Out of the Aeons

"Out of the Aeons" is a short story by H. P. Lovecraft and Hazel Heald, a writer from Somerville, Massachusetts. It is one of five stories Lovecraft revised for Heald. It focuses on a Boston museum that displays an ancient mummy recovered from a sunken island.

Plot summary

The story is told from the point of view of the curator of the Cabot Museum in Boston. In 1879, a freighter captain sighted an uncharted island, presumably risen from its sunken state due to volcanic activity. From it, he recovered a strange mummy and a metal cylinder containing a scroll. A year later, the mummy is put on display in the museum, and the island vanishes without a trace.

Over the years, the mummy garners a reputation as a possible link to an ancient tale from the Black Book by Friedrich von Juntz of a man named T'yog, who challenged Ghatanothoa, one of the gods of Yuggoth, using the power of a magical scroll, the work of Great Old Ones opposed to Ghatanothoa. In his sleep, however, one of the cultists stole the true magical scroll and replaced it with a fake one, and T'yog was never seen again. When the possible link to the Black Book and T'yog reaches the general public, the narrator begins to notice more and more suspicious foreigners coming to the museum.