The Call of Cthulhu

HP Lovecraft

(Found Among the Papers of the Late

“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 consciousness was manifested, perhaps, in shapes and forms long since withdrawn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 deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.
Theosophists have guessed at the awesome grandeur of the cosmic cycle wherein our world and human
race form transient incidents. They have hinted at strange survivals in terms which would freeze the
blood if not masked by a bland optimism. But it is not from them that there came the single glimpse of
forbidden aeons which chills me when I think of it and maddens me when I dream of it. That glimpse,
like all dread glimpses of truth, flashed out from an accidental piecing together of separated things—in
this case an old newspaper item and the notes of a dead professor. I hope that no one else will
accomplish this piecing out; certainly, if I live, I shall never knowingly supply a link in so hideous a chain. I
think that the professor, too, intended to keep silent regarding the part he knew, and that he would have
destroyed his notes had not sudden death seized him.
My knowledge of the thing began in the winter of 1926–27 with the death of my grand-uncle George
Gammell Angell, Professor Emeritus of Semitic Languages in Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island.
Professor Angell was widely known as an authority on ancient inscriptions, and had frequently been
resorted to by the heads of prominent museums; so that his passing at the age of ninety-two may be
recalled by many. Locally, interest was intensified by the obscurity of the cause of death. The professor
had been stricken whilst returning from the Newport boat; falling suddenly, as witnesses said, after
having been jostled by a nautical-looking negro who had come from one of the queer dark courts on the
precipitous hillside which formed a short cut from the waterfront to the deceased’s home in Williams
Street. Physicians were unable to find any visible disorder, but concluded after perplexed debate that
some obscure lesion of the heart, induced by the brisk ascent of so steep a hill by so elderly a man, was
responsible for the end. At the time I saw no reason to dissent from this dictum, but latterly I am inclined
to wonder—and more than wonder.
As my grand-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 shewing to other eyes. It had been locked, and I did not find the key till it occurred to me to
examine the personal ring which the professor carried always in his pocket. Then indeed I succeeded in
opening it, but when I did so seemed only to be confronted by a greater and more closely locked barrier.
For what could be the meaning of the queer clay bas-relief and the disjointed jottings, ramblings, and
cuttings which I found? Had my uncle, in his latter years, become credulous of the most superficial
impostures? I resolved to search out the eccentric sculptor responsible for this apparent disturbance of
an old man’s peace of mind.
The bas-relief was a rough rectangle less than an inch thick and about five by six inches in area; obviously
of modern origin. Its designs, however, were far from modern in atmosphere and suggestion; for
although the vagaries of cubism and futurism are many and wild, they do not often reproduce that
cryptic regularity which lurks in prehistoric writing. And writing of some kind the bulk of these designs
seemed certainly to be; though my memory, despite much familiarity with the papers and collections of
my uncle, failed in any way to identify this particular species, or even to hint at its remotest affiliations.
Above these apparent hieroglyphics was a figure of evidently pictorial intent, though its impressionistic
execution forbade a very clear idea of its nature. It seemed to be a sort of monster, or symbol
representing a monster, of a form which only a diseased fancy could conceive. If I say that my somewhat
extravagant imagination yielded simultaneous pictures of an octopus, a dragon, and a human caricature,
I shall not be unfaithful to the spirit of the thing. A pulpy, tentacled head surmounted a grotesque and
scaly body with rudimentary wings; but it was the general outline of the whole which made it most
shockingly frightful. Behind the figure was a vague suggestion of a Cyclopean architectural background.
The writing accompanying this oddity was, aside from a stack of press cuttings, in Professor Angell’s most
recent hand; and made no pretence 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. The manuscript was divided into two sections, the first of which was headed “1925—Dream
and Dream Work of H. A. Wilcox, 7 Thomas St., Providence, R.I.”, and the second, “Narrative of Inspector
John R. Legrasse, 121 Bienville St., New Orleans, La., at 1908 A. A. S. Mtg.—Notes on Same, & Prof.
Webb’s Acct.” The other manuscript papers were all brief notes, some of them accounts of the queer
dreams of different persons, some of them citations from theosophical books and magazines (notably W.
Scott-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 illnesses and outbreaks of group folly or mania in the spring of 1925.
The first half of the principal manuscript told a very peculiar tale. It appears that on March 1st, 1925, a
thin, dark young man of neurotic and excited aspect had called upon Professor Angell bearing the
singular clay bas-relief, which was then exceedingly damp and fresh. His card bore the name of Henry
Anthony Wilcox, and my uncle had recognised 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 archaeological knowledge in identifying the hieroglyphics on the bas-relief. He spoke in a
dreamy, stilted manner which suggested pose and alienated sympathy; and my uncle shewed some
sharpness in replying, for the conspicuous freshness of the tablet implied kinship with anything but
archaeology. Young Wilcox’s rejoinder, which impressed my uncle enough to make him recall and record
it verbatim, was of a fantastically poetic cast which must have typified his whole conversation, and which
I have since found highly characteristic of him. He said, “It is new, indeed, for I made it last night in a
dream of strange cities; and dreams are older than brooding Tyre, or the contemplative Sphinx, or
garden-girdled Babylon.”
It was then that he began that rambling tale which suddenly played upon a sleeping memory and won
the fevered interest of my uncle. There had been a slight earthquake tremor the night before, the most
considerable felt in New England for some years; and Wilcox’s imagination had been keenly affected.
Upon retiring, he had had an unprecedented dream of great Cyclopean cities of titan blocks and sky-
flung monoliths, all dripping with green ooze and sinister with latent horror. Hieroglyphics had covered
the walls and pillars, and from some undetermined point below had come a voice that was not a voice; a
chaotic sensation which only fancy could transmute into sound, but which he attempted to render by the
almost unpronounceable jumble of letters, “Cthulhu fhtagn”.
This verbal jumble was the key to the recollection which excited and disturbed Professor Angell. He
questioned the sculptor with scientific minuteness; and studied with almost frantic intensity the bas-
relief on which the youth had found himself working, chilled and clad only in his night-clothes, when
waking had stolen bewilderingly over him. My uncle blamed his old age, Wilcox afterward said, for his
slowness in recognising both hieroglyphics and pictorial design. Many of his questions seemed highly
out-of-place to his visitor, especially those which tried to connect the latter with strange cults or
societies; and Wilcox could not understand the repeated promises of silence which he was offered in
exchange for an admission of membership in some widespread mystical or paganly religious body. When
Professor Angell became convinced that the sculptor was indeed ignorant of any cult or system of cryptic
lore, he besieged his visitor with demands for future reports of dreams. This bore regular fruit, for after
the first interview the manuscript records daily calls of the young man, during which he related startling
fragments of nocturnal imagery whose burden was always some terrible Cyclopean vista of dark and
dripping stone, with a subterrene voice or intelligence shouting monotonously in enigmatical sense-
impacts uninscribable save as gibberish. The two sounds most frequently repeated are those rendered
by the letters “Cthulhu” and “R’lyeh”.
On March 23d, 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 his whole condition was otherwise such as to suggest true fever rather than mental disorder.
On April 2nd at about 3 p.m. every trace of Wilcox’s malady suddenly ceased. He sat upright in bed,
astonished to find himself at home and completely ignorant of what had happened in dream or reality
since the night of March 22nd. Pronounced well by his physician, he returned to his quarters in three
days; but to Professor Angell he was of no further assistance. All traces of strange dreaming had
vanished with his recovery, and my uncle kept no record of his night-thoughts after a week of pointless
and irrelevant accounts of thoroughly usual visions.
Here the first part of the manuscript ended, but references to certain of the scattered notes gave me
much material for thought—so much, in fact, that only the ingrained scepticism then forming my
philosophy can account for my continued distrust of the artist. The notes in question were those
descriptive of the dreams of various persons covering the same period as that in which young Wilcox had
had his strange visitations. My uncle, it seems, had quickly instituted a prodigiously far-flung body of
inquiries amongst nearly all the friends whom he could question without impertinence, asking for nightly
reports of their dreams, and the dates of any notable visions for some time past. The reception of his
request seems to have been varied; but he must, at the very least, have received more responses than
any ordinary man could have handled without a secretary. This original correspondence was not
preserved, but his notes formed a thorough and really significant digest. Average people in society and
business—New England’s traditional “salt of the earth”—gave an almost completely negative result,
though scattered cases of uneasy but formless nocturnal impressions appear here and there, always
between March 23d and April 2nd—the period of young Wilcox’s delirium. Scientific men were little
more affected, though four cases of vague description suggest fugitive glimpses of strange landscapes,
and in one case there is mentioned a dread of something abnormal.
It was from the artists and poets that the pertinent answers came, and I know that panic would have
broken loose had they been able to compare notes. As it was, lacking their original letters, I half
suspected the compiler of having asked leading questions, or of having edited the correspondence in
corroboration of what he had latently resolved to see. That is why I continued to feel that Wilcox,
somehow cognisant of the old data which my uncle had possessed, had been imposing on the veteran
scientist. These responses from aesthetes told a disturbing tale. From February 28th to April 2nd a large
proportion of them had dreamed very bizarre things, the intensity of the dreams being immeasurably
the stronger during the period of the sculptor’s delirium. Over a fourth of those who reported anything,
reported scenes and half-sounds not unlike those which Wilcox had described; and some of the
dreamers confessed acute fear of the gigantic nameless thing visible toward the last. One case, which
the note describes with emphasis, was very sad. The subject, a widely known architect with leanings
toward theosophy and occultism, went violently insane on the date of young Wilcox’s seizure, and
expired several months later after incessant screamings to be saved from some escaped denizen of hell.
Had my uncle referred to these cases by name instead of merely by number, I should have attempted
some corroboration and personal investigation; but as it was, I succeeded in tracing down only a few. All
of these, however, bore out the notes in full. I have often wondered if all the objects of the professor’s
questioning felt as puzzled as did this fraction. It is well that no explanation shall ever reach them.
The press cuttings, as I have intimated, touched on cases of panic, mania, and eccentricity during the
given period. Professor Angell must have employed a cutting bureau, for the number of extracts was
tremendous and the sources scattered throughout the globe. Here was a nocturnal suicide in London,
where a lone sleeper had leaped from a window after a shocking cry. Here likewise a rambling letter to
the editor of a paper in South America, where a fanatic deduces a dire future from visions he has seen. A
despatch from California describes a theosophist colony as donning white robes en masse for some
“glorious fulfilment” which never arrives, whilst items from India speak guardedly of serious native
unrest toward the end of March. Voodoo orgies multiply in Hayti, and African outposts report ominous
mutterings. American officers in the Philippines find certain tribes bothersome about this time, and New
York policemen are mobbed by hysterical Levantines on the night of March 22–23. The west of Ireland,
too, is full of wild rumour and legendry, and a fantastic painter named Ardois-Bonnot hangs a
blasphemous “Dream Landscape” in the Paris spring salon of 1926. And so numerous are the recorded
troubles in insane asylums, that only a miracle can have stopped the medical fraternity from noting
strange parallelisms and drawing mystified conclusions. A weird bunch of cuttings, all told; and I can at
this date scarcely envisage the callous rationalism with which I set them aside. But I was then convinced
that young Wilcox had known of the older matters mentioned by the professor.

II.
The Tale of Inspector Legrasse.

The older matters which had made the sculptor’s dream and bas-relief so significant to my uncle formed
the subject of the second half of his long manuscript. Once before, it appears, Professor Angell had seen
the hellish outlines of the nameless monstrosity, puzzled over the unknown hieroglyphics, and heard the
ominous syllables which can be rendered only as “Cthulhu”; and all this in so stirring and horrible a
connexion that it is small wonder he pursued young Wilcox with queries and demands for data.
The 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 Esquimau 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
the pale undergrowth beyond endless avenues of forest night. Reluctant even to be left alone again,
each one of the cowed squatters refused point-blank to advance another inch toward the scene of
unholy worship, so Inspector Legrasse and his nineteen colleagues plunged on unguided into black
arcades of horror that none of them had ever trod before.
The region now entered by the police was one of traditionally evil repute, substantially unknown and
untraversed by white men. There were legends of a hidden lake unglimpsed by mortal sight, in which
dwelt a huge, formless white polypous thing with luminous eyes; and squatters whispered that bat-
winged devils flew up out of caverns in inner earth to worship it at midnight. They said it had been there
before D’Iberville, before La Salle, before the Indians, and before even the wholesome beasts and birds
of the woods. It was nightmare itself, and to see it was to die. But it made men dream, and so they knew
enough to keep away. The present voodoo orgy was, indeed, on the merest fringe of this abhorred area,
but that location was bad enough; hence perhaps the very place of the worship had terrified the
squatters more than the shocking sounds and incidents.
Only poetry or madness could do justice to the noises heard by Legrasse’s men as they ploughed on
through the black morass toward the red glare and the muffled tom-toms. There are vocal qualities
peculiar to men, and vocal qualities peculiar to beasts; and it is terrible to hear the one when the source
should yield the other. Animal fury and orgiastic licence here whipped themselves to daemoniac heights
by howls and squawking ecstasies that tore and reverberated through those nighted woods like
pestilential tempests from the gulfs of hell. Now and then the less organised 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 with 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 fetichism 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 an immensely aged mestizo named Castro, who claimed to have sailed to
strange ports and talked with undying leaders of the cult in the mountains of China.
Old Castro remembered bits of hideous legend that paled the speculations of theosophists and made
man and the world seem recent and transient indeed. There had been 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 to 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, but 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 small idols which the Great Ones
shewed them; idols brought in dim aeras 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
had 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 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 deserts of Arabia, where Irem, the City of
Pillars, dreams hidden and untouched. It was not allied to the European witch-cult, and was virtually
unknown beyond its members. No book had ever really hinted of it, though the deathless Chinamen said
that there were double meanings in the Necronomicon of the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred which the
initiated might read as they chose, especially the much-discussed couplet:

“That is not dead which can eternal lie,

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 Esquimau 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. When I told him who I was, he displayed some interest; for my uncle had excited
his curiosity in probing his strange dreams, yet had never explained the reason for the study. I did not
enlarge his knowledge in this regard, but sought with some subtlety to draw him out. In a short time I
became convinced of his absolute sincerity, for he spoke of the dreams in a manner none could mistake.
They and their subconscious residuum had influenced his art profoundly, and he shewed me a morbid
statue whose contours almost made me shake with the potency of its black suggestion. He could not
recall having seen the original of this thing except in his own dream bas-relief, but the outlines had
formed themselves insensibly under his hands. It was, no doubt, the giant shape he had raved of in
delirium. That he really knew nothing of the hidden cult, save from what my uncle’s relentless catechism
had let fall, he soon made clear; and again I strove to think of some way in which he could possibly have
received the weird impressions.
He talked of his dreams in a strangely poetic fashion; making me see with terrible vividness the damp
Cyclopean city of slimy green stone—whose geometry, he oddly said, was all wrong—and hear with
frightened expectancy the ceaseless, half-mental calling from underground: “Cthulhu fhtagn”, “Cthulhu
fhtagn”. These words had formed part of that dread ritual which told of dead Cthulhu’s dream-vigil in his
stone vault at R’lyeh, and I felt deeply moved despite my rational beliefs. Wilcox, I was sure, had heard of
the cult in some casual way, and had soon forgotten it amidst the mass of his equally weird reading and
imagining. Later, by virtue of its sheer impressiveness, it had found subconscious expression in dreams,
in the bas-relief, and in the terrible statue I now beheld; so that his imposture upon my uncle had been a
very innocent one. The youth was of a type, at once slightly affected and slightly ill-mannered, which I
could never like; but I was willing enough now to admit both his genius and his honesty. I took leave of
him amicably, and wish him all the success his talent promises.
The matter of the cult still remained to fascinate me, and at times I had visions of personal fame from
researches into its origin and connexions. I visited New Orleans, talked with Legrasse and others of that
old-time raiding-party, saw the frightful image, and even questioned such of the mongrel prisoners as
still survived. Old Castro, unfortunately, had been dead for some years. What I now heard so graphically
at first-hand, though it was really no more than a detailed confirmation of what my uncle had written,
excited me afresh; for I felt sure that I was on the track of a very real, very secret, and very ancient
religion whose discovery would make me an anthropologist of note. My attitude was still one of absolute
materialism, as 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 poison needles as
ruthless and as anciently known as the cryptic rites and beliefs. Legrasse and his men, it is true, have
been let alone; but in Norway a certain seaman who saw things is dead. Might not the deeper inquiries
of my uncle after encountering the sculptor’s data have come to sinister ears? I think Professor Angell
died because he knew too much, or because he was likely to learn too much. Whether I shall go as he
did remains to be seen, for I have learned much now.

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 has wide affiliations in all conceivable foreign
parts; and the picture was a half-tone cut of a hideous stone image almost identical with that which
Legrasse had found in the swamp.
Eagerly clearing the sheet of its precious contents, I scanned the item in detail; and was disappointed to
find it of only moderate length. What it suggested, however, was of portentous significance to my
flagging quest; and I carefully tore it out for immediate action. It read as follows:

MYSTERY DERELICT FOUND AT SEA

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 a foot in height, regarding whose nature authorities at Sydney
University, the Royal Society, and the Museum in College Street all profess complete bafflement, and
which the survivor says he found in the cabin of the yacht, in a small carved shrine of common pattern.
This man, after recovering his senses, told an exceedingly strange story of piracy and slaughter. He is
Gustaf Johansen, a Norwegian of some intelligence, and had been second mate of the two-masted
schooner Emma of Auckland, which sailed for Callao February 20th with a complement of eleven men.
The Emma, he says, was delayed and thrown widely south of her course by the great storm of March 1st,
and on March 22nd, in S. Latitude 49° 51′, W. Longitude 128° 34′, encountered the Alert, manned by a
queer and evil-looking crew of Kanakas and half-castes. Being ordered peremptorily to turn back, Capt.
Collins refused; whereupon the strange crew began to fire savagely and without warning upon the
schooner with a peculiarly heavy battery of brass cannon forming part of the yacht’s equipment. The
Emma’s men shewed fight, says the survivor, and though the schooner began to sink from shots beneath
the waterline they managed to heave alongside their enemy and board her, grappling with the savage
crew on the yacht’s deck, and being forced to kill them all, the number being slightly superior, because of
their particularly abhorrent and desperate though rather clumsy mode of fighting.
Three of the Emma’s men, including Capt. Collins and First Mate Green, were killed; and the remaining
eight under Second Mate Johansen proceeded to navigate the captured yacht, going ahead in their
original direction to see if any reason for their ordering back had existed. The next day, it appears, they
raised and landed on a small island, although none is known to exist in that part of the ocean; and six of
the men somehow died ashore, though Johansen is queerly reticent about this part of his story, and
speaks only of their falling into a rock chasm. Later, it seems, he and one companion boarded the yacht
and tried to manage her, but were beaten about by the storm of April 2nd. From that time till his rescue
on the 12th the man remembers little, and he does not even recall when William Briden, his companion,
died. Briden’s death reveals no apparent cause, and was probably due to excitement or exposure. Cable
advices from Dunedin report that the Alert was well known there as an island trader, and bore an evil
reputation along the waterfront. It was owned by a curious group of half-castes whose frequent
meetings and night trips to the woods attracted no little curiosity; and it had set sail in great haste just
after the storm and earth tremors of March 1st. Our Auckland correspondent gives the Emma and her
crew an excellent reputation, and Johansen is described as a sober and worthy man. The admiralty will
institute an inquiry on the whole matter beginning tomorrow, at which every effort will be made to
induce Johansen to speak more freely than he has done hitherto.

This was all, together with the picture of the hellish image; but what a train of ideas it started in my
mind! Here were new treasuries of data on the Cthulhu Cult, and evidence that it had strange interests
at sea as well as on land. What motive prompted the hybrid crew to order back the Emma as they sailed
about with their hideous idol? What was the unknown island on which six of the Emma’s crew had died,
and about which the mate Johansen was so secretive? What had the vice-admiralty’s investigation
brought out, and what was known of the noxious cult in Dunedin? And most 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—our February 28th according to the International Date Line—the earthquake and storm had
come. From Dunedin the Alert and her noisome crew had darted eagerly forth as if imperiously
summoned, and on the other side of the earth poets and artists had begun to dream of a strange, dank
Cyclopean city whilst a young sculptor had moulded in his sleep the form of the dreaded Cthulhu. March
23d the crew of the Emma landed on an unknown island and left six men dead; and on that date the
dreams of sensitive men assumed a heightened vividness and darkened with dread of a giant monster’s
malign pursuit, whilst an architect had gone mad and a sculptor had lapsed suddenly into delirium! And
what of this storm of April 2nd—the date on which all dreams of the dank city ceased, and Wilcox
emerged unharmed from the bondage of strange fever? What of all this—and of those hints of old
Castro about the sunken, star-born Old Ones and their coming reign; their faithful cult and their mastery
of dreams? Was I tottering on the brink of cosmic horrors beyond man’s power to bear? If so, they must
be horrors of the mind alone, for in some way the second of April had put a stop to whatever monstrous
menace had begun its siege of mankind’s soul.
That evening, after a day of hurried cabling and arranging, I bade my host adieu and took a train for San
Francisco. In less than a month I was in Dunedin; where, however, I found that little was known of the
strange cult-members who had lingered in the old sea-taverns. Waterfront scum was far too common for
special mention; though there was vague talk about one inland trip these mongrels had made, during
which faint drumming and red flame were noted on the distant hills. In Auckland I learned that Johansen
had returned with yellow hair turned white after a perfunctory and inconclusive questioning at Sydney,
and had thereafter sold his cottage in West Street and sailed with his wife to his old home in Oslo. Of his
stirring experience he would tell his friends no more than he had told the admiralty officials, and all they
could do was to give me his Oslo address.
After that I went to Sydney and talked profitlessly with seamen and members of the vice-admiralty court.
I saw the Alert, now sold and in commercial use, at Circular Quay in Sydney Cove, but gained nothing
from its non-committal bulk. The crouching image with its cuttlefish head, dragon body, scaly wings, and
hieroglyphed pedestal, was preserved in the Museum at Hyde Park; and I studied it long and well, finding
it a thing of balefully exquisite workmanship, and with the same utter mystery, terrible antiquity, and
unearthly strangeness of material which I had noted in Legrasse’s smaller specimen. Geologists, the
curator told me, had found it a monstrous puzzle; for they vowed that the world held no rock like it.
Then I thought with a shudder of what old Castro had told Legrasse about the primal Great Ones: “They
had come from the stars, and had brought Their images with Them.”
Shaken with such a mental revolution as I had never before known, I now resolved to visit Mate
Johansen in Oslo. Sailing for London, I reëmbarked 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 survived his return, said his wife, for the doings at sea in 1925 had broken him. He had told
her no more than he had told the public, but had left a long manuscript—of “technical matters” as he
said—written in English, evidently in order to safeguard her from the peril of casual perusal. During a
walk through a narrow lane near the Gothenburg dock, a bundle of papers falling from an attic window
had knocked him down. Two Lascar sailors at once helped him to his feet, but before the ambulance
could reach him he was dead. Physicians found no adequate cause for the end, and laid it to heart
trouble and a weakened constitution.
I now felt gnawing at my vitals that dark terror which will never leave me till I, too, am at rest;
“accidentally” or otherwise. Persuading the widow that my connexion with her husband’s “technical
matters” was sufficient to entitle me to his manuscript, I bore the document away and began to read it
on the London boat. It was a simple, rambling thing—a naive sailor’s effort at a post-facto diary—and
strove to recall day by day that last awful voyage. I cannot attempt to transcribe it verbatim in all its
cloudiness and redundance, but I will tell its gist enough to shew why the sound of the water against the
vessel’s sides became so unendurable to me that I stopped my ears with cotton.
Johansen, thank God, did not know quite all, even though he saw the city and the Thing, but I shall never
sleep calmly again when I think of the horrors that lurk ceaselessly behind life in time and in space, and
of those unhallowed blasphemies from elder stars which dream beneath the sea, known and favoured
by a nightmare cult ready and eager to loose them on the world whenever another earthquake shall
heave their monstrous stone city again to the sun and air.
Johansen’s voyage had begun just as he told it to the vice-admiralty. The Emma, in ballast, had cleared
Auckland on February 20th, and had felt the full force of that earthquake-born tempest which must have
heaved up from the sea-bottom the horrors that filled men’s dreams. Once more under control, the ship
was making good progress when held up by the Alert on March 22nd, and I could feel the mate’s regret
as he wrote of her bombardment and sinking. Of the swarthy cult-fiends on the Alert he speaks with
significant horror. There was some peculiarly abominable quality about them which made their
destruction seem almost a duty, and Johansen shews ingenuous wonder at the charge of ruthlessness
brought against his party during the proceedings of the court of inquiry. Then, driven ahead by curiosity
in their captured yacht under Johansen’s command, the men sight a great stone pillar sticking out of the
sea, and in S. Latitude 47° 9′, W. Longitude 126° 43′ come upon a coast-line 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
mate’s frightened description.
Without knowing what futurism is like, Johansen achieved something very close to it when he spoke of
the city; for instead of describing any definite structure or building, he dwells only on broad impressions
of vast angles and stone surfaces—surfaces too great to belong to any thing right or proper for this
earth, and impious with horrible images and hieroglyphs. I mention his talk about angles because it
suggests something Wilcox had told me of his awful dreams. He had said that the geometry of the
dream-place he saw was abnormal, non-Euclidean, and loathsomely redolent of spheres and dimensions
apart from ours. Now an unlettered seaman felt the same thing whilst gazing at the terrible reality.
Johansen and his men landed at a sloping mud-bank on this monstrous Acropolis, and clambered
slipperily up over titan oozy blocks which could have been no mortal staircase. The very sun of heaven
seemed distorted when viewed through the polarising miasma welling out from this sea-soaked
perversion, and twisted menace and suspense lurked leeringly in those crazily elusive angles of carven
rock where a second glance shewed concavity after the first shewed convexity.
Something very like fright had come over all the explorers before anything more definite than rock and
ooze and weed was seen. Each would have fled had he not feared the scorn of the others, and it was
only half-heartedly that they searched—vainly, as it proved—for some portable souvenir to bear away.
It was Rodriguez the Portuguese who climbed up the foot of the monolith and shouted of what he had
found. The rest followed him, and looked curiously at the immense carved door with the now familiar
squid-dragon bas-relief. It was, Johansen said, like a great barn-door; and they all felt that it was a door
because of the ornate lintel, threshold, and jambs around it, though they could not decide whether it lay
flat like a trap-door or slantwise like an outside cellar-door. As Wilcox would have said, the geometry of
the place was all wrong. One could not be sure that the sea and the ground were horizontal, hence the
relative position of everything else seemed phantasmally variable.
Briden pushed at the stone in several places without result. Then Donovan felt over it delicately around
the edge, pressing each point separately as he went. He climbed interminably along the grotesque stone
moulding—that is, one would call it climbing if the thing was not after all horizontal—and the men
wondered how any door in the universe could be so vast. Then, very softly and slowly, the acre-great
panel began to give inward at the top; and they saw that it was balanced. Donovan slid or somehow
propelled himself down or along the jamb and rejoined his fellows, and everyone watched the queer
recession of the monstrously carven portal. In this 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 arising from the newly opened
depths was intolerable, and at length the quick-eared Hawkins thought he heard a nasty, slopping sound
down there. Everyone listened, and everyone was listening still when It lumbered slobberingly into sight
and gropingly squeezed Its gelatinous green immensity through the black doorway into the tainted
outside air of that poison city of madness.
Poor Johansen’s handwriting almost gave out when he wrote of this. Of the six men who never reached
the ship, he thinks two perished of pure fright in that accursed instant. The Thing 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 Ångstrom. 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 would not put on paper. For an
instant the ship was befouled by an acrid and blinding green cloud, and then there was only a venomous
seething astern; where—God in heaven!—the scattered plasticity of that nameless sky-spawn was
nebulously recombining in its hateful original form, whilst its distance widened every second as the Alert
gained impetus from its mounting steam.
That was all. After that Johansen only brooded over the idol in the cabin and attended to a few matters
of food for himself and the laughing maniac by his side. He did not try to navigate after the first bold
flight, for the reaction had taken something out of his soul. Then came the storm of April 2nd, and a
gathering of the clouds about his consciousness. There is a sense of spectral whirling through liquid gulfs
of infinity, of dizzying rides through reeling universes on a comet’s tail, and of hysterical plunges from the
pit to the moon and from the moon back again to the pit, all livened by a cachinnating chorus of the
distorted, hilarious elder gods and the green, bat-winged mocking imps of Tartarus.
Out of that dream came rescue—the Vigilant, the vice-admiralty court, the streets of Dunedin, and the
long voyage back home to the old house by the Egeberg. He could not tell—they would think him mad.
He would write of what he knew before death came, but his wife must not guess. Death would be a
boon if only it could blot out the memories.
That was the document I read, and now I have placed it in the tin box beside the bas-relief and the
papers of Professor Angell. With it shall go this record of mine—this test of my own sanity, wherein is
pieced together that which I hope may never be pieced together again. I have looked upon all that the
universe has to hold of horror, and even the skies of spring and the flowers of summer must ever
afterward be poison to me. But I do not think my life will be long. As my uncle went, as poor Johansen
went, so I shall go. I know too much, and the cult still lives.
Cthulhu still lives, too, I suppose, again in that chasm of stone which has shielded him since the sun was
young. His accursed city is sunken once more, for the Vigilant sailed over the spot after the April storm;
but his ministers on earth still bellow and prance and slay around idol-capped monoliths in lonely places.
He must have been trapped by the sinking whilst within his black abyss, or else the world would by now
be screaming with fright and frenzy. Who knows the end? What has risen may sink, and what has sunk
may rise. Loathsomeness waits and dreams in the deep, and decay spreads over the tottering cities of
men. A time will come—but I must not and 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.