# The Call of Cthulhu (B1 edition)

*H. P. Lovecraft*

## 1. The Horror in Clay

*(Found among the papers of the late Francis Wayland Thurston, of Boston.)*

"Great powers or beings like these may possibly have survived ... survived from a very distant time when ... thinking life appeared, perhaps, in shapes and forms. These forms went away long ago, before the coming tide of humans ... Only poetry and legend have caught a quick memory of them. They called them gods, monsters, mythical beings of all sorts and kinds...."

—*Algernon Blackwood.*

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is this: the human mind cannot connect all the things it holds. We live on a calm island of ignorance in the middle of black seas of infinity. We were not meant to travel far. The sciences, each pulling in its own direction, have not harmed us much so far. But one day someone will put together separate pieces of knowledge. Then terrible views of reality will open up in front of us. We will also see our own frightening place in that reality. Then we will either go mad from what we learn. Or we will run away from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.

Theosophists have guessed at the great and wonderful size of the cosmic cycle. In this cycle, our world and the human race are only short events. They have also hinted at strange things that have survived. Their words would freeze the blood if they were not hidden behind a cheerful optimism. But my one glimpse of forbidden eons did not come from them. This glimpse chills me when I think of it, and it drives me mad when I dream of it. Like all terrible glimpses of truth, it came from an accidental putting together of separate things. In this case, the things were an old newspaper item and the notes of a dead professor. I hope that no one else will put these pieces together. Certainly, if I live, I will never knowingly add a link to such a terrible chain. I think that the professor, too, meant to keep silent about the part he knew. I think he would have destroyed his notes if sudden death had not taken him.

My knowledge of the thing began in the winter of 1926-27, when my grand-uncle died. He was George Gammell Angell, Professor Emeritus of Semitic languages at Brown University, in Providence, Rhode Island. Professor Angell was widely known as an expert on ancient inscriptions. The heads of important museums had often asked him for help. So many people may remember his death at the age of ninety-two. In Providence, people were even more interested, because the cause of his death was unclear. The professor was taken ill while he was coming back from the Newport boat. Witnesses said that he fell suddenly. Just before he fell, a negro who looked like a sailor had pushed him. This man had come from one of the strange, dark courtyards on the very steep hillside. The hillside was a short cut from the waterfront to the dead man's home in Williams Street. The doctors could not find anything visibly wrong with him. They discussed the case for a long time and were puzzled. In the end they decided that some hidden problem of the heart had killed him. It had been caused, they said, by such an old man climbing such a steep hill so fast. At the time I saw no reason to disagree with them. But lately I have begun to wonder—and more than wonder.

I was my grand-uncle's heir and executor, for his wife had died and he had no children. So I had to go through his papers carefully. For this reason I moved all his files and boxes to my rooms in Boston. Much of the material that I put in order will later be published by the American Archeological Society. But there was one box that puzzled me very much. I did not want to show it to anyone else. It was locked, and for a long time I could not find the key. Then I thought of the personal key ring that the professor always carried in his pocket. With it, I was able to open the box. But when I did, I seemed to face an even bigger barrier, locked even more tightly. What could the strange clay bas-relief mean? And what about the disconnected notes, ramblings and newspaper cuttings that I found there? Had my uncle, in his last years, become ready to believe the most obvious tricks? I decided to find the strange sculptor who was responsible. This young man had apparently disturbed the 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 size. It was clearly modern. But its designs did not feel modern at all. Cubism and futurism have many wild ideas. But they do not often copy the mysterious regularity that hides in prehistoric writing. And most of these designs certainly seemed to be writing of some kind. I knew my uncle's papers and collections well. But I could not identify this kind of writing at all. I could not even guess what it might be distantly related to.

Above these hieroglyphics, or what seemed to be hieroglyphics, was a figure. It was clearly meant to be a picture. But it was made so roughly that its nature was not very clear. It seemed to be a kind of monster, or a symbol of a monster. Only a sick imagination could think of such a shape. My imagination is rather wild. It gave me pictures of an octopus, a dragon and a twisted human shape, all at the same time. I do not think this is unfair to the spirit of the thing. A soft head with tentacles sat on top of an ugly, scaly body with small, undeveloped wings. But it was the *general outline* of the whole thing that made it most shockingly frightful. Behind the figure there was a vague suggestion of Cyclopean buildings.

Apart from a pile of press cuttings, all the writing with this strange object was in Professor Angell's hand. It was his handwriting from his last years, and it did not try to have any literary style. The main document had the heading "*CTHULHU CULT*". The letters were printed with great care, so that no one could misread such an unknown word. This manuscript had two sections. The first section had the heading "1925—Dream and Dream Work of H. A. Wilcox, 7 Thomas St., Providence, R. I." The second was headed "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 papers were all short notes. Some of them described the strange dreams of different people. Some were quotations from theosophical books and magazines, especially W. Scott-Eliott's *Atlantis and the Lost Lemuria*. The rest were comments on secret societies and hidden cults that had survived for a long time. These notes mentioned passages in books about myths and human cultures. Among these books were Frazer's *Golden Bough* and Miss Murray's *Witch-Cult in Western Europe*. The cuttings were mostly about very strange mental illnesses. They also told of outbreaks of group madness or foolishness in the spring of 1925.

The first half of the main manuscript told a very strange story. It seems that on March 1st, 1925, a thin, dark young man visited Professor Angell. He looked nervous and excited. He brought the strange clay bas-relief, which was then still very wet and fresh. The name on his card was Henry Anthony Wilcox. My uncle recognized him as the youngest son of a very good family that he knew slightly. Lately the young man had been studying sculpture at the Rhode Island School of Design. He lived alone in the Fleur-de-Lys Building, near the school. Wilcox was very clever for his age and was known as a genius. But he was also very strange. Since his childhood, people had noticed the strange stories and odd dreams that he liked to tell. He called himself "psychically hypersensitive". But the serious, old-fashioned people of the old commercial city just called him "queer". He never mixed much with other people. Slowly he had disappeared from society. Now only a small group of art-lovers from other towns knew him. Even the Providence Art Club, which wanted to keep its traditional ways, had found him quite hopeless.

On the day of the visit, the professor's manuscript said, the sculptor suddenly asked for his help. He wanted the professor's knowledge of archeology to identify the hieroglyphics on the bas-relief. He spoke in a dreamy, unnatural way. It seemed like a pose, and it made people dislike him. My uncle answered rather sharply. The clay tablet was so obviously fresh that it could have nothing to do with archeology. Young Wilcox's answer impressed my uncle so much that he remembered it and wrote it down word for word. It was fantastically poetic. All his conversation must have been like this, and I have since found it very typical 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 dark, thoughtful Tyre, or the thinking Sphinx, or Babylon with its gardens."

Then he began his rambling story. It suddenly woke a sleeping memory in my uncle and caught his feverish interest. There had been a slight earthquake tremor the night before. It was the strongest that New England had felt for some years. Wilcox's imagination had been strongly affected by it. When he went to bed, he had a dream like no dream before. He dreamed of great Cyclopean cities of huge Titan blocks and of monoliths that reached up to the sky. Everything was dripping with green ooze and full of hidden horror. Hieroglyphics covered the walls and pillars. And from some unknown place below came a voice that was not a voice. It was a confused feeling that only imagination could turn into sound. But he tried to write it down as a jumble of letters that was almost impossible to say: "*Cthulhu fhtagn*".

These strange words were the key to the memory that excited and disturbed Professor Angell. He questioned the sculptor with scientific care. And he studied the bas-relief very hard, almost wildly. Wilcox had found himself working on it when he slowly and confusedly woke up. He had been cold and wearing only his nightclothes. Wilcox said later that my uncle blamed his own old age. The old man said he was too slow to recognize both the hieroglyphics and the picture. Many of his questions seemed very out of place to his visitor. This was especially true of the questions that tried to connect him with strange cults or societies. Wilcox could not understand why the professor kept promising to keep silent. These promises were offered if Wilcox would admit he belonged to some widespread mystical or pagan religious group. At last Professor Angell became sure that the sculptor really knew nothing of any cult or secret knowledge. Then he demanded reports of Wilcox's future dreams again and again. This worked well. After the first meeting, the manuscript records that the young man came every day. Each time he told startling pieces of what he had seen at night. It was always some terrible Cyclopean view of dark and dripping stone. And under the ground a voice or mind was always shouting the same thing. It came as puzzling feelings in his mind that could only be written down as nonsense. The two sounds that were repeated most often are written as "*Cthulhu*" and "*R'lyeh*".

On March 23rd, the manuscript went on, Wilcox did not come. My uncle asked at his rooms. He learned that Wilcox had a strange kind of fever. He had been taken to his family's home in Waterman Street. He had cried out in the night and woken several other artists in the building. Since then he had been either unconscious or delirious. My uncle telephoned the family at once. From then on he followed the case closely. He often visited the Thayer Street office of Dr. Tobey, who he learned was in charge. The young man's feverish mind was apparently busy with strange things. The doctor shuddered now and then as he spoke of them. Wilcox repeated what he had dreamed before. But he also talked wildly of a gigantic thing "miles high" which walked or moved heavily about. He never fully described this thing. But Dr. Tobey repeated some of his wild words, and they convinced the professor. It must be the same nameless monster that Wilcox had tried to show in his dream-sculpture. Every time the young man spoke of this thing, the doctor added, he sank into a deep, heavy sleep. Strangely, his temperature was not much above normal. But in every other way his condition looked like a real fever, not a mental illness.

On April 2nd at about 3 p.m., every sign of Wilcox's illness suddenly stopped. He sat up in bed. He was amazed to find himself at home. He knew nothing of what had happened, in dream or in reality, since the night of March 22nd. His doctor said he was well, and he went back to his rooms in three days. But he was no more help to Professor Angell. All signs of strange dreaming had disappeared when he got better. For a week my uncle wrote down his accounts of quite ordinary dreams. They were pointless and had nothing to do with the case. After that he kept no more records of his night-thoughts.

Here the first part of the manuscript ended. But some of the scattered notes gave me much to think about. In fact, they gave me so much that only one thing explains why I still distrusted the artist. That was the deep-rooted skepticism of my thinking at that time. The notes I mean described the dreams of different people. They covered the same period as young Wilcox's strange night visions. My uncle, it seems, had quickly sent out a huge number of questions. He sent them to nearly all the friends he could ask without being rude. He asked them for nightly reports of their dreams. He also asked for the dates of any unusual dreams for some time back. People seem to have received his request in different ways. But he must have received more answers than any ordinary man could handle without a secretary. These original letters were not kept. But his notes were a thorough and really important summary of them. Average people in society and business gave an almost completely negative result. They were New England's traditional "salt of the earth". But here and there were a few cases of uneasy, shapeless impressions at night. These always came between March 23rd and April 2nd, the period of young Wilcox's delirium. Scientific men were affected only a little more. Four of them gave vague descriptions that suggested quick glimpses of strange landscapes. And in one case there was a fear of something abnormal.

It was the artists and poets who gave the important answers. I know that there would have been panic if they had been able to compare notes. As it was, I did not have their original letters. So I half suspected my uncle of asking leading questions. Or perhaps he had changed the letters to support what he secretly wanted to see. That is why I still felt that Wilcox had been tricking the old scientist. Somehow, I thought, he knew of the old facts that my uncle had. These answers from the artists told a disturbing story. From February 28th to April 2nd, many of them had dreamed very strange things. The dreams were far, far stronger during the time of the sculptor's delirium. Over a quarter of those who reported anything described scenes and half-sounds similar to Wilcox's. Some of the dreamers admitted a strong fear of the gigantic nameless thing that they saw near the end. One case, which the note stressed, was very sad. A widely known architect, interested in theosophy and the secret world of magic, went violently insane. This happened on the very day that young Wilcox fell ill. He died several months later. Until then he screamed without stopping to be saved from some creature that had escaped from hell. My uncle called these cases by numbers and not by names. If he had used names, I would have tried to check them and investigate in person. As it was, I was able to trace only a few. But all of these agreed fully with the notes. I have often wondered if all the people my uncle questioned felt as puzzled as this small group. It is good that no explanation will ever reach them.

The press cuttings, as I have said, were about cases of panic, madness and strange behavior during this period. Professor Angell must have used a cutting bureau, because there was a huge number of cuttings. They came from all over the world. Here was a suicide at night in London. A man sleeping alone had jumped from a window after a shocking cry. Here, too, was a rambling letter to the editor of a newspaper in South America. In it a man with wild beliefs predicts a terrible future from visions he has seen. A report from California describes a group of theosophists who live together. All of them put on white robes at the same time for some "glorious fulfilment" that never comes. Meanwhile reports from India speak carefully of serious unrest among the native people toward the end of March. Voodoo orgies increase in Haiti. Distant stations in Africa report dark, threatening whispers. American officers in the Philippines find certain tribes troublesome at about this time. New York policemen are attacked by crowds of hysterical Levantines on the night of March 22-23. The west of Ireland, too, is full of wild rumors and legends. A fantastic painter named Ardois-Bonnot hangs a shocking, godless *Dream Landscape*. It is shown at the spring art show in Paris in 1926. And the hospitals for the insane record a great many troubles. Only a miracle can have stopped the doctors from noticing strange similarities and from drawing puzzled conclusions. All in all, it was a strange collection of cuttings. Today I can hardly imagine the cold, hard reason with which I put them aside. But at that time I was sure that young Wilcox had known of the older matters that the professor mentioned.

### Glossary

- **bas-relief**: a picture carved so that it stands out a little from a flat surface.
- **hieroglyphics**: picture-like signs used as writing.
- **Cyclopean**: made of enormous stone blocks, as if built by giants.
- **monolith**: a single huge standing stone or stone pillar.
- **eons**: extremely long periods of time.
- **cult**: a secret religious group with strange beliefs and ceremonies.
- **heir and executor**: the person who receives a dead person's property, and the person who looks after the dead person's papers and property.
- **theosophists**: followers of a mystical movement of the time that was interested in ancient secret wisdom.
- **delirium / delirious**: a state of confused, wild thoughts and talk, often during a fever.
- **"psychically hypersensitive"**: Wilcox's words for himself: his mind feels hidden, unseen things much more strongly than other people's minds.
- **A. A. S. Mtg … Acct.**: short forms in Angell's notes: "Meeting of the American Archeological Society" and "account" (a report of what happened).
- **"salt of the earth"**: good, ordinary, honest people.
- **negro**: an old word for a Black person; today it is offensive.
- **Levantines**: an old word for people from the countries of the eastern Mediterranean; used like this, it sounds offensive today.
- **voodoo orgies**: wild, uncontrolled ceremonies of voodoo, a religion from Haiti and West Africa.
- **cutting bureau**: a company that collected newspaper articles on a subject for a customer.

## 2. The Tale of Inspector Legrasse

The older matters had made the sculptor's dream and bas-relief so important to my uncle. They were the subject of the second half of his long manuscript. It seems that Professor Angell had seen the terrible outline of the nameless monster once before. He had puzzled over the same unknown hieroglyphics. He had heard the same threatening sounds, which can only be written as "*Cthulhu*". All this had happened in such an exciting and horrible situation that it is no wonder he chased young Wilcox with questions. He wanted every piece of information he could get.

This earlier experience had come in 1908, seventeen years before. That year the American Archeological Society held its annual meeting in St. Louis. Professor Angell was an important expert, so he had a big part in all the discussions. Several outsiders used the meeting to bring questions and problems to the experts. He was one of the first people they came to.

The chief of these outsiders soon became the center of interest for the whole meeting. He was an ordinary-looking, middle-aged man. He had traveled all the way from New Orleans for special information that he could not get anywhere near home. His name was John Raymond Legrasse, and he was a police inspector. With him he brought the reason for his visit. It was a stone statuette, strange, ugly and disgusting, and apparently very ancient. He could not find out where it came from.

No one should think that Inspector Legrasse had the smallest interest in archeology. He wanted information only for police reasons. The statuette, idol, fetish, or whatever it was, had been captured some months before. The police had found it in the wooded swamps south of New Orleans. It was during a raid on what they thought was a voodoo meeting. The ceremonies connected with it were very strange and horrible. So the police understood that they had found a dark cult that was totally unknown to them. It was far more devilish than even the darkest African voodoo groups. The police had forced some wild, unbelievable stories out of the captured members. Apart from these, nothing at all could be learned about the cult's origin. So the police wanted any expert knowledge about ancient things. It might help them to identify the frightful symbol. Then, through the symbol, they could follow the cult back to its source.

Inspector Legrasse was not ready for the excitement his statuette caused. One look at the thing was enough. The scientists became tense and excited, and they quickly crowded round him. They stared at the small figure. It was totally strange, and it seemed truly and enormously old. It suggested unopened views into a very ancient past. No known school of sculpture had made this terrible object. Yet centuries, even thousands of years, seemed written in its dim, greenish surface. And no one could say what kind of stone it was.

At last the figure was passed slowly from man to man, and each one studied it closely. It was between seven and eight inches high, and the work was beautiful and highly skilled. It showed a monster with a roughly human shape. But it had an octopus-like head, and its face was a mass of feelers. Its body was scaly and looked like rubber. It had huge claws on its back and front feet, and long, narrow wings behind. The thing seemed full of a frightening, unnatural evil. It was rather fat and swollen. It sat low, in an evil way, on a rectangular block, or base. The block was covered with writing that no one could read. The tips of the wings touched the back edge of the block. The seat was in the center. The back legs were folded up under the body. Their long, curved claws gripped the front edge of the block. They reached a quarter of the way down toward the bottom of the base. The octopus-like head was bent forward. So the ends of the feelers on its face brushed the backs of the huge front paws. These paws held the creature's raised knees. The whole figure looked unnaturally alive. It was even more frightening because no one knew where it came from. Its huge, uncountable age was certain. Yet it showed no link with any known kind of art from the early days of civilization. In fact, it showed no link with the art of any other time either.

Its material, too, was a complete mystery. The stone was soapy and greenish-black. It had spots and lines that were gold or shone with changing rainbow colors. Scientists who study rocks and minerals had never known anything like it. The writing along the base was just as puzzling. Half of the world's experts in this field were present. Yet not one of them had the smallest idea which family of languages it belonged to. They could not even guess at a very distant connection. The writing, like the figure and its stone, belonged to something horribly far away from mankind as we know it. In a frightening way, it suggested old and unholy cycles of life. Our world and our ideas have no part in them.

One by one, the members shook their heads. They admitted that they could not solve the inspector's problem. But there was one man in the group who felt something strangely familiar in the monstrous shape and writing. Soon, rather shyly, he told the small, odd thing he knew. This man was the late William Channing Webb. He was a professor of anthropology at Princeton University, and quite a famous explorer.

Forty-eight years before, Professor Webb had made a tour of Greenland and Iceland. He was looking for some Runic inscriptions, but he never found them. High up on the West Greenland coast, he had met a strange tribe, or cult, of low, fallen Eskimos. Their religion was a strange kind of devil-worship. Its deliberate love of blood and its ugliness chilled him. Other Eskimos knew little about this faith, and they spoke of it only with shudders. They said it had come down from horribly ancient eons, before the world was even made. There were nameless ceremonies and human sacrifices. There were also some strange rituals that were passed down through families. These rituals were spoken to a supreme elder devil, or *tornasuk*. Professor Webb had made a careful copy of their sounds. He took them from an old *angekok*, or wizard-priest. He wrote the sounds in Roman letters as well as he could. But the most important thing now was the fetish that this cult loved. The people danced around it when the aurora leaped high over the ice cliffs. It was, the professor said, a very rough stone bas-relief. It had a terrible picture and some mysterious writing. As far as he could tell, it roughly matched the beast-like thing now in front of the meeting. It was like it in all the important features.

The members listened to this with suspense and amazement. For Inspector Legrasse it was doubly exciting, and at once he began to question the professor. Legrasse had written down a spoken ritual of the swamp worshipers his men had arrested. Now he begged the professor to remember the sounds as well as he could. These were the sounds he had written down among the devil-worshiping Eskimos. Then the two men compared every detail. At the end there was a moment of truly awed silence. Both the detective and the scientist agreed on one thing. The two hellish rituals were worlds apart, but they shared almost exactly the same phrase. The Eskimo wizards and the Louisiana swamp-priests had chanted it to their related idols. It was something very like this. The breaks between the words were guessed from the usual pauses when the phrase was chanted aloud:

"*Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn.*"

Legrasse knew one thing more than Professor Webb. Several of his mongrel prisoners had told him what the words meant. Older worshipers had explained it to them. The meaning, as they gave it, was something like this:

"In his house at R'lyeh dead Cthulhu waits dreaming."

Then everyone urgently asked Inspector Legrasse to tell his story. So he told them, as fully as he could, about his experience with the swamp worshipers. I could see that my uncle thought his story was deeply important. It was like the wildest dreams of myth-makers and theosophists. And it showed an amazing cosmic imagination among half-castes and pariahs. They were the very people one would least expect to have it.

On November 1st, 1907, a desperate message came to the New Orleans police. It came from the swamp and lagoon country to the south. The squatters there were mostly simple but good-natured people. They were descended from Lafitte's men. Now they were in the grip of total terror. An unknown thing had come secretly upon them in the night. It seemed to be voodoo, but voodoo of a more terrible kind than they had ever known. Some of their women and children had disappeared since the evil tom-tom began its endless beating. It beat far inside the black, haunted woods, where none of the people living there ever went. There were mad shouts and terrible screams. There were chants that chilled the soul, and dancing flames like devils. And, the frightened messenger added, the people could not stand it any more.

So a group of twenty police set out in the late afternoon. They filled two carriages and an automobile, and the shivering squatter came as their guide. At the end of the road that they could drive on, they got out. For miles they splashed on in silence through the terrible cypress woods, where day never came. Ugly roots and evil-looking Spanish moss surrounded them. The moss hung down in loops, like the ropes used to hang people. Every badly shaped tree and every little island of fungus filled them with darkness and sadness. Now and then they passed a pile of wet stones or pieces of a rotting wall. These hinted that someone had once lived there, in a sick and unhealthy way. That made the dark mood even worse. At last the squatter settlement came into view, a miserable group of huts. Hysterical people ran out and crowded around the bobbing lanterns. Now the men could just hear the dull beat of tom-toms, far, far ahead. Now and then, when the wind changed, a blood-chilling scream came too. A reddish glow also seemed to come through the pale bushes, beyond endless avenues of forest night. The frightened squatters did not even want to be left alone again. But every one of them flatly refused to go one inch nearer to the unholy worship. So Inspector Legrasse and his nineteen colleagues went on without a guide. They pushed into black arches of horror that none of them had ever walked through before.

The police had now entered an area with a traditionally evil name. White men knew almost nothing about it, and they had almost never crossed it. There were legends of a hidden lake that no human eye had ever seen. In it lived a huge, shapeless white thing like a polyp, with shining eyes. The squatters whispered that bat-winged devils flew up out of caves deep in the earth. They came to worship the thing at midnight. They said it had been there before D'Iberville, before La Salle, and before the Indians. It had been there before even the healthy animals 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 really only on the very edge of this hated area. But that place was bad enough. Perhaps that is why the place of the worship frightened the squatters more than the shocking sounds and events.

Only poetry or madness could truly describe the noises that Legrasse's men heard. They heard them as they pushed on through the black swamp toward the red glow and the dull tom-toms. Some kinds of voice belong only to men, and some belong only to beasts. It is terrible to hear one kind when it comes from the other. Here, animal fury and wild, uncontrolled freedom drove themselves to devilish heights. There were howls and screams of wild joy. They tore through those dark woods and echoed there. They were like storms of disease blowing up from the depths of hell. Now and then the wilder howling stopped. Then what seemed like a well-trained chorus of rough voices rose in a singsong chant. It was that terrible phrase, or ritual:

"*Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn.*"

Then the men reached a place where the trees were thinner. Suddenly they could see the scene itself. Four of them staggered, and one fainted. Two of them were so shaken that they cried out wildly. Luckily, the mad noise of the orgy covered their cry. Legrasse threw swamp water on the face of the man who had fainted. They all stood there trembling, almost hypnotized with horror.

In a natural clearing in the swamp there was a grassy island of perhaps an acre. It was clear of trees and fairly dry. On it a crowd of human abnormality jumped and twisted. Only a painter like Sime or Angarola could paint such a crowd. These hybrid spawn wore no clothes. They were braying like donkeys, shouting and twisting around a monstrous bonfire in the shape of a ring. Now and then there were gaps in the curtain of flame. Through them one could see a great granite monolith in the center, about eight feet high. On top of it rested the disgusting carved statuette. It looked strangely small up there. Around the monolith and its ring of fire stood a wide circle of ten scaffolds, at regular distances. From them hung, head down, the strangely damaged bodies of the helpless squatters who had disappeared. The ring of worshipers jumped and roared inside this circle. The whole crowd moved from left to right. It was an endless wild dance between the ring of bodies and the ring of fire.

It may have been only imagination, or it may have been only echoes. But one of the men, an excitable Spaniard, thought he heard voices answering the ritual. They seemed to come from some far, dark place deeper in the wood of ancient legend and horror. I later met this man, Joseph D. Galvez, and questioned him. He turned out to be far too imaginative. He even hinted at the faint beating of great wings. He also spoke of a glimpse of shining eyes, and a mountainous white shape beyond the farthest trees. But I suppose he had been listening to too many superstitions of the local people.

In fact, the men's horrified pause did not last long. Duty came first. There must have been nearly a hundred mongrel worshipers in the crowd. But the police trusted their guns and charged with determination into the disgusting mob. For five minutes the noise and chaos were beyond description. Wild blows were struck, shots were fired, and some people escaped. But in the end Legrasse was able to count about forty-seven silent, angry prisoners. He made them dress quickly and line up between two rows of policemen. Five of the worshipers lay dead. Two badly wounded ones were carried away by their fellow prisoners on stretchers made on the spot. Legrasse, of course, carefully removed the image from the monolith and carried it back with him.

The prisoners were examined at headquarters after a journey of great stress and tiredness. They all turned out to be men of a very low, mixed-blooded and mentally abnormal type. Most were seamen. There were also some negroes and mulattoes, mostly West Indians or Brava Portuguese from the Cape Verde Islands. They gave a touch of voodoo to this very mixed cult. But very soon, before many questions had been asked, something became clear. Something far deeper and older than negro fetish-worship was involved. The creatures were low and ignorant. Yet, surprisingly, they all held on to the same central idea of their disgusting faith.

They worshiped, they said, the Great Old Ones. These beings lived ages before there were any men, and they came to the young world out of the sky. The Old Ones were gone now, inside the earth and under the sea. But their dead bodies had told their secrets in dreams to the first man. He formed a cult which had never died. This was that cult, the prisoners said. It had always existed and always would exist. It was hidden in distant wild lands and dark places all over the world. It was waiting for the great priest Cthulhu to rise from his dark house in the mighty city of R'lyeh under the waters. Then he would bring the earth under his rule again. Some day he would call, when the stars were ready. And the secret cult would always be waiting to free him.

Until then, nothing more must be told. There was a secret that even torture could not force out of them. Mankind was not completely alone among the thinking beings of the earth. 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 carved idol was great Cthulhu. But no one could say if the others looked exactly like him. No one could read the old writing now, but things were passed on by word of mouth. The chanted ritual was not the secret. The secret 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. The rest were locked up in various institutions. They all denied taking part in the ritual murders. They insisted that the killing had been done by Black-winged Ones. These had come to them from their ancient meeting-place in the haunted wood. But no one ever got a clear account of these mysterious helpers. Most of what the police did learn came from a very old mestizo named Castro. He said that he had sailed to strange ports. He also said that he had talked with the undying leaders of the cult in the mountains of China.

Old Castro remembered bits of terrible legend. They made the ideas of the theosophists seem weak and pale. They made man and the world seem very new and short-lived. There had been eons when other Things ruled the earth, and They had had great cities. Remains of Them could still be found, he said, as Cyclopean stones on islands in the Pacific. The deathless Chinamen had told him this. They all died huge ages of time before man came. But there were arts that could bring Them back to life. This could happen when the stars had come round again to the right positions in the cycle of eternity. They had, indeed, come from the stars themselves, and brought Their images with Them.

These Great Old Ones, Castro went on, were not made completely of flesh and blood. They had shape. Did not this image, made in the stars, prove it? But that shape was not made of matter. When the stars were right, They could jump from world to world through the sky. But when the stars were wrong, They could not live. And although They no longer lived, They would never really die. They all lay in stone houses in Their great city of R'lyeh. The spells of mighty Cthulhu kept Them safe there for a glorious return to life. That would come when the stars and the earth were ready for Them once more. But at that time some force from outside would have to free Their bodies. The spells that kept Them whole also stopped Them from making the first move. So They could only lie awake in the dark and think, while uncounted millions of years rolled by. They knew everything that happened in the universe, because They spoke by sending thoughts. Even now They talked in Their tombs. After endless ages of chaos, the first men came. Then the Great Old Ones spoke to the sensitive ones among them by shaping their dreams. Only in this way could Their language reach the minds of mammals, which are made of flesh.

Then, Castro whispered, those first men formed the cult around small idols which the Great Ones showed them. These idols had been brought from dark stars in dim, distant ages. The cult would never die until the stars came right again. Then the secret priests would take great Cthulhu from His tomb. He would bring His subjects back to life and rule the earth again. The time would be easy to know. Mankind would have become like the Great Old Ones: free and wild and beyond good and evil. Laws and morals would be thrown aside. All men would be shouting and killing and enjoying themselves wildly. Then the freed Old Ones would teach them new ways to shout and kill and celebrate and enjoy themselves. And all the earth would burn in a great fire of wild joy and freedom. Until then, the cult had to use the right ceremonies to keep alive the memory of those ancient ways. And it had to keep telling of their promised return.

In the old days, chosen men had talked in dreams with the Old Ones in their tombs. But then something had happened. The great stone city of R'lyeh, with its monoliths and tombs, had sunk beneath the waves. The deep waters are full of the one first and oldest mystery, and not even thought can pass through it. So the waters had cut off this ghostly contact. But memory never died. And high priests said that the city would rise again when the stars were right. Then out of the earth came the black spirits of earth. They were moldy and shadowy, and full of dim rumors. They had picked up these rumors in caves beneath forgotten sea-bottoms. But old Castro did not dare to say much about them. He stopped himself quickly. No amount of asking or clever tricks could get any more out of him on this subject. Strangely, he also refused to mention the *size* of the Old Ones. About the cult, he said that he thought its center lay in the deserts of Arabia, where there are no paths. There Irem, the City of Pillars, dreams hidden and untouched. The cult was not connected to the European witch-cult. It was almost unknown outside its own members. No book had ever really hinted at it. But the deathless Chinamen said that the *Necronomicon* had double meanings. This book was written by the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred. Those who knew the secrets could read these meanings as they chose. This was true especially of the much-discussed couplet:

"That is not dead which can eternal lie,

And with strange eons even death may die."

Legrasse was deeply impressed and more than a little confused. He had asked about the cult's links with history, but without success. Castro had apparently told the truth when he said that it was completely secret. The experts at Tulane University could not explain either the cult or the image. And now the detective had come to the highest experts in the country. Yet he had found nothing more than Professor Webb's Greenland tale.

Legrasse's tale, supported by the statuette, caused feverish interest at the meeting. This interest shows in the letters that the people who were there wrote afterwards. But the society's official publication hardly mentions it. People who sometimes have to deal with tricks and frauds are always careful first. For some time Legrasse lent the image to Professor Webb. But when Webb died, it was returned to Legrasse. He still has it, and I saw it there not long ago. It is truly a terrible thing. And it is clearly related to the dream-sculpture of young Wilcox.

So I did not wonder that the sculptor's tale had excited my uncle. He knew what Legrasse had learned about the cult. Then he heard of a sensitive young man who had *dreamed* the figure of the swamp image. He had also dreamed the exact hieroglyphics of that image and of the Greenland devil tablet. And *in his dreams* he had found at least three of the exact words of the formula. Both the Eskimo devil-worshipers and the mongrel Louisianans spoke these words. What thoughts must have come to my uncle then! It was completely natural for Professor Angell to start a very thorough investigation at once. But privately I suspected young Wilcox. I thought he had heard of the cult in some indirect way. Then he had invented a series of dreams. In this way he made the mystery bigger and kept it going, at my uncle's expense. Of course, the dream reports and cuttings that the professor collected strongly supported the story. But my mind was rational, and the whole subject was so wild. So I came to what I thought were the most sensible conclusions. I studied the manuscript carefully again. I connected the theosophical and anthropological notes with Legrasse's story of the cult. Then I made a trip to Providence. I wanted to see the sculptor and scold him as I thought he deserved. He had boldly tricked a learned old man.

Wilcox still lived alone in the Fleur-de-Lys Building in Thomas Street. It is an ugly Victorian copy of Seventeenth Century Breton buildings. It shows off its plastered front among the lovely Colonial houses on the ancient hill. It stands in the very shadow of the finest Georgian church steeple in America. I found him at work in his rooms. From the pieces lying about, I had to admit at once that his genius is deep and real. I believe that some day he will be known as one of the great decadents. Arthur Machen creates nightmares and fantasies in his stories. Clark Ashton Smith makes them visible in poems and in paintings. Wilcox has given these same nightmares shape in clay, and one day he will show them in marble.

He was dark, thin and weak-looking, and rather untidy. He turned slowly and lazily at my knock. Without getting up, he asked me what I wanted. When I told him who I was, he showed some interest. My uncle had made him curious by studying his strange dreams, but he had never explained why. I did not tell him any more about this. Instead I tried, quite cleverly, to get him talking.

In a short time I was sure that he was completely sincere. He spoke of the dreams in a way that no one could mistake. The dreams, and what remained of them deep in his mind, had influenced his art very much. He showed me a dark, sick-looking statue. Its shape had such a powerful black suggestion that it almost made me shake. He could not remember seeing the original of this thing anywhere except in his own dream bas-relief. The shape had formed itself under his hands without his noticing. It was surely the giant shape he had shouted about in his delirium. He soon made clear that he really knew nothing of the hidden cult. He knew only what had slipped out in my uncle's endless questions. And again I tried to think how he could possibly have got these strange impressions.

He talked of his dreams in a strangely poetic way. He made me see the damp Cyclopean city of slimy green stone very clearly, and it was terrible. Its *geometry*, he said strangely, was *all wrong*. He made me hear, with frightened expectation, the endless, half-mental calling from underground: "*Cthulhu fhtagn*," "*Cthulhu fhtagn*."

These words were part of that terrible ritual. It told of dead Cthulhu, who lay dreaming and waiting in his stone tomb at R'lyeh. I felt deeply moved, in spite of my rational beliefs. I was sure that Wilcox had heard of the cult in some casual way. Then he had soon forgotten it among all his other strange reading and imagining. Later, because it was so powerful, it had come out from his unconscious mind. It had shown itself in his dreams, in the bas-relief, and in the terrible statue I now saw. So his trick on my uncle had been a very innocent one. The young man was a type that I could never like. He was slightly affected and slightly ill-mannered at the same time. But now I was ready to admit both his genius and his honesty. I said goodbye to him in a friendly way. I wish him all the success his talent promises.

The matter of the cult still fascinated me. At times I dreamed of becoming famous from research into its origin and connections. I visited New Orleans. I talked with Legrasse and others from that old raiding party. I saw the frightful image. I even questioned some of the mongrel prisoners who were still alive. Old Castro, sadly, had been dead for some years. Now I heard the story so vividly, from the people who were there. Really it only confirmed in detail what my uncle had written. But it excited me again. I felt sure that I was on the track of a very real, very secret and very ancient religion. Its discovery would make me a well-known anthropologist. My attitude was still one of complete materialism, *as I wish it still were*. With an almost unexplainable stubbornness, I ignored a strange coincidence. It was there in the dream notes and odd cuttings that Professor Angell had collected.

There is one thing that I began to suspect then, and that I now fear I *know*. It is that my uncle's death was far from natural. He fell on a narrow hill street leading up from an ancient waterfront. That waterfront is full of foreign mongrels. He fell after a careless push from a negro sailor. I did not forget that the cult members in Louisiana were of mixed blood and worked at sea. I would not be surprised to learn of secret methods and poison needles. They might be as cruel, and as anciently known, as the mysterious ceremonies and beliefs. It is true that Legrasse and his men have been left alone. But in Norway a certain seaman who saw things is dead. After my uncle heard the sculptor's story, he asked deeper questions. Might these questions have reached evil ears? I think Professor Angell died because he knew too much, or because he was likely to learn too much. Whether I will die as he did remains to be seen. For I have learned much now.

### Glossary

- **statuette**: a small statue.
- **fetish**: an object people worship because they think it has magic power.
- **Runic inscriptions**: old writing cut into stone in runes, the letters of the early peoples of northern Europe.
- **Eskimos**: the native people of Greenland and the Arctic (today they are called Inuit).
- **tornasuk**: the Eskimo word for the cult's supreme devil.
- **angekok**: an Eskimo wizard-priest.
- **aurora**: colored lights in the night sky near the North Pole (the northern lights).
- **"Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn"**: the cult's chant; it means "In his house at R'lyeh dead Cthulhu waits dreaming."
- **mongrel**: an old, offensive word for a person of mixed race; it is really a word for a dog of mixed breed.
- **half-castes and pariahs**: "half-caste" is an old, offensive word for a person of mixed race; "pariahs" are people that everyone rejects.
- **lagoon**: an area of shallow sea water, partly cut off from the sea.
- **squatters**: poor people who live on land without owning it.
- **Lafitte's men**: the men of Jean Lafitte, a famous pirate who lived near New Orleans.
- **tom-tom**: a drum beaten with the hands.
- **Spanish moss**: a grey plant that hangs in long strands from trees in the southern USA.
- **polyp**: a soft, simple sea creature with a tube-like body and arms around its mouth.
- **hybrid spawn**: an old, offensive way of speaking about people of mixed race, as if they were animals.
- **scaffolds**: wooden frames; here, frames from which dead bodies hang.
- **negroes and mulattoes**: old words for Black people and people with one Black and one white parent; today they are offensive.
- **the Great Old Ones**: in the cult's belief, beings from the stars who ruled the earth before humans.
- **mestizo**: a person with Spanish and Native American family.
- **Chinamen**: an old word for Chinese men; today it is offensive.
- **when the stars were right**: the cult's phrase for the time when the stars return to the right positions and the Old Ones can live again.
- **couplet**: two lines of poetry that go together; this one means that what can lie still for ever is not truly dead, and over strange, long ages even death can die.
- **Necronomicon**: an imaginary ancient book of dark secrets by "the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred".
- **decadents**: artists who love dark, strange and unhealthy beauty.
- **geometry**: the shapes, lines and angles of something; "all wrong" means they did not follow normal rules.
- **affected**: not natural in his manner; acting as if to impress people.

## 3. The Madness from the Sea

If heaven ever wants to give me a gift, I hope it will wipe out the results of one pure chance. That chance made me notice a certain piece of paper on a shelf. It was nothing I would normally find in my daily life. It was an old copy of an Australian newspaper, the *Sydney Bulletin* for April 18, 1925. Even the cutting bureau had missed it. And at that time the bureau was eagerly collecting material for my uncle's research.

I had mostly given up my research into what Professor Angell called the "Cthulhu Cult." I was visiting a learned friend in Paterson, New Jersey. He was the curator of a local museum and a well-known mineralogist. One day I was looking at some extra stone specimens in a back room of the museum. They were roughly placed on the storage shelves. Then I noticed a strange picture in one of the old newspapers spread under the stones. It was the *Sydney Bulletin* I have mentioned. My friend has contacts in every foreign country you can imagine. The picture was a printed photograph of a horrible stone image. It was almost the same as the one Legrasse had found in the swamp.

I eagerly cleared the valuable stones off the sheet and read the article carefully. I was disappointed that it was only of medium length. But what it suggested was hugely important for my fading search. I carefully tore it out so that I could act at once. It said:

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 Details of Strange Experience. Odd Idol Found With Him. Inquiry to Follow.*

The Morrison Co.'s cargo ship *Vigilant*, coming from Valparaiso, arrived this morning at its wharf in Darling Harbour. It was pulling behind it the steam yacht *Alert* of Dunedin, N. Z. The yacht was damaged by battle and could not move by itself, but it was heavily armed. It was sighted on April 12th at S. Latitude 34° 21', W. Longitude 152° 17'. There was one living man and one dead man aboard.

The *Vigilant* left Valparaiso on March 25th. On April 2nd very heavy storms and huge waves drove her far south of her course. On April 12th the derelict was sighted. It seemed to be empty. But when the crew went aboard, they found one survivor, who was half delirious. They also found one man who had clearly been dead for more than a week.

The living man was holding tightly a horrible stone idol of unknown origin, about a foot high. Experts at Sydney University, the Royal Society and the Museum in College Street all say they are completely puzzled by it. The survivor says he found it in the cabin of the yacht. It was in a small carved shrine of an ordinary type.

After he recovered, the man told a very strange story of piracy and killing. He is Gustaf Johansen, a Norwegian of some intelligence. He was second mate of the two-masted schooner *Emma* of Auckland. The *Emma* sailed for Callao on February 20th with a crew of eleven men.

The *Emma*, he says, was delayed by the great storm of March 1st, which threw her far south of her course. On March 22nd, at S. Latitude 49° 51', W. Longitude 128° 34', she met the *Alert*. The *Alert* had a strange and evil-looking crew of Kanakas and half-castes. They sharply ordered the *Emma* to turn back, but Capt. Collins refused. Then the strange crew began to fire violently and without warning on the schooner. They used a set of unusually heavy brass cannon, which was part of the yacht's equipment.

The *Emma*'s men fought back, says the survivor. Shots below the waterline made the schooner begin to sink. But the men managed to bring her alongside the enemy ship and climb aboard. They fought with the savage crew on the yacht's deck. The enemy were slightly more in number, but the *Emma*'s men were forced to kill them all. This was because the enemy fought in a particularly disgusting and desperate, though rather clumsy, way.

Three of the *Emma*'s men were killed, including Capt. Collins and First Mate Green. The other eight, under Second Mate Johansen, took control of the captured yacht. They sailed on in their original direction. They wanted to see if there had been any reason for ordering them back.

The next day, it seems, they sighted a small island and landed on it. But no island is known in that part of the ocean. Six of the men somehow died on shore. Johansen is strangely unwilling to speak about this part of his story. He speaks only of their falling into a rock chasm.

Later, it seems, he and one companion went back aboard the yacht and tried to sail her. But they were beaten about by the storm of April 2nd.

From that time until his rescue on the 12th, the man remembers little. He does not even remember when his companion, William Briden, died. There is no clear cause for Briden's death. It was probably caused by excitement, or by cold and bad weather.

Telegrams from Dunedin report that the *Alert* was well known there as an island trading ship. It had an evil reputation along the waterfront. It was owned by a strange group of half-castes. Their frequent meetings and night trips to the woods made many people curious. The ship had sailed in great haste just after the storm and the earth tremors of March 1st.

Our Auckland correspondent says that the *Emma* and her crew have an excellent reputation. He describes Johansen as a sober and respectable man.

The admiralty will begin an inquiry into the whole matter tomorrow. Every effort will be made to persuade Johansen to speak more freely than he has done so far.

That was all, together with the picture of the hellish image. But what a chain of ideas it started in my mind! Here was a rich store of new facts about the Cthulhu Cult. Here was proof that it had strange interests at sea as well as on land. Why did the hybrid crew order the *Emma* back as they sailed about with their horrible idol? What was the unknown island where six of the *Emma*'s crew had died? And why was the mate Johansen so secretive about it? What had the vice-admiralty's investigation found out? What was known of the disgusting cult in Dunedin? And most amazing of all, what was this deep and more than natural connection of dates? It gave an evil meaning, which nobody could now deny, to the events my uncle had noted so carefully.

March 1st—our February 28th according to the International Date Line—the earthquake and storm had come. From Dunedin the *Alert* and her disgusting crew had rushed out eagerly, as if a master had called them. On the other side of the earth, poets and artists had begun to dream of a strange, wet Cyclopean city. At the same time a young sculptor had shaped in his sleep the form of the dreaded Cthulhu. On March 23rd the crew of the *Emma* landed on an unknown island and left six men dead. On that date the dreams of sensitive men became more vivid. They grew darker with fear of a giant monster that was chasing them with evil purpose. At the same time an architect had gone mad, and a sculptor had suddenly fallen into delirium! And what of this storm of April 2nd? On that date all dreams of the wet city stopped. On that date Wilcox came out unharmed from the prison of his strange fever. What of all this? And what of old Castro's hints about the sunken, star-born Old Ones and their coming rule? What of their faithful cult *and their mastery of dreams*? Was I standing unsteadily at the edge of cosmic horrors too great for any man to bear? If so, they must be horrors of the mind alone. For in some way the second of April had stopped the monstrous threat that had begun its attack on the soul of mankind.

I spent the day sending hurried telegrams and making arrangements. That evening I said goodbye to my host and took a train for San Francisco. In less than a month I was in Dunedin. But there I found that little was known of the strange cult members. They had stayed for a while in the old taverns by the sea. Waterfront scum like them was far too common for anyone to notice them specially. But there was vague talk about one trip inland that these mongrels had made. During that trip, faint drumming and red flames were seen on the distant hills.

In Auckland I learned that Johansen had come back *with yellow hair turned white*. In Sydney he had been questioned only quickly and carelessly, without any result. After that he had sold his cottage in West Street. Then he had sailed with his wife to his old home in Oslo. He told his friends no more about his dramatic experience than he had told the admiralty officials. All they could do was give me his Oslo address.

After that I went to Sydney. There I talked with seamen and members of the vice-admiralty court, but it was no use. I saw the *Alert* at Circular Quay in Sydney Cove. It had been sold and was now used for business. But I learned nothing from its huge, silent shape. The crouching image was kept in the Museum at Hyde Park. It had a cuttlefish head, a dragon body and scaly wings, and its base was covered with hieroglyphs. I studied it long and carefully. It was evil, but it was beautifully made. It had the same total mystery and terrible age as Legrasse's smaller specimen. Its material was just as strange and unearthly. The curator told me that geologists had found it a monstrous puzzle. They swore that the world held no rock like it. Then I thought with a shudder of what old Castro had told Legrasse about the ancient Great Ones: "They had come from the stars, and had brought Their images with Them."

My mind was shaken as it had never been shaken before. I now decided to visit Mate Johansen in Oslo. I sailed for London, and from there I went on at once to the Norwegian capital. One autumn day I landed at the neat wharves in the shadow of the Egeberg.

I found that Johansen's address was in the Old Town of King Harold Haardrada. This part of the city kept the name of Oslo alive for many centuries. During all those centuries the bigger city pretended to be "Christiania." I made the short trip by taxi. My heart was beating fast as I knocked at the door of a neat old building. Its front was covered with plaster. A sad-faced woman in black answered. She told me in slow, broken English that Gustaf Johansen was dead. I felt a sharp, painful disappointment.

He had not lived long after his return, his wife said. The events at sea in 1925 had broken him. He had told her no more than he had told the public. But he had left a long manuscript about "technical matters," as he called them. He had written it in English. Clearly he wanted to protect her from the danger of reading it by chance. One day he was walking through a narrow lane near the Gothenburg dock. A bundle of papers fell from an attic window and knocked him down. Two Lascar sailors helped him to his feet at once. But he was dead before the ambulance could reach him. The doctors found no real cause for his death. They blamed heart trouble and a weak body.

I now felt a dark terror eating away inside me. It will never leave me until I, too, am at rest, "accidentally" or otherwise. I persuaded the widow that my connection with her husband's "technical matters" gave me the right to his manuscript. I took the document away and began to read it on the London boat.

It was a simple, confused piece of writing. It was an innocent sailor's attempt to write a diary after the events. In it he tried to remember that last awful voyage day by day. I cannot copy it word for word, with all its confusion and repetition. But I will tell enough of its main story to explain something. The sound of water against the ship's sides became unbearable to me, so I stopped my ears with cotton. This story will show why.

Johansen, thank God, did not know everything, even though he saw the city and the Thing. But I will never sleep calmly again when I think of the horrors behind life. They wait there without end, in time and in space. And I think of those unholy, evil beings from older stars that dream under the sea. A nightmare cult knows them and loves them. It is ready and eager to set them free on the world. It will do this whenever another earthquake lifts 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 left Auckland on February 20th. She had felt the full force of that storm born from the earthquake. That storm must have lifted from the sea-bottom the horrors that filled men's dreams. When the ship was under control again, she made good progress. Then on March 22nd the *Alert* stopped her. I could feel the mate's regret as he wrote of the shelling and sinking of his ship. He speaks with real horror of the dark-skinned cult-devils on the *Alert*. There was something especially disgusting about them. It made destroying them seem almost a duty. Johansen seems innocently surprised that the court of inquiry accused his party of cruelty.

Then curiosity drove the men on in their captured yacht, under Johansen's command. They saw a great stone pillar sticking out of the sea. At S. Latitude 47° 9', W. Longitude 126° 43', they came upon a coastline. It was a mixture of mud, ooze and weedy Cyclopean stonework. This can only be the real, solid body of earth's greatest terror. It was the nightmare city of the dead, R'lyeh. It was built in endless eons before history by the huge, disgusting shapes that came down from the dark stars. There lay great Cthulhu and his countless followers, hidden in green, slimy stone rooms. At last, after uncountable cycles of time, he was sending out his thoughts. They spread fear into the dreams of sensitive people. They also gave strong commands to the faithful. The faithful were to come on a holy journey to set him free and bring back his rule. Johansen suspected none of this, but God knows he soon saw enough!

I suppose that only one mountain-top actually rose out of the waters. It was the horrible fortress, crowned by the monolith, where great Cthulhu was buried. When I think of the *extent* of what may lie down there, I almost want to kill myself at once. Johansen and his men were filled with wonder and fear by the cosmic greatness of this dripping Babylon of ancient demons. They must have guessed without help that it belonged to no sane planet, not this one or any other. Every line of the mate's frightened description shows their wonder and fear, and it is sad to read. They were amazed at the unbelievable size of the greenish stone blocks. They were amazed at the dizzying height of the great carved monolith. And they were amazed that the huge statues and bas-reliefs were exactly like the strange image from the shrine on the *Alert*.

Johansen did not know what futurism is like. But he came very close to it when he spoke of the city. He does not describe any definite building or structure. Instead he speaks only of broad impressions of huge angles and stone surfaces. These surfaces were too great to belong to anything right or proper for this earth. And they were evil, against God, with their horrible images and hieroglyphs. I mention his talk about *angles* because it reminds me of something Wilcox had told me about his awful dreams. He had said that the *geometry* of the place in his dreams was abnormal and non-Euclidean. He said it was disgustingly full of the feeling of worlds and dimensions different from ours. Now an uneducated seaman felt the same thing while he looked at the terrible reality.

Johansen and his men landed at a sloping mud-bank on this monstrous Acropolis. They climbed, slipping, over giant blocks covered in ooze. These could never have been a staircase made for humans. Even the sun in the sky seemed twisted when they saw it through the poisonous mist. The mist rose from this sea-soaked, unnatural place and bent the light. Threat and suspense seemed to look out slyly and nastily from the crazy, shifting angles of carved rock. There, a second look showed a hollow where the first look had shown a bulge.

Something very like fright had come over all the men. This happened before they saw anything more than rock, ooze and weed. Each of them would have run away if he had not feared the others' laughter. They searched for some small souvenir to carry away, but only half-heartedly. As it turned out, they found nothing.

It was Rodriguez the Portuguese who climbed up the foot of the monolith and shouted about what he had found. The others followed him. They looked curiously at the huge carved door with the now familiar squid-dragon bas-relief. Johansen said it was like a great barn-door. They all felt that it was a door because of the decorated lintel, threshold and side-posts around it. But they could not decide whether it lay flat like a trap-door or at a slant like an outside cellar-door. As Wilcox would have said, the geometry of the place was all wrong. You could not be sure that the sea and the ground were horizontal. So the position of everything else seemed to change, like a ghost.

Briden pushed at the stone in several places, but nothing happened. Then Donovan felt carefully around the edge. He pressed each point separately as he went. He climbed endlessly along the strange, ugly carved border of the stone. That is, you would call it climbing if the thing was not, after all, horizontal. The men wondered how any door in the universe could be so huge. Then, very softly and slowly, the acre-great panel began to move inward at the top. They saw that it was balanced.

Donovan slid down or along the side-post, or somehow moved himself there. He joined the others again. Everyone watched the strange movement of the monstrous carved door as it went back. In this fantasy of twisted, prism-like shapes, it moved unnaturally, along a diagonal line. All the rules of matter and perspective seemed to be turned upside down.

The opening was black with a darkness that seemed almost solid. That darkness was really a *positive quality*. It hid parts of the inner walls that should have been visible. And it actually burst out like smoke from its prison of eons. It visibly darkened the sun as it slipped away into the shrunken, strangely curved sky. It flew away on flapping wings of skin. The smell from the newly opened depths was unbearable. At last quick-eared Hawkins thought he heard a nasty, slopping sound down there. Everyone listened. And everyone was still listening when It came into sight. It moved heavily and wetly, feeling Its way. It squeezed Its green, jelly-like hugeness through the black doorway. It came out into the poisoned outside air of that city of madness.

Poor Johansen's handwriting almost failed when he wrote of this. Six men never reached the ship. He thinks two of them died of pure fright in that cursed moment. The Thing cannot be described. There is no language for such depths of screaming, ancient madness. There are no words for such unearthly contradictions of all matter, force and cosmic order. A mountain walked or stumbled. God! Is it any wonder that a great architect went mad on the other side of the earth? Or that poor Wilcox talked wildly with fever in that telepathic moment? The Thing of the idols, the green, sticky child of the stars, had woken to claim what was his. The stars were right again. An ancient cult had failed to do this on purpose. But a group of innocent sailors had done it by accident. After vigintillions of years great Cthulhu was free again, and hungry for pleasure.

Three men were swept up by the soft, flabby claws before anybody turned. God rest them, if there is any rest in the universe. They were Donovan, Guerrera and Angstrom. The other three rushed wildly over endless stretches of green-crusted rock towards the boat. As they ran, Parker slipped. Johansen swears that an angle of stonework swallowed him up, an angle which should not have been there. It was an acute angle, but it behaved as if it were obtuse. So only Briden and Johansen reached the boat. They rowed desperately for the *Alert*. Meanwhile the mountainous monster flopped down the slimy stones. At the edge of the water it stopped, unsure, and struggled clumsily.

The steam had not been allowed to go down completely, although all the men had gone ashore. So it took only a few moments of feverish rushing between wheel and engines to get the *Alert* moving. Slowly, among the twisted horrors of that scene, she began to stir up the deadly water. No words can describe that scene. Meanwhile the giant Thing from the stars was on the stonework of that shore of death. That shore was not of this earth. There the Thing dribbled and made wild, mad noises, like Polypheme cursing the escaping ship of Odysseus. Then great Cthulhu, braver than the Cyclops of the old story, slid greasily into the water. He began to chase them with huge, wave-raising strokes of cosmic power. Briden looked back and went mad. He laughed shrilly, and he kept on laughing at times until death found him one night in the cabin. At that time Johansen was wandering about in delirium.

But Johansen had not given up yet. He knew that the Thing could surely catch the *Alert* until the steam was fully up. So he decided to take a desperate chance. He set the engine for full speed. Then he ran like lightning up on deck and turned the wheel the other way. There was a mighty swirling and foaming in the disgusting salt water. As the steam rose higher and higher, the brave Norwegian drove his ship straight at the chasing jelly. It rose above the dirty foam like the back of a huge old ship of demons. The awful squid-head with its twisting feelers came almost up to the bowsprit of the strong yacht. But Johansen drove on without stopping.

There was a bursting like an exploding bladder. There was a soft, wet nastiness like a sunfish cut in two. There was a smell like a thousand opened graves. And there was a sound that the writer would not put on paper. For a moment a bitter, burning and blinding green cloud covered the ship. Then there was only a poisonous bubbling behind the ship. And there—God in heaven!—the scattered soft matter of that nameless sky-creature was slowly *recombining*. Like a cloud, it was coming back together into its hateful original shape. But the distance grew every second, as the *Alert* gained speed from its rising steam.

That was all. After that Johansen only sat thinking darkly over the idol in the cabin. He took care of a little food for himself and for the laughing madman beside him. He did not try to steer the ship after that first brave escape. The shock had taken something out of his soul. Then came the storm of April 2nd, and clouds gathered over his mind. There is a feeling of ghostly whirling through liquid depths of infinity. There are dizzy rides through turning universes on a comet's tail. There are wild falls from the pit to the moon, and from the moon back again to the pit. And all of it is filled with a chorus of wild laughter. It comes from the twisted, merry elder gods and the green, bat-winged, mocking little devils of Tartarus.

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

That was the document I read. Now I have placed it in the tin box beside the bas-relief and the papers of Professor Angell. This record of mine will go with it. It is a test of my own sanity. In it I have put together things that I hope no one will ever put together again. I have looked at all the horror that the universe holds. Even the skies of spring and the flowers of summer must always be poison to me now. But I do not think I will live long. As my uncle went, as poor Johansen went, so I will go. I know too much, and the cult still lives.

Cthulhu still lives too, I suppose. He lies again in that chasm of stone which has protected him since the sun was young. His cursed city has sunk once more, for the *Vigilant* sailed over the spot after the April storm. But his servants on earth still shout and dance and kill. They do it around monoliths topped with idols, in lonely places. He must have been trapped by the sinking while he was inside his black depths. If not, the world would by now be screaming with fear and madness. Who knows the end? What has risen may sink, and what has sunk may rise. Disgusting horror waits and dreams in the deep, and decay spreads over the shaking cities of men. A time will come—but I must not and cannot think! Let me pray for one thing, in case I do not survive this manuscript. I pray that my executors will put caution before boldness. And I pray that they will make sure no other eye sees it.

### Glossary

- **derelict**: a ship left without control at sea, with no one steering it.
- **yacht**: a private boat; here a boat with a steam engine.
- **schooner**: a sailing ship with two or more masts.
- **mate**: an officer on a ship under the captain; the "second mate" is the third most important officer.
- **in Tow**: pulled behind another ship.
- **shrine**: a small holy place or box where an idol is kept.
- **Inquiry**: an official investigation; a "court of inquiry" is a court that tries to find out what happened.
- **admiralty**: the official court and offices for matters at sea; the "vice-admiralty court" is one of these courts.
- **Kanakas**: an old word for Pacific Islanders; today it is offensive.
- **half-castes**: an old word for people whose parents are of different races; today it is offensive.
- **hybrid**: here, an old, offensive word for people of mixed race.
- **scum**: a very rude word for people the speaker thinks are worthless; it shows the narrator's prejudice.
- **mongrels**: an old, offensive word for people of mixed race.
- **Lascar**: an old word for a sailor from India or South Asia; today it can be offensive.
- **in ballast**: carrying no cargo, only heavy weight to keep the ship steady.
- **International Date Line**: the line in the Pacific where the date changes; March 1st there was February 28th in America.
- **mastery of dreams**: the power to control people's dreams.
- **cuttlefish**: a sea animal like a small octopus, with many arms around its head.
- **futurism**: a modern art style of the early 1900s, with sharp, broken shapes.
- **non-Euclidean**: not following the normal rules of shapes and space that we learn at school.
- **Acropolis**: a fortress city on a hill.
- **lintel**: the stone or beam across the top of a door; the **threshold** is the stone at the bottom.
- **positive quality**: here, something real that exists, not just an absence of light.
- **telepathic**: passing from mind to mind without words.
- **vigintillions**: an unimaginably huge number.
- **acute**: an acute angle is smaller than 90°; an **obtuse** angle is bigger than 90°.
- **Polypheme**: Polyphemus, the one-eyed giant (Cyclops) in an old Greek story, who curses the escaping ship of Odysseus.
- **bowsprit**: a long pole sticking out from the front of a ship.
- **Tartarus**: the deepest part of the underworld in Greek stories.
- **sanity**: being mentally healthy; the opposite of madness.