven months. His speech was somewhat remarkable both because of its
difference from the ordinary accents of the region, and because it
displayed a freedom from infantile lisping of which many children of
three or four might well be proud. The boy was not talkative, yet when
he spoke he seemed to reflect some elusive element wholly unpossessed
by Dunwich and its denizens. The strangeness did not reside in what he
said, or even in the simple idioms he used; but seemed vaguely linked
with his intonation or with the internal organs that produced the
spoken sounds. His facial aspect, too, was remarkable for its maturity;
for though he shared his mother's and grandfather's chinlessness, his
firm and precociously shaped nose united with the expression of his
large, dark, almost Latin eyes to give him an air of quasi-adulthood
and well-nigh preternatural intelligence. He was, however, exceedingly
ugly despite his appearance of brilliancy; there being something almost
goatish or animalistic about his thick lips, large-pored, yellowish
skin, coarse crinkly hair, and oddly elongated ears. He was soon
disliked even more decidedly than his mother and grandsire, and all
conjectures about him were spiced with references to the bygone magic
of Old Whateley, and how the hills once shook when he shrieked the
dreadful name of Yog-Sothoth in the midst of a circle of stones with a
great book open in his arms before him. Dogs abhorred the boy, and he
was always obliged to take various defensive measures against their
barking menace.


III.

Meanwhile Old Whateley continued to buy cattle without measurably
increasing the size of his herd. He also cut timber and began to repair
the unused parts of his house--a spacious, peak-roofed affair whose
rear end was buried entirely in the rocky hillside, and whose three
least-ruined ground-floor rooms had always been sufficient for himself
and his daughter.

There must have been prodigious reserves of strength in the old man
to enable him to accomplish so much hard labour; and though he still
babbled dementedly at times, his carpentry seemed to show the effects
of sound calculation. It had already begun as soon as Wilbur was born,
when one of the many tool sheds had been put suddenly in order,
clapboarded, and fitted with a stout fresh lock. Now, in restoring the
abandoned upper storey of the house, he was a no less thorough
craftsman. His mania showed itself only in his tight boarding-up of all
the windows in the reclaimed section--though many declared that it was
a crazy thing to bother with the reclamation at all.

Less inexplicable was his fitting up of another downstairs room for
his new grandson--a room which several callers saw, though no one was
ever admitted to the closely-boarded upper storey. This chamber he
lined with tall, firm shelving, along which he began gradually to
arrange, in apparently careful order, all the rotting ancient books and
parts of books which during his own day had been heaped promiscuously
in odd corners of the various rooms.

'I made some use of 'em,' he would say as he tried to mend a torn
black-letter page with paste prepared on the rusty kitchen stove, 'but
the boy's fitten to make better use of 'em. He'd orter hev 'em as well
so as he kin, for they're goin' to be all of his larnin'.'

When Wilbur was a year and seven months old--in September of 1914--
his size and accomplishments were almost alarming. He had grown as
large as a child of four, and was a fluent and incredibly intelligent
talker. He ran freely about the fields and hills, and accompanied his
mother on all her wanderings. At home he would pore diligently over
the queer pictures and charts in his grandfather's books, while Old
Whateley would instruct and catechize him through long, hushed
afternoons. By this time the restoration of the house was finished, and
those who watched it wondered why one of the upper windows had been
made into a solid plank door. It was a window in the rear of the east
gable end, close against the hill; and no one could imagine why a
cleated wooden runway was built up to it from the ground. About the
period of this work's completion people noticed that the old
tool-house, tightly locked and windowlessly clapboarded since Wilbur's
birth, had been abandoned again. The door swung listlessly open, and
when Earl Sawyer once stepped within after a cattle-selling call on Old
Whateley he was quite discomposed by the singular odour he encountered
--such a stench, he averred, as he had never before smelt in all his
life except near the Indian circles on the hills, and which could not
come from anything sane or of this earth. But then, the homes and sheds
of Dunwich folk have never been remarkable for olfactory immaculateness.

The following months were void of visible events, save that everyone
swore to a slow but steady increase in the mysterious hill noises. On
May Eve of 1915 there were tremors which even the Aylesbury people
felt, whilst the following Hallowe'en produced an underground rumbling
queerly synchronized with bursts of flame--'them witch Whateleys'
doin's'--from the summit of Sentinel Hill. Wilbur was growing up
uncannily, so that he looked like a boy of ten as he entered his fourth
year. He read avidly by himself now; but talked much less than
formerly. A settled taciturnity was absorbing him, and for the first
time people began to speak specifically of the dawning look of evil in
his goatish face. He would sometimes mutter an unfamiliar jargon, and
chant in bizarre rhythms which chilled the listener with a sense of
unexplainable terror. The aversion displayed towards him by dogs had
now become a matter of wide remark, and he was obliged to carry a
pistol in order to traverse the countryside in safety. His occasional
use of the weapon did not enhance his popularity amongst the owners of
canine guardians.

The few callers at the house would often find Lavinia alone on the
ground floor, while odd cries and footsteps resounded in the boarded-up
second storey. She would never tell what her father and the boy were
doing up there, though once she turned pale and displayed an abnormal
degree of fear when a jocose fish-pedlar tried the locked door leading
to the stairway. That pedlar told the store loungers at Dunwich Village
that he thought he heard a horse stamping on that floor above. The
loungers reflected, thinking of the door and runway, and of the cattle
that so swiftly disappeared. Then they shuddered as they recalled tales
of Old Whateley's youth, and of the strange things that are called out
of the earth when a bullock is sacrificed at the proper time to certain
heathen gods. It had for some time been noticed that dogs had begun to
hate and fear the whole Whateley place as violently as they hated and
feared young Wilbur personally.

In 1917 the war came, and Squire Sawyer Whateley, as chairman of the
local draft board, had hard work finding a quota of young Dunwich men
fit even to be sent to development camp. The government, alarmed at
such signs of wholesale regional decadence, sent several officers and
medical experts to investigate; conducting a survey which New England
newspaper readers may still recall. It was the publicity attending this
investigation which set reporters on the track of the Whateleys, and
caused the Boston Globe and Arkham Advertiser to print flamboyant
Sunday stories of young Wilbur's precociousness, Old Whateley's black
magic, and the shelves of strange books, the sealed second storey of
the ancient farmhouse, and the weirdness of the whole region and its
hill noises. Wilbur was four and a half then, and looked like a lad of
fifteen. His lips and cheeks were fuzzy with a coarse dark down, and
his voice had begun to break.

Earl Sawyer went out to the Whateley place with both sets of
reporters and camera men, and called their attention to the queer
stench which now seemed to trickle down from the sealed upper spaces.
It was, he said, exactly like a smell he had found in the toolshed
abandoned when the house was finally repaired; and like the faint
odours which he sometimes thought he caught near the stone circle on
the mountains. Dunwich folk read the stories when they appeared, and
grinned over the obvious mistakes. They wondered, too, why the writers
made so much of the fact that Old Whateley always paid for his cattle
in gold pieces of extremely ancient date. The Whateleys had received
their visitors with ill-concealed distaste, though they did not dare
court further publicity by a violent resistance or refusal to talk.


IV.

For a decade the annals of the Whateleys sink indistinguishably into
the general life of a morbid community used to their queer ways and
hardened to their May Eve and All-Hallows orgies. Twice a year they
would light fires on the top of Sentinel Hill, at which times the
mountain rumblings would recur with greater and greater violence; while
at all seasons there were strange and portentous doings at the lonely
farm-house. In the course of time callers professed to hear sounds in
the sealed upper storey even when all the family were downstairs, and
they wondered how swiftly or how lingeringly a cow or bullock was
usually sacrificed. There was talk of a complaint to the Society for
the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals but nothing ever came of it, since
Dunwich folk are never anxious to call the outside world's attention to
themselves.

About 1923, when Wilbur was a boy of ten whose mind, voice, stature,
and bearded face gave all the impressions of maturity, a second great
siege of carpentry went on at the old house. It was all inside the
sealed upper part, and from bits of discarded lumber people concluded
that the youth and his grandfather had knocked out all the partitions
and even removed the attic floor, leaving only one vast open void
between the ground storey and the peaked roof. They had torn down the
great central chimney, too, and fitted the rusty range with a flimsy
outside tin stove-pipe.

In the spring after this event Old Whateley noticed the growing
number of whippoorwills that would come out of Cold Spring Glen to
chirp under his window at night. He seemed to regard the circumstance
as one of great significance, and told the loungers at Osborn's that he
thought his time had almost come.

'They whistle jest in tune with my breathin' naow,' he said, 'an' I
guess they're gittin' ready to ketch my soul. They know it's a-goin'
aout, an' dun't calc'late to miss it. Yew'll know, boys, arter I'm
gone, whether they git me er not. Ef they dew, they'll keep up
a-singin' an' laffin' till break o' day. Ef they dun't they'll kinder
quiet daown like. I expeck them an' the souls they hunts fer hev some
pretty tough tussles sometimes.'

On Lammas Night, 1924, DrHoughton of Aylesbury was hastily summoned
by Wilbur Whateley, who had lashed his one remaining horse through the
darkness and telephoned from Osborn's in the village. He found Old
Whateley in a very grave state, with a cardiac action and stertorous
breathing that told of an end not far off. The shapeless albino
daughter and oddly bearded grandson stood by the bedside, whilst from
the vacant abyss overhead there came a disquieting suggestion of
rhythmical surging or lapping, as of the waves on some level beach. The
doctor, though, was chiefly disturbed by the chattering night birds
outside; a seemingly limitless legion of whippoorwills that cried their
endless message in repetitions timed diabolically to the wheezing gasps
of the dying man. It was uncanny and unnatural--too much, thought Dr
Houghton, like the whole of the region he had entered so reluctantly in
response to the urgent call.

Towards one o'clock Old Whateley gained consciousness, and interrupted
his wheezing to choke out a few words to his grandson.

'More space, Willy, more space soon. Yew grows--an' that grows
faster. It'll be ready to serve ye soon, boy. Open up the gates to
Yog-Sothoth with the long chant that ye'll find on page 751 of the
complete edition, an' then put a match to the prison. Fire from airth
can't burn it nohaow.'

He was obviously quite mad. After a pause, during which the flock of
whippoorwills outside adjusted their cries to the altered tempo while
some indications of the strange hill noises came from afar off, he
added another sentence or two.

'Feed it reg'lar, Willy, an' mind the quantity; but dun't let it
grow too fast fer the place, fer ef it busts quarters or gits aout
afore ye opens to Yog-Sothoth, it's all over an' no use. Only them from
beyont kin make it multiply an' work...Only them, the old uns as wants
to come back...'

But speech gave place to gasps again, and Lavinia screamed at the
way the whippoorwills followed the change. It was the same for more
than an hour, when the final throaty rattle came. Dr Houghton drew
shrunken lids over the glazing grey eyes as the tumult of birds faded
imperceptibly to silence. Lavinia sobbed, but Wilbur only chuckled
whilst the hill noises rumbled faintly.

'They didn't git him,' he muttered in his heavy bass voice.

Wilbur was by this time a scholar of really tremendous erudition in
his one-sided way, and was quietly known by correspondence to many
librarians in distant places where rare and forbidden books of old days
are kept. He was more and more hated and dreaded around Dunwich because
of certain youthful disappearances which suspicion laid vaguely at his
door; but was always able to silence inquiry through fear or through
use of that fund of old-time gold which still, as in his grandfather's
time, went forth regularly and increasingly for cattle-buying. He was
now tremendously mature of aspect, and his height, having reached the
normal adult limit, seemed inclined to wax beyond that figure. In 1925,
when a scholarly correspondent from Miskatonic University called upon
him one day and departed pale and puzzled, he was fully six and
three-quarters feet tall.

Through all the years Wilbur had treated his half-deformed albino
mother with a growing contempt, finally forbidding her to go to the
hills with him on May Eve and Hallowmass; and in 1926 the poor creature
complained to Mamie Bishop of being afraid of him.

'They's more abaout him as I knows than I kin tell ye, Mamie,' she
said, 'an' naowadays they's more nor what I know myself. I vaow afur
Gawd, I dun't know what he wants nor what he's a-tryin' to dew.'

That Hallowe'en the hill noises sounded louder than ever, and fire
burned on Sentinel Hill as usual; but people paid more attention to the
rhythmical screaming of vast flocks of unnaturally belated
whippoorwills which seemed to be assembled near the unlighted Whateley
farmhouse. After midnight their shrill notes burst into a kind of
pandemoniac cachinnation which filled all the countryside, and not
until dawn did they finally quiet down. Then they vanished, hurrying
southward where they were fully a month overdue. What this meant, no
one could quite be certain till later. None of the countryfolk seemed
to have died--but poor Lavinia Whateley, the twisted albino, was never
seen again.

In the summer of 1927 Wilbur repaired two sheds in the farmyard and
began moving his books and effects out to them. Soon afterwards Earl
Sawyer told the loungers at Osborn's that more carpentry was going on
in the Whateley farmhouse. Wilbur was closing all the doors and windows
on the ground floor, and seemed to be taking out partitions as he and
his grandfather had done upstairs four years before. He was living in
one of the sheds, and Sawyer thought he seemed unusually worried and
tremulous. People generally suspected him of knowing something about
his mother's disappearance, and very few ever approached his
neighbourhood now. His height had increased to more than seven feet,
and showed no signs of ceasing its development.


V.

The following winter brought an event no less strange than Wilbur's
first trip outside the Dunwich region. Correspondence with the Widener
Library at Harvard, the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, the British
Museum, the University of Buenos Ayres, and the Library of Miskatonic
University at Arkham had failed to get him the loan of a book he
desperately wanted; so at length he set out in person, shabby, dirty,
bearded, and uncouth of dialect, to consult the copy at Miskatonic,
which was the nearest to him geographically. Almost eight feet tall,
and carrying a cheap new valise from Osborne's general store, this dark
and goatish gargoyle appeared one day in Arkham in quest of the dreaded
volume kept under lock and key at the college library--the hideous
Necronomicon of the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred in Olaus Wormius' Latin
version, as printed in Spain in the seventeenth century. He had never
seen a city before, but had no thought save to find his way to the
university grounds; where indeed, he passed heedlessly by the great
white-fanged watchdog that barked with unnatural fury and enmity, and
tugged frantically at its stout chain.

Wilbur had with him the priceless but imperfect copy of Dr Dee's
English version which his grandfather had bequeathed him, and upon
receiving access to the Latin copy he at once began to collate the two
texts with the aim of discovering a certain passage which would have
come on the 751st page of his own defective volume. This much he could
not civilly refrain from telling the librarian--the same erudite Henry
Armitage (A.M. Miskatonic, Ph.D. Princeton, Litt.D. Johns Hopkins) who
had once called at the farm, and who now politely plied him with
questions. He was looking, he had to admit, for a kind of formula or
incantation containing the frightful name Yog-Sothoth, and it puzzled
him to find discrepancies, duplications, and ambiguities which made the
matter of determination far from easy. As he copied the formula he
finally chose, Dr Armitage looked involuntarily over his shoulder at
the open pages; the left-hand one of which, in the Latin version,
contained such monstrous threats to the peace and sanity of the world.

Nor is it to be thought (ran the text as Armitage mentally
translated it) that man is either the oldest or the last of earth's
masters, or that the common bulk of life and substance walks alone. The
Old Ones were, the Old Ones are, and the Old Ones shall be. Not in the
spaces we know, but between them, they walk serene and primal,
undimensioned and to us unseen. Yog-Sothoth knows the gate. Yog-Sothoth
is the gate. Yog-Sothoth is the key and guardian of the gate. Past,
present, future, all are one in Yog-Sothoth. He knows where the Old
Ones broke through of old, and where They shall break through again. He
knows where They had trod earth's fields, and where They still tread
them, and why no one can behold Them as They tread. By Their smell can
men sometimes know Them near, but of Their semblance can no man know,
saving only in the features of those They have begotten on mankind; and
of those are there many sorts, differing in likeness from man's truest
eidolon to that shape without sight or substance which is Them. They
walk unseen and foul in lonely places where the Words have been spoken
and the Rites howled through at their Seasons. The wind gibbers with
Their voices, and the earth mutters with Their consciousness. They bend
the forest and crush the city, yet may not forest or city behold the
hand that smites. Kadath in the cold waste hath known Them, and what
man knows Kadath? The ice desert of the South and the sunken isles of
Ocean hold stones whereon Their seal is engraver, but who hath seen the
deep frozen city or the sealed tower long garlanded with seaweed and
barnacles? Great Cthulhu is Their cousin, yet can he spy Them only
dimly. Iä! Shub-Niggurath! As a foulness shall ye know Them. Their hand
is at your throats, yet ye see Them not; and Their habitation is even
one with your guarded threshold. Yog-Sothoth is the key to the gate,
whereby the spheres meet. Man rules now where They ruled once; They
shall soon rule where man rules now. After summer is winter, after
winter summer. They wait patient and potent, for here shall They reign
again.

Dr. Armitage, associating what he was reading with what he had heard
of Dunwich and its brooding presences, and of Wilbur Whateley and his
dim, hideous aura that stretched from a dubious birth to a cloud of
probable matricide, felt a wave of fright as tangible as a draught of
the tomb's cold clamminess. The bent, goatish giant before him seemed
like the spawn of another planet or dimension; like something only
partly of mankind, and linked to black gulfs of essence and entity that
stretch like titan phantasms beyond all spheres of force and matter,
space and time. Presently Wilbur raised his head and began speaking in
that strange, resonant fashion which hinted at sound-producing organs
unlike the run of mankind's.

'Mr Armitage,' he said, 'I calc'late I've got to take that book
home. They's things in it I've got to try under sarten conditions that
I can't git here, en' it 'ud be a mortal sin to let a red-tape rule
hold me up. Let me take it along, Sir, an' I'll swar they wun't nobody
know the difference. I dun't need to tell ye I'll take good keer of it.
It wan't me that put this Dee copy in the shape it is...'

He stopped as he saw firm denial on the librarian's face, and his
own goatish features grew crafty. Armitage, half-ready to tell him he
might make a copy of what parts he needed, thought suddenly of the
possible consequences and checked himself. There was too much
responsibility in giving such a being the key to such blasphemous outer
spheres. Whateley saw how things stood, and tried to answer lightly.

'Wal, all right, ef ye feel that way abaout it. Maybe Harvard won't
be so fussy as yew be.' And without saying more he rose and strode out
of the building, stooping at each doorway.

Armitage heard the savage yelping of the great watchdog, and studied
Whateley's gorilla-like lope as he crossed the bit of campus visible
from the window. He thought of the wild tales he had heard, and
recalled the old Sunday stories in the Advertiser; these things, and
the lore he had picked up from Dunwich rustics and villagers during his
one visit there. Unseen things not of earth--or at least not of
tridimensional earth--rushed foetid and horrible through New England's
glens, and brooded obscenely on the mountain tops. Of this he had long
felt certain. Now he seemed to sense the close presence of some
terrible part of the intruding horror, and to glimpse a hellish advance
in the black dominion of the ancient and once passive nightmare. He
locked away the Necronomicon with a shudder of disgust, but the room
still reeked with an unholy and unidentifiable stench. 'As a foulness
shall ye know them,' he quoted. Yes--the odour was the same as that
which had sickened him at the Whateley farmhouse less than three years
before. He thought of Wilbur, goatish and ominous, once again, and
laughed mockingly at the village rumours of his parentage.

'Inbreeding?' Armitage muttered half-aloud to himself. 'Great God,
what simpletons! Show them Arthur Machen's Great God Pan and they'll
think it a common Dunwich scandal! But what thing--what cursed
shapeless influence on or off this three-dimensional earth--was Wilbur
Whateley's father? Born on Candlemas--nine months after May Eve of
1912, when the talk about the queer earth noises reached clear to
Arkham--what walked on the mountains that May night? What Roodmas
horror fastened itself on the world in half-human flesh and blood?'

During the ensuing weeks Dr Armitage set about to collect all
possible data on Wilbur Whateley and the formless presences around
Dunwich. He got in communication with Dr Houghton of Aylesbury, who had
attended Old Whateley in his last illness, and found much to ponder
over in the grandfather's last words as quoted by the physician. A
visit to Dunwich Village failed to bring out much that was new; but a
close survey of the Necronomicon, in those parts which Wilbur had
sought so avidly, seemed to supply new and terrible clues to the
nature, methods, and desires of the strange evil so vaguely threatening
this planet. Talks with several students of archaic lore in Boston, and
letters to many others elsewhere, gave him a growing amazement which
passed slowly through varied degrees of alarm to a state of really
acute spiritual fear. As the summer drew on he felt dimly that
something ought to be done about the lurking terrors of the upper
Miskatonic valley, and about the monstrous being known to the human
world as Wilbur Whateley.


VI.

The Dunwich horror itself came between Lammas and the equinox in
1928, and Dr Armitage was among those who witnessed its monstrous
prologue. He had heard, meanwhile, of Whateley's grotesque trip to
Cambridge, and of his frantic efforts to borrow or copy from the
Necronomicon at the Widener Library. Those efforts had been in vain,
since Armitage had issued warnings of the keenest intensity to all
librarians having charge of the dreaded volume. Wilbur had been
shockingly nervous at Cambridge; anxious for the book, yet almost
equally anxious to get home again, as if he feared the results of being
away long.

Early in August the half-expected outcome developed, and in the
small hours of the third Dr Armitage was awakened suddenly by the wild,
fierce cries of the savage watchdog on the college campus. Deep and
terrible, the snarling, half-mad growls and barks continued; always in
mounting volume, but with hideously significant pauses. Then there rang
out a scream from a wholly different throat--such a scream as roused
half the sleepers of Arkham and haunted their dreams ever afterwards--
such a scream as could come from no being born of earth, or wholly of
earth.

Armitage, hastening into some clothing and rushing across the street
and lawn to the college buildings, saw that others were ahead of him;
and heard the echoes of a burglar-alarm still shrilling from the
library. An open window showed black and gaping in the moonlight. What
had come had indeed completed its entrance; for the barking and the
screaming, now fast fading into a mixed low growling and moaning,
proceeded unmistakably from within. Some instinct warned Armitage that
what was taking place was not a thing for unfortified eyes to see, so
he brushed back the crowd with authority as he unlocked the vestibule
door. Among the others he saw Professor Warren Rice and Dr Francis
Morgan, men to whom he had told some of his conjectures and misgivings;
and these two he motioned to accompany him inside. The inward sounds,
except for a watchful, droning whine from the dog, had by this time
quite subsided; but Armitage now perceived with a sudden start that a
loud chorus of whippoorwills among the shrubbery had commenced a
damnably rhythmical piping, as if in unison with the last breaths of a
dying man.

The building was full of a frightful stench which Dr Armitage knew
too well, and the three men rushed across the hall to the small
genealogical reading-room whence the low whining came. For a second
nobody dared to turn on the light, then Armitage summoned up his
courage and snapped the switch. One of the three--it is not certain
which--shrieked aloud at what sprawled before them among disordered
tables and overturned chairs. Professor Rice declares that he wholly
lost consciousness for an instant, though he did not stumble or fall.

The thing that lay half-bent on its side in a foetid pool of
greenish-yellow ichor and tarry stickiness was almost nine feet tall,
and the dog had torn off all the clothing and some of the skin. It was
not quite dead, but twitched silently and spasmodically while its chest
heaved in monstrous unison with the mad piping of the expectant
whippoorwills outside. Bits of shoe-leather and fragments of apparel
were scattered about the room, and just inside the window an empty
canvas sack lay where it had evidently been thrown. Near the central
desk a revolver had fallen, a dented but undischarged cartridge later
explaining why it had not been fired. The thing itself, however,
crowded out all other images at the time. It would be trite and not
wholly accurate to say that no human pen could describe it, but one may
properly say that it could not be vividly visualized by anyone whose
ideas of aspect and contour are too closely bound up with the common
life-forms of this planet and of the three known dimensions. It was
partly human, beyond a doubt, with very manlike hands and head, and the
goatish, chinless face had the stamp of the Whateley's upon it. But the
torso and lower parts of the body were teratologically fabulous, so
that only generous clothing could ever have enabled it to walk on earth
unchallenged or uneradicated.

Above the waist it was semi-anthropomorphic; though its chest, where
the dog's rending paws still rested watchfully, had the leathery,
reticulated hide of a crocodile or alligator. The back was piebald with
yellow and black, and dimly suggested the squamous covering of certain
snakes. Below the waist, though, it was the worst; for here all human
resemblance left off and sheer phantasy began. The skin was thickly
covered with coarse black fur, and from the abdomen a score of long
greenish-grey tentacles with red sucking mouths protruded limply.

Their arrangement was odd, and seemed to follow the symmetries of
some cosmic geometry unknown to earth or the solar system. On each of
the hips, deep set in a kind of pinkish, ciliated orbit, was what
seemed to be a rudimentary eye; whilst in lieu of a tail there depended
a kind of trunk or feeler with purple annular markings, and with many
evidences of being an undeveloped mouth or throat. The limbs, save for
their black fur, roughly resembled the hind legs of prehistoric earth's
giant saurians, and terminated in ridgy-veined pads that were neither
hooves nor claws. When the thing breathed, its tail and tentacles
rhythmically changed colour, as if from some circulatory cause normal
to the non-human greenish tinge, whilst in the tail it was manifest as
a yellowish appearance which alternated with a sickly grayish-white in
the spaces between the purple rings. Of genuine blood there was none;
only the foetid greenish-yellow ichor which trickled along the painted
floor beyond the radius of the stickiness, and left a curious
discoloration behind it.

As the presence of the three men seemed to rouse the dying thing, it
began to mumble without turning or raising its head. Dr Armitage made
no written record of its mouthings, but asserts confidently that
nothing in English was uttered. At first the syllables defied all
correlation with any speech of earth, but towards the last there came
some disjointed fragments evidently taken from the Necronomicon, that
monstrous blasphemy in quest of which the thing had perished. These
fragments, as Armitage recalls them, ran something like 'N'gai,
n'gha'ghaa, bugg-shoggog, y'hah: Yog-Sothoth, Yog-Sothoth...' They
trailed off into nothingness as the whippoorwills shrieked in
rhythmical crescendos of unholy anticipation.

Then came a halt in the gasping, and the dog raised its head in a
long, lugubrious howl. A change came over the yellow, goatish face of
the prostrate thing, and the great black eyes fell in appallingly.
Outside the window the shrilling of the whippoorwills had suddenly
ceased, and above the murmurs of the gathering crowd there came the
sound of a panic-struck whirring and fluttering. Against the moon vast
clouds of feathery watchers rose and raced from sight, frantic at that
which they had sought for prey.

All at once the dog started up abruptly, gave a frightened bark, and
leaped nervously out of the window by which it had entered. A cry rose
from the crowd, and Dr Armitage shouted to the men outside that no one
must be admitted till the police or medical examiner came. He was
thankful that the windows were just too high to permit of peering in,
and drew the dark curtains carefully down over each one. By this time
two policemen had arrived; and Dr Morgan, meeting them in the
vestibule, was urging them for their own sakes to postpone entrance to
the stench-filled reading-room till the examiner came and the prostrate
thing could be covered up.

Meanwhile frightful changes were taking place on the floor. One need
not describe the kind and rate of shrinkage and disintegration that
occurred before the eyes of Dr Armitage and Professor Rice; but it is
permissible to say that, aside from the external appearance of face and
hands, the really human element in Wilbur Whateley must have been very
small. When the medical examiner came, there was only a sticky whitish
mass on the painted boards, and the monstrous odour had nearly
disappeared. Apparently Whateley had had no skull or bony skeleton; at
least, in any true or stable sense. He had taken somewhat after his
unknown father.


VII.

Yet all this was only the prologue of the actual Dunwich horror.
Formalities were gone through by bewildered officials, abnormal details
were duly kept from press and public, and men were sent to Dunwich and
Aylesbury to look up property and notify any who might be heirs of the
late Wilbur Whateley. They found the countryside in great agitation,
both because of the growing rumblings beneath the domed hills, and
because of the unwonted stench and the surging, lapping sounds which
came increasingly from the great empty shell formed by Whateley's
boarded-up farmhouse. Earl Sawyer, who tended the horse and cattle
during Wilbur's absence, had developed a woefully acute case of nerves.
The officials devised excuses not to enter the noisome boarded place;
and were glad to confine their survey of the deceased's living
quarters, the newly mended sheds, to a single visit. They filed a
ponderous report at the courthouse in Aylesbury, and litigations
concerning heirship are said to be still in progress amongst the
innumerable Whateleys, decayed and undecayed, of the upper Miskatonic
valley.

An almost interminable manuscript in strange characters, written in
a huge ledger and adjudged a sort of diary because of the spacing and
the variations in ink and penmanship, presented a baffling puzzle to
those who found it on the old bureau which served as its owner's desk.
After a week of debate it was sent to Miskatonic University, together
with the deceased's collection of strange books, for study and possible
translation; but even the best linguists soon saw that it was not
likely to be unriddled with ease. No trace of the ancient gold with
which Wilbur and Old Whateley had always paid their debts has yet been
discovered.

It was in the dark of September ninth that the horror broke loose.
The hill noises had been very pronounced during the evening, and dogs
barked frantically all night. Early risers on the tenth noticed a
peculiar stench in the air. About seven o'clock Luther Brown, the hired
boy at George Corey's, between Cold Spring Glen and the village, rushed
frenziedly back from his morning trip to Ten-Acre Meadow with the cows.
He was almost convulsed with fright as he stumbled into the kitchen;
and in the yard outside the no less frightened herd were pawing and
lowing pitifully, having followed the boy back in the panic they shared
with him. Between gasps Luther tried to stammer out his tale to Mrs
Corey.

'Up thar in the rud beyont the glen, Mis' Corey--they's suthin' ben
thar! It smells like thunder, an' all the bushes an' little trees is
pushed back from the rud like they'd a haouse ben moved along of it.
An' that ain't the wust, nuther. They's prints in the rud, Mis' Corey--
great raound prints as big as barrel-heads, all sunk dawon deep like a
elephant had ben along, only they's a sight more nor four feet could
make! I looked at one or two afore I run, an' I see every one was
covered with lines spreadin' aout from one place, like as if big
palm-leaf fans--twict or three times as big as any they is--hed of
ben paounded dawon into the rud. An' the smell was awful, like what it
is around Wizard Whateley's ol' haouse...'

Here he faltered, and seemed to shiver afresh with the fright that
had sent him flying home. Mrs Corey, unable to extract more
information, began telephoning the neighbours; thus starting on its
rounds the overture of panic that heralded the major terrors. When she
got Sally Sawyer, housekeeper at Seth Bishop's, the nearest place to
Whateley's, it became her turn to listen instead of transmit; for
Sally's boy Chauncey, who slept poorly, had been up on the hill towards
Whateley's, and had dashed back in terror after one look at the place,
and at the pasturage where Mr Bishop's cows had been left out all night.

'Yes, Mis' Corey,' came Sally's tremulous voice over the party wire,
'Cha'ncey he just come back a-postin', and couldn't half talk fer bein'
scairt! He says Ol' Whateley's house is all bowed up, with timbers
scattered raound like they'd ben dynamite inside; only the bottom floor
ain't through, but is all covered with a kind o' tar-like stuff that
smells awful an' drips daown offen the aidges onto the graoun' whar the
side timbers is blowed away. An' they's awful kinder marks in the yard,
tew--great raound marks bigger raound than a hogshead, an' all sticky
with stuff like is on the browed-up haouse. Cha'ncey he says they leads
off into the medders, whar a great swath wider'n a barn is matted
daown, an' all the stun walls tumbled every whichway wherever it goes.

'An' he says, says he, Mis' Corey, as haow he sot to look fer Seth's
caows, frightened ez he was an' faound 'em in the upper pasture nigh
the Devil's Hop Yard in an awful shape. Haff on 'em's clean gone, an'
nigh haff o' them that's left is sucked most dry o' blood, with sores
on 'em like they's ben on Whateleys cattle ever senct Lavinny's black
brat was born. Seth hes gone aout naow to look at 'em, though I'll vaow
he won't keer ter git very nigh Wizard Whateley's! Cha'ncey didn't look
keerful ter see whar the big matted-daown swath led arter it leff the
pasturage, but he says he thinks it p'inted towards the glen rud to the
village.

'I tell ye, Mis' Corey, they's suthin' abroad as hadn't orter be
abroad, an' I for one think that black Wilbur Whateley, as come to the
bad end he deserved, is at the bottom of the breedin' of it. He wa'n't
all human hisself, I allus says to everybody; an' I think he an' Ol'
Whateley must a raised suthin' in that there nailed-up haouse as ain't
even so human as he was. They's allus ben unseen things araound Dunwich
--livin' things--as ain't human an' ain't good fer human folks.

'The graoun' was a-talkin' las' night, an' towards mornin' Cha'ncey
he heered the whippoorwills so laoud in Col' Spring Glen he couldn't
sleep nun. Then he thought he heered another faint-like saound over
towards Wizard Whateley's--a kinder rippin' or tearin' o' wood, like
some big box er crate was bein' opened fur off. What with this an'
that, he didn't git to sleep at all till sunup, an' no sooner was he up
this mornin', but he's got to go over to Whateley's an' see what's the
matter. He see enough I tell ye, Mis' Corey! This dun't mean no good,
an' I think as all the men-folks ought to git up a party an' do
suthin'. I know suthin' awful's abaout, an' feel my time is nigh,
though only Gawd knows jest what it is.

'Did your Luther take accaount o' whar them big tracks led tew? No?
Wal, Mis' Corey, ef they was on the glen rud this side o' the glen, an'
ain't got to your haouse yet, I calc'late they must go into the glen
itself. They would do that. I allus says Col' Spring Glen ain't no
healthy nor decent place. The whippoorwills an' fireflies there never
did act like they was creaters o' Gawd, an' they's them as says ye kin
hear strange things a-rushin' an' a-talkin' in the air dawon thar ef ye
stand in the right place, atween the rock falls an' Bear's Den.'

By that noon fully three-quarters of the men and boys of Dunwich
were trooping over the roads and meadows between the newmade Whateley
ruins and Cold Spring Glen, examining in horror the vast, monstrous
prints, the maimed Bishop cattle, the strange, noisome wreck of the
farmhouse, and the bruised, matted vegetation of the fields and
roadside. Whatever had burst loose upon the world had assuredly gone
down into the great sinister ravine; for all the trees on the banks
were bent and broken, and a great avenue had been gouged in the
precipice-hanging underbrush. It was as though a house, launched by an
avalanche, had slid down through the tangled growths of the almost
vertical slope. From below no sound came, but only a distant,
undefinable foetor; and it is not to be wondered at that the men
preferred to stay on the edge and argue, rather than descend and beard
the unknown Cyclopean horror in its lair. Three dogs that were with the
party had barked furiously at first, but seemed cowed and reluctant
when near the glen. Someone telephoned the news to the Aylesbury
Transcript; but the editor, accustomed to wild tales from Dunwich, did
no more than concoct a humorous paragraph about it; an item soon
afterwards reproduced by the Associated Press.

That night everyone went home, and every house and barn was
barricaded as stoutly as possible. Needless to say, no cattle were
allowed to remain in open pasturage. About two in the morning a
frightful stench and the savage barking of the dogs awakened the
household at Elmer Frye's, on the eastern edge of Cold Spring Glen, and
all agreed that they could hear a sort of muffled swishing or lapping
sound from somewhere outside. Mrs Frye proposed telephoning the
neighbours, and Elmer was about to agree when the noise of splintering
wood burst in upon their deliberations. It came, apparently, from the
barn; and was quickly followed by a hideous screaming and stamping
amongst the cattle. The dogs slavered and crouched close to the feet of
the fear-numbed family. Frye lit a lantern through force of habit, but
knew it would be death to go out into that black farmyard. The children
and the women-folk whimpered, kept from screaming by some obscure,
vestigial instinct of defence which told them their lives depended on
silence. At last the noise of the cattle subsided to a pitiful moaning,
and a great snapping, crashing, and crackling ensued. The Fryes,
huddled together in the sitting-room, did not dare to move until the
last echoes died away far down in Cold Spring Glen. Then, amidst the
dismal moans from the stable and the daemoniac piping of the late
whippoorwills in the glen, Selina Frye tottered to the telephone and
spread what news she could of the second phase of the horror.

The next day all the countryside was in a panic; and cowed,
uncommunicative groups came and went where the fiendish thing had
occurred. Two titan swaths of destruction stretched from the glen to
the Frye farmyard, monstrous prints covered the bare patches of ground,
and one side of the old red barn had completely caved in. Of the
cattle, only a quarter could be found and identified. Some of these
were in curious fragments, and all that survived had to be shot. Earl
Sawyer suggested that help be asked from Aylesbury or Arkham, but
others maintained it would be of no use. Old Zebulon Whateley, of a
branch that hovered about halfway between soundness and decadence, made
darkly wild suggestions about rites that ought to be practiced on the
hill-tops. He came of a line where tradition ran strong, and his
memories of chantings in the great stone circles were not altogether
connected with Wilbur and his grandfather.

Darkness fell upon a stricken countryside too passive to organize
for real defence. In a few cases closely related families would band
together and watch in the gloom under one roof; but in general there
was only a repetition of the barricading of the night before, and a
futile, ineffective gesture of loading muskets and setting pitchforks
handily about. Nothing, however, occurred except some hill noises; and
when the day came there were many who hoped that the new horror had
gone as swiftly as it had come. There were even bold souls who proposed
an offensive expedition down in the glen, though they did not venture
to set an actual example to the still reluctant majority.

When night came again the barricading was repeated, though there was
less huddling together of families. In the morning both the Frye and
the Seth Bishop households reported excitement among the dogs and vague
sounds and stenches from afar, while early explorers noted with horror
a fresh set of the monstrous tracks in the road skirting Sentinel Hill.
As before, the sides of the road showed a bruising indicative of the
blasphemously stupendous bulk of the horror; whilst the conformation of
the tracks seemed to argue a passage in two directions, as if the
moving mountain had come from Cold Spring Glen and returned to it along
the same path. At the base of the hill a thirty-foot swath of crushed
shrubbery saplings led steeply upwards, and the seekers gasped when
they saw that even the most perpendicular places did not deflect the
inexorable trail. Whatever the horror was, it could scale a sheer stony
cliff of almost complete verticality; and as the investigators climbed
round to the hill's summit by safer routes they saw that the trail
ended--or rather, reversed--there.

It was here that the Whateleys used to build their hellish fires and
chant their hellish rituals by the table-like stone on May Eve and
Hallowmass. Now that very stone formed the centre of a vast space
thrashed around by the mountainous horror, whilst upon its slightly
concave surface was a thick and foetid deposit of the same tarry
stickiness observed on the floor of the ruined Whateley farmhouse when
the horror escaped. Men looked at one another and muttered. Then they
looked down the hill. Apparently the horror had descended by a route
much the same as that of its ascent. To speculate was futile. Reason,
logic, and normal ideas of motivation stood confounded. Only old
Zebulon, who was not with the group, could have done justice to the
situation or suggested a plausible explanation.

Thursday night began much like the others, but it ended less
happily. The whippoorwills in the glen had screamed with such unusual
persistence that many could not sleep, and about 3 A.M. all the party
telephones rang tremulously. Those who took down their receivers heard
a fright-mad voice shriek out, 'Help, oh, my Gawd!...' and some
thought a crashing sound followed the breaking off of the exclamation.
There was nothing more. No one dared do anything, and no one knew till
morning whence the call came. Then those who had heard it called
everyone on the line, and found that only the Fryes did not reply. The
truth appeared an hour later, when a hastily assembled group of armed
men trudged out to the Frye place at the head of the glen. It was
horrible, yet hardly a surprise. There were more swaths and monstrous
prints, but there was no longer any house. It had caved in like an
egg-shell, and amongst the ruins nothing living or dead could be
discovered. Only a stench and a tarry stickiness. The Elmer Fryes had
been erased from Dunwich.


VIII.

In the meantime a quieter yet even more spiritually poignant phase
of the horror had been blackly unwinding itself behind the closed door
of a shelf-lined room in Arkham. The curious manuscript record or diary
of Wilbur Whateley, delivered to Miskatonic University for translation
had caused much worry and bafflement among the experts in language both
ancient and modern; its very alphabet, notwithstanding a general
resemblance to the heavily-shaded Arabic used in Mesopotamia, being
absolutely unknown to any available authority. The final conclusion of
the linguists was that the text represented an artificial alphabet,
giving the effect of a cipher; though none of the usual methods of
cryptographic solution seemed to furnish any clue, even when applied on
the basis of every tongue the writer might conceivably have used. The
ancient books taken from Whateley's quarters, while absorbingly
interesting and in several cases promising to open up new and terrible
lines of research among philosophers and men of science, were of no
assistance whatever in this matter. One of them, a heavy tome with an
iron clasp, was in another unknown alphabet--this one of a very
different cast, and resembling Sanskrit more than anything else. The
old ledger was at length given wholly into the charge of Dr Armitage,
both because of his peculiar interest in the Whateley matter, and
because of his wide linguistic learning and skill in the mystical
formulae of antiquity and the middle ages.

Armitage had an idea that the alphabet might be something
esoterically used by certain forbidden cults which have come down from
old times, and which have inherited many forms and traditions from the
wizards of the Saracenic world. That question, however, he did not deem
vital; since it would be unnecessary to know the origin of the symbols
if, as he suspected, they were used as a cipher in a modern language.
It was his belief that, considering the great amount of text involved,
the writer would scarcely have wished the trouble of using another
speech than his own, save perhaps in certain special formulae and
incantations. Accordingly he attacked the manuscript with the
preliminary assumption that the bulk of it was in English.

Dr Armitage knew, from the repeated failures of his colleagues, that
the riddle was a deep and complex one; and that no simple mode of
solution could merit even a trial. All through late August he fortified
himself with the mass lore of cryptography; drawing upon the fullest
resources of his own library, and wading night after night amidst the
arcana of Trithemius' Poligraphia, Giambattista Porta's De Furtivis
Literarum Notis, De Vigenere's Traite des Chiffres, Falconer's
Cryptomenysis Patefacta, Davys' and Thicknesse's eighteenth-century
treatises, and such fairly modern authorities as Blair, van Marten and
Kluber's script itself, and in time became convinced that he had to
deal with one of those subtlest and most ingenious of cryptograms, in
which many separate lists of corresponding letters are arranged like
the multiplication table, and the message built up with arbitrary
key-words known only to the initiated. The older authorities seemed
rather more helpful than the newer ones, and Armitage concluded that
the code of the manuscript was one of great antiquity, no doubt handed
down through a long line of mystical experimenters. Several times he
seemed near daylight, only to be set back by some unforeseen obstacle.
Then, as September approached, the clouds began to clear. Certain
letters, as used in certain parts of the manuscript, emerged definitely
and unmistakably; and it became obvious that the text was indeed in
English.

On the evening of September second the last major barrier gave way,
and Dr Armitage read for the first time a continuous passage of Wilbur
Whateley's annals. It was in truth a diary, as all had thought; and it
was couched in a style clearly showing the mixed occult erudition and
general illiteracy of the strange being who wrote it. Almost the first
long passage that Armitage deciphered, an entry dated November 26,
1916, proved highly startling and disquieting. It was written, he
remembered, by a child of three and a half who looked like a lad of
twelve or thirteen.

Today learned the Aklo for the Sabaoth (it ran), which did not like,
it being answerable from the hill and not from the air. That upstairs
more ahead of me than I had thought it would be, and is not like to
have much earth brain. Shot Elam Hutchins's collie Jack when he went to
bite me, and Elam says he would kill me if he dast. I guess he won't.
Grandfather kept me saying the Dho formula last night, and I think I
saw the inner city at the 2 magnetic poles. I shall go to those poles
when the earth is cleared off, if I can't break through with the
Dho-Hna formula when I commit it. They from the air told me at Sabbat
that it will be years before I can clear off the earth, and I guess
grandfather will be dead then, so I shall have to learn all the angles
of the planes and all the formulas between the Yr and the Nhhngr. They
from outside will help, but they cannot take body without human blood.
That upstairs looks it will have the right cast. I can see it a little
when I make the Voorish sign or blow the powder of Ibn Ghazi at it, and
it is near like them at May Eve on the Hill. The other face may wear
off some. I wonder how I shall look when the earth is cleared and there
are no earth beings on it. He that came with the Aklo Sabaoth said I
may be transfigured there being much of outside to work on.

Morning found Dr Armitage in a cold sweat of terror and a frenzy of
wakeful concentration. He had not left the manuscript all night, but
sat at his table under the electric light turning page after page with
shaking hands as fast as he could decipher the cryptic text. He had
nervously telephoned his wife he would not be home, and when she
brought him a breakfast from the house he could scarcely dispose of a
mouthful. All that day he read on, now and then halted maddeningly as a
reapplication of the complex key became necessary. Lunch and dinner
were brought him, but he ate only the smallest fraction of either.
Toward the middle of the next night he drowsed off in his chair, but
soon woke out of a tangle of nightmares almost as hideous as the truths
and menaces to man's existence that he had uncovered.

On the morning of September fourth Professor Rice and Dr Morgan
insisted on seeing him for a while, and departed trembling and
ashen-grey. That evening he went to bed, but slept only fitfully.
Wednesday--the next day--he was back at the manuscript, and began to
take copious notes both from the current sections and from those he had
already deciphered. In the small hours of that night he slept a little
in a easy chair in his office, but was at the manuscript again before
dawn. Some time before noon his physician, Dr Hartwell, called to see
him and insisted that he cease work. He refused; intimating that it was
of the most vital importance for him to complete the reading of the
diary and promising an explanation in due course of time. That evening,
just as twilight fell, he finished his terrible perusal and sank back
exhausted. His wife, bringing his dinner, found him in a half-comatose
state; but he was conscious enough to warn her off with a sharp cry
when he saw her eyes wander toward the notes he had taken. Weakly
rising, he gathered up the scribbled papers and sealed them all in a
great envelope, which he immediately placed in his inside coat pocket.
He had sufficient strength to get home, but was so clearly in need of
medical aid that Dr Hartwell was summoned at once. As the doctor put
him to bed he could only mutter over and over again, 'But what, in
God's name, can we do?'

Dr Armitage slept, but was partly delirious the next day. He made no
explanations to Hartwell, but in his calmer moments spoke of the
imperative need of a long conference with Rice and Morgan. His wilder
wanderings were very startling indeed, including frantic appeals that
something in a boarded-up farmhouse be destroyed, and fantastic
references to some plan for the extirpation of the entire human race
and all animal and vegetable life from the earth by some terrible elder
race of beings from another dimension. He would shout that the world
was in danger, since the Elder Things wished to strip it and drag it
away from the solar system and cosmos of matter into some other plane
or phase of entity from which it had once fallen, vigintillions of
aeons ago. At other times he would call for the dreaded Necronomicon
and the Daemonolatreia of Remigius, in which he seemed hopeful of
finding some formula to check the peril he conjured up.

'Stop them, stop them!' he would shout. 'Those Whateleys meant to
let them in, and the worst of all is left! Tell Rice and Morgan we must
do something--it's a blind business, but I know how to make the
powder...It hasn't been fed since the second of August, when Wilbur
came here to his death, and at that rate...'

But Armitage had a sound physique despite his seventy-three years,
and slept off his disorder that night without developing any real
fever. He woke late Friday, clear of head, though sober with a gnawing
fear and tremendous sense of responsibility. Saturday afternoon he felt
able to go over to the library and summon Rice and Morgan for a
conference, and the rest of that day and evening the three men tortured
their brains in the wildest speculation and the most desperate debate.
Strange and terrible books were drawn voluminously from the stack
shelves and from secure places of storage; and diagrams and formulae
were copied with feverish haste and in bewildering abundance. Of
scepticism there was none. All three had seen the body of Wilbur
Whateley as it lay on the floor in a room of that very building, and
after that not one of them could feel even slightly inclined to treat
the diary as a madman's raving.

Opinions were divided as to notifying the Massachusetts State
Police, and the negative finally won. There were things involved which
simply could not be believed by those who had not seen a sample, as
indeed was made clear during certain subsequent investigations. Late at
night the conference disbanded without having developed a definite
plan, but all day Sunday Armitage was busy comparing formulae and
mixing chemicals obtained from the college laboratory. The more he
reflected on the hellish diary, the more he was inclined to doubt the
efficacy of any material agent in stamping out the entity which Wilbur
Whateley had left behind him--the earth threatening entity which,
unknown to him, was to burst forth in a few hours and become the
memorable Dunwich horror.

Monday was a repetition of Sunday with Dr Armitage, for the task in
hand required an infinity of research and experiment. Further
consultations of the monstrous diary brought about various changes of
plan, and he knew that even in the end a large amount of uncertainty
must remain. By Tuesday he had a definite line of action mapped out,
and believed he would try a trip to Dunwich within a week. Then, on
Wednesday, the great shock came. Tucked obscurely away in a corner of
the Arkham Advertiser was a facetious little item from the Associated
Press, telling what a record-breaking monster the bootleg whisky of
Dunwich had raised up. Armitage, half stunned, could only telephone for
Rice and Morgan. Far into the night they discussed, and the next day
was a whirlwind of preparation on the part of them all. Armitage knew
he would be meddling with terrible powers, yet saw that there was no
other way to annul the deeper and more malign meddling which others had
done before him.


IX.

Friday morning Armitage, Rice, and Morgan set out by motor for
Dunwich, arriving at the village about one in the afternoon. The day
was pleasant, but even in the brightest sunlight a kind of quiet dread
and portent seemed to hover about the strangely domed hills and the
deep, shadowy ravines of the stricken region. Now and then on some
mountain top a gaunt circle of stones could be glimpsed against the
sky. From the air of hushed fright at Osborn's store they knew
something hideous had happened, and soon learned of the annihilation of
the Elmer Frye house and family. Throughout that afternoon they rode
around Dunwich, questioning the natives concerning all that had
occurred, and seeing for themselves with rising pangs of horror the
drear Frye ruins with their lingering traces of the tarry stickiness,
the blasphemous tracks in the Frye yard, the wounded Seth Bishop
cattle, and the enormous swaths of disturbed vegetation in various
places. The trail up and down Sentinel Hill seemed to Armitage of
almost cataclysmic significance, and he looked long at the sinister
altar-like stone on the summit.

At length the visitors, apprised of a party of State Police which
had come from Aylesbury that morning in response to the first telephone
reports of the Frye tragedy, decided to seek out the officers and
compare notes as far as practicable. This, however, they found more
easily planned than performed; since no sign of the party could be
found in any direction. There had been five of them in a car, but now
the car stood empty near the ruins in the Frye yard. The natives, all
of whom had talked with the policemen, seemed at first as perplexed as
Armitage and his companions. Then old Sam Hutchins thought of something
and turned pale, nudging Fred Farr and pointing to the dank, deep
hollow that yawned close by.

'Gawd,' he gasped, 'I telled 'em not ter go daown into the glen, an'
I never thought nobody'd dew it with them tracks an' that smell an' the
whippoorwills a-screechin' daown thar in the dark o' noonday...'

A cold shudder ran through natives and visitors alike, and every ear
seemed strained in a kind of instinctive, unconscious listening.
Armitage, now that he had actually come upon the horror and its
monstrous work, trembled with the responsibility he felt to be his.
Night would soon fall, and it was then that the mountainous blasphemy
lumbered upon its eldritch course. Negotium perambuians in tenebris...
The old librarian rehearsed the formulae he had memorized, and clutched
the paper containing the alternative one he had not memorized. He saw
that his electric flashlight was in working order. Rice, beside him,
took from a valise a metal sprayer of the sort used in combating
insects; whilst Morgan uncased the big-game rifle on which he relied
despite his colleague's warnings that no material weapon would be of
help.

Armitage, having read the hideous diary, knew painfully well what
kind of a manifestation to expect; but he did not add to the fright of
the Dunwich people by giving any hints or clues. He hoped that it might
be conquered without any revelation to the world of the monstrous thing
it had escaped. As the shadows gathered, the natives commenced to
disperse homeward, anxious to bar themselves indoors despite the
present evidence that all human locks and bolts were useless before a
force that could bend trees and crush houses when it chose. They shook
their heads at the visitors' plan to stand guard at the Frye ruins near
the glen; and, as they left, had little expectancy of ever seeing the
watchers again.

There were rumblings under the hills that night, and the
whippoorwills piped threateningly. Once in a while a wind, sweeping up
out of Cold Spring Glen, would bring a touch of ineffable foetor to the
heavy night air; such a foetor as all three of the watchers had smelled
once before, when they stood above a dying thing that had passed for
fifteen years and a half as a human being. But the looked-for terror
did not appear. Whatever was down there in the glen was biding its
time, and Armitage told his colleagues it would be suicidal to try to
attack it in the dark.

Morning came wanly, and the night-sounds ceased. It was a grey,
bleak day, with now and then a drizzle of rain; and heavier and heavier
clouds seemed to be piling themselves up beyond the hills to the
north-west. The men from Arkham were undecided what to do. Seeking
shelter from the increasing rainfall beneath one of the few undestroyed
Frye outbuildings, they debated the wisdom of waiting, or of taking the
aggressive and going down into the glen in quest of their nameless,
monstrous quarry. The downpour waxed in heaviness, and distant peals of
thunder sounded from far horizons. Sheet lightning shimmered, and then
a forky bolt flashed near at hand, as if descending into the accursed
glen itself. The sky grew very dark, and the watchers hoped that the
storm would prove a short, sharp one followed by clear weather.

It was still gruesomely dark when, not much over an hour later, a
confused babel of voices sounded down the road. Another moment brought
to view a frightened group of more than a dozen men, running, shouting,
and even whimpering hysterically. Someone in the lead began sobbing out
words, and the Arkham men started violently when those words developed
a coherent form.

'Oh, my Gawd, my Gawd,' the voice choked out. 'It's a-goin' agin,
an' this time by day! It's aout--it's aout an' a-movin' this very
minute, an' only the Lord knows when it'll be on us all!'

The speaker panted into silence, but another took up his message.

'Nigh on a haour ago Zeb Whateley here heered the 'phone a-ringin',
an' it was Mis' Corey, George's wife, that lives daown by the junction.
She says the hired boy Luther was aout drivin' in the caows from the
storm arter the big bolt, when he see all the trees a-bendin' at the
maouth o' the glen--opposite side ter this--an' smelt the same awful
smell like he smelt when he faound the big tracks las' Monday mornin'.
An' she says he says they was a swishin' lappin' saound, more nor what
the bendin' trees an' bushes could make, an' all on a suddent the trees
along the rud begun ter git pushed one side, an' they was a awful
stompin' an' splashin' in the mud. But mind ye, Luther he didn't see
nothin' at all, only just the bendin' trees an' underbrush.

'Then fur ahead where Bishop's Brook goes under the rud he heerd a
awful creakin' an' strainin' on the bridge, an' says he could tell the
saound o' wood a-startin' to crack an' split. An' all the whiles he
never see a thing, only them trees an' bushes a-bendin'. An' when the
swishin' saound got very fur off--on the rud towards Wizard Whateley's
an' Sentinel Hill--Luther he had the guts ter step up whar he'd heerd
it fust an' look at the graound. It was all mud an' water, an' the sky
was dark, an' the rain was wipin' aout all tracks abaout as fast as
could be; but beginnin' at the glen maouth, whar the trees hed moved,
they was still some o' them awful prints big as bar'ls like he seen
Monday.'

At this point the first excited speaker interrupted.

'But that ain't the trouble naow--that was only the start. Zeb here
was callin' folks up an' everybody was a-listenin' in when a call from
Seth Bishop's cut in. His haousekeeper Sally was carryin' on fit to
kill--she'd jest seed the trees a-bendin' beside the rud, an' says
they was a kind o' mushy saound, like a elephant puffin' an' treadin',
a-headin' fer the haouse. Then she up an' spoke suddent of a fearful
smell, an' says her boy Cha'ncey was a-screamin' as haow it was jest
like what he smelt up to the Whateley rewins Monday mornin'. An' the
dogs was barkin' an' whinin' awful.

'An' then she let aout a turrible yell, an' says the shed daown the
rud had jest caved in like the storm hed blowed it over, only the wind
w'an't strong enough to dew that. Everybody was a-listenin', an' we
could hear lots o' folks on the wire a-gaspin'. All to onct Sally she
yelled again, an' says the front yard picket fence hed just crumbled
up, though they wa'n't no sign o' what done it. Then everybody on the
line could hear Cha'ncey an' old Seth Bishop a-yellin' tew, an' Sally
was shriekin' aout that suthin' heavy hed struck the haouse--not
lightnin' nor nothin', but suthin' heavy again' the front, that kep'
a-launchin' itself agin an' agin, though ye couldn't see nothin' aout
the front winders. An' then...an' then...'

Lines of fright deepened on every face; and Armitage, shaken as he was,
had barely poise enough to prompt the speaker.

'An' then...Sally she yelled aout, "O help, the haouse is a-cavin'
in"...an' on the wire we could hear a turrible crashin' an' a hull
flock o' screaming...jes like when Elmer Frye's place was took, only
wuss...'

The man paused, and another of the crowd spoke.

'That's all--not a saound nor squeak over the 'phone arter that.
Jest still-like. We that heerd it got aout Fords an' wagons an' rounded
up as many able-bodied men-folks as we could git, at Corey's place, an'
come up here ter see what yew thought best ter dew. Not but what I
think it's the Lord's jedgment fer our iniquities, that no mortal kin
ever set aside.'

Armitage saw that the time for positive action had come, and spoke
decisively to the faltering group of frightened rustics.

'We must follow it, boys.' He made his voice as reassuring as
possible. 'I believe there's a chance of putting it out of business.
You men know that those Whateleys were wizards--well, this thing is a
thing of wizardry, and must be put down by the same means. I've seen
Wilbur Whateley's diary and read some of the strange old books he used
to read; and I think I know the right kind of spell to recite to make
the thing fade away. Of course, one can't be sure, but we can always
take a chance. It's invisible--I knew it would be--but there's powder
in this long-distance sprayer that might make it show up for a second.
Later on we'll try it. It's a frightful thing to have alive, but it
isn't as bad as what Wilbur would have let in if he'd lived longer.
You'll never know what the world escaped. Now we've only this one thing
to fight, and it can't multiply. It can, though, do a lot of harm; so
we mustn't hesitate to rid the community of it.

'We must follow it--and the way to begin is to go to the place that
has just been wrecked. Let somebody lead the way--I don't know your
roads very well, but I've an idea there might be a shorter cut across
lots. How about it?'

The men shuffled about a moment, and then Earl Sawyer spoke softly,
pointing with a grimy finger through the steadily lessening rain.

'I guess ye kin git to Seth Bishop's quickest by cuttin' across the
lower medder here, wadin' the brook at the low place, an' climbin'
through Carrier's mowin' an' the timber-lot beyont. That comes aout on
the upper rud mighty nigh Seth's--a leetle t'other side.'

Armitage, with Rice and Morgan, started to walk in the direction
indicated; and most of the natives followed slowly. The sky was growing
lighter, and there were signs that the storm had worn itself away. When
Armitage inadvertently took a wrong direction, Joe Osborn warned him
and walked ahead to show the right one. Courage and confidence were
mounting, though the twilight of the almost perpendicular wooded hill
which lay towards the end of their short cut, and among whose fantastic
ancient trees they had to scramble as if up a ladder, put these
qualities to a severe test.

At length they emerged on a muddy road to find the sun coming out.
They were a little beyond the Seth Bishop place, but bent trees and
hideously unmistakable tracks showed what had passed by. Only a few
moments were consumed in surveying the ruins just round the bend. It
was the Frye incident all over again, and nothing dead or living was
found in either of the collapsed shells which had been the Bishop house
and barn. No one cared to remain there amidst the stench and tarry
stickiness, but all turned instinctively to the line of horrible prints
leading on towards the wrecked Whateley farmhouse and the altar-crowned
slopes of Sentinel Hill.

As the men passed the site of Wilbur Whateley's abode they shuddered
visibly, and seemed again to mix hesitancy with their zeal. It was no
joke tracking down something as big as a house that one could not see,
but that had all the vicious malevolence of a daemon. Opposite the base
of Sentinel Hill the tracks left the road, and there was a fresh
bending and matting visible along the broad swath marking the monster's
former route to and from the summit.

Armitage produced a pocket telescope of considerable power and
scanned the steep green side of the hill. Then he handed the instrument
to Morgan, whose sight was keener. After a moment of gazing Morgan
cried out sharply, passing the glass to Earl Sawyer and indicating a
certain spot on the slope with his finger. Sawyer, as clumsy as most
non-users of optical devices are, fumbled a while; but eventually
focused the lenses with Armitage's aid. When he did so his cry was less
restrained than Morgan's had been.

'Gawd almighty, the grass an' bushes is a'movin'! It's a-goin' up--
slow-like--creepin'--up ter the top this minute, heaven only knows
what fur!'

Then the germ of panic seemed to spread among the seekers. It was
one thing to chase the nameless entity, but quite another to find it.
Spells might be all right--but suppose they weren't? Voices began
questioning Armitage about what he knew of the thing, and no reply
seemed quite to satisfy. Everyone seemed to feel himself in close
proximity to phases of Nature and of being utterly forbidden and wholly
outside the sane experience of mankind.


X.

In the end the three men from Arkham--old, white-bearded Dr
Armitage, stocky, iron-grey Professor Rice, and lean, youngish Dr
Morgan, ascended the mountain alone. After much patient instruction
regarding its focusing and use, they left the telescope with the
frightened group that remained in the road; and as they climbed they
were watched closely by those among whom the glass was passed round. It
was hard going, and Armitage had to be helped more than once. High
above the toiling group the great swath trembled as its hellish maker
repassed with snail-like deliberateness. Then it was obvious that the
pursuers were gaining.

Curtis Whateley--of the undecayed branch--was holding the
telescope when the Arkham party detoured radically from the swath. He
told the crowd that the men were evidently trying to get to a
subordinate peak which overlooked the swath at a point considerably
ahead of where the shrubbery was now bending. This, indeed, proved to
be true; and the party were seen to gain the minor elevation only a
short time after the invisible blasphemy had passed it.

Then Wesley Corey, who had taken the glass, cried out that Armitage
was adjusting the sprayer which Rice held, and that something must be
about to happen. The crowd stirred uneasily, recalling that his sprayer
was expected to give the unseen horror a moment of visibility. Two or
three men shut their eyes, but Curtis Whateley snatched back the
telescope and strained his vision to the utmost. He saw that Rice, from
the party's point of advantage above and behind the entity, had an
excellent chance of spreading the potent powder with marvellous effect.

Those without the telescope saw only an instant's flash of grey
cloud--a cloud about the size of a moderately large building--near
the top of the mountain. Curtis, who held the instrument, dropped it
with a piercing shriek into the ankle-deep mud of the road. He reeled,
and would have crumbled to the ground had not two or three others
seized and steadied him. All he could do was moan half-inaudibly.

'Oh, oh, great Gawd...that...that...'

There was a pandemonium of questioning, and only Henry Wheeler
thought to rescue the fallen telescope and wipe it clean of mud. Curtis
was past all coherence, and even isolated replies were almost too much
for him.

'Bigger'n a barn...all made o' squirmin' ropes...hull thing sort
o' shaped like a hen's egg bigger'n anything with dozens o' legs like
hogs-heads that haff shut up when they step...nothin' solid abaout it
--all like jelly, an' made o' sep'rit wrigglin' ropes pushed clost
together...great bulgin' eyes all over it...ten or twenty maouths or
trunks a-stickin' aout all along the sides, big as stove-pipes an all
a-tossin' an openin' an' shuttin'...all grey, with kinder blue or
purple rings...an' Gawd it Heaven--that haff face on top...'

This final memory, whatever it was, proved too much for poor Curtis;
and he collapsed completely before he could say more. Fred Farr and
Will Hutchins carried him to the roadside and laid him on the damp
grass. Henry Wheeler, trembling, turned the rescued telescope on the
mountain to see what he might. Through the lenses were discernible
three tiny figures, apparently running towards the summit as fast as
the steep incline allowed. Only these--nothing more. Then everyone
noticed a strangely unseasonable noise in the deep valley behind, and
even in the underbrush of Sentinel Hill itself. It was the piping of
unnumbered whippoorwills, and in their shrill chorus there seemed to
lurk a note of tense and evil expectancy.

Earl Sawyer now took the telescope and reported the three figures as
standing on the topmost ridge, virtually level with the altar-stone but
at a considerable distance from it. One figure, he said, seemed to be
raising its hands above its head at rhythmic intervals; and as Sawyer
mentioned the circumstance the crowd seemed to hear a faint,
half-musical sound from the distance, as if a loud chant were
accompanying the gestures. The weird silhouette on that remote peak
must have been a spectacle of infinite grotesqueness and
impressiveness, but no observer was in a mood for aesthetic
appreciation. 'I guess he's sayin' the spell,' whispered Wheeler as he
snatched back the telescope. The whippoorwills were piping wildly, and
in a singularly curious irregular rhythm quite unlike that of the
visible ritual.

Suddenly the sunshine seemed to lessen without the intervention of
any discernible cloud. It was a very peculiar phenomenon, and was
plainly marked by all. A rumbling sound seemed brewing beneath the
hills, mixed strangely with a concordant rumbling which clearly came
from the sky. Lightning flashed aloft, and the wondering crowd looked
in vain for the portents of storm. The chanting of the men from Arkham
now became unmistakable, and Wheeler saw through the glass that they
were all raising their arms in the rhythmic incantation. From some
farmhouse far away came the frantic barking of dogs.

The change in the quality of the daylight increased, and the crowd
gazed about the horizon in wonder. A purplish darkness, born of nothing
more than a spectral deepening of the sky's blue, pressed down upon the
rumbling hills. Then the lightning flashed again, somewhat brighter
than before, and the crowd fancied that it had showed a certain
mistiness around the altar-stone on the distant height. No one,
however, had been using the telescope at that instant. The
whippoorwills continued their irregular pulsation, and the men of
Dunwich braced themselves tensely against some imponderable menace with
which the atmosphere seemed surcharged.

Without warning came those deep, cracked, raucous vocal sounds which
will never leave the memory of the stricken group who heard them. Not
from any human throat were they born, for the organs of man can yield
no such acoustic perversions. Rather would one have said they came from
the pit itself, had not their source been so unmistakably the
altar-stone on the peak. It is almost erroneous to call them sounds at
all, since so much of their ghastly, infra-bass timbre spoke to dim
seats of consciousness and terror far subtler than the ear; yet one
must do so, since their form was indisputably though vaguely that of
half-articulate words. They were loud--loud as the rumblings and the
thunder above which they echoed--yet did they come from no visible
being. And because imagination might suggest a conjectural source in
the world of non-visible beings, the huddled crowd at the mountain's
base huddled still closer, and winced as if in expectation of a blow.

Ygnailh...ygnaiih...thflthkh'ngha...Yog-Sothoth...rang the hideous
croaking out of space. Y'bthnk...h'ehye--n'grkdl'lh...

The speaking impulse seemed to falter here, as if some frightful
psychic struggle were going on. Henry Wheeler strained his eye at the
telescope, but saw only the three grotesquely silhouetted human figures
on the peak, all moving their arms furiously in strange gestures as
their incantation drew near its culmination. From what black wells of
Acherontic fear or feeling, from what unplumbed gulfs of extra-cosmic
consciousness or obscure, long-latent heredity, were those
half-articulate thunder-croakings drawn? Presently they began to gather
renewed force and coherence as they grew in stark, utter, ultimate
frenzy.

Eh-y-ya-ya-yahaah--e'yayayaaaa...ngh'aaaaa...ngh'aaa...
h'yuh...h'yuh...HELP! HELP!...ff--ff--ff--FATHER! FATHER!
YOG-SOTHOTH!...

But that was all. The pallid group in the road, still reeling at the
indisputably English syllables that had poured thickly and thunderously
down from the frantic vacancy beside that shocking altar-stone, were
never to hear such syllables again. Instead, they jumped violently at
the terrific report which seemed to rend the hills; the deafening,
cataclysmic peal whose source, be it inner earth or sky, no hearer was
ever able to place. A single lightning bolt shot from the purple zenith
to the altar-stone, and a great tidal wave of viewless force and
indescribable stench swept down from the hill to all the countryside.
Trees, grass, and under-brush were whipped into a fury; and the
frightened crowd at the mountain's base, weakened by the lethal foetor
that seemed about to asphyxiate them, were almost hurled off their
feet. Dogs howled from the distance, green grass and foliage wilted to
a curious, sickly yellow-grey, and over field and forest were scattered
the bodies of dead whippoorwills.

The stench left quickly, but the vegetation never came right again.
To this day there is something queer and unholy about the growths on
and around that fearsome hill Curtis Whateley was only just regaining
consciousness when the Arkham men came slowly down the mountain in the
beams of a sunlight once more brilliant and untainted. They were grave
and quiet, and seemed shaken by memories and reflections even more
terrible than those which had reduced the group of natives to a state
of cowed quivering. In reply to a jumble of questions they only shook
their heads and reaffirmed one vital fact.

'The thing has gone for ever,' Armitage said. 'It has been split up
into what it was originally made of, and can never exist again. It was
an impossibility in a normal world. Only the least fraction was really
matter in any sense we know. It was like its father--and most of it
has gone back to him in some vague realm or dimension outside our
material universe; some vague abyss out of which only the most accursed
rites of human blasphemy could ever have called him for a moment on the
hills.'

There was a brief silence, and in that pause the scattered senses of
poor Curtis Whateley began to knit back into a sort of continuity; so
that he put his hands to his head with a moan. Memory seemed to pick
itself up where it had left off, and the horror of the sight that had
prostrated him burst in upon him again.

'Oh, oh, my Gawd, that haff face--that haff face on top of it...
that face with the red eyes an' crinkly albino hair, an' no chin, like
the Whateleys...It was a octopus, centipede, spider kind o' thing, but
they was a haff-shaped man's face on top of it, an' it looked like
Wizard Whateley's, only it was yards an' yards acrost...'

He paused exhausted, as the whole group of natives stared in a
bewilderment not quite crystallized into fresh terror. Only old Zebulon
Whateley, who wanderingly remembered ancient things but who had been
silent heretofore, spoke aloud.

'Fifteen year' gone,' he rambled, 'I heered Ol' Whateley say as haow
some day we'd hear a child o' Lavinny's a-callin' its father's name on
the top o' Sentinel Hill...'

But Joe Osborn interrupted him to question the Arkham men anew.

'What was it, anyhaow, an' haowever did young Wizard Whateley call it
aout o' the air it come from?'

Armitage chose his words very carefully.

'It was--well, it was mostly a kind of force that doesn't belong in
our part of space; a kind of force that acts and grows and shapes
itself by other laws than those of our sort of Nature. We have no
business calling in such things from outside, and only very wicked
people and very wicked cults ever try to. There was some of it in
Wilbur Whateley himself--enough to make a devil and a precocious
monster of him, and to make his passing out a pretty terrible sight.
I'm going to burn his accursed diary, and if you men are wise you'll
dynamite that altar-stone up there, and pull down all the rings of
standing stones on the other hills. Things like that brought down the
beings those Whateleys were so fond of--the beings they were going to
let in tangibly to wipe out the human race and drag the earth off to
some nameless place for some nameless purpose.

'But as to this thing we've just sent back--the Whateleys raised it
for a terrible part in the doings that were to come. It grew fast and
big from the same reason that Wilbur grew fast and big--but it beat
him because it had a greater share of the outsideness in it. You
needn't ask how Wilbur called it out of the air. He didn't call it out.
It was his twin brother, but it looked more like the father than he
did.'



* THE WHISPERER IN DARKNESS


I

Bear in mind closely that I did not see any actual visual horror at
the end. To say that a mental shock was the cause of what I inferred--
that last straw which sent me racing out of the lonely Akeley farmhouse
and through the wild domed hills of Vermont in a commandeered motor at
night--is to ignore the plainest facts of my final experience.
Notwithstanding the deep things I saw and heard, and the admitted
vividness the impression produced on me by these things, I cannot prove
even now whether I was right or wrong in my hideous inference. For
after all Akeley's disappearance establishes nothing. People found
nothing amiss in his house despite the bullet-marks on the outside and
inside. It was just as though he had walked out casually for a ramble
in the hills and failed to return. There was not even a sign that a
guest had been there, or that those horrible cylinders and machines had
been stored in the study. That he had mortally feared the crowded green
hills and endless trickle of brooks among which he had been born and
reared, means nothing at all, either; for thousands are subject to just
such morbid fears. Eccentricity, moreover, could easily account for his
strange acts and apprehensions toward the last.

The whole matter began, so far as I am concerned, with the historic
and unprecedented Vermont floods of November 3, 1927. I was then, as
now, an instructor of literature at Miskatonic University in Arkham,
Massachusetts, and an enthusiastic amateur student of New England
folklore. Shortly after the flood, amidst the varied reports of
hardship, suffering, and organized relief which filled the press, there
appeared certain odd stories of things found floating in some of the
swollen rivers; so that many of my friends embarked on curious
discussions and appealed to me to shed what light I could on the
subject. I felt flattered at having my folklore study taken so
seriously, and did what I could to belittle the wild, vague tales which
seemed so clearly an outgrowth of old rustic superstitions. It amused
me to find several persons of education who insisted that some stratum
of obscure, distorted fact might underlie the rumors.

The tales thus brought to my notice came mostly through newspaper
cuttings; though one yarn had an oral source and was repeated to a
friend of mine in a letter from his mother in Hardwick, Vermont. The
type of thing described was essentially the same in all cases, though
there seemed to be three separate instances involved--one connected
with the Winooski River near Montpelier, another attached to the West
River in Windham County beyond Newfane, and a third centering in the
Passumpsic in Caledonia County above Lyndonville. Of course many of the
stray items mentioned other instances, but on analysis they all seemed
to boil down to these three. In each case country folk reported seeing
one or more very bizarre and disturbing objects in the surging waters
that poured down from the unfrequented hills, and there was a
widespread tendency to connect these sights with a primitive,
half-forgotten cycle of whispered legend which old people resurrected
for the occasion.

What people thought they saw were organic shapes not quite like any
they had ever seen before. Naturally, there were many human bodies
washed along by the streams in that tragic period; but those who
described these strange shapes felt quite sure that they were not
human, despite some superficial resemblances in size and general
outline. Nor, said the witnesses, could they have been any kind of
animal known to Vermont. They were pinkish things about five feet long;
with crustaceous bodies bearing vast pairs of dorsal fins or membranous
wings and several sets of articulated limbs, and with a sort of
convoluted ellipsoid, covered with multitudes of very short antennae,
where a head would ordinarily be. It was really remarkable how closely
the reports from different sources tended to coincide; though the
wonder was lessened by the fact that the old legends, shared at one
time throughout the hill country, furnished a morbidly vivid picture
which might well have coloured the imaginations of all the witnesses
concerned. It was my conclusion that such witnesses--in every case
naive and simple backwoods folk--had glimpsed the battered and bloated
bodies of human beings or farm animals in the whirling currents; and
had allowed the half-remembered folklore to invest these pitiful
objects with fantastic attributes.

The ancient folklore, while cloudy, evasive, and largely forgotten
by the present generation, was of a highly singular character, and
obviously reflected the influence of still earlier Indian tales. I knew
it well, though I had never been in Vermont, through the exceedingly
rare monograph of Eli Davenport, which embraces material orally
obtained prior to 1839 among the oldest people of the state. This
material, moreover, closely coincided with tales which I had personally
heard from elderly rustics in the mountains of New Hampshire. Briefly
summarized, it hinted at a hidden race of monstrous beings which lurked
somewhere among the remoter hills--in the deep woods of the highest
peaks, and the dark valleys where streams trickle from unknown sources.
These beings were seldom glimpsed, but evidences of their presence were
reported by those who had ventured farther than usual up the slopes of
certain mountains or into certain deep, steep-sided gorges that even
the wolves shunned.

There were queer footprints or claw-prints in the mud of
brook-margins and barren patches, and curious circles of stones, with
the grass around them worn away, which did not seem to have been placed
or entirely shaped by Nature. There were, too, certain caves of
problematical depth in the sides of the hills; with mouths closed by
boulders in a manner scarcely accidental, and with more than an average
quota of the queer prints leading both toward and away from them--if
indeed the direction of these prints could be justly estimated. And
worst of all, there were the things which adventurous people had seen
very rarely in the twilight of the remotest valleys and the dense
perpendicular woods above the limits of normal hill-climbing.

It would have been less uncomfortable if the stray accounts of these
things had not agreed so well. As it was, nearly all the rumors had
several points in common; averring that the creatures were a sort of
huge, light-red crab with many pairs of legs and with two great batlike
wings in the middle of the back. They sometimes walked on all their
legs, and sometimes on the hindmost pair only, using the others to
convey large objects of indeterminate nature. On one occasion they were
spied in considerable numbers, a detachment of them wading along a
shallow woodland watercourse three abreast in evidently disciplined
formation. Once a specimen was seen flying--launching itself from the
top of a bald, lonely hill at night and vanishing in the sky after its
great flapping wings had been silhouetted an instant against the full
moon

These things seemed content, on the whole, to let mankind alone;
though they were at times held responsible for the disappearance of
venturesome individuals--especially persons who built houses too close
to certain valleys or too high up on certain mountains. Many localities
came to be known as inadvisable to settle in, the feeling persisting
long after the cause was forgotten. People would look up at some of the
neighbouring mountain-precipices with a shudder, even when not
recalling how many settlers had been lost, and how many farmhouses
burnt to ashes, on the lower slopes of those grim, green sentinels.

But while according to the earliest legends the creatures would
appear to have harmed only those trespassing on their privacy; there
were later accounts of their curiosity respecting men, and of their
attempts to establish secret outposts in the human world. There were
tales of the queer claw-prints seen around farmhouse windows in the
morning, and of occasional disappearances in regions outside the
obviously haunted areas. Tales, besides, of buzzing voices in imitation
of human speech which made surprising offers to lone travelers on roads
and cart-paths in the deep woods, and of children frightened out of
their wits by things seen or heard where the primal forest pressed
close upon their door-yards. In the final layer of legends--the layer
just preceding the decline of superstition and the abandonment of close
contact with the dreaded places--there are shocked references to
hermits and remote farmers who at some period of life appeared to have
undergone a repellent mental change, and who were shunned and whispered
about as mortals who had sold themselves to the strange beings. In one
of the northeastern counties it seemed to be a fashion about 1800 to
accuse eccentric and unpopular recluses of being allies or
representatives of the abhorred things.

As to what the things were--explanations naturally varied. The
common name applied to them was "those ones," or "the old ones," though
other terms had a local and transient use. Perhaps the bulk of the
Puritan settlers set them down bluntly as familiars of the devil, and
made them a basis of awed theological speculation. Those with Celtic
legendry in their heritage--mainly the Scotch-Irish element of New
Hampshire, and their kindred who had settled in Vermont on Governor
Wentworth's colonial grants--linked them vaguely with the malign
fairies and "little people" of the bogs and raths, and protected
themselves with scraps of incantation handed down through many
generations. But the Indians had the most fantastic theories of all.
While different tribal legends differed, there was a marked consensus
of belief in certain vital particulars; it being unanimously agreed
that the creatures were not native to this earth.

The Pennacook myths, which were the most consistent and picturesque,
taught that the Winged Ones came from the Great Bear in the sky, and
had mines in our earthly hills whence they took a kind of stone they
could not get on any other world. They did not live here, said the
myths, but merely maintained outposts and flew back with vast cargoes
of stone to their own stars in the north. They harmed only those
earth-people who got too near them or spied upon them. Animals shunned
them through instinctive hatred, not because of being hunted. They
could not eat the things and animals of earth, but brought their own
food from the stars. It was bad to get near them, and sometimes young
hunters who went into their hills never came back. It was not good,
either, to listen to what they whispered at night in the forest with
voices like a bee's that tried to be like the voices of men. They knew
the speech of all kinds of men--Pennacooks, Hurons, men of the Five
Nations--but did not seem to have or need any speech of their own.
They talked with their heads, which changed colour in different ways to
mean different things.

All the legendry, of course, white and Indian alike, died down
during the nineteenth century, except for occasional atavistical
flareups. The ways of the Vermonters became settled; and once their
habitual paths and dwellings were established according to a certain
fixed plan, they remembered less and less what fears and avoidances had
determined that plan, and even that there had been any fears or
avoidances. Most people simply knew that certain hilly regions were
considered as highly unhealthy, unprofitable, and generally unlucky to
live in, and that the farther one kept from them the better off one
usually was. In time the ruts of custom and economic interest became so
deeply cut in approved places that there was no longer any reason for
going outside them, and the haunted hills were left deserted by
accident rather than by design. Save during infrequent local scares,
only wonder-loving grandmothers and retrospective nonagenarians ever
whispered of beings dwelling in those hills; and even such whispers
admitted that there was not much to fear from those things now that
they were used to the presence of houses and settlements, and now that
human beings let their chosen territory severely alone.

All this I had long known from my reading, and from certain folk
tales picked up in New Hampshire; hence when the flood-time rumours
began to appear, I could easily guess what imaginative background had
evolved them. I took great pains to explain this to my friends, and was
correspondingly amused when several contentious souls continued to
insist on a possible element of truth in the reports. Such persons
tried to point out that the early legends had a significant persistence
and uniformity, and that the virtually unexplored nature of the Vermont
hills made it unwise to be dogmatic about what might or might not dwell
among them; nor could they be silenced by my assurance that all the
myths were of a well-known pattern common to most of mankind and
determined by early phases of imaginative experience which always
produced the same type of delusion.

It was of no use to demonstrate to such opponents that the Vermont
myths differed but little in essence from those universal legends of
natural personification which filled the ancient world with fauns and
dryads and satyrs, suggested the kallikanzarai of modern Greece, and
gave to wild Wales and Ireland their dark hints of strange, small, and
terrible hidden races of troglodytes and burrowers. No use, either, to
point out the even more startlingly similar belief of the Nepalese hill
tribes in the dreaded Mi-Go or "Abominable Snow-Men" who lurk hideously
amidst the ice and rock pinnacles of the Himalayan summits. When I
brought up this evidence, my opponents turned it against me by claiming
that it must imply some actual historicity for the ancient tales; that
it must argue the real existence of some queer elder earth-race, driven
to hiding after the advent and dominance of mankind, which might very
conceivably have survived in reduced numbers to relatively recent times
--or even to the present.

The more I laughed at such theories, the more these stubborn friends
asseverated them; adding that even without the heritage of legend the
recent reports were too clear, consistent, detailed, and sanely prosaic
in manner of telling, to be completely ignored. Two or three fanatical
extremists went so far as to hint at possible meanings in the ancient
Indian tales which gave the hidden beings a nonterrestrial origin;
citing the extravagant books of Charles Fort with their claims that
voyagers from other worlds and outer space have often visited the
earth. Most of my foes, however, were merely romanticists who insisted
on trying to transfer to real life the fantastic lore of lurking
"little people" made popular by the magnificent horror-fiction of
Arthur Machen.


II

As was only natural under the circumstances, this piquant debating
finally got into print in the form of letters to the Arkham Advertiser;
some of which were copied in the press of those Vermont regions whence
the flood-stories came. The Rutland Herald gave half a page of extracts
from the letters on both sides, while the Brattleboro Reformer
reprinted one of my long historical and mythological summaries in full,
with some accompanying comments in "The Pendrifter's" thoughtful column
which supported and applauded my skeptical conclusions. By the spring
of 1928 I was almost a well-known figure in Vermont, notwithstanding
the fact that I had never set foot in the state. Then came the
challenging letters from Henry Akeley which impressed me so profoundly,
and which took me for the first and last time to that fascinating realm
of crowded green precipices and muttering forest streams.

Most of what I know of Henry Wentworth Akeley was gathered by
correspondence with his neighbours, and with his only son in
California, after my experience in his lonely farmhouse. He was, I
discovered, the last representative on his home soil of a long, locally
distinguished line of jurists, administrators, and
gentlemen-agriculturists. In him, however, the family mentally had
veered away from practical affairs to pure scholarship; so that he had
been a notable student of mathematics, astronomy, biology,
anthropology, and folklore at the University of Vermont. I had never
previously heard of him, and he did not give many autobiographical
details in his communications; but from the first I saw he was a man of
character, education, and intelligence, albeit a recluse with very
little worldly sophistication.

Despite the incredible nature of what he claimed, I could not help
at once taking Akeley more seriously than I had taken any of the other
challengers of my views. For one thing, he was really close to the
actual phenomena--visible and tangible--that he speculated so
grotesquely about; and for another thing, he was amazingly willing to
leave his conclusions in a tentative state like a true man of science.
He had no personal preferences to advance, and was always guided by
what he took to be solid evidence. Of course I began by considering him
mistaken, but gave him credit for being intelligently mistaken; and at
no time did I emulate some of his friends in attributing his ideas, and
his fear of the lonely green hills, to insanity. I could see that there
was a great deal to the man, and knew that what he reported must surely
come from strange circumstance deserving investigation, however little
it might have to do with the fantastic causes he assigned. Later on I
received from him certain material proofs which placed the matter on a
somewhat different and bewilderingly bizarre basis.

I cannot do better than transcribe in full, so far as is possible,
the long letter in which Akeley introduced himself, and which formed
such an important landmark in my own intellectual history. It is no
longer in my possession, but my memory holds almost every word of its
portentous message; and again I affirm my confidence in the sanity of
the man who wrote it. Here is the text--a text which reached me in the
cramped, archaic-looking scrawl of one who had obviously not mingled
much with the world during his sedate, scholarly life.
R.F.D. #2,

Townshend, Windham Co., Vermont.
May 5,1928

Albert N. Wilmarth, Esq.,
118 Saltonstall St.,
Arkham, Mass.


My Dear Sir:

I have read with great interest the Brattleboro Reformer's
reprint (Apr. 23, '28) of your letter on the recent stories of strange
bodies seen floating in our flooded streams last fall, and on the
curious folklore they so well agree with. It is easy to see why an
outlander would take the position you take, and even why "Pendrifter"
agrees with you. That is the attitude generally taken by educated
persons both in and out of Vermont, and was my own attitude as a young
man (I am now 57) before my studies, both general and in Davenport's
book, led me to do some exploring in parts of the hills hereabouts not
usually visited.

I was directed toward such studies by the queer old tales I used to
hear from elderly farmers of the more ignorant sort, but now I wish I
had let the whole matter alone. I might say, with all proper modesty,
that the subject of anthropology and folklore is by no means strange to
me. I took a good deal of it at college, and am familiar with most of
the standard authorities such as Tylor, Lubbock, Frazer, Quatrefages,
Murray, Osborn, Keith, Boule, G. Elliott Smith, and so on. It is no
news to me that tales of hidden races are as old as all mankind. I have
seen the reprints of letters from you, and those agreeing with you, in
the Rutland Herald, and guess I know about where your controversy stands
at the present time.

What I desire to say now is, that I am afraid your adversaries are
nearer right than yourself, even though all reason seems to be on your
side. They are nearer right than they realise themselves--for of
course they go only by theory, and cannot know what I know. If I knew
as little of the matter as they, I would feel justified in believing as
they do. I would be wholly on your side.

You can see that I am having a hard time getting to the point,
probably because I really dread getting to the point; but the upshot of
the matter is that I have certain evidence that monstrous things do indeed
live in the woods on the high hills which nobody visits.
I have not seen any of the things floating in the rivers, as reported,
but I have seen things like them under circumstances I dread to repeat.
I have seen footprints, and of late have seen them nearer my own home
(I live in the old Akeley place south of Townshend Village, on the side
of Dark Mountain) than I dare tell you now. And I have overheard voices
in the woods at certain points that I will not even begin to describe
on paper.

At one place I heard them so much that I took a phonograph
therewith a dictaphone attachment and wax blank--and I shall try to
arrange to have you hear the record I got. I have run it on the machine
for some of the old people up here, and one of the voices had nearly
scared them paralysed by reason of its likeness to a certain voice
(that buzzing voice in the woods which Davenport mentions) that their
grandmothers have told about and mimicked for them. I know what most
people think of a man who tells about "hearing voices"--but before you
draw conclusions just listen to this record and ask some of the older
backwoods people what they think of it. If you can account for it
normally, very well; but there must be something behind it. Ex nihilo
nihil fit, you know.

Now my object in writing you is not to start an argument but to
give you information which I think a man of your tastes will find
deeply interesting. This is private. Publicly I am on your side,
for certain things show me that it does not do for people to know too
much about these matters. My own studies are now wholly private, and I
would not think of saying anything to attract people's attention and
cause them to visit the places I have explored. It is true--terribly
true--that there are non-human creatures watching us all the time; with
spies among us gathering information. It is from a wretched man who, if
he was sane (as I think he was) was one of those spies, that I got a
large part of my clues to the matter. He later killed himself, but I
have reason to think there are others now.

The things come from another planet, being able to live in interstellar
space and fly through it on clumsy, powerful wings which have a way of
resisting the aether but which are too poor at steering to be of
much use in helping them about on earth. I will tell you about
this later if you do not dismiss me at once as a madman. They
come here to get metals from mines that go deep under the hills,
and I think I know where they come from. They will not hurt us
if we let them alone, but no one can say what will happen if we
get too curious about them. Of course a good army of men could
wipe out their mining colony. That is what they are afraid of.
But if that happened, more would come from outside--any number
of them. They could easily conquer the earth, but have not tried
so far because they have not needed to. They would rather leave
things as they are to save bother.

I think they mean to get rid of me because of what I have
discovered. There is a great black stone with unknown hieroglyphics
half worn away which I found in the woods on Round Hill, east of here;
and after I took it home everything became different. If they think I
suspect too much they will either kill me or take me off the earth to
where they come from. They like to take away men of learning once in
a while, to keep informed on the state of things in the human world.

This leads me to my secondary purpose in addressing you--namely,
to urge you to hush up the present debate rather than give it more
publicity. People must be kept away from these hills, and in
order to effect this, their curiosity ought not to be aroused any
further. Heaven knows there is peril enough anyway, with promoters and
real estate men flooding Vermont with herds of summer people to overrun
the wild places and cover the hills with cheap bungalows.

I shall welcome further communication with you, and shall try to
send you that phonograph record and black stone (which is so worn that
photographs don't show much) by express if you are willing. I say "try"
because I think those creatures have a way of tampering with things
around here. There is a sullen furtive fellow named Brown, on a farm
near the village, who I think is their spy. Little by little they are
trying to cut me off from our world because I know too much about their
world.

They have the most amazing way of finding out what I do. You may
not even get this letter. I think I shall have to leave this part of
the country and go live with my son in San Diego, Cal., if things get
any worse, but it is not easy to give up the place you were born in,
and where your family has lived for six generations. Also, I would
hardly dare sell this house to anybody now that the creatures have
taken notice of it. They seem to be trying to get the black stone back
and destroy the phonograph record, but I shall not let them if I can
help it. My great police dogs always hold them back, for there are very
few here as yet, and they are clumsy in getting about. As I have said,
their wings are not much use for short flights on earth. I am on the
very brink of deciphering that stone--in a very terrible way--and
with your knowledge of folklore you may be able to supply the missing
links enough to help me. I suppose you know all about the fearful myths
antedating the coming of man to the earth--the Yog-Sothoth and Cthulhu
cycles--which are hinted at in the Necronomicon. I had access to a copy
of that once, and hear that you have one in your college library under
lock and key.

To conclude, Mr. Wilmarth, I think that with our respective studies
we can be very useful to each other. I don't wish to put you in any
peril, and suppose I ought to warn you that possession of the stone and
the record won't be very safe; but I think you will find any risks
worth running for the sake of knowledge. I will drive down to Newfane
or Brattleboro to send whatever you authorize me to send, for the
express offices there are more to be trusted. I might say that I live
quite alone now, since I can't keep hired help any more. They won't
stay because of the things that try to get near the house at night, and
that keep the dogs barking continually. I am glad I didn't get as deep
as this into the business while my wife was alive, for it would have
driven her mad.

Hoping that I am not bothering you unduly, and that you will decide
to get in touch with me rather than throw this letter into the waste
basket as a madman's raving, I am

Yrs. very truly, Henry W. Akeley

P.S. I am making some extra prints of certain photographs taken by
me, which I think will help to prove a number of the points I have
touched on. The old people think they are monstrously true. I shall
send you these very soon if you are interested.

H. W. A.


It would be difficult to describe my sentiments upon reading this
strange document for the first time. By all ordinary rules, I ought to
have laughed more loudly at these extravagances than at the far milder
theories which had previously moved me to mirth; yet something in the
tone of the letter made me take it with paradoxical seriousness. Not
that I believed for a moment in the hidden race from the stars which my
correspondent spoke of; but that, after some grave preliminary doubts,
I grew to feel oddly sure of his sanity and sincerity, and of his
confrontation by some genuine though singular and abnormal phenomenon
which he could not explain except in this imaginative way. It could not
be as he thought it, I reflected, yet on the other hand, it could not
be otherwise than worthy of investigation. The man seemed unduly
excited and alarmed about something, but it was hard to think that all
cause was lacking. He was so specific and logical in certain ways--and
after all, his yarn did fit in so perplexingly well with some of the
old myths--even the wildest Indian legends.

That he had really overheard disturbing voices in the hills, and had
really found the black stone he spoke about, was wholly possible
despite the crazy inferences he had made--inferences probably
suggested by the man who had claimed to be a spy of the outer beings
and had later killed himself. It was easy to deduce that this man must
have been wholly insane, but that he probably had a streak of perverse
outward logic which made the naive Akeley--already prepared for such
things by his folklore studies--believe his tale. As for the latest
developments--it appeared from his inability to keep hired help that
Akeley's humbler rustic neighbours were as convinced as he that his
house was besieged by uncanny things at night. The dogs really barked,
too.

And then the matter of that phonograph record, which I could not but
believe he had obtained in the way he said. It must mean something;
whether animal noises deceptively like human speech, or the speech of
some hidden, night-haunting human being decayed to a state not much
above that of lower animals. From this my thoughts went back to the
black hieroglyphed stone, and to speculations upon what it might mean.
Then, too, what of the photographs which Akeley said he was about to
send, and which the old people had found so convincingly terrible?

As I re-read the cramped handwriting I felt as never before that my
credulous opponents might have more on their side than I had conceded.
After all, there might be some queer and perhaps hereditarily misshapen
outcasts in those shunned hills, even though no such race of star-born
monsters as folklore claimed. And if there were, then the presence of
strange bodies in the flooded streams would not be wholly beyond
belief. Was it too presumptuous to suppose that both the old legends
and the recent reports had this much of reality behind them? But even
as I harboured these doubts I felt ashamed that so fantastic a piece of
bizarrerie as Henry Akeley's wild letter had brought them up.

In the end I answered Akeley's letter, adopting a tone of friendly
interest and soliciting further particulars. His reply came almost by
return mail; and contained, true to promise, a number of Kodak views of
scenes and objects illustrating what he had to tell. Glancing at these
pictures as I took them from the envelope, I felt a curious sense of
fright and nearness to forbidden things; for in spite of the vagueness
of most of them, they had a damnably suggestive power which was
intensified by the fact of their being genuine photographs--actual
optical links with what they portrayed, and the product of an
impersonal transmitting process without prejudice, fallibility, or
mendacity.

The more I looked at them, the more I saw that my serious estimate of
Akeley and his story had not been unjustified. Certainly, these
pictures carried conclusive evidence of something in the Vermont hills
which was at least vastly outside the radius of our common knowledge
and belief. The worst thing of all was the footprint--a view taken
where the sun shone on a mud patch somewhere in a deserted upland. This
was no cheaply counterfeited thing, I could see at a glance; for the
sharply defined pebbles and grassblades in the field of vision gave a
clear index of scale and left no possibility of a tricky double
exposure. I have called the thing a "footprint," but "claw-print" would
be a better term. Even now I can scarcely describe it save to say that
it was hideously crablike, and that there seemed to be some ambiguity
about its direction. It was not a very deep or fresh print, but seemed
to be about the size of an average man's foot. From a central pad,
pairs of saw-toothed nippers projected in opposite directions--quite
baffling as to function, if indeed the whole object were exclusively an
organ of locomotion.

Another photograph--evidently a time-exposure taken in deep shadow
--was of the mouth of a woodland cave, with a boulder of rounded
regularity choking the aperture. On the bare ground in front of, it one
could just discern a dense network of curious tracks, and when I
studied the picture with a magnifier I felt uneasily sure that the
tracks were like the one in the other view. A third pictured showed a
druid-like circle of standing stones on the summit of a wild hill.
Around the cryptic circle the grass was very much beaten down and worn
away, though I could not detect any footprints even with the glass. The
extreme remoteness of the place was apparent from the veritable sea of
tenantless mountains which formed the background and stretched away
toward a misty horizon.888

But if the most disturbing of all the views was that of the
footprint, the most curiously suggestive was that of the great black
stone found in the Round Hill woods. Akeley had photographed it on what
was evidently his study table, for I could see rows of books and a bust
of Milton in the background. The thing, as nearly as one might guess,
had faced the camera vertically with a somewhat irregularly curved
surface of one by two feet; but to say anything definite about that
surface, or about the general shape of the whole mass, almost defies
the power of language. What outlandish geometrical principles had
guided its cutting--for artificially cut it surely was--I could not
even begin to guess; and never before had I seen anything which struck
me as so strangely and unmistakably alien to this world. Of the
hieroglyphics on the surface I could discern very few, but one or two
that I did see gave rather a shock. Of course they might be fraudulent,
for others besides myself had read the monstrous and abhorred
Necronomicon of the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred; but it nevertheless made
me shiver to recognise certain ideographs which study had taught me to
link with the most blood-curdling and blasphemous whispers of things
that had had a kind of mad half-existence before the earth and the
other inner worlds of the solar system were made.

Of the five remaining pictures, three were of swamp and hill scenes
which seemed to bear traces of hidden and unwholesome tenancy. Another
was of a queer mark in the ground very near Akeley's house, which he
said he had photographed the morning after a night on which the dogs
had barked more violently than usual. It was very blurred, and one
could really draw no certain conclusions from it; but it did seem
fiendishly like that other mark or claw-print photographed on the
deserted upland. The final picture was of the Akeley place itself; a
trim white house of two stories and attic, about a century and a
quarter old, and with a well-kept lawn and stone-bordered path leading
up to a tastefully carved Georgian doorway. There were several huge
police dogs on the lawn, squatting near a pleasant-faced man with a
close-cropped grey beard whom I took to be Akeley himself--his own
photographer, one might infer from the tube-connected bulb in his right
hand.

From the pictures I turned to the bulky, closely-written letter
itself; and for the next three hours was immersed in a gulf of
unutterable horror. Where Akeley had given only outlines before, he now
entered into minute details; presenting long transcripts of words
overheard in the woods at night, long accounts of monstrous pinkish
forms spied in thickets at twilight on the hills, and a terrible cosmic
narrative derived from the application of profound and varied
scholarship to the endless bygone discourses of the mad self-styled spy
who had killed himself. I found myself faced by names and terms that I
had heard elsewhere in the most hideous of connections--Yuggoth, Great
Cthulhu, Tsathoggua, YogSothoth, R'lyeh, Nyarlathotep, Azathoth,
Hastur, Yian, Leng, the Lake of Hali, Bethmoora, the Yellow Sign,
L'mur-Kathulos, Bran, and the Magnum Innominandum--and was drawn back
through nameless aeons and inconceivable dimensions to worlds of elder,
outer entity at which the crazed author of the Necronomicon had only
guessed in the vaguest way. I was told of the pits of primal life, and
of the streams that had trickled down therefrom; and finally, of the
tiny rivulets from one of those streams which had become entangled with
the destinies of our own earth.

My brain whirled; and where before I had attempted to explain things
away, I now began to believe in the most abnormal and incredible
wonders. The array of vital evidence was damnably vast and
overwhelming; and the cool, scientific attitude of Akeley--an attitude
removed as far as imaginable from the demented, the fanatical, the
hysterical, or even the extravagantly speculative--had a tremendous
effect on my thought and judgment. By the time I laid the frightful
letter aside I could understand the fears he had come to entertain, and
was ready to do anything in my power to keep people away from those
wild, haunted hills. Even now, when time has dulled the impression and
made me half-question my own experience and horrible doubts, there are
things in that letter of Akeley's which I would not quote, or even form
into words on paper. I am almost glad that the letter and record and
photographs are gone now--and I wish, for reasons I shall soon make
clear, that the new planet beyond Neptune had not been discovered.

With the reading of that letter my public debating about the Vermont
horror permanently ended. Arguments from opponents remained unanswered
or put off with promises, and eventually the controversy petered out
into oblivion. During late May and June I was in constant
correspondence with Akeley; though once in a while a letter would be
lost, so that we would have to retrace our ground and perform
considerable laborious copying. What we were trying to do, as a whole,
was to compare notes in matters of obscure mythological scholarship and
arrive at a clearer correlation of the Vermont horrors with the general
body of primitive world legend.

For one thing, we virtually decided that these morbidities and the
hellish Himalayan Mi-Go were one and the same order of incarnated
nightmare. There was also absorbing zoological conjectures, which I
would have referred to Professor Dexter in my own college but for
Akeley's imperative command to tell no one of the matter before us. If
I seem to disobey that command now, it is only because I think that at
this stage a warning about those farther Vermont hills--and about
those Himalayan peaks which bold explorers are more and more determined
to ascend--is more conducive to public safety than silence would be.
One specific thing we were leading up to was a deciphering of the
hieroglyphics on that infamous black stone--a deciphering which might
well place us in possession of secrets deeper and more dizzying than
any formerly known to man.


III

Toward the end of June the phonograph record came--shipped from
Brattleboro, since Akeley was unwilling to trust conditions on the
branch line north of there. He had begun to feel an increased sense of
espionage, aggravated by the loss of some of our letters; and said much
about the insidious deeds of certain men whom he considered tools and
agents of the hidden beings. Most of all he suspected the surly farmer
Walter Brown, who lived alone on a run-down hillside place near the
deep woods, and who was often seen loafing around corners in
Brattleboro, Bellows Falls, Newfane, and South Londonderry in the most
inexplicable and seemingly unmotivated way. Brown's voice, he felt
convinced, was one of those he had overheard on a certain occasion in a
very terrible conversation; and he had once found a footprint or
clawprint near Brown's house which might possess the most ominous
significance. It had been curiously near some of Brown's own footprints
--footprints that faced toward it.

So the record was shipped from Brattleboro, whither Akeley drove in
his Ford car along the lonely Vermont back roads. He confessed in an
accompanying note that he was beginning to be afraid of those roads,
and that he would not even go into Townshend for supplies now except in
broad daylight. It did not pay, he repeated again and again, to know
too much unless one were very remote from those silent and
problematical hills. He would be going to California pretty soon to
live with his son, though it was hard to leave a place where all one's
memories and ancestral feelings centered.

Before trying the record on the commercial machine which I borrowed
from the college administration building I carefully went over all the
explanatory matter in Akeley's various letters. This record, he had
said, was obtained about 1 A.M. on the 1st of May, 1915, near the
closed mouth of a cave where the wooded west slope of Dark Mountain
rises out of Lee's swamp. The place had always been unusually plagued
with strange voices, this being the reason he had brought the
phonograph, dictaphone, and blank in expectation of results. Former
experience had told him that May Eve--the hideous Sabbat-night of
underground European legend--would probably be more fruitful than any
other date, and he was not disappointed. It was noteworthy, though,
that he never again heard voices at that particular spot.

Unlike most of the overheard forest voices, the substance of the
record was quasi-ritualistic, and included one palpably human voice
which Akeley had never been able to place. It was not Brown's, but
seemed to be that of a man of greater cultivation. The second voice,
however, was the real crux of the thing--for this was the accursed
buzzing which had no likeness to humanity despite the human words which
it uttered in good English grammar and a scholarly accent.

The recording phonograph and dictaphone had not worked uniformly
well, and had of course been at a great disadvantage because of the
remote and muffled nature of the overheard ritual; so that the actual
speech secured was very fragmentary. Akeley had given me a transcript
of what he believed the spoken words to be, and I glanced through this
again as I prepared the machine for action. The text was darkly
mysterious rather than openly horrible, though a knowledge of its
origin and manner of gathering gave it all the associative horror which
any words could well possess. I will present it here in full as I
remember it--and I am fairly confident that I know it correctly by
heart, not only from reading the transcript, but from playing the
record itself over and over again. It is not a thing which one might
readily forget!
(Indistinguishable Sounds)

(A Cultivated Male Human Voice)

...is the Lord of the Wood, even to...and the gifts of the men of
Leng...so from the wells of night to the gulfs of space, and from the
gulfs of space to the wells of night, ever the praises of Great
Cthulhu, of Tsathoggua, and of Him Who is not to be Named. Ever Their
praises, and abundance to the Black Goat of the Woods. Ia!
Shub-Niggurath! The Goat with a Thousand Young!

(A Buzzing Imitation of Human Speech)

Ia! Shub-Niggurath! The Black Goat of the Woods with a Thousand Young!

(Human Voice)

And it has come to pass that the Lord of the Woods, being...seven
and nine, down the onyx steps...(tri)butes to Him in the Gulf,
Azathoth, He of Whom Thou has taught us marv(els)...on the wings of
night out beyond space, out beyond th...to That whereof Yuggoth is the
youngest child, rolling alone in black aether at the rim...

(Buzzing Voice)

...go out among men and find the ways thereof, that He in the Gulf
may know. To Nyarlathotep, Mighty Messenger, must all things be told.
And He shall put on the semblance of men, the waxen mask and the robe
that hides, and come down from the world of Seven Suns to mock...

(Human Voice)

(Nyarl)athotep, Great Messenger, bringer of strange joy to Yuggoth
through the void, Father of the Million Favoured Ones, Stalker among...

(Speech Cut Off by End of Record)

Such were the words for which I was to listen when I started the
phonograph. It was with a trace of genuine dread and reluctance that I
pressed the lever and heard the preliminary scratching of the sapphire
point, and I was glad that the first faint, fragmentary words were in a
human voice--a mellow, educated voice which seemed vaguely Bostonian
in accent, and which was certainly not that of any native of the
Vermont hills. As I listened to the tantalisingly feeble rendering, I
seemed to find the speech identical with Akeley's carefully prepared
transcript. On it chanted, in that mellow Bostonian voice..."Ia!
Shub-Niggurath! The Goat with a Thousand Young!..."

And then I heard the other voice. To this hour I shudder
retrospectively when I think of how it struck me, prepared though I was
by Akeley's accounts. Those to whom I have since described the record
profess to find nothing but cheap imposture or madness in it; but could
they have the accursed thing itself, or read the bulk of Akeley's
correspondence, (especially that terrible and encyclopaedic second
letter), I know they would think differently. It is, after all, a
tremendous pity that I did not disobey Akeley and play the record for
others--a tremendous pity, too, that all of his letters were lost. To
me, with my first-hand impression of the actual sounds, and with my
knowledge of the background and surrounding circumstances, the voice
was a monstrous thing. It swiftly followed the human voice in
ritualistic response, but in my imagination it was a morbid echo
winging its way across unimaginable abysses from unimaginable outer
hells. It is more than two years now since I last ran off that
blasphemous waxen cylinder; but at this moment, and at all other
moments, I can still hear that feeble, fiendish buzzing as it reached
me for the first time.

"Ia! Shub-Niggurath! The Black Goat of the Woods with a Thousand Young!"

But though the voice is always in my ears, I have not even yet been
able to analyse it well enough for a graphic description. It was like
the drone of some loathsome, gigantic insect ponderously shaped into
the articulate speech of an alien species, and I am perfectly certain
that the organs producing it can have no resemblance to the vocal
organs of man, or indeed to those of any of the mammalia. There were
singularities in timbre, range, and overtones which placed this
phenomenon wholly outside the sphere of humanity and earth-life. Its
sudden advent that first time almost stunned me, and I heard the rest
of the record through in a sort of abstracted daze. When the longer
passage of buzzing came, there was a sharp intensification of that
feeling of blasphemous infinity which had struck me during the shorter
and earlier passage. At last the record ended abruptly, during an
unusually clear speech of the human and Bostonian voice; but I sat
stupidly staring long after the machine had automatically stopped.

I hardly need say that I gave that shocking record many another
playing, and that I made exhaustive attempts at analysis and comment in
comparing notes with Akeley. It would be both useless and disturbing to
repeat here all that we concluded; but I may hint that we agreed in
believing we had secured a clue to the source of some of the most
repulsive primordial customs in the cryptic elder religions of mankind.
It seemed plain to us, also, that there were ancient and elaborate
alliance; between the hidden outer creatures and certain members of the
human race. How extensive these alliances were, and how their state
today might compare with their state in earlier ages, we had no means
of’ guessing; yet at best there was room for a limitless amount of
horrified speculation. There seemed to be an awful, immemorial linkage
in several definite stages betwixt man and nameless infinity. The
blasphemies which appeared on earth, it was hinted, came from the dark
planet Yuggoth, at the rim of the solar system; but this was itself
merely the populous outpost of a frightful interstellar race whose
ultimate source must lie far outside even the Einsteinian space-time
continuum or greatest known cosmos.

Meanwhile we continued to discuss the black stone and the best way
of getting it to Arkham--Akeley deeming it inadvisable to have me
visit him at the scene of his nightmare studies. For some reason or
other, Akeley was afraid to trust the thing to any ordinary or expected
transportation route. His final idea was to take it across country to
Bellows Falls and ship it on the Boston and Maine system through Keene
and Winchendon and Fitchburg, even though this would necessitate his
driving along somewhat lonelier and more forest-traversing hill roads
than the main highway to Brattleboro. He said he had noticed a man
around the express office at Brattleboro when he had sent the
phonograph record, whose actions and expression had been far from
reassuring. This man had seemed too anxious to talk with the clerks,
and had taken the train on which the record was shipped. Akeley
confessed that he had not felt strictly at ease about that record until
he heard from me of its safe receipt.

About this time--the second week in July--another letter of mine
went astray, as I learned through an anxious communication from Akeley.
After that he told me to address him no more at Townshend, but to send
all mail in care of the General Delivery at Brattleboro; whither he
would make frequent trips either in his car or on the motor-coach line
which had lately replaced passenger service on the lagging branch
railway. I could see that he was getting more and more anxious, for he
went into much detail about the increased barking of the dogs on
moonless nights, and about the fresh claw-prints he sometimes found in
the road and in the mud at the back of his farmyard when morning came.
Once he told about a veritable army of prints drawn up in a line facing
an equally thick and resolute line of dog-tracks, and sent a
loathsomely disturbing Kodak picture to prove it. That was after a
night on which the dogs had outdone themselves in barking and howling.

On the morning of Wednesday, July 18, I received a telegram from
Bellows Falls, in which Akeley said he was expressing the black stone
over the B. & M. on Train No. 5508, leaving Bellows Falls at 12:15
P.M., standard time, and due at the North Station in Boston at 4:12
P.M. It ought, I calculated, to get up to Arkham at least by the next
noon; and accordingly I stayed in all Thursday morning to receive it.
But noon came and went without its advent, and when I telephoned down
to the express office I was informed that no shipment for me had
arrived. My next act, performed amidst a growing alarm, was to give a
long-distance call to the express agent at the Boston North Station;
and I was scarcely surprised to learn that my consignment had not
appeared. Train No. 5508 had pulled in only 35 minutes late on the day
before, but had contained no box addressed to me. The agent promised,
however, to institute a searching inquiry; and I ended the day by
sending Akeley a night-letter outlining the situation.

With commendable promptness a report came from the Boston office on
the following afternoon, the agent telephoning as soon as he learned
the facts. It seemed that the railway express clerk on No. 5508 had
been able to recall an incident which might have much bearing on my
loss--an argument with a very curious-voiced man, lean, sandy, and
rustic-looking, when the train was waiting at Keene, N. H., shortly
after one o’clock standard time. The man, he said, was greatly excited
about a heavy box which he claimed to expect, but which was neither on
the train nor entered on the company’s books. He had given the name of
Stanley Adams, and had had such a queerly thick droning voice, that it
made the clerk abnormally dizzy and sleepy to listen to him. The clerk
could not remember quite how the conversation had ended, but recalled
starting into a fuller awakeness when the train began to move. The
Boston agent added that this clerk was a young man of wholly
unquestioned veracity and reliability, of known antecedents and long
with the company.

That evening I went to Boston to interview the clerk in person,
having obtained his name and address from the office. He was a frank,
prepossessing fellow, but I saw that he could add nothing to his
original account. Oddly, he was scarcely sure that he could even
recognise the strange inquirer again. Realising that he had no more to
tell, I returned to Arkham and sat up till morning writing letters to
Akeley, to the express company and to the police department and station
agent in Keene. I felt that the strange-voiced man who had so queerly
affected the clerk must have a pivotal place in the ominous business,
and hoped that Keene station employees and telegraph-office records
might tell something about him and about how he happened to make his
inquiry when and where he did.

I must admit, however, that all my investigations came to nothing.
The queer-voiced man had indeed been noticed around the Keene station
in the early afternoon of July 18, and one lounger seemed to couple him
vaguely with a heavy box; but he was altogether unknown, and had not
been seen before or since. He had not visited the telegraph office or
received any message so far as could be learned, nor had any message
which might justly be considered a notice of the black stone’s presence
on No. 5508 come through the office for anyone. Naturally Akeley joined
with me in conducting these inquiries, and even made a personal trip to
Keene to question the people around the station; but his attitude
toward the matter was more fatalistic than mine. He seemed to find the
loss of the box a portentous and menacing fulfillment of inevitable
tendencies, and had no real hope at all of its recovery. He spoke of
the undoubted telepathic and hypnotic powers of the hill creatures and
their agents, and in one letter hinted that he did not believe the
stone was on this earth any longer. For my part, I was duly enraged,
for I had felt there was at least a chance of learning profound and
astonishing things from the old, blurred hieroglyphs. The matter would
have rankled bitterly in my mind had not Akeley’s immediately
subsequent letters brought up a new phase of the whole horrible hill
problem which at once seized all my attention.


IV

The unknown things, Akeley wrote in a script grown pitifully
tremulous, had begun to close in on him with a wholly new degree of
determination. The nocturnal barking of the dogs whenever the moon. was
dim or absent was hideous now, and there had been attempts to molest
him on the lonely roads he had to traverse by day. On the second of
August, while bound for the village in his car, he had found a
tree-trunk laid in his path at a point where the highway ran through a
deep patch of woods; while the savage barking of the two great dogs he
had with him told all too well of the things which must have been
lurking near. What would have happened had the dogs not been there, he
did not dare guess--but he never went out now without at least two of
his faithful and powerful pack. Other road experiences had occurred on
August fifth and sixth; a shot grazing his car on one occasion, and the
barking of the dogs telling of unholy woodland presences on the other.

On August fifteenth I received a frantic letter which disturbed me
greatly, and which made me wish Akeley could put aside his lonely
reticence and call in the aid of the law. There had been frightful
happening on the night of the 12-13th, bullets flying outside the
farmhouse, and three of the twelve great dogs being found shot dead in
the morning. There were myriads of claw-prints in the road, with the
human prints of Walter Brown among them. Akeley had started to
telephone to Brattleboro for more dogs, but the wire had gone dead
before he had a chance to say much. Later he went to Brattleboro in his
car, and learned there that linemen had found the main cable neatly cut
at a point where it ran through the deserted hills north of Newfane.
But he was about to start home with four fine new dogs, and several
cases of ammunition for his big-game repeating rifle. The letter was
written at the post office in Brattleboro, and came through to me
without delay.

My attitude toward the matter was by this time quickly slipping from
a scientific to an alarmedly personal one. I was afraid for Akeley in
his remote, lonely farmhouse, and half afraid for myself because of my
now definite connection with the strange hill problem. The thing was
reaching out so. Would it suck me in and engulf me? In replying to his
letter I urged him to seek help, and hinted that I might take action
myself if he did not. I spoke of visiting Vermont in person in spite of
his wishes, and of helping him explain the situation to the proper
authorities. In return, however, I received only a telegram from
Bellows Falls which read thus:

APPRECIATE YOUR POSITION BUT CAN DO NOTHING TAKE NO ACTION YOURSELF FOR
IT COULD ONLY HARM BOTH WAIT FOR EXPLANATION

HENRY AKELY

But the affair was steadily deepening. Upon my replying to the
telegram I received a shaky note from Akeley with the astonishing news
that he had not only never sent the wire, but had not received the
letter from me to which it was an obvious reply. Hasty inquiries by him
at Bellows Falls had brought out that the message was deposited by a
strange sandy-haired man with a curiously thick, droning voice, though
more than this he could not learn. The clerk showed him the original
text as scrawled in pencil by the sender, but the handwriting was
wholly unfamiliar. It was noticeable that the signature was
misspelled--A-K-E-L-Y, without the second "E." Certain conjectures
were inevitable, but amidst the obvious crisis he did not stop to
elaborate upon them,

He spoke of the death of more dogs and the purchase of still others,
and of the exchange of gunfire which had become a settled feature each
moonless night. Brown’s prints, and the prints of at least one or two
more shod human figures, were now found regularly among the claw-prints
in the road, and at the back of the farmyard. It was, Akeley admitted,
a pretty bad business; and before long he would probably have to go to
live with his California son whether or not he could sell the old
place. But it was not easy to leave the only spot one could really
think of as home. He must try to hang on a little longer; perhaps he
could scare off the intruders--especially if he openly gave up all
further attempts to penetrate their secrets.

Writing Akeley at once, I renewed my offers of aid, and spoke again
of visiting him and helping him convince the authorities of his dire
peril. In his reply he seemed less set against that plan than his past
attitude would have led one to predict, but said he would like to hold
off a little while longer--long enough to get his things in order and
reconcile himself to the idea of leaving an almost morbidly cherished
birthplace. People looked askance at his studies and speculations and
it would be better to get quietly off without setting the countryside
in a turmoil and creating widespread doubts of his own sanity. He had
had enough, he admitted, but he wanted to make a dignified exit if he
could.

This letter reached me on the 28th of August, and I prepared and
mailed as encouraging a reply as I could. Apparently the encouragement
had effect, for Akeley had fewer terrors to report when he acknowledged
my note. He was not very optimistic, though, and expressed the belief
that it was only the full moon season which was holding the creatures
off. He hoped there would not be many densely cloudy nights, and talked
vaguely of boarding in Brattleboro when the moon waned. Again I wrote
him encouragingly but on September 5th there came a fresh communication
which had obviously crossed my letter in the mails; and to this I could
not give any such hopeful response. In view of its importance I believe
I had better give it in full--as best I can do from memory of the
shaky script. It ran substantially as follows:

Monday

Dear Wilmarth

A rather discouraging P. S. to my last. Last night was thickly
cloudy--though no rain--and not a bit of moonlight got through.
Things were pretty bad, and I think the end is getting near, in spite
of all we have hoped. After midnight something landed on the roof of
the house, and the dogs all rushed up to see what it was. I could hear
them snapping and tearing around, and then one managed to get on the
roof by jumping from the low ell. There was a terrible fight up there,
and I heard a frightful buzzing which I’ll never forget. And then there
was a shocking smell. About the same time bullets came through the
window and nearly grazed me. I think the main line of the hill
creatures had got close to the house when the dogs divided because of
the roof business. What was up there I don’t know yet, but I’m afraid
the creatures are learning to steer better with their space wings. I
put out the light and used the windows for loopholes, and raked all
around the house with rifle fire aimed just high enough not to hit the
dogs. That seemed to end the business, but in the morning I found great
pools of blood in the yard, besides pools of a green sticky stuff that
had the worst odour I have ever smelled. I climbed up on the roof and
found more of the sticky stuff there. Five of the dogs were killed--
I’m afraid I hit one myself by aiming too low, for he was shot in the
back. Now I am setting the panes the shots broke, and am going to
Brattleboro for more dogs. I guess the men at the kennels think I am
crazy. Will drop another note later. Suppose I’ll be ready for moving
in a week or two, though it nearly kills me to think of it.

Hastily--Akeley

But this was not the only letter from Akeley to cross mine. On the
next morning--September 6th--still another came; this time a frantic
scrawl which utterly unnerved me and put me at a loss what to say or do
next. Again I cannot do better than quote the text as faithfully as
memory will let me.
Tuesday

Clouds didn’t break, so no moon again--and going into the wane
anyhow. I’d have the house wired for electricity and put in a
searchlight if I didn’t know they’d cut the cables as fast as they
could be mended.

I think I am going crazy. It may be that all I have ever written
you is a dream or madness. It was bad enough before, but this time it
is too much. They talked to me last night--talked in that cursed
buzzing voice and told me things that I dare not repeat to you. I heard
them plainly above the barking of the dogs, and once when they were
drowned out a human voice helped them. Keep out of this, Wilmarth--it
is worse than either you or I ever suspected. They don’t mean to let me
get to California now--they want to take me off alive, or what
theoretically and mentally amounts to alive--not only to Yuggoth, but
beyond that--away outside the galaxy and possibly beyond the last
curved rim of space. I told them I wouldn’t go where they wish, or in
the terrible way they propose to take me, but I’m afraid it will be no
use. My place is so far out that they may come by day as well as by
night before long. Six more dogs killed, and I felt presences all along
the wooded parts of the road when I drove to Brattleboro today. It was
a mistake for me to try to send you that phonograph record and black
stone. Better smash the record before it’s too late. Will drop you
another line tomorrow if I’m still here. Wish I could arrange to get my
books and things to Brattleboro and board there. I would run off
without anything if I could but something inside my mind holds me back.
I can slip out to Brattleboro, where I ought to be safe, but I feel
just as much a prisoner there as at the house. And I seem to know that
I couldn’t get much farther even if I dropped everything and tried. It
is horrible--don’t get mixed up in this.

Yrs--Akeley

I did not sleep at all the night after receiving this terrible
thing, and was utterly baffled as to Akeley’s remaining degree of
sanity. The substance of the note was wholly insane, yet the manner of
expression--in view of all that had gone before--had a grimly potent
quality of convincingness. I made no attempt to answer it, thinking it
better to wait until Akeley might have time to reply to my latest
communication. Such a reply indeed came on the following day, though
the fresh material in it quite overshadowed any of the points brought
up by the letter nominally answered. Here is what I recall of the text,
scrawled and blotted as it was in the course of a plainly frantic and
hurried composition.
Wednesday

W--

Your letter came, but it’s no use to discuss anything any more. I
am fully resigned. Wonder that I have even enough will power left to
fight them off. Can’t escape even if I were willing to give up
everything and run. They’ll get me.

Had a letter from them yesterday--R.F.D. man brought it while I
was at Brattleboro. Typed and postmarked Bellows Falls. Tells what they
want to do with me--I can’t repeat it. Look out for yourself, too!
Smash that record. Cloudy nights keep up, and moon waning all the time.
Wish I dared to get help--it might brace up my will power--but
everyone who would dare to come at all would call me crazy unless there
happened to be some proof. Couldn’t ask people to come for no reason at
all--am all out of touch with everybody and have been for years.

But I haven’t told you the worst, Wilmarth. Brace up to read this,
for it will give you a shock. I am telling the truth, though. It is
this--I have seen and touched one of the things, or part of one of the
things. God, man, but it’s awful! It was dead, of course. One of the
dogs had it, and I found it near the kennel this morning. I tried to
save it in the woodshed to convince people of the whole thing, but it
all evaporated in a few hours. Nothing left. You know, all those things
in the rivers were seen only on the first morning after the flood. And
here’s the worst. I tried to photograph it for you, but when I
developed the film there wasn’t anything visible except the woodshed.
What can the thing have been made of? I saw it and felt it, and they
all leave footprints. It was surely made of matter--but what kind of
matter? The shape can’t be described. It was a great crab with a lot of
pyramided fleshy rings or knots of thick, ropy stuff covered with
feelers where a man’s head would be. That green sticky stuff is its
blood or juice. And there are more of them due on earth any minute.

Walter Brown is missing--hasn’t been seen loafing around any of
his usual corners in the villages hereabouts. I must have got him with
one of my shots, though the creatures always seem to try to take their
dead and wounded away.

Got into town this afternoon without any trouble, but am afraid
they’re beginning to hold off because they’re sure of me. Am writing
this in Brattleboro P. O. This may be goodbye--if it is, write my son
George Goodenough Akeley, 176 Pleasant St., San Diego, Cal., but don’t
come up here. Write the boy if you don’t hear from me in a week, and
watch the papers for news.

I’m going to play my last two cards now--if I have the will power
left. First to try poison gas on the things (I’ve got the right
chemicals and have fixed up masks for myself and the dogs) and then if
that doesn’t work, tell the sheriff. They can lock me in a madhouse if
they want to--it’ll be better than what the other creatures would do.
Perhaps I can get them to pay attention to the prints around the house
--they are faint, but I can find them every morning. Suppose, though,
police would say I faked them somehow; for they all think I’m a queer
character.

Must try to have a state policeman spend a night here and see for
himself--though it would be just like the creatures to learn about it
and hold off that night. They cut my wires whenever I try to telephone
in the night--the linemen think it is very queer, and may testify for
me if they don’t go and imagine I cut them myself. I haven’t tried to
keep them repaired for over a week now.

I could get some of the ignorant people to testify for me about the
reality of the horrors, but everybody laughs at what they say, and
anyway, they have shunned my place for so long that they don’t know any
of the new events. You couldn’t get one of those rundown farmers to
come within a mile of my house for love or money. The mail-carrier
hears what they say and jokes me about it--God! If I only dared tell
him how real it is! I think I’ll try to get him to notice the prints,
but he comes in the afternoon and they’re usually about gone by that
time. If I kept one by setting a box or pan over it, he’d think surely
it was a fake or joke.

Wish I hadn’t gotten to be such a hermit, so folks don’t drop
around as they used to. I’ve never dared show the black stone or the
Kodak pictures, or play that record, to anybody but the ignorant
people. The others would say I faked the whole business and do nothing
but laugh. But I may yet try showing the pictures. They give those
claw-prints clearly, even if the things that made them can’t be
photographed. What a shame nobody else saw that thing this morning
before it went to nothing!

But I don’t know as I care. After what I’ve been through, a
madhouse is as good a place as any. The doctors can help me make up my
mind to get away from this house, and that is all that will save me.


Write my son George if you don’t hear soon. Goodbye, smash that record,
and don’t mix up in this.

Yrs--Akeley

This letter frankly plunged me into the blackest of terror. I did
not know what to say in answer, but scratched off some incoherent words
of advice and encouragement and sent them by registered mail. I recall
urging Akeley to move to Brattleboro at once, and place himself under
the protection of the authorities; adding that I would come to that
town with the phonograph record and help convince the courts of his
sanity. It was time, too, I think I wrote, to alarm the people
generally against this thing in their midst. It will be observed that
at this moment of stress my own belief in all Akeley had told and
claimed was virtually complete, though I did think his failure to get a
picture of the dead monster was due not to any freak of Nature but to
some excited slip of his own.


V

Then, apparently crossing my incoherent note and reaching me
Saturday afternoon, September 8th, came that curiously different and
calming letter neatly typed on a new machine; that strange letter of
reassurance and invitation which must have marked so prodigious a
transition in the whole nightmare drama of the lonely hills. Again I
will quote from memory--seeking for special reasons to preserve as
much of the flavour of the style as I can. It was postmarked Bellows
Falls, and the signature as well as the body of the letter was typed--
as is frequent with beginners in typing. The text, though, was
marvellously accurate for a tyro’s work; and I concluded that Akeley
must have used a machine at some previous period--perhaps in college.
To say that the letter relieved me would be only fair, yet beneath my
relief lay a substratum of uneasiness. If Akeley had been sane in his
terror, was he now sane in his deliverance? And the sort of "improved
rapport" mentioned...what was it? The entire thing implied such a
diametrical reversal of Akeley’s previous attitude! But here is the
substance of the text, carefully transcribed from a memory in which I
take some pride.
Townshend, Vermont, Thursday, Sept. 6, 1928.

My dear Wilmarth:--

It gives me great pleasure to be able to set you at rest regarding
all the silly things I’ve been writing you. I say "silly," although by
that I mean my frightened attitude rather than my descriptions of
certain phenomena. Those phenomena are real and important enough; my
mistake had been in establishing an anomalous attitude toward them.


I think I mentioned that my strange visitors were beginning to
communicate with me, and to attempt such communication. Last night this
exchange of speech became actual. In response to certain signals I
admitted to the house a messenger from those outside--a fellow-human,
let me hasten to say. He told me much that neither you nor I had even
begun to guess, and showed clearly how totally we had misjudged and
misinterpreted the purpose of the Outer Ones in maintaining their
secret colony on this planet.

It seems that the evil legends about what they have offered to men,
and what they wish in connection with the earth, are wholly the result
of an ignorant misconception of allegorical speech--speech, of course,
moulded by cultural backgrounds and thought-habits vastly different
from anything we dream of. My own conjectures, I freely own, shot as
widely past the mark as any of the guesses of illiterate farmers and
savage Indians. What I had thought morbid and shameful and ignominious
is in reality awesome and mind-expanding and even glorious--my
previous estimate being merely a phase of man’s eternal tendency to
hate and fear and shrink from the utterly different.

Now I regret the harm I have inflicted upon these alien and
incredible beings in the course of our nightly skirmishes. If only I
had consented to talk peacefully and reasonably with them in the first
place! But they bear me no grudge, their emotions being organised very
differently from ours. It is their misfortune to have had as their
human agents in Vermont some very inferior specimens--the late Walter
Brown, for example. He prejudiced me vastly against them. Actually,
they have never knowingly harmed men, but have often been cruelly
wronged and spied upon by our species. There is a whole secret cult of
evil men (a man of your mystical erudition will understand me when I
link them with Hastur and the Yellow Sign) devoted to the purpose of
tracking them down and injuring them on behalf of monstrous powers from
other dimensions. It is against these aggressors--not against normal
humanity--that the drastic precautions of the Outer Ones are directed.
Incidentally, I learned that many of our lost letters were stolen not
by the Outer Ones but by the emissaries of this malign cult.

All that the Outer Ones wish of man is peace and non-molestation
and an increasing intellectual rapport. This latter is absolutely
necessary now that our inventions and devices are expanding our
knowledge and motions, and making it more and more impossible for the
Outer Ones’ necessary outposts to exist secretly on this planet. The
alien beings desire to know mankind more fully, and to have a few of
mankind’s philosophic and scientific leaders know more about them. With
such an exchange of knowledge all perils will pass, and a satisfactory
modus vivendi be established. The very idea of any attempt to enslave
or degrade mankind is ridiculous.

As a beginning of this improved rapport, the Outer Ones have
naturally chosen me--whose knowledge of them is already so
considerable--as their primary interpreter on earth. Much was told me
last night--facts of the most stupendous and vista-opening nature--
and more will be subsequently communicated to me both orally and in
writing. I shall not be called upon to make any trip outside just yet,
though I shall probably wish to do so later on--employing special
means and transcending everything which we have hitherto been
accustomed to regard as human experience. My house will be besieged no
longer. Everything has reverted to normal, and the dogs will have no
further occupation. In place of terror I have been given a rich boon of
knowledge and intellectual adventure which few other mortals have ever
shared.

The Outer Beings are perhaps the most marvellous organic things in
or beyond all space and time-members of a cosmos-wide race of which all
other life-forms are merely degenerate variants. They are more
vegetable than animal, if these terms can be applied to the sort of
matter composing them, and have a somewhat fungoid structure; though
the presence of a chlorophyll-like substance and a very singular
nutritive system differentiate them altogether from true cormophytic
fungi. Indeed, the type is composed of a form of matter totally alien
to our part of space--with electrons having a wholly different
vibration-rate. That is why the beings cannot be photographed on the
ordinary camera films and plates of our known universe, even though our
eyes can see them. With proper knowledge, however, any good chemist
could make a photographic emulsion which would record their images.

The genus is unique in its ability to traverse the heatless and
airless interstellar void in full corporeal form, and some of its
variants cannot do this without mechanical aid or curious surgical
transpositions. Only a few species have the ether-resisting wings
characteristic of the Vermont variety. Those inhabiting certain remote
peaks in the Old World were brought in other ways. Their external
resemblance to animal life, and to the sort of structure we understand
as material, is a matter of parallel evolution rather than of close
kinship. Their brain-capacity exceeds that of any other surviving
life-form, although the winged types of our hill country are by no
means the most highly developed. Telepathy is their usual means of
discourse, though we have rudimentary vocal organs which, after a
slight operation (for surgery is an incredibly expert and everyday
thing among them), can roughly duplicate the speech of such types of
organism as still use speech.

Their main immediate abode is a still undiscovered and almost
lightless planet at the very edge of our solar system--beyond Neptune,
and the ninth in distance from the sun. It is, as we have inferred, the
object mystically hinted at as "Yuggoth" in certain ancient and
forbidden writings; and it will soon be the scene of a strange
focussing of thought upon our world in an effort to facilitate mental
rapport. I would not be surprised if astronomers become sufficiently
sensitive to these thought-currents to discover Yuggoth when the Outer
Ones wish them to do so. But Yuggoth, of course, is only the
stepping-stone. The main body of the beings inhabits strangely
organized abysses wholly beyond the utmost reach of any human
imagination. The space-time globule which we recognize as the totality
of all cosmic entity is only an atom in the genuine infinity which is
theirs. And as much of this infinity as any human brain can hold is
eventually to be opened up to me, as it has been to not more than fifty
other men since the human race has existed.

You will probably call this raving at first, Wilmarth, but in time
you will appreciate the titanic opportunity I have stumbled upon. I
want you to share as much of it as is possible, and to that end must
tell you thousands of things that won’t go on paper. In the past I have
warned you not to come to see me. Now that all is safe, I take pleasure
in rescinding that warning and inviting you.

Can’t you make a trip up here before your college term opens? It
would be marvelously delightful if you could. Bring along the
phonograph record and all my letters to you as consultative data--we
shall need them in piecing together the whole tremendous story. You
might bring the Kodak prints, too, since I seem to have mislaid the
negatives and my own prints in all this recent excitement. But what a
wealth of facts I have to add to all this groping and tentative
material--and what a stupendous device I have to supplement my
additions!

Don’t hesitate--I am free from espionage now, and you will not
meet anything unnatural or disturbing. Just come along and let my car
meet you at the Brattleboro station--prepare to stay as long as you
can, and expect many an evening of discussion of things beyond all
human conjecture. Don’t tell anyone about it, of course--for this
matter must not get to the promiscuous public.

The train service to Brattleboro is not bad--you can get a
timetable in Boston. Take the B. & M. to Greenfield, and then
change for the brief remainder of the way. I suggest your taking the
convenient 4:10 P.M.--standard--from Boston. This gets into Greenfield
at 7:35, and at 9:19 a train leaves there which reaches Brattleboro at
10:01. That is weekdays. Let me know the date and I’ll have my car on
hand at the station.

Pardon this typed letter, but my handwriting has grown shaky of
late, as you know, and I don’t feel equal to long stretches of script.
I got this new Corona in Brattleboro yesterday--it seems to work very
well.

Awaiting word, and hoping to see you shortly with the phonograph record
and all my letters--and the Kodak prints--

I am

Yours in anticipation,
Henry W. Akeley

TO ALBERT N. WILMARTH, ESQ.,
MISKATONIC UNIVERSITY,
ARKHAM, MASS.

The complexity of my emotions upon reading, re-reading, and
pondering over this strange and unlooked-for letter is past adequate
description. I have said that I was at once relieved and made uneasy,
but this expresses only crudely the overtones of diverse and largely
subconscious feelings which comprised both the relief and the
uneasiness. To begin with, the thing was so antipodally at variance
with the whole chain of horrors preceding it--the change of mood from
stark terror to cool complacency and even exultation was so unheralded,
lightning-like, and complete! I could scarcely believe that a single
day could so alter the psychological perspective of one who had written
that final frenzied bulletin of Wednesday, no matter what relieving
disclosures that day might have brought. At certain moments a sense of
conflicting unrealities made me wonder whether this whole distantly
reported drama of fantastic forces were not a kind of half-illusory
dream created largely within my own mind. Then I thought of the
phonograph record and gave way to still greater bewilderment.

The letter seemed so unlike anything which could have been expected!
As I analysed my impression, I saw that it consisted of two distinct
phases. First, granting that Akeley had been sane before and was still
sane, the indicated change in the situation itself was so swift and
unthinkable. And secondly, the change in Akeley’s own manner, attitude,
and language was so vastly beyond the normal or the predictable. The
man’s whole personality seemed to have undergone an insidious mutation
--a mutation so deep that one could scarcely reconcile his two aspects
with the supposition that both represented equal sanity. Word-choice,
spelling--all were subtly different. And with my academic
sensitiveness to prose style, I could trace profound divergences in his
commonest reactions and rhythm-responses. Certainly, the emotional
cataclysm or revelation which could produce so radical an overturn must
be an extreme one indeed! Yet in another way the letter seemed quite
characteristic of Akeley. The same old passion for infinity--the same
old scholarly inquisitiveness. I could not a moment--or more than a
moment--credit the idea of spuriousness or malign substitution. Did
not the invitation--the willingness to have me test the truth of the
letter in person--prove its genuineness?

I did not retire Saturday night, but sat up thinking of the shadows
and marvels behind the letter I had received. My mind, aching from the
quick succession of monstrous conceptions it had been forced to
confront during the last four months, worked upon this startling new
material in a cycle of doubt and acceptance which repeated most of the
steps experienced in facing the earlier wonders; till long before dawn
a burning interest and curiosity had begun to replace the original
storm of perplexity and uneasiness. Mad or sane, metamorphosed or
merely relieved, the chances were that Akeley had actually encountered
some stupendous change of perspective in his hazardous research; some
change at once diminishing his danger--real or fancied--and opening
dizzy new vistas of cosmic and superhuman knowledge. My own zeal for
the unknown flared up to meet his, and I felt myself touched by the
contagion of the morbid barrier-breaking. To shake off the maddening
and wearying limitations of time and space and natural law--to be
linked with the vast outside--to come close to the nighted and abysmal
secrets of the infinite and the ultimate--surely such a thing was
worth the risk of one’s life, soul, and sanity! And Akeley had said
there was no longer any peril--he had invited me to visit him instead
of warning me away as before. I tingled at the thought of what he might
now have to tell me--there was an almost paralysing fascination in the
thought of sitting in that lonely and lately-beleaguered farmhouse with
a man who had talked with actual emissaries from outer space; sitting
there with the terrible record and the pile of letters in which Akeley
had summarised his earlier conclusions.

So late Sunday morning I telegraphed Akeley that I would meet him in
Brattleboro on the following Wednesday--September 12th--if that date
were convenient for him. In only one respect did I depart from his
suggestions, and that concerned the choice of a train. Frankly, I did
not feel like arriving in that haunted Vermont region late at night; so
instead of accepting the train he chose I telephoned the station and
devised another arrangement. By rising early and taking the 8:07 A.M.
(standard) into Boston, I could catch the 9:25 for Greenfield; arriving
there at 12:22 noon. This connected exactly with a train reaching
Brattleboro at 1:08 p.m.--a much more comfortable hour than 10:01 for
meeting Akeley and riding with him into the close-packed,
secret-guarding hills.

I mentioned this choice in my telegram, and was glad to learn in the
reply which came toward evening that it had met with my prospective
host’s endorsement. His wire ran thus:

ARRANGEMENT SATISFACTORY WILL MEET ONE EIGHT TRAIN WEDNESDAY DONT
FORGET RECORD AND LETTERS AND PRINTS KEEP DESTINATION QUIET EXPECT
GREAT REVELATIONS

AKELEY

Receipt of this message in direct response to one sent to Akeley--
and necessarily delivered to his house from the Townshend station
either by official messenger or by a restored telephone service--
removed any lingering subconscious doubts I may have had about the
authorship of the perplexing letter. My relief was marked--indeed, it
was greater than I could account for at the time; since all such doubts
had been rather deeply buried. But I slept soundly and long that night,
and was eagerly busy with preparations during the ensuing two days.


VI

On Wednesday I started as agreed, taking with me a valise full of
simple necessities and scientific data, including the hideous
phonograph record, the Kodak prints, and the entire file of Akeley’s
correspondence. As requested, I had told no one where I was going; for
I could see that the matter demanded utmost privacy, even allowing for
its most favourable turns. The thought of actual mental contact with
alien, outside entities was stupefying enough to my trained and
somewhat prepared mind; and this being so, what might one think of its
effect on the vast masses of uninformed laymen? I do not know whether
dread or adventurous expectancy was uppermost in me as I changed trains
at Boston and began the long westward run out of familiar regions into
those I knew less thoroughly. Waltham--Concord--Ayer--Fitchburg--
Gardner--Athol--

My train reached Greenfield seven minutes late, but the northbound
connecting express had been held. Transferring in haste, I felt a
curious breathlessness as the cars rumbled on through the early
afternoon sunlight into territories I had always read of but had never
before visited. I knew I was entering an altogether older-fashioned and
more primitive New England than the mechanised, urbanised coastal and
southern areas where all my life had been spent; an unspoiled,
ancestral New England without the foreigners and factory-smoke,
bill-boards and concrete roads, of the sections which modernity has
touched. There would be odd survivals of that continuous native life
whose deep roots make it the one authentic outgrowth of the landscape--
the continuous native life which keeps alive strange ancient memories,
and fertilises the soil for shadowy, marvellous, and seldom-mentioned
beliefs.

Now and then I saw the blue Connecticut River gleaming in the sun,
and after leaving Northfield we crossed it. Ahead loomed green and
cryptical hills, and when the conductor came around I learned that I
was at last in Vermont. He told me to set my watch back an hour, since
the northern hill country will have no dealings with new-fangled
daylight time schemes. As I did so it seemed to me that I was likewise
turning the calendar back a century.

The train kept close to the river, and across in New Hampshire I
could see the approaching slope of steep Wantastiquet, about which
singular old legends cluster. Then streets appeared on my left, and a
green island showed in the stream on my right. People rose and filed to
the door, and I followed them. The car stopped, and I alighted beneath
the long train-shed of the Brattleboro station.

Looking over the line of waiting motors I hesitated a moment to see
which one might turn out to be the Akeley Ford, but my identity was
divined before I could take the initiative. And yet it was clearly not
Akeley himself who advanced to meet me with an outstretched hand and a
mellowly phrased query as to whether I was indeed Mr. Albert N.
Wilmarth of Arkham. This man bore no resemblance to the bearded,
grizzled Akeley of the snapshot; but was a younger and more urbane
person, fashionably dressed, and wearing only a small, dark moustache.
His cultivated voice held an odd and almost disturbing hint of vague
familiarity, though I could not definitely place it in my memory.

As I surveyed him I heard him explaining that he was a friend of my
prospective host’s who had come down from Townshend in his stead.
Akeley, he declared, had suffered a sudden attack of some asthmatic
trouble, and did not feel equal to making a trip in the outdoor air. It
was not serious, however, and there was to be no change in plans
regarding my visit. I could not make out just how much this Mr. Noyes--
as he announced himself--knew of Akeley’s researches and discoveries,
though it seemed to me that his casual manner stamped him as a
comparative outsider. Remembering what a hermit Akeley had been, I was
a trifle surprised at the ready availability of such a friend; but did
not let my puzzlement deter me from entering the motor to which he
gestured me. It was not the small ancient car I had expected from
Akeley’s descriptions, but a large and immaculate specimen of recent
pattern--apparently Noyes’s own, and bearing Massachusetts license
plates with the amusing "sacred codfish" device of that year. My guide,
I concluded, must be a summer transient in the Townshend region.

Noyes climbed into the car beside me and started it at once. I was
glad that he did not overflow with conversation, for some peculiar
atmospheric tensity made me feel disinclined to talk. The town seemed
very attractive in the afternoon sunlight as we swept up an incline and
turned to the right into the main street. It drowsed like the older New
England cities which one remembers from boyhood, and something in the
collocation of roofs and steeples and chimneys and brick walls formed
contours touching deep viol-strings of ancestral emotion. I could tell
that I was at the gateway of a region half-bewitched through the
piling-up of unbroken time-accumulations; a region where old, strange
things have had a chance to grow and linger because they have never
been stirred up.

As we passed out of Brattleboro my sense of constraint and
foreboding increased, for a vague quality in the hill-crowded
countryside with its towering, threatening, close-pressing green and
granite slopes hinted at obscure secrets and immemorial survivals which
might or might not be hostile to mankind. For a time our course
followed a broad, shallow river which flowed down from unknown hills in
the north, and I shivered when my companion told me it was the West
River. It was in this stream, I recalled from newspaper items, that one
of the morbid crablike beings had been seen floating after the floods.

Gradually the country around us grew wilder and more deserted.
Archaic covered bridges lingered fearsomely out of the past in pockets
of the hills, and the half-abandoned railway track paralleling the
river seemed to exhale a nebulously visible air of desolation. There
were awesome sweeps of vivid valley where great cliffs rose, New
England’s virgin granite showing grey and austere through the verdure
that scaled the crests. There were gorges where untamed streams leaped,
bearing down toward the river the unimagined secrets of a thousand
pathless peaks. Branching away now and then were narrow, half-concealed
roads that bored their way through solid, luxuriant masses of forest
among whose primal trees whole armies of elemental spirits might well
lurk. As I saw these I thought of how Akeley had been molested by
unseen agencies on his drives along this very route, and did not wonder
that such things could be.

The quaint, sightly village of Newfane, reached in less than an
hour, was our last link with that world which man can definitely call
his own by virtue of conquest and complete occupancy. After that we
cast off all allegiance to immediate, tangible, and time-touched
things, and entered a fantastic world of hushed unreality in which the
narrow, ribbon-like road rose and fell and curved with an almost
sentient and purposeful caprice amidst the tenantless green peaks and
half-deserted valleys. Except for the sound of the motor, and the faint
stir of the few lonely farms we passed at infrequent intervals, the
only thing that reached my ears was the gurgling, insidious trickle of
strange waters from numberless hidden fountains in the shadowy woods.

The nearness and intimacy of the dwarfed, domed hills now became
veritably breath-taking. Their steepness and abruptness were even
greater than I had imagined from hearsay, and suggested nothing in
common with the prosaic objective world we know. The dense, unvisited
woods on those inaccessible slopes seemed to harbour alien and
incredible things, and I felt that the very outline of the hills
themselves held some strange and aeon-forgotten meaning, as if they
were vast hieroglyphs left by a rumoured titan race whose glories live
only in rare, deep dreams. All the legends of the past, and all the
stupefying imputations of Henry Akeley’s letters and exhibits, welled
up in my memory to heighten the atmosphere of tension and growing
menace. The purpose of my visit, and the frightful abnormalities it
postulated struck at me all at once with a chill sensation that nearly
over-balanced my ardour for strange delvings.

My guide must have noticed my disturbed attitude; for as the road
grew wilder and more irregular, and our motion slower and more jolting,
his occasional pleasant comments expanded into a steadier flow of
discourse. He spoke of the beauty and weirdness of the country, and
revealed some acquaintance with the folklore studies of my prospective
host. From his polite questions it was obvious that he knew I had come
for a scientific purpose, and that I was bringing data of some
importance; but he gave no sign of appreciating the depth and awfulness
of the knowledge which Akeley had finally reached.

His manner was so cheerful, normal, and urbane that his remarks
ought to have calmed and reassured me; but oddly enough. I felt only
the more disturbed as we bumped and veered onward into the unknown
wilderness of hills and woods. At times it seemed as if he were pumping
me to see what I knew of the monstrous secrets of the place, and with
every fresh utterance that vague, teasing, baffling familiarity in his
voice increased. It was not an ordinary or healthy familiarity despite
the thoroughly wholesome and cultivated nature of the voice. I somehow
linked it with forgotten nightmares, and felt that I might go mad if I
recognised it. If any good excuse had existed, I think I would have
turned back from my visit. As it was, I could not well do so--and it
occurred to me that a cool, scientific conversation with Akeley himself
after my arrival would help greatly to pull me together.

Besides, there was a strangely calming element of cosmic beauty in
the hypnotic landscape through which we climbed and plunged
fantastically. Time had lost itself in the labyrinths behind, and
around us stretched only the flowering waves of faery and the
recaptured loveliness of vanished centuries--the hoary groves, the
untainted pastures edged with gay autumnal blossoms, and at vast
intervals the small brown farmsteads nestling amidst huge trees beneath
vertical precipices of fragrant brier and meadow-grass. Even the
sunlight assumed a supernal glamour, as if some special atmosphere or
exhalation mantled the whole region. I had seen nothing like it before
save in the magic vistas that sometimes form the backgrounds of Italian
primitives. Sodoma and Leonardo conceived such expanses, but only in
the distance, and through the vaultings of Renaissance arcades. We were
now burrowing bodily through the midst of the picture, and I seemed to
find in its necromancy a thing I had innately known or inherited and
for which I had always been vainly searching.

Suddenly, after rounding an obtuse angle at the top of a sharp
ascent, the car came to a standstill. On my left, across a well-kept
lawn which stretched to the road and flaunted a border of whitewashed
stones, rose a white, two-and-a-half-story house of unusual size and
elegance for the region, with a congenes of contiguous or arcade-linked
barns, sheds, and windmill behind and to the right. I recognised it at
once from the snapshot I had received, and was not surprised to see the
name of Henry Akeley on the galvanised-iron mailbox near the road. For
some distance back of the house a level stretch of marshy and
sparsely-wooded land extended, beyond which soared a steep,
thickly-forested hillside ending in a jagged leafy crest. This latter,
I knew, was the summit of Dark Mountain, half way up which we must have
climbed already.

Alighting from the car and taking my valise, Noyes asked me to wait
while he went in and notified Akeley of my advent. He himself, he
added, had important business elsewhere, and could not stop for more
than a moment. As he briskly walked up the path to the house I climbed
out of the car myself, wishing to stretch my legs a little before
settling down to a sedentary conversation. My feeling of nervousness
and tension had risen to a maximum again now that I was on the actual
scene of the morbid beleaguering described so hauntingly in Akeley’s
letters, and I honestly dreaded the coming discussions which were to
link me with such alien and forbidden worlds.

Close contact with the utterly bizarre is often more terrifying than
inspiring, and it did not cheer me to think that this very bit of dusty
road was the place where those monstrous tracks and that foetid green
ichor had been found after moonless nights of fear and death. Idly I
noticed that none of Akeley’s dogs seemed to be about. Had he sold them
all as soon as the Outer Ones made peace with him? Try as I might, I
could not have the same confidence in the depth and sincerity of that
peace which appeared in Akeley’s final and queerly different letter.
After all, he was a man of much simplicity and with little worldly
experience. Was there not, perhaps, some deep and sinister undercurrent
beneath the surface of the new alliance?

Led by my thoughts, my eyes turned downward to the powdery road
surface which had held such hideous testimonies. The last few days had
been dry, and tracks of all sorts cluttered the rutted, irregular
highway despite the unfrequented nature of the district. With a vague
curiosity I began to trace the outline of some of the heterogeneous
impressions, trying meanwhile to curb the flights of macabre fancy
which the place and its memories suggested. There was something
menacing and uncomfortable in the funereal stillness, in the muffled,
subtle trickle of distant brooks, and in the crowding green peaks and
black-wooded precipices that choked the narrow horizon.

And then an image shot into my consciousness which made those vague
menaces and flights of fancy seem mild and insignificant indeed. I have
said that I was scanning the miscellaneous prints in the road with a
kind of idle curiosity--but all at once that curiosity was shockingly
snuffed out by a sudden and paralysing gust of active terror. For
though the dust tracks were in general confused and overlapping, and
unlikely to arrest any casual gaze, my restless vision had caught
certain details near the spot where the path to the house joined the
highway; and had recognised beyond doubt or hope the frightful
significance of those details. It was not for nothing, alas, that I had
pored for hours over the Kodak views of the Outer Ones’ claw-prints
which Akeley had sent. Too well did I know the marks of those loathsome
nippers, and that hint of ambiguous direction which stamped the horrors
as no creatures of this planet. No chance had been left me for merciful
mistake. Here, indeed, in objective form before my own eyes, and surely
made not many hours ago, were at least three marks which stood out
blasphemously among the surprising plethora of blurred footprints
leading to and from the Akeley farmhouse. They were the hellish tracks
of the living fungi from Yuggoth.

I pulled myself together in time to stifle a scream. After all, what
more was there than I might have expected, assuming that I had really
believed Akeley’s letters? He had spoken of making peace with the
things. Why, then, was it strange that some of them had visited his
house? But the terror was stronger than the reassurance. Could any man
be expected to look unmoved for the first time upon the claw-marks of
animate beings from outer depths of space? Just then I saw Noyes emerge
from the door and approach with a brisk step. I must, I reflected, keep
command of myself, for the chances were that this genial friend knew
nothing of Akeley’s profoundest and most stupendous probings into the
forbidden.

Akeley, Noyes hastened to inform me, was glad and ready to see me;
although his sudden attack of asthma would prevent him from being a
very competent host for a day or two. These spells hit him hard when
they came, and were always accompanied by a debilitating fever and
general weakness. He never was good for much while they lasted--had to
talk in a whisper, and was very clumsy and feeble in getting about. His
feet and ankles swelled, too, so that he had to bandage them like a
gouty old beef-eater. Today he was in rather bad shape, so that I would
have to attend very largely to my own needs; but he was none the less
eager for conversation. I would find him in the study at the left of
the front hall--the room where the blinds were shut. He had to keep
the sunlight out when he was ill, for his eyes were very sensitive.

As Noyes bade me adieu and rode off northward in his car I began to
walk slowly toward the house. The door had been left ajar for me; but
before approaching and entering I cast a searching glance around the
whole place, trying to decide what had struck me as so intangibly queer
about it. The barns and sheds looked trimly prosaic enough, and I
noticed Akeley’s battered Ford in its capacious, unguarded shelter.
Then the secret of the queerness reached me. It was the total silence.
Ordinarily a farm is at least moderately murmurous from its various
kinds of livestock, but here all signs of life were missing. What of
the hens and the dogs? The cows, of which Akeley had said he possessed
several, might conceivably be out to pasture, and the dogs might
possibly have been sold; but the absence of any trace of cackling or
grunting was truly singular.

I did not pause long on the path, but resolutely entered the open
house door and closed it behind me. It had cost me a distinct
psychological effort to do so, and now that I was shut inside I had a
momentary longing for precipitate retreat. Not that the place was in
the least sinister in visual suggestion; on the contrary, I thought the
graceful late-colonial hallway very tasteful and wholesome, and admired
the evident breeding of the man who had furnished it. What made me wish
to flee was something very attenuated and indefinable. Perhaps it was a
certain odd odour which I thought I noticed--though I well knew how
common musty odours are in even the best of ancient farmhouses.


VII

Refusing to let these cloudy qualms overmaster me, I recalled
Noyes’s instructions and pushed open the six-panelled, brass-latched
white door on my left. The room beyond was darkened as I had known
before; and as I entered it I noticed that the queer odour was stronger
there. There likewise appeared to be some faint, half-imaginary rhythm
or vibration in the air. For a moment the closed blinds allowed me to
see very little, but then a kind of apologetic hacking or whispering
sound drew my attention to a great easy-chair in the farther, darker
corner of the room. Within its shadowy depths I saw the white blur of a
man’s face and hands; and in a moment I had crossed to greet the figure
who had tried to speak. Dim though the light was, I perceived that this
was indeed my host. I had studied the Kodak picture repeatedly, and
there could be no mistake about this firm, weather-beaten face with the
cropped, grizzled beard.

But as I looked again my recognition was mixed with sadness and
anxiety; for certainly, his face was that of a very sick man. I felt
that there must be something more than asthma behind that strained,
rigid, immobile expression and unwinking glassy stare; and realised how
terribly the strain of his frightful experiences must have told on him.
Was it not enough to break any human being--even a younger man than
this intrepid delver into the forbidden? The strange and sudden relief,
I feared, had come too late to save him from something like a general
breakdown. There was a touch of the pitiful in the limp, lifeless way
his lean hands rested in his lap. He had on a loose dressing-gown, and
was swathed around the head and high around the neck with a vivid
yellow scarf or hood.

And then I saw that he was trying to talk in the same hacking
whisper with which he had greeted me. It was a hard whisper to catch at
first, since the grey moustache concealed all movements of the lips,
and something in its timbre disturbed me greatly; but by concentrating
my attention I could soon make out its purport surprisingly well. The
accent was by no means a rustic one, and the language was even more
polished than correspondence had led me to expect.

"Mr. Wilmarth, I presume? You must pardon my not rising. I am quite
ill, as Mr. Noyes must have told you; but I could not resist having you
come just the same. You know what I wrote in my last letter--there is
so much to tell you tomorrow when I shall feel better. I can’t say how
glad I am to see you in person after all our many letters. You have the
file with you, of course? And the Kodak prints and records? Noyes put
your valise in the hall--I suppose you saw it. For tonight I fear
you’ll have to wait on yourself to a great extent. Your room is
upstairs--the one over this--and you’ll see the bathroom door open at
the head of the staircase. There’s a meal spread for you in the
dining-room--right through this door at your right--which you can
take whenever you feel like it. I’ll be a better host tomorrow--but
just now weakness leaves me helpless.

"Make yourself at home--you might take out the letters and pictures
and records and put them on the table here before you go upstairs with
your bag. It is here that we shall discuss them--you can see my
phonograph on that corner stand.

"No, thanks--there’s nothing you can do for me. I know these spells
of old. Just come back for a little quiet visiting before night, and
then go to bed when you please. I’ll rest right here--perhaps sleep
here all night as I often do. In the morning I’ll be far better able to
go into the things we must go into. You realise, of course, the utterly
stupendous nature of the matter before us. To us, as to only a few men
on this earth, there will be opened up gulfs of time and space and
knowledge beyond anything within the conception of human science or
philosophy.

"Do you know that Einstein is wrong, and that certain objects and
forces can move with a velocity greater than that of light? With proper
aid I expect to go backward and forward in time, and actually see and
feel the earth of remote past and future epochs. You can’t imagine the
degree to which those beings have carried science. There is nothing
they can’t do with the mind and body of living organisms. I expect to
visit other planets, and even other stars and galaxies. The first trip
will be to Yuggoth, the nearest world fully peopled by the beings. It
is a strange dark orb at the very rim of our solar system--unknown to
earthly astronomers as yet. But I must have written you about this. At
the proper time, you know, the beings there will direct
thought-currents toward us and cause it to be discovered--or perhaps
let one of their human allies give the scientists a hint.

"There are mighty cities on Yuggoth--great tiers of terraced towers
built of black stone like the specimen I tried to send you. That came
from Yuggoth. The sun shines there no brighter than a star, but the
beings need no light. They have other subtler senses, and put no
windows in their great houses and temples. Light even hurts and hampers
and confuses them, for it does not exist at all in the black cosmos
outside time and space where they came from originally. To visit
Yuggoth would drive any weak man mad--yet I am going there. The black
rivers of pitch that flow under those mysterious cyclopean bridges--
things built by some elder race extinct and forgotten before the beings
came to Yuggoth from the ultimate voids--ought to be enough to make
any man a Dante or Poe if he can keep sane long enough to tell what he
has seen.

"But remember--that dark world of fungoid gardens and windowless
cities isn’t really terrible. It is only to us that it would seem so.
Probably this world seemed just as terrible to the beings when they
first explored it in the primal age. You know they were here long
before the fabulous epoch of Cthulhu was over, and remember all about
sunken R’lyeh when it was above the waters. They’ve been inside the
earth, too--there are openings which human beings know nothing of--
some of them in these very Vermont hills--and great worlds of unknown
life down there; blue-litten K’n-yan, red-litten Yoth, and black,
lightless N’kai. It’s from N’kai that frightful Tsathoggua came--you
know, the amorphous, toad-like god-creature mentioned in the Pnakotic
Manuscripts and the Necronomicon and the Commoriom myth-cycle preserved
by the Atlantean high-priest Klarkash-Ton.

"But we will talk of all this later on. It must be four or five
o’clock by this time. Better bring the stuff from your bag, take a
bite, and then come back for a comfortable chat."

Very slowly I turned and began to obey my host; fetching my valise,
extracting and depositing the desired articles, and finally ascending
to the room designated as mine. With the memory of that roadside
claw-print fresh in my mind, Akeley’s whispered paragraphs had affected
me queerly; and the hints of familiarity with this unknown world of
fungous life--forbidden Yuggoth--made my flesh creep more than I
cared to own. I was tremendously sorry about Akeley’s illness, but had
to confess that his hoarse whisper had a hateful as well as pitiful
quality. If only he wouldn’t gloat so about Yuggoth and its black
secrets!

My room proved a very pleasant and well-furnished one, devoid alike
of the musty odour and disturbing sense of vibration; and after leaving
my valise there I descended again to greet Akeley and take the lunch he
had set out for me. The dining-room was just beyond the study, and I
saw that a kitchen extended still farther in the same direction. On
the dining-table an ample array of sandwiches, cake, and cheese awaited
me, and a Thermos-bottle beside a cup and saucer testified that hot
coffee had not been forgotten. After a well-relished meal I poured
myself a liberal cup of coffee, but found that the culinary standard
had suffered a lapse in this one detail. My first spoonful revealed a
faintly unpleasant acrid taste, so that I did not take more. Throughout
the lunch I thought of Akeley sitting silently in the great chair in
the darkened next room.

Once I went in to beg him to share the repast, but he whispered that
he could eat nothing as yet. Later on, just before he slept, he would
take some malted milk--all he ought to have that day.

After lunch I insisted on clearing the dishes away and washing them
in the kitchen sink--incidentally emptying the coffee which I had not
been able to appreciate. Then returning to the darkened study I drew up
a chair near my host’s corner and prepared for such conversation as he
might feel inclined to conduct. The letters, pictures, and record were
still on the large centre-table, but for the nonce we did not have to
draw upon them. Before long I forgot even the bizarre odour and curious
suggestions of vibration.

I have said that there were things in some of Akeley’s letters--
especially the second and most voluminous one--which I would not dare
to quote or even form into words on paper. This hesitancy applies with
still greater force to the things I heard whispered that evening in the
darkened room among the lonely hills. Of the extent of the cosmic
horrors unfolded by that raucous voice I cannot even hint. He had known
hideous things before, but what he had learned since making his pact
with the Outside Things was almost too much for sanity to bear. Even
now I absolutely refused to believe what he implied about the
constitution of ultimate infinity, the juxtaposition of dimensions, and
the frightful position of our known cosmos of space and time in the
unending chain of linked cosmos-atoms which makes up the immediate
super-cosmos of curves, angles, and material and semi-material
electronic organisation.

Never was a sane man more dangerously close to the arcana of basic
entity--never was an organic brain nearer to utter annihilation in the
chaos that transcends form and force and symmetry. I learned whence
Cthulhu first came, and why half the great temporary stars of history
had flared forth. I guessed--from hints which made even my informant
pause timidly--the secret behind the Magellanic Clouds and globular
nebulae, and the black truth veiled by the immemorial allegory of Tao.
The nature of the Doels was plainly revealed, and I was told the
essence (though not the source) of the Hounds of Tindalos. The legend
of Yig, Father of Serpents, remained figurative no longer, and I
started with loathing when told of the monstrous nuclear chaos beyond
angled space which the Necronomicon had mercifully cloaked under the
name of Azathoth. It was shocking to have the foulest nightmares of
secret myth cleared up in concrete terms whose stark, morbid
hatefulness exceeded the boldest hints of ancient and mediaeval
mystics. Ineluctably I was led to believe that the first whisperers of
these accursed tales must have had discourse with Akeley’s Outer Ones,
and perhaps have visited outer cosmic realms as Akeley now proposed
visiting them.

I was told of the Black Stone and what it implied, and was glad that
it had not reached me. My guesses about those hieroglyphics had been
all too correct! And yet Akeley now seemed reconciled to the whole
fiendish system he had stumbled upon; reconciled and eager to probe
farther into the monstrous abyss. I wondered what beings he had talked
with since his last letter to me, and whether many of them had been as
human as that first emissary he had mentioned. The tension in my head
grew insufferable, and I built up all sorts of wild theories about that
queer, persistent odour and those insidious hints of vibration in the
darkened room.

Night was falling now, and as I recalled what Akeley had written me
about those earlier nights I shuddered to think there would be no moon.
Nor did I like the way the farmhouse nestled in the lee of that
colossal forested slope leading up to Dark Mountain’s unvisited crest.
With Akeley’s permission I lighted a small oil lamp, turned it low, and
set it on a distant bookcase beside the ghostly bust of Milton; but
afterward I was sorry I had done so, for it made my host’s strained,
immobile face and listless hands look damnably abnormal and corpselike.
He seemed half-incapable of motion, though I saw him nod stiffly once
in awhile.

After what he had told, I could scarcely imagine what profounder
secrets he was saving for the morrow; but at last it developed that his
trip to Yuggoth and beyond--and my own possible participation in it--
was to be the next day’s topic. He must have been amused by the start
of horror I gave at hearing a cosmic voyage on my part proposed, for
his head wabbled violently when I showed my fear. Subsequently he spoke
very gently of how human beings might accomplish--and several times
had accomplished--the seemingly impossible flight across the
interstellar void. It seemed that complete human bodies did not indeed
make the trip, but that the prodigious surgical, biological, chemical,
and mechanical skill of the Outer Ones had found a way to convey human
brains without their concomitant physical structure.

There was a harmless way to extract a brain, and a way to keep the
organic residue alive during its absence. The bare, compact cerebral
matter was then immersed in an occasionally replenished fluid within an
ether-tight cylinder of a metal mined in Yuggoth, certain electrodes
reaching through and connecting at will with elaborate instruments
capable of duplicating the three vital faculties of sight, hearing, and
speech. For the winged fungus-beings to carry the brain-cylinders
intact through space was an easy matter. Then, on every planet covered
by their civilisation, they would find plenty of adjustable
faculty-instruments capable of being connected with the encased brains;
so that after a little fitting these travelling intelligences could be
given a full sensory and articulate life--albeit a bodiless and
mechanical one--at each stage of their journeying through and beyond
the space-time continuum. It was as simple as carrying a phonograph
record about and playing it wherever a phonograph of corresponding make
exists. Of its success there could be no question. Akeley was not
afraid. Had it not been brilliantly accomplished again and again?

For the first time one of the inert, wasted hands raised itself and
pointed stiffly to a high shelf on the farther side of the room. There,
in a neat row, stood more than a dozen cylinders of a metal I had never
seen before--cylinders about a foot high and somewhat less in
diameter, with three curious sockets set in an isosceles triangle over
the front convex surface of each. One of them was linked at two of the
sockets to a pair of singular-looking machines that stood in the
background. Of their purport I did not need to be told, and I shivered
as with ague. Then I saw the hand point to a much nearer corner where
some intricate instruments with attached cords and plugs, several of
them much like the two devices on the shelf behind the cylinders, were
huddled together.

"There are four kinds of instruments here, Wilmarth," whispered the
voice. "Four kinds--three faculties each--makes twelve pieces in all.
You see there are four different sorts of beings represented in those
cylinders up there. Three humans, six fungoid beings who can’t navigate
space corporeally, two beings from Neptune (God! if you could see the
body this type has on its own planet!), and the rest entities from the
central caverns of an especially interesting dark star beyond the
galaxy. In the principal outpost inside Round Hill you’ll now and then
find more cylinders and machines--cylinders of extra-cosmic brains
with different senses from any we know--allies and explorers from the
uttermost Outside--and special machines for giving them impressions
and expression in the several ways suited at once to them and to the
comprehensions of different types of listeners. Round Hill, like most
of the beings’ main outposts all through the various universes, is a
very cosmopolitan place. Of course, only the more common types have
been lent to me for experiment.

"Here--take the three machines I point to and set them on the
table. That tall one with the two glass lenses in front--then the box
with the vacuum tubes and sounding-board--and now the one with the
metal disc on top. Now for the cylinder with the label ‘B-67’ pasted on
it. Just stand in that Windsor chair to reach the shelf. Heavy? Never
mind! Be sure of the number--B-67. Don’t bother that fresh, shiny
cylinder joined to the two testing instruments--the one with my name
on it. Set B-67 on the table near where you’ve put the machines--and
see that the dial switch on all three machines is jammed over to the
extreme left.

"Now connect the cord of the lens machine with the upper socket on
the cylinder--there! Join the tube machine to the lower left-hand
socket, and the disc apparatus to the outer socket. Now move all the
dial switches on the machine over to the extreme right--first the lens
one, then the disc one, and then the tube one. That’s right. I might as
well tell you that this is a human being--just like any of us. I’ll
give you a taste of some of the others tomorrow."

To this day I do not know why I obeyed those whispers so slavishly,
or whether I thought Akeley was mad or sane. After what had gone
before, I ought to have been prepared for anything; but this mechanical
mummery seemed so like the typical vagaries of crazed inventors and
scientists that it struck a chord of doubt which even the preceding
discourse had not excited. What the whisperer implied was beyond all
human belief--yet were not the other things still farther beyond, and
less preposterous only because of their remoteness from tangible
concrete proof?

As my mind reeled amidst this chaos, I became conscious of a mixed
grating and whirring from all three of the machines lately linked to
the cylinder--a grating and whirring which soon subsided into a
virtual noiselessness. What was about to happen? Was I to hear a voice?
And if so, what proof would I have that it was not some cleverly
concocted radio device talked into by a concealed but closely watched
speaker? Even now I am unwilling to swear just what I heard, or just
what phenomenon really took place before me. But something certainly
seemed to take place.

To be brief and plain, the machine with the tubes and sound-box
began to speak, and with a point and intelligence which left no doubt
that the speaker was actually present and observing us. The voice was
loud, metallic, lifeless, and plainly mechanical in every detail of its
production. It was incapable of inflection or expressiveness, but
scraped and rattled on with a deadly precision and deliberation.

"Mr. Wilmarth," it said, "I hope I do not startle you. I am a human
being like yourself, though my body is now resting safely under proper
vitalising treatment inside Round Hill, about a mile and a half east of
here. I myself am here with you--my brain is in that cylinder and I
see, hear, and speak through these electronic vibrators. In a week I am
going across the void as I have been many times before, and I expect to
have the pleasure of Mr. Akeley’s company. I wish I might have yours as
well; for I know you by sight and reputation, and have kept close track
of your correspondence with our friend. I am, of course, one of the men
who have become allied with the outside beings visiting our planet. I
met them first in the Himalayas, and have helped them in various ways.
In return they have given me experiences such as few men have ever had.

"Do you realise what it means when I say I have been on thirty-seven
different celestial bodies--planets, dark stars, and less definable
objects--including eight outside our galaxy and two outside the curved
cosmos of space and time? All this has not harmed me in the least. My
brain has been removed from my body by fissions so adroit that it would
be crude to call the operation surgery. The visiting beings have
methods which make these extractions easy and almost normal--and one’s
body never ages when the brain is out of it. The brain, I may add, is
virtually immortal with its mechanical faculties and a limited
nourishment supplied by occasional changes of the preserving fluid.

"Altogether, I hope most heartily that you will decide to come with
Mr. Akeley and me. The visitors are eager to know men of knowledge like
yourself, and to show them the great abysses that most of us have had
to dream about in fanciful ignorance. It may seem strange at first to
meet them, but I know you will be above minding that. I think Mr. Noyes
will go along, too--the man who doubtless brought you up here in his
car. He has been one of us for years--I suppose you recognised his
voice as one of those on the record Mr. Akeley sent you."

At my violent start the speaker paused a moment before concluding.
"So Mr. Wilmarth, I will leave the matter to you; merely adding that a
man with your love of strangeness and folklore ought never to miss such
a chance as this. There is nothing to fear. All transitions are
painless; and there is much to enjoy in a wholly mechanised state of
sensation. When the electrodes are disconnected, one merely drops off
into a sleep of especially vivid and fantastic dreams.

"And now, if you don’t mind, we might adjourn our session till
tomorrow. Good night--just turn all the switches back to the left;
never mind the exact order, though you might let the lens machine be
last. Good night, Mr. Akeley--treat our guest well! Ready now with
those switches?"

That was all. I obeyed mechanically and shut off all three switches,
though dazed with doubt of everything that had occurred. My head was
still reeling as I heard Akeley’s whispering voice telling me that I
might leave all the apparatus on the table just as it was. He did not
essay any comment on what had happened, and indeed no comment could
have conveyed much to my burdened faculties. I heard him telling me I
could take the lamp to use in my room, and deduced that he wished to
rest alone in the dark. It was surely time he rested, for his discourse
of the afternoon and evening had been such as to exhaust even a
vigorous man. Still dazed, I bade my host good night and went upstairs
with the lamp, although I had an excellent pocket flashlight with me.

I was glad to be out of that downstairs study with the queer odour
and vague suggestions of vibration, yet could not of course escape a
hideous sense of dread and peril and cosmic abnormality as I thought of
the place I was in and the forces I was meeting. The wild, lonely
region, the black, mysteriously forested slope towering so close behind
the house; the footprint in the road, the sick, motionless whisperer in
the dark, the hellish cylinders and machines, and above all the
invitations to strange surgery and stranger voyagings--these things,
all so new and in such sudden succession, rushed in on me with a
cumulative force which sapped my will and almost undermined my physical
strength.

To discover that my guide Noyes was the human celebrant in that
monstrous bygone Sabbat-ritual on the phonograph record was a
particular shock, though I had previously sensed a dim, repellent
familiarity in his voice. Another special shock came from my own
attitude toward my host whenever I paused to analyse it; for much as I
had instinctively liked Akeley as revealed in his correspondence, I now
found that he filled me with a distinct repulsion. His illness ought to
have excited my pity; but instead, it gave me a kind of shudder. He was
so rigid and inert and corpselike--and that incessant whispering was
so hateful and unhuman!

It occurred to me that this whispering was different from anything
else of the kind I had ever heard; that, despite the curious
motionlessness of the speaker’s moustache-screened lips, it had a
latent strength and carrying-power remarkable for the wheezing of an
asthmatic. I had been able to understand the speaker when wholly across
the room, and once or twice it had seemed to me that the faint but
penetrant sounds represented not so much weakness as deliberate
repression--for what reason I could not guess. From the first I had
felt a disturbing quality in their timbre. Now, when I tried to weigh
the matter, I thought I could trace this impression to a kind of
subconscious familiarity like that which had made Noyes’s voice so
hazily ominous. But when or where I had encountered the thing it hinted
at, was more than I could tell.

One thing was certain--I would not spend another night here. My
scientific zeal had vanished amidst fear and loathing, and I felt
nothing now but a wish to escape from this net of morbidity and
unnatural revelation. I knew enough now. It must indeed be true that
strange cosmic linkages do exist--but such things are surely not meant
for normal human beings to meddle with.

Blasphemous influences seemed to surround me and press chokingly
upon my senses. Sleep, I decided, would be out of the question; so I
merely extinguished the lamp and threw myself on the bed fully dressed.
No doubt it was absurd, but I kept ready for some unknown emergency;
gripping in my right hand the revolver I had brought along, and holding
the pocket flashlight in my left. Not a sound came from below, and I
could imagine how my host was sitting there with cadaverous stiffness
in the dark.

Somewhere I heard a clock ticking, and was vaguely grateful for the
normality of the sound. It reminded me, though, of another thing about
the region which disturbed me--the total absence of animal life. There
were certainly no farm beasts about, and now I realised that even the
accustomed night-noises of wild living things were absent. Except for
the sinister trickle of distant unseen waters, that stillness was
anomalous--interplanetary--and I wondered what star-spawned,
intangible blight could be hanging over the region. I recalled from old
legends that dogs and other beasts had always hated the Outer Ones, and
thought of what those tracks in the road might mean.


VIII

Do not ask me how long my unexpected lapse into slumber lasted, or
how much of what ensued was sheer dream. If I tell you that I awakened
at a certain time, and heard and saw certain things, you will merely
answer that I did not wake then; and that everything was a dream until
the moment when I rushed out of the house, stumbled to the shed where I
had seen the old Ford, and seized that ancient vehicle for a mad,
aimless race over the haunted hills which at last landed me--after
hours of jolting and winding through forest-threatened labyrinths--in
a village which turned out to be Townshend.

You will also, of course, discount everything else in my report; and
declare that all the pictures, record-sounds, cylinder-and-machine
sounds, and kindred evidences were bits of pure deception practiced on
me by the missing Henry Akeley. You will even hint that he conspired
with other eccentrics to carry out a silly and elaborate hoax--that he
had the express shipment removed at Keene, and that he had Noyes make
that terrifying wax record. It is odd, though, that Noyes has not ever
yet been identified; that he was unknown at any of the villages near
Akeley’s place, though he must have been frequently in the region. I
wish I had stopped to memorize the license-number of his car--or
perhaps it is better after all that I did not. For I, despite all you
can say, and despite all I sometimes try to say to myself, know that
loathsome outside influences must be lurking there in the half-unknown
hills--and that, those influences have spies and emissaries in the
world of men. To keep as far as possible from such influences and such
emissaries is all that I ask of life in future.

When my frantic story sent a sheriff’s posse out to the farmhouse,
Akeley was gone without leaving a trace. His loose dressing gown,
yellow scarf, and foot-bandages lay on the study floor near his corner.
easy-chair, and it could not be decided whether any of his other
apparel had vanished with him. The dogs and livestock were indeed
missing, and there were some curious bullet-holes both on the house’s
exterior and on some of the walls within; but beyond this nothing
unusual could be detected. No cylinders or machines, none of the
evidences I had brought in my valise, no queer odour or
vibration-sense, no foot-prints in the road, and none of the
problematical things I glimpsed at the very last.

I stayed a week in Brattleboro after my escape, making inquiries
among people of every kind who had known Akeley; and the results
convince me that the matter is no figment of dream or delusion.’
Akeley’s queer purchase of dogs and ammunition and chemicals, and the
cutting of his telephone wires, are matters of record; while all who
knew him--including his son in California--concede that his
occasional remarks on strange studies had a certain consistency. Solid
citizens believe he was mad, and unhesitatingly pronounce all reported
evidences mere hoaxes devised with insane cunning and perhaps abetted
by eccentric associates; but the lowlier country folk sustain his
statements in every detail. He had showed some of these rustics his
photographs and black stone, and had played the hideous record for
them; and they all said the footprints and buzzing voice were like
those described in ancestral legends.

They said, too, that suspicious sights and sounds had been noticed
increasingly around Akeley’s house after he found the black stone, and
that the place was now avoided by everybody except the mail man and
other casual, tough-minded people. Dark Mountain and Round Hill were
both notoriously haunted spots, and I could find no one who had ever
closely explored either. Occasional disappearances of natives
throughout the district’s history were well attested, and these now
included the semi-vagabond Walter Brown, whom Akeley’s letters had
mentioned. I even came upon one farmer who thought he had personally
glimpsed one of the queer bodies at flood-time in the swollen West
River, but his tale was too confused to be really valuable.

When I left Brattleboro I resolved never to go back to Vermont, and
I feel quite certain I shall keep my resolution. Those wild hills are
surely the outpost of a frightful cosmic race--as I doubt all the less
since reading that a new ninth planet has been glimpsed beyond Neptune,
just as those influences had said it would be glimpsed. Astronomers,
with a hideous appropriateness they little suspect, have named this
thing "Pluto." I feel, beyond question, that it is nothing less than
nighted Yuggoth--and I shiver when I try to figure out the real reason
why its monstrous denizens wish it to be known in this way at this
especial time. I vainly try to assure myself that these daemoniac
creatures are not gradually leading up to some new policy hurtful to
the earth and its normal inhabitants.

But I have still to tell of the ending of that terrible night in the
farmhouse. As I have said, I did finally drop into a troubled doze; a
doze filled with bits of dream which involved monstrous
landscape-glimpses. Just what awaked me I cannot yet say, but that I
did indeed awake at this given point I feel very certain. My first
confused impression was of stealthily creaking floor-boards in the hall
outside my door, and of a clumsy, muffled fumbling at the latch. This,
however, ceased almost at once; so that my really clear impressions
begin with the voices heard from the study below. There seemed to be
several speakers, and I judged that they were controversially engaged.

By the time I had listened a few seconds I was broad awake, for the
nature of the voices was such as to make all thought of sleep
ridiculous. The tones were curiously varied, and no one who had
listened to that accursed phonograph record could harbour any doubts
about the nature of at least two of them. Hideous though the idea was,
I knew that I was under the same roof with nameless things from abysmal
space; for those two voices were unmistakably the blasphemous buzzings
which the Outside Beings used in their communication with men. The two
were individually different--different in pitch, accent, and tempo--
but they were both of the same damnable general kind.

A third voice was indubitably that of a mechanical utterance-machine
connected with one of the detached brains in the cylinders. There was
as little doubt about that as about the buzzings; for the loud,
metallic, lifeless voice of the previous evening, with its
inflectionless, expressionless scraping and rattling, and its
impersonal precision and deliberation, had been utterly unforgettable.
For a time I did not pause to question whether the intelligence behind
the scraping was the identical one which had formerly talked to me; but
shortly afterward I reflected that any brain would emit vocal sounds of
the same quality if linked to the same mechanical speech-producer; the
only possible differences being in language, rhythm, speed, and
pronunciation. To complete the eldritch colloquy there were two
actually human voices--one the crude speech of an unknown and
evidently rustic man, and the other the suave Bostonian tones of my
erstwhile guide Noyes.

As I tried to catch the words which the stoutly-fashioned floor so
bafflingly intercepted, I was also conscious of a great deal of
stirring and scratching and shuffling in the room below; so that I
could not escape the impression that it was full of living beings--
many more than the few whose speech I could single out. The exact
nature of this stirring is extremely hard to describe, for very few
good bases of comparison exist. Objects seemed now and then to move
across the room like conscious entities; the sound of their footfalls
having something about it like a loose, hard-surfaced clattering--as
of the contact of ill-coordinated surfaces of horn or hard rubber. It
was, to use a more concrete but less accurate comparison, as if people
with loose, splintery wooden shoes were shambling and rattling about on
the polished board floor. Of the nature and appearance of those
responsible for the sounds, I did not care to speculate.

Before long I saw that it would be impossible to distinguish any
connected discourse. Isolated words--including the names of Akeley and
myself--now and then floated up, especially when uttered by the
mechanical speech-producer; but their true significance was lost for
want of continuous context. Today I refuse to form any definite
deductions from them, and even their frightful effect on me was one of
suggestion rather than of revelation. A terrible and abnormal conclave,
I felt certain, was assembled below me; but for what shocking
deliberations I could not tell. It was curious how this unquestioned
sense of the malign and the blasphemous pervaded me despite Akeley’s
assurances of the Outsider’s friendliness.

With patient listening I began to distinguish clearly between
voices, even though I could not grasp much of what any of the voices
said. I seemed to catch certain typical emotions behind some of the
speakers. One of the buzzing voices, for example, held an unmistakable
note of authority; whilst the mechanical voice, notwithstanding its
artificial loudness and regularity, seemed to be in a position of
subordination and pleading. Noyes’s tones exuded a kind of conciliatory
atmosphere. The others I could make no attempt to interpret. I did not
hear the familiar whisper of Akeley, but well knew that such a sound
could never penetrate the solid flooring of my room.

I will try to set down some of the few disjointed words and other
sounds I caught, labelling the speakers of the words as best I know
how. It was from the speech-machine that I first picked up a few
recognisable phrases.
(The Speech-Machine)

"...brought it on myself...sent back the letters and the record...
end on it...taken in...seeing and hearing...damn you...impersonal
force, after all...fresh, shiny cylinder...great God..."

(First Buzzing Voice)

"...time we stopped...small and human...Akeley...brain...saying..."

(Second Buzzing Voice)

"Nyarlathotep...Wilmarth...records and letters...cheap imposture..."

(Noyes)

"...(an unpronounceable word or name, possibly N’gah-Kthun)
harmless...peace...couple of weeks...theatrical...told you that
before..."

(First Buzzing Voice)

"...no reason...original plan...effects...Noyes can watch Round
Hill...fresh cylinder...Noyes’s car..."

(Noyes)

"...well...all yours...down here...rest...place..."

(Several Voices at Once in Indistinguishable Speech)

(Many Footsteps, Including the Peculiar Loose Stirring or Clattering)

(A Curious Sort of Flapping Sound)

(The Sound of an Automobile Starting and Receding)

(Silence)

That is the substance of what my ears brought me as I lay rigid upon
that strange upstairs bed in the haunted farmhouse among the daemoniac
hills--lay there fully dressed, with a revolver clenched in my right
hand and a pocket flashlight gripped in my left. I became, as I have
said, broad awake; but a kind of obscure paralysis nevertheless kept me
inert till long after the last echoes of the sounds had died away. I
heard the wooden, deliberate ticking of the ancient Connecticut clock
somewhere far below, and at last made out the irregular snoring of a
sleeper. Akeley must have dozed off after the strange session, and I
could well believe that he needed to do so.

Just what to think or what to do was more than I could decide After
all, what had I heard beyond things which previous information might
have led me to expect? Had I not known that the nameless Outsiders were
now freely admitted to the farmhouse? No doubt Akeley had been
surprised by an unexpected visit from them. Yet something in that
fragmentary discourse had chilled me immeasurably, raised the most
grotesque and horrible doubts, and made me wish fervently that I might
wake up and prove everything a dream. I think my subconscious mind must
have caught something which my consciousness has not yet recognised.
But what of Akeley? Was he not my friend, and would he not have
protested if any harm were meant me? The peaceful snoring below seemed
to cast ridicule on all my suddenly intensified fears.

Was it possible that Akeley had been imposed upon and used as a lure
to draw me into the hills with the letters and pictures and phonograph
record? Did those beings mean to engulf us both in a common destruction
because we had come to know too much? Again I thought of the abruptness
and unnaturalness of that change in the situation which must have
occurred between Akeley’s penultimate and final letters. Something, my
instinct told me, was terribly wrong. All was not as it seemed. That
acrid coffee which I refused--had there not been an attempt by some
hidden, unknown entity to drug it? I must talk to Akeley at once, and
restore his sense of proportion. They had hypnotised him with their
promises of cosmic revelations, but now he must listen to reason. We
must get out of this before it would be too late. If he lacked the will
power to make the break for liberty. I would supply it. Or if I could
not persuade him to go, I could at least go myself. Surely he would let
me take his Ford and leave it in a garage in Brattleboro. I had noticed
it in the shed--the door being left unlocked and open now that peril
was deemed past--and I believed there was a good chance of its being
ready for instant use. That momentary dislike of Akeley which I had
felt during and after the evening’s conversation was all gone now. He
was in a position much like my own, and we must stick together. Knowing
his indisposed condition, I hated to wake him at this juncture, but I
knew that I must. I could not stay in this place till morning as
matters stood.

At last I felt able to act, and stretched myself vigorously to
regain command of my muscles. Arising with a caution more impulsive
than deliberate, I found and donned my hat, took my valise, and started
downstairs with the flashlight’s aid. In my nervousness I kept the
revolver clutched in my right hand, being able to take care of both
valise and flashlight with my left. Why I exerted these precautions I
do not really know, since I was even then on my way to awaken the only
other occupant of the house.

As I half-tiptoed down the creaking stairs to the lower hall I could
hear the sleeper more plainly, and noticed that he must be in the room
on my left--the living-room I had not entered. On my right was the
gaping blackness of the study in which I had heard the voices. Pushing
open the unlatched door of the living-room I traced a path with the
flashlight toward the source of the snoring, and finally turned the
beams on the sleeper’s face. But in the next second I hastily turned
them away and commenced a catlike retreat to the hall, my caution this
time springing from reason as well as from instinct. For the sleeper on
the couch was not Akeley at all, but my quondam guide Noyes.

Just what the real situation was, I could not guess; but common
sense told me that the safest thing was to find out as much as possible
before arousing anybody. Regaining the hall, I silently closed and
latched the living-room door after me; thereby lessening the chances of
awakening Noyes. I now cautiously entered the dark study, where I
expected to find Akeley, whether asleep or awake, in the great corner
chair which was evidently his favorite resting-place. As I advanced,
the beams of my flashlight caught the great centre-table, revealing one
of the hellish cylinders with sight and hearing machines attached, and
with a speech machine standing close by, ready to be connected at any
moment. This, I reflected, must be the encased brain I had heard
talking during the frightful conference; and for a second I had a
perverse impulse to attach the speech machine and see what it would say.

It must, I thought, be conscious of my presence even now; since the
sight and hearing attachments could not fail to disclose the rays of my
flashlight and the faint creaking of the floor beneath my feet. But in
the end I did not dare meddle with the thing. I idly saw that it was
the fresh shiny cylinder with Akeley’s name on it, which I had noticed
on the shelf earlier in the evening and which my host had told me not
to bother. Looking back at that moment, I can only regret my timidity
and wish that I had boldly caused the apparatus to speak. God knows
what mysteries and horrible doubts and questions of identity it might
have cleared up! But then, it may be merciful that I let it alone.

From the table I turned my flashlight to the corner where I thought
Akeley was, but found to my perplexity that the great easy-chair was
empty of any human occupant asleep or awake. From the seat to the floor
there trailed voluminously the familiar old dressing-gown, and near it
on the floor lay the yellow scarf and the huge foot-bandages I had
thought so odd. As I hesitated, striving to conjecture where Akeley
might be, and why he had so suddenly discarded his necessary sick-room
garments, I observed that the queer odour and sense of vibration were
no longer in the room. What had been their cause? Curiously it occurred
to me that I had noticed them only in Akeley’s vicinity. They had been
strongest where he sat, and wholly absent except in the room with him
or just outside the doors of that room. I paused, letting the
flashlight wander about the dark study and racking my brain for
explanations of the turn affairs had taken.

Would to Heaven I had quietly left the place before allowing that
light to rest again on the vacant chair. As it turned out, I did not
leave quietly; but with a muffled shriek which must have disturbed,
though it did not quite awake, the sleeping sentinel across the hall.
That shriek, and Noyes’s still-unbroken snore, are the last sounds I
ever heard in that morbidity-choked farmhouse beneath the black-wooded
crest of haunted mountain--that focus of transcosmic horror amidst the
lonely green hills and curse-muttering brooks of a spectral rustic land.

It is a wonder that I did not drop flashlight, valise, and revolver
in my wild scramble, but somehow I failed to lose any of these. I
actually managed to get out of that room and that house without making
any further noise, to drag myself and my belongings safely into the old
Ford in the shed, and to set that archaic vehicle in motion toward some
unknown point of safety in the black, moonless night. The ride that
followed was a piece of delirium out of Poe or Rimbaud or the drawings
of Dore, but finally I reached Townshend. That is all. If my sanity is
still unshaken, I am lucky. Sometimes I fear what the years will bring,
especially since that new planet Pluto has been so curiously discovered.

As I have implied, I let my flashlight return to the vacant
easy-chair after its circuit of the room; then noticing for the first
time the presence of certain objects in the seat, made inconspicuous by
the adjacent loose folds of the empty dressing-gown. These are the
objects, three in number, which the investigators did not find when
they came later on. As I said at the outset, there was nothing of
actual visual horror about them. The trouble was in what they led one
to infer. Even now I have my moments of half-doubt--moments in which I
half-accept the scepticism of those who attribute my whole experience
to dream and nerves and delusion.

The three things were damnably clever constructions of their kind,
and were furnished with ingenious metallic clamps to attach them to
organic developments of which I dare not form any conjecture. I hope--
devoutly hope--that they were the waxen products of a master artist,
despite what my inmost fears tell me. Great God! That whisperer in
darkness with its morbid odour and vibrations! Sorcerer, emissary,
changeling, outsider...that hideous repressed buzzing...and all
the time in that fresh, shiny cylinder on the shelf...poor devil...
"Prodigious surgical, biological, chemical, and mechanical skill...

For the things in the chair, perfect to the last, subtle detail of
microscopic resemblance--or identity--were the face and hands of
Henry Wentworth Akeley.



* DREAMS IN THE WITCH-HOUSE


Whether the dreams brought on the fever or the fever brought on the
dreams Walter Gilman did not know. Behind everything crouched the
brooding, festering horror of the ancient town, and of the mouldy,
unhallowed garret gable where he wrote and studied and wrestled with
figures and formulae when he was not tossing on the meagre iron bed.
His ears were growing sensitive to a preternatural and intolerable
degree, and he had long ago stopped the cheap mantel clock whose
ticking had come to seem like a thunder of artillery. At night the
subtle stirring of the black city outside, the sinister scurrying of
rats in the wormy partitions, and the creaking of hidden timbers in the
centuried house, were enough to give him a sense of strident
pandemonium. The darkness always teemed with unexplained sound--and
yet he sometimes shook with fear lest the noises he heard should
subside and allow him to hear certain other fainter noises which he
suspected were lurking behind them.

He was in the changeless, legend-haunted city of Arkham, with its
clustering gambrel roofs that sway and sag over attics where witches
hid from the King's men in the dark, olden years of the Province. Nor
was any spot in that city more steeped in macabre memory than the gable
room which harboured him--for it was this house and this room which
had likewise harboured old Keziah Mason, whose flight from Salem Gaol
at the last no one was ever able to explain. That was in 1692--the
gaoler had gone mad and babbled of a small white-fanged furry thing
which scuttled out of Keziah's cell, and not even Cotton Mather could
explain the curves and angles smeared on the grey stone walls with some
red, sticky fluid.

Possibly Gilman ought not to have studied so hard. Non-Euclidean
calculus and quantum physics are enough to stretch any brain, and when
one mixes them with folklore, and tries to trace a strange background
of multi-dimensional reality behind the ghoulish hints of the Gothic
tales and the wild whispers of the chimney-corner, one can hardly
expect to be wholly free from mental tension. Gilman came from
Haverhill, but it was only after he had entered college in Arkham that
he began to connect his mathematics with the fantastic legends of elder
magic. Something in the air of the hoary town worked obscurely on his
imagination. The professors at Miskatonic had urged him to slacken up,
and had voluntarily cut down his course at several points. Moreover,
they had stopped him from consulting the dubious old books on forbidden
secrets that were kept under lock and key in a vault at the university
library. But all these precautions came late in the day, so that Gilman
had some terrible hints from the dreaded Necronomicon of Abdul
Alhazred, the fragmentary Book of Eibon, and the suppressed
Unaussprechlichen Kulten of von Junzt to correlate with his abstract
formulae on the properties of space and the linkage of dimensions known
and unknown.

He knew his room was in the old Witch-House--that, indeed, was why
he had taken it. There was much in the Essex County records about
Keziah Mason's trial, and what she had admitted under pressure to the
Court of Oyer and Terminer had fascinated Gilman beyond all reason. She
had told Judge Hathorne of lines and curves that could be made to point
out directions leading through the walls of space to other spaces
beyond, and had implied that such lines and curves were frequently used
at certain midnight meetings in the dark valley of the white stone
beyond Meadow Hill and on the unpeopled island in the river. She had
spoken also of the Black Man, of her oath, and of her new secret name
of Nahab. Then she had drawn those devices on the walls of her cell and
vanished.

Gilman believed strange things about Keziah, and had felt a queer
thrill on learning that her dwelling was still standing after more than
two hundred and thirty-five years. When he heard the hushed Arkham
whispers about Keziah's persistent presence in the old house and the
narrow streets, about the irregular human tooth-marks left on certain
sleepers in that and other houses, about the childish cries heard near
May-Eve, and Hallowmass, about the stench often noted in the old
house's attic just after those dreaded seasons, and about the small,
furry, sharp-toothed thing which haunted the mouldering structure and
the town and nuzzled people curiously in the black hours before dawn,
he resolved to live in the place at any cost. A room was easy to
secure, for the house was unpopular, hard to rent, and long given over
to cheap lodgings. Gilman could not have told what he expected to find
there, but he knew he wanted to be in the building where some
circumstance had more or less suddenly given a mediocre old woman of
the Seventeenth Century an insight into mathematical depths perhaps
beyond the utmost modern delvings of Planck, Heisenberg, Einstein, and
de Sitter.

He studied the timber and plaster walls for traces of cryptic
designs at every accessible spot where the paper had peeled, and within
a week managed to get the eastern attic room where Keziah was held to
have practised her spells. It had been vacant from the first--for no
one had ever been willing to stay there long--but the Polish landlord
had grown wary about renting it. Yet nothing whatever happened to
Gilman till about the time of the fever. No ghostly Keziah flitted
through the sombre halls and chambers, no small furry thing crept into
his dismal eyrie to nuzzle him, and no record of the witch's
incantations rewarded his constant search. Sometimes he would take
walks through shadowy tangles of unpaved musty-smelling lanes where
eldritch brown houses of unknown age leaned and tottered and leered
mockingly through narrow, small-paned windows. Here he knew strange
things had happened once, and there was a faint suggestion behind the
surface that everything of that monstrous past might not--at least in
the darkest, narrowest, and most intricately crooked alleys--have
utterly perished. He also rowed out twice to the ill-regarded island in
the river, and made a sketch of the singular angles described by the
moss-grown rows of grey standing stones whose origin was so obscure and
immemorial.

Gilman's room was of good size but queerly irregular shape; the
north wall slanting perceptibly inward from the outer to the inner end,
while the low ceiling slanted gently downward in the same direction.
Aside from an obvious rat-hole and the signs of other stopped-up ones,
there was no access--nor any appearance of a former avenue of access--
to the space which must have existed between the slanting wall and the
straight outer wall on the house's north side, though a view from the
exterior showed where a window had been boarded up at a very remote
date. The loft above the ceiling--which must have had a slanting floor
--was likewise inaccessible. When Gilman climbed up a ladder to the
cob-webbed level loft above the rest of the attic he found vestiges of
a bygone aperture tightly and heavily covered with ancient planking and
secured by the stout wooden pegs common in Colonial carpentry. No
amount of persuasion, however, could induce the stolid landlord to let
him investigate either of these two closed spaces.

As time wore along, his absorption in the irregular wall and ceiling
of his room increased; for he began to read into the odd angles a
mathematical significance which seemed to offer vague clues regarding
their purpose. Old Keziah, he reflected, might have had excellent
reasons for living in a room with peculiar angles; for was it not
through certain angles that she claimed to have gone outside the
boundaries of the world of space we know? His interest gradually veered
away from the unplumbed voids beyond the slanting surfaces, since it
now appeared that the purpose of those surfaces concerned the side he
was on.

The touch of brain-fever and the dreams began early in February. For
some time, apparently, the curious angles of Gilman's room had been
having a strange, almost hypnotic effect on him; and as the bleak
winter advanced he had found himself staring more and more intently at
the corner where the down-slanting ceiling met the inward-slanting
wall. About this period his inability to concentrate on his formal
studies worried him considerably, his apprehensions about the mid-year
examinations being very acute. But the exaggerated sense of hearing was
scarcely less annoying. Life had become an insistent and almost
unendurable cacophony, and there was that constant, terrifying
impression of other sounds--perhaps from regions beyond life--
trembling on the very brink of audibility. So far as concrete noises
went, the rats in the ancient partitions were the worst. Sometimes
their scratching seemed not only furtive but deliberate. When it came
from beyond the slanting north wall it was mixed with a sort of dry
rattling; and when it came from the century-closed loft above the
slanting ceiling Gilman always braced himself as if expecting some
horror which only bided its time before descending to engulf him
utterly.

The dreams were wholly beyond the pale of sanity, and Gilman felt
that they must be a result, jointly, of his studies in mathematics and
in folklore. He had been thinking too much about the vague regions
which his formulae told him must lie beyond the three dimensions we
know, and about the possibility that old Keziah Mason--guided by some
influence past all conjecture--had actually found the gate to those
regions. The yellowed country records containing her testimony and that
of her accusers were so damnably suggestive of things beyond human
experience--and the descriptions of the darting little furry object
which served as her familiar were so painfully realistic despite their
incredible details.

That object--no larger than a good-sized rat and quaintly called by
the townspeople "Brown Jenkin"--seemed to have been the fruit of a
remarkable case of sympathetic herd-delusion, for in 1692 no less than
eleven persons had testified to glimpsing it. There were recent
rumours, too, with a baffling and disconcerting amount of agreement.
Witnesses said it had long hair and the shape of a rat, but that its
sharp-toothed, bearded face was evilly human while its paws were like
tiny human hands. It took messages betwixt old Keziah and the devil,
and was nursed on the witch's blood, which it sucked like a vampire.
Its voice was a kind of loathsome titter, and it could speak all
languages. Of all the bizarre monstrosities in Gilman's dreams, nothing
filled him with greater panic and nausea than this blasphemous and
diminutive hybrid, whose image flitted across his vision in a form a
thousandfold more hateful than anything his waking mind had deduced
from the ancient records and the modern whispers.

Gilman's dreams consisted largely in plunges through limitless
abysses of inexplicably coloured twilight and bafflingly disordered
sound; abysses whose material and gravitational properties, and whose
relation to his own entity, he could not even begin to explain. He did
not walk or climb, fly or swim, crawl or wriggle; yet always
experienced a mode of motion partly voluntary and partly involuntary.
Of his own condition he could not well judge, for sight of his arms,
legs, and torso seemed always cut off by some odd disarrangement of
perspective; but he felt that his physical organization and faculties
were somehow marvellously transmuted and obliquely projected--though
not without a certain grotesque relationship to his normal proportions
and properties.

The abysses were by no means vacant, being crowded with
indescribably angled masses of alien-hued substance, some of which
appeared to be organic while others seemed inorganic. A few of the
organic objects tended to awake vague memories in the back of his mind,
though he could form no conscious idea of what they mockingly resembled
or suggested. In the later dreams he began to distinguish separate
categories into which the organic objects appeared to be divided, and
which seemed to involve in each case a radically different species of
conduct-pattern and basic motivation. Of these categories one seemed to
him to include objects slightly less illogical and irrelevant in their
motions than the members of the other categories.

All the objects--organic and inorganic alike--were totally beyond
description or even comprehension. Gilman sometimes compared the
inorganic matter to prisms, labyrinths, clusters of cubes and planes,
and Cyclopean buildings; and the organic things struck him variously as
groups of bubbles, octopi, centipedes, living Hindoo idols, and
intricate arabesques roused into a kind of ophidian animation.
Everything he saw was unspeakably menacing and horrible; and whenever
one of the organic entities appeared by its motions to be noticing him,
he felt a stark, hideous fright which generally jolted him awake. Of
how the organic entities moved, he could tell no more than of how he
moved himself. In time he observed a further mystery--the tendency of
certain entities to appear suddenly out of empty space, or to disappear
totally with equal suddenness. The shrieking, roaring confusion of
sound which permeated the abysses was past all analysis as to pitch,
timbre or rhythm; but seemed to be synchronous with vague visual
changes in all the indefinite objects, organic and inorganic alike.
Gilman had a constant sense of dread that it might rise to some
unbearable degree of intensity during one or another of its obscure,
relentlessly inevitable fluctuations.

But it was not in these vortices of complete alienage that he saw
Brown Jenkin. That shocking little horror was reserved for certain
lighter, sharper dreams which assailed him just before he dropped into
the fullest depths of sleep. He would be lying in the dark fighting to
keep awake when a faint lambent glow would seem to shimmer around the
centuried room, showing in a violet mist the convergence of angled
planes which had seized his brain so insidiously. The horror would
appear to pop out of the rat-hole in the corner and patter toward him
over the sagging, wide-planked floor with evil expectancy in its tiny,
bearded human face; but mercifully, this dream always melted away
before the object got close enough to nuzzle him. It had hellishly
long, sharp, canine teeth; Gilman tried to stop up the rat-hole every
day, but each night the real tenants of the partitions would gnaw away
the obstruction, whatever it might be. Once he had the landlord nail a
tin over it, but the next night the rats gnawed a fresh hole, in making
which they pushed or dragged out into the room a curious little
fragment of bone.

Gilman did not report his fever to the doctor, for he knew he could
not pass the examinations if ordered to the college infirmary when
every moment was needed for cramming. As it was, he failed in Calculus
D and Advanced General Psychology, though not without hope of making up
lost ground before the end of the term.

It was in March when the fresh element entered his lighter
preliminary dreaming, and the nightmare shape of Brown Jenkin began to
be companioned by the nebulous blur which grew more and more to
resemble a bent old woman. This addition disturbed him more than he
could account for, but finally he decided that it was like an ancient
crone whom he had twice actually encountered in the dark tangle of
lanes near the abandoned wharves. On those occasions the evil,
sardonic, and seemingly unmotivated stare of the beldame had set him
almost shivering--especially the first time when an overgrown rat
darting across the shadowed mouth of a neighbouring alley had made him
think irrationally of Brown Jenkin. Now, he reflected, those nervous
fears were being mirrored in his disordered dreams. That the influence
of the old house was unwholesome he could not deny, but traces of his
early morbid interest still held him there. He argued that the fever
alone was responsible for his nightly fantasies, and that when the
touch abated he would be free from the monstrous visions. Those
visions, however, were of absorbing vividness and convincingness, and
whenever he awaked he retained a vague sense of having undergone much
more than he remembered. He was hideously sure that in unrecalled
dreams he had talked with both Brown Jenkin and the old woman, and that
they had been urging him to go somewhere with them and to meet a third
being of greater potency.

Toward the end of March he began to pick up in his mathematics,
though the other studies bothered him increasingly. He was getting an
intuitive knack for solving Riemannian equations, and astonished
Professor Upham by his comprehension of fourth-dimensional and other
problems which had floored all the rest of the class. One afternoon
there was a discussion of possible freakish curvatures in space, and of
theoretical points of approach or even contact between our part of the
cosmos and various other regions as distant as the farthest stars or
the transgalactic gulfs themselves--or even as fabulously remote as
the tentatively conceivable cosmic units beyond the whole Einsteinian
space-time continuum. Gilman's handling of this theme filled everyone
with admiration, even though some of his hypothetical illustrations
caused an increase in the always plentiful gossip about his nervous and
solitary eccentricity. What made the students shake their heads was his
sober theory that a man might--given mathematical knowledge admittedly
beyond all likelihood of human acquirement--step deliberately from the
earth to any other celestial body which might lie at one of an infinity
of specific points in the cosmic pattern.

Such a step, he said, would require only two stages; first, a
passage out of the three-dimensional sphere we know, and second, a
passage back to the three-dimensional sphere at another point, perhaps
one of infinite remoteness. That this could be accomplished without
loss of life was in many cases conceivable. Any being from any part of
three-dimensional space could probably survive in the fourth dimension;
and its survival of the second stage would depend upon what alien part
of three-dimensional space it might select for its re-entry. Denizens
of some planets might be able to live on certain others--even planets
belonging to other galaxies, or to similar dimensional phases of other
space-time continua--though of course there must be vast numbers of
mutually uninhabitable even though mathematically juxtaposed bodies or
zones of space.

It was also possible that the inhabitants of a given dimensional
realm could survive entry to many unknown and incomprehensible realms
of additional or indefinitely multiplied dimensions--be they within or
outside the given space-time continuum--and that the converse would be
likewise true. This was a matter for speculation, though one could be
fairly certain that the type of mutation involved in a passage from any
given dimensional plane to the next higher one would not be destructive
of biological integrity as we understand it. Gilman could not be very
clear about his reasons for this last assumption, but his haziness here
was more than overbalanced by his clearness on other complex points.
Professor Upham especially liked his demonstration of the kinship of
higher mathematics to certain phases of magical lore transmitted down
the ages from an ineffable antiquity--human or pre-human--whose
knowledge of the cosmos and its laws was greater than ours.

Around 1 April Gilman worried considerably because his slow fever did
not abate. He was also troubled by what some of his fellow lodgers said
about his sleep-walking. It seemed that he was often absent from his
bed and that the creaking of his floor at certain hours of the night
was remarked by the man in the room below. This fellow also spoke of
hearing the tread of shod feet in the night; but Gilman was sure he
must have been mistaken in this, since shoes as well as other apparel
were always precisely in place in the morning. One could develop all
sorts of aural delusions in this morbid old house--for did not Gilman
himself, even in daylight, now feel certain that noises other than
rat-scratching came from the black voids beyond the slanting wall and
above the slanting ceiling? His pathologically sensitive ears began to
listen for faint footfalls in the immemorially sealed loft overhead,
and sometimes the illusion of such things was agonizingly realistic.

However, he knew that he had actually become a somnambulist; for
twice at night his room had been found vacant, though with all his
clothing in place. Of this he had been assured by Frank Elwood, the one
fellow-student whose poverty forced him to room in this squalid and
unpopular house. Elwood had been studying in the small hours and had
come up for help on a differential equation, only to find Gilman
absent. It had been rather presumptuous of him to open the unlocked
door after knocking had failed to rouse a response, but he had needed
the help very badly and thought that his host would not mind a gentle
prodding awake. On neither occasion, though, had Gilman been there; and
when told of the matter he wondered where he could have been wandering,
barefoot and with only his night clothes on. He resolved to investigate
the matter if reports of his sleep-walking continued, and thought of
sprinkling flour on the floor of the corridor to see where his
footsteps might lead. The door was the only conceivable egress, for
there was no possible foothold outside the narrow window.

As April advanced, Gilman's fever-sharpened ears were disturbed by
the whining prayers of a superstitious loom-fixer named Joe Mazurewicz
who had a room on the ground floor. Mazurewicz had told long, rambling
stories about the ghost of old Keziah and the furry sharp-fanged,
nuzzling thing, and had said he was so badly haunted at times that only
his silver crucifix--given him for the purpose by Father Iwanicki of
St. Stanislaus' Church--could bring him relief. Now he was praying
because the Witches' Sabbath was drawing near. May Eve was Walpurgis
Night, when hell's blackest evil roamed the earth and all the slaves of
Satan gathered for nameless rites and deeds. It was always a very bad
time in Arkham, even though the fine folks up in Miskatonic Avenue and
High and Saltonstall Streets pretended to know nothing about it. There
would be bad doings, and a child or two would probably be missing. Joe
knew about such things, for his grandmother in the old country had
heard tales from her grandmother. It was wise to pray and count one's
beads at this season. For three months Keziah and Brown Jenkin had not
been near Joe's room, nor near Paul Choynski's room, nor anywhere else
--and it meant no good when they held off like that. They must be up to
something.

Gilman dropped in at the doctor's office on the sixteenth of the
month, and was surprised to find his temperature was not as high as he
had feared. The physician questioned him sharply, and advised him to
see a nerve specialist. On reflection, he was glad he had not consulted
the still more inquisitive college doctor. Old Waldron, who had
curtailed his activities before, would have made him take a rest--an
impossible thing now that he was so close to great results in his
equations. He was certainly near the boundary between the known
universe and the fourth dimension, and who could say how much farther
he might go?

But even as these thoughts came to him he wondered at the source of
his strange confidence. Did all of this perilous sense of immininence
come from the formulae on the sheets he covered day by day? The soft,
stealthy, imaginary footsteps in the sealed loft above were unnerving.
And now, too, there was a growing feeling that somebody was constantly
persuading him to do something terrible which he could not do. How
about the somnambulism? Where did he go sometimes in the night? And
what was that faint suggestion of sound which once in a while seemed to
trickle through the confusion of identifiable sounds even in broad
daylight and full wakefulness? Its rhythm did not correspond to
anything on earth, unless perhaps to the cadence of one or two
unmentionable Sabbat-chants, and sometimes he feared it corresponded to
certain attributes of the vague shrieking or roaring in those wholly
alien abysses of dream.

The dreams were meanwhile getting to be atrocious. In the lighter
preliminary phase the evil old woman was now of fiendish distinctness,
and Gilman knew she was the one who had frightened him in the slums.
Her bent back, long nose, and shrivelled chin were unmistakable, and
her shapeless brown garments were like those he remembered. The
expression on her face was one of hideous malevolence and exultation,
and when he awaked he could recall a croaking voice that persuaded and
threatened. He must meet the Black Man and go with them all to the
throne of Azathoth at the centre of ultimate chaos. That was what she
said. He must sign the book of Azathoth in his own blood and take a new
secret name now that his independent delvings had gone so far. What
kept him from going with her and Brown Jenkin and the other to the
throne of Chaos where the thin flutes pipe mindlessly was the fact that
he had seen the name "Azathoth" in the Necronomicon, and knew it stood
for a primal evil too horrible for description.

The old woman always appeared out of thin air near the corner where
the downward slant met the inward slant. She seemed to crystallize at a
point closer to the ceiling than to the floor, and every night she was
a little nearer and more distinct before the dream shifted. Brown
Jenkin, too was always a little nearer at the last, and its
yellowish-white fangs glistened shockingly in that unearthly violet
phosphorescence. Its shrill loathsome tittering struck more and more
into Gilman's head, and he could remember in the morning how it had
pronounced the words "Azathoth" and "Nyarlathotep".

In the deeper dreams everything was likewise more distinct, and
Gilman felt that the twilight abysses around him were those of the
fourth dimension. Those organic entities whose motions seemed least
flagrantly irrelevant and unmotivated were probably projections of
life-forms from our own planet, including human beings. What the others
were in their own dimensional sphere or spheres he dared not try to
think. Two of the less irrelevantly moving things--a rather large
congeries of iridescent, prolately spheroidal bubbles and a very much
smaller polyhedron of unknown colours and rapidly shifting surface
angles--seemed to take notice of him and follow him about or float
ahead as he changed position among the titan prisms, labyrinths,
cube-and-plane clusters and quasi-buildings; and all the while the
vague shrieking and roaring waxed louder and louder, as if approaching
some monstrous climax of utterly unendurable intensity.

During the night of 19-20 April the new development occurred. Gilman
was half involuntarily moving about in the twilight abysses with the
bubble-mass and the small polyhedron floating ahead when he noticed the
peculiarly regular angles formed by the edges of some gigantic
neighbouring prism-clusters. In another second he was out of the abyss
and standing tremulously on a rocky hillside bathed in intense,
diffused green light. He was barefooted and in his nightclothes. and
when he tried to walk discovered that he could scarcely lift his feet.
A swirling vapour hid everything but the immediate sloping terrain from
sight, and he shrank from the thought of the sounds, that might surge
out of that vapour.

Then he saw the two shapes laboriously crawling toward him--the old
woman and the little furry thing. The crone strained up to her knees
and managed to cross her arms in a singular fashion, while Brown Jenkin
pointed in a certain direction with a horribly anthropoid forepaw which
it raised with evident difficulty. Spurred by an impulse he did not
originate, Gilman dragged himself forward along a course determined by
the angle of the old woman's arms and the direction of the small
monstrosity's paw, and before he had shuffled three steps he was back
in the twilight abysses. Geometrical shapes seethed around him, and he
fell dizzily and interminably. At last he woke in his bed in the
crazily angled garret of the eldritch old house.

He was good for nothing that morning, and stayed away from all his
classes. Some unknown attraction was pulling his eyes in a seemingly
irrelevant direction, for he could not help staring at a certain vacant
spot on the floor. As the day advanced, the focus of his unseeing eyes
changed position, and by noon he had conquered the impulse to stare at
vacancy. About two o'clock he went out for lunch and as he threaded the
narrow lanes of the city he found himself turning always to the
southeast. Only an effort halted him at a cafeteria in Church Street,
and after the meal he felt the unknown pull still more strongly.

He would have to consult a nerve specialist after all--perhaps
there was a connection with his somnambulism--but meanwhile he might
at least try to break the morbid spell himself. Undoubtedly he could
still manage to walk away from the pull, so with great resolution he
headed against it and dragged himself deliberately north along Garrison
Street. By the time he had reached the bridge over the Miskatonic he
was in a cold perspiration, and he clutched at the iron railing as he
gazed upstream at the ill-regarded island whose regular lines of
ancient standing stones brooded sullenly in the afternoon sunlight.

Then he gave a start. For there was a clearly visible living figure
on that desolate island, and a second glance told him it was certainly
the strange old woman whose sinister aspect had worked itself so
disastrously into his dreams. The tall grass near her was moving, too,
as if some other living thing were crawling close to the ground. When
the old woman began to turn toward him he fled precipitately off the
bridge and into the shelter of the town's labyrinthine waterfront
alleys. Distant though the island was, he felt that a monstrous and
invincible evil could flow from the sardonic stare of that bent,
ancient figure in brown.

The southeastwards pull still held, and only with tremendous
resolution could Gilman drag himself into the old house and up the
rickety stairs. For hours he sat silent and aimless, with his eyes
shifting gradually westward. About six o'clock his sharpened ears
caught the whining prayers of Joe Mazurewicz two floors below, and in
desperation he seized his hat and walked out into the sunset-golden
streets, letting the now directly southward pull carry him where it
might. An hour later darkness found him in the open fields beyond
Hangman's Brook, with the glimmering spring stars shining ahead. The
urge to walk was gradually changing to an urge to leap mystically into
space, and suddenly he realized just where the source of the pull lay.

It was in the sky. A definite point among the stars had a claim on
him and was calling him. Apparently it was a point somewhere between
Hydra and Argo Navis, and he knew that he had been urged toward it ever
since he had awaked soon after dawn. In the morning it had been
underfoot, and now it was roughly south but stealing toward the west.
What was the meaning of this new thing? Was he going mad? How long
would it last? Again mustering his resolution, Gilman turned and
dragged himself back to the sinister old house.

Mazurewicz was waiting for him at the door, and seemed both anxious
and reluctant to whisper some fresh bit of superstition. It was about
the witch-light. Joe had been out celebrating the night before--and it
was Patriots' Day in Massachusetts--and had come home after midnight.
Looking up at the house from outside, he had thought at first that
Gilman's window was dark, but then he had seen the faint violet glow
within. He wanted to warn the gentleman about that glow, for everybody
in Arkham knew it was Keziah's witch-light which played near Brown
Jenkin and the ghost of the old crone herself. He had not mentioned
this before, but now he must tell about it because it meant that Keziah
and her long-toothed familiar were haunting the young gentleman.
Sometimes he and Paul Choynski and Landlord Dombrowski thought they saw
that light seeping out of cracks in the sealed loft above the young
gentleman's room, but they had all agreed not to talk about that.
However, it would be better for the gentleman to take another room and
get a crucifix from some good priest like Father Iwanicki.

As the man rambled on, Gilman felt a nameless panic clutch at his
throat. He knew that Joe must have been half drunk when he came home
the night before; yet the mention of a violet light in the garret
window was of frightful import. It was a lambent glow of this sort
which always played about the old woman and the small furry thing in
those lighter, sharper dreams which prefaced his plunge into unknown
abysses, and the thought that a wakeful second person could see the
dream-luminance was utterly beyond sane harborage. Yet where had the
fellow got such an odd notion? Had he himself talked as well as walked
around the house in his sleep? No, Joe said, he had not--but he must
check up on this. Perhaps Frank Elwood could tell him something, though
he hated to ask.

Fever--wild dreams--somnambulism--illusions of sounds--a pull
toward a point in the sky--and now a suspicion of insane
sleep-talking! He must stop studying, see a nerve specialist, and take
himself in hand. When he climbed to the second storey he paused at
Elwood's door but saw that the other youth was out. Reluctantly he
continued up to his garret room and sat down in the dark. His gaze was
still pulled to the southward, but he also found himself listening
intently for some sound in the closed loft above, and half imagining
that an evil violet light seeped down through an infinitesimal crack in
the low, slanting ceiling.

That night as Gilman slept, the violet light broke upon him with
heightened intensity, and the old witch and small furry thing, getting
closer than ever before, mocked him with inhuman squeals and devilish
gestures. He was glad to sink into the vaguely roaring twilight
abysses, though the pursuit of that iridescent bubble-congeries and
that kaleidoscopic little polyhedron was menacing and irritating. Then
came the shift as vast converging planes of a slippery-looking
substance loomed above and below him--a shift which ended in a flash
of delirium and a blaze of unknown, alien light in which yellow,
carmine, and indigo were madly and inextricably blended.

He was half lying on a high, fantastically balustraded terrace above
a boundless jungle of outlandish, incredible peaks, balanced planes,
domes, minarets, horizontal disks poised on pinnacles, and numberless
forms of still greater wildness--some of stone and some of metal--
which glittered gorgeously in the mixed, almost blistering glare from a
poly-chromatic sky. Looking upward he saw three stupendous disks of
flame, each of a different hue, and at a different height above an
infinitely distant curving horizon of low mountains. Behind him tiers
of higher terraces towered aloft as far as he could see. The city below
stretched away to the limits of vision, and he hoped that no sound
would well up from it.

The pavement from which he easily raised himself was a veined
polished stone beyond his power to identify, and the tiles were cut in
bizarre-angled shapes which struck him as less asymmetrical than based
on some unearthly symmetry whose laws he could not comprehend. The
balustrade was chest-high, delicate, and fantastically wrought, while
along the rail were ranged at short intervals little figures of
grotesque design and exquisite workmanship. They, like the whole
balustrade, seemed to be made of some sort of shining metal whose
colour could not be guessed in the chaos of mixed effulgences, and
their nature utterly defied conjecture. They represented some ridged
barrel-shaped objects with thin horizontal arms radiating spoke-like
from a central ring and with vertical knobs or bulbs projecting from
the head and base of the barrel. Each of these knobs was the hub of a
system of five long, flat, triangularly tapering arms arranged around
it like the arms of a starfish--nearly horizontal, but curving
slightly away from the central barrel. The base of the bottom knob was
fused to the long railing with so delicate a point of contact that
several figures had been broken off and were missing. The figures were
about four and a half inches in height, while the spiky arms gave them
a maximum diameter of about two and a half inches.

When Gilman stood up, the tiles felt hot to his bare feet. He was
wholly alone, and his first act was to walk to the balustrade and look
dizzily down at the endless, Cyclopean city almost two thousand feet
below. As he listened he thought a rhythmic confusion of faint musical
pipings covering a wide tonal range welled up from the narrow streets
beneath, and he wished he might discern the denizens of the place. The
sight turned him giddy after a while, so that he would have fallen to
the pavement had he not clutched instinctively at the lustrous
balustrade. His right hand fell on one of the projecting figures, the
touch seeming to steady him slightly. It was too much, however, for the
exotic delicacy of the metal-work, and the spiky figure snapped off
under his grasp. Still half dazed, he continued to clutch it as his
other hand seized a vacant space on the smooth railing.

But now his over-sensitive ears caught something behind him, and he
looked back across the level terrace. Approaching him softly though
without apparent furtiveness were five figures, two of which were the
sinister old woman and the fanged, furry little animal. The other three
were what sent him unconscious; for they were living entities about
eight feet high, shaped precisely like the spiky images on the
balustrade, and propelling themselves by a spider-like wriggling of
their lower set of starfish-arms.

Gilman awoke in his bed, drenched by a cold perspiration and with a
smarting sensation in his face, hands and feet. Springing to the floor,
he washed and dressed in frantic haste, as if it were necessary for him
to get out of the house as quickly as possible. He did not know where
he wished to go, but felt that once more he would have to sacrifice his
classes. The odd pull toward that spot in the sky between Hydra and
Argo had abated, but another of even greater strength had taken its
place. Now he felt that he must go north--infinitely north. He dreaded
to cross the bridge that gave a view of the desolate island in the
Miskatonic, so went over the Peabody Avenue bridge. Very often he
stumbled, for his eyes and ears were chained to an extremely lofty
point in the blank blue sky.

After about an hour he got himself under better control, and saw
that he was far from the city. All around him stretched the bleak
emptiness of salt marshes, while the narrow road ahead led to Innsmouth
--that ancient, half-deserted town which Arkham people were so
curiously unwilling to visit. Though the northward pull had not
diminished, he resisted it as he had resisted the other pull, and
finally found that he could almost balance the one against the other.
Plodding back to town and getting some coffee at a soda fountain, he
dragged himself into the public library and browsed aimlessly among the
lighter magazines. Once he met some friends who remarked how oddly
sunburned he looked, but he did not tell them of his walk. At three
o'clock he took some lunch at a restaurant, noting meanwhile that the
pull had either lessened or divided itself. After that he killed the
time at a cheap cinema show, seeing the inane performance over and over
again without paying any attention to it.

About nine at night he drifted homeward and shuffled into the
ancient house. Joe Mazurewicz was whining unintelligible prayers, and
Gilman hastened up to his own garret chamber without pausing to see if
Elwood was in. It was when he turned on the feeble electric light that
the shock came. At once he saw there was something on the table which
did not belong there, and a second look left no room for doubt. Lying
on its side--for it could not stand up alone--was the exotic spiky
figure which in his monstrous dream he had broken off the fantastic
balustrade. No detail was missing. The ridged, barrel-shaped center,
the thin radiating arms, the knobs at each end, and the flat, slightly
outward-curving starfish-arms spreading from those knobs--all were
there. In the electric light the colour seemed to be a kind of
iridescent grey veined with green; and Gilman could see amidst his
horror and bewilderment that one of the knobs ended in a jagged break,
corresponding to its former point of attachment to the dream-railing.

Only his tendency toward a dazed stupor prevented him from screaming
aloud. This fusion of dream and reality was too much to bear. Still
dazed, he clutched at the spiky thing and staggered downstairs to
Landlord Dombrowski's quarters. The whining prayers of the
superstitious loom-fixer were still sounding through the mouldy halls,
but Gilman did not mind them now. The landlord was in, and greeted him
pleasantly. No, he had not seen that thing before and did not know
anything about it. But his wife had said she found a funny tin thing in
one of the beds when she fixed the rooms at noon, and maybe that was
it. Dombrowski called her, and she waddled in. Yes, that was the thing.
She had found it in the young gentleman's bed--on the side next the
wall. It had looked very queer to her, but of course the young
gentleman had lots of queer things in his room--books and curios and
pictures and markings on paper. She certainly knew nothing about it.

So Gilman climbed upstairs again in mental turmoil, convinced that
he was either still dreaming or that his somnambulism had run to
incredible extremes and led him to depredations in unknown places.
Where had he got this outré thing? He did not recall seeing it in any
museum in Arkham. It must have been somewhere, though; and the sight of
it as he snatched it in his sleep must have caused the odd
dream-picture of the balustraded terrace. Next day he would make some
very guarded inquiries--and perhaps see the nerve specialist.

Meanwhile he would try to keep track of his somnambulism. As he went
upstairs and across the garret hall he sprinkled about some flour which
he had borrowed--with a frank admission as to its purpose--from the
landlord. He had stopped at Elwood's door on the way, but had found all
dark within. Entering his room, he placed the spiky thing on the table,
and lay down in complete mental and physical exhaustion without pausing
to undress. From the closed loft above the slanting ceiling he thought
he heard a faint scratching and padding, but he was too disorganized
even to mind it. That cryptical pull from the north was getting very
strong again, though it seemed now to come from a lower place in the
sky.

In the dazzling violet light of dream the old woman and the fanged,
furry thing came again and with a greater distinctness than on any
former occasion. This time they actually reached him, and he felt the
crone's withered claws clutching at him. He was pulled out of bed and
into empty space, and for a moment he heard a rhythmic roaring and saw
the twilight amorphousness of the vague abysses seething around him.
But that moment was very brief, for presently he was in a crude,
windowless little space with rough beams and planks rising to a peak
just above his head, and with a curious slanting floor underfoot.
Propped level on that floor were low cases full of books of every
degree of antiquity and disintegration, and in the centre were a table
and bench, both apparently fastened in place. Small objects of unknown
shape and nature were ranged on the tops of the cases, and in the
flaming violet light Gilman thought he saw a counterpart of the spiky
image which had puzzled him so horribly. On the left the floor fell
abruptly away, leaving a black triangular gulf out of which, after a
second's dry rattling, there presently climbed the hateful little furry
thing with the yellow fangs and bearded human face.

The evilly-grinning beldame still clutched him, and beyond the table
stood a figure he had never seen before--a tall, lean man of dead
black colouration but without the slightest sign of negroid features:
wholly devoid of either hair or beard, and wearing as his only garment
a shapeless robe of some heavy black fabric. His feet were
indistinguishable because of the table and bench, but he must have been
shod, since there was a clicking whenever he changed position. The man
did not speak, and bore no trace of expression on his small, regular
features. He merely pointed to a book of prodigious size which lay open
on the table, while the beldame thrust a huge grey quill into Gilman's
right hand. Over everything was a pall of intensely maddening fear, and
the climax was reached when the furry thing ran up the dreamer's
clothing to his shoulders and then down his left arm, finally biting
him sharply in the wrist just below his cuff. As the blood spurted from
this wound Gilman lapsed into a faint.

He awaked on the morning of the twenty-second with a pain in his
left wrist, and saw that his cuff was brown with dried blood. His
recollections were very confused, but the scene with the black man in
the unknown space stood out vividly. The rats must have bitten him as
he slept, giving rise to the climax of that frightful dream. Opening
the door, he saw that the flour on the corridor floor was undisturbed
except for the huge prints of the loutish fellow who roomed at the
other end of the garret. So he had not been sleep-walking this time.
But something would have to be done about those rats. He would speak to
the landlord about them. Again he tried to stop up the hole at the base
of the slanting wall, wedging in a candlestick which seemed of about
the right size. His ears were ringing horribly, as if with the residual
echoes of some horrible noise heard in dreams.

As he bathed and changed clothes he tried to recall what he had
dreamed after the scene in the violet-litten space, but nothing
definite would crystallize in his mind. That scene itself must have
corresponded to the sealed loft overhead, which had begun to attack his
imagination so violently, but later impressions were faint and hazy.
There were suggestions of the vague, twilight abysses, and of still
vaster, blacker abysses beyond them--abysses in which all fixed
suggestions were absent. He had been taken there by the
bubble-congeries and the little polyhedron which always dogged him; but
they, like himself, had changed to wisps of mist in this farther void
of ultimate blackness. Something else had gone on ahead--a larger wisp
which now and then condensed into nameless approximations of form--and
he thought that their progress had not been in a straight line, but
rather along the alien curves and spirals of some ethereal vortex which
obeyed laws unknown to the physics and mathematics of any conceivable
cosmos. Eventually there had been a hint of vast, leaping shadows, of a
monstrous, half-acoustic pulsing, and of the thin, monotonous piping of
an unseen flute--but that was all. Gilman decided he had picked up
that last conception from what he had read in the Necronomicon about
the mindless entity Azathoth, which rules all time and space from a
black throne at the centre of Chaos.

When the blood was washed away the wrist wound proved very slight,
and Gilman puzzled over the location of the two tiny punctures. It
occurred to him that there was no blood on the bedspread where he had
lain--which was very curious in view of the amount on his skin and
cuff. Had he been sleep-walking within his room, and had the rat bitten
him as he sat in some chair or paused in some less rational position?
He looked in every corner for brownish drops or stains, but did not
find any. He had better, he thought, sprinkle flour within the room as
well as outside the door--though after all no further proof of his
sleep-walking was needed. He knew he did walk and the thing to do now
was to stop it. He must ask Frank Elwood for help. This morning the
strange pulls from space seemed lessened, though they were replaced by
another sensation even more inexplicable. It was a vague, insistent
impulse to fly away from his present situation, but held not a hint of
the specific direction in which he wished to fly. As he picked up the
strange spiky image on the table he thought the older northward pull
grew a trifle stronger; but even so, it was wholly overruled by the
newer and more bewildering urge.

He took the spiky image down to Elwood's room, steeling himself
against the whines of the loom-fixer which welled up from the ground
floor. Elwood was in, thank heaven, and appeared to be stirring about.
There was time for a little conversation before leaving for breakfast
and college, so Gilman hurriedly poured forth an account of his recent
dreams and fears. His host was very sympathetic, and agreed that
something ought to be done. He was shocked by his guest's drawn,
haggard aspect, and noticed the queer, abnormal-looking sunburn which
others had remarked during the past week.

There was not much, though, that he could say. He had not seen
Gilman on any sleep-walking expedition, and had no idea what the
curious image could be. He had, though, heard the French-Canadian who
lodged just under Gilman talking to Mazurewicz one evening. They were
telling each other how badly they dreaded the coming of Walpurgis
Night, now only a few days off; and were exchanging pitying comments
about the poor, doomed young gentleman. Desrochers, the fellow under
Gilman's room, had spoken of nocturnal footsteps shod and unshod, and
of the violet light he saw one night when he had stolen fearfully up to
peer through Gilman's keyhole. He had not dared to peer, he told
Mazurewicz, after he had glimpsed that light through the cracks around
the door. There had been soft talking, too--and as he began to
describe it his voice had sunk to an inaudible whisper.

Elwood could not imagine what had set these superstitious creatures
gossiping, but supposed their imaginations had been roused by Gilman's
late hours and somnolent walking and talking on the one hand, and by
the nearness of traditionally-feared May Eve on the other hand. That
Gilman talked in his sleep was plain, and it was obviously from
Desrochers' keyhole listenings that the delusive notion of the violet
dream-light had got abroad. These simple people were quick to imagine
they had seen any odd thing they had heard about. As for a plan of
action--Gilman had better move down to Elwood's room and avoid
sleeping alone. Elwood would, if awake, rouse him whenever he began to
talk or rise in his sleep. Very soon, too, he must see the specialist.
Meanwhile they would take the spiky image around to the various museums
and to certain professors; seeking identification and stating that it
had been found in a public rubbish-can. Also, Dombrowski must attend to
the poisoning of those rats in the walls.

Braced up by Elwood's companionship, Gilman attended classes that
day. Strange urges still tugged at him, but he could sidetrack them
with considerable success. During a free period he showed the queer
image to several professors, all of whom were intensely interested,
though none of them could shed any light upon its nature or origin.
That night he slept on a couch which Elwood had had the landlord bring
to the second-storey room, and for the first time in weeks was wholly
free from disquieting dreams. But the feverishness still hung on, and
the whines of the loom-fixer were an unnerving influence.

During the next few days Gilman enjoyed an almost perfect immunity
from morbid manifestations. He had, Elwood said, showed no tendency to
talk or rise in his sleep; and meanwhile the landlord was putting
rat-poison everywhere. The only disturbing element was the talk among
the superstitious foreigners, whose imaginations had become highly
excited. Mazurewicz was always trying to make him get a crucifix, and
finally forced one upon him which he said had been blessed by the good
Father Iwanicki. Desrochers, too, had something to say; in fact, he
insisted that cautious steps had sounded in the now vacant room above
him on the first and second nights of Gilinan's absence from it. Paul
Choynski thought he heard sounds in the halls and on the stairs at
night, and claimed that his door had been softly tried, while Mrs.
Dombrowski vowed she had seen Brown Jenkin for the first time since
All-Hallows. But such naïve reports could mean very little, and Gilman
let the cheap metal crucifix hang idly from a knob on his host's
dresser.

For three days Gilman and Elwood canvassed the local museums in an
effort to identify the strange spiky image, but always without success.
In every quarter, however, interest was intense; for the utter alienage
of the thing was a tremendous challenge to scientific curiosity. One of
the small radiating arms was broken off and subjected to chemical
analysis. Professor Ellery found platinum, iron and tellurium in the
strange alloy; but mixed with these were at least three other apparent
elements of high atomic weight which chemistry was absolutely powerless
to classify. Not only did they fail to correspond with any known
element, but they did not even fit the vacant places reserved for
probable elements in the periodic system. The mystery remains unsolved
to this day, though the image is on exhibition at the museum of
Miskatonic University.

On the morning of April twenty-seventh a fresh rat-hole appeared in
the room where Gilman was a guest, but Dombrowski tinned it up during
the day. The poison was not having much effect, for scratchings and
scurryings in the walls were virtually undiminished.

Elwood was out late that night, and Gilman waited up for him. He did
not wish to go to sleep in a room alone--especially since he thought
he had glimpsed in the evening twilight the repellent old woman whose
image had become so horribly transferred to his dreams. He wondered who
she was, and what had been near her rattling the tin can in a
rubbish-heap at the mouth of a squalid courtyard. The crone had seemed
to notice him and leer evilly at him--though perhaps this was merely
his imagination.

The next day both youths felt very tired, and knew they would sleep
like logs when night came. In the evening they drowsily discussed the
mathematical studies which had so completely and perhaps harmfully
engrossed Gilman, and speculated about the linkage with ancient magic
and folklore which seemed so darkly probable. They spoke of old Keziah
Mason, and Elwood agreed that Gilman had good scientific grounds for
thinking she might have stumbled on strange and significant
information. The hidden cults to which these witches belonged often
guarded and handed down surprising secrets from elder, forgotten eons;
and it was by no means impossible that Keziah had actually mastered the
art of passing through dimensional gates. Tradition emphasizes the
uselessness of material barriers in halting a witch's notions, and who
can say what underlies the old tales of broomstick rides through the
night?

Whether a modern student could ever gain similar powers from
mathematical research alone, was still to be seen. Success, Gilman
added, might lead to dangerous and unthinkable situations, for who
could foretell the conditions pervading an adjacent but normally
inaccessible dimension? On the other hand, the picturesque
possibilities were enormous. Time could not exist in certain belts of
space, and by entering and remaining in such a belt one might preserve
one's life and age indefinitely; never suffering organic metabolism or
deterioration except for slight amounts incurred during visits to one's
own or similar planes. One might, for example, pass into a timeless
dimension and emerge at some remote period of the earth's history as
young as before.

Whether anybody had ever managed to do this, one could hardly
conjecture with any degree of authority. Old legends are hazy and
ambiguous, and in historic times all attempts at crossing forbidden
gaps seem complicated by strange and terrible alliances with beings and
messengers from outside. There was the immemorial figure of the deputy
or messenger of hidden and terrible powers--the "Black Man" of the
witch-cult, and the "Nyarlathotep" of the Necronomicon. There was, too,
the baffling problem of the lesser messengers or intermediaries--the
quasi-animals and queer hybrids which legend depicts as witches'
familiars. As Gilman and Elwood retired, too sleepy to argue further,
they heard Joe Mazurewicz reel into the house half drunk, and shuddered
at the desperate wildness of his whining prayers.

That night Gilman saw the violet light again. In his dream he had
heard a scratching and gnawing in the partitions, and thought that
someone fumbled clumsily at the latch. Then he saw the old woman and
the small furry thing advancing toward him over the carpeted floor. The
beldame's face was alight with inhuman exultation, and the little
yellow-toothed morbidity tittered mockingly as it pointed at the
heavily-sleeping form of Elwood on the other couch across the room. A
paralysis of fear stifled all attempts to cry out. As once before, the
hideous crone seized Gilman by the shoulders, yanking him out of bed
and into empty space. Again the infinitude of the shrieking abysses
flashed past him, but in another second he thought he was in a dark,
muddy, unknown alley of foetid odors with the rotting walls of ancient
houses towering up on every hand.

Ahead was the robed black man he had seen in the peaked space in the
other dream, while from a lesser distance the old woman was beckoning
and grimacing imperiously. Brown Jenkin was rubbing itself with a kind
of affectionate playfulness around the ankles of the black man, which
the deep mud largely concealed. There was a dark open doorway on the
right, to which the black man silently pointed. Into this the grinning
crone started, dragging Gilman after her by his pajama sleeves. There
were evil-smelling staircases which creaked ominously, and on which the
old woman seemed to radiate a faint violet light; and finally a door
leading off a landing. The crone fumbled with the latch and pushed the
door open, motioning to Gilman to wait, and disappearing inside the
black aperture.

The youth's over-sensitive ears caught a hideous strangled cry, and
presently the beldame came out of the room bearing a small, senseless
form which she thrust at the dreamer as if ordering him to carry it.
The sight of this form, and the expression on its face, broke the
spell. Still too dazed to cry out, he plunged recklessly down the
noisome staircase and into the mud outside, halting only when seized
and choked by the waiting black man. As consciousness departed he heard
the faint, shrill tittering of the fanged, rat-like abnormality.

On the morning of the twenty-ninth Gilman awaked into a maelstrom of
horror. The instant he opened his eyes he knew something was terribly
wrong, for he was back in his old garret room with the slanting wall
and ceiling, sprawled on the now unmade bed. His throat was aching
inexplicably, and as he struggled to a sitting posture he saw with
growing fright that his feet and pajama bottoms were brown with caked
mud. For the moment his recollections were hopelessly hazy, but he knew
at least that he must have been sleep-walking. Elwood had been lost too
deeply in slumber to hear and stop him. On the floor were confused
muddy prints, but oddly enough they did not extend all the way to the
door. The more Gilman looked at them, the more peculiar they seemed;
for in addition to those he could recognize as his there were some
smaller, almost round markings--such as the legs of a large chair or a
table might make, except that most of them tended to be divided into
halves. There were also some curious muddy rat-tracks leading out of a
fresh hole and back into it again. Utter bewilderment and the fear of
madness racked Gilman as he staggered to the door and saw that there
were no muddy prints outside. The more he remembered of his hideous
dream the more terrified he felt, and it added to his desperation to
hear Joe Mazurewicz chanting mournfully two floors below.

Descending to Elwood's room he roused his still-sleeping host and
began telling of how he had found himself, but Elwood could form no
idea of what might really have happened. Where Gilman could have been,
how he got back to his room without making tracks in the hall, and how
the muddy, furniture-like prints came to be mixed with his in the
garret chamber, were wholly beyond conjecture. Then there were those
dark, livid marks on his throat, as if he had tried to strangle
himself. He put his hands up to them, but found that they did not even
approximately fit. While they were talking, Desrochers dropped in to
say that he had heard a terrific clattering overhead in the dark small
hours. No, there had been no one on the stairs after midnight, though
just before midnight he had heard faint footfalls in the garret, and
cautiously descending steps he did not like. It was, he added, a very
bad time of year for Arkham. The young gentleman had better be sure to
wear the crucifix Joe Mazurewicz had given him. Even the daytime was
not safe, for after dawn there had been strange sounds in the house--
especially a thin, childish wail hastily choked off.

Gilman mechanically attended classes that morning, but was wholly
unable to fix his mind on his studies. A mood of hideous apprehension
and expectancy had seized him, and he seemed to be awaiting the fall of
some annihilating blow. At noon he lunched at the University spa,
picking up a paper from the next seat as he waited for dessert. But he
never ate that dessert; for an item on the paper's first page left him
limp, wild-eyed, and able only to pay his check and stagger back to
Elwood's room.

There had been a strange kidnapping the night before in Orne's
Gangway, and the two-year-old child of a clod-like laundry worker named
Anastasia Wolejko had completely vanished from sight. The mother, it
appeared, had feared the event for some time; but the reasons she
assigned for her fear were so grotesque that no one took them
seriously. She had, she said, seen Brown Jenkin about the place now and
then ever since early in March, and knew from its grimaces and
titterings that little Ladislas must be marked for sacrifice at the
awful Sabbat on Walpurgis Night. She had asked her neighbour Mary
Czanek to sleep in the room and try to protect the child, but Mary had
not dared. She could not tell the police, for they never believed such
things. Children had been taken that way every year ever since she
could remember. And her friend Pete Stowacki would not help because he
wanted the child out of the way.

But what threw Gilman into a cold perspiration was the report of a
pair of revellers who had been walking past the mouth of the gangway
just after midnight. They admitted they had been drunk, but both vowed
they had seen a crazily dressed trio furtively entering the dark
passageway. There had, they said, been a huge robed negro, a little old
woman in rags, and a young white man in his night-clothes. The old
woman had been dragging the youth, while around the feet of the negro a
tame rat was rubbing and weaving in the brown mud.

Gilman sat in a daze all the afternoon, and Elwood--who had
meanwhile seen the papers and formed terrible conjectures from them--
found him thus when he came home. This time neither could doubt but
that something hideously serious was closing in around them. Between
the phantasms of nightmare and the realities of the objective world a
monstrous and unthinkable relationship was crystallizing, and only
stupendous vigilance could avert still more direful developments.
Gilman must see a specialist sooner or later, but not just now, when
all the papers were full of this kidnapping business.

Just what had really happened was maddeningly obscure, and for a
moment both Gilman and Elwood exchanged whispered theories of the
wildest kind. Had Gilman unconsciously succeeded better than he knew in
his studies of space and its dimensions? Had he actually slipped
outside our sphere to points unguessed and unimaginable? Where--if
anywhere--had he been on those nights of demoniac alienage? The
roaring twilight abysses--the green hillside--the blistering terrace
--the pulls from the stars--the ultimate black vortex--the black man
--the muddy alley and the stairs--the old witch and the fanged, furry
horror--the bubble-congeries and the little polyhedron--the strange
sunburn--the wrist-wound--the unexplained image--the muddy feet--
the throat marks--the tales and fears of the superstitious foreigners
--what did all this mean? To what extent could the laws of sanity apply
to such a case?

There was no sleep for either of them that night, but next day they
both cut classes and drowsed. This was April thirtieth, and with the
dusk would come the hellish Sabbat-time which all the foreigners and
the superstitious old folk feared. Mazurewicz came home at six o'clock
and said people at the mill were whispering that the Walpurgis revels
would be held in the dark ravine beyond Meadow Hill where the old white
stone stands in a place queerly devoid of all plant-life. Some of them
had even told the police and advised them to look there for the missing
Wolejko child, but they did not believe anything would be done. Joe
insisted that the poor young gentleman wear his nickel-chained
crucifix, and Gilman put it on and dropped it inside his shirt to
humour the fellow.

Late at night the two youths sat drowsing in their chairs, lulled by
the praying of the loom-fixer on the floor below. Gilman listened as he
nodded, his preternaturally sharpened hearing seeming to strain for
some subtle, dreaded murmur beyond the noises in the ancient house.
Unwholesome recollections of things in the Necronomicon and the Black
Book welled up, and he found himself swaying to infandous rhythms said
to pertain to the blackest ceremonies of the Sabbat and to have an
origin outside the time and space we comprehend.

Presently he realized what he was listening for--the hellish chant
of the celebrants in the distant black valley. How did he know so much
about what they expected? How did he know the time when Nahab and her
acolyte were due to bear the brimming bowl which would follow the black
cock and the black goat? He saw that Elwood had dropped asleep, and
tried to call out and waken him. Something, however, closed his throat.
He was not his own master. Had he signed the black man's book after all?

Then his fevered, abnormal hearing caught the distant, windborne
notes. Over miles of hill and field and alley they came, but he
recognized them none the less. The fires must be lit, and the dancers
must be starting in. How could he keep himself from going? What was it
that had enmeshed him? Mathematics--folklore--the house--old Keziah
--Brown Jenkin...and now he saw that there was a fresh rat-hole in
the wall near his couch. Above the distant chanting and the nearer
praying of Joe Mazurewicz came another sound--a stealthy, determined
scratching in the partitions. He hoped the electric lights would not go
out. Then he saw the fanged, bearded little face in the rat-hole--the
accursed little face which he at last realized bore such a shocking,
mocking resemblance to old Keziah's--and heard the faint fumbling at
the door.

The screaming twilight abysses flashed before him, and he felt
himself helpless in the formless grasp of the iridescent
bubble-congeries. Ahead raced the small, kaleidoscopic polyhedron and
all through the churning void there was a heightening and acceleration
of the vague tonal pattern which seemed to foreshadow some unutterable
and unendurable climax. He seemed to know what was coming--the
monstrous burst of Walpurgis-rhythm in whose cosmic timbre would be
concentrated all the primal, ultimate space-time seethings which lie
behind the massed spheres of matter and sometimes break forth in
measured reverberations that penetrate faintly to every layer of entity
and give hideous significance throughout the worlds to certain dreaded
periods.

But all this vanished in a second. He was again in the cramped,
violet-litten peaked space with the slanting floor, the low cases of
ancient books, the bench and table, the queer objects, and the
triangular gulf at one side. On the table lay a small white figure--an
infant boy, unclothed and unconscious--while on the other side stood
the monstrous, leering old woman with a gleaming, grotesque-hafted
knife in her right hand, and a queerly proportioned pale metal bowl
covered with curiously chased designs and having delicate lateral
handles in her left. She was intoning some croaking ritual in a
language which Gilman could not understand, but which seemed like
something guardedly quoted in the Necronomicon.

As the scene grew clearer he saw the ancient crone bend forward and
extend the empty bowl across the table--and unable to control his own
emotions, he reached far forward and took it in both hands, noticing as
he did so its comparative lightness. At the same moment the disgusting
form of Brown Jenkin scrambled up over the brink of the triangular
black gulf on his left. The crone now motioned him to hold the bowl in
a certain position while she raised the huge, grotesque knife above the
small white victim as high as her right hand could reach. The fanged,
furry thing began tittering a continuation of the unknown ritual, while
the witch croaked loathsome responses. Gilman felt a gnawing poignant
abhorrence shoot through his mental and emotional paralysis, and the
light metal bowl shook in his grasp. A second later the downward motion
of the knife broke the spell completely, and he dropped the bowl with a
resounding bell-like clangour while his hands darted out frantically to
stop the monstrous deed.

In an instant he had edged up the slanting floor around the end of
the table and wrenched the knife from the old woman's claws; sending it
clattering over the brink of the narrow triangular gulf. In another
instant, however, matters were reversed; for those murderous claws had
locked themselves tightly around his own throat, while the wrinkled
face was twisted with insane fury. He felt the chain of the cheap
crucifix grinding into his neck, and in his peril wondered how the
sight of the object itself would affect the evil creature. Her strength
was altogether superhuman, but as she continued her choking he reached
feebly in his shirt and drew out the metal symbol, snapping the chain
and pulling it free.

At sight of the device the witch seemed struck with panic, and her
grip relaxed long enough to give Gilman a chance to break it entirely.
He pulled the steel-like claws from his neck, and would have dragged
the beldame over the edge of the gulf had not the claws received a
fresh access of strength and closed in again. This time he resolved to
reply in kind, and his own hands reached out for the creature's throat.
Before she saw what he was doing he had the chain of the crucifix
twisted about her neck, and a moment later he had tightened it enough
to cut off her breath. During her last struggle he felt something bite
at his ankle, and saw that Brown Jenkin had come to her aid. With one
savage kick he sent the morbidity over the edge of the gulf and heard
it whimper on some level far below.

Whether he had killed the ancient crone he did not know, but he let
her rest on the floor where she had fallen. Then, as he turned away, he
saw on the table a sight which nearly snapped the last thread of his
reason. Brown Jenkin, tough of sinew and with four tiny hands of
demoniac dexterity, had been busy while the witch was throttling him,
and his efforts had been in vain. What he had prevented the knife from
doing to the victim's chest, the yellow fangs of the furry blasphemy
had done to a wrist--and the bowl so lately on the floor stood full
beside the small lifeless body.

In his dream-delirium Gilman heard the hellish alien-rhythmed chant
of the Sabbat coming from an infinite distance, and knew the black man
must be there. Confused memories mixed themselves with his mathematics,
and he believed his subconscious mind held the angles which he needed
to guide him back to the normal world alone and unaided for the first
time. He felt sure he was in the immemorially sealed loft above his own
room, but whether he could ever escape through the slanting floor or
the long-stopped egress he doubted greatly. Besides, would not an
escape from a dream-loft bring him merely into a dream-house--an
abnormal projection of the actual place he sought? He was wholly
bewildered as to the relation betwixt dream and reality in all his
experiences.

The passage through the vague abysses would be frightful, for the
Walpurgis-rhythm would be vibrating, and at last he would have to hear
that hitherto-veiled cosmic pulsing which he so mortally dreaded. Even
now he could detect a low, monstrous shaking whose tempo he suspected
all too well. At Sabbat-time it always mounted and reached through to
the worlds to summon the initiate to nameless rites. Half the chants of
the Sabbat were patterned on this faintly overheard pulsing which no
earthly ear could endure in its unveiled spatial fulness. Gilman
wondered, too, whether he could trust his instincts to take him back to
the right part of space. How could he be sure he would not land on that
green-litten hillside of a far planet, on the tessellated terrace above
the city of tentacled monsters somewhere beyond the galaxy or in the
spiral black vortices of that ultimate void of Chaos where reigns the
mindless demon-sultan Azathoth?

Just before he made the plunge the violet light went out and left
him in utter blackness. The witch--old Keziah--Nahab--that must have
meant her death. And mixed with the distant chant of the Sabbat and the
whimpers of Brown Jenkin in the gulf below he thought he heard another
and wilder whine from unknown depths. Joe Mazurewicz--the prayers
against the Crawling Chaos now turning to an inexplicably triumphant
shriek--w