GHOST STORIES

M. R JAMES
 THE FESTIVAL
Efficiut Daemones, ut quae non sunt, sic tamen quasi sint, conspicienda hominibus
exhibeant.

--Lacantius

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

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

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

Then beyond the hill's crest I saw Kingsport outspread frostily in the gloaming; snowy
Kingsport with its ancient vanes and steeples, ridgepoles and chimney-pots, wharves
and small bridges, willow-trees and graveyards; endless labyrinths of steep, narrow,
crooked streets, and dizzy church-crowned central peak that time durst not touch;
ceaseless mazes of colonial houses piled and scattered at all angles and levels like a
child's disordered blocks; antiquity hovering on grey wings over winter-whitened gables
and gambrel roofs; fanlights and small-paned windows one by one gleaming out in the
cold dusk to join Orion and the archaic stars. And against the rotting wharves the sea
pounded; the secretive, immemorial sea out of which the people had come in the elder
time.
Beside the road at its crest a still higher summit rose, bleak and windswept, and I saw
that it was a burying-ground where black gravestones stuck ghoulishly through the
snow like the decayed fingernails of a gigantic corpse. The printless road was very
lonely, and sometimes I thought I heard a distant horrible creaking as of a gibbet in the
wind. They had hanged four kinsmen of mine for witchcraft in 1692, but I did not know
just where.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

THE COLOUR OUT OF SPACE

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The day after that--all this was in June of '82--the professors had trooped out again in a
great excitement. As they passed Ammi's they told him what queer things the specimen
had done, and how it had faded wholly away when they put it in a glass beaker. The
beaker had gone, too, and the wise men talked of the strange stone's affinity for silicon.
It had acted quite unbelievably in that well-ordered laboratory; doing nothing at all and
showing no occluded gases when heated on charcoal, being wholly negative in the
borax bead, and soon proving itself absolutely non-volatile at any producible
temperature, including that of the oxy-hydrogen blowpipe. On an anvil it appeared
highly malleable, and in the dark its luminosity was very marked. Stubbornly refusing
to grow cool, it soon had the college in a state of real excitement; and when upon
heating before the spectroscope it displayed shining bands unlike any known colours of
the normal spectrum there was much breathless talk of new elements, bizarre optical
properties, and other things which puzzled men of science are wont to say when faced
by the unknown.
Hot as it was, they tested it in a crucible with all the proper reagents. Water did nothing.
Hydrochloric acid was the same. Nitric acid and even aqua regia merely hissed and
spattered against its torrid invulnerability. Ammi had difficulty in recalling all these
things, but recognized some solvents as I mentioned them in the usual order of use.
There were ammonia and caustic soda, alcohol and ether, nauseous carbon disulphide
and a dozen others; but although the weight grew steadily less as time passed, and the
fragment seemed to be slightly cooling, there was no change in the solvents to show that
they had attacked the substance at all. It was a metal, though, beyond a doubt. It was
magnetic, for one thing; and after its immersion in the acid solvents there seemed to be
faint traces of the Widmanstatten figures found on meteoric iron. When the cooling had
grown very considerable, the testing was carried on in glass; and it was in a glass beaker
that they left all the chips made of the original fragment during the work. The next
morning both chips and beaker were gone without trace, and only a charred spot marked
the place on the wooden shelf where they had been.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Winter came early, and was very cold. Ammi saw Nahum less often than usual, and
observed that he had begun to look worried. The rest of his family too, seemed to have
grown taciturn; and were far from steady in their church-going or their attendance at the
various social events of the countryside. For this reserve or melancholy no cause could
be found, though all the household confessed now and then to poorer health and a
feeling of vague disquiet. Nahum himself gave the most definite statement of anyone
when he said he was disturbed about certain footprints in the snow. They were the usual
winter prints of red squirrels, white rabbits, and foxes, but the brooding farmer
professed to see something not quite right about their nature and arrangement. He was
never specific, but appeared to think that they were not as characteristic of the anatomy
and habits of squirrels and rabbits and foxes as they ought to be. Ammi listened without
interest to this talk until one night when he drove past Nahum's house in his sleigh on
the way back from Clark's Comer. There had been a moon, and a rabbit had run across
the road, and the leaps of that rabbit were longer than either Ammi or his horse liked.
The latter, indeed, had almost run away when brought up by a firm rein. Thereafter
Ammi gave Nahum's tales more respect, and wondered why the Gardner dogs seemed
so cowed and quivering every morning. They had, it developed, nearly lost the spirit to
bark.
In February the McGregor boys from Meadow Hill were out shooting woodchucks, and
not far from the Gardner place bagged a very peculiar specimen. The proportions of its
body seemed slightly altered in a queer way impossible to describe, while its face had
taken on an expression which no one ever saw in a woodchuck before. The boys were
genuinely frightened, and threw the thing away at once, so that only their grotesque
tales of it ever reached the people of the countryside. But the shying of horses near
Nahum's house had now become an acknowledged thing, and all the basis for a cycle of
whispered legend was fast taking form.

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

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

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

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

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

The grass had so far seemed untouched, and the cows were freely pastured in the lot
near the house, but toward the end of May the milk began to be bad. Then Nahum had
the cows driven to the uplands, after which this trouble ceased. Not long after this the
change in grass and leaves became apparent to the eye. All the verdure was going grey,
and was developing a highly singular quality of brittleness. Ammi was now the only
person who ever visited the place, and his visits were becoming fewer and fewer. When
school closed the Gardners were virtually cut off from the world, and sometimes let
Ammi do their errands in town. They were failing curiously both physically and
mentally, and no one was surprised when the news of Mrs. Gardner's madness stole
around.
It happened in June, about the anniversary of the meteor's fall, and the poor woman
screamed about things in the air which she could not describe. In her raving there was
not a single specific noun, but only verbs and pronouns. Things moved and changed and
fluttered, and ears tingled to impulses which were not wholly sounds. Something was
taken away--she was being drained of something--something was fastening itself on her
that ought not to be--someone must make it keep off--nothing was ever still in the night-
-the walls and windows shifted. Nahum did not send her to the county asylum, but let
her wander about the house as long as she was harmless to herself and others. Even
when her expression changed he did nothing. But when the boys grew afraid of her, and
Thaddeus nearly fainted at the way she made faces at him, he decided to keep her
locked in the attic. By July she had ceased to speak and crawled on all fours, and before
that month was over Nahum got the mad notion that she was slightly luminous in the
dark, as he now clearly saw was the case with the nearby vegetation.

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

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

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

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

On the nineteenth of October Nahum staggered into Ammi's house with hideous news.
The death had come to poor Thaddeus in his attic room, and it had come in a way which
could not be told. Nahum had dug a grave in the railed family plot behind the farm, and
had put therein what he found. There could have been nothing from outside, for the
small barred window and locked door were intact; but it was much as it had been in the
barn. Ammi and his wife consoled the stricken man as best they could, but shuddered as
they did so. Stark terror seemed to cling round the Gardners and all they touched, and
the very presence of one in the house was a breath from regions unnamed and
unnamable. Ammi accompanied Nahum home with the greatest reluctance, and did
what he might to calm the hysterical sobbing of little Merwin. Zenas needed no
calming. He had come of late to do nothing but stare into space and obey what his father
told him; and Ammi thought that his fate was very merciful. Now and then Merwin's
screams were answered faintly from the attic, and in response to an inquiring look
Nahum said that his wife was getting very feeble. When night approached, Ammi
managed to get away; for not even friendship could make him stay in that spot when the
faint glow of the vegetation began and the trees may or may not have swayed without
wind. It was really lucky for Ammi that he was not more imaginative. Even as things
were, his mind was bent ever so slightly; but had he been able to connect and reflect
upon all the portents around him he must inevitably have turned a total maniac. In the
twilight he hastened home, the screams of the mad woman and the nervous child ringing
horribly in his ears.
Three days later Nahum burst into Ammi's kitchen in the early morning, and in the
absence of his host stammered out a desperate tale once more, while Mrs. Pierce
listened in a clutching fright. It was little Merwin this time. He was gone. He had gone
out late at night with a lantern and pail for water, and had never come back. He'd been
going to pieces for days, and hardly knew what he was about. Screamed at everything.
There had been a frantic shriek from the yard then, but before the father could get to the
door the boy was gone. There was no glow from the lantern he had taken, and of the
child himself no trace. At the time Nahum thought the lantern and pail were gone too;
but when dawn came, and the man had plodded back from his all-night search of the
woods and fields, he had found some very curious things near the well. There was a
crushed and apparently somewhat melted mass of iron which had certainly been the
lantern; while a bent handle and twisted iron hoops beside it, both half-fused, seemed to
hint at the remnants of the pail. That was all. Nahum was past imagining, Mrs. Pierce
was blank, and Ammi, when he had reached home and heard the tale, could give no
guess. Merwin was gone, and there would be no use in telling the people around, who
shunned all Gardners now. No use, either, in telling the city people at Arkham who
laughed at everything. Thad was gone, and now Merwin was gone. Something was
creeping and creeping and waiting to be seen and heard. Nahum would go soon, and he
wanted Ammi to look after his wife and Zenas if they survived him. It must all be a
judgment of some sort; though he could not fancy what for, since he had always walked
uprightly in the Lord's ways so far as he knew.

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

Questioning tactfully, Ammi could get no clear data at all about the missing Zenas. "In
the well--he lives in the well--" was all that the clouded father would say. Then there
flashed across the visitor's mind a sudden thought of the mad wife, and he changed his
line of inquiry. "Nabby? Why, here she is!" was the surprised response of poor Nahum,
and Ammi soon saw that he must search for himself. Leaving the harmless babbler on
the couch, he took the keys from their nail beside the door and climbed the creaking
stairs to the attic. It was very close and noisome up there, and no sound could be heard
from any direction. Of the four doors in sight, only one was locked, and on this he tried
various keys of the ring he had taken. The third key proved the right one, and after some
fumbling Ammi threw open the low white door.
It was quite dark inside, for the window was small and half-obscured by the crude
wooden bars; and Ammi could see nothing at all on the wide-planked floor. The stench
was beyond enduring, and before proceeding further he had to retreat to another room
and return with his lungs filled with breathable air. When he did enter he saw something
dark in the corner, and upon seeing it more clearly he screamed outright. While he
screamed he thought a momentary cloud eclipsed the window, and a second later he felt
himself brushed as if by some hateful current of vapour. Strange colours danced before
his eyes; and had not a present horror numbed him he would have thought of the
globule in the meteor that the geologist's hammer had shattered, and of the morbid
vegetation that had sprouted in the spring. As it was he thought only of the blasphemous
monstrosity which confronted him, and which all too clearly had shared the nameless
fate of young Thaddeus and the livestock. But the terrible thing about the horror was
that it very slowly and perceptibly moved as it continued to crumble.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The shock served to loosen several tongues, and embarrassed whispers were exchanged.
"It spreads on everything organic that's been around here," muttered the medical
examiner. No one replied, but the man who had been in the well gave a hint that his
long pole must have stirred up something intangible. "It was awful," he added. "There
was no bottom at all. Just ooze and bubbles and the feeling of something lurking under
there." Ammi's horse still pawed and screamed deafeningly in the road outside, and
nearly drowned its owner's faint quaver as he mumbled his formless reflections. "It
come from that stone--it growed down thar--it got everything livin'--it fed itself on 'em,
mind and body--Thad an' Merwin, Zenas an' Nabby--Nahum was the last--they all
drunk the water--it got strong on 'em--it come from beyond, whar things ain't like they
be here--now it's goin' home--"
At this point, as the column of unknown colour flared suddenly stronger and began to
weave itself into fantastic suggestions of shape which each spectator described
differently, there came from poor tethered Hero such a sound as no man before or since
ever heard from a horse. Every person in that low-pitched sitting room stopped his ears,
and Ammi turned away from the window in horror and nausea. Words could not convey
it--when Ammi looked out again the hapless beast lay huddled inert on the moonlit
ground between the splintered shafts of the buggy. That was the last of Hero till they
buried him next day. But the present was no time to mourn, for almost at this instant a
detective silently called attention to something terrible in the very room with them. In
the absence of the lamplight it was clear that a faint phosphorescence had begun to
pervade the entire apartment. It glowed on the broad-planked floor and the fragment of
rag carpet, and shimmered over the sashes of the small-paned windows. It ran up and
down the exposed corner-posts, coruscated about the shelf and mantel, and infected the
very doors and furniture. Each minute saw it strengthen, and at last it was very plain
that healthy living things must leave that house.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

THE CALL OF CTHULHU

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

--Algernon Blackwood
I. The Horror In Clay

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

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

My knowledge of the thing began in the winter of 1926-27 with the death of my great-
uncle, George Gammell Angell, Professor Emeritus of Semitic Languages in Brown
University, Providence, Rhode Island. Professor Angell was widely known as an
authority on ancient inscriptions, and had frequently been resorted to by the heads of
prominent museums; so that his passing at the age of ninety-two may be recalled by
many. Locally, interest was intensified by the obscurity of the cause of death. The
professor had been stricken whilst returning from the Newport boat; falling suddenly; as
witnesses said, after having been jostled by a nautical-looking negro who had come
from one of the queer dark courts on the precipitous hillside which formed a short cut
from the waterfront to the deceased's home in Williams Street. Physicians were unable
to find any visible disorder, but concluded after perplexed debate that some obscure
lesion of the heart, induced by the brisk ascent of so steep a hill by so elderly a man,
was responsible for the end. At the time I saw no reason to dissent from this dictum, but
latterly I am inclined to wonder--and more than wonder.

As my great-uncle's heir and executor, for he died a childless widower, I was expected
to go over his papers with some thoroughness; and for that purpose moved his entire set
of files and boxes to my quarters in Boston. Much of the material which I correlated
will be later published by the American Archaeological Society, but there was one box
which I found exceedingly puzzling, and which I felt much averse from showing to
other eyes. It had been locked and I did not find the key till it occurred to me to examine
the personal ring which the professor carried in his pocket. Then, indeed, I succeeded in
opening it, but when I did so seemed only to be confronted by a greater and more
closely locked barrier. For what could be the meaning of the queer clay bas-relief and
the disjointed jottings, ramblings, and cuttings which I found? Had my uncle, in his
latter years become credulous of the most superficial impostures? I resolved to search
out the eccentric sculptor responsible for this apparent disturbance of an old man's peace
of mind.
The bas-relief was a rough rectangle less than an inch thick and about five by six inches
in area; obviously of modern origin. Its designs, however, were far from modern in
atmosphere and suggestion; for, although the vagaries of cubism and futurism are many
and wild, they do not often reproduce that cryptic regularity which lurks in prehistoric
writing. And writing of some kind the bulk of these designs seemed certainly to be;
though my memory, despite much the papers and collections of my uncle, failed in any
way to identify this particular species, or even hint at its remotest affiliations.

Above these apparent hieroglyphics was a figure of evident pictorial intent, though its
impressionistic execution forbade a very clear idea of its nature. It seemed to be a sort
of monster, or symbol representing a monster, of a form which only a diseased fancy
could conceive. If I say that my somewhat extravagant imagination yielded
simultaneous pictures of an octopus, a dragon, and a human caricature, I shall not be
unfaithful to the spirit of the thing. A pulpy, tentacled head surmounted a grotesque and
scaly body with rudimentary wings; but it was the general outline of the whole which
made it most shockingly frightful. Behind the figure was a vague suggestions of a
Cyclopean architectural background.

The writing accompanying this oddity was, aside from a stack of press cuttings, in
Professor Angell's most recent hand; and made no pretense to literary style. What
seemed to be the main document was headed "CTHULHU CULT" in characters
painstakingly printed to avoid the erroneous reading of a word so unheard-of. This
manuscript was divided into two sections, the first of which was headed "1925--Dream
and Dream Work of H.A. Wilcox, 7 Thomas St., Providence, R. I.", and the second,
"Narrative of Inspector John R. Legrasse, 121 Bienville St., New Orleans, La., at 1908
A. A. S. Mtg.--Notes on Same, & Prof. Webb's Acct." The other manuscript papers
were brief notes, some of them accounts of the queer dreams of different persons, some
of them citations from theosophical books and magazines (notably W. Scott-Elliot's
Atlantis and the Lost Lemuria), and the rest comments on long-surviving secret
societies and hidden cults, with references to passages in such mythological and
anthropological source-books as Frazer's Golden Bough and Miss Murray's Witch-Cult
in Western Europe. The cuttings largely alluded to outré mental illness and outbreaks of
group folly or mania in the spring of 1925.

The first half of the principal manuscript told a very particular tale. It appears that on
March 1st, 1925, a thin, dark young man of neurotic and excited aspect had called upon
Professor Angell bearing the singular clay bas-relief, which was then exceedingly damp
and fresh. His card bore the name of Henry Anthony Wilcox, and my uncle had
recognized him as the youngest son of an excellent family slightly known to him, who
had latterly been studying sculpture at the Rhode Island School of Design and living
alone at the Fleur-de-Lys Building near that institution. Wilcox was a precocious youth
of known genius but great eccentricity, and had from childhood excited attention
through the strange stories and odd dreams he was in the habit of relating. He called
himself "psychically hypersensitive", but the staid folk of the ancient commercial city
dismissed him as merely "queer." Never mingling much with his kind, he had dropped
gradually from social visibility, and was now known only to a small group of aesthetes
from other towns. Even the Providence Art Club, anxious to preserve its conservatism,
had found him quite hopeless.
On the occasion of the visit, ran the professor's manuscript, the sculptor abruptly asked
for the benefit of his host's archeological knowledge in identifying the hieroglyphics of
the bas-relief. He spoke in a dreamy, stilted manner which suggested pose and alienated
sympathy; and my uncle showed some sharpness in replying, for the conspicuous
freshness of the tablet implied kinship with anything but archeology. Young Wilcox's
rejoinder, which impressed my uncle enough to make him recall and record it verbatim,
was of a fantastically poetic cast which must have typified his whole conversation, and
which I have since found highly characteristic of him. He said, "It is new, indeed, for I
made it last night in a dream of strange cities; and dreams are older than brooding Tyre,
or the contemplative Sphinx, or garden-girdled Babylon."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

II. The Tale of Inspector Legrasse

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

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

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

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

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

And yet, as the members severally shook their heads and confessed defeat at the
Inspector's problem, there was one man in that gathering who suspected a touch of
bizarre familiarity in the monstrous shape and writing, and who presently told with
some diffidence of the odd trifle he knew. This person was the late William Channing
Webb, Professor of Anthropology in Princeton University, and an explorer of no slight
note. Professor Webb had been engaged, forty-eight years before, in a tour of Greenland
and Iceland in search of some Runic inscriptions which he failed to unearth; and whilst
high up on the West Greenland coast had encountered a singular tribe or cult of
degenerate Esquimaux whose religion, a curious form of devil-worship, chilled him
with its deliberate bloodthirstiness and repulsiveness. It was a faith of which other
Esquimaux knew little, and which they mentioned only with shudders, saying that it had
come down from horribly ancient aeons before ever the world was made. Besides
nameless rites and human sacrifices there were certain queer hereditary rituals
addressed to a supreme elder devil or tornasuk; and of this Professor Webb had taken a
careful phonetic copy from an aged angekok or wizard-priest, expressing the sounds in
Roman letters as best he knew how. But just now of prime significance was the fetish
which this cult had cherished, and around which they danced when the aurora leaped
high over the ice cliffs. It was, the professor stated, a very crude bas-relief of stone,
comprising a hideous picture and some cryptic writing. And so far as he could tell, it
was a rough parallel in all essential features of the bestial thing now lying before the
meeting.

This data, received with suspense and astonishment by the assembled members, proved
doubly exciting to Inspector Legrasse; and he began at once to ply his informant with
questions. Having noted and copied an oral ritual among the swamp cult-worshippers
his men had arrested, he besought the professor to remember as best he might the
syllables taken down amongst the diabolist Esquimaux. There then followed an
exhaustive comparison of details, and a moment of really awed silence when both
detective and scientist agreed on the virtual identity of the phrase common to two
hellish rituals so many worlds of distance apart. What, in substance, both the
Esquimaux wizards and the Louisiana swamp-priests had chanted to their kindred idols
was something very like this: the word-divisions being guessed at from traditional
breaks in the phrase as chanted aloud:

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

Legrasse had one point in advance of Professor Webb, for several among his mongrel
prisoners had repeated to him what older celebrants had told them the words meant.
This text, as given, ran something like this:

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

And now, in response to a general and urgent demand, Inspector Legrasse related as
fully as possible his experience with the swamp worshippers; telling a story to which I
could see my uncle attached profound significance. It savoured of the wildest dreams of
myth-maker and theosophist, and disclosed an astonishing degree of cosmic imagination
among such half-castes and pariahs as might be least expected to possess it.

On November 1st, 1907, there had come to the New Orleans police a frantic summons
from the swamp and lagoon country to the south. The squatters there, mostly primitive
but good-natured descendants of Lafitte's men, were in the grip of stark terror from an
unknown thing which had stolen upon them in the night. It was voodoo, apparently, but
voodoo of a more terrible sort than they had ever known; and some of their women and
children had disappeared since the malevolent tom-tom had begun its incessant beating
far within the black haunted woods where no dweller ventured. There were insane
shouts and harrowing screams, soul-chilling chants and dancing devil-flames; and, the
frightened messenger added, the people could stand it no more.

So a body of twenty police, filling two carriages and an automobile, had set out in the
late afternoon with the shivering squatter as a guide. At the end of the passable road
they alighted, and for miles splashed on in silence through the terrible cypress woods
where day never came. Ugly roots and malignant hanging nooses of Spanish moss beset
them, and now and then a pile of dank stones or fragment of a rotting wall intensified by
its hint of morbid habitation a depression which every malformed tree and every
fungous islet combined to create. At length the squatter settlement, a miserable huddle
of huts, hove in sight; and hysterical dwellers ran out to cluster around the group of
bobbing lanterns. The muffled beat of tom-toms was now faintly audible far, far ahead;
and a curdling shriek came at infrequent intervals when the wind shifted. A reddish
glare, too, seemed to filter through pale undergrowth beyond the endless avenues of
forest night. Reluctant even to be left alone again, each one of the cowed squatters
refused point-blank to advance another inch toward the scene of unholy worship, so
Inspector Legrasse and his nineteen colleagues plunged on unguided into black arcades
of horror that none of them had ever trod before.

The region now entered by the police was one of traditionally evil repute, substantially
unknown and untraversed by white men. There were legends of a hidden lake
unglimpsed by mortal sight, in which dwelt a huge, formless white polypous thing with
luminous eyes; and squatters whispered that bat-winged devils flew up out of caverns in
inner earth to worship it at midnight. They said it had been there before D'Iberville,
before La Salle, before the Indians, and before even the wholesome beasts and birds of
the woods. It was nightmare itself, and to see it was to die. But it made men dream, and
so they knew enough to keep away. The present voodoo orgy was, indeed, on the merest
fringe of this abhorred area, but that location was bad enough; hence perhaps the very
place of the worship had terrified the squatters more than the shocking sounds and
incidents.

Only poetry or madness could do justice to the noises heard by Legrasse's men as they
ploughed on through the black morass toward the red glare and muffled tom-toms.
There are vocal qualities peculiar to men, and vocal qualities peculiar to beasts; and it is
terrible to hear the one when the source should yield the other. Animal fury and
orgiastic license here whipped themselves to daemoniac heights by howls and
squawking ecstacies that tore and reverberated through those nighted woods like
pestilential tempests from the gulfs of hell. Now and then the less organized ululation
would cease, and from what seemed a well-drilled chorus of hoarse voices would rise in
sing-song chant that hideous phrase or ritual:

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

Then the men, having reached a spot where the trees were thinner, came suddenly in
sight of the spectacle itself. Four of them reeled, one fainted, and two were shaken into
a frantic cry which the mad cacophony of the orgy fortunately deadened. Legrasse
dashed swamp water on the face of the fainting man, and all stood trembling and nearly
hypnotised with horror.
In a natural glade of the swamp stood a grassy island of perhaps an acre's extent, clear
of trees and tolerably dry. On this now leaped and twisted a more indescribable horde of
human abnormality than any but a Sime or an Angarola could paint. Void of clothing,
this hybrid spawn were braying, bellowing, and writhing about a monstrous ring-shaped
bonfire; in the centre of which, revealed by occasional rifts in the curtain of flame, stood
a great granite monolith some eight feet in height; on top of which, incongruous in its
diminutiveness, rested the noxious carven statuette. From a wide circle of ten scaffolds
set up at regular intervals with the flame-girt monolith as a centre hung, head
downward, the oddly marred bodies of the helpless squatters who had disappeared. It
was inside this circle that the ring of worshippers jumped and roared, the general
direction of the mass motion being from left to right in endless Bacchanal between the
ring of bodies and the ring of fire.

It may have been only imagination and it may have been only echoes which induced
one of the men, an excitable Spaniard, to fancy he heard antiphonal responses to the
ritual from some far and unillumined spot deeper within the wood of ancient legendry
and horror. This man, Joseph D. Galvez, I later met and questioned; and he proved
distractingly imaginative. He indeed went so far as to hint of the faint beating of great
wings, and of a glimpse of shining eyes and a mountainous white bulk beyond the
remotest trees but I suppose he had been hearing too much native superstition.

Actually, the horrified pause of the men was of comparatively brief duration. Duty came
first; and although there must have been nearly a hundred mongrel celebrants in the
throng, the police relied on their firearms and plunged determinedly into the nauseous
rout. For five minutes the resultant din and chaos were beyond description. Wild blows
were struck, shots were fired, and escapes were made; but in the end Legrasse was able
to count some forty-seven sullen prisoners, whom he forced to dress in haste and fall
into line between two rows of policemen. Five of the worshippers lay dead, and two
severely wounded ones were carried away on improvised stretchers by their fellow-
prisoners. The image on the monolith, of course, was carefully removed and carried
back by Legrasse.

Examined at headquarters after a trip of intense strain and weariness, the prisoners all
proved to be men of a very low, mixed-blooded, and mentally aberrant type. Most were
seamen, and a sprinkling of Negroes and mulattoes, largely West Indians or Brava
Portuguese from the Cape Verde Islands, gave a colouring of voodooism to the
heterogeneous cult. But before many questions were asked, it became manifest that
something far deeper and older than Negro fetishism was involved. Degraded and
ignorant as they were, the creatures held with surprising consistency to the central idea
of their loathsome faith.

They worshipped, so they said, the Great Old Ones who lived ages before there were
any men, and who came to the young world out of the sky. Those Old Ones were gone
now, inside the earth and under the sea; but their dead bodies had told their secrets in
dreams to the first men, who formed a cult which had never died. This was that cult, and
the prisoners said it had always existed and always would exist, hidden in distant wastes
and dark places all over the world until the time when the great priest Cthulhu, from his
dark house in the mighty city of R'lyeh under the waters, should rise and bring the earth
again beneath his sway. Some day he would call, when the stars were ready, and the
secret cult would always be waiting to liberate him.
Meanwhile no more must be told. There was a secret which even torture could not
extract. Mankind was not absolutely alone among the conscious things of earth, for
shapes came out of the dark to visit the faithful few. But these were not the Great Old
Ones. No man had ever seen the Old Ones. The carven idol was great Cthulhu, but none
might say whether or not the others were precisely like him. No one could read the old
writing now, but things were told by word of mouth. The chanted ritual was not the
secret--that was never spoken aloud, only whispered. The chant meant only this: "In his
house at R'lyeh dead Cthulhu waits dreaming."

Only two of the prisoners were found sane enough to be hanged, and the rest were
committed to various institutions. All denied a part in the ritual murders, and averred
that the killing had been done by Black Winged Ones which had come to them from
their immemorial meeting-place in the haunted wood. But of those mysterious allies no
coherent account could ever be gained. What the police did extract, came mainly from
the immensely aged mestizo named Castro, who claimed to have sailed to strange ports
and talked with undying leaders of the cult in the mountains of China.

Old Castro remembered bits of hideous legend that paled the speculations of
theosophists and made man and the world seem recent and transient indeed. There had
been aeons when other Things ruled on the earth, and They had had great cities.
Remains of Them, he said the deathless Chinamen had told him, were still be found as
Cyclopean stones on islands in the Pacific. They all died vast epochs of time before men
came, but there were arts which could revive Them when the stars had come round
again to the right positions in the cycle of eternity. They had, indeed, come themselves
from the stars, and brought Their images with Them.

These Great Old Ones, Castro continued, were not composed altogether of flesh and
blood. They had shape--for did not this star-fashioned image prove it?--but that shape
was not made of matter. When the stars were right, They could plunge from world to
world through the sky; but when the stars were wrong, They could not live. But
although They no longer lived, They would never really die. They all lay in stone
houses in Their great city of R'lyeh, preserved by the spells of mighty Cthulhu for a
glorious resurrection when the stars and the earth might once more be ready for Them.
But at that time some force from outside must serve to liberate Their bodies. The spells
that preserved them intact likewise prevented Them from making an initial move, and
They could only lie awake in the dark and think whilst uncounted millions of years
rolled by. They knew all that was occurring in the universe, for Their mode of speech
was transmitted thought. Even now They talked in Their tombs. When, after infinities of
chaos, the first men came, the Great Old Ones spoke to the sensitive among them by
moulding their dreams; for only thus could Their language reach the fleshly minds of
mammals.

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

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

That is not dead which can eternal lie,

And with strange aeons even death may die.

Legrasse, deeply impressed and not a little bewildered, had inquired in vain concerning
the historic affiliations of the cult. Castro, apparently, had told the truth when he said
that it was wholly secret. The authorities at Tulane University could shed no light upon
either cult or image, and now the detective had come to the highest authorities in the
country and met with no more than the Greenland tale of Professor Webb.

The feverish interest aroused at the meeting by Legrasse's tale, corroborated as it was by
the statuette, is echoed in the subsequent correspondence of those who attended;
although scant mention occurs in the formal publications of the society. Caution is the
first care of those accustomed to face occasional charlatanry and imposture. Legrasse
for some time lent the image to Professor Webb, but at the latter's death it was returned
to him and remains in his possession, where I viewed it not long ago. It is truly a terrible
thing, and unmistakably akin to the dream-sculpture of young Wilcox.

That my uncle was excited by the tale of the sculptor I did not wonder, for what
thoughts must arise upon hearing, after a knowledge of what Legrasse had learned of
the cult, of a sensitive young man who had dreamed not only the figure and exact
hieroglyphics of the swamp-found image and the Greenland devil tablet, but had come
in his dreams upon at least three of the precise words of the formula uttered alike by
Esquimaux diabolists and mongrel Louisianans? Professor Angell's instant start on an
investigation of the utmost thoroughness was eminently natural; though privately I
suspected young Wilcox of having heard of the cult in some indirect way, and of having
invented a series of dreams to heighten and continue the mystery at my uncle's expense.
The dream-narratives and cuttings collected by the professor were, of course, strong
corroboration; but the rationalism of my mind and the extravagance of the whole subject
led me to adopt what I thought the most sensible conclusions. So, after thoroughly
studying the manuscript again and correlating the theosophical and anthropological
notes with the cult narrative of Legrasse, I made a trip to Providence to see the sculptor
and give him the rebuke I thought proper for so boldly imposing upon a learned and
aged man.

Wilcox still lived alone in the Fleur-de-Lys Building in Thomas Street, a hideous
Victorian imitation of seventeenth century Breton Architecture which flaunts its
stuccoed front amidst the lovely colonial houses on the ancient hill, and under the very
shadow of the finest Georgian steeple in America, I found him at work in his rooms,
and at once conceded from the specimens scattered about that his genius is indeed
profound and authentic. He will, I believe, some time be heard from as one of the great
decadents; for he has crystallised in clay and will one day mirror in marble those
nightmares and phantasies which Arthur Machen evokes in prose, and Clark Ashton
Smith makes visible in verse and in painting.

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

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

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

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

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

III. The Madness from the Sea

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

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

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

MYSTERY DERELICT FOUND AT SEA

Vigilant Arrives With Helpless Armed New Zealand Yacht in Tow. One Survivor and
Dead Man Found Aboard. Tale of Desperate Battle and Deaths at Sea. Rescued Seaman
Refuses Particulars of Strange Experience. Odd Idol Found in His Possession. Inquiry
to Follow.
The Morrison Co.'s freighter Vigilant, bound from Valparaiso, arrived this morning at
its wharf in Darling Harbour, having in tow the battled and disabled but heavily armed
steam yacht Alert of Dunedin, N.Z., which was sighted April 12th in S. Latitude 34°21',
W. Longitude 152°17', with one living and one dead man aboard.

The Vigilant left Valparaiso March 25th, and on April 2nd was driven considerably
south of her course by exceptionally heavy storms and monster waves. On April 12th
the derelict was sighted; and though apparently deserted, was found upon boarding to
contain one survivor in a half-delirious condition and one man who had evidently been
dead for more than a week. The living man was clutching a horrible stone idol of
unknown origin, about foot in height, regarding whose nature authorities at Sydney
University, the Royal Society, and the Museum in College Street all profess complete
bafflement, and which the survivor says he found in the cabin of the yacht, in a small
carved shrine of common pattern.

This man, after recovering his senses, told an exceedingly strange story of piracy and
slaughter. He is Gustaf Johansen, a Norwegian of some intelligence, and had been
second mate of the two-masted schooner Emma of Auckland, which sailed for Callao
February 20th with a complement of eleven men. The Emma, he says, was delayed and
thrown widely south of her course by the great storm of March 1st, and on March 22nd,
in S. Latitude 49°51' W. Longitude 128°34', encountered the Alert, manned by a queer
and evil-looking crew of Kanakas and half-castes. Being ordered peremptorily to turn
back, Capt. Collins refused; whereupon the strange crew began to fire savagely and
without warning upon the schooner with a peculiarly heavy battery of brass cannon
forming part of the yacht's equipment. The Emma's men showed fight, says the
survivor, and though the schooner began to sink from shots beneath the water-line they
managed to heave alongside their enemy and board her, grappling with the savage crew
on the yacht's deck, and being forced to kill them all, the number being slightly
superior, because of their particularly abhorrent and desperate though rather clumsy
mode of fighting.

Three of the Emma's men, including Capt. Collins and First Mate Green, were killed;
and the remaining eight under Second Mate Johansen proceeded to navigate the
captured yacht, going ahead in their original direction to see if any reason for their
ordering back had existed. The next day, it appears, they raised and landed on a small
island, although none is known to exist in that part of the ocean; and six of the men
somehow died ashore, though Johansen is queerly reticent about this part of his story,
and speaks only of their falling into a rock chasm. Later, it seems, he and one
companion boarded the yacht and tried to manage her, but were beaten about by the
storm of April 2nd, From that time till his rescue on the 12th the man remembers little,
and he does not even recall when William Briden, his companion, died. Briden's death
reveals no apparent cause, and was probably due to excitement or exposure. Cable
advices from Dunedin report that the Alert was well known there as an island trader,
and bore an evil reputation along the waterfront, It was owned by a curious group of
half-castes whose frequent meetings and night trips to the woods attracted no little
curiosity; and it had set sail in great haste just after the storm and earth tremors of
March 1st. Our Auckland correspondent gives the Emma and her crew an excellent
reputation, and Johansen is described as a sober and worthy man. The admiralty will
institute an inquiry on the whole matter beginning tomorrow, at which every effort will
be made to induce Johansen to speak more freely than he has done hitherto.
This was all, together with the picture of the hellish image; but what a train of ideas it
started in my mind! Here were new treasuries of data on the Cthulhu Cult, and evidence
that it had strange interests at sea as well as on land. What motive prompted the hybrid
crew to order back the Emma as they sailed about with their hideous idol? What was the
unknown island on which six of the Emma's crew had died, and about which the mate
Johansen was so secretive? What had the vice-admiralty's investigation brought out, and
what was known of the noxious cult in Dunedin? And most marvellous of all, what deep
and more than natural linkage of dates was this which gave a malign and now
undeniable significance to the various turns of events so carefully noted by my uncle?

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

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

After that I went to Sydney and talked profitlessly with seamen and members of the
vice-admiralty court. I saw the Alert, now sold and in commercial use, at Circular Quay
in Sydney Cove, but gained nothing from its non-committal bulk. The crouching image
with its cuttlefish head, dragon body, scaly wings, and hieroglyphed pedestal, was
preserved in the Museum at Hyde Park; and I studied it long and well, finding it a thing
of balefully exquisite workmanship, and with the same utter mystery, terrible antiquity,
and unearthly strangeness of material which I had noted in Legrasse's smaller specimen.
Geologists, the curator told me, had found it a monstrous puzzle; for they vowed that
the world held no rock like it. Then I thought with a shudder of what Old Castro had
told Legrasse about the Old Ones; "They had come from the stars, and had brought
Their images with Them."
Shaken with such a mental resolution as I had never before known, I now resolved to
visit Mate Johansen in Oslo. Sailing for London, I reembarked at once for the
Norwegian capital; and one autumn day landed at the trim wharves in the shadow of the
Egeberg. Johansen's address, I discovered, lay in the Old Town of King Harold
Haardrada, which kept alive the name of Oslo during all the centuries that the greater
city masqueraded as "Christiana." I made the brief trip by taxicab, and knocked with
palpitant heart at the door of a neat and ancient building with plastered front. A sad-
faced woman in black answered my summons, and I was stung with disappointment
when she told me in halting English that Gustaf Johansen was no more.

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

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

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

Johansen's voyage had begun just as he told it to the vice-admiralty. The Emma, in
ballast, had cleared Auckland on February 20th, and had felt the full force of that
earthquake-born tempest which must have heaved up from the sea-bottom the horrors
that filled men's dreams. Once more under control, the ship was making good progress
when held up by the Alert on March 22nd, and I could feel the mate's regret as he wrote
of her bombardment and sinking. Of the swarthy cult-fiends on the Alert he speaks with
significant horror. There was some peculiarly abominable quality about them which
made their destruction seem almost a duty, and Johansen shows ingenuous wonder at
the charge of ruthlessness brought against his party during the proceedings of the court
of inquiry. Then, driven ahead by curiosity in their captured yacht under Johansen's
command, the men sight a great stone pillar sticking out of the sea, and in S. Latitude
47°9', W. Longitude l23°43', come upon a coastline of mingled mud, ooze, and weedy
Cyclopean masonry which can be nothing less than the tangible substance of earth's
supreme terror--the nightmare corpse-city of R'lyeh, that was built in measureless aeons
behind history by the vast, loathsome shapes that seeped down from the dark stars.
There lay great Cthulhu and his hordes, hidden in green slimy vaults and sending out at
last, after cycles incalculable, the thoughts that spread fear to the dreams of the sensitive
and called imperiously to the faithful to come on a pilgrimage of liberation and
restoration. All this Johansen did not suspect, but God knows he soon saw enough!

I suppose that only a single mountain-top, the hideous monolith-crowned citadel

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Steam had not been suffered to go down entirely, despite the departure of all hands for
the shore; and it was the work of only a few moments of feverish rushing up and down
between wheel and engines to get the Alert under way. Slowly, amidst the distorted
horrors of that indescribable scene, she began to churn the lethal waters; whilst on the
masonry of that charnel shore that was not of earth the titan Thing from the stars
slavered and gibbered like Polypheme cursing the fleeing ship of Odysseus. Then,
bolder than the storied Cyclops, great Cthulhu slid greasily into the water and began to
pursue with vast wave-raising strokes of cosmic potency. Briden looked back and went
mad, laughing shrilly as he kept on laughing at intervals till death found him one night
in the cabin whilst Johansen was wandering deliriously.
But Johansen had not given out yet. Knowing that the Thing could surely overtake the
Alert until steam was fully up, he resolved on a desperate chance; and, setting the
engine for full speed, ran lightning-like on deck and reversed the wheel. There was a
mighty eddying and foaming in the noisome brine, and as the steam mounted higher and
higher the brave Norwegian drove his vessel head on against the pursuing jelly which
rose above the unclean froth like the stern of a daemon galleon. The awful squid-head
with writhing feelers came nearly up to the bowsprit of the sturdy yacht, but Johansen
drove on relentlessly. There was a bursting as of an exploding bladder, a slushy
nastiness as of a cloven sunfish, a stench as of a thousand opened graves, and a sound
that the chronicler could not put on paper. For an instant the ship was befouled by an
acrid and blinding green cloud, and then there was only a venomous seething astern;
where--God in heaven!--the scattered plasticity of that nameless sky-spawn was
nebulously recombining in its hateful original form, whilst its distance widened every
second as the Alert gained impetus from its mounting steam.

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

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

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

Cthulhu still lives, too, I suppose, again in that chasm of stone which has shielded him
since the sun was young. His accursed city is sunken once more, for the Vigilant sailed
over the spot after the April storm; but his ministers on earth still bellow and prance and
slay around idol-capped monoliths in lonely places. He must have been trapped by the
sinking whilst within his black abyss, or else the world would by now be screaming
with fright and frenzy. Who knows the end? What has risen may sink, and what has
sunk may rise. Loathsomeness waits and dreams in the deep, and decay spreads over the
tottering cities of men. A time will come--but I must not and cannot think! Let me pray
that, if I do not survive this manuscript, my executors may put caution before audacity
and see that it meets no other eye.
 THE DUNWICH HORROR
Gorgons and Hydras, and Chimaeras--dire stories of Celaeno and the Harpies--may
reproduce themselves in the brain of superstition--but they were there before. They are
transcripts, types--the archetypes are in us, and eternal. How else should the recital of
that which we know in a waking sense to be false come to affect us all? Is it that we
naturally conceive terror from such objects, considered in their capacity of being able to
inflict upon us bodily injury? O, least of all! These terrors are of older standing. They
date beyond body--or without the body, they would have been the same...That the kind
of fear here treated is purely spiritual--that it is strong in proportion as it is objectless on
earth, that it predominates in the period of our sinless infancy--are difficulties the
solution of which might afford some probable insight into our ante-mundane condition,
and a peep at least into the shadowland of pre-existence.

--Charles Lamb: Witches and Other Night-Fears

I.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

II.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

III.

Meanwhile Old Whateley continued to buy cattle without measurably increasing the
size of his herd. He also cut timber and began to repair the unused parts of his house--a
spacious, peak-roofed affair whose rear end was buried entirely in the rocky hillside,
and whose three least-ruined ground-floor rooms had always been sufficient for himself
and his daughter.
There must have been prodigious reserves of strength in the old man to enable him to
accomplish so much hard labour; and though he still babbled dementedly at times, his
carpentry seemed to show the effects of sound calculation. It had already begun as soon
as Wilbur was born, when one of the many tool sheds had been put suddenly in order,
clapboarded, and fitted with a stout fresh lock. Now, in restoring the abandoned upper
storey of the house, he was a no less thorough craftsman. His mania showed itself only
in his tight boarding-up of all the windows in the reclaimed section--though many
declared that it was a crazy thing to bother with the reclamation at all.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

IV.

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

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

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

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

On Lammas Night, 1924, Dr Houghton of Aylesbury was hastily summoned by Wilbur

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

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

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

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

'Feed it reg'lar, Willy, an' mind the quantity; but dun't let it grow too fast fer the place,
fer ef it busts quarters or gits aout afore ye opens to Yog-Sothoth, it's all over an' no use.
Only them from beyont kin make it multiply an' work...Only them, the old uns as wants
to come back...'
But speech gave place to gasps again, and Lavinia screamed at the way the
whippoorwills followed the change. It was the same for more than an hour, when the
final throaty rattle came. Dr Houghton drew shrunken lids over the glazing grey eyes as
the tumult of birds faded imperceptibly to silence. Lavinia sobbed, but Wilbur only
chuckled whilst the hill noises rumbled faintly.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

'Inbreeding?' Armitage muttered half-aloud to himself. 'Great God, what simpletons!

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

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

VI.

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

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

Armitage, hastening into some clothing and rushing across the street and lawn to the
college buildings, saw that others were ahead of him; and heard the echoes of a burglar-
alarm still shrilling from the library. An open window showed black and gaping in the
moonlight. What had come had indeed completed its entrance; for the barking and the
screaming, now fast fading into a mixed low growling and moaning, proceeded
unmistakably from within. Some instinct warned Armitage that what was taking place
was not a thing for unfortified eyes to see, so he brushed back the crowd with authority
as he unlocked the vestibule door. Among the others he saw Professor Warren Rice and
Dr Francis Morgan, men to whom he had told some of his conjectures and misgivings;
and these two he motioned to accompany him inside. The inward sounds, except for a
watchful, droning whine from the dog, had by this time quite subsided; but Armitage
now perceived with a sudden start that a loud chorus of whippoorwills among the
shrubbery had commenced a damnably rhythmical piping, as if in unison with the last
breaths of a dying man.
The building was full of a frightful stench which Dr Armitage knew too well, and the
three men rushed across the hall to the small genealogical reading-room whence the low
whining came. For a second nobody dared to turn on the light, then Armitage
summoned up his courage and snapped the switch. One of the three--it is not certain
which--shrieked aloud at what sprawled before them among disordered tables and
overturned chairs. Professor Rice declares that he wholly lost consciousness for an
instant, though he did not stumble or fall.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

VII.

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

An almost interminable manuscript in strange characters, written in a huge ledger and

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

When night came again the barricading was repeated, though there was less huddling
together of families. In the morning both the Frye and the Seth Bishop households
reported excitement among the dogs and vague sounds and stenches from afar, while
early explorers noted with horror a fresh set of the monstrous tracks in the road skirting
Sentinel Hill. As before, the sides of the road showed a bruising indicative of the
blasphemously stupendous bulk of the horror; whilst the conformation of the tracks
seemed to argue a passage in two directions, as if the moving mountain had come from
Cold Spring Glen and returned to it along the same path. At the base of the hill a thirty-
foot swath of crushed shrubbery saplings led steeply upwards, and the seekers gasped
when they saw that even the most perpendicular places did not deflect the inexorable
trail. Whatever the horror was, it could scale a sheer stony cliff of almost complete
verticality; and as the investigators climbed round to the hill's summit by safer routes
they saw that the trail ended--or rather, reversed--there.
It was here that the Whateleys used to build their hellish fires and chant their hellish
rituals by the table-like stone on May Eve and Hallowmass. Now that very stone formed
the centre of a vast space thrashed around by the mountainous horror, whilst upon its
slightly concave surface was a thick and foetid deposit of the same tarry stickiness
observed on the floor of the ruined Whateley farmhouse when the horror escaped. Men
looked at one another and muttered. Then they looked down the hill. Apparently the
horror had descended by a route much the same as that of its ascent. To speculate was
futile. Reason, logic, and normal ideas of motivation stood confounded. Only old
Zebulon, who was not with the group, could have done justice to the situation or
suggested a plausible explanation.

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

VIII.

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

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

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

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

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

Morning found Dr Armitage in a cold sweat of terror and a frenzy of wakeful

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

IX.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

At this point the first excited speaker interrupted.

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

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

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

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

The man paused, and another of the crowd spoke.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

X.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ygnailh...ygnaiih...thflthkh'ngha....Yog-Sothoth...rang the hideous croaking out of

space. Y'bthnk...h'ehye--n'grkdl'lh...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

'What was it, anyhaow, an' haowever did young Wizard Whateley call it aout o' the air it
come from?'
Armitage chose his words very carefully.

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

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

THE WHISPERER IN DARKNESS

I

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

The whole matter began, so far as I am concerned, with the historic and unprecedented
Vermont floods of November 3, 1927. I was then, as now, an instructor of literature at
Miskatonic University in Arkham, Massachusetts, and an enthusiastic amateur student
of New England folklore. Shortly after the flood, amidst the varied reports of hardship,
suffering, and organized relief which filled the press, there appeared certain odd stories
of things found floating in some of the swollen rivers; so that many of my friends
embarked on curious discussions and appealed to me to shed what light I could on the
subject. I felt flattered at having my folklore study taken so seriously, and did what I
could to belittle the wild, vague tales which seemed so clearly an outgrowth of old
rustic superstitions. It amused me to find several persons of education who insisted that
some stratum of obscure, distorted fact might underlie the rumors.
The tales thus brought to my notice came mostly through newspaper cuttings; though
one yarn had an oral source and was repeated to a friend of mine in a letter from his
mother in Hardwick, Vermont. The type of thing described was essentially the same in
all cases, though there seemed to be three separate instances involved--one connected
with the Winooski River near Montpelier, another attached to the West River in
Windham County beyond Newfane, and a third centering in the Passumpsic in
Caledonia County above Lyndonville. Of course many of the stray items mentioned
other instances, but on analysis they all seemed to boil down to these three. In each case
country folk reported seeing one or more very bizarre and disturbing objects in the
surging waters that poured down from the unfrequented hills, and there was a
widespread tendency to connect these sights with a primitive, half-forgotten cycle of
whispered legend which old people resurrected for the occasion.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

II

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

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

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

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

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

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

My Dear Sir:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This leads me to my secondary purpose in addressing you--namely, to urge you to hush

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

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

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

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

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

Yrs. very truly, Henry W. Akeley

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

H. W. A.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Another photograph--evidently a time-exposure taken in deep shadow--was of the

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

III

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

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

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

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

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

(A Cultivated Male Human Voice)

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

(A Buzzing Imitation of Human Speech)

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

(Human Voice)

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

(Buzzing Voice)

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

(Human Voice)

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

(Speech Cut Off by End of Record)

Such were the words for which I was to listen when I started the phonograph. It was
with a trace of genuine dread and reluctance that I pressed the lever and heard the
preliminary scratching of the sapphire point, and I was glad that the first faint,
fragmentary words were in a human voice--a mellow, educated voice which seemed
vaguely Bostonian in accent, and which was certainly not that of any native of the
Vermont hills. As I listened to the tantalisingly feeble rendering, I seemed to find the
speech identical with Akeley's carefully prepared transcript. On it chanted, in that
mellow Bostonian voice..."Ia! Shub-Niggurath! The Goat with a Thousand Young!..."
And then I heard the other voice. To this hour I shudder retrospectively when I think of
how it struck me, prepared though I was by Akeley's accounts. Those to whom I have
since described the record profess to find nothing but cheap imposture or madness in it;
but could they have the accursed thing itself, or read the bulk of Akeley's
correspondence, (especially that terrible and encyclopaedic second letter), I know they
would think differently. It is, after all, a tremendous pity that I did not disobey Akeley
and play the record for others--a tremendous pity, too, that all of his letters were lost. To
me, with my first-hand impression of the actual sounds, and with my knowledge of the
background and surrounding circumstances, the voice was a monstrous thing. It swiftly
followed the human voice in ritualistic response, but in my imagination it was a morbid
echo winging its way across unimaginable abysses from unimaginable outer hells. It is
more than two years now since I last ran off that blasphemous waxen cylinder; but at
this moment, and at all other moments, I can still hear that feeble, fiendish buzzing as it
reached me for the first time.

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

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

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

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

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

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

With commendable promptness a report came from the Boston office on the following
afternoon, the agent telephoning as soon as he learned the facts. It seemed that the
railway express clerk on No. 5508 had been able to recall an incident which might have
much bearing on my loss--an argument with a very curious-voiced man, lean, sandy,
and rustic-looking, when the train was waiting at Keene, N. H., shortly after one o'clock
standard time. The man, he said, was greatly excited about a heavy box which he
claimed to expect, but which was neither on the train nor entered on the company's
books. He had given the name of Stanley Adams, and had had such a queerly thick
droning voice, that it made the clerk abnormally dizzy and sleepy to listen to him. The
clerk could not remember quite how the conversation had ended, but recalled starting
into a fuller awakeness when the train began to move. The Boston agent added that this
clerk was a young man of wholly unquestioned veracity and reliability, of known
antecedents and long with the company.
That evening I went to Boston to interview the clerk in person, having obtained his
name and address from the office. He was a frank, prepossessing fellow, but I saw that
he could add nothing to his original account. Oddly, he was scarcely sure that he could
even recognise the strange inquirer again. Realising that he had no more to tell, I
returned to Arkham and sat up till morning writing letters to Akeley, to the express
company and to the police department and station agent in Keene. I felt that the strange-
voiced man who had so queerly affected the clerk must have a pivotal place in the
ominous business, and hoped that Keene station employees and telegraph-office records
might tell something about him and about how he happened to make his inquiry when
and where he did.

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

IV

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

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

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

APPRECIATE YOUR POSITION BUT CAN DO NOTHING TAKE NO ACTION

YOURSELF FOR IT COULD ONLY HARM BOTH WAIT FOR EXPLANATION

HENRY AKELY

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

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

Writing Akeley at once, I renewed my offers of aid, and spoke again of visiting him and
helping him convince the authorities of his dire peril. In his reply he seemed less set
against that plan than his past attitude would have led one to predict, but said he would
like to hold off a little while longer--long enough to get his things in order and reconcile
himself to the idea of leaving an almost morbidly cherished birthplace. People looked
askance at his studies and speculations and it would be better to get quietly off without
setting the countryside in a turmoil and creating widespread doubts of his own sanity.
He had had enough, he admitted, but he wanted to make a dignified exit if he could.
This letter reached me on the 28th of August, and I prepared and mailed as encouraging
a reply as I could. Apparently the encouragement had effect, for Akeley had fewer
terrors to report when he acknowledged my note. He was not very optimistic, though,
and expressed the belief that it was only the full moon season which was holding the
creatures off. He hoped there would not be many densely cloudy nights, and talked
vaguely of boarding in Brattleboro when the moon waned. Again I wrote him
encouragingly but on September 5th there came a fresh communication which had
obviously crossed my letter in the mails; and to this I could not give any such hopeful
response. In view of its importance I believe I had better give it in full--as best I can do
from memory of the shaky script. It ran substantially as follows:

Monday

Dear Wilmarth

A rather discouraging P. S. to my last. Last night was thickly cloudy--though no rain--

and not a bit of moonlight got through. Things were pretty bad, and I think the end is
getting near, in spite of all we have hoped. After midnight something landed on the roof
of the house, and the dogs all rushed up to see what it was. I could hear them snapping
and tearing around, and then one managed to get on the roof by jumping from the low
ell. There was a terrible fight up there, and I heard a frightful buzzing which I'll never
forget. And then there was a shocking smell. About the same time bullets came through
the window and nearly grazed me. I think the main line of the hill creatures had got
close to the house when the dogs divided because of the roof business. What was up
there I don't know yet, but I'm afraid the creatures are learning to steer better with their
space wings. I put out the light and used the windows for loopholes, and raked all
around the house with rifle fire aimed just high enough not to hit the dogs. That seemed
to end the business, but in the morning I found great pools of blood in the yard, besides
pools of a green sticky stuff that had the worst odour I have ever smelled. I climbed up
on the roof and found more of the sticky stuff there. Five of the dogs were killed--I'm
afraid I hit one myself by aiming too low, for he was shot in the back. Now I am setting
the panes the shots broke, and am going to Brattleboro for more dogs. I guess the men at
the kennels think I am crazy. Will drop another note later. Suppose I'll be ready for
moving in a week or two, though it nearly kills me to think of it.

Hastily--Akeley

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

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

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

Yrs--Akeley

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

W--

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But I don't know as I care. After what I've been through, a madhouse is as good a place
as any. The doctors can help me make up my mind to get away from this house, and that
is all that will save me.
Write my son George if you don't hear soon. Goodbye, smash that record, and don't mix
up in this.

Yrs--Akeley

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

Then, apparently crossing my incoherent note and reaching me Saturday afternoon,

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

My dear Wilmarth:--

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Don't hesitate--I am free from espionage now, and you will not meet anything unnatural
or disturbing. Just come along and let my car meet you at the Brattleboro station--
prepare to stay as long as you can, and expect many an evening of discussion of things
beyond all human conjecture. Don't tell anyone about it, of course--for this matter must
not get to the promiscuous public.
The train service to Brattleboro is not bad--you can get a timetable in Boston. Take the
B. & M. to Greenfield, and then change for the brief remainder of the way. I suggest
your taking the convenient 4:10 P.M.--standard--from Boston. This gets into Greenfield
at 7:35, and at 9:19 a train leaves there which reaches Brattleboro at 10:01. That is
weekdays. Let me know the date and I'll have my car on hand at the station.

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

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

I am

Yours in anticipation, Henry W. Akeley

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

MASS.

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

The letter seemed so unlike anything which could have been expected! As I analysed
my impression, I saw that it consisted of two distinct phases. First, granting that Akeley
had been sane before and was still sane, the indicated change in the situation itself was
so swift and unthinkable. And secondly, the change in Akeley's own manner, attitude,
and language was so vastly beyond the normal or the predictable. The man's whole
personality seemed to have undergone an insidious mutation--a mutation so deep that
one could scarcely reconcile his two aspects with the supposition that both represented
equal sanity. Word-choice, spelling--all were subtly different. And with my academic
sensitiveness to prose style, I could trace profound divergences in his commonest
reactions and rhythm-responses. Certainly, the emotional cataclysm or revelation which
could produce so radical an overturn must be an extreme one indeed! Yet in another
way the letter seemed quite characteristic of Akeley. The same old passion for infinity--
the same old scholarly inquisitiveness. I could not a moment--or more than a moment--
credit the idea of spuriousness or malign substitution. Did not the invitation--the
willingness to have me test the truth of the letter in person--prove its genuineness?
I did not retire Saturday night, but sat up thinking of the shadows and marvels behind
the letter I had received. My mind, aching from the quick succession of monstrous
conceptions it had been forced to confront during the last four months, worked upon this
startling new material in a cycle of doubt and acceptance which repeated most of the
steps experienced in facing the earlier wonders; till long before dawn a burning interest
and curiosity had begun to replace the original storm of perplexity and uneasiness. Mad
or sane, metamorphosed or merely relieved, the chances were that Akeley had actually
encountered some stupendous change of perspective in his hazardous research; some
change at once diminishing his danger--real or fancied--and opening dizzy new vistas of
cosmic and superhuman knowledge. My own zeal for the unknown flared up to meet
his, and I felt myself touched by the contagion of the morbid barrier-breaking. To shake
off the maddening and wearying limitations of time and space and natural law--to be
linked with the vast outside--to come close to the nighted and abysmal secrets of the
infinite and the ultimate--surely such a thing was worth the risk of one's life, soul, and
sanity! And Akeley had said there was no longer any peril--he had invited me to visit
him instead of warning me away as before. I tingled at the thought of what he might
now have to tell me--there was an almost paralysing fascination in the thought of sitting
in that lonely and lately-beleaguered farmhouse with a man who had talked with actual
emissaries from outer space; sitting there with the terrible record and the pile of letters
in which Akeley had summarised his earlier conclusions.

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

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

ARRANGEMENT SATISFACTORY WILL MEET ONE EIGHT TRAIN

WEDNESDAY DONT FORGET RECORD AND LETTERS AND PRINTS KEEP
DESTINATION QUIET EXPECT GREAT REVELATIONS

AKELEY

Receipt of this message in direct response to one sent to Akeley--and necessarily

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

As we passed out of Brattleboro my sense of constraint and foreboding increased, for a

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

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

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

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

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

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

Besides, there was a strangely calming element of cosmic beauty in the hypnotic
landscape through which we climbed and plunged fantastically. Time had lost itself in
the labyrinths behind, and around us stretched only the flowering waves of faery and the
recaptured loveliness of vanished centuries--the hoary groves, the untainted pastures
edged with gay autumnal blossoms, and at vast intervals the small brown farmsteads
nestling amidst huge trees beneath vertical precipices of fragrant brier and meadow-
grass. Even the sunlight assumed a supernal glamour, as if some special atmosphere or
exhalation mantled the whole region. I had seen nothing like it before save in the magic
vistas that sometimes form the backgrounds of Italian primitives. Sodoma and Leonardo
conceived such expanses, but only in the distance, and through the vaultings of
Renaissance arcades. We were now burrowing bodily through the midst of the picture,
and I seemed to find in its necromancy a thing I had innately known or inherited and for
which I had always been vainly searching.
Suddenly, after rounding an obtuse angle at the top of a sharp ascent, the car came to a
standstill. On my left, across a well-kept lawn which stretched to the road and flaunted a
border of whitewashed stones, rose a white, two-and-a-half-story house of unusual size
and elegance for the region, with a congenes of contiguous or arcade-linked barns,
sheds, and windmill behind and to the right. I recognised it at once from the snapshot I
had received, and was not surprised to see the name of Henry Akeley on the galvanised-
iron mailbox near the road. For some distance back of the house a level stretch of
marshy and sparsely-wooded land extended, beyond which soared a steep, thickly-
forested hillside ending in a jagged leafy crest. This latter, I knew, was the summit of
Dark Mountain, half way up which we must have climbed already.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

VII

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

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

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

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

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

"No, thanks--there's nothing you can do for me. I know these spells of old. Just come
back for a little quiet visiting before night, and then go to bed when you please. I'll rest
right here--perhaps sleep here all night as I often do. In the morning I'll be far better
able to go into the things we must go into. You realise, of course, the utterly stupendous
nature of the matter before us. To us, as to only a few men on this earth, there will be
opened up gulfs of time and space and knowledge beyond anything within the
conception of human science or philosophy.
"Do you know that Einstein is wrong, and that certain objects and forces can move with
a velocity greater than that of light? With proper aid I expect to go backward and
forward in time, and actually see and feel the earth of remote past and future epochs.
You can't imagine the degree to which those beings have carried science. There is
nothing they can't do with the mind and body of living organisms. I expect to visit other
planets, and even other stars and galaxies. The first trip will be to Yuggoth, the nearest
world fully peopled by the beings. It is a strange dark orb at the very rim of our solar
system--unknown to earthly astronomers as yet. But I must have written you about this.
At the proper time, you know, the beings there will direct thought-currents toward us
and cause it to be discovered--or perhaps let one of their human allies give the scientists
a hint.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

For the first time one of the inert, wasted hands raised itself and pointed stiffly to a high
shelf on the farther side of the room. There, in a neat row, stood more than a dozen
cylinders of a metal I had never seen before--cylinders about a foot high and somewhat
less in diameter, with three curious sockets set in an isosceles triangle over the front
convex surface of each. One of them was linked at two of the sockets to a pair of
singular-looking machines that stood in the background. Of their purport I did not need
to be told, and I shivered as with ague. Then I saw the hand point to a much nearer
corner where some intricate instruments with attached cords and plugs, several of them
much like the two devices on the shelf behind the cylinders, were huddled together.
"There are four kinds of instruments here, Wilmarth," whispered the voice. "Four kinds-
-three faculties each--makes twelve pieces in all. You see there are four different sorts
of beings represented in those cylinders up there. Three humans, six fungoid beings who
can't navigate space corporeally, two beings from Neptune (God! if you could see the
body this type has on its own planet!), and the rest entities from the central caverns of
an especially interesting dark star beyond the galaxy. In the principal outpost inside
Round Hill you'll now and then find more cylinders and machines--cylinders of extra-
cosmic brains with different senses from any we know--allies and explorers from the
uttermost Outside--and special machines for giving them impressions and expression in
the several ways suited at once to them and to the comprehensions of different types of
listeners. Round Hill, like most of the beings' main outposts all through the various
universes, is a very cosmopolitan place. Of course, only the more common types have
been lent to me for experiment.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Blasphemous influences seemed to surround me and press chokingly upon my senses.

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

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

VIII

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A third voice was indubitably that of a mechanical utterance-machine connected with

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

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

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

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

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

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

(First Buzzing Voice)

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

(Second Buzzing Voice)

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

(Noyes)

"...(an unpronounceable word or name, possibly N'gah-Kthun) harmless...peace...couple

of weeks...theatrical...told you that before..."

(First Buzzing Voice)

"...no reason...original plan...effects...Noyes can watch Round Hill...fresh

cylinder...Noyes's car..."

(Noyes)

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

(Several Voices at Once in Indistinguishable Speech)

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

(A Curious Sort of Flapping Sound)

(The Sound of an Automobile Starting and Receding)

(Silence)

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

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

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

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

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

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

It must, I thought, be conscious of my presence even now; since the sight and hearing
attachments could not fail to disclose the rays of my flashlight and the faint creaking of
the floor beneath my feet. But in the end I did not dare meddle with the thing. I idly saw
that it was the fresh shiny cylinder with Akeley's name on it, which I had noticed on the
shelf earlier in the evening and which my host had told me not to bother. Looking back
at that moment, I can only regret my timidity and wish that I had boldly caused the
apparatus to speak. God knows what mysteries and horrible doubts and questions of
identity it might have cleared up! But then, it may be merciful that I let it alone.
From the table I turned my flashlight to the corner where I thought Akeley was, but
found to my perplexity that the great easy-chair was empty of any human occupant
asleep or awake. From the seat to the floor there trailed voluminously the familiar old
dressing-gown, and near it on the floor lay the yellow scarf and the huge foot-bandages
I had thought so odd. As I hesitated, striving to conjecture where Akeley might be, and
why he had so suddenly discarded his necessary sick-room garments, I observed that the
queer odour and sense of vibration were no longer in the room. What had been their
cause? Curiously it occurred to me that I had noticed them only in Akeley's vicinity.
They had been strongest where he sat, and wholly absent except in the room with him or
just outside the doors of that room. I paused, letting the flashlight wander about the dark
study and racking my brain for explanations of the turn affairs had taken.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Gilman's dreams consisted largely in plunges through limitless abysses of inexplicably

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Such a step, he said, would require only two stages; first, a passage out of the three-
dimensional sphere we know, and second, a passage back to the three-dimensional
sphere at another point, perhaps one of infinite remoteness. That this could be
accomplished without loss of life was in many cases conceivable. Any being from any
part of three-dimensional space could probably survive in the fourth dimension; and its
survival of the second stage would depend upon what alien part of three-dimensional
space it might select for its re-entry. Denizens of some planets might be able to live on
certain others--even planets belonging to other galaxies, or to similar dimensional
phases of other space-time continua--though of course there must be vast numbers of
mutually uninhabitable even though mathematically juxtaposed bodies or zones of
space.
It was also possible that the inhabitants of a given dimensional realm could survive
entry to many unknown and incomprehensible realms of additional or indefinitely
multiplied dimensions--be they within or outside the given space-time continuum--and
that the converse would be likewise true. This was a matter for speculation, though one
could be fairly certain that the type of mutation involved in a passage from any given
dimensional plane to the next higher one would not be destructive of biological integrity
as we understand it. Gilman could not be very clear about his reasons for this last
assumption, but his haziness here was more than overbalanced by his clearness on other
complex points. Professor Upham especially liked his demonstration of the kinship of
higher mathematics to certain phases of magical lore transmitted down the ages from an
ineffable antiquity--human or pre-human--whose knowledge of the cosmos and its laws
was greater than ours.

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

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

As April advanced, Gilman's fever-sharpened ears were disturbed by the whining

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

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

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

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

The old woman always appeared out of thin air near the corner where the downward
slant met the inward slant. She seemed to crystallize at a point closer to the ceiling than
to the floor, and every night she was a little nearer and more distinct before the dream
shifted. Brown Jenkin, too was always a little nearer at the last, and its yellowish-white
fangs glistened shockingly in that unearthly violet phosphorescence. Its shrill loathsome
tittering struck more and more into Gilman's head, and he could remember in the
morning how it had pronounced the words "Azathoth" and "Nyarlathotep."
In the deeper dreams everything was likewise more distinct, and Gilman felt that the
twilight abysses around him were those of the fourth dimension. Those organic entities
whose motions seemed least flagrantly irrelevant and unmotivated were probably
projections of life-forms from our own planet, including human beings. What the others
were in their own dimensional sphere or spheres he dared not try to think. Two of the
less irrelevantly moving things--a rather large congeries of iridescent, prolately
spheroidal bubbles and a very much smaller polyhedron of unknown colours and
rapidly shifting surface angles--seemed to take notice of him and follow him about or
float ahead as he changed position among the titan prisms, labyrinths, cube-and-plane
clusters and quasi-buildings; and all the while the vague shrieking and roaring waxed
louder and louder, as if approaching some monstrous climax of utterly unendurable
intensity.

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

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

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

He would have to consult a nerve specialist after all--perhaps there was a connection
with his somnambulism--but meanwhile he might at least try to break the morbid spell
himself. Undoubtedly he could still manage to walk away from the pull, so with great
resolution he headed against it and dragged himself deliberately north along Garrison
Street. By the time he had reached the bridge over the Miskatonic he was in a cold
perspiration, and he clutched at the iron railing as he gazed upstream at the ill-regarded
island whose regular lines of ancient standing stones brooded sullenly in the afternoon
sunlight.
Then he gave a start. For there was a clearly visible living figure on that desolate island,
and a second glance told him it was certainly the strange old woman whose sinister
aspect had worked itself so disastrously into his dreams. The tall grass near her was
moving, too, as if some other living thing were crawling close to the ground. When the
old woman began to turn toward him he fled precipitately off the bridge and into the
shelter of the town's labyrinthine waterfront alleys. Distant though the island was, he
felt that a monstrous and invincible evil could flow from the sardonic stare of that bent,
ancient figure in brown.

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

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

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

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

Fever--wild dreams--somnambulism--illusions of sounds--a pull toward a point in the

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In the dazzling violet light of dream the old woman and the fanged, furry thing came
again and with a greater distinctness than on any former occasion. This time they
actually reached him, and he felt the crone's withered claws clutching at him. He was
pulled out of bed and into empty space, and for a moment he heard a rhythmic roaring
and saw the twilight amorphousness of the vague abysses seething around him. But that
moment was very brief, for presently he was in a crude, windowless little space with
rough beams and planks rising to a peak just above his head, and with a curious slanting
floor underfoot. Propped level on that floor were low cases full of books of every degree
of antiquity and disintegration, and in the centre were a table and bench, both apparently
fastened in place. Small objects of unknown shape and nature were ranged on the tops
of the cases, and in the flaming violet light Gilman thought he saw a counterpart of the
spiky image which had puzzled him so horribly. On the left the floor fell abruptly away,
leaving a black triangular gulf out of which, after a second's dry rattling, there presently
climbed the hateful little furry thing with the yellow fangs and bearded human face.
The evilly-grinning beldame still clutched him, and beyond the table stood a figure he
had never seen before--a tall, lean man of dead black colouration but without the
slightest sign of negroid features: wholly devoid of either hair or beard, and wearing as
his only garment a shapeless robe of some heavy black fabric. His feet were
indistinguishable because of the table and bench, but he must have been shod, since
there was a clicking whenever he changed position. The man did not speak, and bore no
trace of expression on his small, regular features. He merely pointed to a book of
prodigious size which lay open on the table, while the beldame thrust a huge grey quill
into Gilman's right hand. Over everything was a pall of intensely maddening fear, and
the climax was reached when the furry thing ran up the dreamer's clothing to his
shoulders and then down his left arm, finally biting him sharply in the wrist just below
his cuff. As the blood spurted from this wound Gilman lapsed into a faint.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Braced up by Elwood's companionship, Gilman attended classes that day. Strange urges
still tugged at him, but he could sidetrack them with considerable success. During a free
period he showed the queer image to several professors, all of whom were intensely
interested, though none of them could shed any light upon its nature or origin. That
night he slept on a couch which Elwood had had the landlord bring to the second-storey
room, and for the first time in weeks was wholly free from disquieting dreams. But the
feverishness still hung on, and the whines of the loom-fixer were an unnerving
influence.
During the next few days Gilman enjoyed an almost perfect immunity from morbid
manifestations. He had, Elwood said, showed no tendency to talk or rise in his sleep;
and meanwhile the landlord was putting rat-poison everywhere. The only disturbing
element was the talk among the superstitious foreigners, whose imaginations had
become highly excited. Mazurewicz was always trying to make him get a crucifix, and
finally forced one upon him which he said had been blessed by the good Father
Iwanicki. Desrochers, too, had something to say; in fact, he insisted that cautious steps
had sounded in the now vacant room above him on the first and second nights of
Gilinan's absence from it. Paul Choynski thought he heard sounds in the halls and on the
stairs at night, and claimed that his door had been softly tried, while Mrs. Dombrowski
vowed she had seen Brown Jenkin for the first time since All-Hallows. But such naïve
reports could mean very little, and Gilman let the cheap metal crucifix hang idly from a
knob on his host's dresser.

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

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

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

The next day both youths felt very tired, and knew they would sleep like logs when
night came. In the evening they drowsily discussed the mathematical studies which had
so completely and perhaps harmfully engrossed Gilman, and speculated about the
linkage with ancient magic and folklore which seemed so darkly probable. They spoke
of old Keziah Mason, and Elwood agreed that Gilman had good scientific grounds for
thinking she might have stumbled on strange and significant information. The hidden
cults to which these witches belonged often guarded and handed down surprising
secrets from elder, forgotten eons; and it was by no means impossible that Keziah had
actually mastered the art of passing through dimensional gates. Tradition emphasizes
the uselessness of material barriers in halting a witch's notions, and who can say what
underlies the old tales of broomstick rides through the night?
Whether a modern student could ever gain similar powers from mathematical research
alone, was still to be seen. Success, Gilman added, might lead to dangerous and
unthinkable situations, for who could foretell the conditions pervading an adjacent but
normally inaccessible dimension? On the other hand, the picturesque possibilities were
enormous. Time could not exist in certain belts of space, and by entering and remaining
in such a belt one might preserve one's life and age indefinitely; never suffering organic
metabolism or deterioration except for slight amounts incurred during visits to one's
own or similar planes. One might, for example, pass into a timeless dimension and
emerge at some remote period of the earth's history as young as before.

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

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

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

The youth's over-sensitive ears caught a hideous strangled cry, and presently the
beldame came out of the room bearing a small, senseless form which she thrust at the
dreamer as if ordering him to carry it. The sight of this form, and the expression on its
face, broke the spell. Still too dazed to cry out, he plunged recklessly down the noisome
staircase and into the mud outside, halting only when seized and choked by the waiting
black man. As consciousness departed he heard the faint, shrill tittering of the fanged,
rat-like abnormality.
On the morning of the twenty-ninth Gilman awaked into a maelstrom of horror. The
instant he opened his eyes he knew something was terribly wrong, for he was back in
his old garret room with the slanting wall and ceiling, sprawled on the now unmade bed.
His throat was aching inexplicably, and as he struggled to a sitting posture he saw with
growing fright that his feet and pajama bottoms were brown with caked mud. For the
moment his recollections were hopelessly hazy, but he knew at least that he must have
been sleep-walking. Elwood had been lost too deeply in slumber to hear and stop him.
On the floor were confused muddy prints, but oddly enough they did not extend all the
way to the door. The more Gilman looked at them, the more peculiar they seemed; for
in addition to those he could recognize as his there were some smaller, almost round
markings--such as the legs of a large chair or a table might make, except that most of
them tended to be divided into halves. There were also some curious muddy rat-tracks
leading out of a fresh hole and back into it again. Utter bewilderment and the fear of
madness racked Gilman as he staggered to the door and saw that there were no muddy
prints outside. The more he remembered of his hideous dream the more terrified he felt,
and it added to his desperation to hear Joe Mazurewicz chanting mournfully two floors
below.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Late at night the two youths sat drowsing in their chairs, lulled by the praying of the
loom-fixer on the floor below. Gilman listened as he nodded, his preternaturally
sharpened hearing seeming to strain for some subtle, dreaded murmur beyond the noises
in the ancient house. Unwholesome recollections of things in the Necronomicon and the
Black Book welled up, and he found himself swaying to infandous rhythms said to
pertain to the blackest ceremonies of the Sabbat and to have an origin outside the time
and space we comprehend.
Presently he realized what he was listening for--the hellish chant of the celebrants in the
distant black valley. How did he know so much about what they expected? How did he
know the time when Nahab and her acolyte were due to bear the brimming bowl which
would follow the black cock and the black goat? He saw that Elwood had dropped
asleep, and tried to call out and waken him. Something, however, closed his throat. He
was not his own master. Had he signed the black man's book after all?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Just before he made the plunge the violet light went out and left him in utter blackness.
The witch--old Keziah--Nahab--that must have meant her death. And mixed with the
distant chant of the Sabbat and the whimpers of Brown Jenkin in the gulf below he
thought he heard another and wilder whine from unknown depths. Joe Mazurewicz--the
prayers against the Crawling Chaos now turning to an inexplicably triumphant shriek--
worlds of sardonic actuality impinging on vortices of febrile dream--Iä! Shub-
Niggurath! The Goat with a Thousand Young...

They found Gilman on the floor of his queerly-angled old garret room long before
dawn, for the terrible cry had brought Desrochers and Choynski and Dombrowski and
Mazurewicz at once, and had even wakened the soundly sleeping Elwood in his chair.
He was alive, and with open, staring eyes, but seemed largely unconscious. On his
throat were the marks of murderous hands, and on his left ankle was a distressing rat-
bite. His clothing was badly rumpled and Joe's crucifix was missing, Elwood trembled,
afraid even to speculate what new form his friend's sleep-walking had taken.
Mazurewicz seemed half dazed because of a "sign" he said he had had in response to his
prayers, and he crossed himself frantically when the squealing and whimpering of a rat
sounded from beyond the slanting partition.

When the dreamer was settled on his couch in Elwood's room they sent for Doctor
Malkowski--a local practitioner who would repeat no tales where they might prove
embarrassing--and he gave Gilman two hypodermic injections which caused him to
relax in something like natural drowsiness. During the day the patient regained
consciousness at times and whispered his newest dream disjointedly to Elwood. It was a
painful process, and at its very start brought out a fresh and disconcerting fact.

Gilman--whose ears had so lately possessed an abnormal sensitiveness--was now stone-

deaf. Doctor Malkowski, summoned again in haste, told Elwood that both ear-drums
were ruptured, as if by the impact of some stupendous sound intense beyond all human
conception or endurance. How such a sound could have been heard in the last few hours
without arousing all the Miskatonic Valley was more than the honest physician could
say.

Elwood wrote his part of the colloquy on paper, so that a fairly easy communication
was maintained. Neither knew what to make of the whole chaotic business, and decided
it would be better if they thought as little as possible about it. Both, though, agreed that
they must leave this ancient and accursed house as soon as it could be arranged.
Evening papers spoke of a police raid on some curious revellers in a ravine beyond
Meadow Hill just before dawn, and mentioned that the white stone there was an object
of age-long superstitious regard. Nobody had been caught, but among the scattering
fugitives had been glimpsed a huge negro. In another column it was stated that no trace
of the missing child Ladislas Wolejko had been found.

The crowning horror came that very night. Elwood will never forget it, and was forced
to stay out of college the rest of the term because of the resulting nervous breakdown.
He had thought he heard rats in the partition all the evening, but paid little attention to
them. Then, long after both he and Gilman had retired, the atrocious shrieking began.
Elwood jumped up, turned on the lights and rushed over to his guest's couch. The
occupant was emitting sounds of veritably inhuman nature, as if racked by some
torment beyond description. He was writhing under the bedclothes, and a great stain
was beginning to appear on the blankets.

Elwood scarcely dared to touch him, but gradually the screaming and writhing subsided.
By this time Dombrowski, Choynski, Desrochers, Mazurewicz, and the top-floor lodger
were all crowding into the doorway, and the landlord had sent his wife back to
telephone for Doctor Malkowaki. Everybody shrieked when a large rat-like form
suddenly jumped out from beneath the ensanguined bedclothes and scuttled across the
floor to a fresh, open hole close by. When the doctor arrived and began to pull down
those frightful covers Walter Gilman was dead.

It would be barbarous to do more than suggest what had killed Gilman. There had been
virtually a tunnel through his body--something had eaten his heart out. Dombrowski,
frantic at the failure of his rat-poisoning efforts, cast aside all thought of his lease and
within a week had moved with all his older lodgers to a dingy but less ancient house in
Walnut Street. The worst thing for a while was keeping Joe Mazurewicz quiet; for the
brooding loom-fixer would never stay sober, and was constantly whining and muttering
about spectral and terrible things.

It seems that on that last hideous night Joe had stooped to look at the crimson rat-tracks
which led from Gilman's couch to the near-by hole. On the carpet they were very
indistinct, but a piece of open flooring intervened between the carpet's edge and the
baseboard. There Mazurewicz had found something monstrous--or thought he had, for
no one else could quite agree with him despite the undeniable queerness of the prints.
The tracks on the flooring were certainly vastly unlike the average prints of a rat but
even Choynski and Desrochers would not admit that they were like the prints of four
tiny human hands.

The house was never rented again. As soon as Dombrowski left it the pall of its final
desolation began to descend, for people shunned it both on account of its old reputation
and because of the new foetid odour. Perhaps the ex-landlord's rat-poison had worked
after all, for not long after his departure the place became a neighbourhood nuisance.
Health officials traced the smell to the closed spaces above and beside the eastern garret
room, and agreed that the number of dead rats must be enormous. They decided,
however, that it was not worth their while to hew open and disinfect the long-sealed
spaces; for the foetor would soon be over, and the locality was not one which
encouraged fastidious standards. Indeed, there were always vague local tales of
unexplained stenches upstairs in the Witch-House just after May-Eve and Hallowmass.
The neighbours acquiesced in the inertia--but the foetor none the less formed an
additional count against the place. Toward the last the house was condemned as a
habitation by the building inspector.

Gilman's dreams and their attendant circumstances have never been explained. Elwood,
whose thoughts on the entire episode are sometimes almost maddening, came back to
college the next autumn and was graduated in the following June. He found the spectral
gossip of the town much diminished, and it is indeed a fact that--notwithstanding certain
reports of a ghostly tittering in the deserted house which lasted almost as long as that
edifice itself--no fresh appearances either of Old Keziah or of Brown Jenkin have been
muttered of since Gilman's death. It is rather fortunate that Elwood was not in Arkham
in that later year when certain events abruptly renewed the local whispers about elder
horrors. Of course he heard about the matter afterward and suffered untold torments of
black and bewildered speculation; but even that was not as bad as actual nearness and
several possible sights would have been.

In March, 1931, a gale wrecked the roof and great chimney of the vacant Witch-House,
so that a chaos of crumbling bricks, blackened, moss-grown shingles, and rotting planks
and timbers crashed down into the loft and broke through the floor beneath. The whole
attic storey was choked with debris from above, but no one took the trouble to touch the
mess before the inevitable razing of the decrepit structure. That ultimate step came in
the following December, and it was when Gilman's old room was cleared out by
reluctant, apprehensive workmen that the gossip began.

Among the rubbish which had crashed through the ancient slanting ceiling were several
things which made the workmen pause and call in the police. Later the police in turn
called in the coroner and several professors from the university. There were bones--
badly crushed and splintered, but clearly recognizable as human--whose manifestly
modern date conflicted puzzlingly with the remote period at which their only possible
lurking place, the low, slant-floored loft overhead, had supposedly been sealed from all
human access. The coroner's physician decided that some belonged to a small child,
while certain others--found mixed with shreds of rotten brownish cloth--belonged to a
rather undersized, bent female of advanced years. Careful sifting of debris also
disclosed many tiny bones of rats caught in the collapse, as well as older rat-bones
gnawed by small fangs in a fashion now and then highly productive of controversy and
reflection.

Other objects found included the mangled fragments of many books and papers,
together with a yellowish dust left from the total disintegration of still older books and
papers. All, without exception, appeared to deal with black magic in its most advanced
and horrible forms; and the evidently recent date of certain items is still a mystery as
unsolved as that of the modern human bones. An even greater mystery is the absolute
homogeneity of the crabbed, archaic writing found on a wide range of papers whose
conditions and watermarks suggest age differences of at least one hundred and fifty to
two hundred years. To some, though, the greatest mystery of all is the variety of utterly
inexplicable objects--objects whose shapes, materials, types of workmanship, and
purposes baffle all conjecture--found scattered amidst the wreckage in evidently diverse
states of injury. One of these things--which excited several Miskatonic professors
profoundly is a badly damaged monstrosity plainly resembling the strange image which
Gilman gave to the college museum, save that it is large, wrought of some peculiar
bluish stone instead of metal, and possessed of a singularly angled pedestal with
undecipherable hieroglyphics.

Archaeologists and anthropologists are still trying to explain the bizarre designs chased
on a crushed bowl of light metal whose inner side bore ominous brownish stains when
found. Foreigners and credulous grandmothers are equally garrulous about the modern
nickel crucifix with broken chain mixed in the rubbish and shiveringly identified by Joe
Maturewicz as that which he had given poor Gilman many years before. Some believe
this crucifix was dragged up to the sealed loft by rats, while others think it must have
been on the floor in some corner of Gilman's old room at the time. Still others, including
Joe himself, have theories too wild and fantastic for sober credence.

When the slanting wall of Gilman's room was torn out, the once-sealed triangular space
between that partition and the house's north wall was found to contain much less
structural debris, even in proportion to its size, than the room itself, though it had a
ghastly layer of older materials which paralyzed the wreckers with horror. In brief, the
floor was a veritable ossuary of the bones of small children--some fairly modern, but
others extending back in infinite gradations to a period so remote that crumbling was
almost complete. On this deep bony layer rested a knife of great size, obvious antiquity,
and grotesque, ornate, and exotic design--above which the debris was piled.

In the midst of this debris, wedged between a fallen plank and a cluster of cemented
bricks from the ruined chimney, was an object destined to cause more bafflement,
veiled fright, and openly superstitious talk in Arkham than anything else discovered in
the haunted and accursed building.

This object was the partly crushed skeleton of a huge diseased rat, whose abnormalities
of form are still a topic of debate and source of singular reticence among the members
of Miskatonic's department of comparative anatomy. Very little concerning this skeleton
has leaked out, but the workmen who found it whisper in shocked tones about the long,
brownish hairs with which it was associated.

The bones of the tiny paws, it is rumoured, imply prehensile characteristics more typical
of a diminutive monkey than of a rat, while the small skull with its savage yellow fangs
is of the utmost anomalousness, appearing from certain angles like a miniature,
monstrously degraded parody of a human skull. The workmen crossed themselves in
fright when they came upon this blasphemy, but later burned candles of gratitude in St.
Stanislaus' Church because of the shrill, ghostly tittering they felt they would never hear
again.

THE HAUNTER OF THE DARK

I have seen the dark universe yawning
Where the black planets roll without aim,
Where they roll in their horror unheeded,
Without knowledge or lustre or name.

Cautious investigators will hesitate to challenge the common belief that Robert Blake
was killed by lightning, or by some profound nervous shock derived from an electrical
discharge. It is true that the window he faced was unbroken, but nature has shown
herself capable of many freakish performances. The expression on his face may easily
have arisen from some obscure muscular source unrelated to anything he saw, while the
entries in his diary are clearly the result of a fantastic imagination aroused by certain
local superstitions and by certain old matters he had uncovered. As for the anomalous
conditions at the deserted church of Federal Hill--the shrewd analyst is not slow in
attributing them to some charlatanry, conscious or unconscious, with at least some of
which Blake was secretly connected.
For after all, the victim was a writer and painter wholly devoted to the field of myth,
dream, terror, and superstition, and avid in his quest for scenes and effects of a bizarre,
spectral sort. His earlier stay in the city--a visit to a strange old man as deeply given to
occult and forbidden lore as he--had ended amidst death and flame, and it must have
been some morbid instinct which drew him back from his home in Milwaukee. He may
have known of the old stories despite his statements to the contrary in the diary, and his
death may have nipped in the bud some stupendous hoax destined to have a literary
reflection.

Among those, however, who have examined and correlated all this evidence, there
remain several who cling to less rational and commonplace theories. They are inclined
to take much of Blake's diary at its face value, and point significantly to certain facts
such as the undoubted genuineness of the old church record, the verified existence of
the disliked and unorthodox Starry Wisdom sect prior to 1877, the recorded
disappearance of an inquisitive reporter named Edwin M. Lillibridge in 1893, and--
above all--the look of monstrous, transfiguring fear on the face of the young writer
when he died. It was one of these believers who, moved to fanatical extremes, threw
into the bay the curiously angled stone and its strangely adorned metal box found in the
old church steeple--the black windowless steeple, and not the tower where Blake's diary
said those things originally were. Though widely censured both officially and
unofficially, this man--a reputable physician with a taste for odd folklore--averred that
he had rid the earth of something too dangerous to rest upon it.

Between these two schools of opinion the reader must judge for himself. The papers
have given the tangible details from a sceptical angle, leaving for others the drawing of
the picture as Robert Blake saw it--or thought he saw it--or pretended to see it. Now
studying the diary closely, dispassionately, and at leisure, let us summarize the dark
chain of events from the expressed point of view of their chief actor.

Young Blake returned to Providence in the winter of 1934-5, taking the upper floor of a
venerable dwelling in a grassy court off College Street--on the crest of the great
eastward hill near the Brown University campus and behind the marble John Hay
Library. It was a cosy and fascinating place, in a little garden oasis of village-like
antiquity where huge, friendly cats sunned themselves atop a convenient shed. The
square Georgian house had a monitor roof, classic doorway with fan carving, small-
paned windows, and all the other earmarks of early nineteenth century workmanship.
Inside were six-panelled doors, wide floor-boards, a curving colonial staircase, white
Adam-period mantels, and a rear set of rooms three steps below the general level.

Blake's study, a large southwest chamber, overlooked the front garden on one side,
while its west windows--before one of which he had his desk--faced off from the brow
of the hill and commanded a splendid view of the lower town's outspread roofs and of
the mystical sunsets that flamed behind them. On the far horizon were the open
countryside's purple slopes. Against these, some two miles away, rose the spectral hump
of Federal Hill, bristling with huddled roofs and steeples whose remote outlines
wavered mysteriously, taking fantastic forms as the smoke of the city swirled up and
enmeshed them. Blake had a curious sense that he was looking upon some unknown,
ethereal world which might or might not vanish in dream if ever he tried to seek it out
and enter it in person.
Having sent home for most of his books, Blake bought some antique furniture suitable
for his quarters and settled down to write and paint--living alone, and attending to the
simple housework himself. His studio was in a north attic room, where the panes of the
monitor roof furnished admirable lighting. During that first winter he produced five of
his best-known short stories--The Burrower Beneath, The Stairs in the Crypt, Shaggai,
In the Vale of Pnath, and The Feaster from the Stars--and painted seven canvases;
studies of nameless, unhuman monsters, and profoundly alien, non-terrestrial
landscapes.

At sunset he would often sit at his desk and gaze dreamily off at the outspread west--the
dark towers of Memorial Hall just below, the Georgian court-house belfry, the lofty
pinnacles of the downtown section, and that shimmering, spire-crowned mound in the
distance whose unknown streets and labyrinthine gables so potently provoked his fancy.
From his few local aquaintances he learned that the far-off slope was a vast Italian
quarter, though most of the houses were remnant of older Yankee and Irish days. Now
and then he would train his field-glasses on that spectral, unreachable world beyond the
curling smoke; picking out individual roofs and chimneys and steeples, and speculating
upon the bizarre and curious mysteries they might house. Even with optical aid Federal
Hill seemed somehow alien, half fabulous, and linked to the unreal, intangible marvels
of Blake's own tales and pictures. The feeling would persist long after the hill had faded
into the violet, lamp-starred twilight, and the court-house floodlights and the red
Industrial Trust beacon had blazed up to make the night grotesque.

Of all the distant objects on Federal Hill, a certain huge, dark church most fascinated
Blake. It stood out with especial distinctness at certain hours of the day, and at sunset
the great tower and tapering steeple loomed blackly against the flaming sky. It seemed
to rest on especially high ground; for the grimy façade, and the obliquely seen north
side with sloping roof and the tops of great pointed windows, rose boldly above the
tangle of surrounding ridgepoles and chimney-pots. Peculiarly grim and austere, it
appeared to be built of stone, stained and weathered with the smoke and storms of a
century and more. The style, so far as the glass could show, was that earliest
experimental form of Gothic revival which preceded the stately Upjohn period and held
over some of the outlines and proportions of the Georgian age. Perhaps it was reared
around 1810 or 1815.

As months passed, Blake watched the far-off, forbidding structure with an oddly
mounting interest. Since the vast windows were never lighted, he knew that it must be
vacant. The longer he watched, the more his imagination worked, till at length he began
to fancy curious things. He believed that a vague, singular aura of desolation hovered
over the place, so that even the pigeons and swallows shunned its smoky eaves. Around
other towers and belfries his glass would reveal great flocks of birds, but here they
never rested. At least, that is what he thought and set down in his diary. He pointed the
place out to several friends, but none of them had even been on Federal Hill or
possessed the faintest notion of what the church was or had been.

In the spring a deep restlessness gripped Blake. He had begun his long-planned novel--
based on a supposed survival of the witch-cult in Maine--but was strangely unable to
make progress with it. More and more he would sit at his westward window and gaze at
the distant hill and the black, frowning steeple shunned by the birds. When the delicate
leaves came out on the garden boughs the world was filled with a new beauty, but
Blake's restlessness was merely increased. It was then that he first thought of crossing
the city and climbing bodily up that fabulous slope into the smoke-wreathed world of
dream.

Late in April, just before the aeon-shadowed Walpurgis time, Blake made his first trip
into the unknown. Plodding through the endless downtown streets and the bleak,
decayed squares beyond, he came finally upon the ascending avenue of century-worn
steps, sagging Doric porches, and blear-paned cupolas which he felt must lead up to the
long-known, unreachable world beyond the mists. There were dingy blue-and-white
street signs which meant nothing to him, and presently he noted the strange, dark faces
of the drifting crowds, and the foreign signs over curious shops in brown, decade-
weathered buildings. Nowhere could he find any of the objects he had seen from afar; so
that once more he half fancied that the Federal Hill of that distant view was a dream-
world never to be trod by living human feet.

Now and then a battered church façade or crumbling spire came in sight, but never the
blackened pile that he sought. When he asked a shopkeeper about a great stone church
the man smiled and shook his head, though he spoke English freely. As Blake climbed
higher, the region seemed stranger and stranger, with bewildering mazes of brooding
brown alleys leading eternally off to the south. He crossed two or three broad avenues,
and once thought he glimpsed a familiar tower. Again he asked a merchant about the
massive church of stone, and this time he could have sworn that the plea of ignorance
was feigned. The dark man's face had a look of fear which he tried to hide, and Blake
saw him make a curious sign with his right hand.

Then suddenly a black spire stood out against the cloudy sky on his left, above the tiers
of brown roofs lining the tangled southerly alleys. Blake knew at once what it was, and
plunged toward it through the squalid, unpaved lanes that climbed from the avenue.
Twice he lost his way, but he somehow dared not ask any of the patriarchs or
housewives who sat on their doorsteps, or any of the children who shouted and played
in the mud of the shadowy lanes.

At last he saw the tower plain against the southwest, and a huge stone bulk rose darkly
at the end of an alley. Presently he stood in a wind-swept open square, quaintly
cobblestoned, with a high bank wall on the farther side. This was the end of his quest;
for upon the wide, iron-railed, weed-grown plateau which the wall supported--a
separate, lesser world raised fully six feet above the surrounding streets--there stood a
grim, titan bulk whose identity, despite Blake's new perspective, was beyond dispute.

The vacant church was in a state of great decrepitude. Some of the high stone buttresses
had fallen, and several delicate finials lay half lost among the brown, neglected weeds
and grasses. The sooty Gothic windows were largely unbroken, though many of the
stone mullions were missing. Blake wondered how the obscurely painted panes could
have survived so well, in view of the known habits of small boys the world over. The
massive doors were intact and tightly closed. Around the top of the bank wall, fully
enclosing the grounds, was a rusty iron fence whose gate--at the head of a flight of steps
from the square--was visibly padlocked. The path from the gate to the building was
completely overgrown. Desolation and decay hung like a pall above the place, and in
the birdless eaves and black, ivyless walls Blake felt a touch of the dimly sinister
beyond his power to define.
There were very few people in the square, but Blake saw a policeman at the northerly
end and approached him with questions about the church. He was a great wholesome
Irishman, and it seemed odd that he would do little more than make the sign of the cross
and mutter that people never spoke of that building. When Blake pressed him he said
very hurriedly that the Italian priest warned everybody against it, vowing that a
monstrous evil had once dwelt there and left its mark. He himself had heard dark
whispers of it from his father, who recalled certain sounds and rumours from his
boyhood.

There had been a bad sect there in the old days--an outlaw sect that called up awful
things from some unknown gulf of night. It had taken a good priest to exorcise what had
come, though there did be those who said that merely the light could do it. If Father
O'Malley were alive there would be many a thing he could tell. But now there was
nothing to do but let it alone. It hurt nobody now, and those that owned it were dead or
far away. They had run away like rats after the threatening talk in '77, when people
began to mind the way folks vanished now and then in the neighbourhood. Some day
the city would step in and take the property for lack of heirs, but little good would come
of anybody's touching it. Better it be left alone for the years to topple, lest things be
stirred that ought to rest forever in their black abyss.

After the policeman had gone Blake stood staring at the sullen steepled pile. It excited
him to find that the structure seemed as sinister to others as to him, and he wondered
what grain of truth might lie behind the old tales the bluecoat had repeated. Probably
they were mere legends evoked by the evil look of the place, but even so, they were like
a strange coming to life of one of his own stories.

The afternoon sun came out from behind dispersing clouds, but seemed unable to light
up the stained, sooty walls of the old temple that towered on its high plateau. It was odd
that the green of spring had not touched the brown, withered growths in the raised, iron-
fenced yard. Blake found himself edging nearer the raised area and examining the bank
wall and rusted fence for possible avenues of ingress. There was a terrible lure about the
blackened fane which was not to be resisted. The fence had no opening near the steps,
but round on the north side were some missing bars. He could go up the steps and walk
round on the narrow coping outside the fence till he came to the gap. If the people
feared the place so wildly, he would encounter no interference.

He was on the embankment and almost inside the fence before anyone noticed him.
Then, looking down, he saw the few people in the square edging away and making the
same sign with their right hands that the shopkeeper in the avenue had made. Several
windows were slammed down, and a fat woman darted into the street and pulled some
small children inside a rickety, unpainted house. The gap in the fence was very easy to
pass through, and before long Blake found himself wading amidst the rotting, tangled
growths of the deserted yard. Here and there the worn stump of a headstone told him
that there had once been burials in the field; but that, he saw, must have been very long
ago. The sheer bulk of the church was oppressive now that he was close to it, but he
conquered his mood and approached to try the three great doors in the façade. All were
securely locked, so he began a circuit of the Cyclopean building in quest of some minor
and more penetrable opening. Even then he could not be sure that he wished to enter
that haunt of desertion and shadow, yet the pull of its strangeness dragged him on
automatically.
A yawning and unprotected cellar window in the rear furnished the needed aperture.
Peering in, Blake saw a subterrene gulf of cobwebs and dust faintly litten by the western
sun's filtered rays. Debris, old barrels, and ruined boxes and furniture of numerous sorts
met his eye, though over everything lay a shroud of dust which softened all sharp
outlines. The rusted remains of a hot-air furnace showed that the building had been used
and kept in shape as late as mid-Victorian times.

Acting almost without conscious initiative, Blake crawled through the window and let
himself down to the dust-carpeted and debris-strewn concrete floor. The vaulted cellar
was a vast one, without partitions; and in a corner far to the right, amid dense shadows,
he saw a black archway evidently leading upstairs. He felt a peculiar sense of
oppression at being actually within the great spectral building, but kept it in check as he
cautiously scouted about--finding a still-intact barrel amid the dust, and rolling it over to
the open window to provide for his exit. Then, bracing himself, he crossed the wide,
cobweb-festooned space toward the arch. Half-choked with the omnipresent dust, and
covered with ghostly gossamer fibres, he reached and began to climb the worn stone
steps which rose into the darkness. He had no light, but groped carefully with his hands.
After a sharp turn he felt a closed door ahead, and a little fumbling revealed its ancient
latch. It opened inward, and beyond it he saw a dimly illumined corridor lined with
worm-eaten panelling.

Once on the ground floor, Blake began exploring in a rapid fashion. All the inner doors
were unlocked, so that he freely passed from room to room. The colossal nave was an
almost eldritch place with its drifts and mountains of dust over box pews, altar, hour-
glass pulpit, and sounding-board and its titanic ropes of cobweb stretching among the
pointed arches of the gallery and entwining the clustered Gothic columns. Over all this
hushed desolation played a hideous leaden light as the declining afternoon sun sent its
rays through the strange, half-blackened panes of the great apsidal windows.

The paintings on those windows were so obscured by soot that Blake could scarcely
decipher what they had represented, but from the little he could make out he did not like
them. The designs were largely conventional, and his knowledge of obscure symbolism
told him much concerning some of the ancient patterns. The few saints depicted bore
expressions distinctly open to criticism, while one of the windows seemed to show
merely a dark space with spirals of curious luminosity scattered about in it. Turning
away from the windows, Blake noticed that the cobwebbed cross above the altar was
not of the ordinary kind, but resembled the primordial ankh or crux ansata of shadowy
Egypt.

In a rear vestry room beside the apse Blake found a rotting desk and ceiling-high
shelves of mildewed, disintegrating books. Here for the first time he received a positive
shock of objective horror, for the titles of those books told him much. They were the
black, forbidden things which most sane people have never even heard of, or have heard
of only in furtive, timorous whispers; the banned and dreaded repositories of equivocal
secret and immemorial formulae which have trickled down the stream of time from the
days of man's youth, and the dim, fabulous days before man was. He had himself read
many of them--a Latin version of the abhorred Necronomicon, the sinister Liber Ivonis,
the infamous Cultes des Goules of Comte d'Erlette, the Unaussprechlichen Kulten of
von Junzt, and old Ludvig Prinn's hellish De Vermis Mysteriis. But there were others he
had known merely by reputation or not at all--the Pnakotic Manuscripts, the Book of
Dzyan, and a crumbling volume of wholly unidentifiable characters yet with certain
symbols and diagrams shuddering recognizable to the occult student. Clearly, the
lingering local rumours had not lied. This place had once been the seat of an evil older
than mankind and wider than the known universe.

In the ruined desk was a small leatherbound record-book filled with entries in some odd
cryptographic medium. The manuscript writing consisted of the common traditional
symbols used today in astronomy and anciently in alchemy, astrology, and other
dubious arts--the devices of the sun, moon, planets, aspects, and zodiacal signs--here
massed in solid pages of text, with divisions and paragraphings suggesting that each
symbol answered to some alphabetical letter.

In the hope of later solving the cryptogram, Blake bore off this volume in his coat
pocket. Many of the great tomes on the shelves fascinated him unutterably, and he felt
tempted to borrow them at some later time. He wondered how they could have remained
undisturbed so long. Was he the first to conquer the clutching, pervasive fear which had
for nearly sixty years protected this deserted place from visitors?

Having now thoroughly explored the ground floor, Blake ploughed again through the
dust of the spectral nave to the front vestibule, where he had seen a door and staircase
presumably leading up to the blackened tower and steeple--objects so long familiar to
him at a distance. The ascent was a choking experience, for dust lay thick, while the
spiders had done their worst in this constricted place. The staircase was a spiral with
high, narrow wooden treads, and now and then Blake passed a clouded window looking
dizzily out over the city. Though he had seen no ropes below, he expected to find a bell
or peal of bells in the tower whose narrow, louvre-boarded lancet windows his field-
glass had studied so often. Here he was doomed to disappointment; for when he attained
the top of the stairs he found the tower chamber vacant of chimes, and clearly devoted
to vastly different purposes.

The room, about fifteen feet square, was faintly lighted by four lancet windows, one on
each side, which were glazed within their screening of decayed louvre-boards. These
had been further fitted with tight, opaque screens, but the latter were now largely rotted
away. In the centre of the dust-laden floor rose a curiously angled stone pillar dome four
feet in height and two in average diameter, covered on each side with bizarre, crudely
incised and wholly unrecognizable hieroglyphs. On this pillar rested a metal box of
peculiarly asymmetrical form; its hinged lid thrown back, and its interior holding what
looked beneath the decade-deep dust to be an egg-shaped or irregularly spherical object
some four inches through. Around the pillar in a rough circle were seven high-backed
Gothic chairs still largely intact, while behind them, ranging along the dark-panelled
walls, were seven colossal images of crumbling, black-painted plaster, resembling more
than anything else the cryptic carven megaliths of mysterious Easter Island. In one
corner of the cobwebbed chamber a ladder was built into the wall, leading up to the
closed trap door of the windowless steeple above.

As Blake grew accustomed to the feeble light he noticed odd bas-reliefs on the strange
open box of yellowish metal. Approaching, he tried to clear the dust away with his
hands and handkerchief, and saw that the figurings were of a monstrous and utterly
alien kind; depicting entities which, though seemingly alive, resembled no known life-
form ever evolved on this planet. The four-inch seeming sphere turned out to be a nearly
black, red-striated polyhedron with many irregular flat surfaces; either a very
remarkable crystal of some sort or an artificial object of carved and highly polished
mineral matter. It did not touch the bottom of the box, but was held suspended by means
of a metal band around its centre, with seven queerly-designed supports extending
horizontally to angles of the box's inner wall near the top. This stone, once exposed,
exerted upon Blake an almost alarming fascination. He could scarcely tear his eyes from
it, and as he looked at its glistening surfaces he almost fancied it was transparent, with
half-formed worlds of wonder within. Into his mind floated pictures of alien orbs with
great stone towers, and other orbs with titan mountains and no mark of life, and still
remoter spaces where only a stirring in vague blacknesses told of the presence of
consciousness and will.

When he did look away, it was to notice a somewhat singular mound of dust in the far
corner near the ladder to the steeple. Just why it took his attention he could not tell, but
something in its contours carried a message to his unconscious mind. Ploughing toward
it, and brushing aside the hanging cobwebs as he went, he began to discern something
grim about it. Hand and handkerchief soon revealed the truth, and Blake gasped with a
baffling mixture of emotions. It was a human skeleton, and it must have been there for a
very long time. The clothing was in shreds, but some buttons and fragments of cloth
bespoke a man's grey suit. There were other bits of evidence--shoes, metal clasps, huge
buttons for round cuffs, a stickpin of bygone pattern, a reporter's badge with the name of
the old Providence Telegram, and a crumbling leather pocketbook. Blake examined the
latter with care, finding within it several bills of antiquated issue, a celluloid advertising
calendar for 1893, some cards with the name "Edwin M. Lillibridge", and a paper
covered with pencilled memoranda.

This paper held much of a puzzling nature, and Blake read it carefully at the dim
westward window. Its disjointed text included such phrases as the following:

Prof. Enoch Bowen home from Egypt May 1844--buys old Free-Will Church in July--
his archaeological work & studies in occult well known.

Dr Drowne of 4th Baptist warns against Starry Wisdom in sermon 29 Dec. 1844.

Congregation 97 by end of '45.

1846--3 disappearances--first mention of Shining Trapezohedron.

7 disappearances 1848--stories of blood sacrifice begin.

Investigation 1853 comes to nothing--stories of sounds.

Fr O'Malley tells of devil-worship with box found in great Egyptian ruins--says they
call up something that can't exist in light. Flees a little light, and banished by strong
light. Then has to be summoned again. Probably got this from deathbed confession of
Francis X. Feeney, who had joined Starry Wisdom in '49. These people say the Shining
Trapezohedron shows them heaven & other worlds, & that the Haunter of the Dark tells
them secrets in some way.
Story of Orrin B. Eddy 1857. They call it up by gazing at the crystal, & have a secret
language of their own.

200 or more in cong. 1863, exclusive of men at front.

Irish boys mob church in 1869 after Patrick Regan's disappearance.

Veiled article in J. 14 March '72, but people don't talk about it.

6 disappearances 1876--secret committee calls on Mayor Doyle.

Action promised Feb. 1877--church closes in April.

Gang--Federal Hill Boys--threaten Dr--and vestrymen in May.

181 persons leave city before end of '77--mention no names.

Ghost stories begin around 1880--try to ascertain truth of report that no human being
has entered church since 1877.

Ask Lanigan for photograph of place taken 1851...

Restoring the paper to the pocketbook and placing the latter in his coat, Blake turned to
look down at the skeleton in the dust. The implications of the notes were clear, and
there could be no doubt but that this man had come to the deserted edifice forty-two
years before in quest of a newspaper sensation which no one else had been bold enough
to attempt. Perhaps no one else had known of his plan--who could tell? But he had
never returned to his paper. Had some bravely-suppressed fear risen to overcome him
and bring on sudden heart-failure? Blake stooped over the gleaming bones and noted
their peculiar state. Some of them were badly scattered, and a few seemed oddly
dissolved at the ends. Others were strangely yellowed, with vague suggestions of
charring. This charring extended to some of the fragments of clothing. The skull was in
a very peculiar state--stained yellow, and with a charred aperture in the top as if some
powerful acid had eaten through the solid bone. What had happened to the skeleton
during its four decades of silent entombment here Blake could not imagine.

Before he realized it, he was looking at the stone again, and letting its curious influence
call up a nebulous pageantry in his mind. He saw processions of robed, hooded figures
whose outlines were not human, and looked on endless leagues of desert lined with
carved, sky-reaching monoliths. He saw towers and walls in nighted depths under the
sea, and vortices of space where wisps of black mist floated before thin shimmerings of
cold purple haze. And beyond all else he glimpsed an infinite gulf of darkness, where
solid and semisolid forms were known only by their windy stirrings, and cloudy
patterns of force seemed to superimpose order on chaos and hold forth a key to all the
paradoxes and arcana of the worlds we know.

Then all at once the spell was broken by an access of gnawing, indeterminate panic fear.
Blake choked and turned away from the stone, conscious of some formless alien
presence close to him and watching him with horrible intentness. He felt entangled with
something--something which was not in the stone, but which had looked through it at
him--something which would ceaselessly follow him with a cognition that was not
physical sight. Plainly, the place was getting on his nerves--as well it might in view of
his gruesome find. The light was waning, too, and since he had no illuminant with him
he knew he would have to be leaving soon.

It was then, in the gathering twilight, that he thought he saw a faint trace of luminosity
in the crazily angled stone. He had tried to look away from it, but some obscure
compulsion drew his eyes hack. Was there a subtle phosphorescence of radio-activity
about the thing? What was it that the dead man's notes had said concerning a Shining
Trapezohedron? What, anyway, was this abandoned lair of cosmic evil? What had been
done here, and what might still be lurking in the bird-shunned shadows? It seemed now
as if an elusive touch of foetor had arisen somewhere close by, though its source was
not apparent. Blake seized the cover of the long-open box and snapped it down. It
moved easily on its alien hinges, and closed completely over the unmistakably glowing
stone.

At the sharp click of that closing a soft stirring sound seemed to come from the steeple's
eternal blackness overhead, beyond the trap-door. Rats, without question--the only
living things to reveal their presence in this accursed pile since he had entered it. And
yet that stirring in the steeple frightened him horribly, so that he plunged almost wildly
down the spiral stairs, across the ghoulish nave, into the vaulted basement, out amidst
the gathering dust of the deserted square, and down through the teeming, fear-haunted
alleys and avenues of Federal Hill towards the sane central streets and the home-like
brick sidewalks of the college district.

During the days which followed, Blake told no one of his expedition. Instead, he read
much in certain books, examined long years of newspaper files downtown, and worked
feverishly at the cryptogram in that leather volume from the cobwebbed vestry room.
The cipher, he soon saw, was no simple one; and after a long period of endeavour he
felt sure that its language could not be English, Latin, Greek, French, Spanish, Italian,
or German. Evidently he would have to draw upon the deepest wells of his strange
erudition.

Every evening the old impulse to gaze westwards returned, and he saw the black steeple
as of yore amongst the bristling roofs of a distant and half-fabulous world. But now it
held a fresh note of terror for him. He knew the heritage of evil lore it masked, and with
the knowledge his vision ran riot in queer new ways. The birds of spring were returning,
and as he watched their sunset flights he fancied they avoided the gaunt, lone spire as
never before. When a flock of them approached it, he thought, they would wheel and
scatter in panic confusion--and he could guess at the wild twitterings which failed to
reach him across the intervening miles.

It was in June that Blake's diary told of his victory over the cryptogram. The text was,
he found, in the dark Aklo language used by certain cults of evil antiquity, and known
to him in a halting way through previous researches. The diary is strangely reticent
about what Blake deciphered, but he was patently awed and disconcerted by his results.
There are references to a Haunter of the Dark awaked by gazing into the Shining
Trapezohedron, and insane conjectures about the black gulfs of chaos from which it was
called. The being is spoken of as holding all knowledge, and demanding monstrous
sacrifices. Some of Blake's entries show fear lest the thing, which he seemed to regard
as summoned, stalk abroad; though he adds that the streetlights form a bulwark which
cannot be crossed.

Of the Shining Trapezohedron he speaks often, calling it a window on all time and
space, and tracing its history from the days it was fashioned on dark Yuggoth, before
ever the Old Ones brought it to earth. It was treasured and placed in its curious box by
the crinoid things of Antarctica, salvaged from their ruins by the serpent-men of
Valusia, and peered at aeons later in Lemuria by the first human beings. It crossed
strange lands and stranger seas, and sank with Atlantis before a Minoan fisher meshed it
in his net and sold it to swarthy merchants from nighted Khem. The Pharaoh Nephren-
Ka built around it a temple with a windowless crypt, and did that which caused his
name to be stricken from all monuments and records. Then it slept in the ruins of that
evil fane which the priests and the new Pharaoh destroyed, till the delver's spade once
more brought it forth to curse mankind.

Early in July the newspapers oddly supplement Blake's entries, though in so brief and
casual a way that only the diary has called general attention to their contribution. It
appears that a new fear had been growing on Federal Hill since a stranger had entered
the dreaded church. The Italians whispered of unaccustomed stirrings and bumpings and
scrapings in the dark windowless steeple, and called on their priests to banish an entity
which haunted their dreams. Something, they said, was constantly watching at a door to
see if it were dark enough to venture forth. Press items mentioned the longstanding local
superstitions, but failed to shed much light on the earlier background of the horror. It
was obvious that the young reporters of today are no antiquarians. In writing of these
things in his diary, Blake expresses a curious kind of remorse, and talks of the duty of
burying the Shining Trapezohedron and of banishing what he had evoked by letting
daylight into the hideous jutting spire. At the same time, however, he displays the
dangerous extent of his fascination, and admits a morbid longing--pervading even his
dreams--to visit the accursed tower and gaze again into the cosmic secrets of the
glowing stone.

Then something in the Journal on the morning of 17 July threw the diarist into a
veritable fever of horror. It was only a variant of the other half-humorous items about
the Federal Hill restlessness, but to Blake it was somehow very terrible indeed. In the
night a thunderstorm had put the city's lighting-system out of commission for a full
hour, and in that black interval the Italians had nearly gone mad with fright. Those
living near the dreaded church had sworn that the thing in the steeple had taken
advantage of the street lamps' absence and gone down into the body of the church,
flopping and bumping around in a viscous, altogether dreadful way. Towards the last it
had bumped up to the tower, where there were sounds of the shattering of glass. It could
go wherever the darkness reached, but light would always send it fleeing.

When the current blazed on again there had been a shocking commotion in the tower,
for even the feeble light trickling through the grime-blackened, louvre-boarded
windows was too much for the thing. It had bumped and slithered up into its tenebrous
steeple just in time--for a long dose of light would have sent it back into the abyss
whence the crazy stranger had called it. During the dark hour praying crowds had
clustered round the church in the rain with lighted candles and lamps somehow shielded
with folded paper and umbrellas--a guard of light to save the city from the nightmare
that stalks in darkness. Once, those nearest the church declared, the outer door had
rattled hideously.

But even this was not the worst. That evening in the Bulletin Blake read of what the
reporters had found. Aroused at last to the whimsical news value of the scare, a pair of
them had defied the frantic crowds of Italians and crawled into the church through the
cellar window after trying the doors in vain. They found the dust of the vestibule and of
the spectral nave ploughed up in a singular way, with pits of rotted cushions and satin
pew-linings scattered curiously around. There was a bad odour everywhere, and here
and there were bits of yellow stain and patches of what looked like charring. Opening
the door to the tower, and pausing a moment at the suspicion of a scraping sound above,
they found the narrow spiral stairs wiped roughly clean.

In the tower itself a similarly half-swept condition existed. They spoke of the
heptagonal stone pillar, the overturned Gothic chairs, and the bizarre plaster images;
though strangely enough the metal box and the old mutilated skeleton were not
mentioned. What disturbed Blake the most--except for the hints of stains and charring
and bad odours--was the final detail that explained the crashing glass. Every one of the
tower's lancet windows was broken, and two of them had been darkened in a crude and
hurried way by the stuffing of satin pew-linings and cushion-horsehair into the spaces
between the slanting exterior louvre-boards. More satin fragments and bunches of
horsehair lay scattered around the newly swept floor, as if someone had been interrupted
in the act of restoring the tower to the absolute blackness of its tightly curtained days.

Yellowish stains and charred patches were found on the ladder to the windowless spire,
but when a reporter climbed up, opened the horizontally-sliding trap-door and shot a
feeble flashlight beam into the black and strangely foetid space, he saw nothing but
darkness, and a heterogeneous litter of shapeless fragments near the aperture. The
verdict, of course, was charlatanry. Somebody had played a joke on the superstitious
hill-dwellers, or else some fanatic had striven to bolster up their fears for their own
supposed good. Or perhaps some of the younger and more sophisticated dwellers had
staged an elaborate hoax on the outside world. There was an amusing aftermath when
the police sent an officer to verify the reports. Three men in succession found ways of
evading the assignment, and the fourth went very reluctantly and returned very soon
without adding to the account given by the reporters.

From this point onwards Blake's diary shows a mounting tide of insidious horror and
nervous apprehension. He upbraids himself for not doing something, and speculates
wildly on the consequences of another electrical breakdown. It had been verified that on
three occasions--during thunderstorms--he telephoned the electric light company in a
frantic vein and asked that desperate precautions against a lapse of power be taken. Now
and then his entries show concern over the failure of the reporters to find the metal box
and stone, and the strangely marred old skeleton, when they explored the shadowy
tower room. He assumed that these things had been removed--whither, and by whom or
what, he could only guess. But his worst fears concerned himself, and the kind of
unholy rapport he felt to exist between his mind and that lurking horror in the distant
steeple--that monstrous thing of night which his rashness had called out of the ultimate
black spaces. He seemed to feel a constant tugging at his will, and callers of that period
remember how he would sit abstractedly at his desk and stare out of the west window at
that far-off spire-bristling mound beyond the swirling smoke of the city. His entries
dwell monotonously on certain terrible dreams, and of a strengthening of the unholy
rapport in his sleep. There is mention of a night when he awakened to find himself fully
dressed, outdoors, and headed automatically down College Hill towards the west. Again
and again he dwells on the fact that the thing in the steeple knows where to find him.

The week following 30 July is recalled as the time of Blake's partial breakdown. He did
not dress, and ordered all his food by telephone. Visitors remarked the cords he kept
near his bed, and he said that sleep-walking had forced him to bind his ankles every
night with knots which would probably hold or else waken him with the labour of
untying. In his diary he told of the hideous experience which had brought the collapse.
After retiring on the night of the 30th, he had suddenly found himself groping about in
an almost black space. All he could see were short, faint, horizontal streaks of bluish
light, but he could smell an overpowering foetor and hear a curious jumble of soft,
furtive sounds above him. Whenever he moved he stumbled over something, and at
each noise there would come a sort of answering sound from above--a vague stirring,
mixed with the cautious sliding of wood on wood.

Once his groping hands encountered a pillar of stone with a vacant top, whilst later he
found himself clutching the rungs of a ladder built into the wall, and fumbling his
uncertain way upwards towards some region of intenser stench where a hot, searing
blast beat down against him. Before his eyes a kaleidoscopic range of phantasmal
images played, all of them dissolving at intervals into the picture of a vast, unplumbed
abyss of night wherein whirled suns and worlds of an even profounder blackness. He
thought of the ancient legends of Ultimate Chaos, at whose centre sprawls the blind
idiot god Azathoth, Lord of All Things, encircled by his flopping horde of mindless and
amorphous dancers, and lulled by the thin monotonous piping of a demoniac flute held
in nameless paws.

Then a sharp report from the outer world broke through his stupor and roused him to the
unutterable horror of his position. What it was, he never knew--perhaps it was some
belated peal from the fireworks heard all summer on Federal Hill as the dwellers hail
their various patron saints, or the saints of their native villages in Italy. In any event he
shrieked aloud, dropped frantically from the ladder, and stumbled blindly across the
obstructed floor of the almost lightless chamber that encompassed him.

He knew instantly where he was, and plunged recklessly down the narrow spiral
staircase, tripping and bruising himself at every turn. There was a nightmare flight
through a vast cobwebbed nave whose ghostly arches reached up to realms of leering
shadow, a sightless scramble through a littered basement, a climb to regions of air and
street lights outside, and a mad racing down a spectral hill of gibbering gables, across a
grim, silent city of tall black towers, and up the steep eastward precipice to his own
ancient door.

On regaining consciousness in the morning he found himself lying on his study floor
fully dressed. Dirt and cobwebs covered him, and every inch of his body seemed sore
and bruised. When he faced the mirror he saw that his hair was badly scorched while a
trace of strange evil odour seemed to cling to his upper outer clothing. It was then that
his nerves broke down. Thereafter, lounging exhaustedly about in a dressing-gown, he
did little but stare from his west window, shiver at the threat of thunder, and make wild
entries in his diary.
The great storm broke just before midnight on 8 August. Lightning struck repeatedly in
all parts of the city, and two remarkable fireballs were reported. The rain was torrential,
while a constant fusillade of thunder brought sleeplessness to thousands. Blake was
utterly frantic in his fear for the lighting system, and tried to telephone the company
around 1 A.M. though by that time service had been temporarily cut off in the interests
of safety. He recorded everything in his diary--the large, nervous, and often
undecipherable, hieroglyphs telling their own story of growing frenzy and despair, and
of entries scrawled blindly in the dark.

He had to keep the house dark in order to see out of the window, and it appears that
most of his time was spent at his desk, peering anxiously through the rain across the
glistening miles of downtown roofs at the constellation of distant lights marking Federal
Hill. Now and then he would fumblingly make an entry in his diary, so that detached
phrases such as "The lights must not go"; "It knows where I am"; "I must destroy it";
and "it is calling to me, but perhaps it means no injury this time"; are found scattered
down two of the pages.

Then the lights went out all over the city. It happened at 2.12 A.M. according to power-
house records, but Blake's diary gives no indication of the time. The entry is merely,
"Lights out--God help me." On Federal Hill there were watchers as anxious as he, and
rain-soaked knots of men paraded the square and alleys around the evil church with
umbrella-shaded candles, electric flashlights, oil lanterns, crucifixes, and obscure
charms of the many sorts common to southern Italy. They blessed each flash of
lightning, and made cryptical signs of fear with their right hands when a turn in the
storm caused the flashes to lessen and finally to cease altogether. A rising wind blew
out most of the candles, so that the scene grew threatening dark. Someone roused Father
Merluzzo of Spirito Santo Church, and he hastened to the dismal square to pronounce
whatever helpful syllables he could. Of the restless and curious sounds in the blackened
tower, there could be no doubt whatever.

For what happened at 2.35 we have the testimony of the priest, a young, intelligent, and
well-educated person; of Patrolman William J. Monohan of the Central Station, an
officer of the highest reliability who had paused at that part of his beat to inspect the
crowd; and of most of the seventy-eight men who had gathered around the church's high
back wall--especially those in the square where the eastward façade was visible. Of
course there was nothing which can be proved as being outside the order of Nature. The
possible causes of such an event are many. No one can speak with certainty of the
obscure chemical processes arising in a vast, ancient, ill-aired, and long-deserted
building of heterogeneous contents. Mephitic vapours--spontaneous combustion--
pressure of gases born of long decay--any one of numberless phenomena might be
responsible. And then, of course, the factor of conscious charlatanry can by no means be
excluded. The thing was really quite simple in itself, and covered less than three
minutes of actual time. Father Merluzzo, always a precise man, looked at his watch
repeatedly.

It started with a definite swelling of the dull fumbling sounds inside the black tower.
There had for some time been a vague exhalation of strange, evil odours from the
church, and this had now become emphatic and offensive. Then at last there was a
sound of splintering wood and a large, heavy object crashed down in the yard beneath
the frowning easterly façade. The tower was invisible now that the candles would not
burn, but as the object neared the ground the people knew that it was the smoke-grimed
louvre-boarding of that tower's east window.

Immediately afterwards an utterly unbearable foetor welled forth from the unseen
heights, choking and sickening the trembling watchers, and almost prostrating those in
the square. At the same time the air trembled with a vibration as of flapping wings, and
a sudden east-blowing wind more violent than any previous blast snatched off the hats
and wrenched the dripping umbrellas from the crowd. Nothing definite could be seen in
the candleless night, though some upward-looking spectators thought they glimpsed a
great spreading blur of denser blackness against the inky sky--something like a formless
cloud of smoke that shot with meteorlike speed towards the east.

That was all. The watchers were half numbed with fright, awe, and discomfort, and
scarcely knew what to do, or whether to do anything at all. Not knowing what had
happened, they did not relax their vigil; and a moment later they sent up a prayer as a
sharp flash of belated lightning, followed by an earsplitting crash of sound, rent the
flooded heavens. Half an hour later the rain stopped, and in fifteen minutes more the
street lights sprang on again, sending the weary, bedraggled watchers relievedly back to
their homes.

The next day's papers gave these matters minor mention in connection with the general
storm reports. It seems that the great lightning flash and deafening explosion which
followed the Federal Hill occurrence were even more tremendous farther east, where a
burst of the singular foetor was likewise noticed. The phenomenon was most marked
over College Hill, where the crash awakened all the sleeping inhabitants and led to a
bewildered round of speculations. Of those who were already awake only a few saw the
anomalous blaze of light near the top of the hill, or noticed the inexplicable upward rush
of air which almost stripped the leaves from the trees and blasted the plants in the
gardens. It was agreed that the lone, sudden lightning-bolt must have struck somewhere
in this neighbourhood, though no trace of its striking could afterwards be found. A
youth in the Tau Omega fraternity house thought he saw a grotesque and hideous mass
of smoke in the air just as the preliminary flash burst, but his observation has not been
verified. All of the few observers, however, agree as to the violent gust from the west
and the flood of intolerable stench which preceded the belated stroke, whilst evidence
concerning the momentary burned odour after the stroke is equally general.

These points were discussed very carefully because of their probable connection with
the death of Robert Blake. Students in the Psi Delta house, whose upper rear windows
looked into Blake's study, noticed the blurred white face at the westward window on the
morning of the ninth, and wondered what was wrong with the expression. When they
saw the same face in the same position that evening, they felt worried, and watched for
the lights to come up in his apartment. Later they rang the bell of the darkened flat, and
finally had a policeman force the door.

The rigid body sat bolt upright at the desk by the window, and when the intruders saw
the glassy, bulging eyes, and the marks of stark, convulsive fright on the twisted
features, they turned away in sickened dismay. Shortly afterwards the coroner's
physician made an examination, and despite the unbroken window reported electrical
shock, or nervous tension induced by electrical discharge, as the cause of death. The
hideous expression he ignored altogether, deeming it a not improbable result of the
profound shock as experienced by a person of such abnormal imagination and
unbalanced emotions. He deduced these latter qualities from the books, paintings, and
manuscripts found in the apartment, and from the blindly scrawled entries in the diary
on the desk. Blake had prolonged his frenzied jottings to the last, and the broken-
pointed pencil was found clutched in his spasmodically contracted right hand.

The entries after the failure of the lights were highly disjointed, and legible only in part.
From them certain investigators have drawn conclusions differing greatly from the
materialistic official verdict, but such speculations have little chance for belief among
the conservative. The case of these imaginative theorists has not been helped by the
action of superstitious Doctor Dexter, who threw the curious box and angled stone--an
object certainly self-luminous as seen in the black windowless steeple where it was
found--into the deepest channel of Narragansett Bay. Excessive imagination and
neurotic unbalance on Blake's part, aggravated by knowledge of the evil bygone cult
whose startling traces he had uncovered, form the dominant interpretation given those
final frenzied jottings. These are the entries--or all that can be made of them:

Lights still out--must be five minutes now. Everything depends on lightning. Yaddith
grant it will keep up!...Some influence seems beating through it...Rain and thunder and
wind deafen...The thing is taking hold of my mind...

Trouble with memory. I see things I never knew before. Other worlds and other
galaxies...Dark...The lightning seems dark and the darkness seems light...

It cannot be the real hill and church that I see in the pitch-darkness. Must be retinal
impression left by flashes. Heaven grant the Italians are out with their candles if the
lightning stops!

What am I afraid of? Is it not an avatar of Nyarlathotep, who in antique and shadowy
Khem even took the form of man? I remember Yuggoth, and more distant Shaggai, and
the ultimate void of the black planets...

The long, winging flight through the void...cannot cross the universe of light...re-created
by the thoughts caught in the Shining Trapezohedron...send it through the horrible
abysses of radiance...

My name is Blake--Robert Harrison Blake of 620 East Knapp Street, Milwaukee,

Wisconsin...I am on this planet...

Azathoth have mercy!--the lightning no longer flashes--horrible--I can see everything

with a monstrous sense that is not sight--light is dark and dark is light...those people on
the hill...guard...candles and charms...their priests...

Sense of distance gone--far is near and near is far. No light--no glass--see that steeple--
that tower--window--can hear--Roderick Usher--am mad or going mad--the thing is
stirring and fumbling in the tower.

I am it and it is I--I want to get out...must get out and unify the forces...it knows where I
am...
I am Robert Blake, but I see the tower in the dark. There is a monstrous odour...senses
transfigured...boarding at that tower window cracking and giving way...Iä...ngai...ygg...

I see it--coming here--hell-wind--titan blue--black wing--Yog Sothoth save me--the

three-lobed burning eye...

THE SHADOW OVER INNSMOUTH

I

During the winter of 1927-28 officials of the Federal government made a strange and
secret investigation of certain conditions in the ancient Massachusetts seaport of
Innsmouth. The public first learned of it in February, when a vast series of raids and
arrests occurred, followed by the deliberate burning and dynamiting--under suitable
precautions--of an enormous number of crumbling, worm-eaten, and supposedly empty
houses along the abandoned waterfront. Uninquiring souls let this occurrence pass as
one of the major clashes in a spasmodic war on liquor.

Keener news-followers, however, wondered at the prodigious number of arrests, the

abnormally large force of men used in making them, and the secrecy surrounding the
disposal of the prisoners. No trials, or even definite charges were reported; nor were any
of the captives seen thereafter in the regular gaols of the nation. There were vague
statements about disease and concentration camps, and later about dispersal in various
naval and military prisons, but nothing positive ever developed. Innsmouth itself was
left almost depopulated, and it is even now only beginning to show signs of a sluggishly
revived existence.

Complaints from many liberal organizations were met with long confidential
discussions, and representatives were taken on trips to certain camps and prisons. As a
result, these societies became surprisingly passive and reticent. Newspaper men were
harder to manage, but seemed largely to cooperate with the government in the end. Only
one paper--a tabloid always discounted because of its wild policy--mentioned the deep
diving submarine that discharged torpedoes downward in the marine abyss just beyond
Devil Reef. That item, gathered by chance in a haunt of sailors, seemed indeed rather
far-fetched; since the low, black reef lay a full mile and a half out from Innsmouth
Harbour.

People around the country and in the nearby towns muttered a great deal among
themselves, but said very little to the outer world. They had talked about dying and half-
deserted Innsmouth for nearly a century, and nothing new could be wilder or more
hideous than what they had whispered and hinted at years before. Many things had
taught them secretiveness, and there was no need to exert pressure on them. Besides,
they really knew little; for wide salt marshes, desolate and unpeopled, kept neighbors
off from Innsmouth on the landward side.

But at last I am going to defy the ban on speech about this thing. Results, I am certain,
are so thorough that no public harm save a shock of repulsion could ever accrue from a
hinting of what was found by those horrified men at Innsmouth. Besides, what was
found might possibly have more than one explanation. I do not know just how much of
the whole tale has been told even to me, and I have many reasons for not wishing to
probe deeper. For my contact with this affair has been closer than that of any other
layman, and I have carried away impressions which are yet to drive me to drastic
measures.

It was I who fled frantically out of Innsmouth in the early morning hours of July 16,
1927, and whose frightened appeals for government inquiry and action brought on the
whole reported episode. I was willing enough to stay mute while the affair was fresh
and uncertain; but now that it is an old story, with public interest and curiosity gone, I
have an odd craving to whisper about those few frightful hours in that ill-rumored and
evilly-shadowed seaport of death and blasphemous abnormality. The mere telling helps
me to restore confidence in my own faculties; to reassure myself that I was not the first
to succumb to a contagious nightmare hallucination. It helps me, too, in making up my
mind regarding a certain terrible step which lies ahead of me.

I never heard of Innsmouth till the day before I saw it for the first and--so far--last time.
I was celebrating my coming of age by a tour of New England--sightseeing, antiquarian,
and genealogical--and had planned to go directly from ancient Newburyport to Arkham,
whence my mother's family was derived. I had no car, but was travelling by train,
trolley and motor-coach, always seeking the cheapest possible route. In Newburyport
they told me that the steam train was the thing to take to Arkham; and it was only at the
station ticket-office, when I demurred at the high fare, that I learned about Innsmouth.
The stout, shrewd-faced agent, whose speech shewed him to be no local man, seemed
sympathetic toward my efforts at economy, and made a suggestion that none of my
other informants had offered.

"You could take that old bus, I suppose," he said with a certain hesitation, "but it ain't
thought much of hereabouts. It goes through Innsmouth--you may have heard about
that--and so the people don't like it. Run by an Innsmouth fellow--Joe Sargent--but
never gets any custom from here, or Arkham either, I guess. Wonder it keeps running at
all. I s'pose it's cheap enough, but I never see mor'n two or three people in it--nobody
but those Innsmouth folk. Leaves the square--front of Hammond's Drug Store--at 10
a.m. and 7 p.m. unless they've changed lately. Looks like a terrible rattletrap--I've never
been on it."

That was the first I ever heard of shadowed Innsmouth. Any reference to a town not
shown on common maps or listed in recent guidebooks would have interested me, and
the agent's odd manner of allusion roused something like real curiosity. A town able to
inspire such dislike in it its neighbors, I thought, must be at least rather unusual, and
worthy of a tourist's attention. If it came before Arkham I would stop off there and so I
asked the agent to tell me something about it. He was very deliberate, and spoke with an
air of feeling slightly superior to what he said.

"Innsmouth? Well, it's a queer kind of a town down at the mouth of the Manuxet. Used
to be almost a city--quite a port before the War of 1812--but all gone to pieces in the last
hundred years or so. No railroad now--B. and M. never went through, and the branch
line from Rowley was given up years ago.

"More empty houses than there are people, I guess, and no business to speak of except
fishing and lobstering. Everybody trades mostly either here or in Arkham or Ipswich.
Once they had quite a few mills, but nothing's left now except one gold refinery running
on the leanest kind of part time.

"That refinery, though, used to be a big thing, and old man Marsh, who owns it, must be
richer'n Croesus. Queer old duck, though, and sticks mighty close in his home. He's
supposed to have developed some skin disease or deformity late in life that makes him
keep out of sight. Grandson of Captain Obed Marsh, who founded the business. His
mother seems to've been some kind of foreigner--they say a South Sea islander--so
everybody raised Cain when he married an Ipswich girl fifty years ago. They always do
that about Innsmouth people, and folks here and hereabouts always try to cover up any
Innsmouth blood they have in 'em. But Marsh's children and grandchildren look just like
anyone else far's I can see. I've had 'em pointed out to me here--though, come to think
of it, the elder children don't seem to be around lately. Never saw the old man.

"And why is everybody so down on Innsmouth? Well, young fellow, you mustn't take
too much stock in what people here say. They're hard to get started, but once they do get
started they never let up. They've been telling things about Innsmouth--whispering 'em,
mostly--for the last hundred years, I guess, and I gather they're more scared than
anything else. Some of the stories would make you laugh--about old Captain Marsh
driving bargains with the devil and bringing imps out of hell to live in Innsmouth, or
about some kind of devil-worship and awful sacrifices in some place near the wharves
that people stumbled on around 1845 or thereabouts--but I come from Panton, Vermont,
and that kind of story don't go down with me.

"You ought to hear, though, what some of the old-timers tell about the black reef off the
coast--Devil Reef, they call it. It's well above water a good part of the time, and never
much below it, but at that you could hardly call it an island. The story is that there's a
whole legion of devils seen sometimes on that reef--sprawled about, or darting in and
out of some kind of caves near the top. It's a rugged, uneven thing, a good bit over a
mile out, and toward the end of shipping days sailors used to make big detours just to
avoid it.

"That is, sailors that didn't hail from Innsmouth. One of the things they had against old
Captain Marsh was that he was supposed to land on it sometimes at night when the tide
was right. Maybe he did, for I dare say the rock formation was interesting, and it's just
barely possible he was looking for pirate loot and maybe finding it; but there was talk of
his dealing with demons there. Fact is, I guess on the whole it was really the Captain
that gave the bad reputation to the reef.

"That was before the big epidemic of 1846, when over half the folks in Innsmouth was
carried off. They never did quite figure out what the trouble was, but it was probably
some foreign kind of disease brought from China or somewhere by the shipping. It
surely was bad enough--there was riots over it, and all sorts of ghastly doings that I
don't believe ever got outside of town--and it left the place in awful shape. Never came
back--there can't be more'n 300 or 400 people living there now.

"But the real thing behind the way folks feel is simply race prejudice--and I don't say
I'm blaming those that hold it. I hate those Innsmouth folks myself, and I wouldn't care
to go to their town. I s'pose you know--though I can see you're a Westerner by your
talk--what a lot our New England ships used to have to do with queer ports in Africa,
Asia, the South Seas, and everywhere else, and what queer kinds of people they
sometimes brought back with 'em. You've probably heard about the Salem man that
came home with a Chinese wife, and maybe you know there's still a bunch of Fiji
Islanders somewhere around Cape Cod.

"Well, there must be something like that back of the Innsmouth people. The place
always was badly cut off from the rest of the country by marshes and creeks and we
can't be sure about the ins and outs of the matter; but it's pretty clear that old Captain
Marsh must have brought home some odd specimens when he had all three of his ships
in commission back in the twenties and thirties. There certainly is a strange kind of
streak in the Innsmouth folks today--I don't know how to explain it but it sort of makes
you crawl. You'll notice a little in Sargent if you take his bus. Some of 'em have queer
narrow heads with flat noses and bulgy, stary eyes that never seem to shut, and their
skin ain't quite right. Rough and scabby, and the sides of the necks are all shriveled or
creased up. Get bald, too, very young. The older fellows look the worst--fact is, I don't
believe I've ever seen a very old chap of that kind. Guess they must die of looking in the
glass! Animals hate 'em--they used to have lots of horse trouble before the autos came
in.

"Nobody around here or in Arkham or Ipswich will have anything to do with 'em, and
they act kind of offish themselves when they come to town or when anyone tries to fish
on their grounds. Queer how fish are always thick off Innsmouth Harbour when there
ain't any anywhere else around--but just try to fish there yourself and see how the folks
chase you off! Those people used to come here on the railroad--walking and taking the
train at Rowley after the branch was dropped--but now they use that bus.

"Yes, there's a hotel in Innsmouth--called the Gilman House--but I don't believe it can
amount to much. I wouldn't advise you to try it. Better stay over here and take the ten
o'clock bus tomorrow morning; then you can get an evening bus there for Arkham at
eight o'clock. There was a factory inspector who stopped at the Gilman a couple of
years ago and he had a lot of unpleasant hints about the place. Seems they get a queer
crowd there, for this fellow heard voices in other rooms--though most of 'em was
empty--that gave him the shivers. It was foreign talk he thought, but he said the bad
thing about it was the kind of voice that sometimes spoke. It sounded so unnatural--
slopping like, he said--that he didn't dare undress and go to sleep. Just waited up and lit
out the first thing in the morning. The talk went on most all night.

"This fellow--Casey, his name was--had a lot to say about how the Innsmouth folk
watched him and seemed kind of on guard. He found the Marsh refinery a queer place--
it's in an old mill on the lower falls of the Manuxet. What he said tallied up with what
I'd heard. Books in bad shape, and no clear account of any kind of dealings. You know
it's always been a kind of mystery where the Marshes get the gold they refine. They've
never seemed to do much buying in that line, but years ago they shipped out an
enormous lot of ingots.

"Used to be talk of a queer foreign kind of jewelry that the sailors and refinery men
sometimes sold on the sly, or that was seen once or twice on some of the Marsh women-
folks. People allowed maybe old Captain Obed traded for it in some heathen port,
especially since he always ordered stacks of glass beads and trinkets such as seafaring
men used to get for native trade. Others thought and still think he'd found an old pirate
cache out on Devil Reef. But here's a funny thing. The old Captain's been dead these
sixty years, and there's ain't been a good-sized ship out of the place since the Civil War;
but just the same the Marshes still keep on buying a few of those native trade things--
mostly glass and rubber gewgaws, they tell me. Maybe the Innsmouth folks like 'em to
look at themselves--Gawd knows they've gotten to be about as bad as South Sea
cannibals and Guinea savages.

"That plague of '46 must have taken off the best blood in the place. Anyway, they're a
doubtful lot now, and the Marshes and other rich folks are as bad as any. As I told you,
there probably ain't more'n 400 people in the whole town in spite of all the streets they
say there are. I guess they're what they call 'white trash' down South--lawless and sly,
and full of secret things. They get a lot of fish and lobsters and do exporting by truck.
Queer how the fish swarm right there and nowhere else.

"Nobody can ever keep track of these people, and state school officials and census men
have a devil of a time. You can bet that prying strangers ain't welcome around
Innsmouth. I've heard personally of more'n one business or government man that's
disappeared there, and there's loose talk of one who went crazy and is out at Danvers
now. They must have fixed up some awful scare for that fellow.

"That's why I wouldn't go at night if I was you. I've never been there and have no wish
to go, but I guess a daytime trip couldn't hurt you--even though the people hereabouts
will advise you not to make it. If you're just sightseeing, and looking for old-time stuff,
Innsmouth ought to be quite a place for you."

And so I spent part of that evening at the Newburyport Public Library looking up data
about Innsmouth. When I had tried to question the natives in the shops, the lunchroom,
the garages, and the fire station, I had found them even harder to get started than the
ticket agent had predicted; and realized that I could not spare the time to overcome their
first instinctive reticence. They had a kind of obscure suspiciousness, as if there were
something amiss with anyone too much interested in Innsmouth. At the Y. M. C. A.,
where I was stopping, the clerk merely discouraged my going to such a dismal,
decadent place; and the people at the library shewed much the same attitude. Clearly, in
the eyes of the educated, Innsmouth was merely an exaggerated case of civic
degeneration.

The Essex County histories on the library shelves had very little to say, except that the
town was founded in 1643, noted for shipbuilding before the Revolution, a seat of great
marine prosperity in the early 19th century, and later a minor factory center using the
Manuxet as power. The epidemic and riots of 1846 were very sparsely treated, as if they
formed a discredit to the county.

References to decline were few, though the significance of the later record was
unmistakable. After the Civil War all industrial life was confined to the Marsh Refining
Company, and the marketing of gold ingots formed the only remaining bit of major
commerce aside from the eternal fishing. That fishing paid less and less as the price of
the commodity fell and large-scale corporations offered competition, but there was
never a dearth of fish around Innsmouth Harbour. Foreigners seldom settled there, and
there was some discreetly veiled evidence that a number of Poles and Portuguese who
had tried it had been scattered in a peculiarly drastic fashion.
Most interesting of all was a glancing reference to the strange jewelry vaguely
associated with Innsmouth. It had evidently impressed the whole countryside more than
a little, for mention was made of specimens in the museum of Miskatonic University at
Arkham, and in the display room of the Newburyport Historical Society. The
fragmentary descriptions of these things were bald and prosaic, but they hinted to me an
undercurrent of persistent strangeness. Something about them seemed so odd and
provocative that I could not put them out of my mind, and despite the relative lateness
of the hour I resolved to see the local sample--said to be a large, queerly-proportioned
thing evidently meant for a tiara--if it could possibly be arranged.

The librarian gave me a note of introduction to the curator of the Society, a Miss Anna
Tilton, who lived nearby, and after a brief explanation that ancient gentlewoman was
kind enough to pilot me into the closed building, since the hour was not outrageously
late. The collection was a notable one indeed, but in my present mood I had eyes for
nothing but the bizarre object which glistened in a corner cupboard under the electric
lights.

It took no excessive sensitiveness to beauty to make me literally gasp at the strange,

unearthly splendour of the alien, opulent phantasy that rested there on a purple velvet
cushion. Even now I can hardly describe what I saw, though it was clearly enough a sort
of tiara, as the description had said. It was tall in front, and with a very large and
curiously irregular periphery, as if designed for a head of almost freakishly elliptical
outline. The material seemed to be predominantly gold, though a weird lighter
lustrousness hinted at some strange alloy with an equally beautiful and scarcely
identifiable metal. Its condition was almost perfect, and one could have spent hours in
studying the striking and puzzlingly untraditional designs--some simply geometrical,
and some plainly marine--chased or moulded in high relief on its surface with a
craftsmanship of incredible skill and grace.

The longer I looked, the more the thing fascinated me; and in this fascination there was
a curiously disturbing element hardly to be classified or accounted for. At first I decided
that it was the queer other-worldly quality of the art which made me uneasy. All other
art objects I had ever seen either belonged to some known racial or national stream, or
else were consciously modernistic defiances of every recognized stream. This tiara was
neither. It clearly belonged to some settled technique of infinite maturity and perfection,
yet that technique was utterly remote from any--Eastern or Western, ancient or modern-
-which I had ever heard of or seen exemplified. It was as if the workmanship were that
of another planet.

However, I soon saw that my uneasiness had a second and perhaps equally potent
source residing in the pictorial and mathematical suggestion of the strange designs. The
patterns all hinted of remote secrets and unimaginable abysses in time and space, and
the monotonously aquatic nature of the reliefs became almost sinister. Among these
reliefs were fabulous monsters of abhorrent grotesqueness and malignity--half ichthyic
and half batrachian in suggestion--which one could not dissociate from a certain
haunting and uncomfortable sense of pseudomemory, as if they called up some image
from deep cells and tissues whose retentive functions are wholly primal and awesomely
ancestral. At times I fancied that every contour of these blasphemous fish-frogs was
over-flowing with the ultimate quintessence of unknown and inhuman evil.
In odd contrast to the tiara's aspect was its brief and prosy history as related by Miss
Tilton. It had been pawned for a ridiculous sum at a shop in State Street in 1873, by a
drunken Innsmouth man shortly afterward killed in a brawl. The Society had acquired it
directly from the pawnbroker, at once giving it a display worthy of its quality. It was
labeled as of probable East-Indian or Indochinese provenance, though the attribution
was frankly tentative.

Miss Tilton, comparing all possible hypotheses regarding its origin and its presence in
New England, was inclined to believe that it formed part of some exotic pirate hoard
discovered by old Captain Obed Marsh. This view was surely not weakened by the
insistent offers of purchase at a high price which the Marshes began to make as soon as
they knew of its presence, and which they repeated to this day despite the Society's
unvarying determination not to sell.

As the good lady shewed me out of the building she made it clear that the pirate theory
of the Marsh fortune was a popular one among the intelligent people of the region. Her
own attitude toward shadowed Innsmouth--which she never seen--was one of disgust at
a community slipping far down the cultural scale, and she assured me that the rumours
of devil-worship were partly justified by a peculiar secret cult which had gained force
there and engulfed all the orthodox churches.

It was called, she said, "The Esoteric Order of Dagon," and was undoubtedly a debased,
quasi-pagan thing imported from the East a century before, at a time when the
Innsmouth fisheries seemed to be going barren. Its persistence among a simple people
was quite natural in view of the sudden and permanent return of abundantly fine fishing,
and it soon came to be the greatest influence in the town, replacing Freemasonry
altogether and taking up headquarters in the old Masonic Hall on New Church Green.

All this, to the pious Miss Tilton, formed an excellent reason for shunning the ancient
town of decay and desolation; but to me it was merely a fresh incentive. To my
architectural and historical anticipations was now added an acute anthropological zeal,
and I could scarcely sleep in my small room at the "Y" as the night wore away.

II

Shortly before ten the next morning I stood with one small valise in front of Hammond's
Drug Store in old Market Square waiting for the Innsmouth bus. As the hour for its
arrival drew near I noticed a general drift of the loungers to other places up the street, or
to the Ideal Lunch across the square. Evidently the ticket-agent had not exaggerated the
dislike which local People bore toward Innsmouth and its denizens. In a few moments a
small motor-coach of extreme decrepitude and dirty grey colour rattled down State
Street, made a turn, and drew up at the curb beside me. I felt immediately that it was the
right one; a guess which the half-illegible sign on the windshield--Arkham-Innsmouth-
Newburyport--soon verified.

There were only three passengers--dark, unkempt men of sullen visage and somewhat
youthful cast--and when the vehicle stopped they clumsily shambled out and began
walking up State Street in a silent, almost furtive fashion. The driver also alighted, and I
watched him as he went into the drug store to make some purchase. This, I reflected,
must be the Joe Sargent mentioned by the ticket-agent; and even before I noticed any
details there spread over me a wave of spontaneous aversion which could be neither
checked nor explained. It suddenly struck me as very natural that the local people
should not wish to ride on a bus owned and driven by this man, or to visit any oftener
than possible the habitat of such a man and his kinsfolk.

When the driver came out of the store I looked at him more carefully and tried to
determine the source of my evil impression. He was a thin, stoop-shouldered man not
much under six feet tall, dressed in shabby blue civilian clothes and wearing a frayed
golf cap. His age was perhaps thirty-five, but the odd, deep creases in the sides of his
neck made him seem older when one did not study his dull, expressionless face. He had
a narrow head, bulging, watery-blue eyes that seemed never to wink, a flat nose, a
receding forehead and chin, and singularly undeveloped ears. His long thick lip and
coarse-pored, greyish cheeks seemed almost beardless except for some sparse yellow
hairs that straggled and curled in irregular patches; and in places the surface seemed
queerly irregular, as if peeling from some cutaneous disease. His hands were large and
heavily veined, and had a very unusual greyish-blue tinge. The fingers were strikingly
short in proportion to the rest of the structure, and seemed to have a tendency to curl
closely into the huge palm. As he walked toward the bus I observed his peculiarly
shambling gait and saw that his feet were inordinately immense. The more I studied
them the more I wondered how he could buy any shoes to fit them.

A certain greasiness about the fellow increased my dislike. He was evidently given to
working or lounging around the fish docks, and carried with him much of their
characteristic smell. Just what foreign blood was in him I could not even guess. His
oddities certainly did not look Asiatic, Polynesian, Levantine or negroid, yet I could see
why the people found him alien. I myself would have thought of biological
degeneration rather than alienage.

I was sorry when I saw there would be no other passengers on the bus. Somehow I did
not like the idea of riding alone with this driver. But as leaving time obviously
approached I conquered my qualms and followed the man aboard, extending him a
dollar bill and murmuring the single word "Innsmouth." He looked curiously at me for a
second as he returned forty cents change without speaking. I took a seat far behind him,
but on the same side of the bus, since I wished to watch the shore during the journey.

At length the decrepit vehicle stared with a jerk, and rattled noisily past the old brick
buildings of State Street amidst a cloud of vapour from the exhaust. Glancing at the
people on the sidewalks, I thought I detected in them a curious wish to avoid looking at
the bus--or at least a wish to avoid seeming to look at it. Then we turned to the left into
High Street, where the going was smoother; flying by stately old mansions of the early
republic and still older colonial farmhouses, passing the Lower Green and Parker River,
and finally emerging into a long, monotonous stretch of open shore country.

The day was warm and sunny, but the landscape of sand and sedge-grass, and stunted
shrubbery became more and desolate as we proceeded. Out the window I could see the
blue water and the sandy line of Plum Island, and we presently drew very near the beach
as our narrow road veered off from the main highway to Rowley and Ipswich. There
were no visible houses, and I could tell by the state of the road that traffic was very light
hereabouts. The weather-worn telephone poles carried only two wires. Now and then we
crossed crude wooden bridges over tidal creeks that wound far inland and promoted the
general isolation of the region.

Once in a while I noticed dead stumps and crumbling foundation-walls above the
drifting sand, and recalled the old tradition quoted in one of the histories I had read, that
this was once a fertile and thickly-settled countryside. The change, it was said, came
simultaneously with the Innsmouth epidemic of l846, and was thought by simple folk to
have a dark connection with hidden forces of evil. Actually, it was caused by the unwise
cutting of woodlands near the shore, which robbed the soil of the best protection and
opened the way for waves of wind-blown sand.

At last we lost sight of Plum Island and saw the vast expanse of the open Atlantic on
our left. Our narrow course began to climb steeply, and I felt a singular sense of disquiet
in looking at the lonely crest ahead where the rutted road-way met the sky. It was as if
the bus were about to keep on in its ascent, leaving the sane earth altogether and
merging with the unknown arcana of upper air and cryptical sky. The smell of the sea
took on ominous implications, and the silent driver's bent, rigid back and narrow head
became more and more hateful. As I looked at him I saw that the back of his head was
almost as hairless as his face, having only a few straggling yellow strands upon a grey
scabrous surface.

Then we reached the crest and beheld the outspread valley beyond, where the Manuxet
joins the sea just north of the long line of cliffs that culminate in Kingsport Head and
veer off toward Cape Ann. On the far misty horizon I could just make out the dizzy
profile of the Head, topped by the queer ancient house of which so many legends are
told; but for the moment all my attention was captured by the nearer panorama just
below me. I had, I realized, come face to face with rumour-shadowed Innsmouth.

It was a town of wide extent and dense construction, yet one with a portentous dearth of
visible life. From the tangle of chimney-pots scarcely a wisp of smoke came, and the
three tall steeples loomed stark and unpainted against the seaward horizon. One of them
was crumbling down at the top, and in that and another there were only black gaping
holes where clock-dials should have been. The vast huddle of sagging gambrel roofs
and peaked gables conveyed with offensive clearness the idea of wormy decay, and as
we approached along the now descending road I could see that many roofs had wholly
caved in. There were some large square Georgian houses, too, with hipped roofs,
cupolas, and railed "widow's walks." These were mostly well back from the water, and
one or two seemed to be in moderately sound condition. Stretching inland from among
them I saw the rusted, grass-grown line of the abandoned railway, with leaning
telegraph-poles now devoid of wires, and the half-obscured lines of the old carriage
roads to Rowley and Ipswich.

The decay was worst close to the waterfront, though in its very midst I could spy the
white belfry of a fairly well preserved brick structure which looked like a small factory.
The harbour, long clogged with sand, was enclosed by an ancient stone breakwater; on
which I could begin to discern the minute forms of a few seated fishermen, and at
whose end were what looked like the foundations of a bygone lighthouse. A sandy
tongue had formed inside this barrier and upon it I saw a few decrepit cabins, moored
dories, and scattered lobster-pots. The only deep water seemed to be where the river
poured out past the belfried structure and turned southward to join the ocean at the
breakwater's end.

Here and there the ruins of wharves jutted out from the shore to end in indeterminate
rottenness, those farthest south seeming the most decayed. And far out at sea, despite a
high tide, I glimpsed a long, black line scarcely rising above the water yet carrying a
suggestion of odd latent malignancy. This, I knew, must be Devil Reef. As I looked, a
subtle, curious sense of beckoning seemed superadded to the grim repulsion; and oddly
enough, I found this overtone more disturbing than the primary impression.

We met no one on the road, but presently began to pass deserted farms in varying stages
of ruin. Then I noticed a few inhabited houses with rags stuffed in the broken windows
and shells and dead fish lying about the littered yards. Once or twice I saw listless-
looking people working in barren gardens or digging clams on the fishy-smelling beach
below, and groups of dirty, simian-visaged children playing around weed-grown
doorsteps. Somehow these people seemed more disquieting than the dismal buildings,
for almost every one had certain peculiarities of face and motions which I instinctively
disliked without being able to define or comprehend them. For a second I thought this
typical physique suggested some picture I had seen, perhaps in a book, under
circumstances of particular horror or melancholy; but this pseudo-recollection passed
very quickly.

As the bus reached a lower level I began to catch the steady note of a waterfall through
the unnatural stillness, The leaning, unpainted houses grew thicker, lined both sides of
the road, and displayed more urban tendencies than did those we were leaving behind,
The panorama ahead had contracted to a street scene, and in spots I could see where a
cobblestone pavement and stretches of brick sidewalk had formerly existed. All the
houses were apparently deserted, and there were occasional gaps where tumbledown
chimneys and cellar walls told of buildings that had collapsed. Pervading everything
was the most nauseous fishy odour imaginable.

Soon cross streets and junctions began to appear; those on the left leading to shoreward
realms of unpaved squalor and decay, while those on the right shewed vistas of departed
grandeur. So far I had seen no people in the town, but there now came signs of a sparse
habitation--curtained windows here and there, and an occasional battered motorcar at
the curb. Pavement and sidewalks were increasingly well-defined, and though most of
the houses were quite old--wood and brick structures of the early 19th century--they
were obviously kept fit for habitation. As an amateur antiquarian I almost lost my
olfactory disgust and my feeling of menace and repulsion amidst this rich, unaltered
survival from the past.

But I was not to reach my destination without one very strong impression of poignantly
disagreeable quality. The bus had come to a sort of open concourse or radial point with
churches on two sides and the bedraggled remains of a circular green in the centre, and I
was looking at a large pillared hall on the right-hand junction ahead. The structure's
once white paint was now gray and peeling and the black and gold sign on the pediment
was so faded that I could only with difficulty make out the words "Esoteric Order of
Dagon." This, then was the former Masonic Hall now given over to a degraded cult. As
I strained to decipher this inscription my notice was distracted by the raucous tones of a
cracked bell across the street, and I quickly turned to look out the window on my side of
the coach.

The sound came from a squat stone church of manifestly later date than most of the
houses, built in a clumsy Gothic fashion and having a disproportionately high basement
with shuttered windows. Though the hands of its clock were missing on the side I
glimpsed, I knew that those hoarse strokes were tolling the hour of eleven. Then
suddenly all thoughts of time were blotted out by an onrushing image of sharp intensity
and unaccountable horror which had seized me before I knew what it really was. The
door of the church basement was open, revealing a rectangle of blackness inside. And as
I looked, a certain object crossed or seemed to cross that dark rectangle; burning into
my brain a momentary conception of nightmare which was all the more maddening
because analysis could not shew a single nightmarish quality in it.

It was a living object--the first except the driver that I had seen since entering the
compact part of the town--and had I been in a steadier mood I would have found
nothing whatever of terror in it. Clearly, as I realised a moment later, it was the pastor;
clad in some peculiar vestments doubtless introduced since the Order of Dagon had
modified the ritual of the local churches. The thing which had probably caught my first
subconscious glance and supplied the touch of bizarre horror was the tall tiara he wore;
an almost exact duplicate of the one Miss Tilton had shown me the previous evening.
This, acting on my imagination, had supplied namelessly sinister qualities to the
indeterminate face and robed, shambling form beneath it. There was not, I soon decided,
any reason why I should have felt that shuddering touch of evil pseudo-memory. Was it
not natural that a local mystery cult should adopt among its regimentals an unique type
of head-dress made familiar to the community in some strange way--perhaps as
treasure-trove?

A very thin sprinkling of repellent-looking youngish people now became visible on the
sidewalks--lone individuals, and silent knots of two or three. The lower floors of the
crumbling houses sometimes harboured small shops with dingy signs, and I noticed a
parked truck or two as we rattled along. The sound of waterfalls became more and more
distinct, and presently I saw a fairly deep river-gorge ahead, spanned by a wide, iron-
railed highway bridge beyond which a large square opened out. As we clanked over the
bridge I looked out on both sides and observed some factory buildings on the edge of
the grassy bluff or part way down. The water far below was very abundant, and I could
see two vigorous sets of falls upstream on my right and at least one downstream on my
left. From this point the noise was quite deafening. Then we rolled into the large
semicircular square across the river and drew up on the right-hand side in front of a tall,
cupola crowned building with remnants of yellow paint and with a half-effaced sign
proclaiming it to be the Gilman House.

I was glad to get out of that bus, and at once proceeded to check my valise in the shabby
hotel lobby. There was only one person in sight--an elderly man without what I had
come to call the "Innsmouth look"--and I decided not to ask him any of the questions
which bothered me; remembering that odd things had been noticed in this hotel. Instead,
I strolled out on the square, from which the bus had already gone, and studied the scene
minutely and appraisingly.
One side of the cobblestoned open space was the straight line of the river; the other was
a semicircle of slant-roofed brick buildings of about the 1800 period, from which
several streets radiated away to the southeast, south, and southwest. Lamps were
depressingly few and small--all low-powered incandescents--and I was glad that my
plans called for departure before dark, even though I knew the moon would be bright.
The buildings were all in fair condition, and included perhaps a dozen shops in current
operation; of which one was a grocery of the First National chain, others a dismal
restaurant, a drug store, and a wholesale fish-dealer's office, and still another, at the
eastward extremity of the square near the river an office of the town's only industry--the
Marsh Refining Company. There were perhaps ten people visible, and four or five
automobiles and motor trucks stood scattered about. I did not need to be told that this
was the civic centre of Innsmouth. Eastward I could catch blue glimpses of the harbour,
against which rose the decaying remains of three once beautiful Georgian steeples. And
toward the shore on the opposite bank of the river I saw the white belfry surmounting
what I took to be the Marsh refinery.

For some reason or other I chose to make my first inquiries at the chain grocery, whose
personnel was not likely to be native to Innsmouth. I found a solitary boy of about
seventeen in charge, and was pleased to note the brightness and affability which
promised cheerful information. He seemed exceptionally eager to talk, and I soon
gathered that he did not like the place, its fishy smell, or its furtive people. A word with
any outsider was a relief to him. He hailed from Arkham, boarded with a family who
came from Ipswich, and went back whenever he got a moment off. His family did not
like him to work in Innsmouth, but the chain had transferred him there and he did not
wish to give up his job.

There was, he said, no public library or chamber of commerce in Innsmouth, but I could
probably find my way about. The street I had come down was Federal. West of that
were the fine old residence streets--Broad, Washington, Lafayette, and Adams--and east
of it were the shoreward slums. It was in these slums--along Main Street--that I would
find the old Georgian churches, but they were all long abandoned. It would be well not
to make oneself too conspicuous in such neighbourhoods--especially north of the river
since the people were sullen and hostile. Some strangers had even disappeared.

Certain spots were almost forbidden territory, as he had learned at considerable cost.
One must not, for example, linger much around the Marsh refinery, or around any of the
still used churches, or around the pillared Order of Dagon Hall at New Church Green.
Those churches were very odd--all violently disavowed by their respective
denominations elsewhere, and apparently using the queerest kind of ceremonials and
clerical vestments. Their creeds were heterodox and mysterious, involving hints of
certain marvelous transformations leading to bodily immorality--of a sort--on this earth.
The youth's own pastor--Dr. Wallace of Asbury M. E. Church in Arkham--had gravely
urged him not to join any church in Innsmouth.

As for the Innsmouth people--the youth hardly knew what to make of them. They were
as furtive and seldom seen as animals that live in burrows, and one could hardly
imagine how they passed the time apart from their desultory fishing. Perhaps--judging
from the quantities of bootleg liquor they consumed--they lay for most of the daylight
hours in an alcoholic stupor. They seemed sullenly banded together in some sort of
fellowship and understanding--despising the world as if they had access to other and
preferable spheres of entity. Their appearance--especially those staring, unwinking eyes
which one never saw shut--was certainly shocking enough; and their voices were
disgusting. It was awful to hear them chanting in their churches at night, and especially
during their main festivals or revivals, which fell twice a year on April 30th and
October 31st.

They were very fond of the water, and swam a great deal in both river and harbour.
Swimming races out to Devil Reef were very common, and everyone in sight seemed
well able to share in this arduous sport. When one came to think of it, it was generally
only rather young people who were seen about in public, and of these the oldest were
apt to be the most tainted-looking. When exceptions did occur, they were mostly
persons with no trace of aberrancy, like the old clerk at the hotel. One wondered what
became of the bulk of the older folk, and whether the "Innsmouth look" were not a
strange and insidious disease-phenomenon which increased its hold as years advanced.

Only a very rare affliction, of course, could bring about such vast and radical anatomical
changes in a single individual after maturity--changes invoking osseous factors as basic
as the shape of the skull--but then, even this aspect was no more baffling and unheard-
of than the visible features of the malady as a whole. It would be hard, the youth
implied, to form any real conclusions regarding such a matter; since one never came to
know the natives personally no matter how long one might live in Innsmouth.

The youth was certain that many specimens even worse than the worst visible ones were
kept locked indoors in some places. People sometimes heard the queerest kind of
sounds. The tottering waterfront hovels north of the river were reputedly connected by
hidden tunnels, being thus a veritable warren of unseen abnormalities. What kind of
foreign blood--if any--these beings had, it was impossible to tell. They sometimes kept
certain especially repulsive characters out of sight when government and others from
the outside world came to town.

It would be of no use, my informant said, to ask the natives anything about the place.
The only one who would talk was a very aged but normal looking man who lived at the
poorhouse on the north rim of the town and spent his time walking about or lounging
around the fire station. This hoary character, Zadok Allen, was 96 years old and
somewhat touched in the head, besides being the town drunkard. He was a strange,
furtive creature who constantly looked over his shoulder as if afraid of something, and
when sober could not be persuaded to talk at all with strangers. He was, however,
unable to resist any offer of his favorite poison; and once drunk would furnish the most
astonishing fragments of whispered reminiscence.

After all, though, little useful data could be gained from him; since his stories were all
insane, incomplete hints of impossible marvels and horrors which could have no source
save in his own disordered fancy. Nobody ever believed him, but the natives did not like
him to drink and talk with strangers; and it was not always safe to be seen questioning
him. It was probably from him that some of the wildest popular whispers and delusions
were derived.

Several non-native residents had reported monstrous glimpses from time to time, but
between old Zadok's tales and the malformed inhabitants it was no wonder such
illusions were current. None of the non-natives ever stayed out late at night, there being
a widespread impression that it was not wise to do so. Besides, the streets were
loathsomely dark.

As for business--the abundance of fish was certainly almost uncanny, but the natives
were taking less and less advantage of it. Moreover, prices were falling and competition
was growing. Of course the town's real business was the refinery, whose commercial
office was on the square only a few doors east of where we stood. Old Man Marsh was
never seen, but sometimes went to the works in a closed, curtained car.

There were all sorts of rumors about how Marsh had come to look. He had once been a
great dandy; and people said he still wore the frock-coated finery of the Edwardian age
curiously adapted to certain deformities. His son had formerly conducted the office in
the square, but latterly they had been keeping out of sight a good deal and leaving the
brunt of affairs to the younger generation. The sons and their sisters had come to look
very queer, especially the elder ones; and it was said that their health was failing.

One of the Marsh daughters was a repellent, reptilian-looking woman who wore an
excess of weird jewellery clearly of the same exotic tradition as that to which the
strange tiara belonged. My informant had noticed it many times, and had heard it
spoken of as coming from some secret hoard, either of pirates or of demons. The
clergymen--or priests, or whatever they were called nowadays--also wore this kind of
ornament as a headdress; but one seldom caught glimpses of them. Other specimens the
youth had not seen, though many were rumoured to exist around Innsmouth.

The Marshes, together with the other three gently bred families of the town--the Waites,
the Gilmans, and the Eliots--were all very retiring. They lived in immense houses along
Washington Street, and several were reputed to harbour in concealment certain living
kinsfolk whose personal aspect forbade public view, and whose deaths had been
reported and recorded.

Warning me that many of the street signs were down, the youth drew for my benefit a
rough but ample and painstaking sketch map of the town's salient features. After a
moment's study I felt sure that it would be of great help, and pocketed it with profuse
thanks. Disliking the dinginess of the single restaurant I had seen, I bought a fair supply
of cheese crackers and ginger wafers to serve as a lunch later on. My program, I
decided, would be to thread the principal streets, talk with any non-natives I might
encounter, and catch the eight o'clock coach for Arkham. The town, I could see, formed
a significant and exaggerated example of communal decay; but being no sociologist I
would limit my serious observations to the field of architecture.

Thus I began my systematic though half-bewildered tour of Innsmouth's narrow,

shadow-blighted ways. Crossing the bridge and turning toward the roar of the lower
falls, I passed close to the Marsh refinery, which seemed to be oddly free from the noise
of industry. The building stood on the steep river bluff near a bridge and an open
confluence of streets which I took to be the earliest civic center, displaced after the
Revolution by the present Town Square.

Re-crossing the gorge on the Main Street bridge, I struck a region of utter desertion
which somehow made me shudder. Collapsing huddles of gambrel roofs formed a
jagged and fantastic skyline, above which rose the ghoulish, decapitated steeple of an
ancient church. Some houses along Main Street were tenanted, but most were tightly
boarded up. Down unpaved side streets I saw the black, gaping windows of deserted
hovels, many of which leaned at perilous and incredible angles through the sinking of
part of the foundations. Those windows stared so spectrally that it took courage to turn
eastward toward the waterfront. Certainly, the terror of a deserted house swells in
geometrical rather than arithmetical progression as houses multiply to form a city of
stark desolation. The sight of such endless avenues of fishy-eyed vacancy and death,
and the thought of such linked infinities of black, brooding compartments given over to
cob-webs and memories and the conqueror worm, start up vestigial fears and aversions
that not even the stoutest philosophy can disperse.

Fish Street was as deserted as Main, though it differed in having many brick and stone
warehouses still in excellent shape. Water Street was almost its duplicate, save that
there were great seaward gaps where wharves had been. Not a living thing did I see
except for the scattered fishermen on the distant break-water, and not a sound did I hear
save the lapping of the harbour tides and the roar of the falls in the Manuxet. The town
was getting more and more on my nerves, and I looked behind me furtively as I picked
my way back over the tottering Water Street bridge. The Fish Street bridge, according to
the sketch, was in ruins.

North of the river there were traces of squalid life--active fish-packing houses in Water
Street, smoking chimneys and patched roofs here and there, occasional sounds from
indeterminate sources, and infrequent shambling forms in the dismal streets and
unpaved lanes--but I seemed to find this even more oppressive than the southerly
desertion. For one thing, the people were more hideous and abnormal than those near
the centre of the town; so that I was several times evilly reminded of something utterly
fantastic which I could not quite place. Undoubtedly the alien strain in the Innsmouth
folk was stronger here than farther inland--unless, indeed, the "Innsmouth look" were a
disease rather than a blood stain, in which case this district might be held to harbour the
more advanced cases.

One detail that annoyed me was the distribution of the few faint sounds I heard. They
ought naturally to have come wholly from the visibly inhabited houses, yet in reality
were often strongest inside the most rigidly boarded-up facades. There were creakings,
scurryings, and hoarse doubtful noises; and I thought uncomfortably about the hidden
tunnels suggested by the grocery boy. Suddenly I found myself wondering what the
voices of those denizens would be like. I had heard no speech so far in this quarter, and
was unaccountably anxious not to do so.

Pausing only long enough to look at two fine but ruinous old churches at Main and
Church Streets, I hastened out of that vile waterfront slum. My next logical goal was
New Church Green, but somehow or other I could not bear to repass the church in
whose basement I had glimpsed the inexplicably frightening form of that strangely
diademmed priest or pastor. Besides, the grocery youth had told me that churches, as
well as the Order of Dagon Hall, were not advisable neighbourhoods for strangers.

Accordingly I kept north along Main to Martin, then turning inland, crossing Federal
Street safely north of the Green, and entering the decayed patrician neighbourhood of
northern Broad, Washington, Lafayette, and Adams Streets. Though these stately old
avenues were ill-surfaced and unkempt, their elm-shaded dignity had not entirely
departed. Mansion after mansion claimed my gaze, most of them decrepit and boarded
up amidst neglected grounds, but one or two in each street shewing signs of occupancy.
In Washington Street there was a row of four or five in excellent repair and with finely-
tended lawns and gardens. The most sumptuous of these--with wide terraced parterres
extending back the whole way to Lafayette Street--I took to be the home of Old Man
Marsh, the afflicted refinery owner.

In all these streets no living thing was visible, and I wondered at the complete absence
of cats and dogs from Innsmouth. Another thing which puzzled and disturbed me, even
in some of the best-preserved mansions, was the tightly shuttered condition of many
third-story and attic windows. Furtiveness and secretiveness seemed universal in this
hushed city of alienage and death, and I could not escape the sensation of being watched
from ambush on every hand by sly, staring eyes that never shut.

I shivered as the cracked stroke of three sounded from a belfry on my left. Too well did
I recall the squat church from which those notes came. Following Washington Street
toward the river, I now faced a new zone of former industry and commerce; noting the
ruins of a factory ahead, and seeing others, with the traces of an old railway station and
covered railway bridge beyond, up the gorge on my right.

The uncertain bridge now before me was posted with a warning sign, but I took the risk
and crossed again to the south bank where traces of life reappeared. Furtive, shambling
creatures stared cryptically in my direction, and more normal faces eyed me coldly and
curiously. Innsmouth was rapidly becoming intolerable, and I turned down Paine Street
toward the Square in the hope of getting some vehicle to take me to Arkham before the
still-distant starting-time of that sinister bus.

It was then that I saw the tumbledown fire station on my left, and noticed the red faced,
bushy-bearded, watery eyed old man in nondescript rags who sat on a bench in front of
it talking with a pair of unkempt but not abnormal looking firemen. This, of course,
must be Zadok Allen, the half-crazed, liquorish nonagenarian whose tales of old
Innsmouth and its shadow were so hideous and incredible.

III

It must have been some imp of the perverse--or some sardonic pull from dark, hidden
sources--which made me change my plans as I did. I had long before resolved to limit
my observations to architecture alone, and I was even then hurrying toward the Square
in an effort to get quick transportation out of this festering city of death and decay; but
the sight of old Zadok Allen set up new currents in my mind and made me slacken my
pace uncertainly.

I had been assured that the old man could do nothing but hint at wild, disjointed, and
incredible legends, and I had been warned that the natives made it unsafe to be seen
talking with him; yet the thought of this aged witness to the town's decay, with
memories going back to the early days of ships and factories, was a lure that no amount
of reason could make me resist. After all, the strangest and maddest of myths are often
merely symbols or allegories based upon truth--and old Zadok must have seen
everything which went on around Innsmouth for the last ninety years. Curiosity flared
up beyond sense and caution, and in my youthful egotism I fancied I might be able to
sift a nucleus of real history from the confused, extravagant outpouring I would
probably extract with the aid of raw whiskey.

I knew that I could not accost him then and there, for the firemen would surely notice
and object. Instead, I reflected, I would prepare by getting some bootleg liquor at a
place where the grocery boy had told me it was plentiful. Then I would loaf near the fire
station in apparent casualness, and fall in with old Zadok after he had started on one of
his frequent rambles. The youth had said that he was very restless, seldom sitting
around the station for more than an hour or two at a time.

A quart bottle of whiskey was easily, though not cheaply, obtained in the rear of a dingy
variety-store just off the Square in Eliot Street. The dirty-looking fellow who waited on
me had a touch of the staring "Innsmouth look", but was quite civil in his way; being
perhaps used to the custom of such convivial strangers--truckmen, gold-buyers, and the
like--as were occasionally in town.

Reentering the Square I saw that luck was with me; for--shuffling out of Paine Street
around the corner of the Gilman House--I glimpsed nothing less than the tall, lean,
tattered form of old Zadok Allen himself. In accordance with my plan, I attracted his
attention by brandishing my newly-purchased bottle: and soon realised that he had
begun to shuffle wistfully after me as I turned into Waite Street on my way to the most
deserted region I could think of.

I was steering my course by the map the grocery boy had prepared, and was aiming for
the wholly abandoned stretch of southern waterfront which I had previously visited. The
only people in sight there had been the fishermen on the distant breakwater; and by
going a few squares south I could get beyond the range of these, finding a pair of seats
on some abandoned wharf and being free to question old Zadok unobserved for an
indefinite time. Before I reached Main Street I could hear a faint and wheezy "Hey,
Mister!" behind me and I presently allowed the old man to catch up and take copious
pulls from the quart bottle.

I began putting out feelers as we walked amidst the omnipresent desolation and crazily
tilted ruins, but found that the aged tongue did not loosen as quickly as I had expected.
At length I saw a grass-grown opening toward the sea between crumbling brick walls,
with the weedy length of an earth-and-masonry wharf projecting beyond. Piles of moss-
covered stones near the water promised tolerable seats, and the scene was sheltered
from all possible view by a ruined warehouse on the north. Here, I thought was the ideal
place for a long secret colloquy; so I guided my companion down the lane and picked
out spots to sit in among the mossy stones. The air of death and desertion was ghoulish,
and the smell of fish almost insufferable; but I was resolved to let nothing deter me.

About four hours remained for conversation if I were to catch the eight o'clock coach
for Arkham, and I began to dole out more liquor to the ancient tippler; meanwhile
eating my own frugal lunch. In my donations I was careful not to overshoot the mark,
for I did not wish Zadok's vinous garrulousness to pass into a stupor. After an hour his
furtive taciturnity shewed signs of disappearing, but much to my disappointment he still
sidetracked my questions about Innsmouth and its shadow-haunted past. He would
babble of current topics, revealing a wide acquaintance with newspapers and a great
tendency to philosophise in a sententious village fashion.
Toward the end of the second hour I feared my quart of whiskey would not be enough
to produce results, and was wondering whether I had better leave old Zadok and go back
for more. Just then, however, chance made the opening which my questions had been
unable to make; and the wheezing ancient's rambling took a turn that caused me to lean
forward and listen alertly. My back was toward the fishy-smelling sea, but he was
facing it and something or other had caused his wandering gaze to light on the low,
distant line of Devil Reef, then showing plainly and almost fascinatingly above the
waves. The sight seemed to displease him, for he began a series of weak curses which
ended in a confidential whisper and a knowing leer. He bent toward me, took hold of
my coat lapel, and hissed out some hints that could not be mistaken,

"Thar's whar it all begun--that cursed place of all wickedness whar the deep water starts.
Gate o' hell--sheer drop daown to a bottom no saoundin'-line kin tech. Ol' Cap'n Obed
done it--him that faound aout more'n was good fer him in the Saouth Sea islands.

"Everybody was in a bad way them days. Trade fallin' off, mills losin' business--even
the new ones--an' the best of our menfolks kilt aprivateerin' in the War of 1812 or lost
with the Elizy brig an' the Ranger scow--both on 'em Gilman venters. Obed Marsh he
had three ships afloat--brigantine Columby, brig Hefty, an' barque Sumatry Queen. He
was the only one as kep' on with the East-Injy an' Pacific trade, though Esdras Martin's
barkentine Malay Bride made a venter as late as twenty-eight.

"Never was nobody like Cap'n Obed--old limb o' Satan! Heh, heh! I kin mind him a-
tellin' abaout furren parts, an' callin' all the folks stupid for goin' to Christian meetin' an'
bearin' their burdens meek an' lowly. Says they'd orter git better gods like some o' the
folks in the Injies--gods as ud bring 'em good fishin' in return for their sacrifices, an' ud
reely answer folks's prayers.

"Matt Eliot, his fust mate, talked a lot too, only he was again' folks's doin' any heathen
things. Told abaout an island east of Othaheite whar they was a lot o' stone ruins older'n
anybody knew anything abaout, kind o' like them on Ponape, in the Carolines, but with
carven's of faces that looked like the big statues on Easter Island. Thar was a little
volcanic island near thar, too, whar they was other ruins with diff'rent carvin'--ruins all
wore away like they'd ben under the sea onct, an' with picters of awful monsters all over
'em.

"Wal, Sir, Matt he says the natives araound thar had all the fish they cud ketch, an'
sported bracelets an' armlets an' head rigs made aout o' a queer kind o' gold an' covered
with picters o' monsters jest like the ones carved over the ruins on the little island--
sorter fish-like frogs or froglike fishes that was drawed in all kinds o' positions likes
they was human bein's. Nobody cud get aout o' them whar they got all the stuff, an' all
the other natives wondered haow they managed to find fish in plenty even when the
very next island had lean pickin's. Matt he got to wonderon' too an' so did Cap'n Obed.
Obed he notices, besides, that lots of the hn'some young folks ud drop aout o' sight fer
good from year to year, an' that they wan't many old folks around. Also, he thinks some
of the folks looked durned queer even for Kanakys.

"It took Obed to git the truth aout o' them heathen. I dun't know haow he done it, but he
begun by tradin' fer the gold-like things they wore. Ast 'em whar they come from, an' ef
they cud git more, an' finally wormed the story aout o' the old chief--Walakea, they
called him. Nobody but Obed ud ever a believed the old yeller devil, but the Cap'n cud
read folks like they was books. Heh, heh! Nobody never believes me naow when I tell
'em, an' I dun't s'pose you will, young feller--though come to look at ye, ye hev kind o'
got them sharp-readin' eyes like Obed had."

The old man's whisper grew fainter, and I found myself shuddering at the terrible and
sincere portentousness of his intonation, even though I knew his tale could be nothing
but drunken phantasy.

"Wal, Sir, Obed he larnt that they's things on this arth as most folks never heerd about--
an' wouldn't believe ef they did hear. It seems these Kanakys was sacrificin' heaps o'
their young men an' maidens to some kind o' god-things that lived under the sea, an'
gittin' all kinds o' favour in return. They met the things on the little islet with the queer
ruins, an' it seems them awful picters o' frog-fish monsters was supposed to be picters o'
these things. Mebbe they was the kind o' critters as got all the mermaid stories an' sech
started.

"They had all kinds a' cities on the sea-bottom, an' this island was heaved up from thar.
Seem they was some of the things alive in the stone buildin's when the island come up
sudden to the surface, That's how the Kanakys got wind they was daown thar. Made
sign-talk as soon as they got over bein' skeert, an' pieced up a bargain afore long.

"Them things liked human sacrifices. Had had 'em ages afore, but lost track o' the upper
world after a time. What they done to the victims it ain't fer me to say, an' I guess Obed
wa'n't none too sharp abaout askin'. But it was all right with the heathens, because they'd
ben havin' a hard time an' was desp'rate abaout everything. They give a sarten number o'
young folks to the sea-things twice every year--May-Eve an' Hallawe'en--reg'lar as cud
be. Also give some a' the carved knick-knacks they made. What the things agreed to
give in return was plenty a' fish--they druv 'em in from all over the sea--an' a few gold-
like things naow an' then.

"Wal, as I says, the natives met the things on the little volcanic islet--goin' thar in
canoes with the sacrifices et cet'ry, and bringin' back any of the gold-like jools as was
comin' to 'em. At fust the things didn't never go onto the main island, but arter a time
they come to want to. Seems they hankered arter mixin' with the folks, an' havin' j'int
ceremonies on the big days--May-Eve an' Hallowe'en. Ye see, they was able to live both
in ant aout o' water--what they call amphibians, I guess. The Kanakys told 'em as haow
folks from the other islands might wanta wipe 'an out if they got wind o' their bein' thar,
but they says they dun't keer much, because they cud wipe aout the hull brood o'
humans ef they was willin' to bother--that is, any as didn't be, sarten signs sech as was
used onct by the lost Old Ones, whoever they was. But not wantin' to bother, they'd lay
low when anybody visited the island.

"When it come to matin' with them toad-lookin' fishes, the Kanakys kind o' balked, but
finally they larnt something as put a new face on the matter. Seems that human folks has
got a kind a' relation to sech water-beasts--that everything alive come aout o' the water
onct an' only needs a little change to go back agin. Them things told the Kanakys that ef
they mixed bloods there'd be children as ud look human at fust, but later turn more'n
more like the things, till finally they'd take to the water an' jine the main lot o' things
daown har. An' this is the important part, young feller--them as turned into fish things
an' went into the water wouldn't never die. Them things never died excep' they was kilt
violent.

"Wal, Sir, it seems by the time Obed knowed them islanders they was all full o' fish
blood from them deep-water things. When they got old an' begun to shew it, they was
kep' hid until they felt like takin' to the water an' quittin' the place. Some was more
teched than others, an' some never did change quite enough to take to the water; but
mosily they turned out jest the way them things said. Them as was born more like the
things changed arly, but them as was nearly human sometimes stayed on the island till
they was past seventy, though they'd usually go daown under for trial trips afore that.
Folks as had took to the water gen'rally come back a good deal to visit, so's a man ud
often be a'talkin' to his own five-times-great-grandfather who'd left the dry land a
couple o' hundred years or so afore.

"Everybody got aout o' the idee o' dyin'--excep' in canoe wars with the other islanders,
or as sacrifices to the sea-gods daown below, or from snakebite or plague or sharp
gallopin' ailments or somethin' afore they cud take to the water--but simply looked
forrad to a kind o' change that wa'n't a bit horrible arter a while. They thought what
they'd got was well wuth all they'd had to give up--an' I guess Obed kind o' come to
think the same hisself when he'd chewed over old Walakea's story a bit. Walakea,
though, was one of the few as hadn't got none of the fish blood--bein' of a royal line that
intermarried with royal lines on other islands.

"Walakea he shewed Obed a lot o' rites an' incantations as had to do with the sea things,
an' let him see some o' the folks in the village as had changed a lot from human shape.
Somehaow or other, though, he never would let him see one of the reg'lar things from
right aout o' the water. In the end he give him a funny kind o' thingumajig made aout o'
lead or something, that he said ud bring up the fish things from any place in the water
whar they might be a nest o' 'em. The idee was to drop it daown with the right kind o'
prayers an' sech. Walakea allowed as the things was scattered all over the world, so's
anybody that looked abaout cud find a nest an' bring 'em up ef they was wanted.

"Matt he didn't like this business at all, an' wanted Obed shud keep away from the
island; but the Cap'n was sharp fer gain, an' faound he cud get them gold-like things so
cheap it ud pay him to make a specialty of them. Things went on that way for years an'
Obed got enough o' that gold-like stuff to make him start the refinery in Waite's old run-
daown fullin' mill. He didn't dass sell the pieces like they was, for folks ud be all the
time askin' questions. All the same his crews ud get a piece an' dispose of it naow and
then, even though they was swore to keep quiet; an' he let his women-folks wear some
o' the pieces as was more human-like than most.

"Well, come abaout thutty-eight--when I was seven year' old--Obed he faound the
island people all wiped aout between v'yages. Seems the other islanders had got wind o'
what was goin' on, and had took matters into their own hands. S'pose they must a had,
after all, them old magic signs as the sea things says was the only things they was afeard
of. No tellin' what any o' them Kanakys will chance to git a holt of when the sea-bottom
throws up some island with ruins older'n the deluge. Pious cusses, these was--they didn't
leave nothin' standin' on either the main island or the little volcanic islet excep' what
parts of the ruins was too big to knock daown. In some places they was little stones
strewed abaout--like charms--with somethin' on 'em like what ye call a swastika
naowadays. Prob'ly them was the Old Ones' signs. Folks all wiped aout no trace o' no
gold-like things an' none the nearby Kanakys ud breathe a word abaout the matter.
Wouldn't even admit they'd ever ben any people on that island.

"That naturally hit Obed pretty hard, seein' as his normal trade was doin' very poor. It
hit the whole of Innsmouth, too, because in seafarint days what profited the master of a
ship gen'lly profited the crew proportionate. Most of the folks araound the taown took
the hard times kind o' sheep-like an' resigned, but they was in bad shape because the
fishin' was peterin' aout an' the mills wan't doin' none too well.

"Then's the time Obed he begun a-cursin' at the folks fer bein' dull sheep an' prayin' to a
Christian heaven as didn't help 'em none. He told 'em he'd knowed o' folks as prayed to
gods that give somethin' ye reely need, an' says ef a good bunch o' men ud stand by him,
he cud mebbe get a holt o' sarten paowers as ud bring plenty o' fish an' quite a bit of
gold. O' course them as sarved on the Sumatry Queen, an' seed the island knowed what
he meant, an' wa'n't none too anxious to get clost to sea-things like they'd heard tell on,
but them as didn't know what 'twas all abaout got kind o' swayed by what Obed had to
say, and begun to ast him what he cud do to sit 'em on the way to the faith as ud bring
'em results."

Here the old man faltered, mumbled, and lapsed into a moody and apprehensive silence;
glancing nervously over his shoulder and then turning back to stare fascinatedly at the
distant black reef. When I spoke to him he did not answer, so I knew I would have to let
him finish the bottle. The insane yarn I was hearing interested me profoundly, for I
fancied there was contained within it a sort of crude allegory based upon the strangeness
of Innsmouth and elaborated by an imagination at once creative and full of scraps of
exotic legend. Not for a moment did I believe that the tale had any really substantial
foundation; but none the less the account held a hint of genuine terror if only because it
brought in references to strange jewels clearly akin to the malign tiara I had seen at
Newburyport. Perhaps the ornaments had, after all, come from some strange island; and
possibly the wild stories were lies of the bygone Obed himself rather than of this
antique toper.

I handed Zadok the bottle, and he drained it to the last drop. It was curious how he
could stand so much whiskey, for not even a trace of thickness had come into his high,
wheezy voice. He licked the nose of the bottle and slipped it into his pocket, then
beginning to nod and whisper softly to himself. I bent close to catch any articulate
words he might utter, and thought I saw a sardonic smile behind the stained bushy
whiskers. Yes--he was really forming words, and I could grasp a fair proportion of
them.

"Poor Matt--Matt he allus was agin it--tried to line up the folks on his side, an' had long
talks with the preachers--no use--they run the Congregational parson aout o' taown, an'
the Methodist feller quit--never did see Resolved Babcock, the Baptist parson, agin--
Wrath o' Jehovy--I was a mightly little critter, but I heerd what I heerd an, seen what I
seen--Dagon an' Ashtoreth--Belial an' Beelzebub--Golden Caff an' the idols o' Canaan
an' the Philistines--Babylonish abominations--Mene, mene, tekel, upharsin--."
He stopped again, and from the look in his watery blue eyes I feared he was close to a
stupor after all. But when I gently shook his shoulder he turned on me with astonishing
alertness and snapped out some more obscure phrases.

"Dun't believe me, hey? Hey, heh, heh--then jest tell me, young feller, why Cap'n Obed
an' twenty odd other folks used to row aout to Devil Reef in the dead o' night an' chant
things so laoud ye cud hear 'em all over taown when the wind was right? Tell me that,
hey? An' tell me why Obed was allus droppin' heavy things daown into the deep water
t'other side o' the reef whar the bottom shoots daown like a cliff lower'n ye kin saound?
Tell me what he done with that funny-shaped lead thingumajig as Walakea give him?
Hey, boy? An' what did they all haowl on May-Eve, an, agin the next Hallowe'en? An'
why'd the new church parsons--fellers as used to be sailors--wear them queer robes an'
cover their-selves with them gold-like things Obed brung? Hey?"

The watery blue eyes were almost savage and maniacal now, and the dirty white beard
bristled electrically. Old Zadok probably saw me shrink back, for he began to cackle
evilly.

"Heh, heh, heh, heh! Beginnin' to see, hey? Mebbe ye'd like to a ben me in them days,
when I seed things at night aout to sea from the cupalo top o' my haouse. Oh, I kin tell
ye' little pitchers hev big ears, an' I wa'n't missin' nothin' o' what was gossiped abaout
Cap'n Obed an' the folks aout to the reef! Heh, heh, heh! Haow abaout the night I took
my pa's ship's glass up to the cupalo an' seed the reef a-bristlin' thick with shapes that
dove off quick soon's the moon riz?

"Obed an' the folks was in a dory, but them shapes dove off the far side into the deep
water an' never come up...

"Haow'd ye like to be a little shaver alone up in a cupola a-watchin' shapes as wa'n't

human shapes?...Heh?...Heh, heh, heh ..."

The old man was getting hysterical, and I began to shiver with a nameless alarm. He
laid a gnarled claw on my shoulder, and it seemed to me that its shaking was not
altogether that of mirth.

"S'pose one night ye seed somethin' heavy heaved offen Obed's dory beyond the reef'
and then learned next day a young feller was missin' from home. Hey! Did anybody
ever see hide or hair o' Hiram Gilman agin. Did they? An' Nick Pierce, an' Luelly
Waite, an' Adoniram Saouthwick, an' Henry Garrison. Hey? Heh, heh, heh, heh...Shapes
talkin' sign language with their hands...them as had reel hands ...

"Wal, Sir, that was the time Obed begun to git on his feet agin. Folks see his three
darters a-wearin' gold-like things as nobody'd never see on 'em afore, an' smoke stared
comin' aout o' the refin'ry chimbly. Other folks was prosp'rin, too--fish begun to swarm
into the harbour fit to kill an' heaven knows what sized cargoes we begun to ship aout to
Newb'ryport, Arkham, an' Boston. 'Twas then Obed got the ol' branch railrud put
through. Some Kingsport fishermen heerd abaout the ketch an' come up in sloops, but
they was all lost. Nobody never see 'em agin. An' jest then our folk organised the
Esoteric Order 0' Dagon, an' bought Masonic Hall offen Calvary Commandery for
it...heh, heh, heh! Matt Eliot was a Mason an' agin the sellin', but he dropped aout o'
sight jest then.

"Remember, I ain't sayin' Obed was set on hevin' things jest like they was on that
Kanaky isle. I dun't think he aimed at fust to do no mixin', nor raise no younguns to take
to the water an' turn into fishes with eternal life. He wanted them gold things, an' was
willin' to pay heavy, an' I guess the others was satisfied fer a while ...

"Come in' forty-six the taown done some lookin' an' thinkin' fer itself. Too many folks
missin'--too much wild preachin' at meetin' of a Sunday--too much talk abaout that reef.
I guess I done a bit by tellin' Selectman Mowry what I see from the cupalo. They was a
party one night as follered Obed's craowd aout to the reef, an' I heerd shots betwixt the
dories. Nex' day Obed and thutty-two others was in gaol, with everybody a-wonderin'
jest what was afoot and jest what charge agin 'em cud he got to holt. God, ef anybody'd
look'd ahead...a couple o' weeks later, when nothin' had ben throwed into the sea fer thet
long..."

Zadok was shewing sings of fright and exhaustion, and I let him keep silence for a
while, though glancing apprehensively at my watch. The tide had turned and was
coming in now, and the sound of the waves seemed to arouse him. I was glad of that
tide, for at high water the fishy smell might not be so bad. Again I strained to catch his
whispers.

"That awful night...I seed 'em. I was up in the cupalo...hordes of 'em...swarms of

'em...all over the reef an' swimmin' up the harbour into the Manuxet...God, what
happened in the streets of Innsmouth that night...they rattled our door, but pa wouldn't
open...then he clumb aout the kitchen winder with his musket to find Selecman Mowry
an' see what he cud do...Maounds o' the dead an' the dyin'...shots and screams...shaoutin'
in Ol Squar an' Taown Squar an' New Church Green--gaol throwed open...--
proclamation...treason...called it the plague when folks come in an' faoud haff our
people missin'...nobody left but them as ud jine in with Obed an' them things or else
keep quiet...never heard o' my pa no more..."

The old man was panting and perspiring profusely. His grip on my shoulder tightened.

"Everything cleaned up in the mornin'--but they was traces...Obed he kinder takes

charge an' says things is goin' to be changed... others'll worship with us at meetin'-time,
an' sarten haouses hez got to entertin guests...they wanted to mix like they done with the
Kanakys, an' he for one didn't feel baound to stop 'em. Far gone, was Obed...jest like a
crazy man on the subjeck. He says they brung us fish an' treasure, an' shud hev what
they hankered after..."

"Nothin' was to be diff'runt on the aoutside; only we was to keep shy o' strangers ef we
knowed what was good fer us.

"We all hed to take the Oath o' Dagon, an' later on they was secon' an' third oaths that
some o' us took. Them as ud help special, ud git special rewards--gold an' sech--No use
balkin', fer they was millions of 'em daown thar. They'd ruther not start risin' an' wipin'
aout human-kind, but ef they was gave away an' forced to, they cud do a lot toward jest
that. We didn't hev them old charms to cut 'em off like folks in the Saouth Sea did, an'
them Kanakys wudn't never give away their secrets.

"Yield up enough sacrifices an' savage knick-knacks an' harbourage in the taown when
they wanted it, an' they'd let well enough alone. Wudn't bother no strangers as might
bear tales aoutside--that is, withaout they got pryin'. All in the band of the faithful--
Order 0' Dagon--an' the children shud never die, but go back to the Mother Hydra an'
Father Dagon what we all come from onct...Ia! Ia! Cthulhu fhtagn! Ph'nglui mglw'nafh
Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah-nagl fhtaga--"

Old Zadok was fast lapsing into stark raving, and I held my breath. Poor old soul--to
what pitiful depths of hallucination had his liquor, plus his hatred of the decay, alienage,
and disease around him, brought that fertile, imaginative brain? He began to moan now,
and tears were coursing down his channelled checks into the depths of his beard.

"God, what I seen senct I was fifteen year' old--Mene, mene, tekel, upharsin!--the folks
as was missin', and them as kilt theirselves--them as told things in Arkham or Ipswich
or sech places was all called crazy, like you're callin' me right naow--but God, what I
seen--They'd a kilt me long ago fer' what I know, only I'd took the fust an' secon' Oaths
o' Dago offen Obed, so was pertected unlessen a jury of 'em proved I told things
knowin' an' delib'rit...but I wudn't take the third Oath--I'd a died ruther'n take that--

"It got wuss araound Civil War time, when children born senct 'forty-six begun to grow
up--some 'em, that is. I was afeared--never did no pryin' arter that awful night, an' never
see one o'--them--clost to in all my life. That is, never no full-blooded one. I went to the
war, an' ef I'd a had any guts or sense I'd a never come back, but settled away from here.
But folks wrote me things wa'n't so bad. That, I s'pose, was because gov'munt draft men
was in taown arter 'sixty-three. Arter the war it was jest as bad agin. People begun to fall
off--mills an' shops shet daown--shippin' stopped an' the harbour choked up--railrud
give up--but they...they never stopped swimmin' in an' aout o' the river from that cursed
reef o' Satan--an' more an' more attic winders got a-boarded up, an' more an' more
noises was heerd in haouses as wa'n't s'posed to hev nobody in 'em...

"Folks aoutside hev their stories abaout us--s'pose you've heerd a plenty on 'em, seein'
what questions ye ast--stories abaout things they've seed naow an' then, an' abaout that
queer joolry as still comes in from somewhars an' ain't quite all melted up--but nothin'
never gits def'nite. Nobody'll believe nothin'. They call them gold-like things pirate loot,
an' allaow the Innsmouth folks hez furren blood or is dis-tempered or somethin'. Beside,
them that lives here shoo off as many strangers as they kin, an' encourage the rest not to
git very cur'ous, specially raound night time. Beasts balk at the critters--hosses wuss'n
mules--but when they got autos that was all right.

"In 'forty-six Cap'n Obed took a second wife that nobody in the taown never see--some
says he didn't want to, but was made to by them as he'd called in--had three children by
her--two as disappeared young, but one gal as looked like anybody else an' was
eddicated in Europe. Obed finally got her married off by a trick to an Arkham feller as
didn't suspect nothin'. But nobody aoutside'll hav nothin' to do with Innsmouth folks
naow. Barnabas Marsh that runs the refin'ry now is Obed's grandson by his fust wife--
son of Onesiphorus, his eldest son, but his mother was another o' them as wa'n't never
seen aoutdoors.
"Right naow Barnabas is abaout changed. Can't shet his eyes no more, an' is all aout o'
shape. They say he still wears clothes, but he'll take to the water soon. Mebbe he's tried
it already--they do sometimes go daown for little spells afore they go daown for good.
Ain't ben seed abaout in public fer nigh on ten year'. Dun't know haow his poor wife kin
feel--she come from Ipiwich, an' they nigh lynched Barnabas when he courted her fifty
odd year' ago. Obed he died in 'seventy-eight an' all the next gen'ration is gone naow--
the fust wife's children dead, and the rest...God knows..."

The sound of the incoming tide was now very insistent, and little by little it seemed to
change the old man's mood from maudlin tearfulness to watchful fear. He would pause
now and then to renew those nervous glances over his shoulder or out toward the reef,
and despite the wild absurdity of his tale, I could not help beginning to share his
apprehensiveness. Zadok now grew shriller, seemed to be trying to whip up his courage
with louder speech.

"Hey, yew, why dun't ye say somethin'? Haow'd ye like to be livin' in a taown like this,
with everything a-rottin' an' dyin', an' boarded-up monsters crawlin' an' bleatin' an'
barkin' an' hoppin' araoun' black cellars an' attics every way ye turn? Hey? Haow'd ye
like to hear the haowlin' night arter night from the churches an' Order o' Dagon Hall, an'
know what's doin' part o' the haowlin'? Haow'd ye like to hear what comes from that
awful reef every May-Eve an' Hallowmass? Hey? Think the old man's crazy, eh? Wal,
Sir, let me tell ye that ain't the wust!"

Zadok was really screaming now, and the mad frenzy of his voice disturbed me more
than I care to own.

"Curse ye, dun't set thar a'starin' at me with them eyes--I tell Obed Marsh he's in hell,
an, hez got to stay thar! Heh, heh...in hell, I says! Can't git me--I hain't done nothin' nor
told nobody nothin'--

"Oh, you, young feller? Wal, even ef I hain't told nobody nothin' yet, I'm a'goin' to
naow! Yew jest set still an' listen to me, boy--this is what I ain't never told nobody...I
says I didn't get to do pryin' arter that night--but I faound things about jest the same!"

"Yew want to know what the reel horror is, hey? Wal, it's this--it ain't what them fish
devils hez done, but what they're a-goin' to do! They're a-bringin' things up aout o' whar
they come from into the taown--been doin' it fer years, an' slackenin' up lately. Them
haouses north o' the river be-twixt Water an' Main Streets is full of 'em--them devils an'
what they brung--an' when they git ready...I say, when they git...ever hear tell of a
shoggoth?

"Hey, d'ye hear me? I tell ye I know what them things be--I seen 'em one night
when...eh-ahhh-ah! e'yahhh..."

The hideous suddenness and inhuman frightfulness of the old man's shriek almost made
me faint. His eyes, looking past me toward the malodorous sea, were positively starting
from his head; while his face was a mask of fear worthy of Greek tragedy. His bony
claw dug monstrously into my shoulder, and he made no motion as I turned my head to
look at whatever he had glimpsed.
There was nothing that I could see. Only the incoming tide, with perhaps one set of
ripples more local than the long-flung line of breakers. But now Zadok was shaking me,
and I turned back to watch the melting of that fear-frozen face into a chaos of twitching
eyelids and mumbling gums. Presently his voice came back--albeit as a trembling
whisper.

"Git aout o' here! Get aout o' here! They seen us--git aout fer your life! Dun't wait fer
nothin'--they know naow--Run fer it--quick--aout o' this taown--"

Another heavy wave dashed against the loosing masonry of the bygone wharf, and
changed the mad ancient's whisper to another inhuman and blood-curdling scream. "E-
yaahhhh!...Yheaaaaaa!..."

Before I could recover my scattered wits he had relaxed his clutch on my shoulder and
dashed wildly inland toward the street, reeling northward around the ruined warehouse
wall.

I glanced back at the sea, but there was nothing there. And when I reached Water Street
and looked along it toward the north there was no remaining trace of Zadok Allen.

IV

I can hardly describe the mood in which I was left by this harrowing episode--an
episode at once mad and pitiful, grotesque and terrifying. The grocery boy had prepared
me for it, yet the reality left me none the less bewildered and disturbed. Puerile though
the story was, old Zadok's insane earnestness and horror had communicated to me a
mounting unrest which joined with my earlier sense of loathing for the town and its
blight of intangible shadow.

Later I might sift the tale and extract some nucleus of historic allegory; just now I
wished to put it out of my head. The hour grown perilously late--my watch said 7:15,
and the Arkham bus left Town Square at eight--so I tried to give my thoughts as neutral
and practical a cast as possible, meanwhile walking rapidly through the deserted streets
of gaping roofs and leaning houses toward the hotel where I had checked my valise and
would find my bus.

Though the golden light of late afternoon gave the ancient roofs and decrepit chimneys
an air of mystic loveliness and peace, I could not help glancing over my shoulder now
and then. I would surely be very glad to get out of malodorous and fear-shadowed
Innsmouth, and wished there were some other vehicle than the bus driven by that
sinister-looking fellow Sargent. Yet I did not hurry too precipitately, for there were
architectural details worth viewing at every silent corner; and I could easily, I
calculated, cover the necessary distance in a half-hour.

Studying the grocery youth's map and seeking a route I had not traversed before, I chose
Marsh Street instead of State for my approach to Town Square. Near the corner of Fall
Street I began to see scattered groups of furtive whisperers, and when I finally reached
the Square I saw that almost all the loiterers were congregated around the door of the
Gilman House. It seemed as if many bulging, watery, unwinking eyes looked oddly at
me as I claimed my valise in the lobby, and I hoped that none of these unpleasant
creatures would be my fellow-passengers on the coach.

The bus, rather early, rattled in with three passengers somewhat before eight, and an
evil-looking fellow on the sidewalk muttered a few indistinguishable words to the
driver. Sargent threw out a mail-bag and a roll of newspapers, and entered the hotel;
while the passengers--the same men whom I had seen arriving in Newburyport that
morning--shambled to the sidewalk and exchanged some faint guttural words with a
loafer in a language I could have sworn was not English. I boarded the empty coach and
took the seat I had taken before, but was hardly settled before Sargent re-appeared and
began mumbling in a throaty voice of peculiar repulsiveness.

I was, it appeared, in very bad luck. There had been something wrong with the engine,
despite the excellent time made from Newburyport, and the bus could not complete the
journey to Arkham. No, it could not possibly be repaired that night, nor was there any
other way of getting transportation out of Innsmouth either to Arkham or elsewhere.
Sargent was sorry, but I would have to stop over at the Gilman. Probably the clerk
would make the price easy for me, but there was nothing else to do. Almost dazed by
this sudden obstacle, and violently dreading the fall of night in this decaying and half-
unlighted town, I left the bus and reentered the hotel lobby; where the sullen queer-
looking night clerk told me I could have Room 428 on next the top floor--large, but
without running water--for a dollar.

Despite what I had heard of this hotel in Newburyport, I signed the register, paid my
dollar, let the clerk take my valise, and followed that sour, solitary attendant up three
creaking flights of stairs past dusty corridors which seemed wholly devoid of life. My
room was a dismal rear one with two windows and bare, cheap furnishings, overlooked
a dingy court-yard otherwise hemmed in by low, deserted brick blocks, and commanded
a view of decrepit westward-stretching roofs with a marshy countryside beyond. At the
end of the corridor was a bathroom--a discouraging relique with ancient marble bowl,
tin tub, faint electric light, and musty wooded paneling around all the plumbing fixtures.

It being still daylight, I descended to the Square and looked around for a dinner of some
sort; noticing as I did so the strange glances I received from the unwholesome loafers.
Since the grocery was closed, I was forced to patronise the restaurant I had shunned
before; a stooped, narrow-headed man with staring, unwinking eyes, and a flat-nosed
wench with unbelievably thick, clumsy hands being in attendance. The service was all
of the counter type, and it relieved me to find that much was evidently served from cans
and packages. A bowl of vegetable soup with crackers was enough for me, and I soon
headed back for my cheerless room at the Gilman; getting a evening paper and a fly-
specked magazine from the evil-visaged clerk at the rickety stand beside his desk.

As twilight deepened I turned on the one feeble electric bulb over the cheap, iron-
framed bed, and tried as best I could to continue the reading I had begun. I felt it
advisable to keep my mind wholesomely occupied, for it would not do to brood over the
abnormalities of this ancient, blight-shadowed town while I was still within its borders.
The insane yarn I had heard from the aged drunkard did not promise very pleasant
dreams, and I felt I must keep the image of his wild, watery eyes as far as possible from
my imagination.
Also, I must not dwell on what that factory inspector had told the Newburyport ticket-
agent about the Gilman House and the voices of its nocturnal tenants--not on that, nor
on the face beneath the tiara in the black church doorway; the face for whose horror my
conscious mind could not account. It would perhaps have been easier to keep my
thoughts from disturbing topics had the room not been so gruesomely musty. As it was,
the lethal mustiness blended hideously with the town's general fishy odour and
persistently focussed one's fancy on death and decay.

Another thing that disturbed me was the absence of a bolt on the door of my room. One
had been there, as marks clearly shewed, but there were signs of recent removal. No
doubt it had been out of order, like so many other things in this decrepit edifice. In my
nervousness I looked around and discovered a bolt on the clothes press which seemed to
be of the same size, judging from the marks, as the one formerly on the door. To gain a
partial relief from the general tension I busied myself by transferring this hardware to
the vacant place with the aid of a handy three-in-one device including a screwdriver
which I kept on my key-ring. The bolt fitted perfectly, and I was somewhat relieved
when I knew that I could shoot it firmly upon retiring. Not that I had any real
apprehension of its need, but that any symbol of security was welcome in an
environment of this kind. There were adequate bolts on the two lateral doors to
connecting rooms, and these I proceeded to fasten.

I did not undress, but decided to read till I was sleepy and then lie down with only my
coat, collar, and shoes off. Taking a pocket flash light from my valise, I placed it in my
trousers, so that I could read my watch if I woke up later in the dark. Drowsiness,
however, did not come; and when I stopped to analyse my thoughts I found to my
disquiet that I was really unconsciously listening for something--listening for something
which I dreaded but could not name. That inspector's story must have worked on my
imagination more deeply than I had suspected. Again I tried to read, but found that I
made no progress.

After a time I seemed to hear the stairs and corridors creak at intervals as if with
footsteps, and wondered if the other rooms were beginning to fill up. There were no
voices, however, and it struck me that there was something subtly furtive about the
creaking. I did not like it, and debated whether I had better try to sleep at all. This town
had some queer people, and there had undoubtedly been several disappearances. Was
this one of those inns where travelers were slain for their money? Surely I had no look
of excessive prosperity. Or were the towns folk really so resentful about curious
visitors? Had my obvious sightseeing, with its frequent map-consultations, aroused
unfavorable notice. It occurred to me that I must be in a highly nervous state to let a few
random creakings set me off speculating in this fashion--but I regretted none the less
that I was unarmed.

At length, feeling a fatigue which had nothing of drowsiness in it, I bolted the newly
outfitted hall door, turned off the light, and threw myself down on the hard, uneven bed-
-coat, collar, shoes, and all. In the darkness every faint noise of the night seemed
magnified, and a flood of doubly unpleasant thoughts swept over me. I was sorry I had
put out the light, yet was too tired to rise and turn it on again. Then, after a long, dreary
interval, and prefaced by a fresh creaking of stairs and corridor, there came that soft,
damnably unmistakable sound which seemed like a malign fulfillment of all my
apprehensions. Without the least shadow of a doubt, the lock of my door was being
tried--cautiously, furtively, tentatively--with a key.

My sensations upon recognising this sign of actual peril were perhaps less rather than
more tumultuous because of my previous vague fears. I had been, albeit without definite
reason, instinctively on my guard--and that was to my advantage in the new and real
crisis, whatever it might turn out to be. Nevertheless the change in the menace from
vague premonition to immediate reality was a profound shock, and fell upon me with
the force of a genuine blow. It never once occurred to me that the fumbling might be a
mere mistake. Malign purpose was all I could think of, and I kept deathly quiet,
awaiting the would-be intruder's next move.

After a time the cautious rattling ceased, and I heard the room to the north entered with
a pass-key. Then the lock of the connecting door to my room was softly tried. The bolt
held, of course, and I heard the floor creak as the prowler left the room. After a moment
there came another soft rattling, and I knew that the room to the south of me was being
entered. Again a furtive trying of a bolted connecting door, and again a receding
creaking. This time the creaking went along the hall and down the stairs, so I knew that
the prowler had realised the bolted condition of my doors and was giving up his attempt
for a greater or lesser time, as the future would shew.

The readiness with which I fell into a plan of action proves that I must have been
subconsciously fearing some menace and considering possible avenues of escape for
hours. From the first I felt that the unseen fumbler meant a danger not to be met or dealt
with, but only to be fled from as precipitately as possible. The one thing to do was to get
out of that hotel alive as quickly as I could, and through some channel other than the
front stairs and lobby.

Rising softly and throwing my flashlight on the switch, I sought to light the bulb over
my bed in order to choose and pocket some belongings for a swift, valiseless flight.
Nothing, however, happened; and I saw that the power had been cut off. Clearly, some
cryptic, evil movement was afoot on a large scale--just what, I could not say. As I stood
pondering with my hand on the now useless switch I heard a muffled creaking on the
floor below, and thought I could barely distinguish voices in conversation. A moment
later I felt less sure that the deeper sounds were voices, since the apparent hoarse
barkings and loose-syllabled croakings bore so little resemblance to recognized human
speech. Then I thought with renewed force of what the factory inspector had heard in
the night in this mouldering and pestilential building.

Having filled my pockets with the flashlight's aid, I put on my hat and tiptoed to the
windows to consider chances of descent. Despite the state's safety regulations there was
no fire escape on this side of the hotel, and I saw that my windows commanded only a
sheer three story drop to the cobbled courtyard. On the right and left, however, some
ancient brick business blocks abutted on the hotel; their slant roofs coming up to a
reasonable jumping distance from my fourth-story level. To reach either of these lines
of buildings I would have to be in a room two from my own--in one case on the north
and in the other case on the south--and my mind instantly set to work what chances I
had of making the transfer.
I could not, I decided, risk an emergence into the corridor; where my footsteps would
surely be heard, and where the difficulties of entering the desired room would be
insuperable. My progress, if it was to be made at all, would have to be through the less
solidly-built connecting doors of the rooms; the locks and bolts of which I would have
to force violently, using my shoulder as a battering-ram whenever they were set against
me. This, I thought, would be possible owing to the rickety nature of the house and its
fixtures; but I realised I could not do it noiselessly. I would have to count on sheer
speed, and the chance of getting to a window before any hostile forces became
coordinated enough to open the right door toward me with a pass-key. My own outer
door I reinforced by pushing the bureau against it--little by little, in order to make a
minimum of sound.

I perceived that my chances were very slender, and was fully prepared for any calamity.
Even getting to another roof would not solve the problem for there would then remain
the task of reaching the ground and escaping from the town. One thing in my favour
was the deserted and ruinous state of the abutting building and the number of skylights
gaping blackly open in each row.

Gathering from the grocery boy's map that the best route out of town was southward, I
glanced first at the connecting door on the south side of the room. It was designed to
open in my direction, hence I saw--after drawing the bolt and finding other fastening in
place--it was not a favorable one for forcing. Accordingly abandoning it as a route, I
cautiously moved the bedstead against it to hamper any attack which might be made on
it later from the next room. The door on the north was hung to open away from me, and
this--though a test proved it to be locked or bolted from the other side--I knew must be
my route. If I could gain the roofs of the buildings in Paine Street and descend
successfully to the ground level, I might perhaps dart through the courtyard and the
adjacent or opposite building to Washington or Bates--or else emerge in Paine and edge
around southward into Washington. In any case, I would aim to strike Washington
somehow and get quickly out of the Town Square region. My preference would be to
avoid Paine, since the fire station there might be open all night.

As I thought of these things I looked out over the squalid sea of decaying roofs below
me, now brightened by the beams of a moon not much past full. On the right the black
gash of the river-gorge clove the panorama; abandoned factories and railway station
clinging barnacle-like to its sides. Beyond it the rusted railway and the Rowley road led
off through a flat marshy terrain dotted with islets of higher and dryer scrub-grown land.
On the left the creek-threaded country-side was nearer, the narrow road to Ipswich
gleaming white in the moonlight. I could not see from my side of the hotel the
southward route toward Arkham which I had determined to take.

I was irresolutely speculating on when I had better attack the northward door, and on
how I could least audibly manage it, when I noticed that the vague noises underfoot had
given place to a fresh and heavier creaking of the stairs. A wavering flicker of light
shewed through my transom, and the boards of the corridor began to groan with a
ponderous load. Muffled sounds of possible vocal origin approached, and at length a
firm knock came at my outer door.

For a moment I simply held my breath and waited. Eternities seemed to elapse, and the
nauseous fishy odour of my environment seemed to mount suddenly and spectacularly.
Then the knocking was repeated--continuously, and with growing insistence. I knew
that the time for action had come, and forthwith drew the bolt of the northward
connecting door, bracing myself for the task of battering it open. The knocking waxed
louder, and I hoped that its volume would cover the sound of my efforts. At last
beginning my attempt, I lunged again and again at the thin paneling with my left
shoulder, heedless of shock or pain. The door resisted even more than I expected, but I
did not give in. And all the while the clamour at the outer door increased.

Finally the connecting door gave, but with such a crash that I knew those outside must
have heard. Instantly the outside knocking became a violent battering, while keys
sounded ominously in the hall doors of the rooms on both sides of me. Rushing through
the newly opened connexion, I succeeded in bolting the northerly hall door before the
lock could be turned; but even as I did so I heard the hall door of the third room--the
one from whose window I had hoped to reach the roof below--being tried with a pass-
key.

For an instant I felt absolute despair, since my trapping in a chamber with no window
egress seemed complete. A wave of almost abnormal horror swept over me, and
invested with a terrible but unexplainable singularity the flashlight-glimpsed dust prints
made by the intruder who had lately tried my door from this room. Then, with a dazed
automatism which persisted despite hopelessness, I made for the next connecting door
and performed the blind motion of pushing at it in an effort to get through and--granting
that fastenings might be as providentially intact as in this second room--bolt the hall
door beyond before the lock could be turned from outside.

Sheer fortunate chance gave me my reprieve--for the connecting door before me was
not only unlocked but actually ajar. In a second I was though, and had my right knee
and shoulder against a hall door which was visibly opening inward. My pressure took
the opener off guard, for the thing shut as I pushed, so that I could slip the well-
conditioned bolt as I had done with the other door. As I gained this respite I heard the
battering at the two other doors abate, while a confused clatter came from the
connecting door I had shielded with the bedstead. Evidently the bulk of my assailants
had entered the southerly room and were massing in a lateral attack. But at the same
moment a pass-key sounded in the next door to the north, and I knew that a nearer peril
was at hand.

The northward connecting door was wide open, but there was no time to think about
checking the already turning lock in the hall. All I could do was to shut and bolt the
open connecting door, as well as its mate on the opposite side--pushing a bedstead
against the one and a bureau against the other, and moving a washstand in front of the
hall door. I must, I saw, trust to such makeshift barriers to shield me till I could get out
the window and on the roof of the Paine Street block. But even in this acute moment my
chief horror was something apart from the immediate weakness of my defenses. I was
shuddering because not one of my pursuers, despite some hideous panting, grunting,
and subdued barkings at odd intervals, was uttering an unmuffled or intelligible vocal
sound.

As I moved the furniture and rushed toward the windows I heard a frightful scurrying
along the corridor toward the room north of me, and perceived that the southward
battering had ceased. Plainly, most of my opponents were about to concentrate against
the feeble connecting door which they knew must open directly on me. Outside, the
moon played on the ridgepole of the block below, and I saw that the jump would be
desperately hazardous because of the steep surface on which I must land.

Surveying the conditions, I chose the more southerly of the two windows as my avenue
of escape; planning to land on the inner slope of the roof and make for the nearest sky-
light. Once inside one of the decrepit brick structures I would have to reckon with
pursuit; but I hoped to descend and dodge in and out of yawning doorways along the
shadowed courtyard, eventually getting to Washington Street and slipping out of town
toward the south.

The clatter at the northerly connecting door was now terrific, and I saw that the weak
panelling was beginning to splinter. Obviously, the besiegers had brought some
ponderous object into play as a battering-ram. The bedstead, however, still held firm; so
that I had at least a faint chance of making good my escape. As I opened the window I
noticed that it was flanked by heavy velour draperies suspended from a pole by brass
rings, and also that there was a large projecting catch for the shutters on the exterior.
Seeing a possible means of avoiding the dangerous jump, I yanked at the hangings and
brought them down, pole and all; then quickly hooking two of the rings in the shutter
catch and flinging the drapery outside. The heavy folds reached fully to the abutting
roof, and I saw that the rings and catch would be likely to bear my weight. So, climbing
out of the window and down the improvised rope ladder, I left behind me forever the
morbid and horror-infested fabric of the Gilman House.

I landed safely on the loose slates of the steep roof, and succeeded in gaining the gaping
black skylight without a slip. Glancing up at the window I had left, I observed it was
still dark, though far across the crumbling chimneys to the north I could see lights
ominously blazing in the Order of Dagon Hall, the Baptist church, and the
Congregational church which I recalled so shiveringly. There had seemed to be no one
in the courtyard below, and I hoped there would be a chance to get away before the
spreading of a general alarm. Flashing my pocket lamp into the skylight, I saw that there
were no steps down. The distance was slight, however, so I clambered over the brink
and dropped; striking a dusty floor littered with crumbling boxes and barrels.

The place was ghoulish-looking, but I was past minding such impressions and made at
once for the staircase revealed by my flashlight--after a hasty glance at my watch, which
shewed the hour to be 2 a.m. The steps creaked, but seemed tolerably sound; and I raced
down past a barnlike second storey to the ground floor. The desolation was complete,
and only echoes answered my footfalls. At length I reached the lower hall at the end of
which I saw a faint luminous rectangle marking the ruined Paine Street doorway.
Heading the other way, I found the back door also open; and darted out and down five
stone steps to the grass-grown cobblestones of the courtyard.

The moonbeams did not reach down here, but I could just see my way about without
using the flashlight. Some of the windows on the Gilman House side were faintly
glowing, and I thought I heard confused sounds within. Walking softly over to the
Washington Street side I perceived several open doorways, and chose the nearest as my
route out. The hallway inside was black, and when I reached the opposite end I saw that
the street door was wedged immovably shut. Resolved to try another building, I groped
my way back toward the courtyard, but stopped short when close to the doorway.
For out of an opened door in the Gilman House a large crowd of doubtful shapes was
pouring--lanterns bobbing in the darkness, and horrible croaking voices exchanging low
cries in what was certainly not English. The figures moved uncertainly, and I realized to
my relief that they did not know where I had gone; but for all that they sent a shiver of
horror through my frame. Their features were indistinguishable, but their crouching,
shambling gait was abominably repellent. And worst of all, I perceived that one figure
was strangely robed, and unmistakably surmounted by a tall tiara of a design altogether
too familiar. As the figures spread throughout the courtyard, I felt my fears increase.
Suppose I could find no egress from this building on the street side? The fishy odour
was detestable, and I wondered I could stand it without fainting. Again groping toward
the street, I opened a door off the hall and came upon an empty room with closely
shuttered but sashless windows. Fumbling in the rays of my flashlight, I found I could
open the shutters; and in another moment had climbed outside and was fully closing the
aperture in its original manner.

I was now in Washington Street, and for the moment saw no living thing nor any light
save that of the moon. From several directions in the distance, however, I could hear the
sound of hoarse voices, of footsteps, and of a curious kind of pattering which did not
sound quite like footsteps. Plainly I had no time to lose. The points of the compass were
clear to me, and I was glad that all the street lights were turned off, as is often the
custom on strongly moonlit nights in prosperous rural regions. Some of the sounds
came from the south, yet I retained my design of escaping in that direction. There
would, I knew, be plenty of deserted doorways to shelter me in case I met any person or
group who looked like pursuers.

I walked rapidly, softly, and close to the ruined houses. While hatless and dishevelled
after my arduous climb, I did not look especially noticeable; and stood a good chance of
passing unheeded if forced to encounter any casual wayfarer.

At Bates Street I drew into a yawning vestibule while two shambling figures crossed in
front of me, but was soon on my way again and approaching the open space where Eliot
Street obliquely crosses Washington at the intersection of South. Though I had never
seen this space, it had looked dangerous to me on the grocery youth's map; since the
moonlight would have free play there. There was no use trying to evade it, for any
alternative course would involve detours of possibly disastrous visibility and delaying
effect. The only thing to do was to cross it boldly and openly; imitating the typical
shamble of the Innsmouth folk as best I could, and trusting that no one--or at least no
pursuer of mine--would be there.

Just how fully the pursuit was organised--and indeed, just what its purpose might be--I
could form no idea. There seemed to be unusual activity in the town, but I judged that
the news of my escape from the Gilman had not yet spread. I would, of course, soon
have to shift from Washington to some other southward street; for that party from the
hotel would doubtless be after me. I must have left dust prints in that last old building,
revealing how I had gained the street.

The open space was, as I had expected, strongly moonlit; and I saw the remains of a
parklike, iron-railed green in its center. Fortunately no one was about though a curious
sort of buzz or roar seemed to be increasing in the direction of Town Square. South
Street was very wide, leading directly down a slight declivity to the waterfront and
commanding a long view out to sea; and I hoped that no one would be glancing up it
from afar as I crossed in the bright moonlight.

My progress was unimpeded, and no fresh sound arose to hint that I had been spied.
Glancing about me, I involuntarily let my pace slacken for a second to take in the sight
of the sea, gorgeous in the burning moonlight at the street's end. Far out beyond the
breakwater was the dim, dark line of Devil Reef, and as I glimpsed it I could not help
thinking of all the hideous legends I had heard in the last twenty-four hours--legends
which portrayed this ragged rock as a veritable gateway to realms of unfathomed horror
and inconceivable abnormality.

Then, without warning, I saw the intermittent flashes of light on the distant reef. They
were definite and unmistakable, and awaked in my mind a blind horror beyond all
rational proportion. My muscles tightened for panic flight, held in only by a certain
unconscious caution and half-hypnotic fascination. And to make matters worse, there
now flashed forth from the lofty cupola of the Gilman House, which loomed up to the
northeast behind me, a series of analogous though differently spaced gleams which
could be nothing less than an answering signal.

Controlling my muscles, and realising afresh--how plainly visible I was, I resumed my

brisker and feignedly shambling pace; though keeping my eyes on that hellish and
ominous reef as long as the opening of South Street gave me a seaward view. What the
whole proceeding meant, I could not imagine; unless it involved some strange rite
connected with Devil Reef, or unless some party had landed from a ship on that sinister
rock. I now bent to the left around the ruinous green; still gazing toward the ocean as it
blazed in the spectral summer moonlight, and watching the cryptical flashing of those
nameless, unexplainable beacons.

It was then that the most horrible impression of all was borne in upon me--the
impression which destroyed my last vestige of self-control and sent me running
frantically southward past the yawning black doorways and fishily staring windows of
that deserted nightmare street. For at a closer glance I saw that the moonlit waters
between the reef and the shore were far from empty. They were alive with a teeming
horde of shapes swimming inward toward the town; and even at my vast distance and in
my single moment of perception I could tell that the bobbing heads and flailing arms
were alien and aberrant in a way scarcely to be expressed or consciously formulated.

My frantic running ceased before I had covered a block, for at my left I began to hear
something like the hue and cry of organised pursuit. There were footsteps and guttural
sounds, and a rattling motor wheezed south along Federal Street. In a second all my
plans were utterly changed--for if the southward highway were blocked ahead of me, I
must clearly find another egress from Innsmouth. I paused and drew into a gaping
doorway, reflecting how lucky I was to have left the moonlit open space before these
pursuers came down the parallel street.

A second reflection was less comforting. Since the pursuit was down another street, it
was plain that the party was not following me directly. It had not seen me, but was
simply obeying a general plan of cutting off my escape. This, however, implied that all
roads leading out of Innsmouth were similarly patrolled; for the people could not have
known what route I intended to take. If this were so, I would have to make my retreat
across country away from any road; but how could I do that in view of the marshy and
creek-riddled nature of all the surrounding region? For a moment my brain reeled--both
from sheer hopelessness and from a rapid increase in the omnipresent fishy odour.

Then I thought of the abandoned railway to Rowley, whose solid line of ballasted,
weed-grown earth still stretched off to the northwest from the crumbling station on the
edge at the river-gorge. There was just a chance that the townsfolk would not think of
that; since its briar-choked desertion made it half-impassable, and the unlikeliest of all
avenues for a fugitive to choose. I had seen it clearly from my hotel window and knew
about how it lay. Most of its earlier length was uncomfortably visible from the Rowley
road, and from high places in the town itself; but one could perhaps crawl
inconspicuously through the undergrowth. At any rate, it would form my only chance of
deliverance, and there was nothing to do but try it.

Drawing inside the hall of my deserted shelter, I once more consulted the grocery boy's
map with the aid of the flashlight. The immediate problem was how to reach the ancient
railway; and I now saw that the safest course was ahead to Babson Street; then west to
Lafayette--there edging around but not crossing an open space homologous to the one I
had traversed--and subsequently back northward and westward in a zigzagging line
through Lafayette, Bates, Adam, and Bank streets--the latter skirting the river gorge--to
the abandoned and dilapidated station I had seen from my window. My reason for going
ahead to Babson was that I wished neither to recross the earlier open space nor to begin
my westward course along a cross street as broad as South.

Starting once more, I crossed the street to the right-hand side in order to edge around
into Babson as inconspicuously as possible. Noises still continued in Federal Street, and
as I glanced behind me I thought I saw a gleam of light near the building through which
I had escaped. Anxious to leave Washington Street, I broke into a quiet dogtrot, trusting
to luck not to encounter any observing eye. Next the corner of Babson Street I saw to
my alarm that one of the houses was still inhabited, as attested by curtains at the
window; but there were no lights within, and I passed it without disaster.

In Babson Street, which crossed Federal and might thus reveal me to the searchers, I
clung as closely as possible to the sagging, uneven buildings; twice pausing in a
doorway as the noises behind me momentarily increased. The open space ahead shone
wide and desolate under the moon, but my route would not force me to cross it. During
my second pause I began to detect a fresh distribution of vague sounds; and upon
looking cautiously out from cover beheld a motor car darting across the open space,
bound outward along Eliot Street, which there intersects both Babson and Lafayette.

As I watched--choked by a sudden rise in the fishy odour after a short abatement--I saw
a band of uncouth, crouching shapes loping and shambling in the same direction; and
knew that this must be the party guarding the Ipswich road, since that highway forms an
extension of Eliot Street. Two of the figures I glimpsed were in voluminous robes, and
one wore a peaked diadem which glistened whitely in the moonlight. The gait of this
figure was so odd that it sent a chill through me--for it seemed to me the creature was
almost hopping.

When the last of the band was out of sight I resumed my progress; darting around the
corner into Lafayette Street, and crossing Eliot very hurriedly lest stragglers of the party
be still advancing along that thoroughfare. I did hear some croaking and clattering
sounds far off toward Town Square, but accomplished the passage without disaster. My
greatest dread was in re-crossing broad and moonlit South Street--with its seaward
view--and I had to nerve myself for the ordeal. Someone might easily be looking, and
possible Eliot Street stragglers could not fail to glimpse me from either of two points.
At the last moment I decided I had better slacken my trot and make the crossing as
before in the shambling gait of an average Innsmouth native.

When the view of the water again opened out--this time on my right--I was half-
determined not to look at it at all. I could not however, resist; but cast a sidelong glance
as I carefully and imitatively shambled toward the protecting shadows ahead. There was
no ship visible, as I had half-expected there would be. Instead, the first thing which
caught my eye was a small rowboat pulling in toward the abandoned wharves and laden
with some bulky, tarpaulin-covered object. Its rowers, though distantly and indistinctly
seen, were of an especially repellent aspect. Several swimmers were still discernible;
while on the far black reef I could see a faint, steady glow unlike the winking beacon
visible before, and of a curious colour which I could not precisely identify. Above the
slant roofs ahead and to the right there loomed the tall cupola of the Gilman House, but
it was completely dark. The fishy odour, dispelled for a moment by some merciful
breeze, now closed in again with maddening intensity.

I had not quite crossed the street when I heard a muttering band advancing along
Washington from the north. As they reached the broad open space where I had had my
first disquieting glimpse of the moonlit water I could see them plainly only a block
away--and was horrified by the bestial abnormality of their faces and the doglike sub-
humanness of their crouching gait. One man moved in a positively simian way, with
long arms frequently touching the ground; while another figure--robed and tiaraed--
seemed to progress in an almost hopping fashion. I judged this party to be the one I had
seen in the Gilman's courtyard--the one, therefore, most closely on my trail. As some of
the figures turned to look in my direction I was transfixed with fright, yet managed to
preserve the casual, shambling gait I had assumed. To this day I do not know whether
they saw me or not. If they did, my stratagem must have deceived them, for they passed
on across the moonlit space without varying their course--meanwhile croaking and
jabbering in some hateful guttural patois I could not identify.

Once more in shadow, I resumed my former dog-trot past the leaning and decrepit
houses that stared blankly into the night. Having crossed to the western sidewalk I
rounded the nearest corner into Bates Street where I kept close to the buildings on the
southern side. I passed two houses shewing signs of habitation, one of which had faint
lights in upper rooms, yet met with no obstacle. As I turned into Adams Street I felt
measurably safer, but received a shook when a man reeled out of a black doorway
directly in front of me. He proved, however, too hopelessly drunk to be a menace; so
that I reached the dismal ruins of the Bank Street warehouses in safety.

No one was stirring in that dead street beside the river-gorge, and the roar of the
waterfalls quite drowned my foot steps. It was a long dog-trot to the ruined station, and
the great brick warehouse walls around me seemed somehow more terrifying than the
fronts of private houses. At last I saw the ancient arcaded station--or what was left of it-
-and made directly for the tracks that started from its farther end.
The rails were rusty but mainly intact, and not more than half the ties had rotted away.
Walking or running on such a surface was very difficult; but I did my best, and on the
whole made very fair time. For some distance the line kept on along the gorge's brink,
but at length I reached the long covered bridge where it crossed the chasm at a dizzying
height. The condition of this bridge would determine my next step. If humanly possible,
I would use it; if not, I would have to risk more street wandering and take the nearest
intact highway bridge.

The vast, barnlike length of the old bridge gleamed spectrally in the moonlight, and I
saw that the ties were safe for at least a few feet within. Entering, I began to use my
flashlight, and was almost knocked down by the cloud of bats that flapped past me.
About half-way across there was a perilous gap in the ties which I feared for a moment
would halt me; but in the end I risked a desperate jump which fortunately succeeded.

I was glad to see the moonlight again when I emerged from that macabre tunnel. The
old tracks crossed River Street at grade, and at once veered off into a region
increasingly rural and with less and less of Innsmouth's abhorrent fishy odour. Here the
dense growth of weeds and briers hindered me and cruelly tore at my clothes, but I was
none the less glad that they were there to give me concealment in case of peril. I knew
that much of my route must be visible from the Rowley road.

The marshy region began very abruptly, with the single track on a low, grassy
embankment where the weedy growth was somewhat thinner. Then came a sort of
island of higher ground, where the line passed through a shallow open cut choked with
bushes and brambles. I was very glad of this partial shelter, since at this point the
Rowley road was uncomfortably near according to my window view. At the end of the
cut it would cross the track and swerve off to a safer distance; but meanwhile I must be
exceedingly careful. I was by this time thankfully certain that the railway itself was not
patrolled.

Just before entering the cut I glanced behind me, but saw no pursuer. The ancient spires
and roofs of decaying Innsmouth gleamed lovely and ethereal in the magic yellow
moonlight, and I thought of how they must have looked in the old days before the
shadow fell. Then, as my gaze circled inland from the town, something less tranquil
arrested my notice and held me immobile for a second.

What I saw--or fancied I saw--was a disturbing suggestion of undulant motion far to the
south; a suggestion which made me conclude that a very large horde must be pouring
out of the city along the level Ipswich road. The distance was great and I could
distinguish nothing in detail; but I did not at all like the look of that moving column. It
undulated too much, and glistened too brightly in the rays of the now westering moon.
There was a suggestion of sound, too, though the wind was blowing the other way--a
suggestion of bestial scraping and bellowing even worse than the muttering of the
parties I had lately overheard.

All sorts of unpleasant conjectures crossed my mind. I thought of those very extreme
Innsmouth types said to be hidden in crumbling, centuried warrens near the waterfront;
I thought, too, of those nameless swimmers I had seen. Counting the parties so far
glimpsed, as well as those presumably covering other roads, the number of my pursuers
must be strangely large for a town as depopulated as Innsmouth.
Whence could come the dense personnel of such a column as I now beheld? Did those
ancient, unplumbed warrens teem with a twisted, uncatalogued, and unsuspected life?
Or had some unseen ship indeed landed a legion of unknown outsiders on that hellish
reef? Who were they? Why were they here? And if such a column of them was scouring
the Ipswich road, would the patrols on the other roads be likewise augmented?

I had entered the brush-grown cut and was struggling along at a very slow pace when
that damnable fishy odour again waxed dominant. Had the wind suddenly changed
eastward, so that it blew in from the sea and over the town? It must have, I concluded,
since I now began to hear shocking guttural murmurs from that hitherto silent direction.
There was another sound, too--a kind of wholesale, colossal flopping or pattering which
somehow called up images of the most detestable sort. It made me think illogically of
that unpleasantly undulating column on the far-off Ipswich road.

And then both stench and sounds grew stronger, so that I paused shivering and grateful
for the cut's protection. It was here, I recalled, that the Rowley road drew so close to the
old railway before crossing westward and diverging. Something was coming along that
road, and I must lie low till its passage and vanishment in the distance. Thank heaven
these creatures employed no dogs for tracking--though perhaps that would have been
impossible amidst the omnipresent regional odour. Crouched in the bushes of that sandy
cleft I felt reasonably safe, even though I knew the searchers would have to cross the
track in front of me not much more than a hundred yards away. I would be able to see
them, but they could not, except by a malign miracle, see me.

All at once I began dreading to look at them as they passed. I saw the close moonlit
space where they would surge by, and had curious thoughts about the irredeemable
pollution of that space. They would perhaps be the worst of all Innsmouth types--
something one would not care to remember.

The stench waxed overpowering, and the noises swelled to a bestial babel of croaking,
baying and barking without the least suggestion of human speech. Were these indeed
the voices of my pursuers? Did they have dogs after all? So far I had seen none of the
lower animals in Innsmouth. That flopping or pattering was monstrous--I could not look
upon the degenerate creatures responsible for it. I would keep my eyes shut till the
sound receded toward the west. The horde was very close now--air foul with their
hoarse snarlings, and the ground almost shaking with their alien-rhythmed footfalls. My
breath nearly ceased to come, and I put every ounce of will-power into the task of
holding my eyelids down.

I am not even yet willing to say whether what followed was a hideous actuality or only
a nightmare hallucination. The later action of the government, after my frantic appeals,
would tend to confirm it as a monstrous truth; but could not an hallucination have been
repeated under the quasi-hypnotic spell of that ancient, haunted, and shadowed town?
Such places have strange properties, and the legacy of insane legend might well have
acted on more than one human imagination amidst those dead, stench-cursed streets and
huddles of rotting roofs and crumbling steeples. Is it not possible that the germ of an
actual contagious madness lurks in the depths of that shadow over Innsmouth? Who can
be sure of reality after hearing things like the tale of old Zadok Allen? The government
men never found poor Zadok, and have no conjectures to make as to what became of
him. Where does madness leave off and reality begin? Is it possible that even my latest
fear is sheer delusion?

But I must try to tell what I thought I saw that night under the mocking yellow moon--
saw surging and hopping down the Rowley road in plain sight in front of me as I
crouched among the wild brambles of that desolate railway cut. Of course my resolution
to keep my eyes shut had failed. It was foredoomed to failure--for who could crouch
blindly while a legion of croaking, baying entities of unknown source flopped
noisomely past, scarcely more than a hundred yards away?

I thought I was prepared for the worst, and I really ought to have been prepared
considering what I had seen before.

My other pursuers had been accursedly abnormal--so should I not have been ready to
face a strengthening of the abnormal element; to look upon forms in which there was no
mixture of the normal at all? I did not open my eyes until the raucous clamour came
loudly from a point obviously straight ahead. Then I knew that a long section of them
must be plainly in sight where the sides of the cut flattened out and the road crossed the
track--and I could no longer keep myself from sampling whatever horror that leering
yellow moon might have to shew.

It was the end, for whatever remains to me of life on the surface of this earth, of every
vestige of mental peace and confidence in the integrity of nature and of the human
mind. Nothing that I could have imagined--nothing, even, that I could have gathered
had I credited old Zadok's crazy tale in the most literal way--would be in any way
comparable to the demoniac, blasphemous reality that I saw--or believe I saw. I have
tried to hint what it was in order to postpone the horror of writing it down baldly. Can it
be possible that this planet has actually spawned such things; that human eyes have
truly seen, as objective flesh, what man has hitherto known only in febrile phantasy and
tenuous legend?

And yet I saw them in a limitless stream--flopping, hopping, croaking, bleating--urging

inhumanly through the spectral moonlight in a grotesque, malignant saraband of
fantastic nightmare. And some of them had tall tiaras of that nameless whitish-gold
metal...and some were strangely robed...and one, who led the way, was clad in a
ghoulishly humped black coat and striped trousers, and had a man's felt hat perched on
the shapeless thing that answered for a head.

I think their predominant colour was a greyish-green, though they had white bellies.
They were mostly shiny and slippery, but the ridges of their backs were scaly. Their
forms vaguely suggested the anthropoid, while their heads were the heads of fish, with
prodigious bulging eyes that never closed. At the sides of their necks were palpitating
gills, and their long paws were webbed. They hopped irregularly, sometimes on two
legs and sometimes on four. I was somehow glad that they had no more than four limbs.
Their croaking, baying voices, clearly used for articulate speech, held all the dark
shades of expression which their staring faces lacked.

But for all of their monstrousness they were not unfamiliar to me. I knew too well what
they must be--for was not the memory of the evil tiara at Newburyport still fresh? They
were the blasphemous fish-frogs of the nameless design--living and horrible--and as I
saw them I knew also of what that humped, tiaraed priest in the black church basement
had fearsomely reminded me. Their number was past guessing. It seemed to me that
there were limitless swarms of them and certainly my momentary glimpse could have
shewn only the least fraction. In another instant everything was blotted out by a
merciful fit of fainting; the first I had ever had.

It was a gentle daylight rain that awaked me front my stupor in the brush-grown railway
cut, and when I staggered out to the roadway ahead I saw no trace of any prints in the
fresh mud. The fishy odour, too, was gone, Innsmouth's ruined roofs and toppling
steeples loomed up greyly toward the southeast, but not a living creature did I spy in all
the desolate salt marshes around. My watch was still going, and told me that the hour
was past noon.

The reality of what I had been through was highly uncertain in my mind, but I felt that
something hideous lay in the background. I must get away from evil-shadowed
Innsmouth--and accordingly I began to test my cramped, wearied powers of locomotion.
Despite weakness hunger, horror, and bewilderment I found myself after a time able to
walk; so started slowly along the muddy road to Rowley. Before evening I was in
village, getting a meal and providing myself with presentable clothes. I caught the night
train to Arkham, and the next day talked long and earnestly with government officials
there; a process I later repeated in Boston. With the main result of these colloquies the
public is now familiar--and I wish, for normality's sake, there were nothing more to tell.
Perhaps it is madness that is overtaking me--yet perhaps a greater horror--or a greater
marvel--is reaching out.

As may well be imagined, I gave up most of the foreplanned features of the rest of my
tour--the scenic, architectural, and antiquarian diversions on which I had counted so
heavily. Nor did I dare look for that piece of strange jewelry said to be in the
Miskatonic University Museum. I did, however, improve my stay in Arkham by
collecting some genealogical notes I had long wished to possess; very rough and hasty
data, it is true, but capable of good use later on when I might have time to collate and
codify them. The curator of the historical society there--Mr. B. Lapham Peabody--was
very courteous about assisting me, and expressed unusual interest when I told him I was
a grandson of Eliza Orne of Arkham, who was born in 1867 and had married James
Williamson of Ohio at the age of seventeen.

It seemed that a maternal uncle of mine had been there many years before on a quest
much like my own; and that my grandmother's family was a topic of some local
curiosity. There had, Mr. Peabody said, been considerable discussion about the marriage
of her father, Benjamin Orne, just after the Civil War; since the ancestry of the bride
was peculiarly puzzling. That bride was understood to have been an orphaned Marsh of
New Hampshire--a cousin of the Essex County Marshes--but her education had been in
France and she knew very little of her family. A guardian had deposited funds in a
Boston bank to maintain her and her French governess; but that guardian's name was
unfamiliar to Arkham people, and in time he dropped out of sight, so that the governess
assumed the role by court appointment. The Frenchwoman--now long dead--was very
taciturn, and there were those who said she could have told more than she did.
But the most baffling thing was the inability of anyone to place the recorded parents of
the young woman--Enoch and Lydia (Meserve) Marsh--among the known families of
New Hampshire. Possibly, many suggested, she was the natural daughter of some
Marsh of prominence--she certainly had the true Marsh eyes. Most of the puzzling was
done after her early death, which took place at the birth of my grandmother--her only
child. Having formed some disagreeable impressions connected with the name of
Marsh, I did not welcome the news that it belonged on my own ancestral tree; nor was I
pleased by Mr. Peabody's suggestion that I had the true Marsh eyes myself. However, I
was grateful for data which I knew would prove valuable; and took copious notes and
lists of book references regarding the well-documented Orne family.

I went directly home to Toledo from Boston, and later spent a month at Maumee
recuperating from my ordeal. In September I entered Oberlin for my final year, and
from then till the next June was busy with studies and other wholesome activities--
reminded of the bygone terror only by occasional official visits from government men
in connexion with the campaign which my pleas and evidence had started. Around the
middle of July--just a year after the Innsmouth experience--I spent a week with my late
mother's family in Cleveland; checking some of my new genealogical data with the
various notes, traditions, and bits of heirloom material in existence there, and seeing
what kind of a connected chart I could construct.

I did not exactly relish this task, for the atmosphere of the Williamson home had always
depressed me. There was a strain of morbidity there, and my mother had never
encouraged my visiting her parents as a child, although she always welcomed her father
when he came to Toledo. My Arkham-born grandmother had seemed strange and
almost terrifying to me, and I do not think I grieved when she disappeared. I was eight
years old then, and it was said that she had wandered off in grief after the suicide of my
Uncle Douglas, her eldest son. He had shot himself after a trip to New England--the
same trip, no doubt, which had caused him to be recalled at the Arkham Historical
Society.

This uncle had resembled her, and I had never liked him either. Something about the
staring, unwinking expression of both of them had given me a vague, unaccountable
uneasiness. My mother and Uncle Walter had not looked like that. They were like their
father, though poor little cousin Lawrence--Walter's son--had been almost perfect
duplicate of his grandmother before his condition took him to the permanent seclusion
of a sanitarium at Canton. I had not seen him in four years, but my uncle once implied
that his state, both mental and physical, was very bad. This worry had probably been a
major cause of his mother's death two years before.

My grandfather and his widowed son Walter now comprised the Cleveland household,
but the memory of older times hung thickly over it. I still disliked the place, and tried to
get my researches done as quickly as possible. Williamson records and traditions were
supplied in abundance by my grandfather; though for Orne material I had to depend on
my uncle Walter, who put at my disposal the contents of all his files, including notes,
letters, cuttings, heirlooms, photographs, and miniatures.

It was in going over the letters and pictures on the Orne side that I began to acquire a
kind of terror of my own ancestry. As I have said, my grandmother and Uncle Douglas
had always disturbed me. Now, years after their passing, I gazed at their pictured faces
with a measurably heightened feeling of repulsion and alienation. I could not at first
understand the change, but gradually a horrible sort of comparison began to obtrude
itself on my unconscious mind despite the steady refusal of my consciousness to admit
even the least suspicion of it. It was clear that the typical expression of these faces now
suggested something it had not suggested before--something which would bring stark
panic if too openly thought of.

But the worst shock came when my uncle shewed me the Orne jewellery in a downtown
safe deposit vault. Some of the items were delicate and inspiring enough, but there was
one box of strange old pieces descended from my mysterious great-grandmother which
my uncle was almost reluctant to produce. They were, he said, of very grotesque and
almost repulsive design, and had never to his knowledge been publicly worn; though
my grandmother used to enjoy looking at them. Vague legends of bad luck clustered
around them, and my great-grandmother's French governess had said they ought not to
be worn in New England, though it would be quite safe to wear them in Europe.

As my uncle began slowly and grudgingly to unwrap the things he urged me not to be
shocked by the strangeness and frequent hideousness of the designs. Artists and
archaeologists who had seen them pronounced their workmanship superlatively and
exotically exquisite, though no one seemed able to define their exact material or assign
them to any specific art tradition. There were two armlets, a tiara, and a kind of
pectoral; the latter having in high relief certain figures of almost unbearable
extravagance.

During this description I had kept a tight rein on my emotions, but my face must have
betrayed my mounting fears. My uncle looked concerned, and paused in his unwrapping
to study my countenance. I motioned to him to continue, which he did with renewed
signs of reluctance. He seemed to expect some demonstration when the first piece--the
tiara--became visible, but I doubt if he expected quite what actually happened. I did not
expect it, either, for I thought I was thoroughly forewarned regarding what the jewellery
would turn out to be. What I did was to faint silently away, just as I had done in that
brier-choked railway cut a year before.

From that day on my life has been a nightmare of brooding and apprehension nor do I
know how much is hideous truth and how much madness. My great-grandmother had
been a Marsh of unknown source whose husband lived in Arkham--and did not old
Zadok say that the daughter of Obed Marsh by a monstrous mother was married to an
Arkham man through trick? What was it the ancient toper had muttered about the line of
my eyes to Captain Obed's? In Arkham, too, the curator had told me I had the true
Marsh eyes. Was Obed Marsh my own great-great-grandfather? Who--or what--then,
was my great-great-grandmother? But perhaps this was all madness. Those whitish-gold
ornaments might easily have been bought from some Innsmouth sailor by the father of
my great-grandmother, whoever he was. And that look in the staring-eyed faces of my
grandmother and self-slain uncle might be sheer fancy on my part--sheer fancy,
bolstered up by the Innsmouth shadow which had so darkly coloured my imagination.
But why had my uncle killed himself after an ancestral quest in New England?

For more than two years I fought off these reflections with partial success. My father
secured me a place in an insurance office, and I buried myself in routine as deeply as
possible. In the winter of 1930-31, however, the dreams began. They were very sparse
and insidious at first, but increased in frequency and vividness as the weeks went by.
Great watery spaces opened out before me, and I seemed to wander through titanic
sunken porticos and labyrinths of weedy cyclopean walls with grotesque fishes as my
companions. Then the other shapes began to appear, filling me with nameless horror the
moment I awoke. But during the dreams they did not horrify me at all--I was one with
them; wearing their unhuman trappings, treading their aqueous ways, and praying
monstrously at their evil sea-bottom temples.

There was much more than I could remember, but even what I did remember each
morning would be enough to stamp me as a madman or a genius if ever I dared write it
down. Some frightful influence, I felt, was seeking gradually to drag me out of the sane
world of wholesome life into unnamable abysses of blackness and alienage; and the
process told heavily on me. My health and appearance grew steadily worse, till finally I
was forced to give up my position and adopt the static, secluded life of an invalid. Some
odd nervous affliction had me in its grip, and I found myself at times almost unable to
shut my eyes.

It was then that I began to study the mirror with mounting alarm. The slow ravages of
disease are not pleasant to watch, but in my case there was something subtler and more
puzzling in the background. My father seemed to notice it, too, for he began looking at
me curiously and almost affrightedly. What was taking place in me? Could it be that I
was coming to resemble my grandmother and uncle Douglas?

One night I had a frightful dream in which I met my grandmother under the sea. She
lived in a phosphorescent palace of many terraces, with gardens of strange leprous
corals and grotesque brachiate efflorescences, and welcomed me with a warmth that
may have been sardonic. She had changed--as those who take to the water change--and
told me she had never died. Instead, she had gone to a spot her dead son had learned
about, and had leaped to a realm whose wonders-- destined for him as well--he had
spurned with a smoking pistol. This was to be my realm, too--I could not escape it. I
would never die, but would live with those who had lived since before man ever walked
the earth.

I met also that which had been her grandmother. For eighty thousand years Pth'thya-l'yi
had lived in Y'ha-nthlei, and thither she had gone back after Obed Marsh was dead.
Y'ha-nthlei was not destroyed when the upper-earth men shot death into the sea. It was
hurt, but not destroyed. The Deep Ones could never be destroyed, even though the
palaeogean magic of the forgotten Old Ones might sometimes check them. For the
present they would rest; but some day, if they remembered, they would rise again for
the tribute Great Cthulhu craved. It would be a city greater than Innsmouth next time.
They had planned to spread, and had brought up that which would help them, but now
they must wait once more. For bringing the upper-earth men's death I must do a
penance, but that would not be heavy. This was the dream in which I saw a shoggoth for
the first time, and the sight set me awake in a frenzy of screaming. That morning the
mirror definitely told me I had acquired the Innsmouth look.

So far I have not shot myself as my uncle Douglas did. I bought an automatic and
almost took the step, but certain dreams deterred me. The tense extremes of horror are
lessening, and I feel queerly drawn toward the unknown sea-deeps instead of fearing
them. I hear and do strange things in sleep, and awake with a kind of exaltation instead
of terror. I do not believe I need to wait for the full change as most have waited. If I did,
my father would probably shut me up in a sanitarium as my poor little cousin is shut up.
Stupendous and unheard-of splendors await me below, and I shall seek them soon. Ia-
R'lyehl Cihuiha flgagnl id Ia! No, I shall not shoot myself--I cannot be made to shoot
myself!

I shall plan my cousin's escape from that Canton mad-house, and together we shall go to
marvel-shadowed Innsmouth. We shall swim out to that brooding reef in the sea and
dive down through black abysses to Cyclopean and many-columned Y'ha-nthlei, and in
that lair of the Deep Ones we shall dwell amidst wonder and glory for ever.

THE SHADOW OUT OF TIME

I

After twenty-two years of nightmare and terror, saved only by a desperate conviction of
the mythical source of certain impressions, I am unwilling to vouch for the truth of that
which I think I found in Western Australia on the night of 17-18 July 1935. There is
reason to hope that my experience was wholly or partly an hallucination--for which,
indeed, abundant causes existed. And yet, its realism was so hideous that I sometimes
find hope impossible.

If the thing did happen, then man must be prepared to accept notions of the cosmos, and
of his own place in the seething vortex of time, whose merest mention is paralysing. He
must, too, be placed on guard against a specific, lurking peril which, though it will
never engulf the whole race, may impose monstrous and unguessable horrors upon
certain venturesome members of it.

It is for this latter reason that I urge, with all the force of my being, final abandonment
of all the attempts at unearthing those fragments of unknown, primordial masonry
which my expedition set out to investigate.

Assuming that I was sane and awake, my experience on that night was such as has
befallen no man before. It was, moreover, a frightful confirmation of all I had sought to
dismiss as myth and dream. Mercifully there is no proof, for in my fright I lost the
awesome object which would--if real and brought out of that noxious abyss--have
formed irrefutable evidence.

When I came upon the horror I was alone--and I have up to now told no one about it. I
could not stop the others from digging in its direction, but chance and the shifting sand
have so far saved them from finding it. Now I must formulate some definite statement--
not only for the sake of my own mental balance, but to warn such others as may read it
seriously.

These pages--much in whose earlier parts will be familiar to close readers of the general
and scientific press--are written in the cabin of the ship that is bringing me home. I shall
give them to my son, Professor Wingate Peaslee of Miskatonic University--the only
member of my family who stuck to me after my queer amnesia of long ago, and the man
best informed on the inner facts of my case. Of all living persons, he is least likely to
ridicule what I shall tell of that fateful night.
I did not enlighten him orally before sailing, because I think he had better have the
revelation in written form. Reading and re-reading at leisure will leave with him a more
convincing picture than my confused tongue could hope to convey.

He can do anything that he thinks best with this account--showing it, with suitable
comment, in any quarters where it will be likely to accomplish good. It is for the sake of
such readers as are unfamiliar with the earlier phases of my case that I am prefacing the
revelation itself with a fairly ample summary of its background.

My name is Nathaniel Wingate Peaslee, and those who recall the newspaper tales of a
generation back--or the letters and articles in psychological journals six or seven years
ago--will know who and what I am. The press was filled with the details of my strange
amnesia in 1908-13, and much was made of the traditions of horror, madness, and
witchcraft which lurked behind the ancient Massachusetts town then and now forming
my place of residence. Yet I would have it known that there is nothing whatever of the
mad or sinister in my heredity and early life. This is a highly important fact in view of
the shadow which fell so suddenly upon me from outside sources.

It may be that centuries of dark brooding had given to crumbling, whisper-haunted

Arkham a peculiar vulnerability as regards such shadows--though even this seems
doubtful in the light of those other cases which I later came to study. But the chief point
is that my own ancestry and background are altogether normal. What came, came from
somewhere else--where I even now hesitate to assert in plain words.

I am the son of Jonathan and Hannah (Wingate) Peaslee, both of wholesome old
Haverhill stock. I was born and reared in Haverhill--at the old homestead in Boardman
Street near Golden Hill--and did not go to Arkham till I entered Miskatonic University
as instructor of political economy in 1895.

For thirteen years more my life ran smoothly and happily. I married Alice Keezar of
Haverhill in 1896, and my three children, Robert, Wingate and Hannah were born in
1898, 1900, and 1903, respectively. In 1898 I became an associate professor, and in
1902 a full professor. At no time had I the least interest in either occultism or abnormal
psychology.

It was on Thursday, 14 May 1908, that the queer amnesia came. The thing was quite
sudden, though later I realized that certain brief, glimmering visions of several hours
previous--chaotic visions which disturbed me greatly because they were so
unprecedented--must have formed premonitory symptoms. My head was aching, and I
had a singular feeling--altogether new to me--that some one else was trying to get
possession of my thoughts.

The collapse occurred about 10.20 A.M., while I was conducting a class in Political
Economy VI--history and present tendencies of economics--for juniors and a few
sophomores. I began to see strange shapes before my eyes, and to feel that I was in a
grotesque room other than the classroom.

My thoughts and speech wandered from my subject, and the students saw that
something was gravely amiss. Then I slumped down, unconscious, in my chair, in a
stupor from which no one could arouse me. Nor did my rightful faculties again look out
upon the daylight of our normal world for five years, four months, and thirteen days.

It is, of course, from others that I have learned what followed. I showed no sign of
consciousness for sixteen and a half hours though removed to my home at 27 Crane
Street, and given the best of medical attention.

At 3 A.M. May 15 my eyes opened and began to speak and my family were thoroughly
frightened by the trend of my expression and language. It was clear that I had no
remembrance of my identity and my past, though for some reason seemed anxious to
conceal his lack of knowledge. My eyes glazed strangely at the persons around me, and
the flections of my facial muscles were altogether unfamiliar.

Even my speech seemed awkward and foreign. I used my vocal organs clumsily and
gropingly, and my diction had a curiously stilted quality, as if I had laboriously learned
the English language from books. The pronunciation was barbarously alien, whilst the
idiom seemed to include both scraps of curious archaism and expressions of a wholly
incomprehensible cast.

Of the latter, one in particular was very potently--even terrifiedly--recalled by the

youngest of the physicians twenty years afterward. For at that late period such a phrase
began to have an actual currency--first in England and then in the United States--and
though of much complexity and indisputable newness, it reproduced in every least
particular the mystifying words of the strange Arkham patient of 1908.

Physical strength returned at once, although I required an odd amount of re-education in

the use of my hands, legs, and bodily apparatus in general. Because of this and other
handicaps inherent in the mnemonic lapse, I was for some time kept under strict medical
care.

When I saw that my attempts to conceal the lapse had failed, I admitted it openly, and
became eager for information of all sorts. Indeed, it seemed to the doctors that I lost
interest in my proper personality as soon as I found the case of amnesia accepted as a
natural thing.

They noticed that my chief efforts were to master certain points in history, science, art,
language, and folklore--some of them tremendously abstruse, and some childishly
simple--which remained, very oddly in many cases, outside my consciousness.

At the same time they noticed that I had an inexplicable command of many almost
unknown sorts of knowledge--a command which I seemed to wish to hide rather than
display. I would inadvertently refer, with casual assurance, to specific events in dim
ages outside of the range of accepted history--passing off such references as a jest when
I saw the surprise they created. And I had a way of speaking of the future which two or
three times caused actual fright.

These uncanny flashes soon ceased to appear, though some observers laid their
vanishment more to a certain furtive caution on my part than to any waning of the
strange knowledge behind them. Indeed, I seemed anomalously avid to absorb the
speech, customs, and perspectives of the age around me; as if I were a studious traveller
from a far, foreign land.

As soon as permitted, I haunted the college library at all hours; and shortly began to
arrange for those odd travels, and special courses at American and European
Universities, which evoked so much comment during the next few years.

I did not at any time suffer from a lack of learned contacts, for my case had a mild
celebrity among the psychologists of the period. I was lectured upon as a typical
example of secondary personality--even though I seemed to puzzle the lecturers now
and then with some bizarre symptoms or some queer trace of carefully veiled mockery.

Of real friendliness, however, I encountered little. Something in my aspect and speech

seemed to excite vague fears and aversions in every one I met, as if I were a being
infinitely removed from all that is normal and healthful. This idea of a black, hidden
horror connected with incalculable gulfs of some sort of distance was oddly widespread
and persistent.

My own family formed no exception. From the moment of my strange waking my wife
had regarded me with extreme horror and loathing, vowing that I was some utter alien
usurping the body of her husband. In 1910 she obtained a legal divorce, nor would she
ever consent to see me even after my return to normality in 1913. These feelings were
shared by my elder son and my small daughter, neither of whom I have ever seen since.

Only my second son, Wingate, seemed able to conquer the terror and repulsion which
my change aroused. He indeed felt that I was a stranger, but though only eight years old
held fast to a faith that my proper self would return. When it did return he sought me
out, and the courts gave me his custody. In succeeding years he helped me with the
studies to which I was driven, and today, at thirty-five, he is a professor of psychology
at Miskatonic.

But I do not wonder at the horror caused--for certainly, the mind, voice, and facial
expression of the being that awakened on l5 May 1908, were not those of Nathaniel
Wingate Peastee.

I will not attempt to tell much of my life from 1908 to 1913, since readers may glean I
the outward essentials--as I largely had to do--from files of old newspapers and
scientific journals.

I was given charge of my funds, and spent them slowly and on the whole wisely, in
travel and in study at various centres of learning. My travels, however, were singular in
the extreme, involving long visits to remote and desolate places.

In 1909 I spent a month in the Himalayas, and in 1911 roused much attention through a
camel trip into the unknown deserts of Arabia. What happened on those journeys I have
never been able to learn.

During the summer of l9l2 I chartered a ship and sailed in the Arctic, north of
Spitzbergen, afterward showing signs of disappointment.
Later in that year I spent weeks--alone beyond the limits of previous or subsequent
exploration in the vast limestone cavern systems of western Virginia--black labyrinths
so complex that no retracing of my steps could even be considered.

My sojourns at the universities were marked by abnormally rapid assimilation, as if the

secondary personality had an intelligence enormously superior to my own. I have found,
also, that my rate of reading and solitary study was phenomenal. I could master every
detail of a book merely by glancing over it as fast as I could turn the leaves; while my
skill at interpreting complex figures in an instant was veritably awesome.

At times there appeared almost ugly reports of my power to influence the thoughts and
acts of others, though I seemed to have taken care to minimize displays of this faculty.

Other ugly reports concerned my intimacy with leaders of occultist groups, and scholars
suspected of connection with nameless bands of abhorrent elder-world hierophants.
These rumours, though never proved at the time, were doubtless stimulated by the
known tenor of some of my reading--for the consultation of rare books at libraries
cannot be effected secretly.

There is tangible proof--in the form of marginal notes--that I went minutely through
such things as the Comte d'Erlette's Cultes des Goules, Ludvig Prinn's De Vermis
Mysteriis, the Unaussprechlichen Kulten of von Junzt, the surviving fragments of the
puzzling Book of Eibon, and the dreaded Necronomicon of the mad Arab Abdul
Alhazred. Then, too, it is undeniable that a fresh and evil wave of underground cult
activity set in about the time of my odd mutation.

In the summer of 1913 I began to display signs of ennui and flagging interest, and to
hint to various associates that a change might soon be expected in me. I spoke of
returning memories of my earlier life--though most auditors judged me insincere, since
all the recollections I gave were casual, and such as might have been learned from my
old private papers.

About the middle of August I returned to Arkham and re-opened my long-closed house
in Crane Street. Here I installed a mechanism of the most curious aspect, constructed
piecemeal by different makers of scientific apparatus in Europe and America, and
guarded carefully from the sight of any one intelligent enough to analyse it.

Those who did see it--a workman, a servant, and the new housekeeper--say that it was a
queer mixture of rods, wheels, and mirros, though only about two feet tall, one foot
wide, and one foot thick. The central mirror was circular and convex. All this is borne
out by such makers of parts as can be located.

On the evening of Friday, 26 September, I dismissed the housekeeper and the maid until
noon of the next day. Lights burned in the house till late, and a lean, dark, curiously
foreign-looking man called in an automobile.

It was about one A.M. that the lights were last seen. At 2.15 A.M. a policeman observed
the place in darkness, but the stranger's motor still at the curb. By 4 o'clock the motor
was certainly gone.
It was at 6 o'clock that a hesitant, foreign voice on the telephone asked Dr Wilson to call
at my house and bring me out of a peculiar faint. This call--a long-distance one--was
later traced to a public booth in the North Station in Boston, but no sign of the lean
foreigner was ever unearthed.

When the doctor reached my house he found me unconscious in the sitting room--in an
easy-chair with a table drawn up before it. On the polished top were scratches showing
where some heavy object had rested. The queer machine was gone, nor was anything
afterward heard of it. Undoubtedly the dark, lean foreigner had taken it away.

In the library grate were abundant ashes, evidently left from the burning of every
remaining scrap of paper on which I had written since the advent of the amnesia. Dr
Wilson found my breathing very peculiar, but after a hypodermic injection it became
more regular.

At 11.15 A.M., 27 September, I stirred vigorously, and my hitherto masklike face began
to show signs of expression. Dr Wilson remarked that the expression was not that of my
secondary personality, but seemed much like that of my normal self. About 11.30 I
muttered some very curious syllables--syllables which seemed unrelated to any human
speech. I appeared, too, to struggle against something. Then, just afternoon--the
housekeeper and the maid having meanwhile returned--I began to mutter in English.

"--of the orthodox economists of that period, Jevons typifies the prevailing trend toward
scientific correlation. His attempt to link the commercial cycle of prosperity and
depression with the physical cycle of the solar spots forms perhaps the apex of--"

Nathaniel Wingate Peaslee had come back--a spirit in whose time scale it was still
Thursday morning in 1908, with the economics class gazing up at the battered desk on
the platform.

II

My reabsorption into normal life was a painful and difficult process. The loss of over
five years creates more complications than can be imagined, and in my case there were
countless matters to be adjusted.

What I heard of my actions since 1908 astonished and disturbed me, but I tried to view
the matter as philosophically as I could. At last, regaining custody of my second son,
Wingate, I settled down with him in the Crane Street house and endeavoured to resume
my teaching--my old professorship having been kindly offered me by the college.

I began work with the February, 1914, term, and kept at it just a year. By that time I
realized how badly my experience had shaken me. Though perfectly sane--I hoped--and
with no flaw in my original personality, I had not the nervous energy of the old days.
Vague dreams and queer ideas continually haunted me, and when the outbreak of the
World War turned my mind to history I found myself thinking of periods and events in
the oddest possible fashion.

My conception of time, my ability to distinguish between consecutiveness and

simultaneousness--seemed subtly disordered so that I formed chimerical notions about
living in one age and casting one's mind all over eternity for knowledge of past and
future ages.

The war gave me strange impressions of remembering some of its far-off consequences-
-as if I knew how it was coming out and could look back upon it in the light of future
information. All such quasi-memories were attended with much pain, and with a feeling
that some artificial psychological barrier was set against them.

When I diffidently hinted to others about my impressions I met with varied responses.
Some persons looked uncomfortably at me, but men in the mathematics department
spoke of new developments in those theories of relativity--then discussed only in
learned circles--which were later to become so famous. Dr. Albert Einstein, they said,
was rapidly reducing time to the status of a mere dimension.

But the dreams and disturbed feelings gained on me, so that I had to drop my regular
work in 1915. Certainly the impressions were taking an annoying shape--giving me the
persistent notion that my amnesia had formed some unholy sort of exchange; that the
secondary personality had indeed had had suffered displacement.

Thus I was driven to vague and fright speculations concerning the whereabouts of my
true self during the years that another had held my body. The curious knowledge and
strange conduct of my body's late tenant troubled me more and more as I learned further
details from persons, papers, and magazines.

Queernesses that had baffled others seemed to harmonize terribly with some
background of black knowledge which festered in the chasms of my subconscious. I
began to search feverishly for every scrap of information bearing on the studies and
travels of that other one during the dark years.

Not all of my troubles were as semi-abstract as this. There were the dreams--and these
seemed to grow in vividness and concreteness. Knowing how most would regard them,
I seldom mentioned them to anyone but my son or certain trusted psychologists, but
eventually I commenced a scientific study of other cases in order to see how typical or
nontypical such visions might be among amnesia victims.

My results, aided by psychologists, historians, anthropologists, and mental specialists of

wide experience, and by a study that included all records of split personalities from the
days of daemonic-possession legends to the medically realistic present, at first bothered
me more than they consoled me.

I soon found that my dreams had, indeed, no counterpart in the overwhelming bulk of
true amnesia cases. There remained, however, a tiny residue of accounts which for years
baffled and shocked me with their parallelism to my own experience. Some of them
were bits of ancient folklore; others were case histories in the annals of medicine; one or
two were anecdotes obscurely buried in standard histories.

It thus appeared that, while my special kind of affliction was prodigiously rare,
instances of it had occurred at long intervals ever since the beginning of men's annals.
Some centuries might contain one, two, or three cases, others none--or at least none
whose record survived.
The essence was always the same--a person of keen thoughtfulness seized a strange
secondary life and leading for a greater or lesser period an utterly alien existence
typified at first by vocal and bodily awkwardness, and later by a wholesale acquisition
of scientific, historic, artistic, and anthropologic knowledge; an acquisition carried on
with feverish zest and with a wholly abnormal absorptive power. Then a sudden return
of rightful consciousness, intermittently plagued ever after with vague unplaceable
dreams suggesting fragments of some hideous memory elaborately blotted out.

And the close resemblance of those nightmares to my own--even in some of the

smallest particulars--left no doubt in my mind of their significantly typical nature. One
or two of the cases had an added ring of faint, blasphemous familiarity, as if I had heard
of them before through some cosmic channel too morbid and frightful to contemplate.
In three instances there was specific mention of such an unknown machine as had been
in my house before the second change.

Another thing that worried me during my investigation was the somewhat greater
frequency of cases where a brief, elusive glimpse of the typical nightmares was afforded
to persons not visited with well-defined amnesia.

These persons were largely of mediocre mind or less--some so primitive that they could
scarcely be thought of as vehicles for abnormal scholarship and preternatural mental
acquisitions. For a second they would be fired with alien force--then a backward lapse,
and a thin, swift-fading memory of unhuman horrors.

There had been at least three such cases during the past half century--one only fifteen
years before. Had something been groping blindly through time from some unsuspected
abyss in Nature? Were these faint cases monstrous, sinister experiments of a kind and
authorship utterly beyond sane belief?

Such were a few of the formless speculations of my weaker hours--fancies abetted by

myths which my studies uncovered. For I could not doubt but that certain persistent
legends of immemorial antiquity, apparently unknown to the victims and physicians
connected with recent amnesia cases, formed a striking and awesome elaboration of
memory lapses such as mine.

Of the nature of the dreams and impressions which were growing so clamorous I still
almost fear to speak. They seemed to savor of madness, and at times I believed I was
indeed going mad. Was there a special type of delusion afflicting those who had
suffered lapses of memory? Conceivably, the efforts of the subconscious mind to fill up
a perplexing blank with pseudo-memories might give rise to strange imaginative
vagaries.

This indeed--though an alternative folklore theory finally seemed to me more plausible-

-was the belief of many of the alienists who helped me in my search for parallel cases,
and who shared my puzzlement at the exact resemblances sometimes discovered.

They did not call the condition true insanity, but classed it rather among neurotic
disorders. My course in trying to track down and analyze it, instead of vainly seeking to
dismiss or forget it, they heartily endorsed as correct according to the best psychological
principles. I especially valued the advice of such physicians as had studied me during
my possession by the other personality.

My first disturbances were not visual at all, but concerned the more abstract matters
which I have mentioned. There was, too, a feeling of profound and inexplicable horror
concerning myself. I developed a queer fear of seeing my own form, as if my eyes
would find it something utterly alien and inconceivably abhorrent.

When I did glance down and behold the familiar human shape in quiet grey or blue
clothing, I always felt a curious relief, though in order to gain this relief I had to
conquer an infinite dread. I shunned mirrors as much as possible, and was always
shaved at the barber's.

It was a long time before I correlated any of these disappointed feelings with the
fleeting visual impressions which began to develop. The first such correlation had to do
with the odd sensation of an external, artificial restraint on my memory.

I felt that the snatches of sight I experienced had a profound and terrible meaning, and a
frightful connexion with myself, but that some purposeful influence held me from
grasping that meaning and that connexion. Then came that queerness about the element
of time, and with it desperate efforts to place the fragmentary dream-glimpses in the
chronological and spatial pattern.

The glimpses themselves were at first merely strange rather than horrible. I would seem
to be in an enormous vaulted chamber whose lofty stone groinings were well-nigh lost
in the shadows overhead. In whatever time or place the scene might be, the principle of
the arch was known as fully and used as extensively as by the Romans.

There were colossal, round windows and high, arched doors, and pedestals or tables
each as tall as the height of an ordinary room. Vast shelves of dark wood lined the
walls, holding what seemed to be volumes of immense size with strange hieroglyphs on
their backs.

The exposed stonework held curious carvings, always in curvilinear mathematical

designs, and there were chiselled inscriptions in the same characters that the huge books
bore. The dark granite masonry was of a monstrous megathic type, with lines of
convex-topped blocks fitting the concave-bottomed courses which rested upon them.

There were no chairs, but the tops of the vast pedestals were littered with books, papers,
and what seemed to be writing materials--oddly figured jars of a purplish metal, and
rods with stained tips. Tall as the pedestals were, I seemed at times able to view them
from above. On some of them were great globes of luminous crystal serving as lamps,
and inexplicable machines formed of vitreous tubes and metal rods.

The windows were glazed, and latticed with stout-looking bars. Though I dared not
approach and peer out them, I could see from where I was the waving tops of singular
fern-like growths. The floor was of massive octagonal flagstones, while rugs and
hangings were entirely lacking.
Later I had visions of sweeping through Cyclopean corridors of stone, and up and down
gigantic inclined planes of the same monstrous masonry. There were no stairs
anywhere, nor was any passageway less than thirty feet wide. Some of the structures
through which I floated must have towered in the sky for thousands of feet.

There were multiple levels of black vaults below, and never-opened trap-doors, sealed
down with metal bands and holding dim suggestions of some special peril.

I seemed to be a prisoner, and horror hung broodingly over everything I saw. I felt that
the mocking curvilinear hieroglyphs on the walls would blast my soul with their
message were I not guarded by a merciful ignorance.

Still later my dreams included vistas from the great round windows, and from the titanic
flat roof, with its curious gardens, wide barren area, and high, scalloped parapet of
stone, to which the topmost of the inclined planes led.

There were, almost endless leagues of giant buildings, each in its garden, and ranged
along paved roads fully 200 feet wide. They differed greatly in aspect, but few were less
than 500 feet square or a thousand feet high. Many seemed so limitless that they must
have had a frontage of several thousand feet, while some shot up to mountainous
altitudes in the grey, steamy heavens.

They seemed to be mainly of stone or concrete, and most of them embodied the oddly
curvilinear type of masonry noticeable in the building that held me. Roofs were flat and
garden-covered, and tended to have scalloped parapets. Sometimes there were terraces
and higher levels, and wide, cleared spaces amidst the gardens. The great roads held
hints of motion, but in the earlier visions I could not resolve this impression into details.

In certain places I beheld enormous dark cylindrical towers which climbed far above
any of the other structures. These appeared to be of a totally unique nature and shewed
signs of prodigious age and dilapidation. They were built of a bizarre type of square-cut
basalt masonry, and tapered slightly toward their rounded tops. Nowhere in any of them
could the least traces of windows or other apertures save huge doors be found. I noticed
also some lower buildings--all crumbling with the weathering of aeons--which
resembled these dark, cylindrical towers in basic architecture. Around all these aberrant
piles of square-cut masonry there hovered an inexplicable aura of menace and
concentrated fear, like that bred by the sealed trap-doors.

The omnipresent gardens were almost terrifying in their strangeness, with bizarre and
unfamiliar forms of vegetation nodding over broad paths lined with curiously carven
monoliths. Abnormally vast fern-like growths predominated--some green, and some of
a ghastly, fungoid pallor.

Among them rose great spectral things resembling calamites, whose bamboo-like trunks
towered to fabulous heights. Then there were tufted forms like fabulous cycads, and
grotesque dark-green shrubs and trees of coniferous aspect.

Flowers were small, colourless, and unrecognizable, blooming in geometrical beds and
at large among the greenery.
In a few of the terrace and roof-top gardens were larger and more blossoms of most
offensive contours and seeming to suggest artificial breeding. Fungi of inconceivable
size, outlines, and colours speckled the scene in patterns bespeaking some unknown but
well-established horticultural tradition. In the larger gardens on the ground there seemed
to be some attempt to preserve the irregularities of Nature, but on the roofs there was
more selectiveness, and more evidences of the topiary art.

The skies were almost always moist and cloudy, and sometimes I would seem to
witness tremendous rains. Once in a while, though, there would be glimpses of the sun--
which looked abnormally large--and of the moon, whose markings held a touch of
difference from the normal that I could never quite fathom. When--very rarely--the
night sky was clear to any extent, I beheld constellations which were nearly beyond
recognition. Known outlines were sometimes approximated, but seldom duplicated; and
from the position of the few groups I could recognize, I felt I must be in the earth's
southern hemisphere, near the Tropic of Capricorn.

The far horizon was always steamy and indistinct, but I could see that great jungles of
unknown tree-ferns, calamites, lepidodendra, and sigillaria lay outside the city, their
fantastic frondage waving mockingly in the shifting vapours. Now and then there would
be suggestions of motion in the sky, but these my early visions never resolved.

By the autumn of 1914 I began to have infrequent dreams of strange floatings over the
city and through the regions around it. I saw interminable roads through forests of
fearsome growths with mottled, fluted, and banded trunks, and past other cities as
strange as the one which persistently haunted me.

I saw monstrous constructions of black or iridescent tone in glades and clearings where
perpetual twilight reigned, and traversed long causeways over swamps so dark that I
could tell but little of their moist, towering vegetation.

Once I saw an area of countless miles strewn with age-blasted basaltic ruins whose
architecture had been like that of the few windowless, round-topped towers in the
haunting city.

And once I saw the sea--a boundless, steamy expanse beyond the colossal stone piers of
an enormous town of domes and arches. Great shapeless suggestions of shadow moved
over it, and here and there its surface was vexed with anomalous spoutings.

III

As I have said, it was not immediately that these wild visions began to hold their
terrifying quality. Certainly, many persons have dreamed intrinsically stranger things--
things compounded of unrelated scraps of daily life, pictures, and reading, and arranged
in fantastically novel forms by the unchecked caprices of sleep.

For some time I accepted the visions as natural, even though I had never before been an
extravagant dreamer. Many of the vague anomalies, I argued, must have come from
trivial sources too numerous to track down; while others seemed to reflect a common
text book knowledge of the plants and other conditions of the primitive world of a
hundred and fifty million years ago--the world of the Permian or Triassic age.
In the course of some months, however, the element of terror did figure with
accumulating force. This was when the dreams began so unfailingly to have the aspect
of memories, and when my mind began to link them with my growing abstract
disturbances--the feeling of mnemonic restraint, the curious impressions regarding time,
and sense of a loathsome exchange with my secondary personality of 1908-13, and,
considerably later, the inexplicable loathing of my own person.

As certain definite details began to enter the dreams, their horror increased a
thousandfold--until by October, 1915, I felt I must do something. It was then that I
began an intensive study of other cases of amnesia and visions, feeling that I might
thereby objectivise my trouble and shake clear of its emotional grip.

However, as before mentioned, the result was at first almost exactly opposite. It
disturbed me vastly to find that my dreams had been so closely duplicated; especially
since some of the accounts were too early to admit of any geological knowledge--and
therefore of any idea of primitive landscapes--on the subjects' part.

What is more, many of these accounts supplied very horrible details and explanations in
connexion with the visions of great buildings and jungle gardens--and other things. The
actual sights and vague impressions were bad enough, but what was hinted or asserted
by some of the other dreamers savored of madness and blasphemy. Worst of all, my
own pseudo-memory was aroused to milder dreams and hints of coming revelations.
And yet most doctors deemed my course, on the whole, an advisable one.

I studied psychology systematically, and under the prevailing stimulus my son Wingate
did the same--his studies leading eventually to his present professorship. In 1917 and
1918 I took special courses at Miskatonic. Meanwhile, my examination of medical,
historical, and anthropological records became indefatigable, involving travels to distant
libraries, and finally including even a reading of the hideous books of forbidden elder
lore in which my secondary personality had been so disturbingly interested.

Some of the latter were the actual copies I had consulted in my altered state, and I was
greatly disturbed by certain marginal notations and ostensible corrections of the hideous
text in a script and idiom which somehow seemed oddly unhuman.

These markings were mostly in the respective languages of the various books, all of
which the writer seemed to know with equal, though obviously academic, facility. One
note appended to von Junzt's Unaussprechlichen Kulten, however, was alarmingly
otherwise. It consisted of certain curvilinear hieroglyphs in the same ink as that of the
German corrections, but following no recognized human pattern. And these hieroglyphs
were closely and unmistakably akin to the characters constantly met with in my dreams-
-characters whose meaning I would sometimes momentarily fancy I knew, or was just
on the brink of recalling.

To complete my black confusion, my librarians assured me that, in view of previous

examinations and records of consultation of the volumes in question, all of these
notations must have been made by myself in my secondary state. This despite the fact
that I was and still am ignorant of three of the languages involved.
Piecing together the scattered records, ancient and modern, anthropological and
medical, I found a fairly consistent mixture of myth and hallucination whose scope and
wildness left me utterly dazed. Only one thing consoled me, the fact that the myths were
of such early existence. What lost knowledge could have brought pictures of the
Palaeozoic or Mesozoic landscape into these primitive fables, I could not even guess;
but the pictures had been there. Thus, a basis existed for the formation of a fixed type of
delusion.

Cases of amnesia no doubt created the general myth pattern--but afterward the fanciful
accretions of the myths must have reacted on amnesia sufferers and coloured their
pseudo-memories. I myself had read and heard all the early tales during my memory
lapse--my quest had amply proved that. Was it not natural, then, for my subsequent
dreams and emotional impressions to become coloured and moulded by what my
memory subtly held over from my secondary state?

A few of the myths had significant connexions with other cloudy legends of the pre-
human world, especially those Hindu tales involving stupefying gulfs of time and
forming part of the lore of modern theosopists.

Primal myth and modern delusion joined in their assumption that mankind is only one--
perhaps the least--of the highly evolved and dominant races of this planet's long and
largely unknown career. Things of inconceivable shape, they implied, had reared towers
to the sky and delved into every secret of Nature before the first amphibian forbear of
man had crawled out of the hot sea 300 million years ago.

Some had come down from the stars; a few were as old as the cosmos itself, others had
arisen swiftly from terrene germs as far behind the first germs of our life-cycle as those
germs are behind ourselves. Spans of thousands of millions of years, and linkages to
other galaxies and universes, were freely spoken of. Indeed, there was no such thing as
time in its humanly accepted sense.

But most of the tales and impressions concerned a relatively late race, of a queer and
intricate shape, resembling no life-form known to science, which had lived till only fifty
million years before the advent of man. This, they indicated, was the greatest race of all
because it alone had conquered the secret of time.

It had learned all things that ever were known or ever would be known on the earth,
through the power of its keener minds to project themselves into the past and future,
even through gulfs of millions of years, and study the lore of every age. From the
accomplishments of this race arose all legends of prophets, including those in human
mythology.

In its vast libraries were volumes of texts and pictures holding the whole of earth's
annals--histories and descriptions of every species that had ever been or that ever would
be, with full records of their arts, their achievements, their languages, and their
psychologies.

With this aeon-embracing knowledge, the Great Race chose from every era and life-
form such thoughts, arts, and processes as might suit its own nature and situation.
Knowledge of the past, secured through a kind of mind-casting outside the recognized
senses, was harder to glean than knowledge of the future.

In the latter case the course was easier and more material. With suitable mechanical aid
a mind would project itself forward in time, feeling its dim, extra-sensory way till it
approached the desired period. Then, after preliminary trials, it would seize on the best
discoverable representative of the highest of that period's life-forms. It would enter the
organism's brain and set up therein its own vibrations, while the displaced mind would
strike back to the period of the displacer, remaining in the latter's body till a reverse
process was set up.

The projected mind, in the body of the organism of the future, would then pose as a
member of the race whose outward form it wore, learning as quickly as possible all that
could be learned of the chosen age and its massed information and techniques.

Meanwhile the displaced mind, thrown back to the displacer's age and body, would be
carefully guarded. It would be kept from harming the body it occupied, and would be
drained of all its knowledge by trained questioners. Often it could be questioned in its
own language, when previous quests into the future had brought back records of that
language.

If the mind came from a body whose language the Great Race could not physically
reproduce, clever machines would be made, on which the alien speech could be played
as on a musical instrument.

The Great Race's members were immense rugose cones ten feet high, and with head and
other organs attached to foot-thick, distensible limbs spreading from the apexes. They
spoke by the clicking or scraping of huge paws or claws attached to the end of two of
their four limbs, and walked by the expansion and contraction of a viscous layer
attached to their vast, ten-foot bases.

When the captive mind's amazement and resentment had worn off, and when--assuming
that it came from a body vastly different from the Great Race's--it had lost its horror at
its unfamiliar temporary form, it was permitted to study its new environment and
experience a wonder and wisdom approximating that of its displacer.

With suitable precautions, and in exchange for suitable services, it was allowed to rove
all over the habitable world in titan airships or on the huge boatlike atomic-engined
vehicles which traversed the great roads, and to delve freely into the libraries containing
the records of the planet's past and future.

This reconciled many captive minds to their lot; since none were other than keen, and to
such minds the unveiling of hidden mysteries of earth-closed chapters of inconceivable
pasts and dizzying vortices of future time which include the years ahead of their own
natural ages-forms always, despite the abysmal horrors often unveiled, the supreme
experience of life.

Now and then certain captives were permitted to meet other captive minds seized from
the future--to exchange thoughts with consciousnesses living a hundred or a thousand or
a million years before or after their own ages. And all were urged to write copiously in
their own languages of themselves and their respective periods; such documents to be
filed in the great central archives.

It may be added that there was one special type of captive whose privileges were far
greater than those of the majority. These were the dying permanent exiles, whose bodies
in the future had been seized by keen-minded members of the Great Race who, faced
with death, sought to escape mental extinction.

Such melancholy exiles were not as common as might be expected, since the longevity
of the Great Race lessened its love of life--especially among those superior minds
capable of projection. From cases of the permanent projection of elder minds arose
many of those lasting changes of personality noticed in later history--including
mankind's.

As for the ordinary cases of exploration--when the displacing mind had learned what it
wished in the future, it would build an apparatus like that which had started its flight
and reverse the process of projection. Once more it would be in its own body in its own
age, while the lately captive mind would return to that body of the future to which it
properly belonged.

Only when one or the other of the bodies had died during the exchange was this
restoration impossible. In such cases, of course, the exploring mind had--like those of
the death-escapers--to live out an alien-bodied life in the future; or else the captive
mind--like the dying permanent exiles--had to end its days in the form and past age of
the Great Race.

This fate was least horrible when the captive mind was also of the Great Race--a not
infrequent occurrence, since in all its periods that race was intensely concerned with its
own future. The number of dying permanent exiles of the Great Race was very slight--
largely because of the tremendous penalties attached to displacements of future Great
Race minds by the moribund.

Through projection, arrangements were made to inflict these penalties on the offending
minds in their new future bodies--and sometimes forced reëxchanges were effected.

Complex cases of the displacement of exploring or already captive minds by minds in

various regions of the past had been known and carefully rectified. In every age since
the discovery of mind projection, a minute but well-recognised element of the
population consisted of Great Race minds from past ages, sojourning for a longer or
shorter while.

When a captive mind of alien origin was returned to its own body in the future, it was
purged by an intricate mechanical hypnosis of all it had learned in the Great Race's age-
-this because of certain troublesome consequences inherent in the general carrying
forward of knowledge in large quantities.

The few existing instances of clear transmission had caused, and would cause at known
future times, great disasters. And it was largely in consequence of two cases of this
kind--said the old myths--that mankind had learned what it had concerning the Great
Race.
Of all things surviving physically and directly from that aeon-distant world, there
remained only certain ruins of great stones in far places and under the sea, and parts of
the text of the frightful Pnakotic Manuscripts.

Thus the returning mind reached its own age with only the faintest and most
fragmentary visions of what it had undergone since its seizure. All memories that could
be eradicated were eradicated, so that in most cases only a dream-shadowed blank
stretched back to the time of the first exchange. Some minds recalled more than others,
and the chance joining of memories had at rare times brought hints of the forbidden past
to future ages.

There probably never was a time when groups or cults did not secretly cherish certain of
these hints. In the Necronomicon the presence of such a cult among human beings was
suggested--a cult that sometimes gave aid to minds voyaging down the aeons from the
days of the Great Race.

And, meanwhile, the Great Race itself waxed well-nigh omniscient, and turned to the
task of setting up exchanges with the minds of other planets, and of exploring their pasts
and futures. It sought likewise to fathom the past years and origin of that black, aeon-
dead orb in far space whence its own mental heritage had come--for the mind of the
Great Race was older than its bodily form.

The beings of a dying elder world, wise with the ultimate secrets, had looked ahead for
a new world and species wherein they might have long life; and had sent their minds en
masse into that future race best adapted to house them--the cone-shaped beings that
peopled our earth a billion years ago.

Thus the Great Race came to be, while the myriad minds sent backward were left to die
in the horror of strange shapes. Later the race would again face death, yet would live
through another forward migration of its best minds into the bodies of others who had a
longer physical span ahead of them.

Such was the background of intertwined legend and hallucination. When, around 1920,
I had my researches in coherent shape, I felt a slight lessening of the tension which their
earlier stages had increased. After all, and in spite of the fancies prompted by blind
emotions, were not most of my phenomena readily explainable? Any chance might have
turned my mind to dark studies during the amnesia--and then I read the forbidden
legends and met the members of ancient and ill-regarded cults. That, plainly, supplied
the material for the dreams and disturbed feelings which came after the return of
memory.

As for the marginal notes in dream-hieroglyphs and languages unknown to me, but laid
at my door by librarians--I might easily have picked up a smattering of the tongues
during my secondary state, while the hieroglyphs were doubtless coined by my fancy
from descriptions in old legends, and afterward woven into my dreams. I tried to verify
certain points through conversation with known cult leaders, but never succeeded in
establishing the right connexions.
At times the parallelism of so many cases in so many distant ages continued to worry
me as it had at first, but on the other hand I reflected that the excitant folklore was
undoubtedly more universal in the past than in the present.

Probably all the other victims whose cases were like mine had had a long and familiar
knowledge of the tales I had learned only when in my secondary state. When these
victims had lost their memory, they had associated themselves with the creatures of
their household myths--the fabulous invaders supposed to displace men's minds--and
had thus embarked upon quests for knowledge which they thought they could take back
to a fancied, non-human past.

Then, when their memory returned, they reversed the associative process and thought of
themselves as the former captive minds instead of as the displacers. Hence the dreams
and pseudo-memories following the conventional myth pattern.

Despite the seeming cumbrousness of these explanations, they came finally to supersede
all others in my mind--largely because of the greater weakness of any rival theory. And
a substantial number of eminent psychologists and anthropologists gradually agreed
with me.

The more I reflected, the more convincing did my reasoning seem; till in the end I had a
really effective bulwark against the visions and impressions which still assailed me.
Suppose I did see strange things at night? These were only what I had heard and read of.
Suppose I did have odd loathings and perspectives and pseudo-memories? These, too,
were only echoes of myths absorbed in my secondary state. Nothing that I might dream,
nothing that I might feel, could be of any actual significance.

Fortified by this philosophy, I greatly improved in nervous equilibrium, even though the
visions--rather than the abstract impressions--steadily became more frequent and more
disturbingly detailed. In 1922 I felt able to undertake regular work again, and put my
newly gained knowledge to practical use by accepting an instructorship in psychology
at the university.

My old chair of political economy had long been adequately filled--besides which,
methods of teaching economics had changed greatly since my heyday. My son was at
this time just entering on the post-graduate studies leading to his present professorship,
and we worked together a great deal.

IV

I continued, however, to keep a careful record of the outré dreams which crowded upon
me so thickly and vividly. Such a record, I argued, was of genuine value as a
psychological document. The glimpses still seemed damnably like memories, though I
fought off this impression with a goodly measure of success.

In writing, I treated the phantasmata as things seen; but at all other times I brushed them
aside like any gossamer illusions of the night. I had never mentioned such matters in
common conversation; though reports of them, filtering out as such things will, had
aroused sundry rumors regarding my mental health. It is amusing to reflect that these
rumors were confined wholly to laymen, without a single champion among physicians
or psychologists.

Of my visions after 1914 I will here mention only a few, since fuller accounts and
records are at the disposal of the serious student. It is evident that with time the curious
inhibitions somewhat waned, for the scope of my visions vastly increased. They have
never, though, become other than disjointed fragments seemingly without clear
motivation.

Within the dreams I seemed gradually to acquire a greater and greater freedom of
wandering. I floated through many strange buildings of stone, going from one to the
other along mammoth underground passages which seemed to form the common
avenues of transit. Sometimes I encountered those gigantic sealed trap-doors in the
lowest level, around which such an aura of fear and forbiddenness clung.

I saw tremendously tessellated pools, and rooms of curious and inexplicable utensils of
myriad sorts. Then there were colossal caverns of intricate machinery whose outlines
and purpose were wholly strange to me, and whose sound manifested itself only after
many years of dreaming. I may here remark that sight and sound are the only senses I
have ever exercised in the visionary world.

The real horror began in May, 1915, when I first saw the living things. This was before
my studies had taught me what, in view of the myths and case histories, to expect. As
mental barriers wore down, I beheld great masses of thin vapour in various parts of the
building and in the streets below.

These steadily grew more solid and distinct, till at last I could trace their monstrous
outlines with uncomfortable ease. They seemed to be enormous, iridescent cones, about
ten feet high and ten feet wide at the base, and made up of some ridgy, scaly, semi-
elastic matter. From their apexes projected four flexible, cylindrical members, each a
foot thick, and of a ridgy substance like that of the cones themselves.

These members were sometimes contracted almost to nothing, and sometimes extended
to any distance up to about ten feet. Terminating two of them were enormous claws or
nippers. At the end of a third were four red, trumpetlike appendages. The fourth
terminated in an irregular yellowish globe some two feet in diameter and having three
great dark eyes ranged along its central circumference.

Surmounting this head were four slender grey stalks bearing flower-like appendages,
whilst from its nether side dangled eight greenish antennae or tentacles. The great base
of the central cone was fringed with a rubbery, grey substance which moved the whole
entity through expansion and contraction.

Their actions, though harmless, horrified me even more than their appearance--for it is
not wholesome to watch monstrous objects doing what one had known only human
beings to do. These objects moved intelligently about the great rooms, getting books
from the shelves and taking them to the great tables, or vice versa, and sometimes
writing diligently with a peculiar rod gripped in the greenish head tentacles. The huge
nippers were used in carrying books and in conversation-speech consisting of a kind of
clicking and scraping.
The objects had no clothing, but wore satchels or knapsacks suspended from the top of
the conical trunk. They commonly carried their head and its supporting member at the
level of the cone top, although it was frequently raised or lowered.

The other three great members tended to rest downward at the sides of the cone,
contracted to about five feet each when not in use. From their rate of reading, writing,
and operating their machines--those on the tables seemed somehow connected with
thought--I concluded that their intelligence was enormously greater than man's.

Afterward I saw them everywhere; swarming in all the great chambers and corridors,
tending monstrous machines in vaulted crypts, and racing along the vast roads in
gigantic, boat-shaped cars. I ceased to be afraid of them, for they seemed to form
supremely natural parts of their environment.

Individual differences amongst them began to be manifest, and a few appeared to be

under some kind of restraint. These latter, though shewing no physical variation, had a
diversity of gestures and habits which marked them off not only from the majority, but
very largely from one another.

They wrote a great deal in what seemed to my cloudy vision a vast variety of characters-
-never the typical curvilinear hieroglyphs of the majority. A few, I fancied, used our
own familiar alphabet. Most of them worked much more slowly than the general mass
of the entities.

All this time my own part in the dreams seemed to be that of a disembodied
consciousness with a range of vision wider than the normal, floating freely about, yet
confined to the ordinary avenues and speeds of travel. Not until August, 1915, did any
suggestions of bodily existence begin to harass me. I say harass, because the first phase
was a purely abstract, though infinitely terrible, association of my previously noted
body loathing with the scenes of my visions.

For a while my chief concern during dreams was to avoid looking down at myself, and I
recall how grateful I was for the total absence of large mirrors in the strange rooms. I
was mightily troubled by the fact that I always saw the great tables--whose height could
not be under ten feet--from a level not below that of their surfaces.

And then the morbid temptation to look down at myself became greater and greater, till
one night I could not resist it. At first my downward glance revealed nothing whatever.
A moment later I perceived that this was because my head lay at the end of a flexible
neck of enormous length. Retracting this neck and gazing down very sharply, I saw the
scaly, rugose, iridescent bulk of a vast cone ten feet tall and ten feet wide at the base.
That was when I waked half of Arkham with my screaming as I plunged madly up from
the abyss of sleep.

Only after weeks of hideous repetition did I grow half-reconciled to these visions of
myself in monstrous form. In the dreams I now moved bodily among the other unknown
entities, reading terrible books from the endless shelves and writing for hours at the
great tables with a stylus managed by the green tentacles that hung down from my head.
Snatches of what I read and wrote would linger in my memory. There were horrible
annals of other worlds and other universes, and of stirrings of formless life outside of all
universes. There were records of strange orders of beings which had peopled the world
in forgotten pasts, and frightful chronicles of grotesque-bodied intelligences which
would people it millions of years after the death of the last human being.

I learned of chapters in human history whose existence no scholar of today has ever
suspected. Most of these writings were in the language of the hieroglyphs; which I
studied in a queer way with the aid of droning machines, and which was evidently an
agglutinative speech with root systems utterly unlike any found in human languages.

Other volumes were in other unknown tongues learned in the same queer way. A very
few were in languages I knew. Extremely clever pictures, both inserted in the records
and forming separate collections, aided me immensely. And all the time I seemed to be
setting down a history of my own age in English. On waking, I could recall only minute
and meaningless scraps of the unknown tongues which my dream-self had mastered,
though whole phrases of the history stayed with me.

I learned--even before my waking self had studied the parallel cases or the old myths
from which the dreams doubtless sprang--that the entities around me were of the world's
greatest race, which had conquered time and had sent exploring minds into every age. I
knew, too, that I had been snatched from my age while another used my body in that
age, and that a few of the other strange forms housed similarly captured minds. I
seemed to talk, in some odd language of claw clickings, with exiled intellects from
every corner of the solar system.

There was a mind from the planet we know as Venus, which would live incalculable
epochs to come, and one from an outer moon of Jupiter six million years in the past. Of
earthly minds there were some from the winged, star-headed, half-vegetable race of
palaeogean Antarctica; one from the reptile people of fabled Valusia; three from the
furry pre-human Hyperborean worshippers of Tsathoggua; one from the wholly
abominable Tcho-Tchos; two from the arachnid denizens of earth's last age; five from
the hardy coleopterous species immediately following mankind, to which the Great
Race was some day to transfer its keenest minds en masse in the face of horrible peril;
and several from different branches of humanity.

I talked with the mind of Yiang-Li, a philosopher from the cruel empire of Tsan-Chan,
which is to come in 5,000 A.D.; with that of a general of the greatheaded brown people
who held South Africa in 50,000 B.C.; with that of a twelfth-century Florentine monk
named Bartolomeo Corsi; with that of a king of Lomar who had ruled that terrible polar
land one hundred thousand years before the squat, yellow Inutos came from the west to
engulf it.

I talked with the mind of Nug-Soth, a magician of the dark conquerors of 16,000 A.D.;
with that of a Roman named Titus Sempronius Blaesus, who had been a quaestor in
Sulla's time; with that of Khephnes, an Egyptian of the 14th Dynasty, who told me the
hideous secret of Nyarlathotep, with that of a priest of Atlantis' middle kingdom; with
that of a Suffolk gentleman of Cromwell's day, James Woodville; with that of a court
astronomer of pre-Inca Peru; with that of the Australian physicist Nevil Kingston-
Brown, who will die in 2,518 A.D.; with that of an archimage of vanished Yhe in the
Pacific; with that of Theodotides, a Greco-Bactrian official of 200 B.C.; with that of an
aged Frenchman of Louis XIII's time named Pierre-Louis Montagny; with that of Crom-
Ya, a Cimmerian chieftain of 15,000 B.C.; and with so many others that my brain
cannot hold the shocking secrets and dizzying marvels I learned from them.

I awaked each morning in a fever, sometimes frantically trying to verify or discredit

such information as fell within the range of modern human knowledge. Traditional facts
took on new and doubtful aspects, and I marvelled at the dream-fancy which could
invent such surprising addenda to history and science.

I shivered at the mysteries the past may conceal, and trembled at the menaces the future
may bring forth. What was hinted in the speech of post-human entities of the fate of
mankind produced such an effect on me that I will not set it down here.

After man there would be the mighty beetle civilisation, the bodies of whose members
the cream of the Great Race would seize when the monstrous doom overtook the elder
world. Later, as the earth's span closed, the transferred minds would again migrate
through time and space--to another stopping-place in the bodies of the bulbous
vegetable entities of Mercury. But there would be races after them, clinging pathetically
to the cold planet and burrowing to its horror-filled core, before the utter end.

Meanwhile, in my dreams, I wrote endlessly in that history of my own age which I was
preparing--half voluntarily and half through promises of increased library and travel
opportunities--for the Great Race's central archives. The archives were in a colossal
subterranean structure near the city's center, which I came to know well through
frequent labors and consultations. Meant to last as long as the race, and to withstand the
fiercest of earth's convulsions, this titan repository surpassed all other buildings in the
massive, mountain-like firmness of its construction.

The records, written or printed on great sheets of a curiously tenacious cellulose fabric
were bound into books that opened from the top, and were kept in individual cases of a
strange, extremely light, rustless metal of greyish hue, decorated with mathematical
designs and bearing the title in the Great Race's curvilinear hieroglyphs.

These cases were stored in tiers of rectangular vaults--like closed, locked shelves--
wrought of the same rustless metal and fastened by knobs with intricate turnings. My
own history was assigned a specific place in the vaults of the lowest or vertebrate level--
the section devoted to the culture of mankind and of the furry and reptilian races
immediately preceding it in terrestrial dominance.

But none of the dreams ever gave me a full picture of daily life. All were the merest
misty, disconnected fragments, and it is certain that these fragments were not unfolded
in their rightful sequence. I have, for example, a very imperfect idea of my own living
arrangements in the dream-world; though I seem to have possessed a great stone room
of my own. My restrictions as a prisoner gradually disappeared, so that some of the
visions included vivid travels over the mighty jungle roads, sojourns in strange cities,
and explorations of some of the vast, dark, windowless ruins from which the Great Race
shrank in curious fear. There were also long sea voyages in enormous, many-decked
boats of incredible swiftness, and trips over wild regions in closed projectile-like
airships lifted and moved by electrical repulsion.
Beyond the wide, warm ocean were other cities of the Great Race, and on one far
continent I saw the crude villages of the black-snouted, winged creatures who would
evolve as a dominant stock after the Great Race had sent its foremost minds into the
future to escape the creeping horror. Flatness and exuberant green life were always the
keynote of the scene. Hills were low and sparse, and usually displayed signs of volcanic
forces.

Of the animals I saw, I could write volumes. All were wild; for the Great Race's
mechanised culture had long since done away with domestic beasts, while food was
wholly vegetable or synthetic. Clumsy reptiles of great bulk floundered in steaming
morasses, fluttered in the heavy air, or spouted in the seas and lakes; and among these I
fancied I could vaguely recognise lesser, archaic prototypes of many forms--dinosaurs,
pterodactyls, ichthyosaurs, labyrinthodonts, plesiosaurs, and the like-made familiar
through palaeontology. Of birds or mammals there were none that I could discover.

The ground and swamps were constantly alive with snakes, lizards, and crocodiles
while insects buzzed incessantly among the lush vegetation. And far out at sea, unspied
and unknown monsters spouted mountainous columns of foam into the vaporous sky.
Once I was taken under the ocean in a gigantic submarine vessel with searchlights, and
glimpsed some living horrors of awesome magnitude. I saw also the ruins of incredible
sunken cities, and the wealth of crinoid, brachiopod, coral, and ichthyic life which
everywhere abounded.

Of the physiology, psychology, folkways, and detailed history of the Great Race my
visions preserved but little information, and many of the scattered points I here set down
were gleaned from my study of old legends and other cases rather than from my own
dreaming.

For in time, of course, my reading and research caught up with and passed the dreams in
many phases, so that certain dream-fragments were explained in advance and formed
verifications of what I had learned. This consolingly established my belief that similar
reading and research, accomplished by my secondary self, had formed the source of the
whole terrible fabric of pseudomemories.

The period of my dreams, apparently, was one somewhat less than 150,000,000 years
ago, when the Palaeozoic age was giving place to the Mesozoic. The bodies occupied by
the Great Race represented no surviving--or even scientifically known--line of terrestrial
evolution, but were of a peculiar, closely homogeneous, and highly specialised organic
type inclining as much as to the vegetable as to the animal state.

Cell action was of an unique sort almost precluding fatigue, and wholly eliminating the
need of sleep. Nourishment, assimilated through the red trumpet-like appendages on one
of the great flexible limbs, was always semifluid and in many aspects wholly unlike the
food of existing animals.

The beings had but two of the senses which we recognise--sight and hearing, the latter
accomplished through the flower-like appendages on the grey stalks above their heads.
Of other and incomprehensible senses--not, however, well utilizable by alien captive
minds inhabiting their bodies--they possessed many. Their three eyes were so situated
as to give them a range of vision wider than the normal. Their blood was a sort of deep-
greenish ichor of great thickness.

They had no sex, but reproduced through seeds or spores which clustered on their bases
and could be developed only under water. Great, shallow tanks were used for the growth
of their young--which were, however, reared only in small numbers on account of the
longevity of individuals--four or five thousand years being the common life span.

Markedly defective individuals were quickly disposed of as soon as their defects were
noticed. Disease and the approach of death were, in the absence of a sense of touch or of
physical pain, recognised by purely visual symptoms.

The dead were incinerated with dignified ceremonies. Once in a while, as before
mentioned, a keen mind would escape death by forward projection in time; but such
cases were not numerous. When one did occur, the exiled mind from the future was
treated with the utmost kindness till the dissolution of its unfamiliar tenement.

The Great Race seemed to form a single, loosely knit nation or league, with major
institutions in common, though there were four definite divisions. The political and
economic system of each unit was a sort of fascistic socialism, with major resources
rationally distributed, and power delegated to a small governing board elected by the
votes of all able to pass certain educational and psychological tests. Family organisation
was not overstressed, though ties among persons of common descent were recognised,
and the young were generally reared by their parents.

Resemblances to human attitudes and institutions were, of course, most marked in those
fields where on the one hand highly abstract elements were concerned, or where on the
other hand there was a dominance of the basic, unspecialised urges common to all
organic life. A few added likenesses came through conscious adoption as the Great Race
probed the future and copied what it liked.

Industry, highly mechanised, demanded but little time from each citizen; and the
abundant leisure was filled with intellectual and aesthetic activities of various sorts.

The sciences were carried to an unbelievable height of development, and art was a vital
part of life, though at the period of my dreams it had passed its crest and meridian.
Technology was enormously stimulated through the constant struggle to survive, and to
keep in existence the physical fabric of great cities, imposed by the prodigious geologic
upheavals of those primal days.

Crime was surprisingly scant, and was dealt with through highly efficient policing.
Punishments ranged from privilege deprivation and imprisonment to death or major
emotion wrenching, and were never administered without a careful study of the
criminal's motivations.

Warfare, largely civil for the last few millennia though sometimes waged against
reptilian or octopodic invaders, or against the winged, star-headed Old Ones who
centered in the antarctic, was infrequent though infinitely devastating. An enormous
army, using camera-like weapons which produced tremendous electrical effects, was
kept on hand for purposes seldom mentioned, but obviously connected with the
ceaseless fear of the dark, windowless elder ruins and of the great sealed trap-doors in
the lowest subterranean levels.

This fear of the basalt ruins and trap-doors was largely a matter of unspoken suggestion-
-or, at most, of furtive quasi-whispers. Everything specific which bore on it was
significantly absent from such books as were on the common shelves. It was the one
subject lying altogether under a taboo among the Great Race, and seemed to be
connected alike with horrible bygone struggles, and with that future peril which would
some day force the race to send its keener minds ahead en masse in time.

Imperfect and fragmentary as were the other things presented by dreams and legends,
this matter was still more bafflingly shrouded. The vague old myths avoided it--or
perhaps all allusions had for some reason been excised. And in the dreams of myself
and others, the hints were peculiarly few. Members of the Great Race never
intentionally referred to the matter, and what could be gleaned came only from some of
the more sharply observant captive minds.

According to these scraps of information, the basis of the fear was a horrible elder race
of half-polypous, utterly alien entities which had come through space from
immeasurably distant universes and had dominated the earth and three other solar
planets about 600 million years ago. They were only partly material--as we understand
matter--and their type of consciousness and media of perception differed widely from
those of terrestrial organisms. For example, their senses did not include that of sight;
their mental world being a strange, non-visual pattern of impressions.

They were, however, sufficiently material to use implements of normal matter when in
cosmic areas containing it; and they required housing--albeit of a peculiar kind. Though
their senses could penetrate all material barriers, their substance could not; and certain
forms of electrical energy could wholly destroy them. They had the power of aërial
motion, despite the absence of wings or any other visible means of levitation. Their
minds were of such texture that no exchange with them could be effected by the Great
Race.

When these things had come to the earth they had built mighty basalt cities of
windowless towers, and had preyed horribly upon the beings they found. Thus it was
when the minds of the Great Race sped across the void from that obscure, trans-galactic
world known in the disturbing and debatable Eltdown Shards as Yith.

The newcomers, with the instruments they created, had found it easy to subdue the
predatory entities and drive them down to those caverns of inner earth which they had
already joined to their abodes and begun to inhabit.

Then they had sealed the entrances and left them to their fate, afterward occupying most
of their great cities and preserving certain important buildings for reasons connected
more with superstition than with indifference, boldness, or scientific and historical zeal.

But as the aeons passed there came vague, evil signs that the elder things were growing
strong and numerous in the inner world. There were sporadic irruptions of a particularly
hideous character in certain small and remote cities of the Great Race, and in some of
the deserted elder cities which the Great Race had not peopled--places where the paths
to the gulfs below had not been properly sealed or guarded.

After that greater precautions were taken, and many of the paths were closed forever--
though a few were left with sealed trap-doors for strategic use in fighting the elder
things if ever they broke forth in unexpected places.

The irruptions of the elder things must have been shocking beyond all description, since
they had permanently coloured the psychology of the Great Race. Such was the fixed
mood of horror that the very aspect of the creatures was left unmentioned. At no time
was I able to gain a clear hint of what they looked like.

There were veiled suggestions of a monstrous plasticity, and of temporary lapses of

visibility, while other fragmentary whispers referred to their control and military use of
great winds. Singular whistling noises, and colossal footprints made up of five circular
toe marks, seemed also to be associated with them.

It was evident that the coming doom so desperately feared by the Great Race--the doom
that was one day to send millions of keen minds across the chasm of time to strange
bodies in the safer future--had to do with a final successful irruption of the elder beings.

Mental projections down the ages had clearly foretold such a horror, and the Great Race
had resolved that none who could escape should face it. That the foray would be a
matter of vengeance, rather than an attempt to reoccupy the outer world, they knew
from the planet's later history--for their projections shewed the coming and going of
subsequent races untroubled by the monstrous entities.

Perhaps these entities had come to prefer earth's inner abysses to the variable, storm-
ravaged surface, since light meant nothing to them. Perhaps, too, they were slowly
weakening with the aeons. Indeed, it was known that they would be quite dead in the
time of the post-human beetle race which the fleeing minds would tenant.

Meanwhile, the Great Race maintained its cautious vigilance, with potent weapons
ceaselessly ready despite the horrified banishing of the subject from common speech
and visible records. And always the shadow of nameless fear hung bout the sealed trap-
doors and the dark, windowless elder towers.

That is the world of which my dreams brought me dim, scattered echoes every night. I
cannot hope to give any true idea of the horror and dread contained in such echoes, for it
was upon a wholly intangible quality--the sharp sense of pseudo-memory--that such
feelings mainly depended.

As I have said, my studies gradually gave me a defence against these feelings in the
form of rational psychological explanations; and this saving influence was augmented
by the subtle touch of accustomedness which comes with the passage of time. Yet in
spite of everything the vague, creeping terror would return momentarily now and then.
It did not, however, engulf me as it had before; and after 1922 I lived a very normal life
of work and recreation.
In the course of years I began to feel that my experience--together with the kindred
cases and the related folklore--ought to be definitely summarised and published for the
benefit of serious students; hence I prepared a series of articles briefly covering the
whole ground and illustrated with crude sketches of some of the shapes, scenes,
decorative motifs, and hieroglyphs remembered from the dreams.

These appeared at various times during 1928 and 1929 in the Journal of the American
Psychological Society, but did not attract much attention. Meanwhile I continued to
record my dreams with the minutest care, even though the growing stack of reports
attained troublesomely vast proportions. On July 10, 1934, there was forwarded to me
by the Psychological Society the letter which opened the culminating and most horrible
phase of the whole mad ordeal. It was postmarked Pilbarra, Western Australia, and bore
the signature of one whom I found, upon inquiry, to be a mining engineer of
considerable prominence. Enclosed were some very curious snapshots. I will reproduce
the text in its entirety, and no reader can fail to understand how tremendous an effect it
and the photographs had upon me.

I was, for a time, almost stunned and incredulous; for although I had often thought that
some basis of fact must underlie certain phases of the legends which had coloured my
dreams, I was none the less unprepared for anything like a tangible survival from a lost
world remote beyond all imagination. Most devastating of all were the photographs--for
here, in cold, incontrovertible realism, there stood out against a background of sand
certain worn-down, water-ridged, storm-weathered blocks of stone whose slightly
convex tops and slightly concave bottoms told their own story.

And when I studied them with a magnifying glass I could see all too plainly, amidst the
batterings and pittings, the traces of those vast curvilinear designs and occasional
hieroglyphs whose significance had become so hideous to me. But here is the letter,
which speaks for itself.

49, Dampier St.,

Pilbarra, W. Australia, May 18, 1934.

Prof. N. W Peaslee, c/o Am. Psychological Society, 30 E. 41st St., New York City,
U.S.A.

My Dear Sir:

A recent conversation with Dr. E. M. Boyle of Perth, and some papers with your articles
which he has just sent me, make it advisable for me to tell you about certain things I
have seen in the Great Sandy Desert east of our gold field here. It would seem, in view
of the peculiar legends about old cities with huge stonework and strange designs and
hieroglyphs which you describe, that I have come upon something very important.

The blackfellows have always been full of talk about "great stones with marks on
them," and seem to have a terrible fear of such things. They connect them in some way
with their common racial legends about Buddai, the gigantic old man who lies asleep
for ages underground with his head on his arm, and who will some day awake and eat
up the world.
There are some very old and half-forgotten tales of enormous underground huts of great
stones, where passages lead down and down, and where horrible things have happened.
The blackfellows claim that once some warriors, fleeing in battle, went down into one
and never came back, but that frightful winds began to blow from the place soon after
they went down. However, there usually isn't much in what these natives say.

But what I have to tell is more than this. Two years ago, when I was prospecting about
500 miles east in the desert, I came on a lot of queer pieces of dressed stone perhaps 3 X
2 X 2 feet in size, and weathered and pitted to the very limit.

At first I couldn't find any of the marks the blackfellows told about, but when I looked
close enough I could make out some deeply carved lines in spite of the weathering.
There were peculiar curves, just like what the blackfellows had tried to describe. I
imagine there must have been thirty or forty blocks, some nearly buried in the sand, and
all within a circle perhaps a quarter of a mile in diameter.

When I saw some, I looked around closely for more, and made a careful reckoning of
the place with my instruments. I also took pictures of ten or twelve of the most typical
blocks, and will enclose the prints for you to see.

I turned my information and pictures over to the government at Perth, but they have
done nothing about them.

Then I met Dr. Boyle, who had read your articles in the Journal of the American
Psychological Society, and, in time, happened to mention the stones. He was
enormously interested, and became quite excited when I shewed him my snapshots,
saying that the stones and the markings were just like those of the masonry you had
dreamed about and seen described in legends.

He meant to write you, but was delayed. Meanwhile, he sent me most of the magazines
with your articles, and I saw at once, from your drawings and descriptions, that my
stones are certainly the kind you mean. You can appreciate this from the enclosed
prints. Later on you will hear directly from Dr. Boyle.

Now I can understand how important all this will be to you. Without question we are
faced with the remains of an unknown civilization older than any dreamed of before,
and forming a basis for your legends.

As a mining engineer, I have some knowledge of geology, and can tell you that these
blocks are so ancient they frighten me. They are mostly sandstone and granite, though
one is almost certainly made of a queer sort of cement or concrete.

They bear evidence of water action, as if this part of the world had been submerged and
come up again after long ages--all since those blocks were made and used. It is a matter
of hundreds of thousands of years--or heaven knows how much more. I don't like to
think about it.

In view of your previous diligent work in tracking down the legends and everything
connected with them, I cannot doubt but that you will want to lead an expedition to the
desert and make some archaeological excavations. Both Dr. Boyle and I are prepared to
cooperate in such work if you--or organizations known to you--can furnish the funds.

I can get together a dozen miners for the heavy digging--the blackfellows would be of
no use, for I've found that they have an almost maniacal fear of this particular spot.
Boyle and I are saying nothing to others, for you very obviously ought to have
precedence in any discoveries or credit.

The place can be reached from Pilbarra in about four days by motor tractor--which we'd
need for our apparatus. It is somewhat west and south of Warburton's path of 1873, and
100 miles southeast of Joanna Spring. We could float things up the De Grey River
instead of starting from Pilbarra--but all that can be talked over later.

Roughly the stones lie at a point about 22° 3' 14" South Latitude, 125° 0' 39" East
Longitude. The climate is tropical, and the desert conditions are trying.

I shall welcome further correspondence upon this subject, and am keenly eager to assist
in any plan you may devise. After studying your articles I am deeply impressed with the
profound significance of the whole matter. Dr. Boyle will write later. When rapid
communication is needed, a cable to Perth can be relayed by wireless.

Hoping profoundly for an early message,

Believe me,

Most faithfully yours, Robert B.F. Mackenzie

Of the immediate aftermath of this letter, much can be learned from the press. My good
fortune in securing the backing of Miskatonic University was great, and both Mr.
Mackenzie and Dr. Boyle proved invaluable in arranging matters at the Australian end.
We were not too specific with the public about our objects, since the whole matter
would have lent itself unpleasantly to sensational and jocose treatment by the cheaper
newspapers. As a result, printed reports were sparing; but enough appeared to tell of our
quest for reported Australian ruins and to chronicle our various preparatory steps.

Professor William Dyer of the college's geology department--leader of the Miskatonic

Antarctic Expedition Of 1930-31--Ferdinand C. Ashley of the department of ancient
history, and Tyler M. Freeborn of the department of anthropology--together with my
son Wingate--accompanied me.

My correspondent, Mackenzie, came to Arkham early in 1935 and assisted in our final
preparations. He proved to be a tremendously competent and affable man of about fifty,
admirably well-read, and deeply familiar with all the conditions of Australian travel.

He had tractors waiting at Pilbarra, and we chartered a tramp steamer sufficiently small
to get up the river to that point. We were prepared to excavate in the most careful and
scientific fashion, sifting every particle of sand, and disturbing nothing which might
seem to be in or near its original situation.
Sailing from Boston aboard the wheezy Lexington on March 28, 1935, we had a
leisurely trip across the Atlantic and Mediterranean, through the Suez Canal, down the
Red Sea, and across the Indian Ocean to our goal. I need not tell how the sight of the
low, sandy West Australian coast depressed me, and how I detested the crude mining
town and dreary gold fields where the tractors were given their last loads.

Dr. Boyle, who met us, proved to be elderly, pleasant, and intelligent--and his
knowledge of psychology led him into many long discussions with my son and me.

Discomfort and expectancy were oddly mingled in most of us when at length our party
of eighteen rattled forth over the arid leagues of sand and rock. On Friday, May 31st, we
forded a branch of the De Grey and entered the realm of utter desolation. A certain
positive terror grew on me as we advanced to this actual site of the elder world behind
the legends--a terror, of course, abetted by the fact that my disturbing dreams and
pseudo-memories still beset me with unabated force.

It was on Monday, June 3rd, that we saw the first of the half-buried blocks. I cannot
describe the emotions with which I actually touched--in objective reality--a fragment of
Cyclopean masonry in every respect like the blocks in the walls of my dream-buildings.
There was a distinct trace of carving--and my hands trembled as I recognised part of a
curvilinear decorative scheme made hellish to me through years of tormenting
nightmare and baffling research.

A month of digging brought a total of some 1250 blocks in varying stages of wear and
disintegration. Most of these were carven megaliths with curved tops and bottoms. A
minority were smaller, flatter, plain-surfaced, and square or octagonally cut-like those
of the floors and pavements in my dreams--while a few were singularly massive and
curved or slanted in such a manner as to suggest use in vaulting or groining, or as parts
of arches or round window casings.

The deeper--and the farther north and east--we dug, the more blocks we found; though
we still failed to discover any trace of arrangement among them. Professor Dyer was
appalled at the measureless age of the fragments, and Freeborn found traces of symbols
which fitted darkly into certain Papuan and Polynesian legends of infinite antiquity. The
condition and scattering of the blocks told mutely of vertiginous cycles of time and
geologic upheavals of cosmic savagery.

We had an aëroplane with us, and my son Wingate would often go up to different
heights and scan the sand-and-rock waste for signs of dim, large-scale outlines--either
differences of level or trails of scattered blocks. His results were virtually negative; for
whenever he would one day think he had glimpsed some significant trend, he would on
his next trip find the impression replaced by another equally insubstantial--a result of
the shifting, wind-blown sand.

One or two of these ephemeral suggestions, though, affected me queerly and

disagreeably. They seemed, after a fashion, to dovetail horribly with something I had
dreamed or read, but which I could no longer remember. There was a terrible familiarity
about them--which somehow made me look furtively and apprehensively over the
abominable, sterile terrain toward the north and northeast.
Around the first week in July I developed an unaccountable set of mixed emotions
about that general northeasterly region. There was horror, and there was curiosity--but
more than that, there was a persistent and perplexing illusion of memory.

I tried all sorts of psychological expedients to get these notions out of my head, but met
with no success. Sleeplessness also gained upon me, but I almost welcomed this
because of the resultant shortening of my dream-periods. I acquired the habit of taking
long, lone walks in the desert late at night--usually to the north or northeast, whither the
sum of my strange new impulses seemed subtly to pull me.

Sometimes, on these walks, I would stumble over nearly buried fragments of the ancient
masonry. Though there were fewer visible blocks here than where we had started, I felt
sure that there must be a vast abundance beneath the surface. The ground was less level
than at our camp, and the prevailing high winds now and then piled the sand into
fantastic temporary hillocks--exposing low traces of the elder stones while it covered
other traces.

I was queerly anxious to have the excavations extend to this territory, yet at the same
time dreaded what might be revealed. Obviously, I was getting into a rather bad state--
all the worse because I could not account for it.

An indication of my poor nervous health can be gained from my response to an odd

discovery which I made on one of my nocturnal rambles. It was on the evening of July
11th, when the moon flooded the mysterious hillocks with a curious pallor.

Wandering somewhat beyond my usual limits, I came upon a great stone which seemed
to differ markedly from any we had yet encountered. It was almost wholly covered, but
I stooped and cleared away the sand with my hands, later studying the object carefully
and supplementing the moonlight with my electric torch.

Unlike the other very large rocks, this one was perfectly square-cut, with no convex or
concave surface. It seemed, too, to be of a dark basaltic substance, wholly dissimilar to
the granite and sandstone and occasional concrete of the now familiar fragments.

Suddenly I rose, turned, and ran for the camp at top speed. It was a wholly unconscious
and irrational flight, and only when I was close to my tent did I fully realise why I had
run. Then it came to me. The queer dark stone was something which I had dreamed and
read about, and which was linked with the uttermost horrors of the aeon-old legendry.

It was one of the blocks of that basaltic elder masonry which the fabled Great Race held
in such fear--the tall, windowless ruins left by those brooding, half-material, alien things
that festered in earth's nether abysses and against whose wind-like, invisible forces the
trap-doors were sealed and the sleepless sentinels posted.

I remained awake all night, but by dawn realised how silly I had been to let the shadow
of a myth upset me. Instead of being frightened, I should have had a discoverer's
enthusiasm.

The next forenoon I told the others about my find, and Dyer, Freeborn, Boyle, my son,
and I set out to view the anomalous block. Failure, however, confronted us. I had
formed no clear idea of the stone's location, and a late wind had wholly altered the
hillocks of shifting sand.

VI

I come now to the crucial and most difficult part of my narrative--all the more difficult
because I cannot be quite certain of its reality. At times I feel uncomfortably sure that I
was not dreaming or deluded; and it is this feeling in view of the stupendous
implications which the objective truth of my experience would raise--which impels me
to make this record.

My son--a trained psychologist with the fullest and most sympathetic knowledge of my
whole case--shall be the primary judge of what I have to tell.

First let me outline the externals of the matter, as those at the camp know them. On the
night of July 17-18, after a windy day, I retired early but could not sleep. Rising shortly
before eleven, and afflicted as usual with that strange feeling regarding the
northeastward terrain, I set out on one of my typical nocturnal walks; seeing and
greeting only one person--an Australian miner named Tupper--as I left our precincts.

The moon, slightly past full, shone from a clear sky, and drenched the ancient sands
with a white, leprous radiance which seemed to me somehow infinitely evil. There was
no longer any wind, nor did any return for nearly five hours, as amply attested by
Tupper and others who saw me walking rapidly across the pallid, secret-guarding
hillocks toward the northeast.

About 3:30 a.m. a violent wind blew up, waking everyone in camp and felling three of
the tents. The sky was unclouded, and the desert still blazed with that leprous
moonlight. As the party saw to the tents my absence was noted, but in view of my
previous walks this circumstance gave no one alarm. And yet, as many as three men--all
Australians--seemed to feel something sinister in the air.

Mackenzie explained to Professor Freeborn that this was a fear picked up from
blackfellow folklore--the natives having woven a curious fabric of malignant myth
about the high winds which at long intervals sweep across the sands under a clear sky.
Such winds, it is whispered, blow out of the great stone huts under the ground, where
terrible things have happened--and are never felt except near places where the big
marked stones are scattered. Close to four the gale subsided as suddenly as it had begun,
leaving the sand hills in new and unfamiliar shapes.

It was just past five, with the bloated, fungoid moon sinking in the west, when I
staggered into camp--hatless, tattered, features scratched and ensanguined, and without
my electric torch. Most of the men had returned to bed, but Professor Dyer was smoking
a pipe in front of his tent. Seeing my winded and almost frenzied state, he called Dr.
Boyle, and the two of them got me on my cot and made me comfortable. My son,
roused by the stir, soon joined them, and they all tried to force me to lie still and attempt
sleep.

But there was no sleep for me. My psychological state was very extraordinary--different
from anything I had previously suffered. After a time I insisted upon talking--nervously
and elaborately explaining my condition. I told them I had become fatigued, and had
lain down in the sand for a nap. There had, I said, been dreams even more frightful than
usual--and when I was awaked by the sudden high wind my overwrought nerves had
snapped. I had fled in panic, frequently falling over half-buried stones and thus gaining
my tattered and bedraggled aspect. I must have slept long--hence the hours of my
absence.

Of anything strange either seen or experienced I hinted absolutely nothing--exercising

the greatest self-control in that respect. But I spoke of a change of mind regarding the
whole work of the expedition, and urged a halt in all digging toward the northeast. My
reasoning was patently weak--for I mentioned a dearth of blocks, a wish not to offend
the superstitious miners, a possible shortage of funds from the college, and other things
either untrue or irrelevant. Naturally, no one paid the least attention to my new wishes--
not even my son, whose concern for my health was obvious.

The next day I was up and around the camp, but took no part in the excavations. Seeing
that I could not stop the work, I decided to return home as soon as possible for the sake
of my nerves, and made my son promise to fly me in the plane to Perth--a thousand
miles to the southwest--as soon as he had surveyed the region I wished let alone.

If, I reflected, the thing I had seen was still visible, I might decide to attempt a specific
warning even at the cost of ridicule. It was just conceivable that the miners who knew
the local folklore might back me up. Humouring me, my son made the survey that very
afternoon, flying over all the terrain my walk could possibly have covered. Yet nothing
of what I had found remained in sight.

It was the case of the anomalous basalt block all over again--the shifting sand had wiped
out every trace. For an instant I half regretted having lost a certain awesome object in
my stark fright--but now I know that the loss was merciful. I can still believe my whole
experience an illusion--especially if, as I devoutly hope, that hellish abyss is never
found.

Wingate took me to Perth on July 20th, though declining to abandon the expedition and
return home. He stayed with me until the 25th, when the steamer for Liverpool sailed.
Now, in the cabin of the Empress, I am pondering long and frantically upon the entire
matter, and have decided that my son at least must be informed. It shall rest with him
whether to diffuse the matter more widely.

In order to meet any eventuality I have prepared this summary of my background--as

already known in a scattered way to others--and will now tell as briefly as possible what
seemed to happen during my absence from the camp that hideous night.

Nerves on edge, and whipped into a kind of perverse eagerness by that inexplicable,
dread-mingled, mnemonic urge toward the northeast, I plodded on beneath the evil,
burning moon. Here and there I saw, half shrouded by sand, those primal Cyclopean
blocks left from nameless and forgotten aeons.

The incalculable age and brooding horror of this monstrous waste began to oppress me
as never before, and I could not keep from thinking of my maddening dreams, of the
frightful legends which lay behind them, and of the present fears of natives and miners
concerning the desert and its carven stones.

And yet I plodded on as if to some eldritch rendezvous--more and more assailed by

bewildering fancies, compulsions, and pseudo-memories. I thought of some of the
possible contours of the lines of stones as seen by my son from the air, and wondered
why they seemed at once so ominous and so familiar. Something was fumbling and
rattling at the latch of my recollection, while another unknown force sought to keep the
portal barred.

The night was windless, and the pallid sand curved upward and downward like frozen
waves of the sea. I had no goal, but somehow ploughed along as if with fate-bound
assurance. My dreams welled up into the waking world, so that each sand-embedded
megalith seemed part of endless rooms and corridors of pre-human masonry, carved and
hieroglyphed with symbols that I knew too well from years of custom as a captive mind
of the Great Race.

At moments I fancied I saw those omniscient, conical horrors moving about at their
accustomed tasks, and I feared to look down lest I find myself one with them in aspect.
Yet all the while I saw the sand-covered blocks as well as the rooms and corridors; the
evil, burning moon as well as the lamps of luminous crystal; the endless desert as well
as the waving ferns beyond the windows. I was awake and dreaming at the same time.

I do not know how long or how far--or indeed, in just what direction--I had walked
when I first spied the heap of blocks bared by the day's wind. It was the largest group in
one place that I had seen so far, and so sharply did it impress me that the visions of
fabulous aeons faded suddenly away.

Again there were only the desert and the evil moon and the shards of an unguessed past.
I drew close and paused, and cast the added light of my electric torch over the tumbled
pile. A hillock had blown away, leaving a low, irregularly round mass of megaliths and
smaller fragments some forty feet across and from two to eight feet high.

From the very outset I realized that there was some utterly unprecedented quality about
those stones. Not only was the mere number of them quite without parallel, but
something in the sandworn traces of design arrested me as I scanned them under the
mingled beams of the moon and my torch.

Not that any one differed essentially from the earlier specimens we had found. It was
something subtler than that. The impression did not come when I looked at one block
alone, but only when I ran my eye over several almost simultaneously.

Then, at last, the truth dawned upon me. The curvilinear patterns on many of those
blocks were closely related--parts of one vast decorative conception. For the first time in
this aeon-shaken waste I had come upon a mass of masonry in its old position--tumbled
and fragmentary, it is true, but none the less existing in a very definite sense.

Mounting at a low place, I clambered laboriously over the heap; here and there clearing
away the sand with my fingers, and constantly striving to interpret varieties of size,
shape, and style, and relationships of design.
After a while I could vaguely guess at the nature of the bygone structure, and at the
designs which had once stretched over the vast surfaces of the primal masonry. The
perfect identity of the whole with some of my dream-glimpses appalled and unnerved
me.

This was once a Cyclopean corridor thirty feet tall, paved with octagonal blocks and
solidly vaulted overhead. There would have been rooms opening off on the right, and at
the farther end one of those strange inclined planes would have wound down to still
lower depths.

I started violently as these conceptions occurred to me, for there was more in them than
the blocks themselves had supplied. How did I know that this level should have been far
underground? How did I know that the plane leading upward should have been behind
me? How did I know that the long subterrene passage to the Square of Pillars ought to
lie on the left one level above me?

How did I know that the room of machines and the rightward-leading tunnel to the
central archives ought to lie two levels below? How did I know that there would be one
of those horrible, metal-banded trap-doors at the very bottom four levels down?
Bewildered by this intrusion from the dream-world, I found myself shaking and bathed
in a cold perspiration.

Then, as a last, intolerable touch, I felt that faint, insidious stream of cool air trickling
upward from a depressed place near the center of the huge heap. Instantly, as once
before, my visions faded, and I saw again only the evil moonlight, the brooding desert,
and the spreading tumulus of palaeogean masonry. Something real and tangible, yet
fraught with infinite suggestions of nighted mystery, now confronted me. For that
stream of air could argue but one thing--a hidden gulf of great size beneath the
disordered blocks on the surface.

My first thought was of the sinister blackfellow legends of vast underground huts
among the megaliths where horrors happen and great winds are born. Then thoughts of
my own dreams came back, and I felt dim pseudo-memories tugging at my mind. What
manner of place lay below me? What primal, inconceivable source of age-old myth-
cycles and haunting nightmares might I be on the brink of uncovering?

It was only for a moment that I hesitated, for more than curiosity and scientific zeal was
driving me on and working against my growing fear.

I seemed to move almost automatically, as if in the clutch of some compelling fate.

Pocketing my torch, and struggling with a strength that I had not thought I possessed, I
wrenched aside first one titan fragment of stone and then another, till there welled up a
strong draught whose dampness contrasted oddly with the desert's dry air. A black rift
began to yawn, and at length--when I had pushed away every fragment small enough to
budge--the leprous moonlight blazed on an aperture of ample width to admit me.

I drew out my torch and cast a brilliant beam into the opening. Below me was a chaos of
tumbled masonry, sloping roughly down toward the north at an angle of about forty-five
degrees, and evidently the result of some bygone collapse from above.
Between its surface and the ground level was a gulf of impenetrable blackness at whose
upper edge were signs of gigantic, stress-heaved vaulting. At this point, it appeared, the
deserts sands lay directly upon a floor of some titan structure of earth's youth--how
preserved through aeons of geologic convulsion I could not then and cannot now even
attempt to guess.

In retrospect, the barest idea of a sudden, lone descent into such a doubtful abyss--and at
a time when one's whereabouts were unknown to any living soul--seems like the utter
apex of insanity. Perhaps it was--yet that night I embarked without hesitancy upon such
a descent.

Again there was manifest that lure and driving of fatality which had all along seemed to
direct my course. With torch flashing intermittently to save the battery, I commenced a
mad scramble down the sinister, Cyclopean incline below the opening--sometimes
facing forward as I found good hand- and foot-holds, and at other times turning to face
the heap of megaliths as I clung and fumbled more precariously.

In two directions beside me distant walls of carven, crumbling masonry loomed dimly
under the direct beams of my torch. Ahead, however, was only unbroken darkness.

I kept no track of time during my downward scramble. So seething with baffling hints
and images was my mind that all objective matters seemed withdrawn into incalculable
distances. Physical sensation was dead, and even fear remained as a wraith-like, inactive
gargoyle leering impotently at me.

Eventually, I reached a level floor strewn with fallen blocks, shapeless fragments of
stone, and sand and detritus of every kind. On either side--perhaps thirty feet apart--rose
massive walls culminating in huge groinings. That they were carved I could just discern,
but the nature of the carvings was beyond my perception.

What held me the most was the vaulting overhead. The beam from my torch could not
reach the roof, but the lower parts of the monstrous arches stood out distinctly. And so
perfect was their identity with what I had seen in countless dreams of the elder world,
that I trembled actively for the first time.

Behind and high above, a faint luminous blur told of the distant moonlit world outside.
Some vague shred of caution warned me that I should not let it out of my sight, lest I
have no guide for my return.

I now advanced toward the wall at my left, where the traces of carving were plainest.
The littered floor was nearly as hard to traverse as the downward heap had been, but I
managed to pick my difficult way.

At one place I heaved aside some blocks and locked away the detritus to see what the
pavement was like, and shuddered at the utter, fateful familiarity of the great octagonal
stones whose buckled surface still held roughly together.

Reaching a convenient distance from the wall, I cast the searchlight slowly and carefully
over its worn remnants of carving. Some bygone influx of water seemed to have acted
on the sandstone surface, while there were curious incrustations which I could not
explain.

In places the masonry was very loose and distorted, and I wondered how many aeons
more this primal, hidden edifice could keep its remaining traces of form amidst earth's
heavings.

But it was the carvings themselves that excited me most. Despite their time-crumbled
state, they were relatively easy to trace at close range; and the complete, intimate
familiarity of every detail almost stunned my imagination.

That the major attributes of this hoary masonry should be familiar, was not beyond
normal credibility.

Powerfully impressing the weavers of certain myths, they had become embodied in a
stream of cryptic lore which, somehow, coming to my notice during the amnesic period,
had evoked vivid images in my subconscious mind.

But how could I explain the exact and minute fashion in which each line and spiral of
these strange designs tallied with what I had dreamed for more than a score of years?
What obscure, forgotten iconography could have reproduced each subtle shading and
nuance which so persistently, exactly, and unvaryingly besieged my sleeping vision
night after night?

For this was no chance or remote resemblance. Definitely and absolutely, the
millennially ancient, aeon-hidden corridor in which I stood was the original of
something I knew in sleep as intimately as I knew my own house in Crane Street,
Arkham. True, my dreams shewed the place in its undecayed prime; but the identity was
no less real on that account. I was wholly and horribly oriented.

The particular structure I was in was known to me. Known, too, was its place in that
terrible elder city of dreams. That I could visit unerringly any point in that structure or
in that city which had escaped the changes and devastations of uncounted ages, I
realized with hideous and instinctive certainty. What in heaven's name could all this
mean? How had I come to know what I knew? And what awful reality could lie behind
those antique tales of the beings who had dwelt in this labyrinth of primordial stone?

Words can convey only fractionally the welter of dread and bewilderment which ate at
my spirit. I knew this place. I knew what lay before me, and what had lain overhead
before the myriad towering stories had fallen to dust and debris and the desert. No need
now, I thought with a shudder, to keep that faint blur of moonlight in view.

I was torn betwixt a longing to flee and a feverish mixture of burning curiosity and
driving fatality. What had happened to this monstrous megalopolis of old in the millions
of years since the time of my dreams? Of the subterrene mazes which had underlain the
city and linked all the titan towers, how much had still survived the writhings of earth's
crust?

Had I come upon a whole buried world of unholy archaism? Could I still find the house
of the writing master, and the tower where S'gg'ha, the captive mind from the star-
headed vegetable carnivores of Antarctica, had chiselled certain pictures on the blank
spaces of the walls?

Would the passage at the second level down, to the hall of the alien minds, be still
unchoked and traversable? In that hall the captive mind of an incredible entity--a half-
plastic denizen of the hollow interior of an unknown trans-Plutonian planet eighteen
million years in the future--had kept a certain thing which it had modelled from clay.

I shut my eyes and put my hand to my head in a vain, pitiful effort to drive these insane
dream-fragments from my consciousness. Then, for the first time, I felt acutely the
coolness, motion, and dampness of the surrounding air. Shuddering, I realized that a
vast chain of aeon-dead black gulfs must indeed be yawning somewhere beyond and
below me.

I thought of the frightful chambers and corridors and inclines as I recalled them from
my dreams. Would the way to the central archives still be open? Again that driving
fatality tugged insistently at my brain as I recalled the awesome records that once lay
cased in those rectangular vaults of rustless metal.

There, said the dreams and legends, had reposed the whole history, past and future, of
the cosmic space-time continuum--written by captive minds from every orb and every
age in the solar system. Madness, of course--but had I not now stumbled into a nighted
world as mad as I?

I thought of the locked metal shelves, and of the curious knob twistings needed to open
each one. My own came vividly into my consciousness. How often had I gone through
that intricate routine of varied turns and pressures in the terrestrial vertebrate section on
the lowest level! Every detail was fresh and familiar.

If there were such a vault as I had dreamed of, I could open it in a moment. It was then
that madness took me utterly. An instant later, and I was leaping and stumbling over the
rocky debris toward the well-remembered incline to the depths below.

VII

From that point forward my impressions are scarcely to be relied on--indeed, I still
possess a final, desperate hope that they all form parts of some daemonic dream or
illusion born of delirium. A fever raged in my brain, and everything came to me through
a kind of haze--sometimes only intermittently.

The rays of my torch shot feebly into the engulfing blackness, bringing phantasmal
flashes of hideously familiar walls and carvings, all blighted with the decay of ages. In
one place a tremendous mass of vaulting had fallen, so that I had to clamber over a
mighty mound of stones reaching almost to the ragged, grotesquely stalactited roof.

It was all the ultimate apex of nightmare, made worse by the blasphemous tug of
pseudo-memory. One thing only was unfamiliar, and that was my own size in relation to
the monstrous masonry. I felt oppressed by a sense of unwonted smallness, as if the
sight of these towering walls from a mere human body was something wholly new and
abnormal. Again and again I looked nervously down at myself, vaguely disturbed by the
human form I possessed.

Onward through the blackness of the abyss I leaped, plunged, and staggered--often
falling and bruising myself, and once nearly shattering my torch. Every stone and corner
of that daemonic gulf was known to me, and at many points I stopped to cast beams of
light through choked and crumbling, yet familiar, archways.

Some rooms had totally collapsed; others were bare, or debris-filled. In a few I saw
masses of metal--some fairly intact, some broken, and some crushed or battered--which
I recognised as the colossal pedestals or tables of my dreams. What they could in truth
have been, I dared not guess.

I found the downward incline and began its descent--though after a time halted by a
gaping, ragged chasm whose narrowest point could not be much less than four feet
across. Here the stonework had fallen through, revealing incalculable inky depths
beneath.

I knew there were two more cellar levels in this titan edifice, and trembled with fresh
panic as I recalled the metal-clamped trap-door on the lowest one. There could be no
guards now--for what had lurked beneath had long since done its hideous work and
sunk into its long decline. By the time of the posthuman beetle race it would be quite
dead. And yet, as I thought of the native legends, I trembled anew.

It cost me a terrible effort to vault that yawning chasm, since the littered floor prevented
a running start--but madness drove me on. I chose a place close to the left-hand wall--
where the rift was least wide and the landing-spot reasonably clear of dangerous debris-
-and after one frantic moment reached the other side in safety.

At last, gaining the lower level, I stumbled on past the archway of the room of
machines, within which were fantastic ruins of metal, half buried beneath fallen
vaulting. Everything was where I knew it would be, and I climbed confidently over the
heaps which barred the entrance of a vast transverse corridor. This, I realised, would
take me under the city to the central archives.

Endless ages seemed to unroll as I stumbled, leaped, and crawled along that debris-
cluttered corridor. Now and then I could make out carvings on the age-stained walls--
some familiar, others seemingly added since the period of my dreams. Since this was a
subterrene house-connecting highway, there were no archways save when the route led
through the lower levels of various buildings.

At some of these intersections I turned aside long enough to look down well-
remembered corridors and into well-remembered rooms. Twice only did I find any
radical changes from what I had dreamed of--and in one of these cases I could trace the
sealed-up outlines of the archway I remembered.

I shook violently, and felt a curious surge of retarding weakness, as I steered a hurried
and reluctant course through the crypt of one of those great windowless, ruined towers
whose alien, basalt masonry bespoke a whispered and horrible origin.
This primal vault was round and fully two hundred feet across, with nothing carved
upon the dark-hued stonework. The floor was here free from anything save dust and
sand, and I could see the apertures leading upward and downward. There were no stairs
or inclines--indeed, my dreams had pictured those elder towers as wholly untouched by
the fabulous Great Race. Those who had built them had not needed stairs or inclines.

In the dreams, the downward aperture had been tightly sealed and nervously guarded.
Now it lay open-black and yawning, and giving forth a current of cool, damp air. Of
what limitless caverns of eternal night might brood below, I would not permit myself to
think.

Later, clawing my way along a badly heaped section of the corridor, I reached a place
where the roof had wholly caved in. The debris rose like a mountain, and I climbed up
over it, passing through a vast, empty space where my torchlight could reveal neither
walls nor vaulting. This, I reflected, must be the cellar of the house of the metal-
purveyors, fronting on the third square not far from the archives. What had happened to
it I could not conjecture.

I found the corridor again beyond the mountain of detritus and stone, but after a short
distance encountered a wholly choked place where the fallen vaulting almost touched
the perilously sagging ceiling. How I managed to wrench and tear aside enough blocks
to afford a passage, and how I dared disturb the tightly packed fragments when the least
shift of equilibrium might have brought down all the tons of superincumbent masonry to
crush me to nothingness, I do not know.

It was sheer madness that impelled and guided me--if, indeed, my whole underground
adventure was not--as I hope--a hellish delusion or phase of dreaming. But I did make--
or dream that I made--a passage that I could squirm through. As I wiggled over the
mound of debris--my torch, switched continuously on, thrust deeply in my mouth--I felt
myself torn by the fantastic stalactites of the jagged floor above me.

I was now close to the great underground archival structure which seemed to form my
goal. Sliding and clambering down the farther side of the barrier, and picking my way
along the remaining stretch of corridor with hand-held, intermittently flashing torch, I
came at last to a low, circular crypt with arches--still in a marvelous state of
preservation--opening off on every side.

The walls, or such parts of them as lay within reach of my torchlight, were densely
hieroglyphed and chiselled with typical curvilinear symbols--some added since the
period of my dreams.

This, I realised, was my fated destination, and I turned at once through a familiar
archway on my left. That I could find a clear passage up and down the incline to all the
surviving levels, I had, oddly, little doubt. This vast, earth-protected pile, housing the
annals of all the solar system, had been built with supernal skill and strength to last as
long as that system itself.

Blocks of stupendous size, poised with mathematical genius and bound with cements of
incredible toughness, had combined to form a mass as firm as the planet's rocky core.
Here, after ages more prodigious than I could sanely grasp, its buried bulk stood in all
its essential contours, the vast, dust-drifted floors scarce sprinkled with the litter
elsewhere so dominant.

The relatively easy walking from this point onward went curiously to my head. All the
frantic eagerness hitherto frustrated by obstacles now took itself out in a kind of febrile
speed, and I literally raced along the low-roofed, monstrously well-remembered aisles
beyond the archway.

I was past being astonished by the familiarity of what I saw. On every hand the great
hieroglyphed metal shelf-doors loomed monstrously; some yet in place, others sprung
open, and still others bent and buckled under bygone geological stresses not quite strong
enough to shatter the titan masonry.

Here and there a dust-covered heap beneath a gaping, empty shelf seemed to indicate
where cases had been shaken down by earth tremors. On occasional pillars were great
symbols or letters proclaiming classes and subclasses of volumes.

Once I paused before an open vault where I saw some of the accustomed metal cases
still in position amidst the omnipresent gritty dust. Reaching up, I dislodged one of the
thinner specimens with some difficulty, and rested it on the floor for inspection. It was
titled in the prevailing curvilinear hieroglyphs, though something in the arrangement of
the characters seemed subtly unusual.

The odd mechanism of the hooked fastener was perfectly well known to me, and I
snapped up the still rustless and workable lid and drew out the book within. The latter,
as expected, was some twenty by fifteen inches in area, and two inches thick; the thin
metal covers opening at the top.

Its tough cellulose pages seemed unaffected by the myriad cycles of time they had lived
through, and I studied the queerly pigmented, brush-drawn letters of the text-symbols
unlike either the usual curved hieroglyphs or any alphabet known to human scholarship-
-with a haunting, half-aroused memory.

It came to me that this was the language used by a captive mind I had known slightly in
my dreams--a mind from a large asteroid on which had survived much of the archaic
life and lore of the primal planet whereof it formed a fragment. At the same time I
recalled that this level of the archives was devoted to volumes dealing with the non-
terrestrial planets.

As I ceased poring over this incredible document I saw that the light of my torch was
beginning to fail, hence quickly inserted the extra battery I always had with me. Then,
armed with the stronger radiance, I resumed my feverish racing through unending
tangles of aisles and corridors--recognising now and then some familiar shelf, and
vaguely annoyed by the acoustic conditions which made my footfalls echo
incongruously in these catacombs.

The very prints of my shoes behind me in the millennially untrodden dust made me
shudder. Never before, if my mad dreams held anything of truth, had human feet
pressed upon those immemorial pavements.
Of the particular goal of my insane racing, my conscious mind held no hint. There was,
however, some force of evil potency pulling at my dazed will and buried recollection, so
that I vaguely felt I was not running at random.

I came to a downward incline and followed it to profounder depths. Floors flashed by

me as I raced, but I did not pause to explore them. In my whirling brain there had begun
to beat a certain rhythm which set my right hand twitching in unison. I wanted to unlock
something, and felt that I knew all the intricate twists and pressures needed to do it. It
would be like a modern safe with a combination lock.

Dream or not, I had once known and still knew. How any dream--or scrap of
unconsciously absorbed legend--could have taught me a detail so minute, so intricate,
and so complex, I did not attempt to explain to myself. I was beyond all coherent
thought. For was not this whole experience--this shocking familiarity with a set of
unknown ruins, and this monstrously exact identity of everything before me with what
only dreams and scraps of myth could have suggested--a horror beyond all reason?

Probably it was my basic conviction then--as it is now during my saner moments--that I

was not awake at all, and that the entire buried city was a fragment of febrile
hallucination.

Eventually, I reached the lowest level and struck off to the right of the incline. For some
shadowy reason I tried to soften my steps, even though I lost speed thereby. There was a
space I was afraid to cross on this last, deeply buried floor.

As I drew near it I recalled what thing in that space I feared. It was merely one of the
metal-barred and closely guarded trap-doors. There would be no guards now, and on
that account I trembled and tiptoed as I had done in passing through that black basalt
vault where a similar trap-door had yawned.

I felt a current of cool, damp air as I had felt there, and wished that my course led in
another direction. Why I had to take the particular course I was taking, I did not know.

When I came to the space I saw that the trap-door yawned widely open. Ahead, the
shelves began again, and I glimpsed on the floor before one of them a heap very thinly
covered with dust, where a number of cases had recently fallen. At the same moment a
fresh wave of panic clutched me, though for some time I could not discover why.

Heaps of fallen cases were not uncommon, for all through the aeons this lightless
labyrinth had been racked by the heavings of earth and had echoed at intervals of the
deafening clatter of toppling objects. It was only when I was nearly across the space that
I realized why I shook so violently.

Not the heap, but something about the dust of the level floor was troubling me. In the
light of my torch it seemed as if that dust were not as even as it ought to be--there were
places where it looked thinner, as if it had been disturbed not many months before. I
could not be sure, for even the apparently thinner places were dusty enough; yet a
certain suspicion of regularity in the fancied unevenness was highly disquieting.
When I brought the torchlight close to one of the queer places I did not like what I saw--
for the illusion of regularity became very great. It was as if there were regular lines of
composite impressions--impressions that went in threes, each slightly over a foot
square, and consisting of five nearly circular three-inch prints, one in advance of the
other four.

These possible lines of foot-square impressions appeared to lead in two directions, as if

something had gone somewhere and returned. They were, of course, very faint, and may
have been illusions or accidents; but there was an element of dim, fumbling terror about
the way I thought they ran. For at one end of them was the heap of cases which must
have clattered down not long before, while at the other end was the ominous trap-door
with the cool, damp wind, yawning unguarded down to abysses past imagination.

VIII

That my strange sense of compulsion was deep and overwhelming is shewn by its
conquest of my fear. No rational motive could have drawn me on after that hideous
suspicion of prints and the creeping dream-memories it excited. Yet my right hand, even
as it shook with fright, still twitched rhythmically in its eagerness to turn a lock it hoped
to find. Before I knew it I was past the heap of lately fallen cases and running on tiptoe
through aisles of utterly unbroken dust toward a point which I seemed to know
morbidly, horribly well.

My mind was asking itself questions whose origin and relevancy I was only beginning
to guess. Would the shelf be reachable by a human body? Could my human hand master
all the aeon-remembered motions of the lock? Would the lock be undamaged and
workable? And what would I do--what dare I do with what--as I now commenced to
realise--I both hoped and feared to find? Would it prove the awesome, brain-shattering
truth of something past normal conception, or shew only that I was dreaming?

The next I knew I had ceased my tiptoed racing and was standing still, staring at a row
of maddeningly familiar hieroglyphed shelves. They were in a state of almost perfect
preservation, and only three of the doors in this vicinity had sprung open.

My feelings toward these shelves cannot be described--so utter and insistent was the
sense of old acquaintance. I was looking high up at a row near the top and wholly out of
my reach, and wondering how I could climb to best advantage. An open door four rows
from the bottom would help, and the locks of the closed doors formed possible holds for
hands and feet. I would grip the torch between my teeth, as I had in other places where
both hands were needed. Above all I must make no noise.

How to get down what I wished to remove would be difficult, but I could probably hook
its movable fastener in my coat collar and carry it like a knapsack. Again I wondered
whether the lock would be undamaged. That I could repeat each familiar motion I had
not the least doubt. But I hoped the thing would not scrape or creak--and that my hand
could work it properly.

Even as I thought these things I had taken the torch in my mouth and begun to climb.
The projecting locks were poor supports; but, as I had expected, the opened shelf helped
greatly. I used both the swinging door and the edge of the aperture itself in my ascent,
and managed to avoid any loud creaking.

Balanced on the upper edge of the door, and leaning far to my right, I could just reach
the lock I sought. My fingers, half numb from climbing, were very clumsy at first; but I
soon saw that they were anatomically adequate. And the memory-rhythm was strong in
them.

Out of unknown gulfs of time the intricate, secret motions had somehow reached my
brain correctly in every detail--for after less than five minutes of trying there came a
click whose familiarity was all the more startling because I had not consciously
anticipated it. In another instant the metal door was slowly swinging open with only the
faintest grating sound.

Dazedly I looked over the row of greyish case ends thus exposed, and felt a tremendous
surge of some wholly inexplicable emotion. Just within reach of my right hand was a
case whose curving hieroglyphs made me shake with a pang infinitely more complex
than one of mere fright. Still shaking, I managed to dislodge it amidst a shower of gritty
flakes, and ease it over toward myself without any violent noise.

Like the other case I had handled, it was slightly more than twenty by fifteen inches in
size, with curved mathematical designs in low relief. In thickness it just exceeded three
inches.

Crudely wedging it between myself and the surface I was climbing, I fumbled with the
fastener and finally got the hook free. Lifting the cover, I shifted the heavy object to my
back, and let the hook catch hold of my collar. Hands now free, I awkwardly clambered
down to the dusty floor, and prepared to inspect my prize.

Kneeling in the gritty dust, I swung the case around and rested it in front of me. My
hands shook, and I dreaded to draw out the book within almost as much as I longed--
and felt compelled--to do so. It had very gradually become clear to me what I ought to
find, and this realisation nearly paralysed my faculties.

If the thing were there--and if I were not dreaming--the implications would be quite
beyond the power of the human spirit to bear. What tormented me most was my
momentary inability to feel that my surroundings were a dream. The sense of reality
was hideous--and again becomes so as I recall the scene.

At length I tremblingly pulled the book from its container and stared fascinatedly at the
well-known hieroglyphs on the cover. It seemed to be in prime condition, and the
curvilinear letters of the title held me in almost as hypnotised a state as if I could read
them. Indeed, I cannot swear that I did not actually read them in some transient and
terrible access of abnormal memory.

I do not know how long it was before I dared to lift that thin metal cover. I temporized
and made excuses to myself. I took the torch from my mouth and shut it off to save the
battery. Then, in the dark, I collected my courage finally lifting the cover without
turning on the light. Last of all, I did indeed flash the torch upon the exposed page--
steeling myself in advance to suppress any sound no matter what I should find.
I looked for an instant, then collapsed. Clenching my teeth, however, I kept silent. I
sank wholly to the floor and put a hand to my forehead amidst the engulfing blackness.
What I dreaded and expected was there. Either I was dreaming, or time and space had
become a mockery.

I must be dreaming--but I would test the horror by carrying this thing back and shewing
it to my son if it were indeed a reality. My head swam frightfully, even though there
were no visible objects in the unbroken gloom to swirl about me. Ideas and images of
the starkest terror--excited by vistas which my glimpse had opened up--began to throng
in upon me and cloud my senses.

I thought of those possible prints in the dust, and trembled at the sound of my own
breathing as I did so. Once again I flashed on the light and looked at the page as a
serpent's victim may look at his destroyer's eyes and fangs.

Then, with clumsy fingers, in the dark, I closed the book, put it in its container, and
snapped the lid and the curious, hooked fastener. This was what I must carry back to the
outer world if it truly existed--if the whole abyss truly existed--if I, and the world itself,
truly existed.

Just when I tottered to my feet and commenced my return I cannot be certain. It comes
to me oddly--as a measure of my sense of separation from the normal world--that I did
not even once look at my watch during those hideous hours underground.

Torch in hand, and with the ominous case under one arm, I eventually found myself
tiptoeing in a kind of silent panic past the draught-giving abyss and those lurking
suggestions of prints. I lessened my precautions as I climbed up the endless inclines, but
could not shake off a shadow of apprehension which I had not felt on the downward
journey.

I dreaded having to repass through the black basalt crypt that was older than the city
itself, where cold draughts welled up from unguarded depths. I thought of that which
the Great Race had feared, and of what might still be lurking--be it ever so weak and
dying--down there. I thought of those five-circle prints and of what my dreams had told
me of such prints--and of strange winds and whistling noises associated with them. And
I thought of the tales of the modern blackfellows, wherein the horror of great winds and
nameless subterrene ruins was dwelt upon.

I knew from a carven wall symbol the right floor to enter, and came at last after passing
that other book I had examined--to the great circular space with the branching archways.
On my right, and at once recognisable, was the arch through which I had arrived. This I
now entered, conscious that the rest of my course would be harder because of the
tumbled state of the masonry outside the archive building. My new metal-cased burden
weighed upon me, and I found it harder and harder to be quiet as I stumbled among
debris and fragments of every sort.

Then I came to the ceiling-high mound of debris through which I had wrenched a scanty
passage. My dread at wriggling through again was infinite, for my first passage had
made some noise, and I now--after seeing those possible prints--dreaded sound above
all things. The case, too, doubled the problem of traversing the narrow crevice.
But I clambered up the barrier as best I could, and pushed the case through the aperture
ahead of me. Then, torch in mouth, I scrambled through myself--my back torn as before
by stalactites.

As I tried to grasp the case again, it fell some distance ahead of me down the slope of
the debris, making a disturbing clatter and arousing echoes which sent me into a cold
perspiration. I lunged for it at once, and regained it without further noise--but a moment
afterward the slipping of blocks under my feet raised a sudden and unprecedented din.

The din was my undoing. For, falsely or not, I thought I heard it answered in a terrible
way from spaces far behind me. I thought I heard a shrill, whistling sound, like nothing
else on earth, and beyond any adequate verbal description. If so, what followed has a
grim irony--since, save for the panic of this thing, the second thing might never have
happened.

As it was, my frenzy was absolute and unrelieved. Taking my torch in my hand and
clutching feebly at the case, I leaped and bounded wildly ahead with no idea in my brain
beyond a mad desire to race out of these nightmare ruins to the waking world of desert
and moonlight which lay so far above.

I hardly knew it when I reached the mountain of debris which towered into the vast
blackness beyond the caved-in roof, and bruised and cut myself repeatedly in
scrambling up its steep slope of jagged blocks and fragments.

Then came the great disaster. Just as I blindly crossed the summit, unprepared for the
sudden dip ahead, my feet slipped utterly and I found myself involved in a mangling
avalanche of sliding masonry whose cannon-loud uproar split the black cavern air in a
deafening series of earth-shaking reverberations.

I have no recollection of emerging from this chaos, but a momentary fragment of

consciousness shows me as plunging and tripping and scrambling along the corridor
amidst the clangour--case and torch still with me.

Then, just as I approached that primal basalt crypt I had so dreaded, utter madness
came. For as the echoes of the avalanche died down, there became audible a repetition
of that frightful alien whistling I thought I had heard before. This time there was no
doubt about it--and what was worse, it came from a point not behind but ahead of me.

Probably I shrieked aloud then. I have a dim picture of myself as flying through the
hellish basalt vault of the elder things, and hearing that damnable alien sound piping up
from the open, unguarded door of limitless nether blacknesses. There was a wind, too--
not merely a cool, damp draught, but a violent, purposeful blast belching savagely and
frigidly from that abominable gulf whence the obscene whistling came.

There are memories of leaping and lurching over obstacles of every sort, with that
torrent of wind and shrieking sound growing moment by moment, and seeming to curl
and twist purposefully around me as it struck out wickedly from the spaces behind and
beneath.
Though in my rear, that wind had the odd effect of hindering instead of aiding my
progress; as if it acted like a noose or lasso thrown around me. Heedless of the noise I
made, I clattered over a great barrier of blocks and was again in the structure that led to
the surface.

I recall glimpsing the archway to the room of machines and almost crying out as I saw
the incline leading down to where one of those blasphemous trap-doors must be
yawning two levels below. But instead of crying out I muttered over and over to myself
that this was all a dream from which I must soon awake. Perhaps I was in camp--
perhaps I was at home in Arkham. As these hopes bolstered up my sanity I began to
mount the incline to the higher level.

I knew, of course, that I had the four-foot cleft to re-cross, yet was too racked by other
fears to realise the full horror until I came almost upon it. On my descent, the leap
across had been easy--but could I clear the gap as readily when going uphill, and
hampered by fright, exhaustion, the weight of the metal case, and the anomalous
backward tug of that daemon wind? I thought of these things at the last moment, and
thought also of the nameless entities which might be lurking in the black abysses below
the chasm.

My wavering torch was growing feeble, but I could tell by some obscure memory when
I neared the cleft. The chill blasts of wind and the nauseous whistling shrieks behind me
were for the moment like a merciful opiate, dulling my imagination to the horror of the
yawning gulf ahead. And then I became aware of the added blasts and whistling in front
of me--tides of abomination surging up through the cleft itself from depths unimagined
and unimaginable.

Now, indeed, the essence of pure nightmare was upon me. Sanity departed--and,
ignoring everything except the animal impulse of flight, I merely struggled and plunged
upward over the incline's debris as if no gulf had existed. Then I saw the chasm's edge,
leaped frenziedly with every ounce of strength I possessed, and was instantly engulfed
in a pandaemoniae vortex of loathsome sound and utter, materially tangible blackness.

This is the end of my experience, so far as I can recall. Any further impressions belong
wholly to the domain of phantasmagoria delirium. Dream, madness, and memory
merged wildly together in a series of fantastic, fragmentary delusions which can have no
relation to anything real.

There was a hideous fall through incalculable leagues of viscous, sentient darkness, and
a babel of noises utterly alien to all that we know of the earth and its organic life.
Dormant, rudimentary senses seemed to start into vitality within me, telling of pits and
voids peopled by floating horrors and leading to sunless crags and oceans and teeming
cities of windowless, basalt towers upon which no light ever shone.

Secrets of the primal planet and its immemorial aeons flashed through my brain without
the aid of sight or sound, and there were known to me things which not even the wildest
of my former dreams had ever suggested. And all the while cold fingers of damp vapor
clutched and picked at me, and that eldritch, damnable whistling shrieked fiendishly
above all the alternations of babel and silence in the whirlpools of darkness around.
Afterward there were visions of the Cyclopean city of my dreams--not in ruins, but just
as I had dreamed of it. I was in my conical, non-human body again, and mingled with
crowds of the Great Race and the captive minds who carried books up and down the
lofty corridors and vast inclines.

Then, superimposed upon these pictures, were frightful, momentary flashes of a non-
vistial consciousness involving desperate struggles, a writhing free from clutching
tentacles of whistling wind, an insane, bat-like flight through half-solid air, a feverish
burrowing through the cyclone-whipped dark, and a wild stumbling and scrambling
over fallen masonry.

Once there was a curious, intrusive flash of half sight--a faint, diffuse suspicion of
bluish radiance far overhead. Then there came a dream of wind--pursued climbing and
crawling--of wriggling into a blaze of sardonic moonlight through a jumble of debris
which slid and collapsed after me amidst a morbid hurricane. It was the evil,
monotonous beating of that maddening moonlight which at last told me of the return of
what I had once known as the objective, waking world.

I was clawing prone through the sands of the Australian desert, and around me shrieked
such a tumult of wind as I had never before known on our planet's surface. My clothing
was in rags, and my whole body was a mass of bruises and scratches.

Full consciousness returned very slowly, and at no time could I tell just where delirious
dream left off and true memory began. There had seemed to be a mound of titan blocks,
an abyss beneath it, a monstrous revelation from the past, and a nightmare horror at the
end--but how much of this was real?

My flashlight was gone, and likewise any metal case I may have discovered. Had there
been such a case--or any abyss--or any mound? Raising my head, I looked behind me,
and saw only the sterile, undulant sands of the desert.

The daemon wind died down, and the bloated, fungoid moon sank reddeningly in the
west. I lurched to my feet and began to stagger southwestward toward the camp. What
in truth had happened to me? Had I merely collapsed in the desert and dragged a dream-
racked body over miles of sand and buried blocks? If not, how could I bear to live any
longer?

For, in this new doubt, all my faith in the myth-born unreality of my visions dissolved
once more into the hellish older doubting. If that abyss was real, then the Great Race
was real--and its blasphemous reachings and seizures in the cosmos-wide vortex of time
were no myths or nightmares, but a terrible, soul-shattering actuality.

Had I, in full, hideous fact, been drawn back to a pre-human world of a hundred and
fifty million years ago in those dark, baffling days of the amnesia? Had my present
body been the vehicle of a frightful alien consciousness from palaeogean gulfs of time?

Had I, as the captive mind of those shambling horrors, indeed known that accursed city
of stone in its primordial heyday, and wriggled down those familiar corridors in the
loathsome shape of my captor? Were those tormenting dreams of more than twenty
years the offspring of stark, monstrous memories?
Had I once veritably talked with minds from reachless corners of time and space,
learned the universe's secrets, past and to come, and written the annals of my own world
for the metal cases of those titan archives? And were those others--those shocking elder
things of the mad winds and daemon pipings--in truth a lingering, lurking menace,
waiting and slowly weakening in black abysses while varied shapes of life drag out their
multimillennial courses on the planet's age-racked surface?

I do not know. If that abyss and what I held were real, there is no hope. Then, all too
truly, there lies upon this world of man a mocking and incredible shadow out of time.
But, mercifully, there is no proof that these things are other than fresh phases of my
myth-born dreams. I did not bring back the metal case that would have been a proof,
and so far those subterrene corridors have not been found.

If the laws of the universe are kind, they will never be found. But I must tell my son
what I saw or thought I saw, and let him use his judgment as a psychologist in gauging
the reality of my experience, and communicating this account to others.

I have said that the awful truth behind my tortured years of dreaming hinges absolutely
upon the actuality of what I thought I saw in those Cyclopean, buried ruins. It has been
hard for me, literally, to set down that crucial revelation, though no reader can have
failed to guess it. Of course, it lay in that book within the metal case--the case which I
pried out of its lair amidst the dust of a million centuries.

No eye had seen, no hand had touched that book since the advent of man to this planet.
And yet, when I flashed my torch upon it in that frightful abyss, I saw that the queerly
pigmented letters on the brittle, aeon-browned cellulose pages were not indeed any
nameless hieroglyphs of earth's youth. They were, instead, the letters of our familiar
alphabet, spelling out the words of the English language in my own handwriting.

AT THE MOUNTAINS OF MADNESS

I

I am forced into speech because men of science have refused to follow my advice
without knowing why. It is altogether against my will that I tell my reasons for
opposing this contemplated invasion of the antarctic--with its vast fossil hunt and its
wholesale boring and melting of the ancient ice caps. And I am the more reluctant
because my warning may be in vain.

Doubt of the real facts, as I must reveal them, is inevitable; yet, if I suppressed what
will seem extravagant and incredible, there would be nothing left. The hitherto withheld
photographs, both ordinary and aerial, will count in my favor, for they are damnably
vivid and graphic. Still, they will be doubted because of the great lengths to which
clever fakery can be carried. The ink drawings, of course, will be jeered at as obvious
impostures, notwithstanding a strangeness of technique which art experts ought to
remark and puzzle over.

In the end I must rely on the judgment and standing of the few scientific leaders who
have, on the one hand, sufficient independence of thought to weigh my data on its own
hideously convincing merits or in the light of certain primordial and highly baffling
myth cycles; and on the other hand, sufficient influence to deter the exploring world in
general from any rash and over-ambitious program in the region of those mountains of
madness. It is an unfortunate fact that relatively obscure men like myself and my
associates, connected only with a small university, have little chance of making an
impression where matters of a wildly bizarre or highly controversial nature are
concerned.

It is further against us that we are not, in the strictest sense, specialists in the fields
which came primarily to be concerned. As a geologist, my object in leading the
Miskatonic University Expedition was wholly that of securing deep-level specimens of
rock and soil from various parts of the antarctic continent, aided by the remarkable drill
devised by Professor Frank H. Pabodie of our engineering department. I had no wish to
be a pioneer in any other field than this, but I did hope that the use of this new
mechanical appliance at different points along previously explored paths would bring to
light materials of a sort hitherto unreached by the ordinary methods of collection.

Pabodie's drilling apparatus, as the public already knows from our reports, was unique
and radical in its lightness, portability, and capacity to combine the ordinary artesian
drill principle with the principle of the small circular rock drill in such a way as to cope
quickly with strata of varying hardness. Steel head, jointed rods, gasoline motor,
collapsible wooden derrick, dynamiting paraphernalia, cording, rubbish-removal auger,
and sectional piping for bores five inches wide and up to one thousand feet deep all
formed, with needed accessories, no greater load than three seven-dog sledges could
carry. This was made possible by the clever aluminum alloy of which most of the metal
objects were fashioned. Four large Dornier aeroplanes, designed especially for the
tremendous altitude flying necessary on the antarctic plateau and with added fuel-
warming and quick-starting devices worked out by Pabodie, could transport our entire
expedition from a base at the edge of the great ice barrier to various suitable inland
points, and from these points a sufficient quota of dogs would serve us.

We planned to cover as great an area as one antarctic season--or longer, if absolutely

necessary--would permit, operating mostly in the mountain ranges and on the plateau
south of Ross Sea; regions explored in varying degree by Shackleton, Amundsen, Scott,
and Byrd. With frequent changes of camp, made by aeroplane and involving distances
great enough to be of geological significance, we expected to unearth a quite
unprecedented amount of material--especially in the pre-Cambrian strata of which so
narrow a range of antarctic specimens had previously been secured. We wished also to
obtain as great as possible a variety of the upper fossiliferous rocks, since the primal life
history of this bleak realm of ice and death is of the highest importance to our
knowledge of the earth's past. That the antarctic continent was once temperate and even
tropical, with a teeming vegetable and animal life of which the lichens, marine fauna,
arachnida, and penguins of the northern edge are the only survivals, is a matter of
common information; and we hoped to expand that information in variety, accuracy,
and detail. When a simple boring revealed fossiliferous signs, we would enlarge the
aperture by blasting, in order to get specimens of suitable size and condition.

Our borings, of varying depth according to the promise held out by the upper soil or
rock, were to be confined to exposed, or nearly exposed, land surfaces--these inevitably
being slopes and ridges because of the mile or two-mile thickness of solid ice overlying
the lower levels. We could not afford to waste drilling the depth of any considerable
amount of mere glaciation, though Pabodie had worked out a plan for sinking copper
electrodes in thick clusters of borings and melting off limited areas of ice with current
from a gasoline-driven dynamo. It is this plan--which we could not put into effect
except experimentally on an expedition such as ours--that the coming Starkweather-
Moore Expedition proposes to follow, despite the warnings I have issued since our
return from the antarctic.

The public knows of the Miskatonic Expedition through our frequent wireless reports to
the Arkham Advertiser and Associated Press, and through the later articles of Pabodie
and myself. We consisted of four men from the University--Pabodie, Lake of the
biology department, Atwood of the physics department--also a meteorologist--and
myself, representing geology and having nominal command--besides sixteen assistants:
seven graduate students from Miskatonic and nine skilled mechanics. Of these sixteen,
twelve were qualified aeroplane pilots, all but two of whom were competent wireless
operators. Eight of them understood navigation with compass and sextant, as did
Pabodie, Atwood, and I. In addition, of course, our two ships--wooden ex-whalers,
reinforced for ice conditions and having auxiliary steam--were fully manned.

The Nathaniel Derby Pickman Foundation, aided by a few special contributions,

financed the expedition; hence our preparations were extremely thorough, despite the
absence of great publicity. The dogs, sledges, machines, camp materials, and
unassembled parts of our five planes were delivered in Boston, and there our ships were
loaded. We were marvelously well-equipped for our specific purposes, and in all
matters pertaining to supplies, regimen, transportation, and camp construction we
profited by the excellent example of our many recent and exceptionally brilliant
predecessors. It was the unusual number and fame of these predecessors which made
our own expedition--ample though it was--so little noticed by the world at large.

As the newspapers told, we sailed from Boston Harbor on September 2nd, 1930, taking
a leisurely course down the coast and through the Panama Canal, and stopping at Samoa
and Hobart, Tasmania, at which latter place we took on final supplies. None of our
exploring party had ever been in the polar regions before, hence we all relied greatly on
our ship captains--J. B. Douglas, commanding the brig Arkham, and serving as
commander of the sea party, and Georg Thorfinnssen, commanding the barque
Miskatonic--both veteran whalers in antarctic waters.

As we left the inhabited world behind, the sun sank lower and lower in the north, and
stayed longer and longer above the horizon each day. At about 62° South Latitude we
sighted our first icebergs--table-like objects with vertical sides--and just before reaching
the antarctic circle, which we crossed on October 20th with appropriately quaint
ceremonies, we were considerably troubled with field ice. The falling temperature
bothered me considerably after our long voyage through the tropics, but I tried to brace
up for the worse rigors to come. On many occasions the curious atmospheric effects
enchanted me vastly; these including a strikingly vivid mirage--the first I had ever seen-
-in which distant bergs became the battlements of unimaginable cosmic castles.

Pushing through the ice, which was fortunately neither extensive nor thickly packed, we
regained open water at South Latitude 67°, East Longitude 175° On the morning of
October 26th a strong land blink appeared on the south, and before noon we all felt a
thrill of excitement at beholding a vast, lofty, and snow-clad mountain chain which
opened out and covered the whole vista ahead. At last we had encountered an outpost of
the great unknown continent and its cryptic world of frozen death. These peaks were
obviously the Admiralty Range discovered by Ross, and it would now be our task to
round Cape Adare and sail down the east coast of Victoria Land to our contemplated
base on the shore of McMurdo Sound, at the foot of the volcano Erebus in South
Latitude 77° 9'.

The last lap of the voyage was vivid and fancy-stirring. Great barren peaks of mystery
loomed up constantly against the west as the low northern sun of noon or the still lower
horizon-grazing southern sun of midnight poured its hazy reddish rays over the white
snow, bluish ice and water lanes, and black bits of exposed granite slope. Through the
desolate summits swept ranging, intermittent gusts of the terrible antarctic wind; whose
cadences sometimes held vague suggestions of a wild and half-sentient musical piping,
with notes extending over a wide range, and which for some subconscious mnemonic
reason seemed to me disquieting and even dimly terrible. Something about the scene
reminded me of the strange and disturbing Asian paintings of Nicholas Roerich, and of
the still stranger and more disturbing descriptions of the evilly fabled plateau of Leng
which occur in the dreaded Necronomicon of the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred. I was
rather sorry, later on, that I had ever looked into that monstrous book at the college
library.

On the 7th of November, sight of the westward range having been temporarily lost, we
passed Franklin Island; and the next day descried the cones of Mts. Erebus and Terror
on Ross Island ahead, with the long line of the Parry Mountains beyond. There now
stretched off to the east the low, white line of the great ice barrier, rising
perpendicularly to a height of two hundred feet like the rocky cliffs of Quebec, and
marking the end of southward navigation. In the afternoon we entered McMurdo Sound
and stood off the coast in the lee of smoking Mt. Erebus. The scoriac peak towered up
some twelve thousand, seven hundred feet against the eastern sky, like a Japanese print
of the sacred Fujiyama, while beyond it rose the white, ghostlike height of Mt. Terror,
ten thousand, nine hundred feet in altitude, and now extinct as a volcano.

Puffs of smoke from Erebus came intermittently, and one of the graduate assistants--a
brilliant young fellow named Danforth--pointed out what looked like lava on the snowy
slope, remarking that this mountain, discovered in 1840, had undoubtedly been the
source of Poe's image when he wrote seven years later:

--the lavas that restlessly roll Their sulphurous currents down Yaanek In the ultimate
climes of the pole--That groan as they roll down Mount Yaanek In the realms of the
boreal pole.

Danforth was a great reader of bizarre material, and had talked a good deal of Poe. I was
interested myself because of the antarctic scene of Poe's only long story--the disturbing
and enigmatical Arthur Gordon Pym. On the barren shore, and on the lofty ice barrier in
the background, myriads of grotesque penguins squawked and flapped their fins, while
many fat seals were visible on the water, swimming or sprawling across large cakes of
slowly drifting ice.

Using small boats, we effected a difficult landing on Ross Island shortly after midnight
on the morning of the 9th, carrying a line of cable from each of the ships and preparing
to unload supplies by means of a breeches-buoy arrangement. Our sensations on first
treading Antarctic soil were poignant and complex, even though at this particular point
the Scott and Shackleton expeditions had preceded us. Our camp on the frozen shore
below the volcano's slope was only a provisional one, headquarters being kept aboard
the Arkham. We landed all our drilling apparatus, dogs, sledges, tents, provisions,
gasoline tanks, experimental ice-melting outfit, cameras, both ordinary and aerial,
aeroplane parts, and other accessories, including three small portable wireless outfits--
besides those in the planes--capable of communicating with the Arkham's large outfit
from any part of the antarctic continent that we would be likely to visit. The ship's
outfit, communicating with the outside world, was to convey press reports to the
Arkham Advertiser's powerful wireless station on Kingsport Head, Massachusetts. We
hoped to complete our work during a single antarctic summer; but if this proved
impossible, we would winter on the Arkham, sending the Miskatonic north before the
freezing of the ice for another summer's supplies.

I need not repeat what the newspapers have already published about our early work: of
our ascent of Mt. Erebus; our successful mineral borings at several points on Ross
Island and the singular speed with which Pabodie's apparatus accomplished them, even
through solid rock layers; our provisional test of the small ice-melting equipment; our
perilous ascent of the great barrier with sledges and supplies; and our final assembling
of five huge aeroplanes at the camp atop the barrier. The health of our land party--
twenty men and fifty-five Alaskan sledge dogs--was remarkable, though of course we
had so far encountered no really destructive temperatures or windstorms. For the most
part, the thermometer varied between zero and 20° or 25° above, and our experience
with New England winters had accustomed us to rigors of this sort. The barrier camp
was semi-permanent, and destined to be a storage cache for gasoline, provisions,
dynamite, and other supplies.

Only four of our planes were needed to carry the actual exploring material, the fifth
being left with a pilot and two men from the ships at the storage cache to form a means
of reaching us from the Arkham in case all our exploring planes were lost. Later, when
not using all the other planes for moving apparatus, we would employ one or two in a
shuttle transportation service between this cache and another permanent base on the
great plateau from six hundred to seven hundred miles southward, beyond Beardmore
Glacier. Despite the almost unanimous accounts of appalling winds and tempests that
pour down from the plateau, we determined to dispense with intermediate bases, taking
our chances in the interest of economy and probable efficiency.

Wireless reports have spoken of the breathtaking, four-hour, nonstop flight of our
squadron on November 21st over the lofty shelf ice, with vast peaks rising on the west,
and the unfathomed silences echoing to the sound of our engines. Wind troubled us only
moderately, and our radio compasses helped us through the one opaque fog we
encountered. When the vast rise loomed ahead, between Latitudes 83° and 84°, we
knew we had reached Beardmore Glacier, the largest valley glacier in the world, and
that the frozen sea was now giving place to a frowning and mountainous coast line. At
last we were truly entering the white, aeon-dead world of the ultimate south. Even as we
realized it we saw the peak of Mt. Nansen in the eastern distance, towering up to its
height of almost fifteen thousand feet.
The successful establishment of the southern base above the glacier in Latitude 86° 7',
East Longitude 174° 23', and the phenomenally rapid and effective borings and
blastings made at various points reached by our sledge trips and short aeroplane flights,
are matters of history; as is the arduous and triumphant ascent of Mt. Nansen by
Pabodie and two of the graduate students--Gedney and Carroll--on December 13-15.
We were some eight thousand, five hundred feet above sea-level, and when
experimental drillings revealed solid ground only twelve feet down through the snow
and ice at certain points, we made considerable use of the small melting apparatus and
sunk bores and performed dynamiting at many places where no previous explorer had
ever thought of securing mineral specimens. The pre-Cambrian granites and beacon
sandstones thus obtained confirmed our belief that this plateau was homogeneous, with
the great bulk of the continent to the west, but somewhat different from the parts lying
eastward below South America--which we then thought to form a separate and smaller
continent divided from the larger one by a frozen junction of Ross and Weddell Seas,
though Byrd has since disproved the hypothesis.

In certain of the sandstones, dynamited and chiseled after boring revealed their nature,
we found some highly interesting fossil markings and fragments; notably ferns,
seaweeds, trilobites, crinoids, and such mollusks as linguellae and gastropods--all of
which seemed of real significance in connection with the region's primordial history.
There was also a queer triangular, striated marking, about a foot in greatest diameter,
which Lake pieced together from three fragments of slate brought up from a deep-
blasted aperture. These fragments came from a point to the westward, near the Queen
Alexandra Range; and Lake, as a biologist, seemed to find their curious marking
unusually puzzling and provocative, though to my geological eye it looked not unlike
some of the ripple effects reasonably common in the sedimentary rocks. Since slate is
no more than a metamorphic formation into which a sedimentary stratum is pressed, and
since the pressure itself produces odd distorting effects on any markings which may
exist, I saw no reason for extreme wonder over the striated depression.

On January 6th, 1931, Lake, Pabodie, Danforth, the other six students, and myself flew
directly over the south pole in two of the great planes, being forced down once by a
sudden high wind, which, fortunately, did not develop into a typical storm. This was, as
the papers have stated, one of several observation flights, during others of which we
tried to discern new topographical features in areas unreached by previous explorers.
Our early flights were disappointing in this latter respect, though they afforded us some
magnificent examples of the richly fantastic and deceptive mirages of the polar regions,
of which our sea voyage had given us some brief foretastes. Distant mountains floated
in the sky as enchanted cities, and often the whole white world would dissolve into a
gold, silver, and scarlet land of Dunsanian dreams and adventurous expectancy under
the magic of the low midnight sun. On cloudy days we had considerable trouble in
flying owing to the tendency of snowy earth and sky to merge into one mystical
opalescent void with no visible horizon to mark the junction of the two.

At length we resolved to carry out our original plan of flying five hundred miles
eastward with all four exploring planes and establishing a fresh sub-base at a point
which would probably be on the smaller continental division, as we mistakenly
conceived it. Geological specimens obtained there would be desirable for purposes of
comparison. Our health so far had remained excellent--lime juice well offsetting the
steady diet of tinned and salted food, and temperatures generally above zero enabling us
to do without our thickest furs. It was now midsummer, and with haste and care we
might be able to conclude work by March and avoid a tedious wintering through the
long antarctic night. Several savage windstorms had burst upon us from the west, but
we had escaped damage through the skill of Atwood in devising rudimentary aeroplane
shelters and windbreaks of heavy snow blocks, and reinforcing the principal camp
buildings with snow. Our good luck and efficiency had indeed been almost uncanny.

The outside world knew, of course, of our program, and was told also of Lake's strange
and dogged insistence on a westward--or rather, northwestward--prospecting trip before
our radical shift to the new base. It seems that he had pondered a great deal, and with
alarmingly radical daring, over that triangular striated marking in the slate; reading into
it certain contradictions in nature and geological period which whetted his curiosity to
the utmost, and made him avid to sink more borings and blastings in the west-stretching
formation to which the exhumed fragments evidently belonged. He was strangely
convinced that the marking was the print of some bulky, unknown, and radically
unclassifiable organism of considerably advanced evolution, notwithstanding that the
rock which bore it was of so vastly ancient a date--Cambrian if not actually pre-
Cambrian--as to preclude the probable existence not only of all highly evolved life, but
of any life at all above the unicellular or at most the trilobite stage. These fragments,
with their odd marking, must have been five hundred million to a thousand million
years old.

II

Popular imagination, I judge, responded actively to our wireless bulletins of Lake's start
northwestward into regions never trodden by human foot or penetrated by human
imagination, though we did not mention his wild hopes of revolutionizing the entire
sciences of biology and geology. His preliminary sledging and boring journey of
January 11th to 18th with Pabodie and five others--marred by the loss of two dogs in an
upset when crossing one of the great pressure ridges in the ice--had brought up more
and more of the Archaean slate; and even I was interested by the singular profusion of
evident fossil markings in that unbelievably ancient stratum. These markings, however,
were of very primitive life forms involving no great paradox except that any life forms
should occur in rock as definitely pre-Cambrian as this seemed to be; hence I still failed
to see the good sense of Lake's demand for an interlude in our time-saving program--an
interlude requiring the use of all four planes, many men, and the whole of the
expedition's mechanical apparatus. I did not, in the end, veto the plan, though I decided
not to accompany the northwestward party despite Lake's plea for my geological advice.
While they were gone, I would remain at the base with Pabodie and five men and work
out final plans for the eastward shift. In preparation for this transfer, one of the planes
had begun to move up a good gasoline supply from McMurdo Sound; but this could
wait temporarily. I kept with me one sledge and nine dogs, since it is unwise to be at
any time without possible transportation in an utterly tenantless world of aeon-long
death.

Lake's sub-expedition into the unknown, as everyone will recall, sent out its own reports
from the shortwave transmitters on the planes; these being simultaneously picked up by
our apparatus at the southern base and by the Arkham at McMurdo Sound, whence they
were relayed to the outside world on wave lengths up to fifty meters. The start was
made January 22nd at 4 A.M., and the first wireless message we received came only
two hours later, when Lake spoke of descending and starting a small-scale ice-melting
and bore at a point some three hundred miles away from us. Six hours after that a
second and very excited message told of the frantic, beaver-like work whereby a
shallow shaft had been sunk and blasted, culminating in the discovery of slate fragments
with several markings approximately like the one which had caused the original
puzzlement.

Three hours later a brief bulletin announced the resumption of the flight in the teeth of a
raw and piercing gale; and when I dispatched a message of protest against further
hazards, Lake replied curtly that his new specimens made any hazard worth taking. I
saw that his excitement had reached the point of mutiny, and that I could do nothing to
check this headlong risk of the whole expedition's success; but it was appalling to think
of his plunging deeper and deeper into that treacherous and sinister white immensity of
tempests and unfathomed mysteries which stretched off for some fifteen hundred miles
to the half-known, half-suspected coast line of Queen Mary and Knox Lands.

Then, in about an hour and a half more, came that doubly excited message from Lake's
moving plane, which almost reversed my sentiments and made me wish I had
accompanied the party:

"10:05 P.M. On the wing. After snowstorm, have spied mountain range ahead higher
than any hitherto seen. May equal Himalayas, allowing for height of plateau. Probable
Latitude 76° 15', Longitude 113° 10' E. Reaches far as can see to right and left.
Suspicion of two smoking cones. All peaks black and bare of snow. Gale blowing off
them impedes navigation."

After that Pabodie, the men and I hung breathlessly over the receiver. Thought of this
titanic mountain rampart seven hundred miles away inflamed our deepest sense of
adventure; and we rejoiced that our expedition, if not ourselves personally, had been its
discoverers. In half an hour Lake called us again:

"Moulton's plane forced down on plateau in foothills, but nobody hurt and perhaps can
repair. Shall transfer essentials to other three for return or further moves if necessary,
but no more heavy plane travel needed just now. Mountains surpass anything in
imagination. Am going up scouting in Carroll's plane, with all weight out.

"You can't imagine anything like this. Highest peaks must go over thirty-five thousand
feet. Everest out of the running. Atwood to work out height with theodolite while
Carroll and I go up. Probably wrong about cones, for formations look stratified.
Possibly pre-Cambrian slate with other strata mixed in. Queer skyline effects--regular
sections of cubes clinging to highest peaks. Whole thing marvelous in red-gold light of
low sun. Like land of mystery in a dream or gateway to forbidden world of untrodden
wonder. Wish you were here to study."

Though it was technically sleeping time, not one of us listeners thought for a moment of
retiring. It must have been a good deal the same at McMurdo Sound, where the supply
cache and the Arkham were also getting the messages; for Captain Douglas gave out a
call congratulating everybody on the important find, and Sherman, the cache operator,
seconded his sentiments. We were sorry, of course, about the damaged aeroplane, but
hoped it could be easily mended. Then, at 11 P.M., came another call from Lake:
"Up with Carroll over highest foothills. Don't dare try really tall peaks in present
weather, but shall later. Frightful work climbing, and hard going at this altitude, but
worth it. Great range fairly solid, hence can't get any glimpses beyond. Main summits
exceed Himalayas, and very queer. Range looks like pre-Cambrian slate, with plain
signs of many other upheaved strata. Was wrong about volcanism. Goes farther in either
direction than we can see. Swept clear of snow above about twenty-one thousand feet.

"Odd formations on slopes of highest mountains. Great low square blocks with exactly
vertical sides, and rectangular lines of low, vertical ramparts, like the old Asian castles
clinging to steep mountains in Roerich's paintings. Impressive from distance. Flew close
to some, and Carroll thought they were formed of smaller separate pieces, but that is
probably weathering. Most edges crumbled and rounded off as if exposed to storms and
climate changes for millions of years.

"Parts, especially upper parts, seem to be of lighter-colored rock than any visible strata
on slopes proper, hence of evidently crystalline origin. Close flying shows many cave
mouths, some unusually regular in outline, square or semicircular. You must come and
investigate. Think I saw rampart squarely on top of one peak. Height seems about thirty
thousand to thirty-five thousand feet. Am up twenty-one thousand, five hundred myself,
in devilish, gnawing cold. Wind whistles and pipes through passes and in and out of
caves, but no flying danger so far."

From then on for another half hour Lake kept up a running fire of comment, and
expressed his intention of climbing some of the peaks on foot. I replied that I would join
him as soon as he could send a plane, and that Pabodie and I would work out the best
gasoline plan--just where and how to concentrate our supply in view of the expedition's
altered character. Obviously, Lake's boring operations, as well as his aeroplane
activities, would require a great deal for the new base which he planned to establish at
the foot of the mountains; and it was possible that the eastward flight might not be
made, after all, this season. In connection with this business I called Captain Douglas
and asked him to get as much as possible out of the ships and up the barrier with the
single dog team we had left there. A direct route across the unknown region between
Lake and McMurdo Sound was what we really ought to establish.

Lake called me later to say that he had decided to let the camp stay where Moulton's
plane had been forced down, and where repairs had already progressed somewhat. The
ice sheet was very thin, with dark ground here and there visible, and he would sink
some borings and blasts at that very point before making any sledge trips or climbing
expeditions. He spoke of the ineffable majesty of the whole scene, and the queer state of
his sensations at being in the lee of vast, silent pinnacles whose ranks shot up like a wall
reaching the sky at the world's rim. Atwood's theodolite observations had placed the
height of the five tallest peaks at from thirty thousand to thirty-four thousand feet. The
windswept nature of the terrain clearly disturbed Lake, for it argued the occasional
existence of prodigious gales, violent beyond anything we had so far encountered. His
camp lay a little more than five miles from where the higher foothills rose abruptly. I
could almost trace a note of subconscious alarm in his words--flashed across a glacial
void of seven hundred miles--as he urged that we all hasten with the matter and get the
strange, new region disposed of as soon as possible. He was about to rest now, after a
continuous day's work of almost unparalleled speed, strenuousness, and results.
In the morning I had a three-cornered wireless talk with Lake and Captain Douglas at
their widely separated bases. It was agreed that one of Lake's planes would come to my
base for Pabodie, the five men, and myself, as well as for all the fuel it could carry. The
rest of the fuel question, depending on our decision about an easterly trip, could wait for
a few days, since Lake had enough for immediate camp heat and borings. Eventually the
old southern base ought to be restocked, but if we postponed the easterly trip we would
not use it till the next summer, and, meanwhile, Lake must send a plane to explore a
direct route between his new mountains and McMurdo Sound.

Pabodie and I prepared to close our base for a short or long period, as the case might be.
If we wintered in the antarctic we would probably fly straight from Lake's base to the
Arkham without returning to this spot. Some of our conical tents had already been
reinforced by blocks of hard snow, and now we decided to complete the job of making a
permanent village. Owing to a very liberal tent supply, Lake had with him all that his
base would need, even after our arrival. I wirelessed that Pabodie and I would be ready
for the northwestward move after one day's work and one night's rest.

Our labors, however, were not very steady after 4 P.M., for about that time Lake began
sending in the most extraordinary and excited messages. His working day had started
unpropitiously, since an aeroplane survey of the nearly-exposed rock surfaces showed
an entire absence of those Archaean and primordial strata for which he was looking, and
which formed so great a part of the colossal peaks that loomed up at a tantalizing
distance from the camp. Most of the rocks glimpsed were apparently Jurassic and
Comanchian sandstones and Permian and Triassic schists, with now and then a glossy
black outcropping suggesting a hard and slaty coal. This rather discouraged Lake,
whose plans all hinged on unearthing specimens more than five hundred million years
older. It was clear to him that in order to recover the Archaean slate vein in which he
had found the odd markings, he would have to make a long sledge trip from these
foothills to the steep slopes of the gigantic mountains themselves.

He had resolved, nevertheless, to do some local boring as part of the expedition's

general program; hence he set up the drill and put five men to work with it while the
rest finished settling the camp and repairing the damaged aeroplane. The softest visible
rock--a sandstone about a quarter of a mile from the camp--had been chosen for the first
sampling; and the drill made excellent progress without much supplementary blasting. It
was about three hours afterward, following the first really heavy blast of the operation,
that the shouting of the drill crew was heard; and that young Gedney--the acting
foreman--rushed into the camp with the startling news.

They had struck a cave. Early in the boring the sandstone had given place to a vein of
Comanchian limestone, full of minute fossil cephalopods, corals, echini, and spirifera,
and with occasional suggestions of siliceous sponges and marine vertebrate bones--the
latter probably of teleosts, sharks, and ganoids. This, in itself, was important enough, as
affording the first vertebrate fossils the expedition had yet secured; but when shortly
afterward the drill head dropped through the stratum into apparent vacancy, a wholly
new and doubly intense wave of excitement spread among the excavators. A good-sized
blast had laid open the subterrene secret; and now, through a jagged aperture perhaps
five feet across and three feet thick, there yawned before the avid searchers a section of
shallow limestone hollowing worn more than fifty million years ago by the trickling
ground waters of a bygone tropic world.
The hollowed layer was not more than seven or eight feet deep but extended off
indefinitely in all directions and had a fresh, slightly moving air which suggested its
membership in an extensive subterranean system. Its roof and floor were abundantly
equipped with large stalactites and stalagmites, some of which met in columnar form:
but important above all else was the vast deposit of shells and bones, which in places
nearly choked the passage. Washed down from unknown jungles of Mesozoic tree ferns
and fungi, and forests of Tertiary cycads, fan palms, and primitive angiosperms, this
osseous medley contained representatives of more Cretaceous, Eocene, and other animal
species than the greatest paleontologist could have counted or classified in a year.
Mollusks, crustacean armor, fishes, amphibians, reptiles, birds, and early mammals--
great and small, known and unknown. No wonder Gedney ran back to the camp
shouting, and no wonder everyone else dropped work and rushed headlong through the
biting cold to where the tall derrick marked a new-found gateway to secrets of inner
earth and vanished aeons.

When Lake had satisfied the first keen edge of his curiosity, he scribbled a message in
his notebook and had young Moulton run back to the camp to dispatch it by wireless.
This was my first word of the discovery, and it told of the identification of early shells,
bones of ganoids and placoderms, remnants of labyrinthodonts and thecodonts, great
mosasaur skull fragments, dinosaur vertebrae and armor plates, pterodactyl teeth and
wing bones, Archaeopteryx debris, Miocene sharks' teeth, primitive bird skulls, and
other bones of archaic mammals such as palaeotheres, Xiphodons, Eohippi, Oreodons,
and titanotheres. There was nothing as recent as a mastodon, elephant, true camel, deer,
or bovine animal; hence Lake concluded that the last deposits had occurred during the
Oligocene Age, and that the hollowed stratum had lain in its present dried, dead, and
inaccessible state for at least thirty million years.

On the other hand, the prevalence of very early life forms was singular in the highest
degree. Though the limestone formation was, on the evidence of such typical imbedded
fossils as ventriculites, positively and unmistakably Comanchian and not a particle
earlier, the free fragments in the hollow space included a surprising proportion from
organisms hitherto considered as peculiar to far older periods--even rudimentary fishes,
mollusks, and corals as remote as the Silurian or Ordovician. The inevitable inference
was that in this part of the world there had been a remarkable and unique degree of
continuity between the life of over three hundred million years ago and that of only
thirty million years ago. How far this continuity had extended beyond the Oligocene
Age when the cavern was closed was of course past all speculation. In any event, the
coming of the frightful ice in the Pleistocene some five hundred thousand years ago--a
mere yesterday as compared with the age of this cavity--must have put an end to any of
the primal forms which had locally managed to outlive their common terms.

Lake was not content to let his first message stand, but had another bulletin written and
dispatched across the snow to the camp before Moulton could get back. After that
Moulton stayed at the wireless in one of the planes, transmitting to me--and to the
Arkham for relaying to the outside world--the frequent postscripts which Lake sent him
by a succession of messengers. Those who followed the newspapers will remember the
excitement created among men of science by that afternoon's reports--reports which
have finally led, after all these years, to the organization of that very Starkweather-
Moore Expedition which I am so anxious to dissuade from its purposes. I had better
give the messages literally as Lake sent them, and as our base operator McTighe
translated them from the pencil shorthand:

"Fowler makes discovery of highest importance in sandstone and limestone fragments

from blasts. Several distinct triangular striated prints like those in Archaean slate,
proving that source survived from over six hundred million years ago to Comanchian
times without more than moderate morphological changes and decrease in average size.
Comanchian prints apparently more primitive or decadent, if anything, than older ones.
Emphasize importance of discovery in press. Will mean to biology what Einstein has
meant to mathematics and physics. Joins up with my previous work and amplifies
conclusions.

"Appears to indicate, as I suspected, that earth has seen whole cycle or cycles of organic
life before known one that begins with Archaeozoic cells. Was evolved and specialized
not later than a thousand million years ago, when planet was young and recently
uninhabitable for any life forms or normal protoplasmic structure. Question arises when,
where, and how development took place."

"Later. Examining certain skeletal fragments of large land and marine saurians and
primitive mammals, find singular local wounds or injuries to bony structure not
attributable to any known predatory or carnivorous animal of any period, of two sorts--
straight, penetrant bores, and apparently hacking incisions. One or two cases of cleanly
severed bones. Not many specimens affected. Am sending to camp for electric torches.
Will extend search area underground by hacking away stalactites."

"Still later. Have found peculiar soapstone fragment about six inches across and an inch
and a half thick, wholly unlike any visible local formation--greenish, but no evidences
to place its period. Has curious smoothness and regularity. Shaped like five-pointed star
with tips broken off, and signs of other cleavage at inward angles and in center of
surface. Small, smooth depression in center of unbroken surface. Arouses much
curiosity as to source and weathering. Probably some freak of water action. Carroll,
with magnifier, thinks he can make out additional markings of geologic significance.
Groups of tiny dots in regular patterns. Dogs growing uneasy as we work, and seem to
hate this soapstone. Must see if it has any peculiar odor. Will report again when Mills
gets back with light and we start on underground area."

"10:15 P.M. Important discovery. Orrendorf and Watkins, working underground at 9:45
with light, found monstrous barrel-shaped fossil of wholly unknown nature; probably
vegetable unless overgrown specimen of unknown marine radiata. Tissue evidently
preserved by mineral salts. Tough as leather, but astonishing flexibility retained in
places. Marks of broken-off parts at ends and around sides. Six feet end to end, three
and five-tenths feet central diameter, tapering to one foot at each end. Like a barrel with
five bulging ridges in place of staves. Lateral breakages, as of thinnish stalks, are at
equator in middle of these ridges. In furrows between ridges are curious growths--
combs or wings that fold up and spread out like fans. All greatly damaged but one,
which gives almost seven-foot wing spread. Arrangement reminds one of certain
monsters of primal myth, especially fabled Elder Things in Necronomicon.

"Their wings seem to be membranous, stretched on frame work of glandular tubing.

Apparent minute orifices in frame tubing at wing tips. Ends of body shriveled, giving no
clue to interior or to what has been broken off there. Must dissect when we get back to
camp. Can't decide whether vegetable or animal. Many features obviously of almost
incredible primitiveness. Have set all hands cutting stalactites and looking for further
specimens. Additional scarred bones found, but these must wait. Having trouble with
dogs. They can't endure the new specimen, and would probably tear it to pieces if we
didn't keep it at a distance from them."

"11:30 P.M. Attention, Dyer, Pabodie, Douglas. Matter of highest--I might say
transcendent--importance. Arkham must relay to Kingsport Head Station at once.
Strange barrel growth is the Archaean thing that left prints in rocks. Mills, Boudreau,
and Fowler discover cluster of thirteen more at underground point forty feet from
aperture. Mixed with curiously rounded and configured soapstone fragments smaller
than one previously found--star-shaped, but no marks of breakage except at some of the
points.

"Of organic specimens, eight apparently perfect, with all appendages. Have brought all
to surface, leading off dogs to distance. They cannot stand the things. Give close
attention to description and repeat back for accuracy Papers must get this right.

"Objects are eight feet long all over. Six-foot, five-ridged barrel torso three and five-
tenths feet central diameter, one foot end diameters. Dark gray, flexible, and infinitely
tough. Seven-foot membranous wings of same color, found folded, spread out of
furrows between ridges. Wing framework tubular or glandular, of lighter gray, with
orifices at wing tips. Spread wings have serrated edge. Around equator, one at central
apex of each of the five vertical, stave-like ridges are five systems of light gray flexible
arms or tentacles found tightly folded to torso but expansible to maximum length of
over three feet. Like arms of primitive crinoid. Single stalks three inches diameter
branch after six inches into five substalks, each of which branches after eight inches into
small, tapering tentacles or tendrils, giving each stalk a total of twenty-five tentacles.

"At top of torso blunt, bulbous neck of lighter gray, with gill-like suggestions, holds
yellowish five-pointed starfish-shaped apparent head covered with three-inch wiry cilia
of various prismatic colors.

"Head thick and puffy, about two feet point to point, with three-inch flexible yellowish
tubes projecting from each point. Slit in exact center of top probably breathing aperture.
At end of each tube is spherical expansion where yellowish membrane rolls back on
handling to reveal glassy, red-irised globe, evidently an eye.

"Five slightly longer reddish tubes start from inner angles of starfish-shaped head and
end in saclike swellings of same color which, upon pressure, open to bell-shaped
orifices two inches maximum diameter and lined with sharp, white tooth like
projections--probably mouths. All these tubes, cilia, and points of starfish head, found
folded tightly down; tubes and points clinging to bulbous neck and torso. Flexibility
surprising despite vast toughness.

"At bottom of torso, rough but dissimilarly functioning counterparts of head

arrangements exist. Bulbous light-gray pseudo-neck, without gill suggestions, holds
greenish five-pointed starfish arrangement.
"Tough, muscular arms four feet long and tapering from seven inches diameter at base
to about two and five-tenths at point. To each point is attached small end of a greenish
five-veined membranous triangle eight inches long and six wide at farther end. This is
the paddle, fin, or pseudofoot which has made prints in rocks from a thousand million to
fifty or sixty million years old.

"From inner angles of starfish arrangement project two-foot reddish tubes tapering from
three inches diameter at base to one at tip. Orifices at tips. All these parts infinitely
tough and leathery, but extremely flexible. Four-foot arms with paddles undoubtedly
used for locomotion of some sort, marine or otherwise. When moved, display
suggestions of exaggerated muscularity. As found, all these projections tightly folded
over pseudoneck and end of torso, corresponding to projections at other end.

"Cannot yet assign positively to animal or vegetable kingdom, but odds now favor
animal. Probably represents incredibly advanced evolution of radiata without loss of
certain primitive features. Echinoderm resemblances unmistakable despite local
contradictory evidences.

"Wing structure puzzles in view of probable marine habitat, but may have use in water
navigation. Symmetry is curiously vegetablelike, suggesting vegetable's essential up-
and-down structure rather than animal's fore-and-aft structure. Fabulously early date of
evolution, preceding even simplest Archaean protozoa hitherto known, baffles all
conjecture as to origin.

"Complete specimens have such uncanny resemblance to certain creatures of primal

myth that suggestion of ancient existence outside antarctic becomes inevitable. Dyer
and Pabodie have read Necronomicon and seen Clark Ashton Smith's nightmare
paintings based on text, and will understand when I speak of Elder Things supposed to
have created all earth life as jest or mistake. Students have always thought conception
formed from morbid imaginative treatment of very ancient tropical radiata. Also like
prehistoric folklore things Wilmarth has spoken of--Cthulhu cult appendages, etc.

"Vast field of study opened. Deposits probably of late Cretaceous or early Eocene
period, judging from associated specimens. Massive stalagmites deposited above them.
Hard work hewing out, but toughness prevented damage. State of preservation
miraculous, evidently owing to limestone action. No more found so far, but will resume
search later. Job now to get fourteen huge specimens to camp without dogs, which bark
furiously and can't be trusted near them.

"With nine men--three left to guard the dogs--we ought to manage the three sledges
fairly well, though wind is bad. Must establish plane communication with McMurdo
Sound and begin shipping material. But I've got to dissect one of these things before we
take any rest. Wish I had a real laboratory here. Dyer better kick himself for having tried
to stop my westward trip. First the world's greatest mountains, and then this. If this last
isn't the high spot of the expedition, I don't know what is. We're made scientifically.
Congrats, Pabodie, on the drill that opened up the cave. Now will Arkham please repeat
description?"

The sensations of Pabodie and myself at receipt of this report were almost beyond
description, nor were our companions much behind us in enthusiasm. McTighe, who
had hastily translated a few high spots as they came from the droning receiving set,
wrote out the entire message from his shorthand version as soon as Lake's operator
signed off. All appreciated the epoch-making significance of the discovery, and I sent
Lake congratulations as soon as the Arkham's operator had repeated back the
descriptive parts as requested; and my example was followed by Sherman from his
station at the McMurdo Sound supply cache, as well as by Captain Douglas of the
Arkham. Later, as head of the expedition, I added some remarks to be relayed through
the Arkham to the outside world. Of course, rest was an absurd thought amidst this
excitement; and my only wish was to get to Lake's camp as quickly as I could. It
disappointed me when he sent word that a rising mountain gale made early aerial travel
impossible.

But within an hour and a half interest again rose to banish disappointment. Lake,
sending more messages, told of the completely successful transportation of the fourteen
great specimens to the camp. It had been a hard pull, for the things were surprisingly
heavy; but nine men had accomplished it very neatly. Now some of the party were
hurriedly building a snow corral at a safe distance from the camp, to which the dogs
could be brought for greater convenience in feeding. The specimens were laid out on the
hard snow near the camp, save for one on which Lake was making crude attempts at
dissection.

This dissection seemed to be a greater task than had been expected, for, despite the heat
of a gasoline stove in the newly raised laboratory tent, the deceptively flexible tissues of
the chosen specimen--a powerful and intact one--lost nothing of their more than leathery
toughness. Lake was puzzled as to how he might make the requisite incisions without
violence destructive enough to upset all the structural niceties he was looking for. He
had, it is true, seven more perfect specimens; but these were too few to use up recklessly
unless the cave might later yield an unlimited supply. Accordingly he removed the
specimen and dragged in one which, though having remnants of the starfish
arrangements at both ends, was badly crushed and partly disrupted along one of the
great torso furrows.

Results, quickly reported over the wireless, were baffling and provocative indeed.
Nothing like delicacy or accuracy was possible with instruments hardly able to cut the
anomalous tissue, but the little that was achieved left us all awed and bewildered.
Existing biology would have to be wholly revised, for this thing was no product of any
cell growth science knows about. There had been scarcely any mineral replacement, and
despite an age of perhaps forty million years, the internal organs were wholly intact.
The leathery, undeteriorative, and almost indestructible quality was an inherent attribute
of the thing's form of organization, and pertained to some paleogean cycle of
invertebrate evolution utterly beyond our powers of speculation. At first all that Lake
found was dry, but as the heated tent produced its thawing effect, organic moisture of
pungent and offensive odor was encountered toward the thing's uninjured side. It was
not blood, but a thick, dark-green fluid apparently answering the same purpose. By the
time Lake reached this stage, all thirty-seven dogs had been brought to the still
uncompleted corral near the camp, and even at that distance set up a savage barking and
show of restlessness at the acrid, diffusive smell.

Far from helping to place the strange entity, this provisional dissection merely deepened
its mystery. All guesses about its external members had been correct, and on the
evidence of these one could hardly hesitate to call the thing animal; but internal
inspection brought up so many vegetable evidences that Lake was left hopelessly at sea.
It had digestion and circulation, and eliminated waste matter through the reddish tubes
of its starfish-shaped base. Cursorily, one would say that its respiration apparatus
handled oxygen rather than carbon dioxide, and there were odd evidences of air-storage
chambers and methods of shifting respiration from the external orifice to at least two
other fully developed breathing systems--gills and pores. Clearly, it was amphibian, and
probably adapted to long airless hibernation periods as well. Vocal organs seemed
present in connection with the main respiratory system, but they presented anomalies
beyond immediate solution. Articulate speech, in the sense of syllable utterance, seemed
barely conceivable, but musical piping notes covering a wide range were highly
probable. The muscular system was almost prematurely developed.

The nervous system was so complex and highly developed as to leave Lake aghast.
Though excessively primitive and archaic in some respects, the thing had a set of
ganglial centers and connectives arguing the very extremes of specialized development.
Its five-lobed brain was surprisingly advanced, and there were signs of a sensory
equipment, served in part through the wiry cilia of the head, involving factors alien to
any other terrestrial organism. Probably it has more than five senses, so that its habits
could not be predicted from any existing analogy. It must, Lake thought, have been a
creature of keen sensitiveness and delicately differentiated functions in its primal world-
-much like the ants and bees of today. It reproduced like the vegetable cryptogams,
especially the Pteridophyta, having spore cases at the tips of the wings and evidently
developing from a thallus or prothallus.

But to give it a name at this stage was mere folly. It looked like a radiate, but was
clearly something more. It was partly vegetable, but had three-fourths of the essentials
of animal structure. That it was marine in origin, its symmetrical contour and certain
other attributes clearly indicated; yet one could not be exact as to the limit of its later
adaptations. The wings, after all, held a persistent suggestion of the aerial. How it could
have undergone its tremendously complex evolution on a new-born earth in time to
leave prints in Archaean rocks was so far beyond conception as to make Lake
whimsically recall the primal myths about Great Old Ones who filtered down from the
stars and concocted earth life as a joke or mistake; and the wild tales of cosmic hill
things from outside told by a folklorist colleague in Miskatonic's English department.

Naturally, he considered the possibility of the pre-Cambrian prints having been made by
a less evolved ancestor of the present specimens, but quickly rejected this too-facile
theory upon considering the advanced structural qualities of the older fossils. If
anything, the later contours showed decadence rather than higher evolution. The size of
the pseudofeet had decreased, and the whole morphology seemed coarsened and
simplified. Moreover, the nerves and organs just examined held singular suggestions of
retrogression from forms still more complex. Atrophied and vestigial parts were
surprisingly prevalent. Altogether, little could be said to have been solved; and Lake fell
back on mythology for a provisional name--jocosely dubbing his finds "The Elder
Ones."

At about 2:30 A.M., having decided to postpone further work and get a little rest, he
covered the dissected organism with a tarpaulin, emerged from the laboratory tent, and
studied the intact specimens with renewed interest. The ceaseless antarctic sun had
begun to limber up their tissues a trifle, so that the head points and tubes of two or three
showed signs of unfolding; but Lake did not believe there was any danger of immediate
decomposition in the almost subzero air. He did, however, move all the undissected
specimens close together and throw a spare tent over them in order to keep off the direct
solar rays. That would also help to keep their possible scent away from the dogs, whose
hostile unrest was really becoming a problem, even at their substantial distance and
behind the higher and higher snow walls which an increased quota of the men were
hastening to raise around their quarters. He had to weight down the corners of the tent
cloth with heavy blocks of snow to hold it in place amidst the rising gale, for the titan
mountains seemed about to deliver some gravely severe blasts. Early apprehensions
about sudden antarctic winds were revived, and under Atwood's supervision precautions
were taken to bank the tents, new dog corral, and crude aeroplane shelters with snow on
the mountainward side. These latter shelters, begun with hard snow blocks during odd
moments, were by no means as high as they should have been; and Lake finally
detached all hands from other tasks to work on them.

It was after four when Lake at last prepared to sign off and advised us all to share the
rest period his outfit would take when the shelter walls were a little higher. He held
some friendly chat with Pabodie over the ether, and repeated his praise of the really
marvelous drills that had helped him make his discovery. Atwood also sent greetings
and praises. I gave Lake a warm word of congratulations, owning up that he was right
about the western trip, and we all agreed to get in touch by wireless at ten in the
morning. If the gale was then over, Lake would send a plane for the party at my base.
Just before retiring I dispatched a final message to the Arkham with instructions about
toning down the day's news for the outside world, since the full details seemed radical
enough to rouse a wave of incredulity until further substantiated.

III

None of us, I imagine, slept very heavily or continuously that morning. Both the
excitement of Lake's discovery and the mounting fury of the wind were against such a
thing. So savage was the blast, even where we were, that we could not help wondering
how much worse it was at Lake's camp, directly under the vast unknown peaks that bred
and delivered it. McTighe was awake at ten o'clock and tried to get Lake on the
wireless, as agreed, but some electrical condition in the disturbed air to the westward
seemed to prevent communication. We did, however, get the Arkham, and Douglas told
me that he had likewise been vainly trying to reach Lake. He had not known about the
wind, for very little was blowing at McMurdo Sound, despite its persistent rage where
we were.

Throughout the day we all listened anxiously and tried to get Lake at intervals, but
invariably without results. About noon a positive frenzy of wind stampeded out of the
west, causing us to fear for the safety of our camp; but it eventually died down, with
only a moderate relapse at 2 P.M. After three o'clock it was very quiet, and we
redoubled our efforts to get Lake. Reflecting that he had four planes, each provided with
an excellent short-wave outfit, we could not imagine any ordinary accident capable of
crippling all his wireless equipment at once. Nevertheless the stony silence continued,
and when we thought of the delirious force the wind must have had in his locality we
could not help making the more direful conjectures.
By six o'clock our fears had become intense and definite, and after a wireless
consultation with Douglas and Thorfinnssen I resolved to take steps toward
investigation. The fifth aeroplane, which we had left at the McMurdo Sound supply
cache with Sherman and two sailors, was in good shape and ready for instant use, and it
seemed that the very emergency for which it had been saved was now upon us. I got
Sherman by wireless and ordered him to join me with the plane and the two sailors at
the southern base as quickly as possible, the air conditions being apparently highly
favorable. We then talked over the personnel of the coming investigation party, and
decided that we would include all hands, together with the sledge and dogs which I had
kept with me. Even so great a load would not be too much for one of the huge planes
built to our special orders for heavy machinery transportation. At intervals I still tried to
reach Lake with the wireless, but all to no purpose.

Sherman, with the sailors Gunnarsson and Larsen, took off at 7:30, and reported a quiet
flight from several points on the wing. They arrived at our base at midnight, and all
hands at once discussed the next move. It was risky business sailing over the antarctic in
a single aeroplane without any line of bases, but no one drew back from what seemed
like the plainest necessity. We turned in at two o'clock for a brief rest after some
preliminary loading of the plane, but were up again in four hours to finish the loading
and packing.

At 7:15 A.M., January 25th, we started flying northwestward under McTighe's pilotage
with ten men, seven dogs, a sledge, a fuel and food supply, and other items including
the plane's wireless outfit. The atmosphere was clear, fairly quiet, and relatively mild in
temperature, and we anticipated very little trouble in reaching the latitude and longitude
designated by Lake as the site of his camp. Our apprehensions were over what we might
find, or fail to find, at the end of our journey, for silence continued to answer all calls
dispatched to the camp.

Every incident of that four-and-a-half-hour flight is burned into my recollection because

of its crucial position in my life. It marked my loss, at the age of fifty-four, of all that
peace and balance which the normal mind possesses through its accustomed conception
of external nature and nature's laws. Thenceforward the ten of us--but the student
Danforth and myself above all others--were to face a hideously amplified world of
lurking horrors which nothing can erase from our emotions, and which we would refrain
from sharing with mankind in general if we could. The newspapers have printed the
bulletins we sent from the moving plane, telling of our nonstop course, our two battles
with treacherous upper-air gales, our glimpse of the broken surface where Lake had
sunk his mid-journey shaft three days before, and our sight of a group of those strange
fluffy snow cylinders noted by Amundsen and Byrd as rolling in the wind across the
endless leagues of frozen plateau. There came a point, though, when our sensations
could not be conveyed in any words the press would understand, and a latter point when
we had to adopt an actual rule of strict censorship.

The sailor Larsen was first to spy the jagged line of witchlike cones and pinnacles
ahead, and his shouts sent everyone to the windows of the great cabined plane. Despite
our speed, they were very slow in gaining prominence; hence we knew that they must
be infinitely far off, and visible only because of their abnormal height. Little by little,
however, they rose grimly into the western sky; allowing us to distinguish various bare,
bleak, blackish summits, and to catch the curious sense of fantasy which they inspired
as seen in the reddish antarctic light against the provocative background of iridescent
ice-dust clouds. In the whole spectacle there was a persistent, pervasive hint of
stupendous secrecy and potential revelation. It was as if these stark, nightmare spires
marked the pylons of a frightful gateway into forbidden spheres of dream, and complex
gulfs of remote time, space, and ultra-dimensionality. I could not help feeling that they
were evil things--mountains of madness whose farther slopes looked out over some
accursed ultimate abyss. That seething, half-luminous cloud background held ineffable
suggestions of a vague, ethereal beyondness far more than terrestrially spatial, and gave
appalling reminders of the utter remoteness, separateness, desolation, and aeon-long
death of this untrodden and unfathomed austral world.

It was young Danforth who drew our notice to the curious regularities of the higher
mountain skyline--regularities like clinging fragments of perfect cubes, which Lake had
mentioned in his messages, and which indeed justified his comparison with the
dreamlike suggestions of primordial temple ruins, on cloudy Asian mountaintops so
subtly and strangely painted by Roerich. There was indeed something hauntingly
Roerich-like about this whole unearthly continent of mountainous mystery. I had felt it
in October when we first caught sight of Victoria Land, and I felt it afresh now. I felt,
too, another wave of uneasy consciousness of Archaean mythical resemblances; of how
disturbingly this lethal realm corresponded to the evilly famed plateau of Leng in the
primal writings. Mythologists have placed Leng in Central Asia; but the racial memory
of man--or of his predecessors--is long, and it may well be that certain tales have come
down from lands and mountains and temples of horror earlier than Asia and earlier than
any human world we know. A few daring mystics have hinted at a pre-Pleistocene
origin for the fragmentary Pnakotic Manuscripts, and have suggested that the devotees
of Tsathoggua were as alien to mankind as Tsathoggua itself. Leng, wherever in space
or time it might brood, was not a region I would care to be in or near, nor did I relish the
proximity of a world that had ever bred such ambiguous and Archaean monstrosities as
those Lake had just mentioned. At the moment I felt sorry that I had ever read the
abhorred Necronomicon, or talked so much with that unpleasantly erudite folklorist
Wilmarth at the university.

This mood undoubtedly served to aggravate my reaction to the bizarre mirage which
burst upon us from the increasingly opalescent zenith as we drew near the mountains
and began to make out the cumulative undulations of the foothills. I had seen dozens of
polar mirages during the preceding weeks, some of them quite as uncanny and
fantastically vivid as the present example; but this one had a wholly novel and obscure
quality of menacing symbolism, and I shuddered as the seething labyrinth of fabulous
walls and towers and minarets loomed out of the troubled ice vapors above our heads.

The effect was that of a Cyclopean city of no architecture known to man or to human
imagination, with vast aggregations of night-black masonry embodying monstrous
perversions of geometrical laws. There were truncated cones, sometimes terraced or
fluted, surmounted by tall cylindrical shafts here and there bulbously enlarged and often
capped with tiers of thinnish scalloped disks; and strange beetling, table-like
constructions suggesting piles of multitudinous rectangular slabs or circular plates or
five-pointed stars with each one overlapping the one beneath. There were composite
cones and pyramids either alone or surmounting cylinders or cubes or flatter truncated
cones and pyramids, and occasional needle-like spires in curious clusters of five. All of
these febrile structures seemed knit together by tubular bridges crossing from one to the
other at various dizzy heights, and the implied scale of the whole was terrifying and
oppressive in its sheer gigantism. The general type of mirage was not unlike some of the
wilder forms observed and drawn by the arctic whaler Scoresby in 1820, but at this time
and place, with those dark, unknown mountain peaks soaring stupendously ahead, that
anomalous elder-world discovery in our minds, and the pall of probable disaster
enveloping the greater part of our expedition, we all seemed to find in it a taint of latent
malignity and infinitely evil portent.

I was glad when the mirage began to break up, though in the process the various
nightmare turrets and cones assumed distorted, temporary forms of even vaster
hideousness. As the whole illusion dissolved to churning opalescence we began to look
earthward again, and saw that our journey's end was not far off. The unknown
mountains ahead rose dizzily up like a fearsome rampart of giants, their curious
regularities showing with startling clearness even without a field glass. We were over
the lowest foothills now, and could see amidst the snow, ice, and bare patches of their
main plateau a couple of darkish spots which we took to be Lake's camp and boring.
The higher foothills shot up between five and six miles away, forming a range almost
distinct from the terrifying line of more than Himalayan peaks beyond them. At length
Ropes--the student who had relieved McTighe at the controls--began to head downward
toward the left-hand dark spot whose size marked it as the camp. As he did so, McTighe
sent out the last uncensored wireless message the world was to receive from our
expedition.

Everyone, of course, has read the brief and unsatisfying bulletins of the rest of our
antarctic sojourn. Some hours after our landing we sent a guarded report of the tragedy
we found, and reluctantly announced the wiping out of the whole Lake party by the
frightful wind of the preceding day, or of the night before that. Eleven known dead,
young Gedney missing. People pardoned our hazy lack of details through realization of
the shock the sad event must have caused us, and believed us when we explained that
the mangling action of the wind had rendered all eleven bodies unsuitable for
transportation outside. Indeed, I flatter myself that even in the midst of our distress,
utter bewilderment, and soul-clutching horror, we scarcely went beyond the truth in any
specific instance. The tremendous significance lies in what we dared not tell; what I
would not tell now but for the need of warning others off from nameless terrors.

It is a fact that the wind had brought dreadful havoc. Whether all could have lived
through it, even without the other thing, is gravely open to doubt. The storm, with its
fury of madly driven ice particles, must have been beyond anything our expedition had
encountered before. One aeroplane shelter-wall, it seems, had been left in a far too
flimsy and inadequate state--was nearly pulverized--and the derrick at the distant boring
was entirely shaken to pieces. The exposed metal of the grounded planes and drilling
machinery was bruised into a high polish, and two of the small tents were flattened
despite their snow banking. Wooden surfaces left out in the blaster were pitted and
denuded of paint, and all signs of tracks in the snow were completely obliterated. It is
also true that we found none of the Archaean biological objects in a condition to take
outside as a whole. We did gather some minerals from a vast, tumbled pile, including
several of the greenish soapstone fragments whose odd five-pointed rounding and faint
patterns of grouped dots caused so many doubtful comparisons; and some fossil bones,
among which were the most typical of the curiously injured specimens.
None of the dogs survived, their hurriedly built snow inclosure near the camp being
almost wholly destroyed. The wind may have done that, though the greater breakage on
the side next the camp, which was not the windward one, suggests an outward leap or
break of the frantic beasts themselves. All three sledges were gone, and we have tried to
explain that the wind may have blown them off into the unknown. The drill and ice-
melting machinery at the boring were too badly damaged to warrant salvage, so we used
them to choke up that subtly disturbing gateway to the past which Lake had blasted. We
likewise left at the camp the two most shaken up of the planes; since our surviving party
had only four real pilots--Sherman, Danforth, McTighe, and Ropes--in all, with
Danforth in a poor nervous shape to navigate. We brought back all the books, scientific
equipment, and other incidentals we could find, though much was rather unaccountably
blown away. Spare tents and furs were either missing or badly out of condition.

It was approximately 4 P.M., after wide plane cruising had forced us to give Gedney up
for lost, that we sent our guarded message to the Arkham for relaying; and I think we
did well to keep it as calm and noncommittal as we succeeded in doing. The most we
said about agitation concerned our dogs, whose frantic uneasiness near the biological
specimens was to be expected from poor Lake's accounts. We did not mention, I think,
their display of the same uneasiness when sniffing around the queer greenish soapstones
and certain other objects in the disordered region-objects including scientific
instruments, aeroplanes, and machinery, both at the camp and at the boring, whose parts
had been loosened, moved, or otherwise tampered with by winds that must have
harbored singular curiosity and investigativeness.

About the fourteen biological specimens, we were pardonably indefinite. We said that
the only ones we discovered were damaged, but that enough was left of them to prove
Lake's description wholly and impressively accurate. It was hard work keeping our
personal emotions out of this matter--and we did not mention numbers or say exactly
how we had found those which we did find. We had by that time agreed not to transmit
anything suggesting madness on the part of Lake's men, and it surely looked like
madness to find six imperfect monstrosities carefully buried upright in nine-foot snow
graves under five-pointed mounds punched over with groups of dots in patterns exactly
those on the queer greenish soapstones dug up from Mesozoic or Tertiary times. The
eight perfect specimens mentioned by Lake seemed to have been completely blown
away.

We were careful, too, about the public's general peace of mind; hence Danforth and I
said little about that frightful trip over the mountains the next day. It was the fact that
only a radically lightened plane could possibly cross a range of such height, which
mercifully limited that scouting tour to the two of us. On our return at one A.M.,
Danforth was close to hysterics, but kept an admirably stiff upper lip. It took no
persuasion to make him promise not to show our sketches and the other things we
brought away in our pockets, not to say anything more to the others than what we had
agreed to relay outside, and to hide our camera films for private development later on;
so that part of my present story will be as new to Pabodie, McTighe, Ropes, Sherman,
and the rest as it will be to the world in general. Indeed, Danforth is closer mouthed than
I: for he saw, or thinks he saw, one thing he will not tell even me.

As all know, our report included a tale of a hard ascent--a confirmation of Lake's
opinion that the great peaks are of Archaean slate and other very primal crumpled strata
unchanged since at least middle Comanchian times; a conventional comment on the
regularity of the clinging cube and rampart formations; a decision that the cave mouths
indicate dissolved calcaerous veins; a conjecture that certain slopes and passes would
permit of the scaling and crossing of the entire range by seasoned mountaineers; and a
remark that the mysterious other side holds a lofty and immense superplateau as ancient
and unchanging as the mountains themselves--twenty thousand feet in elevation, with
grotesque rock formations protruding through a thin glacial layer and with low gradual
foothills between the general plateau surface and the sheer precipices of the highest
peaks.

This body of data is in every respect true so far as it goes, and it completely satisfied the
men at the camp. We laid our absence of sixteen hours--a longer time than our
announced flying, landing, reconnoitering, and rock-collecting program called for--to a
long mythical spell of adverse wind conditions, and told truly of our landing on the
farther foothills. Fortunately our tale sounded realistic and prosaic enough not to tempt
any of the others into emulating our flight. Had any tried to do that, I would have used
every ounce of my persuasion to stop them--and I do not know what Danforth would
have done. While we were gone, Pabodie, Sherman, Ropes, McTighe, and Williamson
had worked like beavers over Lake's two best planes, fitting them again for use despite
the altogether unaccountable juggling of their operative mechanism.

We decided to load all the planes the next morning and start back for our old base as
soon as possible. Even though indirect, that was the safest way to work toward
McMurdo Sound; for a straightline flight across the most utterly unknown stretches of
the aeon-dead continent would involve many additional hazards. Further exploration
was hardly feasible in view of our tragic decimation and the ruin of our drilling
machinery. The doubts and horrors around us--which we did not reveal--made us wish
only to escape from this austral world of desolation and brooding madness as swiftly as
we could.

As the public knows, our return to the world was accomplished without further
disasters. All planes reached the old base on the evening of the next day--January 27th--
after a swift nonstop flight; and on the 28th we made McMurdo Sound in two laps, the
one pause being very brief, and occasioned by a faulty rudder in the furious wind over
the ice shelf after we had cleared the great plateau. In five days more, the Arkham and
Miskatonic, with all hands and equipment on board, were shaking clear of the
thickening field ice and working up Ross Sea with the mocking mountains of Victoria
Land looming westward against a troubled antarctic sky and twisting the wind's wails
into a wide-ranged musical piping which chilled my soul to the quick. Less than a
fortnight later we left the last hint of polar land behind us and thanked heaven that we
were clear of a haunted, accursed realm where life and death, space and time, have
made black and blasphemous alliances, in the unknown epochs since matter first
writhed and swam on the planet's scarce-cooled crust.

Since our return we have all constantly worked to discourage antarctic exploration, and
have kept certain doubts and guesses to ourselves with splendid unity and faithfulness.
Even young Danforth, with his nervous breakdown, has not flinched or babbled to his
doctors--indeed, as I have said, there is one thing he thinks he alone saw which he will
not tell even me, though I think it would help his psychological state if he would
consent to do so. It might explain and relieve much, though perhaps the thing was no
more than the delusive aftermath of an earlier shock. That is the impression I gather
after those rare, irresponsible moments when he whispers disjointed things to me--
things which he repudiates vehemently as soon as he gets a grip on himself again.

It will be hard work deterring others from the great white south, and some of our efforts
may directly harm our cause by drawing inquiring notice. We might have known from
the first that human curiosity is undying, and that the results we announced would be
enough to spur others ahead on the same age-long pursuit of the unknown. Lake's
reports of those biological monstrosities had aroused naturalists and paleontologists to
the highest pitch, though we were sensible enough not to show the detached parts we
had taken from the actual buried specimens, or our photographs of those specimens as
they were found. We also refrained from showing the more puzzling of the scarred
bones and greenish soapstones; while Danforth and I have closely guarded the pictures
we took or drew on the superplateau across the range, and the crumpled things we
smoothed, studied in terror, and brought away in our pockets.

But now that Starkweather-Moore party is organizing, and with a thoroughness far
beyond anything our outfit attempted. If not dissuaded, they will get to the innermost
nucleus of the antarctic and melt and bore till they bring up that which we know may
end the world. So I must break through all reticences at last--even about that ultimate,
nameless thing beyond the mountains of madness.

IV

It is only with vast hesitancy and repugnance that I let my mind go back to Lake's camp
and what we really found there--and to that other thing beyond the mountains of
madness. I am constantly tempted to shirk the details, and to let hints stand for actual
facts and ineluctable deductions. I hope I have said enough already to let me glide
briefly over the rest; the rest, that is, of the horror at the camp. I have told of the wind-
ravaged terrain, the damaged shelters, the disarranged machinery, the varied uneasiness
of our dogs, the missing sledges and other items, the deaths of men and dogs, the
absence of Gedney, and the six insanely buried biological specimens, strangely sound in
texture for all their structural injuries, from a world forty million years dead. I do not
recall whether I mentioned that upon checking up the canine bodies we found one dog
missing. We did not think much about that till later--indeed, only Danforth and I have
thought of it at all.

The principal things I have been keeping back relate to the bodies, and to certain subtle
points which may or may not lend a hideous and incredible kind of rationale to the
apparent chaos. At the time, I tried to keep the men's minds off those points; for it was
so much simpler--so much more normal--to lay everything to an outbreak of madness
on the part of some of Lake's party. From the look of things, that demon mountain wind
must have been enough to drive any man mad in the midst of this center of all earthly
mystery and desolation.

The crowning abnormality, of course, was the condition of the bodies--men and dogs
alike. They had all been in some terrible kind of conflict, and were torn and mangled in
fiendish and altogether inexplicable ways. Death, so far as we could judge, had in each
case come from strangulation or laceration. The dogs had evidently started the trouble,
for the state of their ill-built corral bore witness to its forcible breakage from within. It
had been set some distance from the camp because of the hatred of the animals for those
hellish Archaean organisms, but the precaution seemed to have been taken in vain.
When left alone in that monstrous wind, behind flimsy walls of insufficient height, they
must have stampeded--whether from the wind itself, or from some subtle, increasing
odor emitted by the nightmare specimens, one could not say.

But whatever had happened, it was hideous and revolting enough. Perhaps I had better
put squeamishness aside and tell the worst at last--though with a categorical statement
of opinion, based on the first-hand observations and most rigid deductions of both
Danforth and myself, that the then missing Gedney was in no way responsible for the
loathsome horrors we found. I have said that the bodies were frightfully mangled. Now
I must add that some were incised and subtracted from in the most curious, cold-
blooded, and inhuman fashion. It was the same with dogs and men. All the healthier,
fatter bodies, quadrupedal or bipedal, had had their most solid masses of tissue cut out
and removed, as by a careful butcher; and around them was a strange sprinkling of salt--
taken from the ravaged provision chests on the planes--which conjured up the most
horrible associations. The thing had occurred in one of the crude aeroplane shelters from
which the plane had been dragged out, and subsequent winds had effaced all tracks
which could have supplied any plausible theory. Scattered bits of clothing, roughly
slashed from the human incision subjects, hinted no clues. It is useless to bring up the
half impression of certain faint snow prints in one shielded corner of the ruined
inclosure--because that impression did not concern human prints at all, but was clearly
mixed up with all the talk of fossil prints which poor Lake had been giving throughout
the preceding weeks. One had to be careful of one's imagination in the lee of those
overshadowing mountains of madness.

As I have indicated, Gedney and one dog turned out to be missing in the end. When we
came on that terrible shelter we had missed two dogs and two men; but the fairly
unharmed dissecting tent, which we entered after investigating the monstrous graves,
had something to reveal. It was not as Lake had left it, for the covered parts of the
primal monstrosity had been removed from the improvised table. Indeed, we had
already realized that one of the six imperfect and insanely buried things we had found--
the one with the trace of a peculiarly hateful odor--must represent the collected sections
of the entity which Lake had tried to analyze. On and around that laboratory table were
strewn other things, and it did not take long for us to guess that those things were the
carefully though oddly and inexpertly dissected parts of one man and one dog. I shall
spare the feelings of survivors by omitting mention of the man's identity. Lake's
anatomical instruments were missing, but there were evidences of their careful
cleansing. The gasoline stove was also gone, though around it we found a curious litter
of matches. We buried the human parts beside the other ten men; and the canine parts
with the other thirty-five dogs. Concerning the bizarre smudges on the laboratory table,
and on the jumble of roughly handled illustrated books scattered near it, we were much
too bewildered to speculate.

This formed the worst of the camp horror, but other things were equally perplexing. The
disappearance of Gedney, the one dog, the eight uninjured biological specimens, the
three sledges, and certain instruments, illustrated technical and scientific books, writing
materials, electric torches and batteries, food and fuel, heating apparatus, spare tents, fur
suits, and the like, was utterly beyond sane conjecture; as were likewise the spatter-
fringed ink blots on certain pieces of paper, and the evidences of curious alien fumbling
and experimentation around the planes and all other mechanical devices both at the
camp and at the boring. The dogs seemed to abhor this oddly disordered machinery.
Then, too, there was the upsetting of the larder, the disappearance of certain staples, and
the jarringly comical heap of tin cans pried open in the most unlikely ways and at the
most unlikely places. The profusion of scattered matches, intact, broken, or spent,
formed another minor enigma--as did the two or three tent cloths and fur suits which we
found lying about with peculiar and unorthodox slashings conceivably due to clumsy
efforts at unimaginable adaptations. The maltreatment of the human and canine bodies,
and the crazy burial of the damaged Archaean specimens, were all of a piece with this
apparent disintegrative madness. In view of just such an eventuality as the present one,
we carefully photographed all the main evidences of insane disorder at the camp; and
shall use the prints to buttress our pleas against the departure of the proposed
Starkweather-Moore Expedition.

Our first act after finding the bodies in the shelter was to photograph and open the row
of insane graves with the five-pointed snow mounds. We could not help noticing the
resemblance of these monstrous mounds, with their clusters of grouped dots, to poor
Lake's descriptions of the strange greenish soapstones; and when we came on some of
the soapstones themselves in the great mineral pile, we found the likeness very close
indeed. The whole general formation, it must be made clear, seemed abominably
suggestive of the starfish head of the Archaean entities; and we agreed that the
suggestion must have worked potently upon the sensitized minds of Lake's overwrought
party.

For madness--centering in Gedney as the only possible surviving agent--was the

explanation spontaneously adopted by everybody so far as spoken utterance was
concerned; though I will not be so naive as to deny that each of us may have harbored
wild guesses which sanity forbade him to formulate completely. Sherman, Pabodie, and
McTighe made an exhaustive aeroplane cruise over all the surrounding territory in the
afternoon, sweeping the horizon with field glasses in quest of Gedney and of the various
missing things; but nothing came to light. The party reported that the titan barrier range
extended endlessly to right and left alike, without any diminution in height or essential
structure. On some of the peaks, though, the regular cube and rampart formations were
bolder and plainer, having doubly fantastic similitudes to Roerich-painted Asian hill
ruins. The distribution of cryptical cave mouths on the black snow-denuded summits
seemed roughly even as far as the range could be traced.

In spite of all the prevailing horrors, we were left with enough sheer scientific zeal and
adventurousness to wonder about the unknown realm beyond those mysterious
mountains. As our guarded messages stated, we rested at midnight after our day of
terror and bafflement--but not without a tentative plan for one or more range-crossing
altitude flights in a lightened plane with aerial camera and geologist's outfit, beginning
the following morning. It was decided that Danforth and I try it first, and we awaked at
7 A.M. intending an early flight; however, heavy winds--mentioned in our brief bulletin
to the outside world--delayed our start till nearly nine o'clock.

I have already repeated the noncommittal story we told the men at camp--and relayed
outside--after our return sixteen hours later. It is now my terrible duty to amplify this
account by filling in the merciful blanks with hints of what we really saw in the hidden
transmontane world--hints of the revelations which have finally driven Danforth to a
nervous collapse. I wish he would add a really frank word about the thing which he
thinks he alone saw--even though it was probably a nervous delusion--and which was
perhaps the last straw that put him where he is; but he is firm against that. All I can do is
to repeat his later disjointed whispers about what set him shrieking as the plane soared
back through the wind-tortured mountain pass after that real and tangible shock which I
shared. This will form my last word. If the plain signs of surviving elder horrors in what
I disclose be not enough to keep others from meddling with the inner antarctic--or at
least from prying too deeply beneath the surface of that ultimate waste of forbidden
secrets and inhuman, aeon-cursed desolation--the responsibility for unnamable and
perhaps immeasurable evils will not be mine.

Danforth and I, studying the notes made by Pabodie in his afternoon flight and checking
up with a sextant, had calculated that the lowest available pass in the range lay
somewhat to the right of us, within sight of camp, and about twenty-three thousand or
twenty-four thousand feet above sea level. For this point, then, we first headed in the
lightened plane as we embarked on our flight of discovery. The camp itself, on foothills
which sprang from a high continental plateau, was some twelve thousand feet in
altitude; hence the actual height increase necessary was not so vast as it might seem.
Nevertheless we were acutely conscious of the rarefied air and intense cold as we rose;
for, on account of visibility conditions, we had to leave the cabin windows open. We
were dressed, of course, in our heaviest furs.

As we drew near the forbidding peaks, dark and sinister above the line of crevasse-riven
snow and interstitial glaciers, we noticed more and more the curiously regular
formations clinging to the slopes; and thought again of the strange Asian paintings of
Nicholas Roerich. The ancient and wind-weathered rock strata fully verified all of
Lake's bulletins, and proved that these pinnacles had been towering up in exactly the
same way since a surprisingly early time in earth's history--perhaps over fifty million
years. How much higher they had once been, it was futile to guess; but everything about
this strange region pointed to obscure atmospheric influences unfavorable to change,
and calculated to retard the usual climatic processes of rock disintegration.

But it was the mountainside tangle of regular cubes, ramparts, and cave mouths which
fascinated and disturbed us most. I studied them with a field glass and took aerial
photographs while Danforth drove; and at times I relieved him at the controls--though
my aviation knowledge was purely an amateur's--in order to let him use the binoculars.
We could easily see that much of the material of the things was a lightish Archaean
quartzite, unlike any formation visible over broad areas of the general surface; and that
their regularity was extreme and uncanny to an extent which poor Lake had scarcely
hinted.

As he had said, their edges were crumbled and rounded from untold aeons of savage
weathering; but their preternatural solidity and tough material had saved them from
obliteration. Many parts, especially those closest to the slopes, seemed identical in
substance with the surrounding rock surface. The whole arrangement looked like the
ruins of Macchu Picchu in the Andes, or the primal foundation walls of Kish as dug up
by the Oxford Field Museum Expedition in 1929; and both Danforth and I obtained that
occasional impression of separate Cyclopean blocks which Lake had attributed to his
flight-companion Carroll. How to account for such things in this place was frankly
beyond me, and I felt queerly humbled as a geologist. Igneous formations often have
strange regularities--like the famous Giants' Causeway in Ireland--but this stupendous
range, despite Lake's original suspicion of smoking cones, was above all else
nonvolcanic in evident structure.

The curious cave mouths, near which the odd formations seemed most abundant,
presented another albeit a lesser puzzle because of their regularity of outline. They
were, as Lake's bulletin had said, often approximately square or semicircular; as if the
natural orifices had been shaped to greater symmetry by some magic hand. Their
numerousness and wide distribution were remarkable, and suggested that the whole
region was honeycombed with tunnels dissolved out of limestone strata. Such glimpses
as we secured did not extend far within the caverns, but we saw that they were
apparently clear of stalactites and stalagmites. Outside, those parts of the mountain
slopes adjoining the apertures seemed invariably smooth and regular; and Danforth
thought that the slight cracks and pittings of the weathering tended toward unusual
patterns. Filled as he was with the horrors and strangenesses discovered at the camp, he
hinted that the pittings vaguely resembled those baffling groups of dots sprinkled over
the primeval greenish soapstones, so hideously duplicated on the madly conceived snow
mounds above those six buried monstrosities.

We had risen gradually in flying over the higher foothills and along toward the
relatively low pass we had selected. As we advanced we occasionally looked down at
the snow and ice of the land route, wondering whether we could have attempted the trip
with the simpler equipment of earlier days. Somewhat to our surprise we saw that the
terrain was far from difficult as such things go; and that despite the crevasses and other
bad spots it would not have been likely to deter the sledges of a Scott, a Shackleton, or
an Amundsen. Some of the glaciers appeared to lead up to wind-bared passes with
unusual continuity, and upon reaching our chosen pass we found that its case formed no
exception.

Our sensations of tense expectancy as we prepared to round the crest and peer out over
an untrodden world can hardly be described on paper; even though we had no cause to
think the regions beyond the range essentially different from those already seen and
traversed. The touch of evil mystery in these barrier mountains, and in the beckoning
sea of opalescent sky glimpsed betwixt their summits, was a highly subtle and
attenuated matter not to be explained in literal words. Rather was it an affair of vague
psychological symbolism and aesthetic association--a thing mixed up with exotic poetry
and paintings, and with archaic myths lurking in shunned and forbidden volumes. Even
the wind's burden held a peculiar strain of conscious malignity; and for a second it
seemed that the composite sound included a bizarre musical whistling or piping over a
wide range as the blast swept in and out of the omnipresent and resonant cave mouths.
There was a cloudy note of reminiscent repulsion in this sound, as complex and
unplaceable as any of the other dark impressions.

We were now, after a slow ascent, at a height of twenty-three thousand, five hundred
and seventy feet according to the aneroid; and had left the region of clinging snow
definitely below us. Up here were only dark, bare rock slopes and the start of rough-
ribbed glaciers--but with those provocative cubes, ramparts, and echoing cave mouths to
add a portent of the unnatural, the fantastic, and the dreamlike. Looking along the line
of high peaks, I thought I could see the one mentioned by poor Lake, with a rampart
exactly on top. It seemed to be half lost in a queer antarctic haze--such a haze, perhaps,
as had been responsible for Lake's early notion of volcanism. The pass loomed directly
before us, smooth and windswept between its jagged and malignly frowning pylons.
Beyond it was a sky fretted with swirling vapors and lighted by the low polar sun--the
sky of that mysterious farther realm upon which we felt no human eye had ever gazed.

A few more feet of altitude and we would behold that realm. Danforth and I, unable to
speak except in shouts amidst the howling, piping wind that raced through the pass and
added to the noise of the unmuffled engines, exchanged eloquent glances. And then,
having gained those last few feet, we did indeed stare across the momentous divide and
over the unsampled secrets of an elder and utterly alien earth.

I think that both of us simultaneously cried out in mixed awe, wonder, terror, and
disbelief in our own senses as we finally cleared the pass and saw what lay beyond. Of
course, we must have had some natural theory in the back of our heads to steady our
faculties for the moment. Probably we thought of such things as the grotesquely
weathered stones of the Garden of the Gods in Colorado, or the fantastically
symmetrical wind-carved rocks of the Arizona desert. Perhaps we even half thought the
sight a mirage like that we had seen the morning before on first approaching those
mountains of madness. We must have had some such normal notions to fall back upon
as our eyes swept that limitless, tempest-scarred plateau and grasped the almost endless
labyrinth of colossal, regular, and geometrically eurythmic stone masses which reared
their crumbled and pitted crests above a glacial sheet not more than forty or fifty feet
deep at its thickest, and in places obviously thinner.

The effect of the monstrous sight was indescribable, for some fiendish violation of
known natural law seemed certain at the outset. Here, on a hellishly ancient table-land
fully twenty thousand feet high, and in a climate deadly to habitation since a prehuman
age not less than five hundred thousand years ago, there stretched nearly to the vision's
limit a tangle of orderly stone which only the desperation of mental self-defense could
possibly attribute to any but conscious and artificial cause. We had previously
dismissed, so far as serious thought was concerned, any theory that the cubes and
ramparts of the mountainsides were other than natural in origin. How could they be
otherwise, when man himself could scarcely have been differentiated from the great
apes at the time when this region succumbed to the present unbroken reign of glacial
death?

Yet now the sway of reason seemed irrefutably shaken, for this Cyclopean maze of
squared, curved, and angled blocks had features which cut off all comfortable refuge. It
was, very clearly, the blasphemous city of the mirage in stark, objective, and ineluctable
reality. That damnable portent had had a material basis after all--there had been some
horizontal stratum of ice dust in the upper air, and this shocking stone survival had
projected its image across the mountains according to the simple laws of reflection, Of
course, the phantom had been twisted and exaggerated, and had contained things which
the real source did not contain; yet now, as we saw that real source, we thought it even
more hideous and menacing than its distant image.

Only the incredible, unhuman massiveness of these vast stone towers and ramparts had
saved the frightful things from utter annihilation in the hundreds of thousands--perhaps
millions--of years it had brooded there amidst the blasts of a bleak upland. "Corona
Mundi--Roof of the World--" All sorts of fantastic phrases sprang to our lips as we
looked dizzily down at the unbelievable spectacle. I thought again of the eldritch primal
myths that had so persistently haunted me since my first sight of this dead antarctic
world--of the demoniac plateau of Leng, of the Mi-Go, or abominable Snow Men of the
Himalayas, of the Pnakotic Manuscripts with their prehuman implications, of the
Cthulhu cult, of the Necronomicon, and of the Hyperborean legends of formless
Tsathoggua and the worse than formless star spawn associated with that semientity.

For boundless miles in every direction the thing stretched off with very little thinning;
indeed, as our eyes followed it to the right and left along the base of the low, gradual
foothills which separated it from the actual mountain rim, we decided that we could see
no thinning at all except for an interruption at the left of the pass through which we had
come. We had merely struck, at random, a limited part of something of incalculable
extent. The foothills were more sparsely sprinkled with grotesque stone structures,
linking the terrible city to the already familiar cubes and ramparts which evidently
formed its mountain outposts. These latter, as well as the queer cave mouths, were as
thick on the inner as on the outer sides of the mountains.

The nameless stone labyrinth consisted, for the most part, of walls from ten to one
hundred and fifty feet in ice-clear height, and of a thickness varying from five to ten
feet. It was composed mostly of prodigious blocks of dark primordial slate, schist, and
sandstone--blocks in many cases as large as 4 x 6 x 8 feet--though in several places it
seemed to be carved out of a solid, uneven bed rock of pre-Cambrian slate. The
buildings were far from equal in size, there being innumerable honeycomb
arrangements of enormous extent as well as smaller separate structures. The general
shape of these things tended to be conical, pyramidal, or terraced; though there were
many perfect cylinders, perfect cubes, clusters of cubes, and other rectangular forms,
and a peculiar sprinkling of angled edifices whose five-pointed ground plan roughly
suggested modern fortifications. The builders had made constant and expert use of the
principle of the arch, and domes had probably existed in the city's heyday.

The whole tangle was monstrously weathered, and the glacial surface from which the
towers projected was strewn with fallen blocks and immemorial debris. Where the
glaciation was transparent we could see the lower parts of the gigantic piles, and we
noticed the ice-preserved stone bridges which connected the different towers at varying
distances above the ground. On the exposed walls we could detect the scarred places
where other and higher bridges of the same sort had existed. Closer inspection revealed
countless largish windows; some of which were closed with shutters of a petrified
material originally wood, though most gaped open in a sinister and menacing fashion.
Many of the ruins, of course, were roofless, and with uneven though wind-rounded
upper edges; whilst others, of a more sharply conical or pyramidal model or else
protected by higher surrounding structures, preserved intact outlines despite the
omnipresent crumbling and pitting. With the field glass we could barely make out what
seemed to be sculptural decorations in horizontal bands--decorations including those
curious groups of dots whose presence on the ancient soapstones now assumed a vastly
larger significance.

In many places the buildings were totally ruined and the ice sheet deeply riven from
various geologic causes. In other places the stonework was worn down to the very level
of the glaciation. One broad swath, extending from the plateau's interior, to a cleft in the
foothills about a mile to the left of the pass we had traversed, was wholly free from
buildings. It probably represented, we concluded, the course of some great river which
in Tertiary times--millions of years ago--had poured through the city and into some
prodigious subterranean abyss of the great barrier range. Certainly, this was above all a
region of caves, gulfs, and underground secrets beyond human penetration.

Looking back to our sensations, and recalling our dazedness at viewing this monstrous
survival from aeons we had thought prehuman, I can only wonder that we preserved the
semblance of equilibrium, which we did. Of course, we knew that something--
chronology, scientific theory, or our own consciousness--was woefully awry; yet we
kept enough poise to guide the plane, observe many things quite minutely, and take a
careful series of photographs which may yet serve both us and the world in good stead.
In my case, ingrained scientific habit may have helped; for above all my bewilderment
and sense of menace, there burned a dominant curiosity to fathom more of this age-old
secret--to know what sort of beings had built and lived in this incalculably gigantic
place, and what relation to the general world of its time or of other times so unique a
concentration of life could have had.

For this place could be no ordinary city. It must have formed the primary nucleus and
center of some archaic and unbelievable chapter of earth's history whose outward
ramifications, recalled only dimly in the most obscure and distorted myths, had
vanished utterly amidst the chaos of terrene convulsions long before any human race we
know had shambled out of apedom. Here sprawled a Palaeogaean megalopolis
compared with which the fabled Atlantis and Lemuria, Commoriom and Uzuldaroum,
and Olathoc in the land of Lomar, are recent things of today--not even of yesterday; a
megalopolis ranking with such whispered prehuman blasphemies as Valusia, R'lyeh, Ib
in the land of Mnar, and the Nameless city of Arabia Deserta. As we flew above that
tangle of stark titan towers my imagination sometimes escaped all bounds and roved
aimlessly in realms of fantastic associations--even weaving links betwixt this lost world
and some of my own wildest dreams concerning the mad horror at the camp.

The plane's fuel tank, in the interest of greater lightness, had been only partly filled;
hence we now had to exert caution in our explorations. Even so, however, we covered
an enormous extent of ground--or, rather, air--after swooping down to a level where the
wind became virtually negligible. There seemed to be no limit to the mountain range, or
to the length of the frightful stone city which bordered its inner foothills. Fifty miles of
flight in each direction showed no major change in the labyrinth of rock and masonry
that clawed up corpselike through the eternal ice. There were, though, some highly
absorbing diversifications; such as the carvings on the canyon where that broad river
had once pierced the foothills and approached its sinking place in the great range. The
headlands at the stream's entrance had been boldly carved into Cyclopean pylons; and
something about the ridgy, barrel-shaped designs stirred up oddly vague, hateful, and
confusing semi-remembrances in both Danforth and me.

We also came upon several star-shaped open spaces, evidently public squares, and noted
various undulations in the terrain. Where a sharp hill rose, it was generally hollowed out
into some sort of rambling-stone edifice; but there were at least two exceptions. Of
these latter, one was too badly weathered to disclose what had been on the jutting
eminence, while the other still bore a fantastic conical monument carved out of the solid
rock and roughly resembling such things as the well-known Snake Tomb in the ancient
valley of Petra.

Flying inland from the mountains, we discovered that the city was not of infinite width,
even though its length along the foothills seemed endless. After about thirty miles the
grotesque stone buildings began to thin out, and in ten more miles we came to an
unbroken waste virtually without signs of sentient artifice. The course of the river
beyond the city seemed marked by a broad, depressed line, while the land assumed a
somewhat greater ruggedness, seeming to slope slightly upward as it receded in the
mist-hazed west.

So far we had made no landing, yet to leave the plateau without an attempt at entering
some of the monstrous structures would have been inconceivable. Accordingly, we
decided to find a smooth place on the foothills near our navigable pass, there grounding
the plane and preparing to do some exploration on foot. Though these gradual slopes
were partly covered with a scattering of ruins, low flying soon disclosed an ampler
number of possible landing places. Selecting that nearest to the pass, since our flight
would be across the great range and back to camp, we succeeded about 12:30 P.M. in
effecting a landing on a smooth, hard snow field wholly devoid of obstacles and well
adapted to a swift and favorable take-off later on.

It did not seem necessary to protect the plane with a snow banking for so brief a time
and in so comfortable an absence of high winds at this level; hence we merely saw that
the landing skis were safely lodged, and that the vital parts of the mechanism were
guarded against the cold. For our foot journey we discarded the heaviest of our flying
furs, and took with us a small outfit consisting of pocket compass, hand camera, light
provisions, voluminous notebooks and paper, geologist's hammer and chisel, specimen
bags, coil of climbing rope, and powerful electric torches with extra batteries; this
equipment having been carried in the plane on the chance that we might be able to effect
a landing, take ground pictures, make drawings and topographical sketches, and obtain
rock specimens from some bare slope, outcropping, or mountain cave. Fortunately we
had a supply of extra paper to tear up, place in a spare specimen bag, and use on the
ancient principle of hare and hounds for marking our course in any interior mazes we
might be able to penetrate. This had been brought in case we found some cave system
with air quiet enough to allow such a rapid and easy method in place of the usual rock-
chipping method of trail blazing.

Walking cautiously downhill over the crusted snow toward the stupendous stone
labyrinth that loomed against the opalescent west, we felt almost as keen a sense of
imminent marvels as we had felt on approaching the unfathomed mountain pass four
hours previously. True, we had become visually familiar with the incredible secret
concealed by the barrier peaks; yet the prospect of actually entering primordial walls
reared by conscious beings perhaps millions of years ago--before any known race of
men could have existed--was none the less awesome and potentially terrible in its
implications of cosmic abnormality. Though the thinness of the air at this prodigious
altitude made exertion somewhat more difficult than usual, both Danforth and I found
ourselves bearing up very well, and felt equal to almost any task which might fall to our
lot. It took only a few steps to bring us to a shapeless ruin worn level with the snow,
while ten or fifteen rods farther on there was a huge, roofless rampart still complete in
its gigantic five-pointed outline and rising to an irregular height of ten or eleven feet.
For this latter we headed; and when at last we were actually able to touch its weathered
Cyclopean blocks, we felt that we had established an unprecedented and almost
blasphemous link with forgotten aeons normally closed to our species.

This rampart, shaped like a star and perhaps three hundred feet from point to point, was
built of Jurassic sandstone blocks of irregular size, averaging 6 x 8 feet in surface. There
was a row of arched loopholes or windows about four feet wide and five feet high,
spaced quite symmetrically along the points of the star and at its inner angles, and with
the bottoms about four feet from the glaciated surface. Looking through these, we could
see that the masonry was fully five feet thick, that there were no partitions remaining
within, and that there were traces of banded carvings or bas-reliefs on the interior walls-
-facts we had indeed guessed before, when flying low over this rampart and others like
it. Though lower parts must have originally existed, all traces of such things were now
wholly obscured by the deep layer of ice and snow at this point.

We crawled through one of the windows and vainly tried to decipher the nearly effaced
mural designs, but did not attempt to disturb the glaciated floor. Our orientation flights
had indicated that many buildings in the city proper were less ice-choked, and that we
might perhaps find wholly clear interiors leading down to the true ground level if we
entered those structures still roofed at the top. Before we left the rampart we
photographed it carefully, and studied its mortar-less Cyclopean masonry with complete
bewilderment. We wished that Pabodie were present, for his engineering knowledge
might have helped us guess how such titanic blocks could have been handled in that
unbelievably remote age when the city and its outskirts were built up.

The half-mile walk downhill to the actual city, with the upper wind shrieking vainly and
savagely through the skyward peaks in the background, was something of which the
smallest details will always remain engraved on my mind. Only in fantastic nightmares
could any human beings but Danforth and me conceive such optical effects. Between us
and the churning vapors of the west lay that monstrous tangle of dark stone towers, its
outre and incredible forms impressing us afresh at every new angle of vision. It was a
mirage in solid stone, and were it not for the photographs, I would still doubt that such a
thing could be. The general type of masonry was identical with that of the rampart we
had examined; but the extravagant shapes which this masonry took in its urban
manifestations were past all description.

Even the pictures illustrate only one or two phases of its endless variety, preternatural
massiveness, and utterly alien exoticism. There were geometrical forms for which an
Euclid would scarcely find a name--cones of all degrees of irregularity and truncation,
terraces of every sort of provocative disproportion, shafts with odd bulbous
enlargements, broken columns in curious groups, and five-pointed or five-ridged
arrangements of mad grotesqueness. As we drew nearer we could see beneath certain
transparent parts of the ice sheet, and detect some of the tubular stone bridges that
connected the crazily sprinkled structures at various heights. Of orderly streets there
seemed to be none, the only broad open swath being a mile to the left, where the ancient
river had doubtless flowed through the town into the mountains.

Our field glasses showed the external, horizontal bands of nearly effaced sculptures and
dot groups to be very prevalent, and we could half imagine what the city must once
have looked like--even though most of the roofs and tower tops had necessarily
perished. As a whole, it had been a complex tangle of twisted lanes and alleys, all of
them deep canyons, and some little better than tunnels because of the overhanging
masonry or overarching bridges. Now, outspread below us, it loomed like a dream
fantasy against a westward mist through whose northern end the low, reddish antarctic
sun of early afternoon was struggling to shine; and when, for a moment, that sun
encountered a denser obstruction and plunged the scene into temporary shadow, the
effect was subtly menacing in a way I can never hope to depict. Even the faint howling
and piping of the unfelt wind in the great mountain passes behind us took on a wilder
note of purposeful malignity. The last stage of our descent to the town was unusually
steep and abrupt, and a rock outcropping at the edge where the grade changed led us to
think that an artificial terrace had once existed there. Under the glaciation, we believed,
there must be a flight of steps or its equivalent.

When at last we plunged into the town itself, clambering over fallen masonry and
shrinking from the oppressive nearness and dwarfing height of omnipresent crumbling
and pitted walls, our sensations again became such that I marvel at the amount of self-
control we retained. Danforth was frankly jumpy, and began making some offensively
irrelevant speculations about the horror at the camp--which I resented all the more
because I could not help sharing certain conclusions forced upon us by many features of
this morbid survival from nightmare antiquity. The speculations worked on his
imagination, too; for in one place--where a debris-littered alley turned a sharp corner--
he insisted that he saw faint traces of ground markings which he did not like; whilst
elsewhere he stopped to listen to a subtle, imaginary sound from some undefined point--
a muffled musical piping, he said, not unlike that of the wind in the mountain caves, yet
somehow disturbingly different. The ceaseless five-pointedness of the surrounding
architecture and of the few distinguishable mural arabesques had a dimly sinister
suggestiveness we could not escape, and gave us a touch of terrible subconscious
certainty concerning the primal entities which had reared and dwelt in this unhallowed
place.

Nevertheless, our scientific and adventurous souls were not wholly dead, and we
mechanically carried out our program of chipping specimens from all the different rock
types represented in the masonry. We wished a rather full set in order to draw better
conclusions regarding the age of the place. Nothing in the great outer walls seemed to
date from later than the Jurassic and Comanchian periods, nor was any piece of stone in
the entire place of a greater recency than the Pliocene Age. In stark certainty, we were
wandering amidst a death which had reigned at least five hundred thousand years, and
in all probability even longer.

As we proceeded through this maze of stone-shadowed twilight we stopped at all

available apertures to study interiors and investigate entrance possibilities. Some were
above our reach, whilst others led only into ice-choked ruins as unroofed and barren as
the rampart on the hill. One, though spacious and inviting, opened on a seemingly
bottomless abyss without visible means of descent. Now and then we had a chance to
study the petrified wood of a surviving shutter, and were impressed by the fabulous
antiquity implied in the still discernible grain. These things had come from Mesozoic
gymnosperms and conifers--especially Cretaceous cycads--and from fan palms and
early angiosperms of plainly Tertiary date. Nothing definitely later than the Pliocene
could be discovered. In the placing of these shutters--whose edges showed the former
presence of queer and long-vanished hinges--usage seemed to be varied--some being on
the outer and some on the inner side of the deep embrasures. They seemed to have
become wedged in place, thus surviving the rusting of their former and probably
metallic fixtures and fastenings.

After a time we came across a row of windows--in the bulges of a colossal five-edged
cone of undamaged apex--which led into a vast, well-preserved room with stone
flooring; but these were too high in the room to permit descent without a rope. We had a
rope with us, but did not wish to bother with this twenty-foot drop unless obliged to--
especially in this thin plateau air where great demands were made upon the heart action.
This enormous room was probably a hall or concourse of some sort, and our electric
torches showed bold, distinct, and potentially startling sculptures arranged round the
walls in broad, horizontal bands separated by equally broad strips of conventional
arabesques. We took careful note of this spot, planning to enter here unless a more
easily gained interior were encountered.

Finally, though, we did encounter exactly the opening we wished; an archway about six
feet wide and ten feet high, marking the former end of an aerial bridge which had
spanned an alley about five feet above the present level of glaciation. These archways,
of course, were flush with upper-story floors, and in this case one of the floors still
existed. The building thus accessible was a series of rectangular terraces on our left
facing westward. That across the alley, where the other archway yawned, was a decrepit
cylinder with no windows and with a curious bulge about ten feet above the aperture. It
was totally dark inside, and the archway seemed to open on a well of illimitable
emptiness.

Heaped debris made the entrance to the vast left-hand building doubly easy, yet for a
moment we hesitated before taking advantage of the long-wished chance. For though
we had penetrated into this tangle of archaic mystery, it required fresh resolution to
carry us actually inside a complete and surviving building of a fabulous elder world
whose nature was becoming more and more hideously plain to us. In the end, however,
we made the plunge, and scrambled up over the rubble into the gaping embrasure. The
floor beyond was of great slate slabs, and seemed to form the outlet of a long, high
corridor with sculptured walls.

Observing the many inner archways which led off from it, and realizing the probable
complexity of the nest of apartments within, we decided that we must begin our system
of hare-and-hound trail blazing. Hitherto our compasses, together with frequent
glimpses of the vast mountain range between the towers in our rear, had been enough to
prevent our losing our way; but from now on, the artificial substitute would be
necessary. Accordingly we reduced our extra paper to shreds of suitable size, placed
these in a bag to be carried by Danforth, and prepared to use them as economically as
safety would allow. This method would probably gain us immunity from straying, since
there did not appear to be any strong air currents inside the primordial masonry. If such
should develop, or if our paper supply should give out, we could of course fall back on
the more secure though more tedious and retarding method of rock chipping.

Just how extensive a territory we had opened up, it was impossible to guess without a
trial. The close and frequent connection of the different buildings made it likely that we
might cross from one to another on bridges underneath the ice, except where impeded
by local collapses and geologic rifts, for very little glaciation seemed to have entered the
massive constructions. Almost all the areas of transparent ice had revealed the
submerged windows as tightly shuttered, as if the town had been left in that uniform
state until the glacial sheet came to crystallize the lower part for all succeeding time.
Indeed, one gained a curious impression that this place had been deliberately closed and
deserted in some dim, bygone aeon, rather than overwhelmed by any sudden calamity or
even gradual decay. Had the coming of the ice been foreseen, and had a nameless
population left en masse to seek a less doomed abode? The precise physiographic
conditions attending the formation of the ice sheet at this point would have to wait for
later solution. It had not, very plainly, been a grinding drive. Perhaps the pressure of
accumulated snows had been responsible, and perhaps some flood from the river, or
from the bursting of some ancient glacial dam in the great range, had helped to create
the special state now observable. Imagination could conceive almost anything in
connection with this place.

VI

It would be cumbrous to give a detailed, consecutive account of our wanderings inside

that cavernous, aeon-dead honeycomb of primal masonry--that monstrous lair of elder
secrets which now echoed for the first time, after uncounted epochs, to the tread of
human feet. This is especially true because so much of the horrible drama and revelation
came from a mere study of the omnipresent mural carvings. Our flashlight photographs
of those carvings will do much toward proving the truth of what we are now disclosing,
and it is lamentable that we had not a larger film supply with us. As it was, we made
crude notebook sketches of certain salient features after all our films were used up.

The building which we had entered was one of great size and elaborateness, and gave us
an impressive notion of the architecture of that nameless geologic past. The inner
partitions were less massive than the outer walls, but on the lower levels were
excellently preserved. Labyrinthine complexity, involving curiously irregular difference
in floor levels, characterized the entire arrangement; and we should certainly have been
lost at the very outset but for the trail of torn paper left behind us. We decided to
explore the more decrepit upper parts first of all, hence climbed aloft in the maze for a
distance of some one hundred feet, to where the topmost tier of chambers yawned
snowily and ruinously open to the polar sky. Ascent was effected over the steep,
transversely ribbed stone ramps or inclined planes which everywhere served in lieu of
stairs. The rooms we encountered were of all imaginable shapes and proportions,
ranging from five-pointed stars to triangles and perfect cubes. It might be safe to say
that their general average was about 30 x 30 feet in floor area, and 20 feet in height,
though many larger apartments existed. After thoroughly examining the upper regions
and the glacial level, we descended, story by story, into the submerged part, where
indeed we soon saw we were in a continuous maze of connected chambers and passages
probably leading over unlimited areas outside this particular building. The Cyclopean
massiveness and gigantism of everything about us became curiously oppressive; and
there was something vaguely but deeply unhuman in all the contours, dimensions,
proportions, decorations, and constructional nuances of the blasphemously archaic
stonework. We soon realized, from what the carvings revealed, that this monstrous city
was many million years old.

We cannot yet explain the engineering principles used in the anomalous balancing and
adjustment of the vast rock masses, though the function of the arch was clearly much
relied on. The rooms we visited were wholly bare of all portable contents, a
circumstance which sustained our belief in the city's deliberate desertion. The prime
decorative feature was the almost universal system of mural sculpture, which tended to
run in continuous horizontal bands three feet wide and arranged from floor to ceiling in
alternation with bands of equal width given over to geometrical arabesques. There were
exceptions to this rule of arrangement, but its preponderance was overwhelming. Often,
however, a series of smooth cartouches containing oddly patterned groups of dots would
be sunk along one of the arabesque bands.

The technique, we soon saw, was mature, accomplished, and aesthetically evolved to
the highest degree of civilized mastery, though utterly alien in every detail to any
known art tradition of the human race. In delicacy of execution no sculpture I have ever
seen could approach it. The minutest details of elaborate vegetation, or of animal life,
were rendered with astonishing vividness despite the bold scale of the carvings; whilst
the conventional designs were marvels of skillful intricacy. The arabesques displayed a
profound use of mathematical principles, and were made up of obscurely symmetrical
curves and angles based on the quantity of five. The pictorial bands followed a highly
formalized tradition, and involved a peculiar treatment of perspective, but had an artistic
force that moved us profoundly, notwithstanding the intervening gulf of vast geologic
periods. Their method of design hinged on a singular juxtaposition of the cross section
with the two-dimensional silhouette, and embodied an analytical psychology beyond
that of any known race of antiquity. It is useless to try to compare this art with any
represented in our museums. Those who see our photographs will probably find its
closest analogue in certain grotesque conceptions of the most daring futurists.

The arabesque tracery consisted altogether of depressed lines, whose depth on

unweathered walls varied from one to two inches. When cartouches with dot groups
appeared--evidently as inscriptions in some unknown and primordial language and
alphabet--the depression of the smooth surface was perhaps an inch and a half, and of
the dots perhaps a half inch more. The pictorial bands were in countersunk low relief,
their background being depressed about two inches from the original wall surface. In
some specimens marks of a former coloration could be detected, though for the most
part the untold aeons had disintegrated and banished any pigments which may have
been applied. The more one studied the marvelous technique, the more one admired the
things. Beneath their strict conventionalization one could grasp the minute and accurate
observation and graphic skill of the artists; and indeed, the very conventions themselves
served to symbolize and accentuate the real essence or vital differentiation of every
object delineated. We felt, too, that besides these recognizable excellences there were
others lurking beyond the reach of our perceptions. Certain touches here and there gave
vague hints of latent symbols and stimuli which another mental and emotional
background, and a fuller or different sensory equipment, might have made of profound
and poignant significance to us.

The subject matter of the sculptures obviously came from the life of the vanished epoch
of their creation, and contained a large proportion of evident history. It is this abnormal
historic-mindedness of the primal race--a chance circumstance operating, through
coincidence, miraculously in our favor--which made the carvings so awesomely
informative to us, and which caused us to place their photography and transcription
above all other considerations. In certain rooms the dominant arrangement was varied
by the presence of maps, astronomical charts, and other scientific designs of an enlarged
scale--these things giving a naive and terrible corroboration to what we gathered from
the pictorial friezes and dadoes. In hinting at what the whole revealed, I can only hope
that my account will not arouse a curiosity greater than sane caution on the part of those
who believe me at all. It would be tragic if any were to be allured to that realm of death
and horror by the very warning meant to discourage them.

Interrupting these sculptured walls were high windows and massive twelve-foot
doorways; both now and then retaining the petrified wooden planks--elaborately carved
and polished--of the actual shutters and doors. All metal fixtures had long ago vanished,
but some of the doors remained in place and had to be forced aside as we progressed
from room to room. Window frames with odd transparent panes--mostly elliptical--
survived here and there, though in no considerable quantity. There were also frequent
niches of great magnitude, generally empty, but once in a while containing some bizarre
object carved from green soapstone which was either broken or perhaps held too
inferior to warrant removal. Other apertures were undoubtedly connected with bygone
mechanical facilities--heating, lighting, and the like--of a sort suggested in many of the
carvings. Ceilings tended to be plain, but had sometimes been inlaid with green
soapstone or other tiles, mostly fallen now. Floors were also paved with such tiles,
though plain stonework predominated.

As I have said, all furniture and other movables were absent; but the sculptures gave a
clear idea of the strange devices which had once filled these tomblike, echoing rooms.
Above the glacial sheet the floors were generally thick with detritus, litter, and debris,
but farther down this condition decreased. In some of the lower chambers and corridors
there was little more than gritty dust or ancient incrustations, while occasional areas had
an uncanny air of newly swept immaculateness. Of course, where rifts or collapses had
occurred, the lower levels were as littered as the upper ones. A central court--as in other
structures we had seen from the air--saved the inner regions from total darkness; so that
we seldom had to use our electric torches in the upper rooms except when studying
sculptured details. Below the ice cap, however, the twilight deepened; and in many parts
of the tangled ground level there was an approach to absolute blackness.

To form even a rudimentary idea of our thoughts and feelings as we penetrated this
aeon-silent maze of unhuman masonry, one must correlate a hopelessly bewildering
chaos of fugitive moods, memories, and impressions. The sheer appalling antiquity and
lethal desolation of the place were enough to overwhelm almost any sensitive person,
but added to these elements were the recent unexplained horror at the camp, and the
revelations all too soon effected by the terrible mural sculptures around us. The moment
we came upon a perfect section of carving, where no ambiguity of interpretation could
exist, it took only a brief study to give us the hideous truth--a truth which it would be
naive to claim Danforth and I had not independently suspected before, though we had
carefully refrained from even hinting it to each other. There could now be no further
merciful doubt about the nature of the beings which had built and inhabited this
monstrous dead city millions of years ago, when man's ancestors were primitive archaic
mammals, and vast dinosaurs roamed the tropical steppes of Europe and Asia.

We had previously clung to a desperate alternative and insisted--each to himself--that

the omnipresence of the five-pointed motifs meant only some cultural or religious
exaltation of the Archaean natural object which had so patently embodied the quality of
five-pointedness; as the decorative motifs of Minoan Crete exalted the sacred bull, those
of Egypt the scarabaeus, those of Rome the wolf and the eagle, and those of various
savage tribes some chosen totem animal. But this lone refuge was now stripped from us,
and we were forced to face definitely the reason-shaking realization which the reader of
these pages has doubtless long ago anticipated. I can scarcely bear to write it down in
black and white even now, but perhaps that will not be necessary.

The things once rearing and dwelling in this frightful masonry in the age of dinosaurs
were not indeed dinosaurs, but far worse. Mere dinosaurs were new and almost
brainless objects--but the builders of the city were wise and old, and had left certain
traces in rocks even then laid down well nigh a thousand million years--rocks laid down
before the true life of earth had advanced beyond plastic groups of cells--rocks laid
down before the true life of earth had existed at all. They were the makers and enslavers
of that life, and above all doubt the originals of the fiendish elder myths which things
like the Pnakotic Manuscripts and the Necronomicon affrightedly hint about. They were
the great "Old Ones" that had filtered down from the stars when earth was young--the
beings whose substance an alien evolution had shaped, and whose powers were such as
this planet had never bred. And to think that only the day before, Danforth and I had
actually looked upon fragments of their millennially fossilized substance, and that poor
Lake and his party had seen their complete outlines. It is of course impossible for me to
relate in proper order the stages by which we picked up what we know of that
monstrous chapter of prehuman life. After the first shock of the certain revelation, we
had to pause a while to recuperate, and it was fully three o'clock before we got started
on our actual tour of systematic research. The sculptures in the building we entered
were of relatively late date--perhaps two million years ago--as checked up by
geological, biological, and astronomical features--and embodied an art which would be
called decadent in comparison with that of specimens we found in older buildings after
crossing bridges under the glacial sheet. One edifice hewn from the solid rock seemed
to go back forty or possibly even fifty million years--to the lower Eocene or upper
Cretaceous--and contained bas reliefs of an artistry surpassing anything else, with one
tremendous exception, that we encountered. That was, we have since agreed, the oldest
domestic structure we traversed.

Were it not for the support of those flashlights soon to be made public, I would refrain
from telling what I found and inferred, lest I be confined as a madman. Of course, the
infinitely early parts of the patchwork tale--representing the preterrestrial life of the star-
headed beings on other planets, in other galaxies, and in other universes--can readily be
interpreted as the fantastic mythology of those beings themselves; yet such parts
sometimes involved designs and diagrams so uncannily close to the latest findings of
mathematics and astrophysics that I scarcely know what to think. Let others judge when
they see the photographs I shall publish.

Naturally, no one set of carvings which we encountered told more than a fraction of any
connected story, nor did we even begin to come upon the various stages of that story in
their proper order. Some of the vast rooms were independent units so far as their
designs were concerned, whilst in other cases a continuous chronicle would be carried
through a series of rooms and corridors. The best of the maps and diagrams were on the
walls of a frightful abyss below even the ancient ground level--a cavern perhaps two
hundred feet square and sixty feet high, which had almost undoubtedly been an
educational center of some sort. There were many provoking repetitions of the same
material in different rooms and buildings, since certain chapters of experience, and
certain summaries or phases of racial history, had evidently been favorites with different
decorators or dwellers. Sometimes, though, variant versions of the same theme proved
useful in settling debatable points and filling up gaps.

I still wonder that we deduced so much in the short time at our disposal. Of course, we
even now have only the barest outline--and much of that was obtained later on from a
study of the photographs and sketches we made. It may be the effect of this later study--
the revived memories and vague impressions acting in conjunction with his general
sensitiveness and with that final supposed horror-glimpse whose essence he will not
reveal even to me--which has been the immediate source of Danforth's present
breakdown. But it had to be; for we could not issue our warning intelligently without
the fullest possible information, and the issuance of that warning is a prime necessity.
Certain lingering influences in that unknown antarctic world of disordered time and
alien natural law make it imperative that further exploration be discouraged.

VII

The full story, so far as deciphered, will eventually appear in an official bulletin of
Miskatonic University. Here I shall sketch only the salient highlights in a formless,
rambling way. Myth or otherwise, the sculptures told of the coming of those star-headed
things to the nascent, lifeless earth out of cosmic space--their coming, and the coming
of many other alien entities such as at certain times embark upon spatial pioneering.
They seemed able to traverse the interstellar ether on their vast membranous wings--
thus oddly confirming some curious hill folklore long ago told me by an antiquarian
colleague. They had lived under the sea a good deal, building fantastic cities and
fighting terrific battles with nameless adversaries by means of intricate devices
employing unknown principles of energy. Evidently their scientific and mechanical
knowledge far surpassed man's today, though they made use of its more widespread and
elaborate forms only when obliged to. Some of the sculptures suggested that they had
passed through a stage of mechanized life on other planets, but had receded upon
finding its effects emotionally unsatisfying. Their preternatural toughness of
organization and simplicity of natural wants made them peculiarly able to live on a high
plane without the more specialized fruits of artificial manufacture, and even without
garments, except for occasional protection against the elements.

It was under the sea, at first for food and later for other purposes, that they first created
earth life--using available substances according to long-known methods. The more
elaborate experiments came after the annihilation of various cosmic enemies. They had
done the same thing on other planets, having manufactured not only necessary foods,
but certain multicellular protoplasmic masses capable of molding their tissues into all
sorts of temporary organs under hypnotic influence and thereby forming ideal slaves to
perform the heavy work of the community. These viscous masses were without doubt
what Abdul Alhazred whispered about as the "Shoggoths" in his frightful
Necronomicon, though even that mad Arab had not hinted that any existed on earth
except in the dreams of those who had chewed a certain alkaloidal herb. When the star-
headed Old Ones on this planet had synthesized their simple food forms and bred a
good supply of Shoggoths, they allowed other cell groups to develop into other forms of
animal and vegetable life for sundry purposes, extirpating any whose presence became
troublesome.
With the aid of the Shoggoths, whose expansions could be made to lift prodigious
weights, the small, low cities under the sea grew to vast and imposing labyrinths of
stone not unlike those which later rose on land. Indeed, the highly adaptable Old Ones
had lived much on land in other parts of the universe, and probably retained many
traditions of land construction. As we studied the architecture of all these sculptured
palaeogean cities, including that whose aeon-dead corridors we were even then
traversing, we were impressed by a curious coincidence which we have not yet tried to
explain, even to ourselves. The tops of the buildings, which in the actual city around us
had, of course, been weathered into shapeless ruins ages ago, were clearly displayed in
the bas-reliefs, and showed vast clusters of needle-like spires, delicate finials on certain
cone and pyramid apexes, and tiers of thin, horizontal scalloped disks capping
cylindrical shafts. This was exactly what we had seen in that monstrous and portentous
mirage, cast by a dead city whence such skyline features had been absent for thousands
and tens of thousands of years, which loomed on our ignorant eyes across the
unfathomed mountains of madness as we first approached poor Lake's ill-fated camp.

Of the life of the Old Ones, both under the sea and after part of them migrated to land,
volumes could be written. Those in shallow water had continued the fullest use of the
eyes at the ends of their five main head tentacles, and had practiced the arts of sculpture
and of writing in quite the usual way--the writing accomplished with a stylus on
waterproof waxen surfaces. Those lower down in the ocean depths, though they used a
curious phosphorescent organism to furnish light, pieced out their vision with obscure
special senses operating through the prismatic cilia on their heads--senses which
rendered all the Old Ones partly independent of light in emergencies. Their forms of
sculpture and writing had changed curiously during the descent, embodying certain
apparently chemical coating processes--probably to secure phosphorescence--which the
bas-reliefs could not make clear to us. The beings moved in the sea partly by
swimming--using the lateral crinoid arms--and partly by wriggling with the lower tier of
tentacles containing the pseudofeet. Occasionally they accomplished long swoops with
the auxiliary use of two or more sets of their fanlike folding wings. On land they locally
used the pseudofeet, but now and then flew to great heights or over long distances with
their wings. The many slender tentacles into which the crinoid arms branched were
infinitely delicate, flexible, strong, and accurate in muscular-nervous coordination--
ensuring the utmost skill and dexterity in all artistic and other manual operations.

The toughness of the things was almost incredible. Even the terrific pressure of the
deepest sea bottoms appeared powerless to harm them. Very few seemed to die at all
except by violence, and their burial places were very limited. The fact that they covered
their vertically inhumed dead with five-pointed inscribed mounds set up thoughts in
Danforth and me which made a fresh pause and recuperation necessary after the
sculptures revealed it. The beings multiplied by means of spores--like vegetable
pteridophytes, as Lake had suspected--but, owing to their prodigious toughness and
longevity, and consequent lack of replacement needs, they did not encourage the large-
scale development of new prothallia except when they had new regions to colonize. The
young matured swiftly, and received an education evidently beyond any standard we
can imagine. The prevailing intellectual and aesthetic life was highly evolved, and
produced a tenaciously enduring set of customs and institutions which I shall describe
more fully in my coming monograph. These varied slightly according to sea or land
residence, but had the same foundations and essentials.
Though able, like vegetables, to derive nourishment from inorganic substances, they
vastly preferred organic and especially animal food. They ate uncooked marine life
under the sea, but cooked their viands on land. They hunted game and raised meat
herds--slaughtering with sharp weapons whose odd marks on certain fossil bones our
expedition had noted. They resisted all ordinary temperatures marvelously, and in their
natural state could live in water down to freezing. When the great chill of the
Pleistocene drew on, however--nearly a million years ago--the land dwellers had to
resort to special measures, including artificial heating--until at last the deadly cold
appears to have driven them back into the sea. For their prehistoric flights through
cosmic space, legend said, they absorbed certain chemicals and became almost
independent of eating, breathing, or heat conditions--but by the time of the great cold
they had lost track of the method. In any case they could not have prolonged the
artificial state indefinitely without harm.

Being nonpairing and semivegetable in structure, the Old Ones had no biological basis
for the family phase of mammal life, but seemed to organize large households on the
principles of comfortable space-utility and--as we deduced from the pictured
occupations and diversions of co-dwellers--congenial mental association. In furnishing
their homes they kept everything in the center of the huge rooms, leaving all the wall
spaces free for decorative treatment. Lighting, in the case of the land inhabitants, was
accomplished by a device probably electro-chemical in nature. Both on land and under
water they used curious tables, chairs and couches like cylindrical frames--for they
rested and slept upright with folded-down tentacles--and racks for hinged sets of dotted
surfaces forming their books.

Government was evidently complex and probably socialistic, though no certainties in

this regard could be deduced from the sculptures we saw. There was extensive
commerce, both local and between different cities--certain small, flat counters, five-
pointed and inscribed, serving as money. Probably the smaller of the various greenish
soapstones found by our expedition were pieces of such currency. Though the culture
was mainly urban, some agriculture and much stock raising existed. Mining and a
limited amount of manufacturing were also practiced. Travel was very frequent, but
permanent migration seemed relatively rare except for the vast colonizing movements
by which the race expanded. For personal locomotion no external aid was used, since in
land, air, and water movement alike the Old Ones seemed to possess excessively vast
capacities for speed. Loads, however, were drawn by beasts of burden--Shoggoths under
the sea, and a curious variety of primitive vertebrates in the later years of land existence.

These vertebrates, as well as an infinity of other life forms--animal and vegetable,

marine, terrestrial, and aerial--were the products of unguided evolution acting on life
cells made by the Old Ones, but escaping beyond their radius of attention. They had
been suffered to develop unchecked because they had not come in conflict with the
dominant beings. Bothersome forms, of course, were mechanically exterminated. It
interested us to see in some of the very last and most decadent sculptures a shambling,
primitive mammal, used sometimes for food and sometimes as an amusing buffoon by
the land dwellers, whose vaguely simian and human foreshadowings were
unmistakable. In the building of land cities the huge stone blocks of the high towers
were generally lifted by vast-winged pterodactyls of a species heretofore unknown to
paleontology.
The persistence with which the Old Ones survived various geologic changes and
convulsions of the earth's crust was little short of miraculous. Though few or none of
their first cities seem to have remained beyond the Archaean Age, there was no
interruption in their civilization or in the transmission of their records. Their original
place of advent to the planet was the Antarctic Ocean, and it is likely that they came not
long after the matter forming the moon was wrenched from the neighboring South
Pacific. According to one of the sculptured maps the whole globe was then under water,
with stone cities scattered farther and farther from the antarctic as aeons passed.
Another map shows a vast bulk of dry land around the south pole, where it is evident
that some of the beings made experimental settlements, though their main centers were
transferred to the nearest sea bottom. Later maps, which display the land mass as
cracking and drifting, and sending certain detached parts northward, uphold in a striking
way the theories of continental drift lately advanced by Taylor, Wegener, and Joly.

With the upheaval of new land in the South Pacific tremendous events began. Some of
the marine cities were hopelessly shattered, yet that was not the worst misfortune.
Another race--a land race of beings shaped like octopi and probably corresponding to
fabulous prehuman spawn of Cthulhu--soon began filtering down from cosmic infinity
and precipitated a--monstrous war which for a time drove the Old Ones wholly back to
the sea--a colossal blow in view of the increasing land settlements. Later peace was
made, and the new lands were given to the Cthulhu spawn whilst the Old Ones held the
sea and the older lands. New land cities were founded--the greatest of them in the
antarctic, for this region of first arrival was sacred. From then on, as before, the
antarctic remained the center of the Old Ones' civilization, and all the cities built there
by the Cthulhu spawn were blotted out. Then suddenly the lands of the Pacific sank
again, taking with them the frightful stone city of R'lyeh and all the cosmic octopi, so
that the Old Ones were again supreme on the planet except for one shadowy fear about
which they did not like to speak. At a rather later age their cities dotted all the land and
water areas of the globe--hence the recommendation in my coming monograph that
some archaeologist make systematic borings with Pabodie's type of apparatus in certain
widely separated regions.

The steady trend down the ages was from water to land--a movement encouraged by the
rise of new land masses, though the ocean was never wholly deserted. Another cause of
the landward movement was the new difficulty in breeding and managing the
Shoggoths upon which successful sea life depended. With the march of time, as the
sculptures sadly confessed, the art of creating new life from inorganic matter had been
lost, so that the Old Ones had to depend on the molding of forms already in existence.
On land the great reptiles proved highly tractable; but the Shoggoths of the sea,
reproducing by fission and acquiring a dangerous degree of accidental intelligence,
presented for a time a formidable problem.

They had always been controlled through the hypnotic suggestions of the Old Ones, and
had modeled their tough plasticity into various useful temporary limbs and organs; but
now their self-modeling powers were sometimes exercised independently, and in
various imitative forms implanted by past suggestion. They had, it seems, developed a
semistable brain whose separate and occasionally stubborn volition echoed the will of
the Old Ones without always obeying it. Sculptured images of these Shoggoths filled
Danforth and me with horror and loathing. They were normally shapeless entities
composed of a viscous jelly which looked like an agglutination of bubbles, and each
averaged about fifteen feet in diameter when a sphere. They had, however, a constantly
shifting shape and volume--throwing out temporary developments or forming apparent
organs of sight, hearing, and speech in imitation of their masters, either spontaneously
or according to suggestion.

They seem to have become peculiarly intractable toward the middle of the Permian Age,
perhaps one hundred and fifty million years ago, when a veritable war of resubjugation
was waged upon them by the marine Old Ones. Pictures of this war, and of the headless,
slime-coated fashion in which the Shoggoths typically left their slain victims, held a
marvelously fearsome quality despite the intervening abyss of untold ages. The Old
Ones had used curious weapons of molecular and atomic disturbances against the rebel
entities, and in the end had achieved a complete victory. Thereafter the sculptures
showed a period in which Shoggoths were tamed and broken by armed Old Ones as the
wild horses of the American west were tamed by cowboys. Though during the rebellion
the Shoggoths had shown an ability to live out of water, this transition was not
encouraged--since their usefulness on land would hardly have been commensurate with
the trouble of their management.

During the Jurassic Age the Old Ones met fresh adversity in the form of a new invasion
from outer space--this time by half-fungous, half-crustacean creatures--creatures
undoubtedly the same as those figuring in certain whispered hill legends of the north,
and remembered in the Himalayas as the Mi-Go, or Abominable Snow Men. To fight
these beings the Old Ones attempted, for the first time since their terrene advent, to sally
forth again into the planetary ether; but, despite all traditional preparations, found it no
longer possible to leave the earth's atmosphere. Whatever the old secret of interstellar
travel had been, it was now definitely lost to the race. In the end the Mi-Go drove the
Old Ones out of all the northern lands, though they were powerless to disturb those in
the sea. Little by little the slow retreat of the elder race to their original antarctic habitat
was beginning.

It was curious to note from the pictured battles that both the Cthulhu spawn and the Mi-
Go seem to have been composed of matter more widely different from that which we
know than was the substance of the Old Ones. They were able to undergo
transformations and reintegrations impossible for their adversaries, and seem therefore
to have originally come from even remoter gulfs of the cosmic space. The Old Ones, but
for their abnormal toughness and peculiar vital properties, were strictly material, and
must have had their absolute origin within the known space-time continuum--whereas
the first sources of the other beings can only be guessed at with bated breath. All this, of
course, assuming that the non-terrestrial linkages and the anomalies ascribed to the
invading foes are not pure mythology. Conceivably, the Old Ones might have invented
a cosmic framework to account for their occasional defeats, since historical interest and
pride obviously formed their chief psychological element. It is significant that their
annals failed to mention many advanced and potent races of beings whose mighty
cultures and towering cities figure persistently in certain obscure legends.

The changing state of the world through long geologic ages appeared with startling
vividness in many of the sculptured maps and scenes. In certain cases existing science
will require revision, while in other cases its bold deductions are magnificently
confirmed. As I have said, the hypothesis of Taylor, Wegener, and Joly that all the
continents are fragments of an original antarctic land mass which cracked from
centrifugal force and drifted apart over a technically viscous lower surface--an
hypothesis suggested by such things as the complementary outlines of Africa and South
America, and the way the great mountain chains are rolled and shoved up--receives
striking support from this uncanny source.

Maps evidently showing the Carboniferous world of an hundred million or more years
ago displayed significant rifts and chasms destined later to separate Africa from the
once continuous realms of Europe (then the Valusia of primal legend), Asia, the
Americas, and the antarctic continent. Other charts--and most significantly one in
connection with the founding fifty million years ago of the vast dead city around us--
showed all the present continents well differentiated. And in the latest discoverable
specimen--dating perhaps from the Pliocene Age--the approximate world of today
appeared quite clearly despite the linkage of Alaska with Siberia, of North America with
Europe through Greenland, and of South America with the antarctic continent through
Graham Land. In the Carboniferous map the whole globe-ocean floor and rifted land
mass alike--bore symbols of the Old Ones' vast stone cities, but in the later charts the
gradual recession toward the antarctic became very plain. The final Pliocene specimen
showed no land cities except on the antarctic continent and the tip of South America,
nor any ocean cities north of the fiftieth parallel of South Latitude. Knowledge and
interest in the northern world, save for a study of coast lines probably made during long
exploration flights on those fanlike membranous wings, had evidently declined to zero
among the Old Ones.

Destruction of cities through the upthrust of mountains, the centrifugal rending of

continents, the seismic convulsions of land or sea bottom, and other natural causes, was
a matter of common record; and it was curious to observe how fewer and fewer
replacements were made as the ages wore on. The vast dead megalopolis that yawned
around us seemed to be the last general center of the race--built early in the Cretaceous
Age after a titanic earth buckling had obliterated a still vaster predecessor not far
distant. It appeared that this general region was the most sacred spot of all, where
reputedly the first Old Ones had settled on a primal sea bottom. In the new city--many
of whose features we could recognize in the sculptures, but which stretched fully a
hundred miles along the mountain range in each direction beyond the farthest limits of
our aerial survey--there were reputed to be preserved certain sacred stones forming part
of the first sea-bottom city, which thrust up to light after long epochs in the course of
the general crumbling of strata.

VIII

Naturally, Danforth and I studied with especial interest and a peculiarly personal sense
of awe everything pertaining to the immediate district in which we were. Of this local
material there was naturally a vast abundance; and on the tangled ground level of the
city we were lucky enough to find a house of very late date whose walls, though
somewhat damaged by a neighboring rift, contained sculptures of decadent
workmanship carrying the story of the region much beyond the period of the Pliocene
map whence we derived our last general glimpse of the prehuman world. This was the
last place we examined in detail, since what we found there gave us a fresh immediate
objective.
Certainly, we were in one of the strangest, weirdest, and most terrible of all the corners
of earth's globe. Of all existing lands, it was infinitely the most ancient. The conviction
grew upon us that this hideous upland must indeed be the fabled nightmare plateau of
Leng which even the mad author of the Necronomicon was reluctant to discuss. The
great mountain chain was tremendously long--starting as a low range at Luitpold Land
on the east coast of Weddell Sea and virtually crossing the entire continent. That really
high part stretched in a mighty arc from about Latitude 82°, E. Longitude 60° to
Latitude 70°, E. Longitude 115°, with its concave side toward our camp and its seaward
end in the region of that long, ice-locked coast whose hills were glimpsed by Wilkes
and Mawson at the antarctic circle.

Yet even more monstrous exaggerations of nature seemed disturbingly close at hand. I
have said that these peaks are higher than the Himalayas, but the sculptures forbid me to
say that they are earth's highest. That grim honor is beyond doubt reserved for
something which half the sculptures hesitated to record at all, whilst others approached
it with obvious repugnance and trepidation. It seems that there was one part of the
ancient land--the first part that ever rose from the waters after the earth had flung off the
moon and the Old Ones had seeped down, from the stars--which had come to be
shunned as vaguely and namelessly evil. Cities built there had crumbled before their
time, and had been found suddenly deserted. Then when the first great earth buckling
had convulsed the region in the Comanchian Age, a frightful line of peaks had shot
suddenly up amidst the most appalling din and chaos--and earth had received her loftiest
and most terrible mountains.

If the scale of the carvings was correct, these abhorred things must have been much over
forty thousand feet high--radically vaster than even the shocking mountains of madness
we had crossed. They extended, it appeared, from about Latitude 77°, E. Longitude 70°
to Latitude 70°, E. Longitude 100°--less than three hundred miles away from the dead
city, so that we would have spied their dreaded summits in the dim western distance had
it not been for that vague, opalescent haze. Their northern end must likewise be visible
from the long antarctic circle coast line at Queen Mary Land.

Some of the Old Ones, in the decadent days, had made strange prayers to those
mountains--but none ever went near them or dared to guess what lay beyond. No human
eye had ever seen them, and as I studied the emotions conveyed in the carvings, I
prayed that none ever might. There are protecting hills along the coast beyond them--
Queen Mary and Kaiser Wilhelm Lands--and I thank Heaven no one has been able to
land and climb those hills. I am not as sceptical about old tales and fears as I used to be,
and I do not laugh now at the prehuman sculptor's notion that lightning paused
meaningfully now and then at each of the brooding crests, and that an unexplained glow
shone from one of those terrible pinnacles all through the long polar night. There may
be a very real and very monstrous meaning in the old Pnakotic whispers about Kadath
in the Cold Waste.

But the terrain close at hand was hardly less strange, even if less namelessly accursed.
Soon after the founding of the city the great mountain range became the seat of the
principal temples, and many carvings showed what grotesque and fantastic towers had
pierced the sky where now we saw only the curiously clinging cubes and ramparts. In
the course of ages the caves had appeared, and had been shaped into adjuncts of the
temples. With the advance of still later epochs, all the limestone veins of the region
were hollowed out by ground waters, so that the mountains, the foothills, and the plains
below them were a veritable network of connected caverns and galleries. Many graphic
sculptures told of explorations deep underground, and of the final discovery of the
Stygian sunless sea that lurked at earth's bowels.

This vast nighted gulf had undoubtedly been worn by the great river which flowed
down from the nameless and horrible westward mountains, and which had formerly
turned at the base of the Old Ones' range and flowed beside that chain into the Indian
Ocean between Budd and Totten Lands on Wilkes's coast line. Little by little it had
eaten away the limestone hill base at its turning, till at last its sapping currents reached
the caverns of the ground waters and joined with them in digging a deeper abyss.
Finally its whole bulk emptied into the hollow hills and left the old bed toward the
ocean dry. Much of the later city as we now found it had been built over that former
bed. The Old Ones, understanding what had happened, and exercising their always keen
artistic sense, had carved into ornate pylons those headlands of the foothills where the
great stream began its descent into eternal darkness.

This river, once crossed by scores of noble stone bridges, was plainly the one whose
extinct course we had seen in our aeroplane survey. Its position in different carvings of
the city helped us to orient ourselves to the scene as it had been at various stages of the
region's age-long, aeon-dead history, so that we were able to sketch a hasty but careful
map of the salient features--squares, important buildings, and the like--for guidance in
further explorations. We could soon reconstruct in fancy the whole stupendous thing as
it was a million or ten million or fifty million years ago, for the sculptures told us
exactly what the buildings and mountains and squares and suburbs and landscape
setting and luxuriant Tertiary vegetation had looked like. It must have had a marvelous
and mystic beauty, and as I thought of it, I almost forgot the clammy sense of sinister
oppression with which the city's inhuman age and massiveness and deadness and
remoteness and glacial twilight had choked and weighed on my spirit. Yet according to
certain carvings, the denizens of that city had themselves known the clutch of
oppressive terror; for there was a somber and recurrent type of scene in which the Old
Ones were shown in the act of recoiling affrightedly from some object--never allowed
to appear in the design--found in the great river and indicated as having been washed
down through waving, vine-draped cycad forests from those horrible westward
mountains.

It was only in the one late-built house with the decadent carvings that we obtained any
foreshadowing of the final calamity leading to the city's desertion. Undoubtedly there
must have been many sculptures of the same age elsewhere, even allowing for the
slackened energies and aspirations of a stressful and uncertain period; indeed, very
certain evidence of the existence of others came to us shortly afterward. But this was the
first and only set we directly encountered. We meant to look farther later on; but as I
have said, immediate conditions dictated another present objective. There would,
though, have been a limit--for after all hope of a long future occupancy of the place had
perished among the Old Ones, there could not but have been a complete cessation of
mural decoration. The ultimate blow, of course, was the coming of the great cold which
once held most of the earth in thrall, and which has never departed from the ill-fated
poles--the great cold that, at the world's other extremity, put an end to the fabled lands
of Lomar and Hyperborea.
Just when this tendency began in the antarctic, it would be hard to say in terms of exact
years. Nowadays we set the beginning of the general glacial periods at a distance of
about five hundred thousand years from the present, but at the poles the terrible scourge
must have commenced much earlier. All quantitative estimates are partly guesswork,
but it is quite likely that the decadent sculptures were made considerably less than a
million years ago, and that the actual desertion of the city was complete long before the
conventional opening of the Pleistocene--five hundred thousand years ago--as reckoned
in terms of the earth's whole surface.

In the decadent sculptures there were signs of thinner vegetation everywhere, and of a
decreased country life on the part of the Old Ones. Heating devices were shown in the
houses, and winter travelers were represented as muffled in protective fabrics. Then we
saw a series of cartouches--the continuous band arrangement being frequently
interrupted in these late carvings--depicting a constantly growing migration to the
nearest refuges of greater warmth--some fleeing to cities under the sea off the far-away
coast, and some clambering down through networks of limestone caverns in the hollow
hills to the neighboring black abyss of subterrene waters.

In the end it seems to have been the neighboring abyss which received the greatest
colonization. This was partly due, no doubt, to the traditional sacredness of this special
region, but may have been more conclusively determined by the opportunities it gave
for continuing the use of the great temples on the honeycombed mountains, and for
retaining the vast land city as a place of summer residence and base of communication
with various mines. The linkage of old and new abodes was made more effective by
means of several gradings and improvements along the connecting routes, including the
chiseling of numerous direct tunnels from the ancient metropolis to the black abyss--
sharply down-pointing tunnels whose mouths we carefully drew, according to our most
thoughtful estimates, on the guide map we were compiling. It was obvious that at least
two of these tunnels lay within a reasonable exploring distance of where we were--both
being on the mountainward edge of the city, one less than a quarter of a mile toward the
ancient river course, and the other perhaps twice that distance in the opposite direction.

The abyss, it seems, had shelving shores of dry land at certain places, but the Old Ones
built their new city under water--no doubt because of its greater certainty of uniform
warmth. The depth of the hidden sea appears to have been very great, so that the earth's
internal heat could ensure its habitability for an indefinite period. The beings seemed to
have had no trouble in adapting themselves to part-time--and eventually, of course,
whole-time--residence under water, since they had never allowed their gill systems to
atrophy. There were many sculptures which showed how they had always frequently
visited their submarine kinsfolk elsewhere, and how they had habitually bathed on the
deep bottom of their great river. The darkness of inner earth could likewise have been
no deterrent to a race accustomed to long antarctic nights.

Decadent though their style undoubtedly was, these latest carvings had a truly epic
quality where they told of the building of the new city in the cavern sea. The Old Ones
had gone about it scientifically--quarrying insoluble rocks from the heart of the
honeycombed mountains, and employing expert workers from the nearest submarine
city to perform the construction according to the best methods. These workers brought
with them all that was necessary to establish the new venture--Shoggoth tissue from
which to breed stone lifters and subsequent beasts of burden for the cavern city, and
other protoplasmic matter to mold into phosphorescent organisms for lighting purposes.

At last a mighty metropolis rose on the bottom of that Stygian sea, its architecture much
like that of the city above, and its workmanship displaying relatively little decadence
because of the precise mathematical element inherent in building operations. The newly
bred Shoggoths grew to enormous size and singular intelligence, and were represented
as taking and executing orders with marvelous quickness. They seemed to converse
with the Old Ones by mimicking their voices--a sort of musical piping over a wide
range, if poor Lake's dissection had indicated aright--and to work more from spoken
commands than from hypnotic suggestions as in earlier times. They were, however, kept
in admirable control. The phosphorescent organisms supplied light With vast
effectiveness, and doubtless atoned for the loss of the familiar polar auroras of the
outer-world night.

Art and decoration were pursued, though of course with a certain decadence. The Old
Ones seemed to realize this falling off themselves, and in many cases anticipated the
policy of Constantine the Great by transplanting especially fine blocks of ancient
carving from their land city, just as the emperor, in a similar age of decline, stripped
Greece and Asia of their finest art to give his new Byzantine capital greater splendors
than its own people could create. That the transfer of sculptured blocks had not been
more extensive was doubtless owing to the fact that the land city was not at first wholly
abandoned. By the time total abandonment did occur--and it surely must have occurred
before the polar Pleistocene was far advanced--the Old Ones had perhaps become
satisfied with their decadent art--or had ceased to recognize the superior merit of the
older carvings. At any rate, the aeon-silent ruins around us had certainly undergone no
wholesale sculptural denudation, though all the best separate statues, like other
movables, had been taken away.

The decadent cartouches and dadoes telling this story were, as I have said, the latest we
could find in our limited search. They left us with a picture of the Old Ones shuttling
back and forth betwixt the land city in summer and the sea-cavern city in winter, and
sometimes trading with the sea-bottom cities off the antarctic coast. By this time the
ultimate doom of the land city must have been recognized, for the sculptures showed
many signs of the cold's malign encroachments. Vegetation was declining, and the
terrible snows of the winter no longer melted completely even in midsummer. The
saurian livestock were nearly all dead, and the mammals were standing it none too well.
To keep on with the work of the upper world it had become necessary to adapt some of
the amorphous and curiously cold-resistant Shoggoths to land life--a thing the Old Ones
had formerly been reluctant to do. The great river was now lifeless, and the upper sea
had lost most of its denizens except the seals and whales. All the birds had flown away,
save only the great, grotesque penguins.

What had happened afterward we could only guess. How long had the new sea-cavern
city survived? Was it still down there, a stony corpse in eternal blackness? Had the
subterranean waters frozen at last? To what fate had the ocean-bottom cities of the outer
world been delivered? Had any of the Old Ones shifted north ahead of the creeping ice
cap? Existing geology shows no trace of their presence. Had the frightful Mi-Go been
still a menace in the outer land world of the north? Could one be sure of what might or
might not linger, even to this day, in the lightless and unplumbed abysses of earth's
deepest waters? Those things had seemingly been able to withstand any amount of
pressure--and men of the sea have fished up curious objects at times. And has the killer-
whale theory really explained the savage and mysterious scars on antarctic seals noticed
a generation ago by Borchgrevingk?

The specimens found by poor Lake did not enter into these guesses, for their geologic
setting proved them to have lived at what must have been a very early date in the land
city's history. They were, according to their location, certainly not less than thirty
million years old, and we reflected that in their day the sea-cavern city, and indeed the
cavern itself, had had no existence. They would have remembered an older scene, with
lush Tertiary vegetation everywhere, a younger land city of flourishing arts around
them, and a great river sweeping northward along the base of the mighty mountains
toward a far-away tropic ocean.

And yet we could not help thinking about these specimens--especially about the eight
perfect ones that were missing from Lake's hideously ravaged camp. There was
something abnormal about that whole business--the strange things we had tried so hard
to lay to somebody's madness--those frightful graves--the amount and nature of the
missing material--Gedney--the unearthly toughness of those archaic monstrosities, and
the queer vital freaks the sculptures now showed the race to have--Danforth and I had
seen a good deal in the last few hours, and were prepared to believe and keep silent
about many appalling and incredible secrets of primal nature.

IX

I have said that our study of the decadent sculptures brought about a change in our
immediate objective. This, of course, had to do with the chiseled avenues to the black
inner world, of whose existence we had not known before, but which we were now
eager to find and traverse. From the evident scale of the carvings we deduced that a
steeply descending walk of about a mile through either of the neighboring tunnels
would bring us to the brink of the dizzy, sunless cliffs about the great abyss; down
whose sides paths, improved by the Old Ones, led to the rocky shore of the hidden and
nighted ocean. To behold this fabulous gulf in stark reality was a lure which seemed
impossible of resistance once we knew of the thing--yet we realized we must begin the
quest at once if we expected to include it in our present trip.

It was now 8 P.M., and we did not have enough battery replacements to let our torches
burn on forever. We had done so much studying and copying below the glacial level
that our battery supply had had at least five hours of nearly continuous use, and despite
the special dry cell formula, would obviously be good for only about four more--though
by keeping one torch unused, except for especially interesting or difficult places, we
might manage to eke out a safe margin beyond that. It would not do to be without a light
in these Cyclopean catacombs, hence in order to make the abyss trip we must give up all
further mural deciphering. Of course we intended to revisit the place for days and
perhaps weeks of intensive study and photography--curiosity having long ago got the
better of horror--but just now we must hasten.

Our supply of trail-blazing paper was far from unlimited, and we were reluctant to
sacrifice spare notebooks or sketching paper to augment it, but we did let one large
notebook go. If worse came to worst we could resort to rock chipping--and of course it
would be possible, even in case of really lost direction, to work up to full daylight by
one channel or another if granted sufficient time for plentiful trial and error. So at last
we set off eagerly in the indicated direction of the nearest tunnel.

According to the carvings from which we had made our map, the desired tunnel mouth
could not be much more than a quarter of a mile from where we stood; the intervening
space showing solid-looking buildings quite likely to be penetrable still at a sub-glacial
level. The opening itself would be in the basement--on the angle nearest the foothills--of
a vast five-pointed structure of evidently public and perhaps ceremonial nature, which
we tried to identify from our aerial survey of the ruins.

No such structure came to our minds as we recalled our flight, hence we concluded that
its upper parts had been greatly damaged, or that it had been totally shattered in an ice
rift we had noticed. In the latter case the tunnel would probably turn out to be choked,
so that we would have to try the next nearest one--the one less than a mile to the north.
The intervening river course prevented our trying any of the more southern tunnels on
this trip; and indeed, if both of the neighboring ones were choked it was doubtful
whether our batteries would warrant an attempt on the next northerly one--about a mile
beyond our second choice.

As we threaded our dim way through the labyrinth with the aid of map and compass--
traversing rooms and corridors in every stage of ruin or preservation, clambering up
ramps, crossing upper floors and bridges and clambering down again, encountering
choked doorways and piles of debris, hastening now and then along finely preserved
and uncannily immaculate stretches, taking false leads and retracing our way (in such
cases removing the blind paper trail we had left), and once in a while striking the
bottom of an open shaft through which daylight poured or trickled down--we were
repeatedly tantalized by the sculptured walls along our route. Many must have told tales
of immense historical importance, and only the prospect of later visits reconciled us to
the need of passing them by. As it was, we slowed down once in a while and turned on
our second torch. If we had had more films, we would certainly have paused briefly to
photograph certain bas-reliefs, but time-consuming hand-copying was clearly out of the
question.

I come now once more to a place where the temptation to hesitate, or to hint rather than
state, is very strong. It is necessary, however, to reveal the rest in order to justify my
course in discouraging further exploration. We had wormed our way very close to the
computed site of the tunnel's mouth--having crossed a second-story bridge to what
seemed plainly the tip of a pointed wall, and descended to a ruinous corridor especially
rich in decadently elaborate and apparently ritualistic sculptures of late workmanship--
when, shortly before 8:30 P.M., Danforth's keen young nostrils gave us the first hint of
something unusual. If we had had a dog with us, I suppose we would have been warned
before. At first we could not precisely say what was wrong with the formerly crystal-
pure air, but after a few seconds our memories reacted only too definitely. Let me try to
state the thing without flinching. There was an odor--and that odor was vaguely, subtly,
and unmistakably akin to what had nauseated us upon opening the insane grave of the
horror poor Lake had dissected.

Of course the revelation was not as clearly cut at the time as it sounds now. There were
several conceivable explanations, and we did a good deal of indecisive whispering.
Most important of all, we did not retreat without further investigation; for having come
this far, we were loath to be balked by anything short of certain disaster. Anyway, what
we must have suspected was altogether too wild to believe. Such things did not happen
in any normal world. It was probably sheer irrational instinct which made us dim our
single torch--tempted no longer by the decadent and sinister sculptures that leered
menacingly from the oppressive walls--and which softened our progress to a cautious
tiptoeing and crawling over the increasingly littered floor and heaps of debris.

Danforth's eyes as well as nose proved better than mine, for it was likewise he who first
noticed the queer aspect of the debris after we had passed many half-choked arches
leading to chambers and corridors on the ground level. It did not look quite as it ought
after countless thousands of years of desertion, and when we cautiously turned on more
light we saw that a kind of swath seemed to have been lately tracked through it. The
irregular nature of the litter precluded any definite marks, but in the smoother places
there were suggestions of the dragging of heavy objects. Once we thought there was a
hint of parallel tracks as if of runners. This was what made us pause again.

It was during that pause that we caught--simultaneously this time--the other odor ahead.
Paradoxically, it was both a less frightful and more frightful odor--less frightful
intrinsically, but infinitely appalling in this place under the known circumstances--
unless, of course, Gedney--for the odor was the plain and familiar one of common
petrol--every-day gasoline.

Our motivation after that is something I will leave to psychologists. We knew now that
some terrible extension of the camp horrors must have crawled into this nighted burial
place of the aeons, hence could not doubt any longer the existence of nameless
conditions--present or at least recent just ahead. Yet in the end we did let sheer burning
curiosity--or anxiety--or autohypnotism--or vague thoughts of responsibility toward
Gedney--or what not--drive us on. Danforth whispered again of the print he thought he
had seen at the alley turning in the ruins above; and of the faint musical piping--
potentially of tremendous significance in the light of Lake's dissection report, despite its
close resemblance to the cave-mouth echoes of the windy peaks--which he thought he
had shortly afterward half heard from unknown depths below. I, in my turn, whispered
of how the camp was left--of what had disappeared, and of how the madness of a lone
survivor might have conceived the inconceivable--a wild trip across the monstrous
mountains and a descent into the unknown, primal masonry.

But we could not convince each other, or even ourselves, of anything definite. We had
turned off all light as we stood still, and vaguely noticed that a trace of deeply filtered
upper day kept the blackness from being absolute. Having automatically begun to move
ahead, we guided ourselves by occasional flashes from our torch. The disturbed debris
formed an impression we could not shake off, and the smell of gasoline grew stronger.
More and more ruin met our eyes and hampered our feet, until very soon we saw that
the forward way was about to cease. We had been all too correct in our pessimistic
guess about that rift glimpsed from the air. Our tunnel quest was a blind one, and we
were not even going to be able to reach the basement out of which the abyssward
aperture opened.

The torch, flashing over the grotesquely carved walls of the blocked corridor in which
we stood, showed several doorways in various states of obstruction; and from one of
them the gasoline odor--quite submerging that other hint of odor--came with especial
distinctness. As we looked more steadily, we saw that beyond a doubt there had been a
slight and recent clearing away of debris from that particular opening. Whatever the
lurking horror might be, we believed the direct avenue toward it was now plainly
manifest. I do not think anyone will wonder that we waited an appreciable time before
making any further motion.

And yet, when we did venture inside that black arch, our first impression was one of
anticlimax. For amidst the littered expanse of that sculptured crypt--a perfect cube with
sides of about twenty feet--there remained no recent object of instantly discernible size;
so that we looked instinctively, though in vain, for a farther doorway. In another
moment, however, Danforth's sharp vision had descried a place where the floor debris
had been disturbed; and we turned on both torches full strength. Though what we saw in
that light was actually simple and trifling, I am none the less reluctant to tell of it
because of what it implied. It was a rough leveling of the debris, upon which several
small objects lay carelessly scattered, and at one corner of which a considerable amount
of gasoline must have been spilled lately enough to leave a strong odor even at this
extreme superplateau altitude. In other words, it could not be other than a sort of camp--
a camp made by questing beings who, like us, had been turned back by the
unexpectedly choked way to the abyss.

Let me be plain. The scattered objects were, so far as substance was concerned, all from
Lake's camp; and consisted of tin cans as queerly opened as those we had seen at that
ravaged place, many spent matches, three illustrated books more or less curiously
smudged, an empty ink bottle with its pictorial and instructional carton, a broken
fountain pen, some oddly snipped fragments of fur and tent cloth, a used electric battery
with circular of directions, a folder that came with our type of tent heater, and a
sprinkling of crumpled papers. It was all bad enough but when we smoothed out the
papers and looked at what was on them, we felt we had come to the worst. We had
found certain inexplicably blotted papers at the camp which might have prepared us, yet
the effect of the sight down there in the prehuman vaults of a nightmare city was almost
too much to bear.

A mad Gedney might have made the groups of dots in imitation of those found on the
greenish soapstones, just as the dots on those insane five-pointed grave mounds might
have been made; and he might conceivably have prepared rough, hasty sketches--
varying in their accuracy or lack of it--which outlined the neighboring parts of the city
and traced the way from a circularly represented place outside our previous route--a
place we identified as a great cylindrical tower in the carvings and as a vast circular gulf
glimpsed in our aerial survey--to the present five-pointed structure and the tunnel mouth
therein.

He might, I repeat, have prepared such sketches; for those before us were quite
obviously compiled, as our own had been, from late sculptures somewhere in the glacial
labyrinth, though not from the ones which we had seen and used. But what the art-blind
bungler could never have done was to execute those sketches in a strange and assured
technique perhaps superior, despite haste and carelessness, to any of the decadent
carvings from which they were taken--the characteristic and unmistakable technique of
the Old Ones themselves in the dead city's heyday.
There are those who will say Danforth and I were utterly mad not to flee for our lives
after that; since our conclusions were now--notwithstanding their wildness--completely
fixed, and of a nature I need not even mention to those who have read my account as far
as this. Perhaps we were mad--for have I not said those horrible peaks were mountains
of madness? But I think I can detect something of the same spirit--albeit in a less
extreme form--in the men who stalk deadly beasts through African jungles to
photograph them or study their habits. Half paralyzed with terror though we were, there
was nevertheless fanned within us a blazing flame of awe and curiosity which
triumphed in the end.

Of course we did not mean to face that--or those--which we knew had been there, but
we felt that they must be gone by now. They would by this time have found the other
neighboring entrance to the abyss, and have passed within, to whatever night-black
fragments of the past might await them in the ultimate gulf--the ultimate gulf they had
never seen. Or if that entrance, too, was blocked, they would have gone on to the north
seeking another. They were, we remembered, partly independent of light.

Looking back to that moment, I can scarcely recall just what precise form our new
emotions took--just what change of immediate objective it was that so sharpened our
sense of expectancy. We certainly did not mean to face what we feared--yet I will not
deny that we may have had a lurking, unconscious wish to spy certain things from some
hidden vantage point. Probably we had not given up our zeal to glimpse the abyss itself,
though there was interposed a new goal in the form of that great circular place shown on
the crumpled sketches we had found. We had at once recognized it as a monstrous
cylindrical tower figuring in the very earliest carvings, but appearing only as a
prodigious round aperture from above. Something about the impressiveness of its
rendering, even in these hasty diagrams, made us think that its subglacial levels must
still form a feature of peculiar importance. Perhaps it embodied architectural marvels as
yet unencountered by us. It was certainly of incredible age according to the sculptures in
which it figured--being indeed among the first things built in the city. Its carvings, if
preserved, could not but be highly significant. Moreover, it might form a good present
link with the upper world--a shorter route than the one we were so carefully blazing, and
probably that by which those others had descended.

At any rate, the thing we did was to study the terrible sketches--which quite perfectly
confirmed our own--and start back over the indicated course to the circular place; the
course which our nameless predecessors must have traversed twice before us. The other
neighboring gate to the abyss would lie beyond that. I need not speak of our journey--
during which we continued to leave an economical trail of paper--for it was precisely
the same in kind as that by which we had reached the cul-de-sac; except that it tended to
adhere more closely to the ground level and even descend to basement corridors. Every
now and then we could trace certain disturbing marks in the debris or litter underfoot;
and after we had passed outside the radius of the gasoline scent, we were again faintly
conscious--spasmodically--of that more hideous and more persistent scent. After the
way had branched from our former course, we sometimes gave the rays of our single
torch a furtive sweep along the walls; noting in almost every case the well-nigh
omnipresent sculptures, which indeed seem to have formed a main aesthetic outlet for
the Old Ones.
About 9:30 P.M., while traversing a long, vaulted corridor whose increasingly glaciated
floor seemed somewhat below the ground level and whose roof grew lower as we
advanced, we began to see strong daylight ahead and were able to turn off our torch. It
appeared that we were coming to the vast circular place, and that our distance from the
upper air could not be very great. The corridor ended in an arch surprisingly low for
these megalithic ruins, but we could see much through it even before we emerged.
Beyond there stretched a prodigious round space--fully two hundred feet in diameter--
strewn with debris and containing many choked archways corresponding to the one we
were about to cross. The walls were--in available spaces--boldly sculptured into a spiral
band of heroic proportions; and displayed, despite the destructive weathering caused by
the openness of the spot, an artistic splendor far beyond anything we had encountered
before. The littered floor was quite heavily glaciated, and we fancied that the true
bottom lay at a considerably lower depth.

But the salient object of the place was the titanic stone ramp which, eluding the
archways by a sharp turn outward into the open floor, wound spirally up the stupendous
cylindrical wall like an inside counterpart of those once climbing outside the monstrous
towers or ziggurats of antique Babylon. Only the rapidity of our flight, and the
perspective which confounded the descent with the tower's inner wall, had prevented
our noticing this feature from the air, and thus caused us to seek another avenue to the
subglacial level. Pabodie might have been able to tell what sort of engineering held it in
place, but Danforth and I could merely admire and marvel. We could see mighty stone
corbels and pillars here and there, but what we saw seemed inadequate to the function
performed. The thing was excellently preserved up to the present top of the tower--a
highly remarkable circumstance in view of its exposure--and its shelter had done much
to protect the bizarre and disturbing cosmic sculptures on the walls.

As we stepped out into the awesome half daylight of this monstrous cylinder bottom--
fifty million years old, and without doubt the most primally ancient structure ever to
meet our eyes--we saw that the ramp-traversed sides stretched dizzily up to a height of
fully sixty feet. This, we recalled from our aerial survey, meant an outside glaciation of
some forty feet; since the yawning gulf we had seen from the plane had been at the top
of an approximately twenty-foot mound of crumbled masonry, somewhat sheltered for
three-fourths of its circumference by the massive curving walls of a line of higher ruins.
According to the sculptures, the original tower had stood in the center of an immense
circular plaza, and had been perhaps five hundred or six hundred feet high, with tiers of
horizontal disks near the top, and a row of needlelike spires along the upper rim. Most
of the masonry had obviously toppled outward rather than inward--a fortunate
happening, since otherwise the ramp might have been shattered and the whole interior
choked. As it was, the ramp showed sad battering; whilst the choking was such that all
the archways at the bottom seemed to have been recently cleared.

It took us only a moment to conclude that this was indeed the route by which those
others had descended, and that this would be the logical route for our own ascent
despite the long trail of paper we had left elsewhere. The tower's mouth was no farther
from the foothills and our waiting plane than was the great terraced building we had
entered, and any further subglacial exploration we might make on this trip would lie in
this general region. Oddly, we were still thinking about possible later trips--even after
all we had seen and guessed. Then, as we picked our way cautiously over the debris of
the great floor, there came a sight which for the time excluded all other matters.
It was the neatly huddled array of three sledges in that farther angle of the ramp's lower
and outward-projecting course which had hitherto been screened from our view. There
they were--the three sledges missing from Lake's camp--shaken by a hard usage which
must have included forcible dragging along great reaches of snowless masonry and
debris, as well as much hand portage over utterly unnavigable places. They were
carefully and intelligently packed and strapped, and contained things memorably
familiar enough: the gasoline stove, fuel cans, instrument cases, provision tins,
tarpaulins obviously bulging with books, and some bulging with less obvious contents--
everything derived from Lake's equipment.

After what we had found in that other room, we were in a measure prepared for this
encounter. The really great shock came when we stepped over and undid one tarpaulin
whose outlines had peculiarly disquieted us. It seems that others as well as Lake had
been interested in collecting typical specimens; for there were two here, both stiffly
frozen, perfectly preserved, patched with adhesive plaster where some wounds around
the neck had occurred, and wrapped with care to prevent further damage. They were the
bodies of young Gedney and the missing dog.

Many people will probably judge us callous as well as mad for thinking about the
northward tunnel and the abyss so soon after our somber discovery, and I am not
prepared to say that we would have immediately revived such thoughts but for a
specific circumstance which broke in upon us and set up a whole new train of
speculations. We had replaced the tarpaulin over poor Gedney and were standing in a
kind of mute bewilderment when the sounds finally reached our consciousness--the first
sounds we had heard since descending out of the open where the mountain wind whined
faintly from its unearthly heights. Well-known and mundane though they were, their
presence in this remote world of death was more unexpected and unnerving than any
grotesque or fabulous tones could possibly have been--since they gave a fresh upsetting
to all our notions of cosmic harmony.

Had it been some trace of that bizarre musical piping over a wide range which Lake's
dissection report had led us to expect in those others--and which, indeed, our
overwrought fancies had been reading into every wind howl we had heard since coming
on the camp horror--it would have had a kind of hellish congruity with the aeon-dead
region around us. A voice from other epochs belongs in a graveyard of other epochs. As
it was, however, the noise shattered all our profoundly seated adjustments--all our tacit
acceptance of the inner antarctic as a waste utterly and irrevocably void of every vestige
of normal life. What we heard was not the fabulous note of any buried blasphemy of
elder earth from whose supernal toughness an age-denied polar sun had evoked a
monstrous response. Instead, it was a thing so mockingly normal and so unerringly
familiarized by our sea days off Victoria Land and our camp days at McMurdo Sound
that we shuddered to think of it here, where such things ought not to be. To be brief--it
was simply the raucous squawking of a penguin.

The muffled sound floated from subglacial recesses nearly opposite to the corridor
whence we had come--regions manifestly in the direction of that other tunnel to the vast
abyss. The presence of a living water bird in such a direction--in a world whose surface
was one of age-long and uniform lifelessness--could lead to only one conclusion; hence
our first thought was to verify the objective reality of the sound. It was, indeed,
repeated, and seemed at times to come from more than one throat. Seeking its source,
we entered an archway from which much debris had been cleared; resuming our trail
blazing--with an added paper supply taken with curious repugnance from one of the
tarpaulin bundles on the sledges--when we left daylight behind.

As the glaciated floor gave place to a litter of detritus, we plainly discerned some
curious, dragging tracks; and once Danforth found a distinct print of a sort whose
description would be only too superfluous. The course indicated by the penguin cries
was precisely what our map and compass prescribed as an approach to the more
northerly tunnel mouth, and we were glad to find that a bridgeless thoroughfare on the
ground and basement levels seemed open. The tunnel, according to the chart, ought to
start from the basement of a large pyramidal structure which we seemed vaguely to
recall from our aerial survey as remarkably well-preserved. Along our path the single
torch showed a customary profusion of carvings, but we did not pause to examine any
of these.

Suddenly a bulky white shape loomed up ahead of us, and we flashed on the second
torch. It is odd how wholly this new quest had turned our minds from earlier fears of
what might lurk near. Those other ones, having left their supplies in the great circular
place, must have planned to return after their scouting trip toward or into the abyss; yet
we had now discarded all caution concerning them as completely as if they had never
existed. This white, waddling thing was fully six feet high, yet we seemed to realize at
once that it was not one of those others. They were larger and dark, and, according to
the sculptures, their motion over land surfaces was a swift, assured matter despite the
queerness of their sea-born tentacle equipment. But to say that the white thing did not
profoundly frighten us would be vain. We were indeed clutched for an instant by
primitive dread almost sharper than the worst of our reasoned fears regarding those
others. Then came a flash of anticlimax as the white shape sidled into a lateral archway
to our left to join two others of its kind which had summoned it in raucous tones. For it
was only a penguin--albeit of a huge, unknown species larger than the greatest of the
known king penguins, and monstrous in its combined albinism and virtual eyelessness.

When we had followed the thing into the archway and turned both our torches on the
indifferent and unheeding group of three, we saw that they were all eyeless albinos of
the same unknown and gigantic species. Their size reminded us of some of the archaic
penguins depicted in the Old Ones' sculptures, and it did not take us long to conclude
that they were descended from the same stock--undoubtedly surviving through a retreat
to some warmer inner region whose perpetual blackness had destroyed their
pigmentation and atrophied their eyes to mere useless slits. That their present habitat
was the vast abyss we sought, was not for a moment to be doubted; and this evidence of
the gulf's continued warmth and habitability filled us with the most curious and subtly
perturbing fancies.

We wondered, too, what had caused these three birds to venture out of their usual
domain. The state and silence of the great dead city made it clear that it had at no time
been an habitual seasonal rookery, whilst the manifest indifference of the trio to our
presence made it seem odd that any passing party of those others should have startled
them. Was it possible that those others had taken some aggressive action or tried to
increase their meat supply? We doubted whether that pungent odor which the dogs had
hated could cause an equal antipathy in these penguins, since their ancestors had
obviously lived on excellent terms with the Old Ones--an amicable relationship which
must have survived in the abyss below as long as any of the Old Ones remained.
Regretting--in a flare-up of the old spirit of pure science--that we could not photograph
these anomalous creatures, we shortly left them to their squawking and pushed on
toward the abyss whose openness was now so positively proved to us, and whose exact
direction occasional penguin tracks made clear.

Not long afterward a steep descent in a long, low, doorless, and peculiarly sculptureless
corridor led us to believe that we were approaching the tunnel mouth at last. We had
passed two more penguins, and heard others immediately ahead. Then the corridor
ended in a prodigious open space which made us gasp involuntarily--a perfect inverted
hemisphere, obviously deep underground; fully a hundred feet in diameter and fifty feet
high, with low archways opening around all parts of the circumference but one, and that
one yawning cavernously with a black, arched aperture which broke the symmetry of
the vault to a height of nearly fifteen feet. It was the entrance to the great abyss.

In this vast hemisphere, whose concave roof was impressively though decadently
carved to a likeness of the primordial celestial dome, a few albino penguins waddled--
aliens there, but indifferent and unseeing. The black tunnel yawned indefinitely off at a
steep, descending grade, its aperture adorned with grotesquely chiseled jambs and lintel.
From that cryptical mouth we fancied a current of slightly warmer air, and perhaps even
a suspicion of vapor proceeded; and we wondered what living entities other than
penguins the limitless void below, and the contiguous honeycombings of the land and
the titan mountains, might conceal. We wondered, too, whether the trace of
mountaintop smoke at first suspected by poor Lake, as well as the odd haze we had
ourselves perceived around the rampart-crowned peak, might not be caused by the
tortuous-channeled rising of some such vapor from the unfathomed regions of earth's
core.

Entering the tunnel, we saw that its outline was--at least at the start--about fifteen feet
each way--sides, floor, and arched roof composed of the usual megalithic masonry. The
sides were sparsely decorated with cartouches of conventional designs in a late,
decadent style; and all the construction and carving were marvelously well-preserved.
The floor was quite clear, except for a slight detritus bearing outgoing penguin tracks
and the inward tracks of these others. The farther one advanced, the warmer it became;
so that we were soon unbuttoning our heavy garments. We wondered whether there
were any actually igneous manifestations below, and whether the waters of that sunless
sea were hot. After a short distance the masonry gave place to solid rock, though the
tunnel kept the same proportions and presented the same aspect of carved regularity.
Occasionally its varying grade became so steep that grooves were cut in the floor.
Several times we noted the mouths of small lateral galleries not recorded in our
diagrams; none of them such as to complicate the problem of our return, and all of them
welcome as possible refuges in case we met unwelcome entities on their way back from
the abyss. The nameless scent of such things was very distinct. Doubtless it was
suicidally foolish to venture into that tunnel under the known conditions, but the lure of
the unplumbed is stronger in certain persons than most suspect--indeed, it was just such
a lure which had brought us to this unearthly polar waste in the first place. We saw
several penguins as we passed along, and speculated on the distance we would have to
traverse. The carvings had led us to expect a steep downhill walk of about a mile to the
abyss, but our previous wanderings had shown us that matters of scale were not wholly
to be depended on.

After about a quarter of a mile that nameless scent became greatly accentuated, and we
kept very careful track of the various lateral openings we passed. There was no visible
vapor as at the mouth, but this was doubtless due to the lack of contrasting cooler air.
The temperature was rapidly ascending, and we were not surprised to come upon a
careless heap of material shudderingly familiar to us. It was composed of furs and tent
cloth taken from Lake's camp, and we did not pause to study the bizarre forms into
which the fabrics had been slashed. Slightly beyond this point we noticed a decided
increase in the size and number of the side galleries, and concluded that the densely
honeycombed region beneath the higher foothills must now have been reached. The
nameless scent was now curiously mixed with another and scarcely less offensive odor-
-of what nature we could not guess, though we thought of decaying organisms and
perhaps unknown subterranean fungi. Then came a startling expansion of the tunnel for
which the carvings had not prepared us--a broadening and rising into a lofty, natural-
looking elliptical cavern with a level floor, some seventy-five feet long and fifty broad,
and with many immense side passages leading away into cryptical darkness.

Though this cavern was natural in appearance, an inspection with both torches
suggested that it had been formed by the artificial destruction of several walls between
adjacent honeycombings. The walls were rough, and the high, vaulted roof was thick
with stalactites; but the solid rock floor had been smoothed off, and was free from all
debris, detritus, or even dust to a positively abnormal extent. Except for the avenue
through which we had come, this was true of the floors of all the great galleries opening
off from it; and the singularity of the condition was such as to set us vainly puzzling.
The curious new fetor which had supplemented the nameless scent was excessively
pungent here; so much so that it destroyed all trace of the other. Something about this
whole place, with its polished and almost glistening floor, struck us as more vaguely
baffling and horrible than any of the monstrous things we had previously encountered.

The regularity of the passage immediately ahead, as well as the larger proportion of
penguin-droppings there, prevented all confusion as to the right course amidst this
plethora of equally great cave mouths. Nevertheless we resolved to resume our paper
trailblazing if any further complexity should develop; for dust tracks, of course, could
no longer be expected. Upon resuming our direct progress we cast a beam of torchlight
over the tunnel walls--and stopped short in amazement at the supremely radical change
which had come over the carvings in this part of the passage. We realized, of course, the
great decadence of the Old Ones' sculpture at the time of the tunneling, and had indeed
noticed the inferior workmanship of the arabesques in the stretches behind us. But now,
in this deeper section beyond the cavern, there was a sudden difference wholly
transcending explanation--a difference in basic nature as well as in mere quality, and
involving so profound and calamitous a degradation of skill that nothing in the hitherto
observed rate of decline could have led one to expect it.

This new and degenerate work was coarse, bold, and wholly lacking in delicacy of
detail. It was countersunk with exaggerated depth in bands following the same general
line as the sparse cartouches of the earlier sections, but the height of the reliefs did not
reach the level of the general surface. Danforth had the idea that it was a second
carving--a sort of palimpsest formed after the obliteration of a previous design. In nature
it was wholly decorative and conventional, and consisted of crude spirals and angles
roughly following the quintile mathematical tradition of the Old Ones, yet seemingly
more like a parody than a perpetuation of that tradition. We could not get it out of our
minds that some subtly but profoundly alien element had been added to the aesthetic
feeling behind the technique--an alien element, Danforth guessed, that was responsible
for the laborious substitution. It was like, yet disturbingly unlike, what we had come to
recognize as the Old Ones' art; and I was persistently reminded of such hybrid things as
the ungainly Palmyrene sculptures fashioned in the Roman manner. That others had
recently noticed this belt of carving was hinted by the presence of a used flashlight
battery on the floor in front of one of the most characteristic cartouches.

Since we could not afford to spend any considerable time in study, we resumed our
advance after a cursory look; though frequently casting beams over the walls to see if
any further decorative changes developed. Nothing of the sort was perceived, though the
carvings were in places rather sparse because of the numerous mouths of smooth-
floored lateral tunnels. We saw and heard fewer penguins, but thought we caught a
vague suspicion of an infinitely distant chorus of them somewhere deep within the
earth. The new and inexplicable odor was abominably strong, and we could detect
scarcely a sign of that other nameless scent. Puffs of visible vapor ahead bespoke
increasing contrasts in temperature, and the relative nearness of the sunless sea cliffs of
the great abyss. Then, quite unexpectedly, we saw certain obstructions on the polished
floor ahead--obstructions which were quite definitely not penguins--and turned on our
second torch after making sure that the objects were quite stationary.

XI

Still another time have I come to a place where it is very difficult to proceed. I ought to
be hardened by this stage; but there are some experiences and intimations which scar
too deeply to permit of healing, and leave only such an added sensitiveness that memory
reinspires all the original horror. We saw, as I have said, certain obstructions on the
polished floor ahead; and I may add that our nostrils were assailed almost
simultaneously by a very curious intensification of the strange prevailing fetor, now
quite plainly mixed with the nameless stench of those others which had gone before.
The light of the second torch left no doubt of what the obstructions were, and we dared
approach them only because we could see, even from a distance, that they were quite as
past all harming power as had been the six similar specimens unearthed from the
monstrous star-mounded graves at poor Lake's camp.

They were, indeed, as lacking in completeness as most of those we had unearthed--

though it grew plain from the thick, dark green pool gathering around them that their
incompleteness was of infinitely greater recency. There seemed to be only four of them,
whereas Lake's bulletins would have suggested no less than eight as forming the group
which had preceded us. To find them in this state was wholly unexpected, and we
wondered what sort of monstrous struggle had occurred down here in the dark.

Penguins, attacked in a body, retaliate savagely with their beaks, and our ears now made
certain the existence of a rookery far beyond. Had those others disturbed such a place
and aroused murderous pursuit? The obstructions did not suggest it, for penguins' beaks
against the tough tissues Lake had dissected could hardly account for the terrible
damage our approaching glance was beginning to make out. Besides, the huge blind
birds we had seen appeared to be singularly peaceful.

Had there, then, been a struggle among those others, and were the absent four
responsible? If so, where were they? Were they close at hand and likely to form an
immediate menace to us? We glanced anxiously at some of the smooth-floored lateral
passages as we continued our slow and frankly reluctant approach. Whatever the
conflict was, it had clearly been that which had frightened the penguins into their
unaccustomed wandering. It must, then, have arisen near that faintly heard rookery in
the incalculable gulf beyond, since there were no signs that any birds had normally
dwelt here. Perhaps, we reflected, there had been a hideous running fight, with the
weaker party seeking to get back to the cached sledges when their pursuers finished
them. One could picture the demoniac fray between namelessly monstrous entities as it
surged out of the black abyss with great clouds of frantic penguins squawking and
scurrying ahead.

I say that we approached those sprawling and incomplete obstructions slowly and
reluctantly. Would to Heaven we had never approached them at all, but had run back at
top speed out of that blasphemous tunnel with the greasily smooth floors and the
degenerate murals aping and mocking the things they had superseded--run back, before
we had seen what we did see, and before our minds were burned with something which
will never let us breathe easily again!

Both of our torches were turned on the prostrate objects, so that we soon realized the
dominant factor in their incompleteness. Mauled, compressed, twisted, and ruptured as
they were, their chief common injury was total decapitation. From each one the
tentacled starfish head had been removed; and as we drew near we saw that the manner
of removal looked more like some hellish tearing or suction than like any ordinary form
of cleavage. Their noisome dark-green ichor formed a large, spreading pool; but its
stench was half overshadowed by the newer and stranger stench, here more pungent
than at any other point along our route. Only when we had come very close to the
sprawling obstructions could we trace that second, unexplainable fetor to any immediate
source--and the instant we did so Danforth, remembering certain very vivid sculptures
of the Old Ones' history in the Permian Age one hundred and fifty million years ago,
gave vent to a nerve-tortured cry which echoed hysterically through that vaulted and
archaic passage with the evil, palimpsest carvings.

I came only just short of echoing his cry myself; for I had seen those primal sculptures,
too, and had shudderingly admired the way the nameless artist had suggested that
hideous slime coating found on certain incomplete and prostrate Old Ones--those whom
the frightful Shoggoths had characteristically slain and sucked to a ghastly headlessness
in the great war of resubjugation. They were infamous, nightmare sculptures even when
telling of age-old, bygone things; for Shoggoths and their work ought not to be seen by
human beings or portrayed by any beings. The mad author of the Necronomicon had
nervously tried to swear that none had been bred on this planet, and that only drugged
dreamers had even conceived them. Formless protoplasm able to mock and reflect all
forms and organs and processes--viscous agglutinations of bubbling cells--rubbery
fifteen-foot spheroids infinitely plastic and ductile--slaves of suggestion, builders of
cities--more and more sullen, more and more intelligent, more and more amphibious,
more and more imitative! Great God! What madness made even those blasphemous Old
Ones willing to use and carve such things?

And now, when Danforth and I saw the freshly glistening and reflectively iridescent
black slime which clung thickly to those headless bodies and stank obscenely with that
new, unknown odor whose cause only a diseased fancy could envisage--clung to those
bodies and sparkled less voluminously on a smooth part of the accursedly resculptured
wall in a series of grouped dots--we understood the quality of cosmic fear to its
uttermost depths. It was not fear of those four missing others--for all too well did we
suspect they would do no harm again. Poor devils! After all, they were not evil things of
their kind. They were the men of another age and another order of being. Nature had
played a hellish jest on them--as it will on any others that human madness, callousness,
or cruelty may hereafter dig up in that hideously dead or sleeping polar waste--and this
was their tragic homecoming. They had not been even savages--for what indeed had
they done? That awful awakening in the cold of an unknown epoch--perhaps an attack
by the furry, frantically barking quadrupeds, and a dazed defense against them and the
equally frantic white simians with the queer wrappings and paraphernalia...poor Lake,
poor Gedney... and poor Old Ones! Scientists to the last--what had they done that we
would not have done in their place? God, what intelligence and persistence! What a
facing of the incredible, just as those carven kinsmen and forbears had faced things only
a little less incredible! Radiates, vegetables, monstrosities, star spawn--whatever they
had been, they were men!

They had crossed the icy peaks on whose templed slopes they had once worshipped and
roamed among the tree ferns. They had found their dead city brooding under its curse,
and had read its carven latter days as we had done. They had tried to reach their living
fellows in fabled depths of blackness they had never seen--and what had they found?
All this flashed in unison through the thoughts of Danforth and me as we looked from
those headless, slime-coated shapes to the loathsome palimpsest sculptures and the
diabolical dot groups of fresh slime on the wall beside them--looked and understood
what must have triumphed and survived down there in the Cyclopean water city of that
nighted, penguin-fringed abyss, whence even now a sinister curling mist had begun to
belch pallidly as if in answer to Danforth's hysterical scream.

The shock of recognizing that monstrous slime and headlessness had frozen us into
mute, motionless statues, and it is only through later conversations that we have learned
of the complete identity of our thoughts at that moment. It seemed aeons that we stood
there, but actually it could not have been more than ten or fifteen seconds. That hateful,
pallid mist curled forward as if veritably driven by some remoter advancing bulk--and
then came a sound which upset much of what we had just decided, and in so doing
broke the spell and enabled us to run like mad past squawking, confused penguins over
our former trail back to the city, along ice-sunken megalithic corridors to the great open
circle, and up that archaic spiral ramp in a frenzied, automatic plunge for the sane outer
air and light of day.

The new sound, as I have intimated, upset much that we had decided; because it was
what poor Lake's dissection had led us to attribute to those we had judged dead. It was,
Danforth later told me, precisely what he had caught in infinitely muffled form when at
that spot beyond the alley corner above the glacial level; and it certainly had a shocking
resemblance to the wind pipings we had both heard around the lofty mountain caves. At
the risk of seeming puerile I will add another thing, too, if only because of the
surprising way Danforth's impressions chimed with mine. Of course common reading is
what prepared us both to make the interpretation, though Danforth has hinted at queer
notions about unsuspected and forbidden sources to which Poe may have had access
when writing his Arthur Gordon Pym a century ago. It will be remembered that in that
fantastic tale there is a word of unknown but terrible and prodigious significance
connected with the antarctic and screamed eternally by the gigantic spectrally snowy
birds of that malign region's core. "Tekeli-li! Tekeli-li!" That, I may admit, is exactly
what we thought we heard conveyed by that sudden sound behind the advancing white
mist--that insidious musical piping over a singularly wide range.

We were in full flight before three notes or syllables had been uttered, though we knew
that the swiftness of the Old Ones would enable any scream-roused and pursuing
survivor of the slaughter to overtake us in a moment if it really wished to do so. We had
a vague hope, however, that nonaggressive conduct and a display of kindred reason
might cause such a being to spare us in case of capture, if only from scientific curiosity.
After all, if such an one had nothing to fear for itself, it would have no motive in
harming us. Concealment being futile at this juncture, we used our torch for a running
glance behind, and perceived that the mist was thinning. Would we see, at last, a
complete and living specimen of those others? Again came that insidious musical
piping--"Tekeli-li! Tekeli-li!" Then, noting that we were actually gaining on our
pursuer, it occurred to us that the entity might be wounded. We could take no chances,
however, since it was very obviously approaching in answer to Danforth's scream,
rather than in flight from any other entity. The timing was too close to admit of doubt.
Of the whereabouts of that less conceivable and less mentionable nightmare--that fetid,
unglimpsed mountain of slime-spewing protoplasm whose race had conquered the abyss
and sent land pioneers to recarve and squirm through the burrows of the hills--we could
form no guess; and it cost us a genuine pang to leave this probably crippled Old One--
perhaps a lone survivor--to the peril of recapture and a nameless fate.

Thank Heaven we did not slacken our run. The curling mist had thickened again, and
was driving ahead with increased speed; whilst the straying penguins in our rear were
squawking and screaming and displaying signs of a panic really surprising in view of
their relatively minor confusion when we had passed them. Once more came that
sinister, wide-ranged piping--"Tekeli-li! Tekeli-li!" We had been wrong. The thing was
not wounded, but had merely paused on encountering the bodies of its fallen kindred
and the hellish slime inscription above them. We could never know what that demon
message was--but those burials at Lake's camp had shown how much importance the
beings attached to their dead. Our recklessly used torch now revealed ahead of us the
large open cavern where various ways converged, and we were glad to be leaving those
morbid palimpsest sculptures--almost felt even when scarcely seen--behind. Another
thought which the advent of the cave inspired was the possibility of losing our pursuer
at this bewildering focus of large galleries. There were several of the blind albino
penguins in the open space, and it seemed clear that their fear of the oncoming entity
was extreme to the point of unaccountability. If at that point we dimmed our torch to the
very lowest limit of traveling need, keeping it strictly in front of us, the frightened
squawking motions of the huge birds in the mist might muffle our footfalls, screen our
true course, and somehow set up a false lead. Amidst the churning, spiraling fog, the
littered and unglistening floor of the main tunnel beyond this point, as differing from the
other morbidly polished burrows, could hardly form a highly distinguishing feature;
even, so far as we could conjecture, for those indicated special senses which made the
Old Ones partly, though imperfectly, independent of light in emergencies. In fact, we
were somewhat apprehensive lest we go astray ourselves in our haste. For we had, of
course, decided to keep straight on toward the dead city; since the consequences of loss
in those unknown foothill honeycombings would be unthinkable.

The fact that we survived and emerged is sufficient proof that the thing did take a wrong
gallery whilst we providentially hit on the right one. The penguins alone could not have
saved us, but in conjunction with the mist they seem to have done so. Only a benign fate
kept the curling vapors thick enough at the right moment, for they were constantly
shifting and threatening to vanish. Indeed, they did lift for a second just before we
emerged from the nauseously resculptured tunnel into the cave; so that we actually
caught one first and only half glimpse of the oncoming entity as we cast a final,
desperately fearful glance backward before dimming the torch and mixing with the
penguins in the hope of dodging pursuit. If the fate which screened us was benign, that
which gave us the half glimpse was infinitely the opposite; for to that flash of
semivision can be traced a full half of the horror which has ever since haunted us.

Our exact motive in looking back again was perhaps no more than the immemorial
instinct of the pursued to gauge the nature and course of its pursuer; or perhaps it was an
automatic attempt to answer a subconscious question raised by one of our senses. In the
midst of our flight, with all our faculties centered on the problem of escape, we were in
no condition to observe and analyze details; yet even so, our latent brain cells must have
wondered at the message brought them by our nostrils. Afterward we realized what it
was that our retreat from the fetid slime coating on those headless obstructions, and the
coincident approach of the pursuing entity, had not brought us the exchange of stenches
which logic called for. In the neighborhood of the prostrate things that new and lately
unexplainable fetor had been wholly dominant; but by this time it ought to have largely
given place to the nameless stench associated with those others. This it had not done--
for instead, the newer and less bearable smell was now virtually undiluted, and growing
more and more poisonously insistent each second.

So we glanced back simultaneously, it would appear; though no doubt the incipient

motion of one prompted the imitation of the other. As we did so we flashed both torches
full strength at the momentarily thinned mist; either from sheer primitive anxiety to see
all we could, or in a less primitive but equally unconscious effort to dazzle the entity
before we dimmed our light and dodged among the penguins of the labyrinth center
ahead. Unhappy act! Not Orpheus himself, or Lot's wife, paid much more dearly for a
backward glance. And again came that shocking, wide-ranged piping--"Tekeli-li!
Tekeli-li!"

I might as well be frank--even if I cannot bear to be quite direct--in stating what we

saw; though at the time we felt that it was not to be admitted even to each other. The
words reaching the reader can never even suggest the awfulness of the sight itself. It
crippled our consciousness so completely that I wonder we had the residual sense to
dim our torches as planned, and to strike the right tunnel toward the dead city. Instinct
alone must have carried us through--perhaps better than reason could have done; though
if that was what saved us, we paid a high price. Of reason we certainly had little enough
left.
Danforth was totally unstrung, and the first thing I remember of the rest of the journey
was hearing him lightheadedly chant an hysterical formula in which I alone of mankind
could have found anything but insane irrelevance. It reverberated in falsetto echoes
among the squawks of the penguins; reverberated through the vaultings ahead, and--
thank God--through the now empty vaultings behind. He could not have begun it at
once--else we would not have been alive and blindly racing. I shudder to think of what a
shade of difference in his nervous reactions might have brought.

"South Station Under--Washington Under--Park Street Under--Kendall --Central--

Harvard--" The poor fellow was chanting the familiar stations of the Boston-Cambridge
tunnel that burrowed through our peaceful native soil thousands of miles away in New
England, yet to me the ritual had neither irrelevance nor home feeling. It had only
horror, because I knew unerringly the monstrous, nefandous analogy that had suggested
it. We had expected, upon looking back, to see a terrible and incredible moving entity if
the mists were thin enough; but of that entity we had formed a clear idea. What we did
see--for the mists were indeed all too malignly thinned--was something altogether
different, and immeasurably more hideous and detestable. It was the utter, objective
embodiment of the fantastic novelist's "thing that should not be"; and its nearest
comprehensible analogue is a vast, onrushing subway train as one sees it from a station
platform--the great black front looming colossally out of infinite subterranean distance,
constellated with strangely colored lights and filling the prodigious burrow as a piston
fills a cylinder.

But we were not on a station platform. We were on the track ahead as the nightmare,
plastic column of fetid black iridescence oozed tightly onward through its fifteen-foot
sinus, gathering unholy speed and driving before it a spiral, rethickening cloud of the
pallid abyss-vapor. It was a terrible, indescribable thing vaster than any subway train--a
shapeless congeries of protoplasmic bubbles, faintly self-luminous, and with myriads of
temporary eyes forming and un-forming as pustules of greenish light all over the tunnel-
filling front that bore down upon us, crushing the frantic penguins and slithering over
the glistening floor that it and its kind had swept so evilly free of all litter. Still came
that eldritch, mocking cry--"Tekeli-li! Tekeli-li!" and at last we remembered that the
demoniac Shoggoths--given life, thought, and plastic organ patterns solely by the Old
Ones, and having no language save that which the dot groups expressed--had likewise
no voice save the imitated accents of their bygone masters.

XII

Danforth and I have recollections of emerging into the great sculptured hemisphere and
of threading our back trail through the Cyclopean rooms and corridors of the dead city;
yet these are purely dream fragments involving no memory of volition, details, or
physical exertion. It was as if we floated in a nebulous world or dimension without time,
causation, or orientation. The gray half-daylight of the vast circular space sobered us
somewhat; but we did not go near those cached sledges or look again at poor Gedney
and the dog. They have a strange and titanic mausoleum, and I hope the end of this
planet will find them still undisturbed.

It was while struggling up the colossal spiral incline that we first felt the terrible fatigue
and short breath which our race through the thin plateau air had produced; but not even
fear of collapse could make us pause before reaching the normal outer realm of sun and
sky. There was something vaguely appropriate about our departure from those buried
epochs; for as we wound our panting way up the sixty-foot cylinder of primal masonry,
we glimpsed beside us a continuous procession of heroic sculptures in the dead race's
early and undecayed technique--a farewell from the Old Ones, written fifty million
years ago.

Finally scrambling out at the top, we found ourselves on a great mound of tumbled
blocks, with the curved walls of higher stonework rising westward, and the brooding
peaks of the great mountains showing beyond the more crumbled structures toward the
east. The low antarctic sun of midnight peered redly from the southern horizon through
rifts in the jagged ruins, and the terrible age and deadness of the nightmare city seemed
all the starker by contrast with such relatively known and accustomed things as the
features of the polar landscape. The sky above was a churning and opalescent mass of
tenuous ice-vapors, and the cold clutched at our vitals. Wearily resting the outfit-bags to
which we had instinctively clung throughout our desperate flight, we rebuttoned our
heavy garments for the stumbling climb down the mound and the walk through the
aeon-old stone maze to the foothills where our aeroplane waited. Of what had set us
fleeing from that darkness of earth's secret and archaic gulfs we said nothing at all.

In less than a quarter of an hour we had found the steep grade to the foothills--the
probable ancient terrace--by which we had descended, and could see the dark bulk of
our great plane amidst the sparse ruins on the rising slope ahead. Halfway uphill toward
our goal we paused for a momentary breathing spell, and turned to look again at the
fantastic tangle of incredible stone shapes below us--once more outlined mystically
against an unknown west. As we did so we saw that the sky beyond had lost its morning
haziness; the restless ice-vapors having moved up to the zenith, where their mocking
outlines seemed on the point of settling into some bizarre pattern which they feared to
make quite definite or conclusive.

There now lay revealed on the ultimate white horizon behind the grotesque city a dim,
elfin line of pinnacled violet whose needle-pointed heights loomed dreamlike against
the beckoning rose color of the western sky. Up toward this shimmering rim sloped the
ancient table-land, the depressed course of the bygone river traversing it as an irregular
ribbon of shadow. For a second we gasped in admiration of the scene's unearthly cosmic
beauty, and then vague horror began to creep into our souls. For this far violet line
could be nothing else than the terrible mountains of the forbidden land--highest of
earth's peaks and focus of earth's evil; harborers of nameless horrors and Archaean
secrets; shunned and prayed to by those who feared to carve their meaning; untrodden
by any living thing on earth, but visited by the sinister lightnings and sending strange
beams across the plains in the polar night--beyond doubt the unknown archetype of that
dreaded Kadath in the Cold Waste beyond abhorrent Leng, whereof primal legends hint
evasively.

If the sculptured maps and pictures in that prehuman city had told truly, these cryptic
violet mountains could not be much less than three hundred miles away; yet none the
less sharply did their dim elfin essence appear above that remote and snowy rim, like
the serrated edge of a monstrous alien planet about to rise into unaccustomed heavens.
Their height, then, must have been tremendous beyond all comparison--carrying them
up into tenuous atmospheric strata peopled only by such gaseous wraiths as rash flyers
have barely lived to whisper of after unexplainable falls. Looking at them, I thought
nervously of certain sculptured hints of what the great bygone river had washed down
into the city from their accursed slopes--and wondered how much sense and how much
folly had lain in the fears of those Old Ones who carved them so reticently. I recalled
how their northerly end must come near the coast at Queen Mary Land, where even at
that moment Sir Douglas Mawson's expedition was doubtless working less than a
thousand miles away; and hoped that no evil fate would give Sir Douglas and his men a
glimpse of what might lie beyond the protecting coastal range. Such thoughts formed a
measure of my overwrought condition at the time--and Danforth seemed to be even
worse.

Yet long before we had passed the great star-shaped ruin and reached our plane, our
fears had become transferred to the lesser but vast-enough range whose recrossing lay
ahead of us. From these foothills the black, ruin-crusted slopes reared up starkly and
hideously against the east, again reminding us of those strange Asian paintings of
Nicholas Roerich; and when we thought of the frightful amorphous entities that might
have pushed their fetidly squirming way even to the topmost hollow pinnacles, we
could not face without panic the prospect of again sailing by those suggestive skyward
cave mouths where the wind made sounds like an evil musical piping over a wide range.
To make matters worse, we saw distinct traces of local mist around several of the
summits--as poor Lake must have done when he made that early mistake about
volcanism--and thought shiveringly of that kindred mist from which we had just
escaped; of that, and of the blasphemous, horror-fostering abyss whence all such vapors
came.

All was well with the plane, and we clumsily hauled on our heavy flying furs. Danforth
got the engine started without trouble, and we made a very smooth take-off over the
nightmare city. Below us the primal Cyclopean masonry spread out as it had done when
first we saw it, and we began rising and turning to test the wind for our crossing through
the pass. At a very high level there must have been great disturbance, since the ice-dust
clouds of the zenith were doing all sorts of fantastic things; but at twenty-four thousand
feet, the height we needed for the pass, we found navigation quite practicable. As we
drew close to the jutting peaks the wind's strange piping again became manifest, and I
could see Danforth's hands trembling at the controls. Rank amateur that I was, I thought
at that moment that I might be a better navigator than he in effecting the dangerous
crossing between pinnacles; and when I made motions to change seats and take over his
duties he did not protest. I tried to keep all my skill and self-possession about me, and
stared at the sector of reddish farther sky betwixt the walls of the pass--resolutely
refusing to pay attention to the puffs of mountain-top vapor, and wishing that I had
wax-stopped ears like Ulysses' men off the Siren's coast to keep that disturbing
windpiping from my consciousness.

But Danforth, released from his piloting and keyed up to a dangerous nervous pitch,
could not keep quiet. I felt him turning and wriggling about as he looked back at the
terrible receding city, ahead at the cave-riddled, cube-barnacled peaks, sidewise at the
bleak sea of snowy, rampart-strewn foothills, and upward at the seething, grotesquely
clouded sky. It was then, just as I was trying to steer safely through the pass, that his
mad shrieking brought us so close to disaster by shattering my tight hold on myself and
causing me to fumble helplessly with the controls for a moment. A second afterward my
resolution triumphed and we made the crossing safely--yet I am afraid that Danforth
will never be the same again.
I have said that Danforth refused to tell me what final horror made him scream out so
insanely--a horror which, I feel sadly sure, is mainly responsible for his present
breakdown. We had snatches of shouted conversation above the wind's piping and the
engine's buzzing as we reached the safe side of the range and swooped slowly down
toward the camp, but that had mostly to do with the pledges of secrecy we had made as
we prepared to leave the nightmare city. Certain things, we had agreed, were not for
people to know and discuss lightly--and I would not speak of them now but for the need
of heading off that Starkweather-Moore Expedition, and others, at any cost. It is
absolutely necessary, for the peace and safety of mankind, that some of earth's dark,
dead corners and unplumbed depths be let alone; lest sleeping abnormalities wake to
resurgent life, and blasphemously surviving nightmares squirm and splash out of their
black lairs to newer and wider conquests.

All that Danforth has ever hinted is that the final horror was a mirage. It was not, he
declares, anything connected with the cubes and caves of those echoing, vaporous,
wormily-honeycombed mountains of madness which we crossed; but a single fantastic,
demoniac glimpse, among the churning zenith clouds, of what lay back of those other
violet westward mountains which the Old Ones had shunned and feared. It is very
probable that the thing was a sheer delusion born of the previous stresses we had passed
through, and of the actual though unrecognized mirage of the dead transmontane city
experienced near Lake's camp the day before; but it was so real to Danforth that he
suffers from it still.

He has on rare occasions whispered disjointed and irresponsible things about "The black
pit," "the carven rim," "the protoShoggoths," "the windowless solids with five
dimensions," "the nameless cylinder," "the elder Pharos," "Yog-Sothoth," "the primal
white jelly," "the color out of space," "the wings," "the eyes in darkness," "the moon-
ladder," "the original, the eternal, the undying," and other bizarre conceptions; but when
he is fully himself he repudiates all this and attributes it to his curious and macabre
reading of earlier years. Danforth, indeed, is known to be among the few who have ever
dared go completely through that worm-riddled copy of the Necronomicon kept under
lock and key in the college library.

The higher sky, as we crossed the range, was surely vaporous and disturbed enough;
and although I did not see the zenith, I can well imagine that its swirls of ice dust may
have taken strange forms. Imagination, knowing how vividly distant scenes can
sometimes be reflected, refracted, and magnified by such layers of restless cloud, might
easily have supplied the rest--and, of course, Danforth did not hint any of these specific
horrors till after his memory had had a chance to draw on his bygone reading. He could
never have seen so much in one instantaneous glance.

At the time, his shrieks were confined to the repetition of a single, mad word of all too
obvious source: "Tekeli-li! Tekeli-li!"

THE CASE OF CHARLES DEXTER WARD

The essential Saltes of Animals may be so prepared and preserved, that an ingenious
Man may have the whole Ark of Noah in his own Studie, and raise the fine Shape of an
Animal out of its Ashes at his Pleasure; and by the lyke Method from the essential
Saltes of humane Dust, a Philosopher may, without any criminal Necromancy, call up
the Shape of any dead Ancestour from the Dust whereinto his Bodie has been
incinerated.

--Borellus

CONTENTS I. A Result and a Prologue II. An Antecedent and a Horror III. A Search
and an Evocation IV. A Mutation and a Madness V. A Nightmare and a Cataclysm

I. A Result and a Prologue

From a private hospital for the insane near Providence, Rhode Island, there recently
disappeared an exceedingly singular person. He bore the name of Charles Dexter Ward,
and was placed under restraint most reluctantly by the grieving father who had watched
his aberration grow from a mere eccentricity to a dark mania involving both a
possibility of murderous tendencies and a profound and peculiar change in the apparent
contents of his mind. Doctors confess themselves quite baffled by his case, since it
presented oddities of a general physiological as well as psychological character.

In the first place, the patient seemed oddly older than his twenty-six years would
warrant. Mental disturbance, it is true, will age one rapidly; but the face of this young
man had taken on a subtle cast which only the very aged normally acquire. In the
second place, his organic processes shewed a certain queerness of proportion which
nothing in medical experience can parallel. Respiration and heart action had a baffling
lack of symmetry; the voice was lost, so that no sounds above a whisper were possible;
digestion was incredibly prolonged and minimised, and neural reactions to standard
stimuli bore no relation at all to anything heretofore recorded, either normal or
pathological. The skin had a morbid chill and dryness, and the cellular structure of the
tissue seemed exaggeratedly coarse and loosely knit. Even a large olive birthmark on
the right hip had disappeared, whilst there had formed on the chest a very peculiar mole
or blackish spot of which no trace existed before. In general, all physicians agree that in
Ward the processes of metabolism had become retarded to a degree beyond precedent.

Psychologically, too, Charles Ward was unique. His madness held no affinity to any
sort recorded in even the latest and most exhaustive of treatises, and was conjoined to a
mental force which would have made him a genius or a leader had it not been twisted
into strange and grotesque forms. Dr. Willett, who was Ward's family physician, affirms
that the patient's gross mental capacity, as gauged by his response to matters outside the
sphere of his insanity, had actually increased since the seizure. Ward, it is true, was
always a scholar and an antiquarian; but even his most brilliant early work did not shew
the prodigious grasp and insight displayed during his last examinations by the alienists.
It was, indeed, a difficult matter to obtain a legal commitment to the hospital, so
powerful and lucid did the youth's mind seem; and only on the evidence of others, and
on the strength of many abnormal gaps in his stock of information as distinguished from
his intelligence, was he finally placed in confinement. To the very moment of his
vanishment he was an omnivorous reader and as great a conversationalist as his poor
voice permitted; and shrewd observers, failing to foresee his escape, freely predicted
that he would not be long in gaining his discharge from custody.
Only Dr. Willett, who brought Charles Ward into the world and had watched his growth
of body and mind ever since, seemed frightened at the thought of his future freedom. He
had had a terrible experience and had made a terrible discovery which he dared not
reveal to his sceptical colleagues. Willett, indeed, presents a minor mystery all his own
in his connexion with the case. He was the last to see the patient before his flight, and
emerged from that final conversation in a state of mixed horror and relief which several
recalled when Ward's escape became known three hours later. That escape itself is one
of the unsolved wonders of Dr. Waite's hospital. A window open above a sheer drop of
sixty feet could hardly explain it, yet after that talk with Willett the youth was
undeniably gone. Willett himself has no public explanations to offer, though he seems
strangely easier in mind than before the escape. Many, indeed, feel that he would like to
say more if he thought any considerable number would believe him. He had found Ward
in his room, but shortly after his departure the attendants knocked in vain. When they
opened the door the patient was not there, and all they found was the open window with
a chill April breeze blowing in a cloud of fine bluish-grey dust that almost choked them.
True, the dogs howled some time before; but that was while Willett was still present,
and they had caught nothing and shewn no disturbance later on. Ward's father was told
at once over the telephone, but he seemed more saddened than surprised. By the time
Dr. Waite called in person, Dr. Willett had been talking with him, and both disavowed
any knowledge or complicity in the escape. Only from certain closely confidential
friends of Willett and the senior Ward have any clues been gained, and even these are
too wildly fantastic for general credence. The one fact which remains is that up to the
present time no trace of the missing madman has been unearthed.

Charles Ward was an antiquarian from infancy, no doubt gaining his taste from the
venerable town around him, and from the relics of the past which filled every corner of
his parents' old mansion in Prospect Street on the crest of the hill. With the years his
devotion to ancient things increased; so that history, genealogy, and the study of
colonial architecture, furniture, and craftsmanship at length crowded everything else
from his sphere of interests. These tastes are important to remember in considering his
madness; for although they do not form its absolute nucleus, they play a prominent part
in its superficial form. The gaps of information which the alienists noticed were all
related to modern matters, and were invariably offset by a correspondingly excessive
though outwardly concealed knowledge of bygone matters as brought out by adroit
questioning; so that one would have fancied the patient literally transferred to a former
age through some obscure sort of auto-hypnosis. The odd thing was that Ward seemed
no longer interested in the antiquities he knew so well. He had, it appears, lost his
regard for them through sheer familiarity; and all his final efforts were obviously bent
toward mastering those common facts of the modern world which had been so totally
and unmistakably expunged from his brain. That this wholesale deletion had occurred,
he did his best to hide; but it was clear to all who watched him that his whole
programme of reading and conversation was determined by a frantic wish to imbibe
such knowledge of his own life and of the ordinary practical and cultural background of
the twentieth century as ought to have been his by virtue of his birth in 1902 and his
education in the schools of our own time. Alienists are now wondering how, in view of
his vitally impaired range of data, the escaped patient manages to cope with the
complicated world of today; the dominant opinion being that he is "lying low" in some
humble and unexacting position till his stock of modern information can be brought up
to the normal.
The beginning of Ward's madness is a matter of dispute among alienists. Dr. Lyman, the
eminent Boston authority, places it in 1919 or 1920, during the boy's last year at the
Moses Brown School, when he suddenly turned from the study of the past to the study
of the occult, and refused to qualify for college on the ground that he had individual
researches of much greater importance to make. This is certainly borne out by Ward's
altered habits at the time, especially by his continual search through town records and
among old burying-grounds for a certain grave dug in 1771; the grave of an ancestor
named Joseph Curwen, some of whose papers he professed to have found behind the
panelling of a very old house in Olney Court, on Stampers' Hill, which Curwen was
known to have built and occupied. It is, broadly speaking, undeniable that the winter of
1919-20 saw a great change in Ward; whereby he abruptly stopped his general
antiquarian pursuits and embarked on a desperate delving into occult subjects both at
home and abroad, varied only by this strangely persistent search for his forefather's
grave.

From this opinion, however, Dr. Willett substantially dissents; basing his verdict on his
close and continuous knowledge of the patient, and on certain frightful investigations
and discoveries which he made toward the last. Those investigations and discoveries
have left their mark upon him; so that his voice trembles when he tells them, and his
hand trembles when he tries to write of them. Willett admits that the change of 1919-20
would ordinarily appear to mark the beginning of a progressive decadence which
culminated in the horrible and uncanny alienation of 1928; but believes from personal
observation that a finer distinction must be made. Granting freely that the boy was
always ill-balanced temperamentally, and prone to be unduly susceptible and
enthusiastic in his responses to phenomena around him, he refuses to concede that the
early alteration marked the actual passage from sanity to madness; crediting instead
Ward's own statement that he had discovered or rediscovered something whose effect
on human though was likely to be marvellous and profound. The true madness, he is
certain, came with a later change; after the Curwen portrait and the ancient papers had
been unearthed; after a trip to strange foreign places had been made, and some terrible
invocations chanted under strange and secret circumstances; after certain answers to
these invocations had been plainly indicated, and a frantic letter penned under agonising
and inexplicable conditions; after the wave of vampirism and the ominous Pawtuxet
gossip; and after the patient's memory commenced to exclude contemporary images
whilst his physical aspect underwent the subtle modification so many subsequently
noticed.

It was only about this time, Willett points out with much acuteness, that the nightmare
qualities became indubitably linked with Ward; and the doctor feels shudderingly sure
that enough solid evidence exists to sustain the youth's claim regarding his crucial
discovery. In the first place, two workmen of high intelligence saw Joseph Curwen's
ancient papers found. Secondly, the boy once shewed Dr. Willett those papers and a
page of the Curwen diary, and each of the documents had every appearance of
genuineness. The hole where Ward claimed to have found them was long a visible
reality, and Willett had a very convincing final glimpse of them in surroundings which
can scarcely be believed and can never perhaps be proved. Then there were the
mysteries and coincidences of the Orne and Hutchinson letters, and the problem of the
Curwen penmanship and of what the detectives brought to light about Dr. Allen; these
things, and the terrible message in mediaeval minuscules found in Willett's pocket when
he gained consciousness after his shocking experience.
And most conclusive of all, there are the two hideous results which the doctor obtained
from a certain pair of formulae during his final investigations; results which virtually
proved the authenticity of the papers and of their monstrous implications at the same
time that those papers were borne forever from human knowledge.

One must look back at Charles Ward's earlier life as at something belonging as much to
the past as the antiquities he loved so keenly. In the autumn of 1918, and with a
considerable show of zest in the military training of the period, he had begun his junior
year at the Moses Brown School, which lies very near his home. The old main building,
erected in 1819, had always charmed his youthful antiquarian sense; and the spacious
park in which the academy is set appealed to his sharp eye for landscape. His social
activities were few; and his hours were spent mainly at home, in rambling walks, in his
classes and drills, and in pursuit of antiquarian and genealogical data at the City Hall,
the State House, the Public Library, the Athenaeum, the Historical Society, the John
Carter Brown and John Hay Libraries of Brown University, and the newly opened
Shepley Library in Benefit Street. One may picture him yet as he was in those days; tall,
slim, and blond, with studious eyes and a slight stoop, dressed somewhat carelessly, and
giving a dominant impression of harmless awkwardness rather than attractiveness.

His walks were always adventures in antiquity, during which he managed to recapture
from the myriad relics of a glamorous old city a vivid and connected picture of the
centuries before. His home was a great Georgian mansion atop the well-nigh precipitous
hill that rises just east of the river; and from the rear windows of its rambling wings he
could look dizzily out over all the clustered spires, domes, roofs, and skyscraper
summits of the lower town to the purple hills of the countryside beyond. Here he was
born, and from the lovely classic porch of the double-bayed brick facade his nurse had
first wheeled him in his carriage; past the little white farmhouse of two hundred years
before that the town had long ago overtaken, and on toward the stately colleges along
the shady, sumptuous street, whose old square brick mansions and smaller wooden
houses with narrow, heavy-columned Doric porches dreamed solid and exclusive amidst
their generous yards and gardens.

He had been wheeled, too, along sleepy Congdon Street, one tier lower down on the
steep hill, and with all its eastern homes on high terraces. The small wooden houses
averaged a greater age here, for it was up this hill that the growing town had climbed;
and in these rides he had imbibed something of the colour of a quaint colonial village.
The nurse used to stop and sit on the benches of Prospect Terrace to chat with
policemen; and one of the child's first memories was of the great westward sea of hazy
roofs and domes and steeples and far hills which he saw one winter afternoon from that
great railed embankment, all violet and mystic against a fevered, apocalyptic sunset of
reds and golds and purples and curious greens. The vast marble dome of the State
House stood out in massive silhouette, its crowning statue haloed fantastically by a
break in one of the tinted stratus clouds that barred the flaming sky.

When he was larger his famous walks began; first with his impatiently dragged nurse,
and then alone in dreamy meditation. Farther and farther down that almost
perpendicular hill he would venture, each time reaching older and quainter levels of the
ancient city. He would hesitate gingerly down vertical Jenckes Street with its bank walls
and colonial gables to the shady Benefit Street corner, where before him was a wooden
antique with an Ionic-pilastered pair of doorways, and beside him a prehistoric gambrel-
roofer with a bit of primal farmyard remaining, and the great Judge Durfee house with
its fallen vestiges of Georgian grandeur. It was getting to be a slum here; but the titan
elms cast a restoring shadow over the place, and the boy used to stroll south past the
long lines of the pre-Revolutionary homes with their great central chimneys and classic
portals. On the eastern side they were set high over basements with railed double flights
of stone steps, and the young Charles could picture them as they were when the street
was new, and red heels and periwigs set off the painted pediments whose signs of wear
were now becoming so visible.

Westward the hill dropped almost as steeply as above, down to the old "Town Street"
that the founders had laid out at the river's edge in 1636. Here ran innumerable little
lanes with leaning, huddled houses of immense antiquity; and fascinated though he was,
it was long before he dared to thread their archaic verticality for fear they would turn
out a dream or a gateway to unknown terrors. He found it much less formidable to
continue along Benefit Street past the iron fence of St. John's hidden churchyard and the
rear of the 1761 Colony House and the mouldering bulk of the Golden Ball Inn where
Washington stopped. At Meeting Street--the successive Gaol Lane and King Street of
other periods--he would look upward to the east and see the arched flight of steps to
which the highway had to resort in climbing the slope, and downward to the west,
glimpsing the old brick colonial schoolhouse that smiles across the road at the ancient
Sign of Shakespeare's Head where the Providence Gazette and Country-Journal was
printed before the Revolution. Then came the exquisite First Baptist Church of 1775,
luxurious with its matchless Gibbs steeple, and the Georgian roofs and cupolas hovering
by. Here and to the southward the neighbourhood became better, flowering at last into a
marvellous group of early mansions; but still the little ancient lanes led off down the
precipice to the west, spectral in their many-gabled archaism and dipping to a riot of
iridescent decay where the wicked old water-front recalls its proud East India days
amidst polyglot vice and squalor, rotting wharves, and blear-eyed ship-chandleries, with
such surviving alley names as Packet, Bullion, Gold, Silver, Coin, Doubloon,
Sovereign, Guilder, Dollar, Dime, and Cent.

Sometimes, as he grew taller and more adventurous, young Ward would venture down
into this maelstrom of tottering houses, broken transoms, tumbling steps, twisted
balustrades, swarthy faces, and nameless odours; winding from South Main to South
Water, searching out the docks where the bay and sound steamers still touched, and
returning northward at this lower level past the steep-roofed 1816 warehouses and the
broad square at the Great Bridge, where the 1773 Market House still stands firm on its
ancient arches. In that square he would pause to drink in the bewildering beauty of the
old town as it rises on its eastward bluff, decked with its two Georgian spires and
crowned by the vast new Christian Science dome as London is crowned by St. Paul's.
He like mostly to reach this point in the late afternoon, when the slanting sunlight
touches the Market House and the ancient hill roofs and belfries with gold, and throws
magic around the dreaming wharves where Providence Indiamen used to ride at anchor.
After a long look he would grow almost dizzy with a poet's love for the sight, and then
he would scale the slope homeward in the dusk past the old white church and up the
narrow precipitous ways where yellow gleams would begin to peep out in small-paned
windows and through fanlights set high over double flights of steps with curious
wrought-iron railings.
At other times, and in later years, he would seek for vivid contrasts; spending half a
walk in the crumbling colonial regions northwest of his home, where the hill drops to
the lower eminence of Stampers' Hill with its ghetto and negro quarter clustering round
the place where the Boston stage coach used to start before the Revolution, and the
other half in the gracious southerly realm about George, Benevolent, Power, and
Williams Streets, where the old slope holds unchanged the fine estates and bits of
walled garden and steep green lane in which so many fragrant memories linger. These
rambles, together with the diligent studies which accompanied them, certainly account
for a large amount of the antiquarian lore which at last crowded the modern world from
Charles Ward's mind; and illustrate the mental soil upon which fell, in that fateful
winter of 1919-20, the seeds that came to such strange and terrible fruition.

Dr. Willett is certain that, up to this ill-omened winter of first change, Charles Ward's
antiquarianism was free from every trace of the morbid. Graveyards held for him no
particular attraction beyond their quaintness and historic value, and of anything like
violence or savage instinct he was utterly devoid. Then, by insidious degrees, there
appeared to develop a curious sequel to one of his genealogical triumphs of the year
before; when he had discovered among his maternal ancestors a certain very long-lived
man named Joseph Curwen, who had come from Salem in March of 1692, and about
whom a whispered series of highly peculiar and disquieting stories clustered.

Ward's great-great-grandfather Welcome Potter had in 1785 married a certain 'Ann

Tillinghast, daughter of Mrs. Eliza, daughter to Capt. James Tillinghast,' of whose
paternity the family had preserved no trace. Late in 1918, whilst examining a volume of
original town records in manuscript, the young genealogist encountered an entry
describing a legal change of name, by which in 1772 a Mrs. Eliza Curwen, widow of
Joseph Curwen, resumed, along with her seven-year-old daughter Ann, her maiden
name of Tillinghast; on the ground 'that her Husband's name was become a public
Reproach by Reason of what was knowne after his Decease; the which confirming an
antient common Rumour, tho' not to be credited by a loyall Wife till so proven as to be
wholely past Doubting.'

This entry came to light upon the accidental separation of two leaves which had been
carefully pasted together and treated as one by a laboured revision of the page numbers.

It was at once clear to Charles Ward that he had indeed discovered a hitherto unknown
great-great-great-grandfather. The discovery doubly excited him because he had already
heard vague reports and seen scattered allusions relating to this person; about whom
there remained so few publicly available records, aside from those becoming public
only in modern times, that it almost seemed as if a conspiracy had existed to blot him
from memory. What did appear, moreover, was of such a singular and provocative
nature that one could not fail to imagine curiously what it was that the colonial
recorders were so anxious to conceal and forget; or to suspect that the deletion had
reasons all too valid.

Before this, Ward had been content to let his romancing about old Joseph Curwen
remain in the idle stage; but having discovered his own relationship to this apparently
"hushed-up" character, he proceeded to hunt out as systematically as possible whatever
he might find concerning him. In this excited quest he eventually succeeded beyond his
highest expectations; for old letters, diaries, and sheaves of unpublished memoirs in
cobwebbed Providence garrets and elsewhere yielded many illuminating passages
which their writers had not thought it worth their while to destroy. One important
sidelight came from a point as remote as New York, where some Rhode Island colonial
correspondence was stored in the Museum at Fraunces' Tavern. The really crucial thing,
though, and what in Dr. Willett's opinion formed the definite source of Ward's undoing,
was the matter found in August 1919 behind the panelling of the crumbling house in
Olney Court. It was that, beyond a doubt, which opened up those black vistas whose
end was deeper than the pit.

II. An Antecedent and a Horror

Joseph Curwen, as revealed by the rambling legends embodied in what Ward heard and
unearthed, was a very astonishing, enigmatic, and obscurely horrible individual. He had
fled from Salem to Providence--that universal haven of the odd, the free, and the
dissenting--at the beginning of the great witchcraft panic; being in fear of accusation
because of his solitary ways and queer chemical or alchemical experiments. He was a
colourless-looking man of about thirty, and was soon found qualified to become a
freeman of Providence; thereafter buying a home lot just north of Gregory Dexter's at
about the foot of Olney Street. His house was built on Stampers' Hill west of the Town
Street, in what later became Olney Court; and in 1761 he replaced this with a larger one,
on the same site, which is still standing.

Now the first odd thing about Joseph Curwen was that he did not seem to grow much
older than he had been on his arrival. He engaged in shipping enterprises, purchased
wharfage near Mile-End Cove, helped rebuild the Great Bridge in 1713, and in 1723
was one of the founders of the Congregational Church on the hill; but always did he
retain his nondescript aspect of a man not greatly over thirty or thirty-five. As decades
mounted up, this singular quality began to excite wide notice; but Curwen always
explained it by saying that he came of hardy forefathers, and practised a simplicity of
living which did not wear him our. How such simplicity could be reconciled with the
inexplicable comings and goings of the secretive merchant, and with the queer gleaming
of his windows at all hours of night, was not very clear to the townsfolk; and they were
prone to assign other reasons for his continued youth and longevity. It was held, for the
most part, that Curwen's incessant mixings and boilings of chemicals had much to do
with his condition. Gossip spoke of the strange substances he brought from London and
the Indies on his ships or purchased in Newport, Boston, and New York; and when old
Dr. Jabez Bowen came from Rehoboth and opened his apothecary shop across the Great
Bridge at the Sign of the Unicorn and Mortar, there was ceaseless talk of the drugs,
acids, and metals that the taciturn recluse incessantly bought or ordered from him.
Acting on the assumption that Curwen possessed a wondrous and secret medical skill,
many sufferers of various sorts applied to him for aid; but though he appeared to
encourage their belief in a non-committal way, and always gave them odd-coloured
potions in response to their requests, it was observed that his ministrations to others
seldom proved of benefit. At length, when over fifty years had passed since the
stranger's advent, and without producing more than five years' apparent change in his
face and physique, the people began to whisper more darkly; and to meet more than half
way that desire for isolation which he had always shewn.
Private letters and diaries of the period reveal, too, a multitude of other reasons why
Joseph Curwen was marvelled at, feared, and finally shunned like a plague. His passion
for graveyards, in which he was glimpsed at all hours, and under all conditions, was
notorious; though no one had witnessed any deed on his part which could actually be
termed ghoulish. On the Pawtuxet Road he had a farm, at which he generally lived
during the summer, and to which he would frequently be seen riding at various odd
times of the day or night. Here his only visible servants, farmers, and caretakers were a
sullen pair of aged Narragansett Indians; the husband dumb and curiously scarred, and
the wife of a very repulsive cast of countenance, probably due to a mixture of negro
blood. In the lean-to of this house was the laboratory where most of the chemical
experiments were conducted. Curious porters and teamers who delivered bottles, bags,
or boxes at the small rear door would exchange accounts of the fantastic flasks,
crucibles, alembics, and furnaces they saw in the low shelved room; and prophesied in
whispers that the close-mouthed "chymist"--by which they meant alchemist--would not
be long in finding the Philosopher's Stone. The nearest neighbours to this farm--the
Fenners, a quarter of a mile away--had still queerer things to tell of certain sounds
which they insisted came from the Curwen place in the night. There were cries, they
said, and sustained howlings; and they did not like the large numbers of livestock which
thronged the pastures, for no such amount was needed to keep a lone old man and a
very few servants in meat, milk, and wool. The identity of the stock seemed to change
from week to week as new droves were purchased from the Kingstown farmers. Then,
too, there was something very obnoxious about a certain great stone outbuilding with
only high narrow slits for windows.

Great Bridge idlers likewise had much to say of Curwen's town house in Olney Court;
not so much the fine new one built in 1761, when the man must have been nearly a
century old, but the first low gambrel-roofed one with the windowless attic and shingled
sides, whose timbers he took the peculiar precaution of burning after its demolition.
Here there was less mystery, it is true; but the hours at which lights were seen, the
secretiveness of the two swarthy foreigners who comprised the only menservants, the
hideous indistinct mumbling of the incredibly aged French housekeeper, the large
amounts of food seen to enter a door within which only four persons lived, and the
quality of certain voices often heard in muffled conversation at highly unseasonable
times, all combined with what was known of the Pawtuxet farm to give the place a bad
name.

In choicer circles, too, the Curwen home was by no means undiscussed; for as the
newcomer had gradually worked into the church and trading life of the town, he had
naturally made acquaintances of the better sort, whose company and conversation he
was well fitted by education to enjoy. His birth was known to be good, since the
Curwens or Corwins of Salem needed no introduction in New England. It developed
that Joseph Curwen had travelled much in very early life, living for a time in England
and making at least two voyages to the Orient; and his speech, when he deigned to use
it, was that of a learned and cultivated Englishman. But for some reason or other
Curwen did not care for society. Whilst never actually rebuffing a visitor, he always
reared such a wall of reserve that few could think of anything to say to him which
would not sound inane.

There seemed to lurk in his bearing some cryptic, sardonic arrogance, as if he had come
to find all human beings dull through having moved among stranger and more potent
entities. When Dr. Checkley the famous wit came from Boston in 1738 to be rector of
King's Church, he did not neglect calling on one of whom he soon heard so much; but
left in a very short while because of some sinister undercurrent he detected in his host's
discourse. Charles Ward told his father, when they discussed Curwen one winter
evening, that he would give much to learn what the mysterious old man had said to the
sprightly cleric, but that all diarists agree concerning Dr. Checkley's reluctance to repeat
anything he had heard. The good man had been hideously shocked, and could never
recall Joseph Curwen without a visible loss of the gay urbanity for which he was famed.

More definite, however, was the reason why another man of taste and breeding avoided
the haughty hermit. In 1746 Mr. John Merritt, an elderly English gentleman of literary
and scientific leanings, came from Newport to the town which was so rapidly
overtaking it in standing, and built a fine country seat on the Neck in what is now the
heart of the best residence section. He lived in considerable style and comfort, keeping
the first coach and liveried servants in town, and taking great pride in his telescope, his
microscope, and his well-chosen library of English and Latin books. Hearing of Curwen
as the owner of the best library in Providence, Mr. Merritt early paid him a call, and was
more cordially received than most other callers at the house had been. His admiration
for his host's ample shelves, which besides the Greek, Latin, and English classics were
equipped with a remarkable battery of philosophical, mathematical, and scientific works
including Paracelsus, Agricola, Van Helmont, Sylvius, Glauber, Boyle, Boerhaave,
Becher, and Stahl, led Curwen to suggest a visit to the farmhouse and laboratory
whither he had never invited anyone before; and the two drove out at once in Mr.
Merritt's coach.

Mr. Merritt always confessed to seeing nothing really horrible at the farmhouse, but
maintained that the titles of the books in the special library of thaumaturgical,
alchemical, and theological subjects which Curwen kept in a front room were alone
sufficient to inspire him with a lasting loathing. Perhaps, however, the facial expression
of the owner in exhibiting them contributed much of the prejudice. This bizarre
collection, besides a host of standard works which Mr. Merritt was not too alarmed to
envy, embraced nearly all the cabbalists, daemonologists, and magicians known to man;
and was a treasure-house of lore in the doubtful realms of alchemy and astrology.
Hermes Trismegistus in Mesnard's edition, the Turba Philosophorum, Geber's Liber
Investigationis, and Artephius's Key of Wisdom all were there; with the cabbalistic
Zohar, Peter Jammy's set of Albertus Magnus, Raymond Lully's Ars Magna et Ultima in
Zetsner's edition, Roger Bacon's Thesaurus Chemicus, Fludd's Clavis Alchimiae, and
Trithemius's De Lapide Philosophico crowding them close. Mediaeval Jews and Arabs
were represented in profusion, and Mr. Merritt turned pale when, upon taking down a
fine volume conspicuously labelled as the Qanoon-e-Islam, he found it was in truth the
forbidden Necronomicon of the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred, of which he had heard such
monstrous things whispered some years previously after the exposure of nameless rites
at the strange little fishing village of Kingsport, in the province of the Massachussetts-
Bay.

But oddly enough, the worthy gentleman owned himself most impalpably disquieted by
a mere minor detail. On the huge mahogany table there lay face downwards a badly
worn copy of Borellus, bearing many cryptical marginalia and interlineations in
Curwen's hand. The book was open at about its middle, and one paragraph displayed
such thick and tremulous pen-strokes beneath the lines of mystic black-letter that the
visitor could not resist scanning it through. Whether it was the nature of the passage
underscored, or the feverish heaviness of the strokes which formed the underscoring, he
could not tell; but something in that combination affected him very badly and very
peculiarly. He recalled it to the end of his days, writing it down from memory in his
diary and once trying to recite it to his close friend Dr. Checkley till he saw how greatly
it disturbed the urbane rector. It read:

'The essential Saltes of Animals may be so prepared and preserved, that an ingenious
Man may have the whole Ark of Noah in his own Studie, and raise the fine Shape of an
Animal out of its Ashes at his Pleasure; and by the lyke Method from the essential
Saltes of humane Dust, a Philosopher may, without any criminal Necromancy, call up
the Shape of any dead Ancestour from the Dust whereinto his Bodie has been
incinerated.'

It was near the docks along the southerly part of the Town Street, however, that the
worst things were muttered about Joseph Curwen. Sailors are superstitious folk; and the
seasoned salts who manned the infinite rum, slave, and molasses sloops, the rakish
privateers, and the great brigs of the Browns, Crawfords, and Tillinghasts, all made
strange furtive signs of protection when they saw the slim, deceptively young-looking
figure with its yellow hair and slight stoop entering the Curwen warehouse in Doubloon
Street or talking with captains and supercargoes on the long quay where the Curwen
ships rode restlessly. Curwen's own clerks and captains hated and feared him, and all his
sailors were mongrel riff-raff from Martinique, St. Eustatius, Havana, or Port Royal. It
was, in a way, the frequency with which these sailors were replaced which inspired the
acutest and most tangible part of the fear in which the old man was held. A crew would
be turned loose in the town on shore leave, some of its members perhaps charged with
this errand or that; and when reassembled it would be almost sure to lack one or more
men. That many of the errands had concerned the farm of Pawtuxet Road, and that few
of the sailors had ever been seen to return from that place, was not forgotten; so that in
time it became exceedingly difficult for Curwen to keep his oddly assorted hands.
Almost invariably several would desert soon after hearing the gossip of the Providence
wharves, and their replacement in the West Indies became an increasingly great
problem to the merchant.

By 1760 Joseph Curwen was virtually an outcast, suspected of vague horrors and
daemoniac alliances which seemed all the more menacing because they could not be
named, understood, or even proved to exist. The last straw may have come from the
affair of the missing soldiers in 1758, for in March and April of that year two Royal
regiments on their way to New France were quartered in Providence, and depleted by an
inexplicable process far beyond the average rate of desertion. Rumour dwelt on the
frequency with which Curwen was wont to be seen talking with the red-coated
strangers; and as several of them began to be missed, people thought of the odd
conditions among his own seamen. What would have happened if the regiments had not
been ordered on, no one can tell.

Meanwhile the merchant's worldly affairs were prospering. He had a virtual monopoly
of the town's trade in saltpetre, black pepper, and cinnamon, and easily led any other
one shipping establishment save the Browns in his importation of brassware, indigo,
cotton, woollens, salt, rigging, iron, paper, and English goods of every kind. Such
shopkeepers as James Green, at the Sign of the Elephant in Cheapside, the Russells, at
the Sign of the Golden Eagle across the Bridge, or Clark and Nightingale at the Frying-
Pan and Fish near New Coffee-House, depended almost wholly upon him for their
stock; and his arrangements with the local distillers, the Narragansett dairymen and
horse-breeders, and the Newport candle-makers, made him one of the prime exporters
of the Colony.

Ostracised though he was, he did not lack for civic spirit of a sort. When the Colony
House burned down, he subscribed handsomely to the lotteries by which the new brick
one--still standing at the head of its parade in the old main street--was built in 1761. In
that same year, too, he helped rebuild the Great Bridge after the October gale. He
replaced many of the books of the public library consumed in the Colony House fire,
and bought heavily in the lottery that gave the muddy Market Parade and deep-rutted
Town Street their pavement of great round stones with a brick footwalk or "causey" in
the middle. About this time, also, he built the plain but excellent new house whose
doorway is still such a triumph of carving. When the Whitefield adherents broke off
from Dr. Cotton's hill church in 1743 and founded Deacon Snow's church across the
Bridge, Curwen had gone with them; though his zeal and attendance soon abated. Now,
however, he cultivated piety once more; as if to dispel the shadow which had thrown
him into isolation and would soon begin to wreck his business fortunes if not sharply
checked.

The sight of this strange, pallid man, hardly middle-aged in aspect yet certainly not less
than a full century old, seeking at last to emerge from a cloud of fright and detestation
too vague to pin down or analyse, was at once a pathetic, a dramatic, and a contemptible
thing. Such is the power of wealth and of surface gestures, however, that there came
indeed a slight abatement in the visible aversion displayed toward him; especially after
the rapid disappearances of his sailors abruptly ceased. He must likewise have begun to
practice an extreme care and secrecy in his graveyard expeditions, for he was never
again caught at such wanderings; whilst the rumours of uncanny sounds and
manoeuvres at his Pawtuxet farm diminished in proportion. His rate of food
consumption and cattle replacement remained abnormally high; but not until modern
times, when Charles Ward examined a set of his accounts and invoices in the Shepley
Library, did it occur to any person--save one embittered youth, perhaps--to make dark
comparisons between the large number of Guinea blacks he imported until 1766, and
the disturbingly small number for whom he could produce bona fide bills of sale either
to slave-dealers at the Great Bridge or to the planters of the Narragansett Country.
Certainly, the cunning and ingenuity of this abhorred character were uncannily
profound, once the necessity for their exercise had become impressed upon him.

But of course the effect of all this belated mending was necessarily slight. Curwen
continued to be avoided and distrusted, as indeed the one fact of his continued air of
youth at a great age would have been enough to warrant; and he could see that in the
end his fortunes would be likely to suffer. His elaborate studies and experiments,
whatever they may have been, apparently required a heavy income for their
maintenance; and since a change of environment would deprive him of the trading
advantages he had gained, it would not have profited him to begin anew in a different
region just then. Judgement demanded that he patch up his relations with the townsfolk
of Providence, so that his presence might no longer be a signal for hushed conversation,
transparent excuses or errands elsewhere, and a general atmosphere of constraint and
uneasiness. His clerks, being now reduced to the shiftless and impecunious residue
whom no one else would employ, were giving him much worry; and he held to his sea-
captains and mates only by shrewdness in gaining some kind of ascendancy over them--
a mortgage, a promissory note, or a bit of information very pertinent to their welfare. In
many cases, diarists have recorded with some awe, Curwen shewed almost the power of
a wizard in unearthing family secrets for questionable use. During the final five years of
his life it seemed as though only direct talks with the long-dead could possibly have
furnished some of the data which he had so glibly at his tongue's end.

About this time the crafty scholar hit upon a last desperate expedient to regain his
footing in the community. Hitherto a complete hermit, he now determined to contract an
advantageous marriage; securing as a bride some lady whose unquestioned position
would make all ostracism of his home impossible. It may be that he also had deeper
reasons for wishing an alliance; reasons so far outside the known cosmic sphere that
only papers found a century and a half after his death caused anyone to suspect them;
but of this nothing certain can ever be learned. Naturally he was aware of the horror and
indignation with which any ordinary courtship of his would be received, hence he
looked about for some likely candidate upon whose parents he might exert a suitable
pressure. Such candidates, he found, were not at all easy to discover; since he had very
particular requirements in the way of beauty, accomplishments, and social security. At
length his survey narrowed down to the household of one of his best and oldest ship-
captains, a widower of high birth and unblemished standing named Dutee Tillinghast,
whose only daughter Eliza seemed dowered with every conceivable advantage save
prospects as an heiress. Capt. Tillinghast was completely under the domination of
Curwen; and consented, after a terrible interview in his cupolaed house on Power's Lane
hill, to sanction the blasphemous alliance.

Eliza Tillinghast was at that time eighteen years of age, and had been reared as gently as
the reduced circumstances of her father permitted. She had attended Stephen Jackson's
school opposite the Court-House Parade; and had been diligently instructed by her
mother, before the latter's death of smallpox in 1757, in all the arts and refinements of
domestic life. A sampler of hers, worked in 1753 at the age of nine, may still be found
in the rooms of the Rhode Island Historical Society. After her mother's death she had
kept the house, aided only by one old black woman. Her arguments with her father
concerning the proposed Curwen marriage must have been painful indeed; but of these
we have no record. Certain it is that her engagement to young Ezra Weeden, second
mate of the Crawford packet Enterprise, was dutifully broken off, and that her union
with Joseph Curwen took place on the seventh of March, 1763, in the Baptist church, in
the presence of the most distinguished assemblages which the town could boast; the
ceremony being performed by the younger Samuel Winsor. The Gazette mentioned the
event very briefly, and in most surviving copies the item in question seems to be cut or
torn out. Ward found a single intact copy after much search in the archives of a private
collector of note, observing with amusement the meaningless urbanity of the language:

'Monday evening last, Mr. Joseph Curwen, of this Town, Merchant, was married to
Miss Eliza Tillinghast, Daughter of Capt. Dutee Tillinghast, a young Lady who has real
Merit, added to a beautiful Person, to grace the connubial State and perpetuate its
Felicity.'
The collection of Durfee-Arnold letters, discovered by Charles Ward shortly before his
first reputed madness in the private collection of Melville F. Peters, Esq., of George St.,
and covering this and a somewhat antecedent period, throws vivid light on the outrage
done to public sentiment by this ill-assorted match. The social influence of the
Tillinghasts, however, was not to be denied; and once more Joseph Curwen found his
house frequented by persons whom he could never otherwise have induced to cross his
threshold. His acceptance was by no means complete, and his bride was socially the
sufferer through her forced venture; but at all events the wall of utter ostracism was
somewhat torn down. In his treatment of his wife the strange bridegroom astonished
both her and the community by displaying an extreme graciousness and consideration.
The new house in Olney Court was now wholly free from disturbing manifestations,
and although Curwen was much absent at the Pawtuxet farm which his wife never
visited, he seemed more like a normal citizen than at any other time in his long years of
residence. Only one person remained in open enmity with him, this being the youthful
ship's officer whose engagement to Eliza Tillinghast had been so abruptly broken. Ezra
Weeden had frankly vowed vengeance; and though of a quiet and ordinarily mild
disposition, was now gaining a hate-bred, dogged purpose which boded no good to the
usurping husband.

On the seventh of May, 1765, Curwen's only child Ann was born; and was christened by
the Rev. John Graves of King's Church, of which both husband and wife had become
communicants shortly after their marriage, in order to compromise between their
respective Congregational and Baptist affiliations. The record of this birth, as well as
that of the marriage two years before, was stricken from most copies of the church and
town annals where it ought to appear; and Charles Ward located both with the greatest
difficulty after his discovery of the widow's change of name had apprised him of his
own relationship, and engendered the feverish interest which culminated in his madness.
The birth entry, indeed, was found very curiously through correspondence with the heirs
of the loyalist Dr. Graves, who had taken with him a duplicate set of records when he
left his pastorate at the outbreak of the Revolution. Ward had tried this source because
he knew that his great-great-grandmother Ann Tillinghast Potter had been an
Episcopalian.

Shortly after the birth of his daughter, an event he seemed to welcome with a fervour
greatly out of keeping with his usual coldness, Curwen resolved to sit for a portrait. This
he had painted by a very gifted Scotsman named Cosmo Alexander, then a resident of
Newport, and since famous as the early teacher of Gilbert Stuart. The likeness was said
to have been executed on a wall-panel of the library of the house in Olney Court, but
neither of the two old diaries mentioning it gave any hint of its ultimate disposition. At
this period the erratic scholar shewed signs of unusual abstraction, and spent as much
time as he possibly could at his farm on the Pawtuxet Road. He seemed, as was stated,
in a condition of suppressed excitement or suspense; as if expecting some phenomenal
thing or on the brink of some strange discovery. Chemistry or alchemy would appear to
have played a great part, for he took from his house to the farm the greater number of
his volumes on that subject.

His affectation of civic interest did not diminish, and he lost no opportunities for
helping such leaders as Stephen Hopkins, Joseph Brown, and Benjamin West in their
efforts to raise the cultural tone of the town, which was then much below the level of
Newport in its patronage of the liberal arts. He had helped Daniel Jenckes found his
bookshop in 1763, and was thereafter his best customer; extending aid likewise to the
struggling Gazette that appeared each Wednesday at the Sign of Shakespeare's Head. In
politics he ardently supported Governor Hopkins against the Ward party whose prime
strength was in Newport, and his really eloquent speech at Hacher's Hall in 1765 against
the setting off of North Providence as a separate town with a pro-Ward vote in the
General Assembly did more than any other thing to wear down the prejudice against
him. But Ezra Weeden, who watched him closely, sneered cynically at all this outward
activity; and freely swore it was no more than a mask for some nameless traffick with
the blackest gulfs of Tartarus. The revengeful youth began a systematic study of the
man and his doings whenever he was in port; spending hours at night by the wharves
with a dory in readiness when he saw lights in the Curwen warehouses, and following
the small boat which would sometimes steal quietly off and down the bay. He also kept
as close a watch as possible on the Pawtuxet farm, and was once severely bitten by the
dogs the old Indian couple loosed upon him.

In 1766 came the final change in Joseph Curwen. It was very sudden, and gained wide
notice amongst the curious townsfolk; for the air of suspense and expectancy dropped
like an old cloak, giving instant place to an ill-concealed exaltation of perfect triumph.
Curwen seemed to have difficulty in restraining himself from public harangues on what
he had found or learned or made; but apparently the need of secrecy was greater than
the longing to share his rejoicing, for no explanation was ever offered by him. It was
after this transition, which appears to have come early in July, that the sinister scholar
began to astonish people by his possession of information which only their long-dead
ancestors would seem to be able to impart.

But Curwen's feverish secret activities by no means ceased with this change. On the
contrary, they tended rather to increase; so that more and more of his shipping business
was handled by the captains whom he now bound to him by ties of fear as potent as
those of bankruptcy had been. He altogether abandoned the slave trade, alleging that its
profits were constantly decreasing. Every possible moment was spent at the Pawtuxet
farm; although there were rumours now and then of his presence in places which,
though not actually near graveyards, were yet so situated in relation to graveyards that
thoughtful people wondered just how thorough the old merchant's change of habits
really was. Ezra Weeden, though his periods of espionage were necessarily brief and
intermittent on account of his sea voyaging, had a vindictive persistence which the bulk
of the practical townsfolk and farmers lacked; and subjected Curwen's affairs to a
scrutiny such as they had never had before.

Many of the odd manoeuvres of the strange merchant's vessels had been taken for
granted on account of the unrest of the times, when every colonist seemed determined to
resist the provisions of the Sugar Act which hampered a prominent traffick. Smuggling
and evasion were the rule in Narragansett Bay, and nocturnal landings of illicit cargoes
were continuous commonplaces. But Weeden, night after night following the lighters or
small sloops which he saw steal off from the Curwen warehouses at the Town Street
docks, soon felt assured that it was not merely His Majesty's armed ships which the
sinister skulker was anxious to avoid. Prior to the change in 1766 these boats had for the
most part contained chained negroes, who were carried down and across the bay and
landed at an obscure point on the shore just north of Pawtuxet; being afterward driven
up the bluff and across country to the Curwen farm, where they were locked in that
enormous stone outbuilding which had only five high narrow slits for windows. After
that change, however, the whole programme was altered. Importation of slaves ceased
at once, and for a time Curwen abandoned his midnight sailings. Then, about the spring
of 1767, a new policy appeared. Once more the lighters grew wont to put out from the
black, silent docks, and this time they would go down the bay some distance, perhaps as
far as Namquit Point, where they would meet and receive cargo from strange ships of
considerable size and widely varied appearance. Curwen's sailors would then deposit
this cargo at the usual point on the shore, and transport it overland to the farm; locking
it in the same cryptical stone building which had formerly received the negroes. The
cargo consisted almost wholly of boxes and cases, of which a large proportion were
oblong and heavy and disturbingly suggestive of coffins.

Weeden always watched the farm with unremitting assiduity; visiting it each night for
long periods, and seldom letting a week go by without a sight except when the ground
bore a footprint-revealing snow. Even then he would often walk as close as possible in
the travelled road or on the ice of the neighbouring river to see what tracks others might
have left. Finding his own vigils interrupted by nautical duties, he hired a tavern
companion named Eleazar Smith to continue the survey during his absence; and
between them the two could have set in motion some extraordinary rumours. That they
did not do so was only because they knew the effect of publicity would be to warn their
quarry and make further progress impossible. Instead, they wished to learn something
definite before taking any action. What they did learn must have been startling indeed,
and Charles Ward spoke many times to his parents of his regret at Weeden's later
burning of his notebooks. All that can be told of their discoveries is what Eleazar Smith
jotted down in a non too coherent diary, and what other diarists and letter-writers have
timidly repeated from the statements which they finally made--and according to which
the farm was only the outer shell of some vast and revolting menace, of a scope and
depth too profound and intangible for more than shadowy comprehension.

It is gathered that Weeden and Smith became early convinced that a great series of
tunnels and catacombs, inhabited by a very sizeable staff of persons besides the old
Indian and his wife, underlay the farm. The house was an old peaked relic of the middle
seventeenth century with enormous stack chimney and diamond-paned lattice windows,
the laboratory being in a lean-to toward the north, where the roof came nearly to the
ground. This building stood clear of any other; yet judging by the different voices heard
at odd times within, it must have been accessible through secret passages beneath.
These voices, before 1766, were mere mumblings and negro whisperings and frenzied
screams, coupled with curious chants or invocations. After that date, however, they
assumed a very singular and terrible cast as they ran the gamut betwixt dronings of dull
acquiescence and explosions of frantic pain or fury, rumblings of conversations and
whines of entreaty, pantings of eagerness and shouts of protest. They appeared to be in
different languages, all known to Curwen, whose rasping accents were frequently
distinguishable in reply, reproof, or threatening. Sometimes it seemed that several
persons must be in the house; Curwen, certain captives, and the guards of those
captives. There were voices of a sort that neither Weeden nor Smith had ever heard
before despite their wide knowledge of foreign parts, and many that they did seem to
place as belonging to this or that nationality. The nature of the conversations seemed
always a kind of catechism, as if Curwen were extorting some sort of information from
terrified or rebellious prisoners.
Weeden had many verbatim reports of overheard scraps in his notebook, for English,
French, and Spanish, which he knew, were frequently used; but of these nothing has
survived. He did, however, say that besides a few ghoulish dialogues in which the past
affairs of Providence families were concerned, most of the questions and answers he
could understand were historical or scientific; occasionally pertaining to very remote
places and ages. Once, for example, an alternately raging and sullen figure was
questioned in French about the Black Prince's massacre at Limoges in 1370, as if there
were some hidden reason which he ought to know. Curwen asked the prisoner--if
prisoner he were--whether the order to slay was given because of the Sign of the Goat
found on the altar in the ancient Roman crypt beneath the Cathedral, or whether the
Dark Man of the Haute Vienne had spoken the Three Words. Failing to obtain replies,
the inquisitor had seemingly resorted to extreme means; for there was a terrific shriek
followed by silence and muttering and a bumping sound.

None of these colloquies was ever ocularly witnessed, since the windows were always
heavily draped. Once, though, during a discourse in an unknown tongue, a shadow was
seen on the curtain which startled Weeden exceedingly; reminding him of one of the
puppets in a show he had seen in the autumn of 1764 in Hacher's Hall, when a man from
Germantown, Pennsylvania, had given a clever mechanical spectacle advertised as

'A View of the Famous City of Jerusalem, in which are represented Jerusalem, the
Temple of Solomon, his Royal Throne, the noted Towers, and Hills, likewise the
Suffering of Our Saviour from the Garden of Gethsemane to the Cross on the Hill of
Golgotha; an artful piece of Statuary, Worthy to be seen by the Curious.'

It was on this occasion that the listener, who had crept close to the window of the front
room whence the speaking proceeded, gave a start which roused the old Indian pair and
caused them to loose the dogs on him. After that no more conversations were ever heard
in the house, and Weeden and Smith concluded that Curwen had transferred his field of
action to regions below.

That such regions in truth existed, seemed amply clear from many things. Faint cries
and groans unmistakably came up now and then from what appeared to be the solid
earth in places far from any structure; whilst hidden in the bushes along the river-bank
in the rear, where the high ground sloped steeply down to the valley of the Pawtuxet,
there was found an arched oaken door in a frame of heavy masonry, which was
obviously an entrance to caverns within the hill. When or how these catacombs could
have been constructed, Weeden was unable to say; but he frequently pointed out how
easily the place might have been reached by bands of unseen workmen from the river.
Joseph Curwen put his mongrel seamen to diverse uses indeed! During the heavy spring
rains of 1769 the two watchers kept a sharp eye on the steep river-bank to see if any
subterrene secrets might be washed to light, and were rewarded by the sight of a
profusion of both human and animal bones in places where deep gullies had been worn
in the banks. Naturally there might be many explanations of such things in the rear of a
stock farm, and a locality where old Indian bury-grounds were common, but Weeden
and Smith drew their own inferences.

It was in January 1770, whilst Weeden and Smith were still debating vainly on what, if
anything, to think or do about the whole bewildering business, that the incident of the
Fortaleza occurred. Exasperated by the burning of the revenue sloop Liberty at Newport
during the previous summer, the customs fleet under Admiral Wallace had adopted an
increased vigilance concerning strange vessels; and on this occasion His Majesty's
armed schooner Cygnet, under Capt. Charles Leslie, captured after a short pursuit one
early morning the scow Fortaleza of Barcelona, Spain, under Capt. Manuel Arruda,
bound according to its log from Grand Cairo, Egypt, to Providence. When searched for
contraband material, this ship revealed the astonishing fact that its cargo consisted
exclusively of Egyptian mummies, consigned to "Sailor A. B. C.", who would come to
remove his goods in a lighter just off Namquit Point and whose identity Capt. Arruda
felt himself in honour bound not to reveal. The Vice-Admiralty at Newport, at a loss
what to do in view of the non-contraband nature of the cargo on the one hand and of the
unlawful secrecy of the entry on the other hand, compromised on Collector Robinson's
recommendation by freeing the ship but forbidding it a port in Rhode Island waters.
There were later rumours of its having been seen in Boston Harbour, though it never
openly entered the Port of Boston.

This extraordinary incident did not fail of wide remark in Providence, and there were
not many who doubted the existence of some connexion between the cargo of mummies
and the sinister Joseph Curwen. His exotic studies and his curious chemical
importations being common knowledge, and his fondness for graveyards being common
suspicion; it did not take much imagination to link him with a freakish importation
which could not conceivably have been destined for anyone else in the town. As if
conscious of this natural belief, Curwen took care to speak casually on several occasions
of the chemical value of the balsams found in mummies; thinking perhaps that he might
make the affair seem less unnatural, yet stopping just short of admitting his
participation. Weeden and Smith, of course, felt no doubt whatsoever of the significance
of the thing; and indulged in the wildest theories concerning Curwen and his monstrous
labours.

The following spring, like that of the year before, had heavy rains; and the watchers
kept careful track of the river-bank behind the Curwen farm. Large sections were
washed away, and a certain number of bones discovered; but no glimpse was afforded
of any actual subterranean chambers or burrows. Something was rumoured, however, at
the village of Pawtuxet about a mile below, where the river flows in falls over a rocky
terrace to join the placed landlocked cove. There, where quaint old cottages climbed the
hill from the rustic bridge, and fishing-smacks lay anchored at their sleepy docks, a
vague report went round of things that were floating down the river and flashing into
sight for a minute as they went over the falls. Of course the Pawtuxet in a long river
which winds through many settled regions abounding in graveyards, and of course the
spring rains had been very heavy; but the fisherfolk about the bridge did not like the
wild way that one of the things stared as it shot down to the still waters below, or the
way that another half cried out although its condition had greatly departed from that of
objects which normally cried out. That rumour sent Smith--for Weeden was just then at
sea--in haste to the river-bank behind the farm; where surely enough there remained the
evidence of an extensive cave-in. There was, however, no trace of a passage into the
steep bank; for the miniature avalanche had left behind a solid wall of mixed earth and
shrubbery from aloft. Smith went to the extent of some experimental digging, but was
deterred by lack of success--or perhaps by fear of possible success. It is interesting to
speculate on what the persistent and revengeful Weeden would have done had he been
ashore at the time.
4

By the autumn of 1770 Weeden decided that the time was ripe to tell others of his
discoveries; for he had a large number of facts to link together, and a second eye-
witness to refute the possible charge that jealousy and vindictiveness had spurred his
fancy. As his first confidant he selected Capt. James Mathewson of the Enterprise, who
on the one hand knew him well enough not to doubt his veracity, and on the other hand
was sufficiently influential in the town to be heard in turn with respect. The colloquy
took place in an upper room of Sabin's Tavern near the docks, with Smith present to
corroborate virtually every statement; and it could be seen that Capt. Mathewson was
tremendously impressed. Like nearly everyone else in the town, he had had black
suspicions of his own anent Joseph Curwen; hence it needed only this confirmation and
enlargement of data to convince him absolutely. At the end of the conference he was
very grave, and enjoined strict silence upon the two younger men. He would, he said,
transmit the information separately to some ten or so of the most learned and prominent
citizens of Providence; ascertaining their views and following whatever advice they
might have to offer. Secrecy would probably be essential in any case, for this was no
matter that the town constables or militia could cope with; and above all else the
excitable crowd must be kept in ignorance, lest there be enacted in these already
troublous times a repetition of that frightful Salem panic of less than a century before
which had first brought Curwen hither.

The right persons to tell, he believed, would be Dr. Benjamin West, whose pamphlet on
the late transit of Venus proved him a scholar and keen thinker; Rev. James Manning,
President of the College which had just moved up from Warren and was temporarily
housed in the new King Street schoolhouse awaiting the completion of its building on
the hill above Presbyterian-Lane; ex-Governor Stephen Hopkins, who had been a
member of the Philosophical Society at Newport, and was a man of very broad
perceptions; John Carter, publisher of the Gazette; all four of the Brown brothers, John,
Joseph, Nicholas, and Moses, who formed the recognised local magnates, and of whom
Joseph was an amateur scientist of parts; old Dr. Jabez Bowen, whose erudition was
considerable, and who had much first-hand knowledge of Curwen's odd purchases; and
Capt. Abraham Whipple, a privateersman of phenomenal boldness and energy who
could be counted on to lead in any active measures needed. These men, if favourable,
might eventually be brought together for collective deliberation; and with them would
rest the responsibility of deciding whether or not to inform the Governor of the Colony,
Joseph Wanton of Newport, before taking action.

The mission of Capt. Mathewson prospered beyond his highest expectations; for whilst
he found one or two of the chosen confidants somewhat sceptical of the possible ghastly
side of Weeden's tale, there was not one who did not think it necessary to take some sort
of secret and coördinated action. Curwen, it was clear, formed a vague potential menace
to the welfare of the town and Colony; and must be eliminated at any cost. Late in
December 1770 a group of eminent townsmen met at the home of Stephen Hopkins and
debated tentative measures. Weeden's notes, which he had given to Capt. Mathewson,
were carefully read; and he and Smith were summoned to give testimony anent details.
Something very like fear seized the whole assemblage before the meeting was over,
though there ran through that fear a grim determination which Capt. Whipple's bluff and
resonant profanity best expressed. They would not notify the Governor, because a more
than legal course seemed necessary. With hidden powers of uncertain extent apparently
at his disposal, Curwen was not a man who could safely be warned to leave town.
Nameless reprisals might ensue, and even if the sinister creature complied, the removal
would be no more than the shifting of an unclean burden to another place. The times
were lawless, and men who had flouted the King's revenue forces for years were not the
ones to balk at sterner things when duty impelled. Curwen must be surprised at his
Pawtuxet farm by a large raiding-party of seasoned privateersmen and given one
decisive chance to explain himself. If he proved a madman, amusing himself with
shrieks and imaginary conversations in different voices, he would be properly confined.
If something graver appeared, and if the underground horrors indeed turned out to be
real, he and all with him must die. It could be done quietly, and even the widow and her
father need not be told how it came about.

While these serious steps were under discussion there occurred in the town an incident
so terrible and inexplicable that for a time little else was mentioned for miles around. In
the middle of a moon-light January night with heavy snow underfoot there resounded
over the river and up the hill a shocking series of cries which brought sleepy heads to
every window; and people around Weybosset Point saw a great white thing plunging
frantically along the badly cleared space in front of the Turk's Head. There was a baying
of dogs in the distance, but this subsided as soon as the clamour of the awakened town
became audible. Parties of men with lanterns and muskets hurried out to see what was
happening, but nothing rewarded their search. The next morning, however, a giant,
muscular body, stark naked, was found on the jams of ice around the southern piers of
the Great Bridge, where the Long Dock stretched out beside Abbott's distil-house, and
the identity of this object became a theme for endless speculation and whispering. It was
not so much the younger as the older folk who whispered, for only in the patriarchs did
that rigid face with horror-bulging eyes strike any chord of memory. They, shaking as
they did so, exchanged furtive murmurs of wonder and fear; for in those stiff, hideous
features lay a resemblance so marvellous as to be almost an identity--and that identity
was with a man who had died full fifty years before.

Ezra Weeden was present at the finding; and remembering the baying of the night
before, set out along Weybosset Street and across Muddy Dock Bridge whence the
sound had come. He had a curious expectancy, and was not surprised when, reaching
the edge of the settled district where the street merged into the Pawtuxet Road, he came
upon some very curious tracks in the snow. The naked giant had been pursued by dogs
and many booted men, and the returning tracks of the hounds and their masters could be
easily traced. They had given up the chase upon coming too near the town. Weeden
smiled grimly, and as a perfunctory detail traced the footprints back to their source. It
was the Pawtuxet farm of Joseph Curwen, as he well knew it would be; and he would
have given much had the yard been less confusingly trampled. As it was, he dared not
seem too interested in full daylight. Dr. Bowen, to whom Weeden went at once with his
report, performed an autopsy on the strange corpse, and discovered peculiarities which
baffled him utterly. The digestive tracts of the huge man seemed never to have been in
use, whilst the whole skin had a coarse, loosely knit texture impossible to account for.
Impressed by what the old men whispered of this body's likeness to the long-dead
blacksmith Daniel Green, whose great-grandson Aaron Hoppin was a supercargo in
Curwen's employ, Weeden asked casual questions till he found where Green was
buried. That night a party of ten visited the old North Burying Ground opposite
Herrenden's Lane and opened a grave. They found it vacant, precisely as they had
expected.
Meanwhile arrangements had been made with the post riders to intercept Joseph
Curwen's mail, and shortly before the incident of the naked body there was found a
letter from one Jedediah Orne of Salem which made the coöperating citizens think
deeply. Parts of it, copied and preserved in the private archives of the Smith family
where Charles Ward found it, ran as follows.

I delight that you continue in ye Gett'g at Olde Matters in your Way, and doe not think
better was done at Mr. Hutchinson's in Salem-Village. Certainely, there was Noth'g but
ye liveliest Awfulness in that which H. rais'd upp from What he cou'd gather onlie a part
of. What you sente, did not Worke, whether because of Any Thing miss'g, or because ye
Wordes were not Righte from my Speak'g or yr Copy'g. I alone am at a Loss. I have not
ye Chymicall art to followe Borellus, and owne my Self confounded by ye VII. Booke
of ye Necronomicon that you recommende. But I wou'd have you Observe what was
told to us aboute tak'g Care whom to calle upp, for you are Sensible what Mr. Mather
writ in ye Magnalia of--, and can judge how truely that Horrendous thing is reported. I
say to you againe, doe not call up Any that you can not put downe; by the Which I
meane, Any that can in Turne call up Somewhat against you, whereby your
Powerfullest Devices may not be of use. Ask of the Lesser, lest the Greater shal not
wish to Answer, and shal commande more than you. I was frighted when I read of your
know'g what Ben Zariatnatmik hadde in his ebony Boxe, for I was conscious who must
have tolde you. And againe I ask that you shalle write me as Jedediah and not Simon. In
this Community a Man may not live too long, and you knowe my Plan by which I came
back as my Son. I am desirous you will Acquaint me with what ye Black Man learnt
from Sylvanus Cocidius in ye Vault, under ye Roman Wall, and will be oblig'd for ye
lend'g of ye MS. you speak of.

Another and unsigned letter from Philadelphia provoked equal thought, especially for
the following passage:

I will observe what you say respecting the sending of Accounts only by yr Vessels, but
can not always be certain when to expect them. In the Matter spoke of, I require onlie
one more thing; but wish to be sure I apprehend you exactly. You inform me, that no
Part must be missing if the finest Effects are to be had, but you can not but know how
hard it is to be sure. It seems a great Hazard and Burthen to take away the whole Box,
and in Town (i.e. St. Peter's, St. Paul's, St. Mary's or Christ Church) it can scarce be
done at all. But I know what Imperfections were in the one I rais'd up October last, and
how many live Specimens you were forc'd to imploy before you hit upon the right Mode
in the year 1766; so will be guided by you in all Matters. I am impatient for yr Brig, and
inquire daily at Mr. Biddle's Wharf.

A third suspicious letter was in an unknown tongue and even an unknown alphabet. In
the Smith diary found by Charles Ward a single oft-repeated combination of characters
is clumsily copied; and authorities at Brown University have pronounced the alphabet
Amharic or Abyssinian, although they do not recognise the word. None of these epistles
was ever delivered to Curwen, though the disappearance of Jedediah Orne from Salem
as recorded shortly afterward shewed that the Providence men took certain quiet steps.
The Pennsylvania Historical Society also has some curious letters received by Dr.
Shippen regarding the presence of an unwholesome character in Philadelphia. But more
decisive steps were in the air, and it is in the secret assemblages of sworn and tested
sailors and faithful old privateersmen in the Brown warehouses by night that we must
look for the main fruits of Weeden's disclosures. Slowly and surely a plan of campaign
was under development which would leave no trace of Joseph Curwen's noxious
mysteries.

Curwen, despite all precautions, apparently felt that something was in the wind; for he
was now remarked to wear an unusually worried look. His coach was seen at all hours
in the town and on the Pawtuxet Road, and he dropped little by little the air of forced
geniality with which he had latterly sought to combat the town's prejudice. The nearest
neighbours to his farm, the Fenners, one night remarked a great shaft of light shooting
into the sky from some aperture in the roof of that cryptical stone building with the
high, excessively narrow windows; an event which they quickly communicated to John
Brown in Providence. Mr. Brown had become the executive leader of the select group
bent on Curwen's extirpation, and had informed the Fenners that some action was about
to be taken. This he deemed needful because of the impossibility of their not witnessing
the final raid; and he explained his course by saying that Curwen was known to be a spy
of the customs officers at Newport, against whom the hand of every Providence skipper,
merchant, and farmer was openly or clandestinely raised. Whether the ruse was wholly
believed by neighbours who had seen so many queer things is not certain; but at any
rate the Fenners were willing to connect any evil with a man of such queer ways. To
them Mr. Brown had entrusted the duty of watching the Curwen farmhouse, and of
regularly reporting every incident which took place there.

The probability that Curwen was on guard and attempting unusual things, as suggested
by the odd shaft of light, precipitated at last the action so carefully devised by the band
of serious citizens. According to the Smith diary a company of about 100 men met at 10
p.m. on Friday, April 12th, 1771, in the great room of Thurston's Tavern at the Sign of
the Golden Lion on Weybosset Point across the Bridge. Of the guiding group of
prominent men in addition to the leader John Brown there were present Dr. Bowen,
with his case of surgical instruments, President Manning without the great periwig (the
largest in the Colonies) for which he was noted, Governor Hopkins, wrapped in his dark
cloak and accompanied by his seafaring brother Esek, whom he had initiated at the last
moment with the permission of the rest, John Carter, Capt. Mathewson, and Capt.
Whipple, who was to lead the actual raiding party. These chiefs conferred apart in a rear
chamber, after which Capt. Whipple emerged to the great room and gave the gathered
seamen their last oaths and instructions. Eleazar Smith was with the leaders as they sat
in the rear apartment awaiting the arrival of Ezra Weeden, whose duty was to keep track
of Curwen and report the departure of his coach for the farm.

About 10:30 a heavy rumble was heard on the Great Bridge, followed by the sound of a
coach in the street outside; and at that hour there was no need of waiting for Weeden in
order to know that the doomed man had set out for his last night of unhallowed
wizardry. A moment later, as the receding coach clattered faintly over the Muddy Dock
Bridge, Weeden appeared; and the raiders fell silently into military order in the street,
shouldering the firelocks, fowling-pieces, or whaling harpoons which they had with
them. Weeden and Smith were with the party, and of the deliberating citizens there were
present for active service Capt. Whipple, the leader, Capt. Esek Hopkins, John Carter,
President Manning, Capt. Mathewson, and Dr. Bowen; together with Moses Brown,
who had come up at the eleventh hour though absent from the preliminary session in the
tavern. All these freemen and their hundred sailors began the long march without delay,
grim and a trifle apprehensive as they left the Muddy Dock behind and mounted the
gentle rise of Broad Street toward the Pawtuxet Road. Just beyond Elder Snow's church
some of the men turned back to take a parting look at Providence lying outspread under
the early spring stars. Steeples and gables rose dark and shapely, and salt breezes swept
up gently from the cove north of the Bridge. Vega was climbing above the great hill
across the water, whose crest of trees was broken by the roof-line of the unfinished
College edifice. At the foot of that hill, and along the narrow mounting lanes of its side,
the old town dreamed; Old Providence, for whose safety and sanity so monstrous and
colossal a blasphemy was about to be wiped out.

An hour and a quarter later the raiders arrived, as previously agreed, at the Fenner
farmhouse; where they heard a final report on their intended victim. He had reached his
farm over half an hour before, and the strange light had soon afterward shot once more
into the sky, but there were no lights in any visible windows. This was always the case
of late. Even as this news was given another great glare arose toward the south, and the
party realised that they had indeed come close to the scene of awesome and unnatural
wonders. Capt. Whipple now ordered his force to separate into three divisions; one of
twenty men under Eleazar Smith to strike across to the shore and guard the landing-
place against possible reinforcements for Curwen until summoned by a messenger for
desperate service, a second of twenty men under Capt. Esek Hopkins to steal down into
the river valley behind the Curwen farm and demolish with axes or gunpowder the
oaken door in the high, steep bank, and the third to close in on the house and adjacent
buildings themselves. Of this division one third was to be led by Capt. Mathewson to
the cryptical stone edifice with high narrow windows, another third to follow Capt.
Whipple himself to the main farmhouse, and the remaining third to preserve a circle
around the whole group of buildings until summoned by a final emergency signal.

The river party would break down the hillside door at the sound of a single whistle-
blast, then wait and capture anything which might issue from the regions within. At the
sound of two whistle-blasts it would advance through the aperture to oppose the enemy
or join the rest of the raiding contingent. The party at the stone building would accept
these respective signals in an analogous manner; forcing an entrance at the first, and at
the second descending whatever passage into the ground might be discovered, and
joining the general or focal warfare expected to take place within the caverns. A third or
emergency signal of three blasts would summon the immediate reserve from its general
guard duty; its twenty men dividing equally and entering the unknown depths through
both farmhouse and stone building. Capt. Whipple's belief in the existence of catacombs
was absolute, and he took no alternative into consideration when making his plans. He
had with him a whistle of great power and shrillness, and did not fear any upsetting or
misunderstanding of signals. The final reserve at the landing, of course, was nearly out
of the whistle's range; hence would require a special messenger if needed for help.
Moses Brown and John Carter went with Capt. Hopkins to the river-bank, while
President Manning was detailed with Capt. Mathewson to the stone building. Dr.
Bowen, with Ezra Weeden, remained in Capt. Whipple's party which was to storm the
farmhouse itself. The attack was to begin as soon as a messenger from Capt. Hopkins
had joined Capt. Whipple to notify him of the river party's readiness. The leader would
then deliver the loud single blast, and the various advance parties would commence
their simultaneous attack on three points. Shortly before 1 a.m. the three divisions left
the Fenner farmhouse; one to guard the landing, another to seek the river valley and the
hillside door, and the third to subdivide and attend to the actual buildings of the Curwen
farm.

Eleazar Smith, who accompanied the shore-guarding party, records in his diary an
uneventful march and a long wait on the bluff by the bay; broken once by what seemed
to be the distant sound of the signal whistle and again by a peculiar muffled blend of
roaring and crying and a powder blast which seemed to come from the same direction.
Later on one man thought he caught some distant gunshots, and still later Smith himself
felt the throb of titanic and thunderous words resounding in upper air. It was just before
dawn that a single haggard messenger with wild eyes and a hideous unknown odour
about his clothing appeared and told the detachment to disperse quietly to their homes
and never again think or speak of the night's doings or of him who had been Joseph
Curwen. Something about the bearing of the messenger carried a conviction which his
mere words could never have conveyed; for though he was a seaman well known to
many of them, there was something obscurely lost or gained in his soul which set him
for evermore apart. It was the same later on when they met other old companions who
had gone into that zone of horror. Most of them had lost or gained something
imponderable and indescribable. They had seen or heard or felt something which was
not for human creatures, and could not forget it. From them there was never any gossip,
for to even the commonest of mortal instincts there are terrible boundaries. And from
that single messenger the party at the shore caught a nameless awe which almost sealed
their own lips. Very few are the rumours which ever came from any of them, and
Eleazar Smith's diary is the only written record which has survived from that whole
expedition which set forth from the Sign of the Golden Lion under the stars.

Charles Ward, however, discovered another vague sidelight in some Fenner

correspondence which he found in New London, where he knew another branch of the
family had lived. It seems that the Fenners, from whose house the doomed farm was
distantly visible, had watched the departing columns of raiders; and had heard very
clearly the angry barking of the Curwen dogs, followed by the first shrill blast which
precipitated the attack. This blast had been followed by a repetition of the great shaft of
light from the stone building, and in another moment, after a quick sounding of the
second signal ordering a general invasion, there had come a subdued prattle of musketry
followed by a horrible roaring cry which the correspondent Luke Fenner had
represented in his epistle by the characters 'Waaaahrrrrr-R'waaahrrr.'

This cry, however, had possessed a quality which no mere writing could convey, and
the correspondent mentions that his mother fainted completely at the sound. It was later
repeated less loudly, and further but more muffled evidences of gunfire ensued; together
with a loud explosion of powder from the direction of the river. About an hour
afterward all the dogs began to bark frightfully, and there were vague ground rumblings
so marked that the candlesticks tottered on the mantelpiece. A strong smell of sulphur
was noted; and Luke Fenner's father declared that he heard the third or emergency
whistle signal, though the others failed to detect it. Muffled musketry sounded again,
followed by a deep scream less piercing but even more horrible than those which had
preceded it; a kind of throaty, nastily plastic cough or gurgle whose quality as a scream
must have come more from its continuity and psychological import than from its actual
acoustic value.
Then the flaming thing burst into sight at a point where the Curwen farm ought to lie,
and the human cries of desperate and frightened men were heard. Muskets flashed and
cracked, and the flaming thing fell to the ground. A second flaming thing appeared, and
a shriek of human origin was plainly distinguished. Fenner wrote that he could even
gather a few words belched in frenzy: Almighty, protect thy lamb! Then there were
more shots, and the second flaming thing fell. After that came silence for about three-
quarters of an hour; at the end of which time little Arthur Fenner, Luke's brother,
exclaimed that he saw "a red fog" going up to the stars from the accursed farm in the
distance. No one but the child can testify to this, but Luke admits the significant
coincidence implied by the panic of almost convulsive fright which at the same moment
arched the backs and stiffened the fur of the three cats then within the room.

Five minutes later a chill wind blew up, and the air became suffused with an intolerable
stench that only the strong freshness of the sea could have prevented its being notice by
the shore party or by any wakeful souls in the Pawtuxet village. This stench was nothing
which any of the Fenners had ever encountered before, and produced a kind of
clutching, amorphous fear beyond that of the tomb or the charnel-house. Close upon it
came the awful voice which no hapless hearer will ever be able to forget. It thundered
out of the sky like a doom, and windows rattled as its echoes died away. It was deep and
musical; powerful as a bass organ, but evil as the forbidden books of the Arabs. What it
said no man can tell, for it spoke in an unknown tongue, but this is the writing Luke
Fenner set down to portray the daemoniac intonations: 'DEESMEES JESHET BONE
DOSEFE DUVEMA ENITEMOSS.' Not till the year 1919 did any soul link this crude
transcript with anything else in mortal knowledge, but Charles Ward paled as he
recognised what Mirandola had denounced in shudders as the ultimate horror among
black magic's incantations.

An unmistakable human shout or deep chorused scream seemed to answer this malign
wonder from the Curwen farm, after which the unknown stench grew complex with an
added odour equally intolerable. A wailing distinctly different from the scream now
burst out, and was protracted ululantly in rising and falling paroxysms. At times it
became almost articulate, though no auditor could trace any definite words; and at one
point it seemed to verge toward the confines of diabolic and hysterical laughter. Then a
yell of utter, ultimate fright and stark madness wrenched from scores of human throats--
a yell which came strong and clear despite the depth from which it must have burst;
after which darkness and silence ruled all things. Spirals of acrid smoke ascended to
blot out the stars, though no flames appeared and no buildings were observed to be gone
or injured on the following day.

Toward dawn two frightened messengers with monstrous and unplaceable odours
saturating their clothing knocked at the Fenner door and requested a keg of rum, for
which they paid very well indeed. One of them told the family that the affair of Joseph
Curwen was over, and that the events of the night were not to be mentioned again.
Arrogant as the order seemed, the aspect of him who gave it took away all resentment
and lent it a fearsome authority; so that only these furtive letters of Luke Fenner, which
he urged his Connecticut relative to destroy, remain to tell what was seen and heard.
The non-compliance of that relative, whereby the letters were saved after all, has alone
kept the matter from a merciful oblivion. Charles Ward had one detail to add as a result
of a long canvass of Pawtuxet residents for ancestral traditions. Old Charles Slocum of
that village said that there was known to his grandfather a queer rumour concerning a
charred, distorted body found in the fields a week after the death of Joseph Curwen was
announced. What kept the talk alive was the notion that this body, so far as could be
seen in its burnt and twisted condition, was neither thoroughly human nor wholly allied
to any animal which Pawtuxet folk had ever seen or read about.

Not one man who participated in that terrible raid could ever be induced to say a word
concerning it, and every fragment of the vague data which survives comes from those
outside the final fighting party. There is something frightful in the care with which these
actual raiders destroyed each scrap which bore the least allusion to the matter. Eight
sailors had been killed, but although their bodies were not produced their families were
satisfied with the statement that a clash with customs officers had occurred. The same
statement also covered the numerous cases of wounds, all of which were extensively
bandaged and treated only by Dr. Jabez Bowen, who had accompanied the party.
Hardest to explain was the nameless odour clinging to all the raiders, a thing which was
discussed for weeks. Of the citizen leaders, Capt. Whipple and Moses Brown were most
severely hurt, and letters of their wives testify the bewilderment which their reticence
and close guarding of their bandages produced. Psychologically every participant was
aged, sobered, and shaken. It is fortunate that they were all strong men of action and
simple, orthodox religionists, for with more subtle introspectiveness and mental
complexity they would have fared ill indeed. President Manning was the most
disturbed; but even he outgrew the darkest shadow, and smothered memories in prayers.
Every man of those leaders had a stirring part to play in later years, and it is perhaps
fortunate that this is so. Little more than a twelvemonth afterward Capt. Whipple led the
mob who burnt the revenue ship Gaspee, and in this bold act we may trace one step in
the blotting out of unwholesome images.

There was delivered to the widow of Joseph Curwen a sealed leaden coffin of curious
design, obviously found ready on the spot when needed, in which she was told her
husband's body lay. He had, it was explained, been killed in a customs battle about
which it was not politic to give details. More than this no tongue ever uttered of Joseph
Curwen's end, and Charles Ward had only a single hint wherewith to construct a theory.
This hint was the merest thread--a shaky underscoring of a passage in Jedediah Orne's
confiscated letter to Curwen, as partly copied in Ezra Weeden's handwriting. The copy
was found in the possession of Smith's descendants; and we are left to decide whether
Weeden gave it to his companion after the end, as a mute clue to the abnormality which
had occurred, or whether, as is more probable, Smith had it before, and added the
underscoring himself from what he had managed to extract from his friend by shrewd
guessing and adroit cross-questioning. The underlined passage is merely this:

I say to you againe, doe not call up Any that you can not put downe; by the Which I
meane, Any that can in Turne call up Somewhat against you, whereby your
Powerfullest Devices may not be of use. Ask of the Lesser, lest the Greater shal not
wish to Answer, and shal commande more than you.

In the light of this passage, and reflecting on what last unmentionable allies a beaten
man might try to summon in his direst extremity, Charles Ward may well have
wondered whether any citizen of Providence killed Joseph Curwen.
The deliberate effacement of every memory of the dead man from Providence life and
annals was vastly aided by the influence of the raiding leaders. They had not at first
meant to be so thorough, and had allowed the widow and her father and child to remain
in ignorance of the true conditions; but Capt. Tillinghast was an astute man, and soon
uncovered enough rumours to whet his horror and cause him to demand that the
daughter and granddaughter change their name, burn the library and all remaining
papers, and chisel the inscription from the slate slab above Joseph Curwen's grave. He
knew Capt. Whipple well, and probably extracted more hints from that bluff mariner
and anyone else ever gained repecting the end of the accursed sorcerer.

From that time on the obliteration of Curwen's memory became increasingly rigid,
extending at last by common consent even to the town records and files of the Gazette.
It can be compared in spirit only to the hush that lay on Oscar Wilde's name for a
decade after his disgrace, and in extent only to the fate of that sinful King of Runazar in
Lord Dunsany's tale, whom the Gods decided must not only cease to be, but must cease
ever to have been.

Mrs. Tillinghast, as the widow became known after 1772, sold the house in Olney Court
and resided with her father in Power's Lane till her death in 1817. The farm at Pawtuxet,
shunned by every living soul, remained to moulder through the years; and seemed to
decay with unaccountable rapidity. By 1780 only the stone and brickwork were
standing, and by 1800 even these had fallen to shapeless heaps. None ventured to pierce
the tangled shrubbery on the river-bank behind which the hillside door may have lain,
nor did any try to frame a definite image of the scenes amidst which Joseph Curwen
departed from the horrors he had wrought.

Only robust old Capt. Whipple was heard by alert listeners to mutter once in a while to
himself, "Pox on that----, but he had no business to laugh while he screamed. 'Twas as
though the damn'd----had some'at up his sleeve. For half a crown I'd burn his----home."

III. A Search and an Evocation

Charles Ward, as we have seen, first learned in 1918 of his descent from Joseph
Curwen. That he at once took an intense interest in everything pertaining to the bygone
mystery is not to be wondered at; for every vague rumour that he had heard of Curwen
now became something vital to himself, in whom flowed Curwen's blood. No spirited
and imaginative genealogist could have done otherwise than begin forthwith an avid
and systematic collection of Curwen data.

In his first delvings there was not the slightest attempt at secrecy; so that even Dr.
Lyman hesitates to date the youth's madness from any period before the close of 1919.
He talked freely with his family--though his mother was not particularly pleased to own
an ancestor like Curwen--and with the officials of the various museums and libraries he
visited. In applying to private families for records thought to be in their possession he
made no concealment of his object, and shared the somewhat amused scepticism with
which the accounts of the old diarists and letter-writers were regarded. He often
expressed a keen wonder as to what really had taken place a century and a half before at
the Pawtuxet farmhouse whose site he vainly tried to find, and what Joseph Curwen
really had been.

When he came across the Smith diary and archives and encountered the letter from
Jedediah Orne he decided to visit Salem and look up Curwen's early activities and
connexions there, which he did during the Easter vacation of 1919. At the Essex
Institute, which was well known to him from former sojourns in the glamorous old town
of crumbling Puritan gables and clustered gambrel roofs, he was very kindly received,
and unearthed there a considerable amount of Curwen data. He found that his ancestor
was born in Salem-Village, now Danvers, seven miles from town, on the eighteenth of
February (O.S.) 1662-3; and that he had run away to sea at the age of fifteen, not
appearing again for nine years, when he returned with the speech, dress, and manners of
a native Englishman and settled in Salem proper. At that time he had little to do with his
family, but spent most of his hours with the curious books he had brought from Europe,
and the strange chemicals which came for him on ships from England, France, and
Holland. Certain trips of his into the country were the objects of much local
inquisitiveness, and were whisperingly associated with vague rumours of fires on the
hills at night.

Curwen's only close friends had been one Edward Hutchinson of Salem-Village and one
Simon Orne of Salem. With these men he was often seen in conference about the
Common, and visits among them were by no means infrequent. Hutchinson had a house
well out toward the woods, and it was not altogether liked by sensitive people because
of the sounds heard there at night. He was said to entertain strange visitors, and the
lights seen from his windows were not always of the same colour. The knowledge he
displayed concerning long-dead persons and long-forgotten events was considered
distinctly unwholesome, and he disappeared about the time the witchcraft panic began,
never to be heard from again. At that time Joseph Curwen also departed, but his
settlement in Providence was soon learned of. Simon Orne lived in Salem until 1720,
when his failure to grow visibly old began to excite attention. He thereafter disappeared,
though thirty years later his precise counterpart and self-styled son turned up to claim
his property. The claim was allowed on the strength of documents in Simon Orne's
known hand, and Jedediah Orne continued to dwell in Salem till 1771, when certain
letters from Providence citizens to the Rev. Thomas Barnard and others brought about
his quiet removal to parts unknown.

Certain documents by and about all of the strange characters were available at the Essex
Institute, the Court House, and the Registry of Deeds, and included both harmless
commonplaces such as land titles and bills of sale, and furtive fragments of a more
provocative nature. There were four or five unmistakable allusions to them on the
witchcraft trial records; as when one Hepzibah Lawson swore on July 10, 1692, at the
Court of Oyer and Terminer under Judge Hathorne, that: 'fortie Witches and the Blacke
Man were wont to meete in the Woodes behind Mr. Hutchinson's house', and one Amity
How declared at a session of August 8th before Judge Gedney that: 'Mr. G. B. (Rev.
George Burroughs) on that Nighte putt ye Divell his Marke upon Bridget S., Jonathan
A., Simon O., Deliverance W., Joseph C., Susan P., Mehitable C., and Deborah B.'

Then there was a catalogue of Hutchinson's uncanny library as found after his
disappearance, and an unfinished manuscript in his handwriting, couched in a cipher
none could read. Ward had a photostatic copy of this manuscript made, and began to
work casually on the cipher as soon as it was delivered to him. After the following
August his labours on the cipher became intense and feverish, and there is reason to
believe from his speech and conduct that he hit upon the key before October or
November. He never stated, though, whether or not he had succeeded.

But of greatest immediate interest was the Orne material. It took Ward only a short time
to prove from identity of penmanship a thing he had already considered established
from the text of the letter to Curwen; namely, that Simon Orne and his supposed son
were one and the same person. As Orne had said to his correspondent, it was hardly safe
to live too long in Salem, hence he resorted to a thirty-year sojourn abroad, and did not
return to claim his lands except as a representative of a new generation. Orne had
apparently been careful to destroy most of his correspondence, but the citizens who took
action in 1771 found and preserved a few letters and papers which excited their wonder.
There were cryptic formulae and diagrams in his and other hands which Ward now
either copied with care or had photographed, and one extremely mysterious letter in a
chirography that the searcher recognised from items in the Registry of Deeds as
positively Joseph Curwen's.

This Curwen letter, though undated as to the year, was evidently not the one in answer
to which Orne had written the confiscated missive; and from internal evidence Ward
placed it not much later than 1750. It may not be amiss to give the text in full, as a
sample of the style of one whose history was so dark and terrible. The recipient is
addressed as "Simon", but a line (whether drawn by Curwen or Orne Ward could not
tell) is run through the word.

Providence, 1. May

Brother:-

My honour'd Antient Friende, due Respects and earnest Wishes to Him whom we serue
for yr eternall Power. I am just come upon That which you ought to knowe, concern'g
the Matter of the Laste Extremitie and what to doe regard'g yt. I am not dispos'd to
followe you in go'g Away on acct. of my Yeares, for Prouidence hath not ye Sharpeness
of ye Bay in hunt'g oute uncommon Things and bringinge to Tryall. I am ty'd up in
Shippes and Goodes, and cou'd not doe as you did, besides the Whiche my Farme at
Patuxet hath under it What you Knowe, and wou'd not waite for my com'g Backe as an
Other.

But I am unreadie for harde Fortunes, as I haue tolde you, and haue longe work'd upon
ye Way of get'g Backe after ye Laste. I laste Night strucke on ye Wordes that bringe up
YOGGE-SOTHOTHE, and sawe for ye first Time that Face spoke of by Ibn Schacabao
in ye----. And IT said, that ye III Psalme in ye Liber-Damnatus holdes ye Clauicle. With
Sunne in V House, Saturne in Trine, drawe ye Pentagram of Fire, and saye ye ninth
Uerse thrice. This Uerse repeate eache Roodemas and Hallow's Eue; and ye Thing will
breede in ye Outside Spheres.

And of ye Seede of Olde shal One be borne who shal looke Backe, tho' know'g not what
he seekes.
Yett will this auaile Nothing if there be no Heir, and if the Saltes, or the Way to make
the Saltes, bee not Readie for his Hande; and here I will owne, I haue not taken needed
Stepps nor founde Much. Ye Process is plaguy harde to come neare; and it used up such
a Store of Specimens, I am harde putte to it to get Enough, notwithstand'g the Sailors I
haue from ye Indies. Ye People aboute are become curious, but I can stande them off.
Ye Gentry are worse that the Populace, be'g more Circumstantiall in their Accts. and
more belieu'd in what they tell. That Parson and Mr. Merritt haue talk'd Some, I am
fearfull, but no Thing soe far is Dangerous. Ye Chymical Substances are easie of get'g,
there be'g II. goode Chymists in Towne, Dr. Bowen and Sam: Carew. I am foll'g oute
what Borellus saith, and haue Helpe in Abdool Al-Hazred his VII. Booke. Whateuer I
gette, you shal haue. And in ye meane while, do not neglect to make use of ye Wordes I
haue here giuen. I haue them Righte, but if you Desire to see HIM, imploy the Writings
on ye Piece of---that I am putt'g in this Packet. Saye ye Uerses euery Roodmas and
Hallow's Eue; and if ye Line runn out not, one shal bee in yeares to come that shal looke
backe and use what Saltes or Stuff for Saltes you shal leaue him. Job XIV. XIV.

I rejoice you are again at Salem, and hope I may see you not longe hence. I haue a
goode Stallion, and am think'g of get'g a Coach, there be'g one (Mr. Merritt's) in
Prouidence already, tho' ye Roades are bad. If you are dispos'd to Trauel, doe not pass
me bye. From Boston take ye Post Rd. thro' Dedham, Wrentham, and Attleborough,
goode Tauerns be'g at all these Townes. Stop at Mr. Balcom's in Wrentham, where ye
Beddes are finer than Mr. Hatch's, but eate at ye other House for their Cooke is better.
Turne into Prou. by Patucket Falls, and ye Rd. past Mr. Sayles's Tauern. My House opp.
Mr. Epenetus Olney's Tauern off ye Towne Street, Ist on ye N. side of Olney's Court.
Distance from Boston Stone abt. XLIV Miles.

Sir, I am ye olde and true Friend and Serut. in Almonsin-Metraton.

Josephus C.

To Mr. Simon Orne, William's-Lane, in Salem.

This letter, oddly enough, was what first gave Ward the exact location of Curwen's
Providence home; for none of the records encountered up to that time had been at all
specific. The discovery was doubly striking because it indicated as the newer Curwen
house, built in 1761 on the site of the old, a dilapidated building still standing in Olney
Court and well known to Ward in his antiquarian rambles over Stampers' Hill. The place
was indeed only a few squares from his own home on the great hill's higher ground, and
was now the abode of a negro family much esteemed for occasional washing,
housecleaning, and furnace-tending services. To find, in distant Salem, such sudden
proof of the significance of this familiar rookery in his own family history, was a highly
impressive thing to Ward; and he resolved to explore the place immediately upon his
return. The more mystical phases of the letter, which he took to be some extravagant
kind of symbolism, frankly baffled him; though he noted with a thrill of curiousity that
the Biblical passage referred to--Job 14,14--was the familiar verse, 'If a man die, shall
he live again? All the days of my appointed time will I wait, until my change come.'

2
Young Ward came home in a state of pleasant excitement, and spent the following
Saturday in a long and exhaustive study of the house in Olney Court. The place, now
crumbling with age, had never been a mansion; but was a modest two-and-a-half story
wooden town house of the familiar Providence colonial type, with plain peaked roof,
large central chimney, and artistically carved doorway with rayed fanlight, triangular
pediment, and trim Doric pilasters. It had suffered but little alteration externally, and
Ward felt he was gazing on something very close to the sinister matters of his quest.

The present negro inhabitants were known to him, and he was very courteously shewn
about the interior by old Asa and his stout wife Hannah. Here there was more change
than the outside indicated, and Ward saw with regret that fully half of the fine scroll-
and-urn overmantels and shell-carved cupboard linings were gone, whilst most of the
fine wainscotting and bolection moulding was marked, hacked, and gouged, or covered
up altogether with cheap wall-paper. In general, the survey did not yield as much as
Ward had somehow expected; but it was at least exciting to stand within the ancestral
walls which had housed such a man of horror as Joseph Curwen. He saw with a thrill
that a monogram had been very carefully effaced from the ancient brass knocker.

From then until after the close of school Ward spent his time on the photostatic copy of
the Hutchinson cipher and the accumulation of local Curwen data. The former still
proved unyielding; but of the latter he obtained so much, and so many clues to similar
data elsewhere, that he was ready by July to make a trip to New London and New York
to consult old letters whose presence in those places was indicated. This trip was very
fruitful, for it brought him the Fenner letters with their terrible description of the
Pawtuxet farmhouse raid, and the Nightingale-Talbot letters in which he learned of the
portrait painted on a panel of the Curwen library. This matter of the portrait interested
him particularly, since he would have given much to know just what Joseph Curwen
looked like; and he decided to make a second search of the house in Olney Court to see
if there might not be some trace of the ancient features beneath peeling coats of later
paint or layers of mouldy wall-paper.

Early in August that search took place, and Ward went carefully over the walls of every
room sizeable enough to have been by any possibility the library of the evil builder. He
paid especial attention to the large panels of such overmantels as still remained; and was
keenly excited after about an hour, when on a broad area above the fireplace in a
spacious ground-floor room he became certain that the surface brought out by the
peeling of several coats of paint was sensibly darker than any ordinary interior paint or
the wood beneath it was likely to have been. A few more careful tests with a thin knife,
and he knew that he had come upon an oil portrait of great extent. With truly scholarly
restraint the youth did not risk the damage which an immediate attempt to uncover the
hidden picture with the knife might have been, but just retired from the scene of his
discovery to enlist expert help. In three days he returned with an artist of long
experience, Mr. Walter C. Dwight, whose studio is near the foot of College Hill; and
that accomplished restorer of paintings set to work at once with proper methods and
chemical substances. Old Asa and his wife were duly excited over their strange visitors,
and were properly reimbursed for this invasion of their domestic hearth.

As day by the day the work of restoration progressed, Charles Ward looked on with
growing interest at the lines and shades gradually unveiled after their long oblivion.
Dwight had begun at the bottom; hence since the picture was a three-quarter-length one,
the face did not come out for some time. It was meanwhile seen that the subject was a
spare, well-shaped man with dark-blue coat, embroidered waistcoat, black satin small-
clothes, and white silk stockings, seated in a carved chair against the background of a
window with wharves and ships beyond. When the head came out it was observed to
bear a neat Albemarle wig, and to possess a thin, calm, undistinguished face which
seemed somehow familiar to both Ward and the artist. Only at the very last, though, did
the restorer and his client begin to grasp with astonishment at the details of that lean,
pallid visage, and to recognise with a touch of awe the dramatic trick which heredity
had played. For it took the final bath of oil and the final stroke of the delicate scraper to
bring out fully the expression which centuries had hidden; and to confront the
bewildered Charles Dexter Ward, dweller in the past, with his own living features in the
countenance of his horrible great-great-great-grandfather.

Ward brought his parents to see the marvel he had uncovered, and his father at once
determined to purchase the picture despite its execution on stationary panelling. The
resemblance to the boy, despite an appearance of rather great age, was marvellous; and
it could be seen that through some trick of atavism the physical contours of Joseph
Curwen had found precise duplication after a century and a half. Mrs. Ward's
resemblance to her ancestor was not at all marked, though she could recall relatives who
had some of the facial characteristics shared by her son and by the bygone Curwen. She
did not relish the discovery, and told her husband that he had better burn the picture
instead of bringing it home. There was, she averred, something unwholesome about it;
not only intrinsically, but in its very resemblance to Charles. Mr. Ward, however, was a
practical man of power and affairs--a cotton manufacturer with extensive mills at
Riverpoint in the Pawtuxet Valley--and not one to listen to feminine scruples. The
picture impressed him mightily with its likeness to his son, and he believed the boy
deserved it as a present. In this opinion, it is needless to say, Charles most heartily
concurred; and a few days later Mr. Ward located the owner of the house--a small
rodent-featured person with a guttural accent--and obtained the whole mantel and
overmantel bearing the picture at a curtly fixed price which cut short the impending
torrent of unctuous haggling.

It now remained to take off the panelling and remove it to the Ward home, where
provisions were made for its thorough restoration and installation with an electric mock-
fireplace in Charles's third-floor study or library. To Charles was left the task of
superintending this removal, and on the twenty-eighth of August he accompanied two
expert workmen from the Crooker decorating firm to the house in Olney Court, where
the mantel and portrait-bearing overmantel were detached with great care and precision
for transportation in the company's motor truck. There was left a space of exposed
brickwork marking the chimney's course, and in this young Ward observed a cubical
recess about a foot square, which must have lain directly behind the head of the portrait.
Curious as to what such a space might mean or contain, the youth approached and
looked within; finding beneath the deep coatings of dust and soot some loose yellowed
papers, a crude, thick copybook, and a few mouldering textile shreds which may have
formed the ribbon binding the rest together. Blowing away the bulk of the dirt and
cinders, he took up the book and looked at the bold inscription on its cover. It was in a
hand which he had learned to recognise at the Essex Institute, and proclaimed the
volume as the 'Journall and Notes of Jos: Curwen, Gent. of Prouidence-Plantations, Late
of Salem.'
Excited beyond measure by his discovery, Ward shewed the book to the two curious
workmen beside him. Their testimony is absolute as to the nature and genuineness of
the finding, and Dr. Willett relies on them to help establish his theory that the youth was
not mad when he began his major eccentricities. All the other papers were likewise in
Curwen's handwriting, and one of them seemed especially portentous because of its
inscription: 'To Him Who Shal Come After, & How He May Gett Beyonde Time & Ye
Spheres.'

Another was in a cipher; the same, Ward hoped, as the Hutchinson cipher which had
hitherto baffled him. A third, and here the searcher rejoiced, seemed to be a key to the
cipher; whilst the fourth and fifth were addressed respectively to: 'Edw: Hutchinson,
Armiger' and 'Jedediah Orne, esq.', 'or Their Heir or Heirs, or Those Represent'g Them.'
The sixth and last was inscribed: 'Joseph Curwen his Life and Travells Bet'n ye yeares
1678 and 1687: Of Whither He Voyag'd, Where He Stay'd, Whom He Sawe, and What
He Learnt.'

We have now reached the point from which the more academic school of alienists date
Charles Ward's madness. Upon his discovery the youth had looked immediately at a few
of the inner pages of the book and manuscripts, and had evidently seen something
which impressed him tremendously. Indeed, in shewing the titles to the workmen, he
appeared to guard the text itself with peculiar care, and to labour under a perturbation
for which even the antiquarian and genealogical significance of the find could hardly
account. Upon returning home he broke the news with an almost embarrassed air, as if
he wished to convey an idea of its supreme importance without having to exhibit the
evidence itself. He did not even shew the titles to his parents, but simply told them that
he had found some documents in Joseph Curwen's handwriting, 'mostly in cipher',
which would have to be studied very carefully before yielding up their true meaning. It
is unlikely that he would have shewn what he did to the workmen, had it not been for
their unconcealed curiousity. As it was he doubtless wished to avoid any display of
peculiar reticence which would increase their discussion of the matter.

That night Charles Ward sat up in his room reading the new-found book and papers, and
when day came he did not desist. His meals, on his urgent request when his mother
called to see what was amiss, were sent up to him; and in the afternoon he appeared
only briefly when the men came to install the Curwen picture and mantelpiece in his
study. The next night he slept in snatches in his clothes, meanwhile wrestling feverishly
with the unravelling of the cipher manuscript. In the morning his mother saw that he
was at work on the photostatic copy of the Hutchinson cipher, which he had frequently
shewn her before; but in response to her query he said that the Curwen key could not be
applied to it. That afternoon he abandoned his work and watched the men fascinatedly
as they finished their installation of the picture with its woodwork above a cleverly
realistic electric log, setting the mock-fireplace and overmantel a little out from the
north wall as if a chimney existed, and boxing in the sides with panelling to match the
room's. The front panel holding the picture was sawn and hinged to allow cupboard
space behind it. After the workmen went he moved his work into the study and sat down
before it with his eyes half on the cipher and half on the portrait which stared back at
him like a year-adding and century-recalling mirror.
His parents, subsequently recalling his conduct at this period, give interesting details
anent the policy of concealment which he practised. Before servants he seldom hid any
paper which he might by studying, since he rightly assumed that Curwen's intricate and
archaic chirography would be too much for them. With his parents, however, he was
more circumspect; and unless the manuscript in question were a cipher, or a mere mass
of cryptic symbols and unknown ideographs (as that entitled 'To Him Who Shal Come
After, etc.' seemed to be), he would cover it with some convenient paper until his caller
had departed. At night he kept the papers under lock and key in an antique cabinet of
his, where he also placed them whenever he left the room. He soon resumed fairly
regular hours and habits, except that his long walks and other outside interests seemed
to cease. The opening of school, where he now began his senior year, seemed a great
bore to him; and he frequently asserted his determination never to bother with college.
He had, he said, important special investigations to make, which would provide him
with more avenues toward knowledge and the humanities than any university which the
world could boast.

Naturally, only one who had always been more or less studious, eccentric, and solitary
could have pursued this course for many days without attracting notice. Ward, however,
was constitutionally a scholar and a hermit; hence his parents were less surprised than
regretful at the close confinement and secrecy he adopted. At the same time, both his
father and mother thought it odd that he would shew them no scrap of his treasure-trove,
nor give any connected account of such data as he had deciphered. This reticence he
explained away as due to a wish to wait until he might announce some connected
revelation, but as the weeks passed without further disclosures there began to grow up
between the youth and his family a kind of constraint; intensified in his mother's case by
her manifest disapproval of all Curwen delvings.

During October Ward began visiting the libraries again, but no longer for the
antiquarian matter of his former days. Witchcraft and magic, occultism and
daemonology, were what he sought now; and when Providence sources proved
unfruitful he would take the train for Boston and tap the wealth of the great library in
Copley Square, the Widener Library at Harvard, or the Zion Research Library in
Brookline, where certain rare works on Biblical subjects are available. He bought
extensively, and fitted up a whole additional set of shelves in his study for newly
acquired works on uncanny subjects; while during the Christmas holidays he made a
round of out-of-town trips including one to Salem to consult certain records at the Essex
Institute.

About the middle of January, 1920, there entered Ward's bearing an element of triumph
which he did not explain, and he was no more found at work upon the Hutchinson
cipher. Instead, he inaugurated a dual policy of chemical research and record-scanning;
fitting up for the one a laboratory in the unused attic of the house, and for the latter
haunting all the sources of vital statistics in Providence. Local dealers in drugs and
scientific supplies, later questioned, gave astonishingly queer and meaningless
catalogues of the substances and instruments he purchased; but clerks at the State
House, the City Hall, and the various libraries agree as to the definite object of his
second interest. He was searching intensely and feverishly for the grave of Joseph
Curwen, from whose slate slab an older generation had so wisely blotted the name.
Little by little there grew upon the Ward family the conviction that something was
wrong. Charles had had freaks and changes of minor interests before, but this growing
secrecy and absorption in strange pursuits was unlike even him. His school work was
the merest pretence; and although he failed in no test, it could be seen that the older
application had all vanished. He had other concernments now; and when not in his new
laboratory with a score of obsolete alchemical books, could be found either poring over
old burial records down town or glued to his volumes of occult lore in his study, where
the startlingly--one almost fancied increasingly--similar features of Joseph Curwen
stared blandly at him from the great overmantel on the north wall.

Late in March Ward added to his archive-searching a ghoulish series of rambles about
the various ancient cemeteries of the city. The cause appeared later, when it was learned
from City Hall clerks that he had probably found an important clue. His quest had
suddenly shifted from the grave of Joseph Curwen to that of one Naphthali Field; and
this shift was explained when, upon going over the files that he had been over, the
investigators actually found a fragmentary record of Curwen's burial which had escaped
the general obliteration, and which stated that the curious leaden coffin had been
interred '10 ft. S. and 5 ft. W. of Naphthali Field's grave in y-.' The lack of a specified
burying-ground in the surviving entry greatly complicated the search, and Naphthali
Field's grave seemed as elusive as that of Curwen; but here no systematic effacement
had existed, and one might reasonably be expected to stumble on the stone itself even if
its record had perished. Hence the rambles--from which St. John's (the former King's)
Churchyard and the ancient Congregational burying-ground in the midst of Swan Point
Cemetery were excluded, since other statistics had shewn that the only Naphthali Field
(obiit 1729) whose grave could have been meant had been a Baptist.

It was toward May when Dr. Willett, at the request of the senior Ward, and fortified
with all the Curwen data which the family had gleaned from Charles in his non-
secretive days, talked with the young man. The interview was of little value or
conclusiveness, for Willett felt at every moment that Charles was thorough master of
himself and in touch with matters of real importance; but it at least force the secretive
youth to offer some rational explanation of his recent demeanour. Of a pallid, impassive
type not easily shewing embarrassment, Ward seemed quite ready to discuss his
pursuits, though not to reveal their object. He stated that the papers of his ancestor had
contained some remarkable secrets of early scientific knowledge, for the most part in
cipher, of an apparent scope comparable only to the discoveries of Friar Bacon and
perhaps surpassing even those. They were, however, meaningless except when
correlated with a body of learning now wholly obsolete; so that their immediate
presentation to a world equipped only with modern science would rob them of all
impressiveness and dramatic significance. To take their vivid place in the history of
human thought they must first be correlated by one familiar with the background out of
which they evolved, and to this task of correlation Ward was now devoting himself. He
was seeking to acquire as fast as possible those neglected arts of old which a true
interpreter of the Curwen data must possess, and hoped in time to made a full
announcement and presentation of the utmost interest to mankind and to the world of
thought. Not even Einstein, he declared, could more profoundly revolutionise the
current conception of things.
As to his graveyard search, whose object he freely admitted, but the details of whose
progress he did not relate, he said he had reason to think that Joseph Curwen's mutilated
headstone bore certain mystic symbols--carved from directions in his will and
ignorantly spared by those who had effaced the name--which were absolutely essential
to the final solution of his cryptic system. Curwen, he believed, had wish to guard his
secret with care; and had consequently distributed the data in an exceedingly curious
fashion. When Dr. Willett asked to see the mystic documents, Ward displayed much
reluctance and tried to put him off with such things as photostatic copies of the
Hutchinson cipher and Orne formulae and diagrams; but finally shewed him the
exteriors of some of the real Curwen finds--the 'Journall and Notes', the cipher (title in
cipher also), and the formula-filled message 'To Him Who Shal Come After'--and let
him glance inside such as were in obscure characters.

He also opened the diary at a page carefully selected for its innocuousness and gave
Willett a glimpse of Curwen's connected handwriting in English. The doctor noted very
closely the crabbed and complicated letters, and the general aura of the seventeenth
century which clung round both penmanship and style despite the writer's survival into
the eighteenth century, and became quickly certain that the document was genuine. The
text itself was relatively trivial, and Willett recalled only a fragment:

'Wedn. 16 Octr. 1754. My Sloope the Wakeful this Day putt in from London with XX
newe Men pick'd up in ye Indies, Spaniards from Martineco and 2 Dutch Men from
Surinam. Ye Dutch Men are like to Desert from have'g hearde Somewhat ill of these
Ventures, but I will see to ye Inducing of them to Staye. For Mr. Knight Dexter of ye
Bay and Book 120 Pieces Camblets, 100 Pieces Assrtd. Cambleteens, 20 Pieces blue
Duffles, 100 Pieces Shalloons, 50 Pieces Calamancoes, 300 Pieces each, Shendsoy and
Humhums. For Mr. Green at ye Elephant 50 Gallon Cyttles, 20 Warm'g Pannes, 15
Bake Cyttles, 10 pr. Smoke'g Tonges. For Mr. Perrigo 1 Sett of Awles. For Mr.
Nightingale 50 Reames prime Foolscap. Say'd ye SABAOTH thrice last Nighte but
None appear'd. I must heare more from Mr. H. in Transylvania, tho' it is Harde reach'g
him and exceeding strange he can not give me the Use of What he hath so well us'd
these hundred Yeares. Simon hath not writ these V. Weekes, but I expecte soon hear'g
from Him.'

When upon reaching this point Dr. Willett turned the leaf he was quickly checked by
Ward, who almost snatched the book from his grasp. All that the doctor had a chance to
see on the newly opened page was a brief pair of sentences; but these, strangely enough,
lingered tenacious in his memory. They ran: 'Ye Verse from Liber-Damnatus be'g spoke
V Roodmasses and IV Hallows-Eves, I am Hopeful ye Thing is breed'g Outside ye
Spheres. It will drawe One who is to Come, if I can make sure he shal Bee, and he shal
think on Past Thinges and look back thro' all ye Yeares, against ye Which I must have
ready ye Saltes or That to make 'em with.'

Willett saw no more, but somehow this small glimpse gave a new and vague terror to
the painted features of Joseph Curwen which stared blandly down from the overmantel.
Even after that he entertained the odd fancy--which his medical skill of course assured
him was only a fancy--that the eyes of the portrait had a sort of wish, if not an actual
tendency, to follow young Charles Ward as he move about the room. He stopped before
leaving to study the picture closely, marvelling at its resemblance to Charles and
memorising every minute detail of the cryptical, colourless face, even down to a slight
scar or pit in the smooth brow above the right eye. Cosmo Alexander, he decided, was a
painter worthy of the Scotland that produced Raeburn, and a teacher worthy of his
illustrious pupil Gilbert Stuart.

Assured by the doctor that Charles's mental health was in no danger, but that on the
other hand he was engaged in researches which might prove of real importance, the
Wards were more lenient than they might otherwise have been when during the
following June the youth made positive his refusal to attend college. He had, he
declared, studies of much more vital importance to pursue; and intimated a wish to go
abroad the following year in order to avail himself of certain sources of data not existing
in America. The senior Ward, while denying this latter wish as absurd for a boy of only
eighteen, acquiesced regarding the university; so that after a none too brilliant
graduation from the Moses Brown School there ensued for Charles a three-year period
of intensive occult study and graveyard searching. He became recognised as an
eccentric, and dropped even more completely from the sight of his family's friends than
he had been before; keeping close to his work and only occasionally making trips to
other cities to consult obscure records. Once he went south to talk to a strange mulatto
who dwelt in a swamp and about whom a newspaper hand printed a curious article.
Again he sought a small village in the Adirondacks whence reports of certain odd
ceremonial practices had come. But still his parents forbade him the trip to the Old
World which he desired.

Coming of age in April, 1923, and having previously inherited a small competence from
his maternal grandfather, Ward determined at last to take the European trip hitherto
denied him. Of his proposed itinerary he would say nothing save that the needs of his
studies would carry him to many places, but he promised to write his parents fully and
faithfully. When they saw he could not be dissuaded, they ceased all opposition and
helped as best they could; so that in June the young man sailed for Liverpool with the
farewell blessings of his father and mother, who accompanied him to Boston and waved
him out of sight from the White Star pier in Charlestown. Letters soon told of his safe
arrival, and of his securing good quarters in Great Russell Street, London; where he
proposed to stay, shunning all family friends, till he had exhausted the resources of the
British Museum in a certain direction. Of his daily life he wrote by little, for there was
little to write. Study and experiment consumed all his time, and he mentioned a
laboratory which he had established in one of his rooms. That he said nothing of
antiquarian rambles in the glamorous old city with its luring skyline of ancient domes
and steeples and its tangles of roads and alleys whose mystic convolutions and sudden
vistas alternately beckon and surprise, was taken by his parents as a good index of the
degree to which his new interests had engrossed his mind.

In June, 1924, a brief note told of his departure for Paris, to which he had before made
one or two flying trips for material in the Bibliothèque Nationale. For three months
thereafter he sent only postal cards, giving an address in the Rue St. Jacques and
referring to a special search among rare manuscripts in the library of an unnamed
private collector. He avoided acquaintances, and no tourists brought back reports of
having seen him. Then came a silence, and in October the Wards received a picture card
from Prague, Czecho-Slovakia, stating that Charles was in that ancient town for the
purpose of conferring with a certain very aged man supposed to be the last living
possessor of some very curious mediaeval information. He gave an address in the
Neustadt, and announced no move till the following January; when he dropped several
cards from Vienna telling of his passage through that city on the way toward a more
easterly region whither one of his correspondents and fellow-delvers into the occult had
invited him.

The next card was from Klausenburg in Transylvania, and told of Ward's progress
toward his destination. He was going to visit a Baron Ferenczy, whose estate lay in the
mountains east of Rakus; and was to be addressed at Rakus in the care of that nobleman.
Another card from Rakus a week later, saying that his host's carriage had met him and
that he was leaving the village for the mountains, was his last message for a
considerable time; indeed, he did reply to his parents' frequent letters until May, when
he wrote to discourage the plan of his mother for a meeting in London, Paris, or Rome
during the summer, when the elder Wards were planning to travel to Europe. His
researches, he said, were such that he could not leave his present quarters; while the
situation of Baron Ferenczy's castle did not favour visits. It was on a crag in the dark
wooded mountains, and the region was so shunned by the country folk that normal
people could not help feeling ill at ease. Moreover, the Baron was not a person likely to
appeal to correct and conservative New England gentlefolk. His aspect and manners had
idiosyncrasies, and his age was so great as to be disquieting. It would be better, Charles
said, if his parents would wait for his return to Providence; which could scarcely be far
distant.

That return did not, however, take place until May 1926, when after a few heralding
cards the young wanderer quietly slipped into New York on the Homeric and traversed
the long miles to Providence by motor-coach, eagerly drinking in the green rolling hills,
and fragrant, blossoming orchards, and the white steepled towns of vernal Connecticut;
his first taste of ancient New England in nearly four years. When the coach crossed the
Pawcatuck and entered Rhode Island amidst the faery goldenness of a late spring
afternoon his heart beat with quickened force, and the entry to Providence along
Reservoir and Elmwood Avenues was a breathless and wonderful thing despite the
depths of forbidden lore to which he had delved. At the high square where Broad,
Weybosset, and Empire Streets join, he saw before and below him in the fire of sunset
the pleasant, remembered houses and domes and steeples of the old town; and his head
swam curiously as the vehicle rolled down to the terminal behind the Biltmore, bringing
into view the great dome and soft, roof-pierced greenery of the ancient hill across the
river, and the tall colonial spire of the First Baptist Church limned pink in the magic
evening against the fresh springtime verdure of its precipitous background.

Old Providence! It was this place and the mysterious forces of its long, continuous
history which had brought him into being, and which had drawn him back toward
marvels and secrets whose boundaries no prophet might fix. Here lay the arcana,
wondrous or dreadful as the case may be, for which all his years of travel and
application had been preparing him. A taxicab whirled him through Post Office Square
with its glimpse of the river, the old Market House, and the head of the bay, and up the
steep curved slope of Waterman Street to Prospect, where the vast gleaming dome and
sunset-flushed Ionic columns of the Christian Science Church beckoned northward.
Then eight squares past the fine old estates his childish eyes had known, and the quaint
brick sidewalks so often trodden by his youthful feet. And at last the little white
overtaken farmhouse on the right, on the left the classic Adam porch and stately facade
of the great brick house where he was born. It was twilight, and Charles Dexter Ward
had come home.
5

A school of alienists slightly less academic than Dr. Lyman's assign to Ward's European
trip the beginning of his true madness. Admitting that he was sane when he started, they
believe that his conduct upon returning implies a disastrous change. But even to this
claim Dr. Willett refuses to concede. There was, he insists, something later; and the
queerness of the youth at this stage he attributes to the practice of rituals learned abroad-
-odd enough things, to be sure, but by no means implying mental aberration on the part
of their celebrant. Ward himself, though visibly aged and hardened, was still normal in
his general reactions; and in several talks with Dr. Willett displayed a balance which no
madman--even an incipient one--could feign continuously for long. What elicited the
notion of insanity at this period were the sounds heard at all hours from Ward's attic
laboratory, in which he kept himself most of the time. There were chantings and
repetitions, and thunderous declamations in uncanny rhythms; and although these
sounds were always in Ward's own voice, there was something in the quality of that
voice, and in the accents of the formulae it pronounced, which could not by chill the
blood of every hearer. It was noticed that Nig, the venerable and beloved black cat of
the household, bristled and arched his back perceptibly when certain of the tones were
heard.

The odours occasionally wafted from the laboratory were likewise exceedingly strange.
Sometimes they were very noxious, but more often they were aromatic, with a haunting,
elusive quality which seemed to have the power of inducing fantastic images. People
who smelled them had a tendency to glimpse momentary mirages of enormous vistas,
with strange hills or endless avenues of sphinxes and hippogriffs stretching off into
infinite distance. Ward did not resume his old-time rambles, but applied himself
diligently to the strange books he had brought home, and to equally strange delvings
within his quarters; explaining that European sources had greatly enlarged the
possibilities of his work, and promising great revelations in the years to come. His older
aspect increased to a startling degree his resemblance to the Curwen portrait in his
library; and Dr. Willett would often pause by the latter after a call, marvelling at the
virtual identity, and reflecting that only the small pit above the picture's right eye now
remained to differentiate the long-dead wizard from the living youth. These calls of
Willett's, undertaken at the request of the senior Wards, were curious affairs. Ward at no
time repulsed the doctor, but the latter saw that he could never reach the young man's
inner psychology. Frequently he noted peculiar things about; little wax images of
grotesque design on the shelves or tables, and the half-erased remnants of circles,
triangles, and pentagrams in chalk or charcoal on the cleared central space of the large
room. And always in the night those rhythms and incantations thundered, till it became
very difficult to keep servants or suppress furtive talk of Charles's madness.

In January, 1927, a peculiar incident occurred. One night about midnight, as Charles
was chanting a ritual whose weird cadence echoed unpleasantly through the house
below, there came a sudden gust of chill wind from the bay, and a faint, obscure
trembling of the earth which everyone in the neighbourhood noted. At the same time the
cat exhibited phenomenal traces of fright, while dogs bayed for as much as a mile
around. This was the prelude to a sharp thunderstorm, anomalous for the season, which
brought with it such a crash that Mr. and Mrs. Ward believed the house had been struck.
They rushed upstairs to see what damage had been done, but Charles met them at the
door to the attic; pale, resolute, and portentous, with an almost fearsome combination of
triumph and seriousness on his face. He assured them that the house had not really been
struck, and that the storm would soon be over. They paused, and looking through a
window saw that he was indeed right; for the lightning flashed farther and farther off,
whilst the trees ceased to bend in the strange frigid gust from the water. The thunder
sank to a sort of dull mumbling chuckle and finally died away. Stars came out, and the
stamp of triumph on Charles Ward's face crystallised into a very singular expression.

For two months or more after this incident Ward was less confined than usual to his
laboratory. He exhibited a curious interest in the weather, and made odd inquires about
the date of the spring thawing of the ground. One night late in March he left the house
after midnight, and did not return till almost morning; when his mother, being wakeful,
heard a rumbling motor draw up to the carriage entrance. Muffled oaths could be
distinguished, and Mrs. Ward, rising and going to the window, saw four dark figures
removing a long, heavy box from a truck at Charles's direction and carrying it within by
the side door. She heard laboured breathing and ponderous footfalls on the stairs, and
finally a dull thumping in the attic; after which the footfalls descended again, and the
four reappeared outside and drove off in their truck.

The next day Charles resumed his strict attic seclusion, drawing down the dark shades
of his laboratory windows and appearing to be working on some metal substance. He
would open the door to no one, and steadfastly refused all proffered food. About noon a
wrenching sound followed by a terrible cry and a fall were heard, but when Mrs. Ward
rapped at the door her son at length answered faintly, and told her that nothing had gone
amiss. The hideous and indescribable stench now welling out was absolutely harmless
and unfortunately necessary. Solitude was the one prime essential, and he would appear
later for dinner. That afternoon, after the conclusion of some odd hissing sounds which
came from behind the locked portal, he did finally appear; wearing an extremely
haggard aspect and forbidding anyone to enter the laboratory upon any pretext. This,
indeed, proved the beginning of a new policy of secrecy; for never afterward was any
other person permitted to visit either the mysterious garret workroom or the adjacent
storeroom which he cleaned out, furnished roughly, and added to his inviolable private
domain as a sleeping apartment. Here he lived, with books brought up from his library
beneath, till the time he purchased the Pawtuxet bungalow and moved to it all his
scientific effects.

In the evening Charles secured the paper before the rest of the family and damaged part
of it through an apparent accident. Later on Dr. Willett, having fixed the date from
statements by various members of the household, looked up an intact copy at the
Journal office and found that in the destroyed section the following small item had
occurred:

Nocturnal Diggers Surprised in North Burial Ground

Robert Hart, night watchman at the North Burial Ground, this morning discovered a
party of several men with a motor truck in the oldest part of the cemetery, but
apparently frightened them off before they had accomplished whatever their object may
have been.

The discovery took place at about four o'clock, when Hart's attention was attracted by
the sound of a motor outside his shelter. Investigating, he saw a large truck on the main
drive several rods away; but could not reach it before the noise of his feet on the gravel
had revealed his approach. The men hastily placed a large box in the truck and drove
away toward the street before they could be overtaken; and since no known grave was
disturbed, Hart believes that this box was an object which they wished to bury.

The diggers must have been at work for a long while before detection, for Hart found an
enormous hold dug at a considerable distance back from the roadway in the lot of
Amasa Field, where most of the old stones have long ago disappeared. The hole, a place
as large and deep as a grave, was empty; and did not coincide with any interment
mentioned in the cemetery records.

Sergt. Riley of the Second Station viewed the spot and gave the opinion that the hole
was dug by bootleggers rather gruesomely and ingeniously seeking a safe cache for
liquor in a place not likely to be disturbed. In reply to questions Hart said he though the
escaping truck had headed up Rochambeau Avenue, though he could not be sure.

During the next few days Charles Ward was seldom seen by his family. Having added
sleeping quarters to his attic realm, he kept closely to himself there, ordering food
brought to the door and not taking it in until after the servant had gone away. The
droning of monotonous formulae and the chanting of bizarre rhythms recurred at
intervals, while at other times occasional listeners could detect the sound of tinkling
glass, hissing chemicals, running water, or roaring gas flames. Odours of the most
unplaceable quality, wholly unlike any before noted, hung at times around the door; and
the air of tension observable in the young recluse whenever he did venture briefly forth
was such as to excite the keenest speculation. Once he made a hasty trip to the
Athenaeum for a book he required, and again he hired a messenger to fetch him a highly
obscure volume from Boston. Suspense was written portentously over the whole
situation, and both the family and Dr. Willett confessed themselves wholly at a loss
what to do or think about it.

Then on the fifteenth of April a strange development occurred. While nothing appeared
to grow different in kind, there was certainly a very terrible difference in degree; and
Dr. Willett somehow attaches great significance to the change. The day was Good
Friday, a circumstance of which the servants made much, but which others quite
naturally dismiss as an irrelevant coincidence. Late in the afternoon young Ward began
repeating a certain formula in a singularly loud voice, at the same time burning some
substance so pungent that its fumes escaped over the entire house. The formula was so
plainly audible in the hall outside the locked door that Mrs. Ward could not help
memorising it as she waited and listened anxiously, and later on she was able to write it
down at Dr. Willett's request. It ran as follows, and experts have told Dr. Willett that its
very close analogue can be found in the mystic writings of "Eliphas Levi", that cryptic
soul who crept through a crack in the forbidden door and glimpsed the frightful vistas of
the void beyond:

'Per Adonai Eloim, Adonai Jehova, Adonai Sabaoth, Metraton On Agla Mathon,
verbum pythonicum, mysterium salamandrae, conventus sylvorum, antra gnomorum,
daemonia Coeli Gad, Almonsin, Gibor, Jehosua, Evam, Zariatnatmik, veni, veni, veni.'
This had been going on for two hours without change or intermission when over all the
neighbourhood a pandaemoniac howling of dogs set in. The extent of this howling can
be judged from the space it received in the papers the next day, but to those in the Ward
household it was overshadowed by the odour which instantly followed it; a hideous, all-
pervasive odour which none of them had ever smelt before or have ever smelt since. In
the midst of this mephitic flood there came a very perceptible flash like that of
lightning, which would have been blinding and impressive but for the daylight around;
and then was heard the voice that no listener can ever forget because of its thunderous
remoteness, its incredible depth, and its eldritch dissimilarity to Charles Ward's voice. It
shook the house, and was clearly heard by at least two neighbours above the howling of
the dogs. Mrs. Ward, who had been listening in despair outside her son's locked
laboratory, shivered as she recognised its hellish imports; for Charles had told of its evil
fame in dark books, and of the manner in which it had thundered, according to the
Fenner letter, above the doomed Pawtuxet farmhouse on the night of Joseph Curwen's
annihilation. There was no mistaking that nightmare phrase, for Charles had described it
too vividly in the old days when he had talked frankly of his Curwen investigations.
And yet it was only this fragment of an archaic and forgotten language: 'DIES MIES
JESCHET BOENE DOESEF DOUVEMA ENITEMAUS.'

Close upon this thundering there came a momentary darkening of the daylight, though
sunset was still an hour distant, and then a puff of added odour different from the first
but equally unknown and intolerable. Charles was chanting again now and his mother
could hear syllables that sounded like 'Yi nash Yog Sothoth he lgeb throdog'--ending in
a 'Yah!' whose maniacal force mounted in an ear-splitting crescendo. A second later all
previous memories were effaced by the wailing scream which burst out with frantic
explosiveness and gradually changed form to a paroxysm of diabolic and hysterical
laughter. Mrs. Ward, with the mingled fear and blind courage of maternity, advanced
and knocked affrightedly at the concealing panels, but obtained no sign of recognition.
She knocked again, but paused nervelessly as a second shriek arose, this one
unmistakably in the familiar voice of her son, and sounding concurrently with the still
bursting cachinnations of that other voice. Presently she fainted, although she is still
unable to recall the precise and immediate cause. Memory sometimes makes merciful
deletions.

Mr. Ward returned from the business section at about quarter past six; and not finding
his wife downstairs, was told by the frightened servants that she was probably watching
at Charles's door, from which the sounds had been far stranger than ever before.
Mounting the stairs at once, he saw Mrs. Ward stretched out at full length on the floor
of the corridor outside the laboratory; and realising that she had fainted, hastened to
fetch a glass of water from a set bowl in a neighbouring alcove. Dashing the cold fluid
in her face, he was heartened to observe an immediate response on her part, and was
watching the bewildered opening of her eyes when a chill shot through him and
threatened to reduce him to the very state from which she was emerging. For the
seemingly silent laboratory was not as silent as it had appeared to be, but held the
murmurs of a tense, muffled conversation in tones too low for comprehension, yet of a
quality profoundly disturbing to the soul.

It was not, of course, new for Charles to mutter formulae; but this muttering was
definitely different. It was so palpably a dialogue, or imitation of a dialogue, with the
regular alteration of inflections suggesting question and answer, statement and response.
One voice was undisguisedly that of Charles, but the other had a depth and hollowness
which the youth's best powers of ceremonial mimicry had scarcely approached before.
There was something hideous, blasphemous, and abnormal about it, and but for a cry
from his recovering wife which cleared his mind by arousing his protective instincts it is
not likely that Theodore Howland Ward could have maintained for nearly a year more
his old boast that he had never fainted. As it was, he seized his wife in his arms and bore
her quickly downstairs before she could notice the voices which had so horribly
disturbed him. Even so, however, he was not quick enough to escape catching
something himself which caused him to stagger dangerously with his burden. For Mrs.
Ward's cry had evidently been heard by others than he, and there had come in response
to it from behind the locked door the first distinguishable words which that masked and
terrible colloquy had yielded. They were merely an excited caution in Charles's own
voice, but somehow their implications held a nameless fright for the father who
overheard them. The phrase was just this: 'Sshh!--write!'

Mr. and Mrs. Ward conferred at some length after dinner, and the former resolved to
have a firm and serious talk with Charles that very night. No matter how important the
object, such conduct could no longer be permitted; for these latest developments
transcended every limit of sanity and formed a menace to the order and nervous well-
being of the entire household. The youth must indeed have taken complete leave of his
senses, since only downright madness could have prompted the wild screams and
imaginary conversations in assumed voices which the present day had brought forth. All
this must be stopped, or Mrs. Ward would be made ill and the keeping of servants
become an impossibility.

Mr. Ward rose at the close of the meal and started upstairs for Charles's laboratory. On
the third floor, however, he paused at the sounds which he heard proceeding from the
now disused library of his son. Books were apparently being flung about and papers
wildly rustled, and upon stepping to the door Mr. Ward beheld the youth within,
excitedly assembling a vast armful of literary matter of every size and shape. Charles's
aspect was very drawn and haggard, and he dropped his entire load with a start at the
sound of his father's voice. At the elder man's command he sat down, and for some time
listened to the admonitions he had so long deserved. There was no scene. At the end of
the lecture he agreed that his father was right, and that his noises, mutterings,
incantations, and chemical odours were indeed inexcusable nuisances. He agreed to a
policy of great quiet, though insisting on a prolongation of his extreme privacy. Much
of his future work, he said, was in any case purely book research; and he could obtain
quarters elsewhere for any such vocal rituals as might be necessary at a later stage. For
the fright and fainting of his mother he expressed the keenest contrition, and explained
that the conversation later heard was part of an elaborate symbolism designed to create a
certain mental atmosphere. His use of abstruse technical terms somewhat bewildered
Mr. Ward, but the parting impression was one of undeniable sanity and poise despite a
mysterious tension of the utmost gravity. The interview was really quite inconclusive,
and as Charles picked up his armful and left the room Mr. Ward hardly knew what to
make of the entire business. It was as mysterious as the death of poor old Nig, whose
stiffening form had been found an hour before in the basement, with staring eyes and
fear-distorted mouth.

Driven by some vague detective instinct, the bewildered parent now glanced curiously
at the vacant shelves to see what his son had taken up to the attic. The youth's library
was plainly and rigidly classified, so that one might tell at a glance the books or at least
the kind of books which had been withdrawn. On this occasion Mr. Ward was
astonished to find that nothing of the occult or the antiquarian, beyond what had been
previously removed, was missing. These new withdrawals were all modern items;
histories, scientific treatises, geographies, manuals of literature, philosophic works, and
certain contemporary newspapers and magazines. It was a very curious shift from
Charles Ward's recent run of reading, and the father paused in a growing vortex of
perplexity and an engulfing sense of strangeness. The strangeness was a very poignant
sensation, and almost clawed at his chest as he strove to see just what was wrong around
him. Something was indeed wrong, and tangibly as well as spiritually so. Ever since he
had been in this room he had known that something was amiss, and at last it dawned
upon him what it was.

On the north wall rose still the ancient carved overmantel from the house in Olney
Court, but to the cracked and precariously restored oils of the large Curwen portrait
disaster had come. Time and unequal heating had done their work at last, and at some
time since the room's last cleaning the worst had happened. Peeling clear of the wood,
curling tighter and tighter, and finally crumbling into small bits with what must have
been malignly silent suddenness, the portrait of Joseph Curwen had resigned forever its
staring surveillance of the youth it so strangely resembled, and now lay scattered on the
floor as a thin coating of fine blue-grey dust.

IV. A Mutation and a Madness

In the week following that memorable Good Friday Charles Ward was seen more often
than usual, and was continually carrying books between his library and the attic
laboratory. His actions were quiet and rational, but he had a furtive, hunted look which
his mother did not like, and developed an incredibly ravenous appetite as gauged by his
demands upon the cook. Dr. Willett had been told of those Friday noises and
happenings, and on the following Tuesday had a long conversation with the youth in the
library where the picture stared no more. The interview was, as always, inconclusive;
but Willett is still ready to swear that the youth was sane and himself at the time. He
held out promises of an early revelation, and spoke of the need of securing a laboratory
elsewhere. At the loss of the portrait he grieved singularly little considering his first
enthusiasm over it, but seemed to find something of positive humour in its sudden
crumbling.

About the second week Charles began to be absent from the house for long periods, and
one day when good old black Hannah came to help with the spring cleaning she
mentioned his frequent visits to the old house in Olney Court, where he would come
with a large valise and perform curious delvings in the cellar. He was always very
liberal to her and to old Asa, but seemed more worried than he used to be; which
grieved her very much, since she had watched him grow up from birth. Another report
of his doings came from Pawtuxet, where some friends of the family saw him at a
distance a surprising number of times. He seemed to haunt the resort and canoe-house
of Rhodes-on-the-Pawtuxet, and subsequent inquiries by Dr. Willett at that place
brought out the fact that his purpose was always to secure access to the rather hedged-in
river-bank, along which he would walk toward the north, usually not reappearing for a
very long while.

Late in May came a momentary revival of ritualistic sounds in the attic laboratory which
brought a stern reproof from Mr. Ward and a somewhat distracted promise of
amendment from Charles. It occurred one morning, and seemed to form a resumption of
the imaginary conversation noted on that turbulent Good Friday. The youth was arguing
or remonstrating hotly with himself, for there suddenly burst forth a perfectly
distinguishable series of clashing shouts in differentiated tones like alternate demands
and denials which caused Mrs. Ward to run upstairs and listen at the door. She could
hear no more than a fragment whose only plain words were 'must have it red for three
months', and upon her knocking all sounds ceased at once. When Charles was later
questioned by his father he said that there were certain conflicts of spheres of
consciousness which only great skill could avoid, but which he would try to transfer to
other realms.

About the middle of June a queer nocturnal incident occurred. In the early evening there
had been some noise and thumping in the laboratory upstairs, and Mr. Ward was on the
point of investigating when it suddenly quieted down. That midnight, after the family
had retired, the butler was nightlocking the front door when according to his statement
Charles appeared somewhat blunderingly and uncertainly at the foot of the stairs with a
large suitcase and made signs that he wished egress. The youth spoke no word, but the
worthy Yorkshireman caught one sight of his fevered eyes and trembled causelessly. He
opened the door and young Ward went out, but in the morning he presented his
resignation to Mrs. Ward. There was, he said, something unholy in the glance Charles
had fixed on him. It was no way for a young gentleman to look at an honest person, and
he could not possibly stay another night. Mrs. Ward allowed the man to depart, but she
did not value his statement highly. To fancy Charles in a savage state that night was
quite ridiculous, for as long as she had remained awake she had heard faint sounds from
the laboratory above; sounds as if of sobbing and pacing, and of a sighing which told
only of despair's profoundest depths. Mrs. Ward had grown used to listening for sounds
in the night, for the mystery of her son was fast driving all else from her mind.

The next evening, much as on another evening nearly three months before, Charles
Ward seized the newspaper very early and accidentally lost the main section. This
matter was not recalled till later, when Dr. Willett began checking up loose ends and
searching out missing links here and there. In the Journal office he found the section
which Charles had lost, and marked two items as of possible significance. They were as
follows:

More Cemetery Delving

It was this morning discovered by Robert Hart, night watchman at the North Burial
Ground, that ghouls were again at work in the ancient portion of the cemetery. The
grave of Ezra Weeden, who was born in 1740 and died in 1824 according to his
uprooted and savagely splintered slate headstone, was found excavated and rifled, the
work being evidently done with a spade stolen from an adjacent tool-shed.

Whatever the contents may have been after more than a century of burial, all was gone
except a few slivers of decayed wood. There were no wheel tracks, but the police have
measured a single set of footprints which they found in the vicinity, and which indicate
the boots of a man of refinement.

Hart is inclined to link this incident with the digging discovered last March, when a
party in a motor truck were frightened away after making a deep excavation; but Sergt.
Riley of the Second Station discounts this theory and points to vital differences in the
two cases. In March the digging had been in a spot where no grave was known; but this
time a well-marked and cared-for grave had been rifled with every evidence of
deliberate purpose, and with a conscious malignity expressed in the splintering of the
slab which had been intact up to the day before.

Members of the Weeden family, notified of the happening, expressed their astonishment
and regret; and were wholly unable to think of any enemy who would care to violate the
grave of their ancestor. Hazard Weeden of 598 Angell Street recalls a family legend
according to which Ezra Weeden was involved in some very peculiar circumstances, not
dishonourable to himself, shortly before the Revolution; but of any modern feud or
mystery he is frankly ignorant. Inspector Cunningham has been assigned to the case,
and hopes to uncover some valuable clues in the near future.

Dogs Noisy in Pawtuxet

Residents of Pawtuxet were aroused about 3 a.m. today by a phenomenal baying of

dogs which seemed to centre near the river just north of Rhodes-on-the-Pawtuxet. The
volume and quality of the howling were unusually odd, according to most who heard it;
and Fred Lemdin, night watchman at Rhodes, declares it was mixed with something
very like the shrieks of a man in mortal terror and agony. A sharp and very brief
thunderstorm, which seemed to strike somewhere near the bank of the river, put an end
to the disturbance. Strange and unpleasant odours, probably from the oil tanks along the
bay, are popularly linked with this incident; and may have had their share in exciting the
dogs.

The aspect of Charles now became very haggard and hunted, and all agreed in
retrospect that he may have wished at this period to make some statement or confession
from which sheer terror withheld him. The morbid listening of his mother in the night
brought out the fact that he made frequent sallies abroad under cover of darkness, and
most of the more academic alienists unite at present in charging him with the revolting
cases of vampirism which the press so sensationally reported about this time, but which
have not yet been definitely traced to any known perpetrator. These cases, too recent
and celebrated to need detailed mention, involved victims of every age and type and
seemed to cluster around two distinct localities; the residential hill and the North End,
near the Ward home, and the suburban districts across the Cranston line near Pawtuxet.
Both late wayfarers and sleepers with open windows were attacked, and those who lived
to tell the tale spoke unanimously of a lean, lithe, leaping monster with burning eyes
which fastened its teeth in the throat or upper arm and feasted ravenously.

Dr. Willett, who refuses to date the madness of Charles Ward as far back as even this, is
cautious in attempting to explain these horrors. He has, he declares, certain theories of
his own; and limits his positive statements to a peculiar kind of negation: 'I will not,' he
says, 'state who or what I believe perpetrated these attacks and murders, but I will
declare that Charles Ward was innocent of them. I have reason to be sure he was
ignorant of the taste of blood, as indeed his continued anaemic decline and increasing
pallor prove better than any verbal argument. Ward meddled with terrible things, but he
has paid for it, and he was never a monster or a villain. As for now--I don't like to think.
A change came, and I'm content to believe that the old Charles Ward died with it. His
soul did, anyhow, for that mad flesh that vanished from Waite's hospital had another.'

Willett speaks with authority, for he was often at the Ward home attending Mrs. Ward,
whose nerves had begun to snap under the strain. Her nocturnal listening had bred some
morbid hallucinations which she confided to the doctor with hesitancy, and which he
ridiculed in talking to her, although they made him ponder deeply when alone. These
delusions always concerned the faint sounds which she fancied she heard in the attic
laboratory and bedroom, and emphasised the occurrence of muffled sighs and sobbings
at the most impossible times. Early in July Willett ordered Mrs. Ward to Atlantic City
for an indefinite recuperative sojourn, and cautioned both Mr. Ward and the haggard
and elusive Charles to write her only cheering letters. It is probably to this enforced and
reluctant escape that she owes her life and continued sanity.

Not long after his mother's departure, Charles Ward began negotiating for the Pawtuxet
bungalow. It was a squalid little wooden edifice with a concrete garage, perched high on
the sparsely settled bank of the river slightly above Rhodes, but for some odd reason the
youth would have nothing else. He gave the real-estate agencies no peace till one of
them secured it for him at an exorbitant price from a somewhat reluctant owner, and as
soon as it was vacant he took possession under cover of darkness,, transporting in a
great closed van the entire contents of his attic laboratory, including the books both
weird and modern which he had borrowed from his study. He had this van loaded in the
black small hours, and his father recalls only a drowsy realisation of stifled oaths and
stamping feet on the night the goods were taken away. After that Charles moved back to
his own old quarters on the third floor, and never haunted the attic again.

To the Pawtuxet bungalow Charles transferred all the secrecy with which he had
surrounded his attic realm, save that he now appeared to have two sharers of his
mysteries; a villainous-looking Portuguese half-caste from the South Main St.
waterfront who acted as a servant, and a thin, scholarly stranger with dark glasses and a
stubbly full beard of dyed aspect whose status was evidently that of a colleague.
Neighbours vainly tried to engage these odd persons in conversation. The mulatto
Gomes spoke very little English, and the bearded man, who gave his name as Dr. Allen,
voluntarily followed his example. Ward himself tried to be more affable, but succeeded
only in provoking curiousity with his rambling accounts of chemical research. Before
long queer tales began to circulate regarding the all-night burning of lights; and
somewhat later, after this burning had suddenly ceased, there rose still queerer tales of
disproportionate orders of meat from the butcher's and of the muffled shouting,
declamation, rhythmic chanting, and screaming supposed to come from some very deep
cellar below the place. Most distinctly the new and strange household was bitterly
disliked by the honest bourgeoisie of the vicinity, and it is not remarkable that dark
hints were advanced connecting the hated establishment with the current epidemic of
vampiristic attacks and murders; especially since the radius of that plague seemed now
confined wholly to Pawtuxet and the adjacent streets of Edgewood.
Ward spent most of his time at the bungalow, but slept occasionally at home and was
still reckoned a dweller beneath his father's roof. Twice he was absent from the city on
week-long trips, whose destinations have not yet been discovered. He grew steadily
paler and more emaciated even than before, and lacked some of his former assurance
when repeating to Dr. Willett his old, old story of vital research and future revelations.
Willett often waylaid him at his father's house, for the elder Ward was deeply worried
and perplexed, and wished his son to get as much sound oversight as could be managed
in the case of so secretive and independent an adult. The doctor still insists that the
youth was sane even as late as this, and adduces many a conversation to prove his point.

About September the vampirism declined, but in the following January almost became
involved in serious trouble. For some time the nocturnal arrival and departure of motor
trucks at the Pawtuxet bungalow had been commented upon, and at this juncture an
unforeseen hitch exposed the nature of at least one item of their contents. In a lonely
spot near Hope Valley had occurred one of the frequent sordid waylaying of trucks by
"hi-jackers" in quest of liquor shipments, but this time the robbers had been destined to
receive the greater shock. For the long cases they seized proved upon opening to contain
some exceedingly gruesome things; so gruesome, in fact, that the matter could not be
kept quiet amongst the denizens of the underworld. The thieves had hastily buried what
they discovered, but when the State Police got wind of the matter a careful search was
made. A recently arrived vagrant, under promise of immunity from prosecution on any
additional charge, at last consented to guide a party of troopers to the spot; and there
was found in that hasty cache a very hideous and shameful thing. It would not be well
for the national--or even the international--sense of decorum if the public were ever to
know what was uncovered by that awestruck party. There was no mistaking it, even by
those far from studious officers; and telegrams to Washington ensued with feverish
rapidity.

The cases were addressed to Charles Ward at his Pawtuxet bungalow, and State and
Federal officials at once paid him a very forceful and serious call. They found him
pallid and worried with his two odd companions, and received from him what seemed to
be a valid explanation and evidence of innocence. He had needed certain anatomical
specimens as part of a programme of research whose depth and genuineness anyone
who had known him in the last decade could prove, and had ordered the required kind
and number from agencies which he had thought as reasonably legitimate as such things
can be. Of the identity of the specimens he had known absolutely nothing, and was
properly shocked when the inspectors hinted at the monstrous effect on public sentiment
and national dignity which a knowledge of the matter would produce. In this statement
he was firmly sustained by his bearded colleague Dr. Allen, whose oddly hollow voice
carried even more conviction than his own nervous tones; so that in the end the officials
took no action, but carefully set down the New York name and address which Ward
gave them a basis for a search which came to nothing. It is only fair to add that the
specimens were quickly and quietly restored to their proper places, and that the general
public will never know of their blasphemous disturbance.

On February 9, 1928, Dr. Willett received a letter from Charles Ward which he
considers of extraordinary importance, and about which he has frequently quarrelled
with Dr. Lyman. Lyman believes that this note contains positive proof of a well-
developed case of dementia praecox, but Willett on the other hand regards it as the last
perfectly sane utterance of the hapless youth. He calls especial attention to the normal
character of the penmanship; which though shewing traces of shattered nerves, is
nevertheless distinctly Ward's own. The text in full is as follows:

100 Prospect St. Providence, R.I., February 8, 1928.

Dear Dr. Willett:-

I feel that at last the time has come for me to make the disclosures which I have so long
promised you, and for which you have pressed me so often. The patience you have
shewn in waiting, and the confidence you have shewn in my mind and integrity, are
things I shall never cease to appreciate.

And now that I am ready to speak, I must own with humiliation that no triumph such as
I dreamed of can ever be mine. Instead of triumph I have found terror, and my talk with
you will not be a boast of victory but a plea for help and advice in saving both myself
and the world from a horror beyond all human conception or calculation. You recall
what those Fenner letters said of the old raiding party at Pawtuxet. That must all be
done again, and quickly. Upon us depends more than can be put into words--all
civilisation, all natural law, perhaps even the fate of the solar system and the universe. I
have brought to light a monstrous abnormality, but I did it for the sake of knowledge.
Now for the sake of all life and Nature you must help me thrust it back into the dark
again.

I have left that Pawtuxet place forever, and we must extirpate everything existing there,
alive or dead. I shall not go there again, and you must not believe it if you ever hear that
I am there. I will tell you why I say this when I see you. I have come home for good,
and wish you would call on me at the very first moment that you can spare five or six
hours continuously to hear what I have to say. It will take that long--and believe me
when I tell you that you never had a more genuine professional duty than this. My life
and reason are the very least things which hang in the balance.

I dare not tell my father, for he could not grasp the whole thing. But I have told him of
my danger, and he has four men from a detective agency watching the house. I don't
know how much good they can do, for they have against them forces which even you
could scarcely envisage or acknowledge. So come quickly if you wish to see me alive
and hear how you may help to save the cosmos from stark hell.

Any time will do--I shall not be out of the house. Don't telephone ahead, for there is no
telling who or what may try to intercept you. And let us pray to whatever gods there be
that nothing may prevent this meeting.

In utmost gravity and desperation,

Charles Dexter Ward.

P.S. Shoot Dr. Allen on sight and dissolve his body in acid. Don't burn it.

Dr. Willett received this note about 10:30 a.m., and immediately arranged to spare the
whole late afternoon and evening for the momentous talk, letting it extend on into the
night as long as might be necessary. He planned to arrive about four o'clock, and
through all the intervening hours was so engulfed in every sort of wild speculation that
most of his tasks were very mechanically performed. Maniacal as the letter would have
sounded to a stranger, Willett had seen too much of Charles Ward's oddities to dismiss
it as sheer raving. That something very subtle, ancient, and horrible was hovering about
he felt quite sure, and the reference to Dr. Allen could almost be comprehended in view
of what Pawtuxet gossip said of Ward's enigmatical colleague. Willett had never seen
the man, but had heard much of his aspect and bearing, and could not but wonder what
sort of eyes those much-discussed dark glasses might conceal.

Promptly at four Dr. Willett presented himself at the Ward residence, but found to his
annoyance that Charles had not adhered to his determination to remain indoors. The
guards were there, but said that the young man seemed to have lost part of his timidity.
He had that morning done much apparently frightened arguing and protesting over the
telephone, one of the detectives said, replying to some unknown voice with phrases
such as 'I am very tired and must rest a while', 'I can't receive anyone for some time',
'you'll have to excuse me', 'Please postpone decisive action till we can arrange some sort
of compromise', or 'I am very sorry, but I must take a complete vacation from
everything; I'll talk with you later.' Then, apparently gaining boldness through
meditation, he had slipped out so quietly that no one had seen him depart or knew that
he had gone until he returned about one o'clock and entered the house without a word.
He had gone upstairs, where a bit of his fear must have surged back; for he was heard to
cry out in a highly terrified fashion upon entering his library, afterward trailing off into
a kind of choking gasp. When, however, the butler had gone to inquire what the trouble
was, he had appeared at the door with a great show of boldness, and had silently
gestured the man away in a manner that terrified him unaccountably. Then he had
evidently done some rearranging of his shelves, for a great clattering and thumping and
creaking ensued; after which he had reappeared and left at once. Willett inquired
whether or not any message had been left, but was told that there was none. The butler
seemed queerly disturbed about something in Charles's appearance and manner, and
asked solicitously if there was much hope for a cure of his disordered nerves.

For almost two hours Dr. Willett waited vainly in Charles Ward's library, watching the
dusty shelves with their wide gaps where books had been removed, and smiling grimly
at the panelled overmantel on the north wall, whence a year before the suave features of
old Joseph Curwen had looked mildly down. After a time the shadows began to gather,
and the sunset cheer gave place to a vague growing terror which flew shadow-like
before the night. Mr. Ward finally arrived, and shewed much surprise and anger at his
son's absence after all the pains which had been taken to guard him. He had not known
of Charles's appointment, and promised to notify Willett when the youth returned. In
bidding the doctor goodnight he expressed his utter perplexity at his son's condition, and
urged his caller to do all he could to restore the boy to normal poise. Willett was glad to
escape from that library, for something frightful and unholy seemed to haunt it; as if the
vanished picture had left behind a legacy of evil. He had never liked that picture; and
even now, strong-nerved though he was, there lurked a quality in its vacant panel which
made him feel an urgent need to get out into the pure air as soon as possible.

The next morning Willett received a message from the senior Ward, saying that Charles
was still absent. Mr. Ward mentioned that Dr. Allen had telephoned him to say that
Charles would remain at Pawtuxet for some time, and that he must not be disturbed.
This was necessary because Allen himself was suddenly called away for an indefinite
period, leaving the researches in need of Charles's constant oversight. Charles sent his
best wishes, and regretted any bother his abrupt change of plans might have caused. In
listening to this message Mr. Ward heard Dr. Allen's voice for the first time, and it
seemed to excite some vague and elusive memory which could not be actually placed,
but which was disturbing to the point of fearfulness.

Faced by these baffling and contradictory reports, Dr. Willett was frankly at a loss what
to do. The frantic earnestness of Charles's note was not to be denied, yet what could one
think of its writer's immediate violation of his own expressed policy? Young Ward had
written that his delvings had become blasphemous and menacing, that they and his
bearded colleague must be extirpated at any cost, and that he himself would never return
to their final scene; yet according to latest advices he had forgotten all this and was back
in the thick of the mystery. Common sense bade one leave the youth alone with his
freakishness, yet some deeper instinct would not permit the impression of that frenzied
letter to subside. Willett read it over again, and could not make its essence sound as
empty and insane as both its bombastic verbiage and its lack of fulfilment would seem
to imply. Its terror was too profound and real, and in conjunction with what the doctor
already knew evoked too vivid hints of monstrosities from beyond time and space to
permit of any cynical explanation. There were nameless horrors abroad; and no matter
how little one might be able to get at them, one ought to stand prepared for any sort of
action at any time.

For over a week Dr. Willett pondered on the dilemma which seemed thrust upon him,
and became more and more inclined to pay Charles a call at the Pawtuxet bungalow. No
friend of the youth had ever ventured to storm this forbidden retreat, and even his father
knew of its interior only from such descriptions as he chose to give; but Willett felt that
some direct conversation with his patient was necessary. Mr. Ward had been receiving
brief and non-committal typed notes from his son, and said that Mrs. Ward in her
Atlantic City retirement had had no better word. So at length the doctor resolved to act;
and despite a curious sensation inspired by old legends of Joseph Curwen, and by more
recent revelations and warnings from Charles Ward, set boldly out for the bungalow on
the bluff above the river.

Willett had visited the spot before through sheer curiousity, though of course never
entering the house or proclaiming his presence; hence knew exactly the route to take.
Driving out Broad Street one early afternoon toward the end of February in his small
motor, he thought oddly of the grim party which had taken that selfsame road a hundred
and fifty-seven years before on a terrible errand which none might ever comprehend.

The ride through the city's decaying fringe was short, and trim Edgewood and sleepy
Pawtuxet presently spread out ahead. Willett turned to the right down Lockwood Street
and drove his car as far along that rural road as he could, then alighted and walked north
to where the bluff towered above the lovely bends of the river and the sweep of misty
downlands beyond. Houses were still few here, and there was no mistaking the isolated
bungalow with its concrete garage on a high point of land at his left. Stepping briskly up
the neglected gravel walk he rapped at the door with a firm hand, and spoke without a
tremor to the evil Portuguese mulatto who opened it to the width of a crack.
He must, he said, see Charles Ward at once on vitally important business. No excuse
would be accepted, and a repulse would mean only a full report of the matter to the
elder Ward. The mulatto still hesitated, and pushed against the door when Willett
attempted to open it; but the doctor merely raised his voice and renewed his demands.
Then there came from the dark interior a husky whisper which somehow chilled the
hearer through and through though he did not know why he feared it. 'Let him in, Tony,'
it said, 'we may as well talk now as ever.' But disturbing as was the whisper, the greater
fear was that which immediately followed. The floor creaked and the speaker hove in
sight--and the owner of those strange and resonant tones was seen to be no other than
Charles Dexter Ward.

The minuteness with which Dr. Willett recalled and recorded his conversation of that
afternoon is due to the importance he assigns to this particular period. For at last he
concedes a vital change in Charles Dexter Ward's mentality, and believes that the youth
now spoke from a brain hopelessly alien to the brain whose growth he had watched for
six and twenty years. Controversy with Dr. Lyman has compelled him to be very
specific, and he definitely dates the madness of Charles Ward from the time the
typewritten notes began to reach his parents. Those notes are not in Ward's normal style;
not even in the style of that last frantic letter to Willett. Instead, they are strange and
archaic, as if the snapping of the writer's mind had released a flood of tendencies and
impressions picked up unconsciously through boyhood antiquarianism. There is an
obvious effort to be modern, but the spirit and occasionally the language are those of the
past.

The past, too, was evident in Ward's every tone and gesture as he received the doctor in
that shadowy bungalow. He bowed, motioned Willett to a seat, and began to speak
abruptly in that strange whisper which he sought to explain at the very outset.

'I am grown phthisical,' he began, 'from this cursed river air. You must excuse my
speech. I suppose you are come from my father to see what ails me, and I hope you will
say nothing to alarm him.'

Willett was studying these scraping tones with extreme care, but studying even more
closely the face of the speaker. Something, he felt, was wrong; and he thought of what
the family had told him about the fright of that Yorkshire butler one night. He wished it
were not so dark, but did not request that the blind be opened. Instead, he merely asked
Ward why he had so belied the frantic note of little more than a week before.

'I was coming to that,' the host replied. 'You must know, I am in a very bad state of
nerves, and do and say queer things I cannot account for. As I have told you often, I am
on the edge of great matters; and the bigness of them has a way of making me light-
headed. Any man might well be frighted of what I have found, but I am not to be put off
for long. I was a dunce to have that guard and stick at home; for having gone this far,
my place is here. I am not well spoke of by prying neighbours, and perhaps I was led by
weakness to believe myself what they say of me. There is no evil to any in what I do, so
long as I do it rightly. Have the goodness to wait six months, and I'll shew you what will
pay your patience well.

'You may as well know I have a way of learning old matters from things surer than
books, and I'll leave you to judge the importance of what I can give to history,
philosophy, and the arts by reason of the doors I have access to. My ancestor had all this
when those witless peeping Toms came and murdered him. I now have it again, or am
coming very imperfectly to have a part of it. This time nothing must happen, and least
of all through any idiot fears of my own. Pray forget all I writ you, Sir, and have no fear
of this place or any in it. Dr. Allen is a man of fine parts, and I own him an apology for
anything ill I have said of him. I wish I had no need to spare him, but there were things
he had to do elsewhere. His zeal is equal to mine in all those matters, and I suppose that
when I feared the work I feared him too as my greatest helper in it.'

Ward paused, and the doctor hardly knew what to say or think. He felt almost foolish in
the face of this calm repudiation of the letter; and yet there clung to him the fact that
while the present discourse was strange and alien and indubitably mad, the note itself
had been tragic in its naturalness and likeness to the Charles Ward he knew. Willett now
tried to turn the talk on early matters, and recall to the youth some past events which
would restore a familiar mood; but in this process he obtained only the most grotesque
results. It was the same with all the alienists later on. Important sections of Charles
Ward's store of mental images, mainly those touching modern times and his own
personal life, had been unaccountably expunged; whilst all the massed antiquarianism
of his youth had welled up from some profound subconsciousness to engulf the
contemporary and the individual. The youth's intimate knowledge of elder things was
abnormal and unholy, and he tried his best to hide it. When Willett would mention some
favourite object of his boyhood archaistic studies he often shed by pure accident such a
light as no normal mortal could conceivably be expected to possess, and the doctor
shuddered as the glib allusion glided by.

It was not wholesome to know so much about the way the fat sheriff's wig fell off as he
leaned over at the play in Mr. Douglass's Histrionick Academy in King Street on the
eleventh of February, 1762, which fell on a Thursday; or about how the actors cut the
text of Steele's Conscious Lover so badly that one was almost glad the Baptist-ridden
legislature closed the theatre a fortnight later. That Thomas Sabin's Boston coach was
"damn'd uncomfortable" old letters may well have told; but what healthy antiquarian
could recall how the creaking of Epenetus Olney's new signboard (the gaudy crown he
set up after he took to calling his tavern the Crown Coffee House) was exactly like the
first few notes of the new jazz piece all the radios in Pawtuxet were playing?

Ward, however, would not be quizzed long in this vein. Modern and personal topics he
waved aside quite summarily, whilst regarding antique affairs he soon shewed the
plainest boredom. What he wished clearly enough was only to satisfy his visitor enough
to make him depart without the intention of returning. To this end he offered to shew
Willett the entire house, and at once proceeded to lead the doctor through every room
from cellar to attic. Willett looked sharply, but noted that the visible books were far too
few and trivial to have ever filled the wide gaps on Ward's shelves at home, and that the
meagre so-called "laboratory" was the flimsiest sort of a blind. Clearly, there were a
library and a laboratory elsewhere; but just where, it was impossible to say. Essentially
defeated in his quest for something he could not name, Willett returned to town before
evening and told the senior Ward everything which had occurred. They agreed that the
youth must be definitely out of his mind, but decided that nothing drastic need be done
just then. Above all, Mrs. Ward must be kept in as complete an ignorance as her son's
own strange typed notes would permit.
Mr. Ward now determined to call in person upon his son, making it wholly a surprise
visit. Dr. Willett took him in his car one evening, guiding him to within sight of the
bungalow and waiting patiently for his return. The session was a long one, and the
father emerged in a very saddened and perplexed state. His reception had developed
much like Willett's, save that Charles had been an excessively long time in appearing
after the visitor had forced his way into the hall and sent the Portuguese away with an
imperative demand; and in the bearing of the altered son there was no trace of filial
affection. The lights had been dim, yet even so the youth had complained that they
dazzled him outrageously. He had not spoken out loud at all, averring that his throat was
in very poor condition; but in his hoarse whisper there was a quality so vaguely
disturbing that Mr. Ward could not banish it from his mind.

Now definitely leagued together to do all they could toward the youth's mental
salvation, Mr. Ward and Dr. Willett set about collecting every scrap of data which the
case might afford. Pawtuxet gossip was the first item they studied, and this was
relatively easy to glean since both had friends in that region. Dr. Willett obtained the
most rumours because people talked more frankly to him than to a parent of the central
figure, and from all he heard he could tell that young Ward's life had become indeed a
strange one. Common tongues would not dissociate his household from the vampirism
of the previous summer, while the nocturnal comings and goings of the motor trucks
provided their share of dark speculations. Local tradesmen spoke of the queerness of the
orders brought them by the evil-looking mulatto, and in particular of the inordinate
amounts of meat and fresh blood secured from the two butcher shops in the immediate
neighbourhood. For a household of only three, these quantities were quite absurd.

Then there was the matter of the sounds beneath the earth. Reports of these things were
harder to pin down, but all the vague hints tallied in certain basic essentials. Noises of a
ritual nature positively existed, and at times when the bungalow was dark. They might,
of course, have come from the known cellar; but rumour insisted that there were deeper
and more spreading crypts. Recalling the ancient tales of Joseph Curwen's catacombs,
and assuming for granted that the present bungalow had been selected because of its
situation on the old Curwen site as revealed in one or another of the documents found
behind the picture, Willett and Mr. Ward gave this phase of the gossip much attention;
and searched many times without success for the door in the river-bank which old
manuscripts mentioned. As to popular opinions of the bungalow's various inhabitants, it
was soon plain that the Brava Portuguese was loathed, the bearded and spectacled Dr.
Allen feared, and the pallid young scholar disliked to a profound degree. During the last
week or two Ward had obviously changed much, abandoning his attempts at affability
and speaking only in hoarse but oddly repellent whispers on the few occasions that he
ventured forth.

Such were the shreds and fragments gathered here and there; and over these Mr. Ward
and Dr. Willett held many long and serious conferences. They strove to exercise
deduction, induction, and constructive imagination to their utmost extent; and to
correlate every known fact of Charles's later life, including the frantic letter which the
doctor now shewed the father, with the meagre documentary evidence available
concerning old Joseph Curwen. They would have given much for a glimpse of the
papers Charles had found, for very clearly the key to the youth's madness lay in what he
had learned of the ancient wizard and his doings.
4

And yet, after all, it was from no step of Mr. Ward's or Dr. Willett's that the next move
in this singular case proceeded. The father and the physician, rebuffed and confused by
a shadow too shapeless and intangible to combat, had rested uneasily on their oars while
the typed notes of young Ward to his parents grew fewer and fewer. Then came the first
of the month with its customary financial adjustments, and the clerks at certain banks
began a peculiar shaking of heads and telephoning from one to the other. Officials who
knew Charles Ward by sight went down to the bungalow to ask why every cheque of his
appearing at this juncture was a clumsy forgery, and were reassured less than they ought
to have been when the youth hoarsely explained that his hand had lately been so much
affected by a nervous shock as to make normal writing impossible. He could, he said,
form no written characters at all except with great difficulty; and could prove it by the
fact that he had been forced to type all his recent letters, even those to his father and
mother, who would bear out the assertion.

What made the investigators pause in confusion was not this circumstance alone, for
that was nothing unprecedented or fundamentally suspicious, nor even the Pawtuxet
gossip, of which one or two of them had caught echoes. It was the muddled discourse of
the young man which nonplussed them, implying as it did a virtually total loss of
memory concerning important monetary matters which he had had at his fingertips only
a month or two before. Something was wrong; for despite the apparent coherence and
rationality of his speech, there could be no normal reason for this ill-concealed
blankness on vital points. Moreover, although none of these men knew Ward well, they
could not help observing the change in his language and manner. They had heard he was
an antiquarian, but even the most hopeless antiquarians do not make daily use of
obsolete phraseology and gestures. Altogether, this combination of hoarseness, palsied
hands, bad memory, and altered speech and bearing must represent some disturbance or
malady of genuine gravity, which no doubt formed the basis of the prevailing odd
rumours; and after their departure the party of officials decided that a talk with the
senior Ward was imperative.

So on the sixth of March, 1928, there was a long and serious conference in Mr. Ward's
office, after which the utterly bewildered father summoned Dr. Willett in a kind of
helpless resignation. Willett looked over the strained and awkward signatures of the
cheque, and compared them in his mind with the penmanship of that last frantic note.
Certainly, the change was radical and profound, and yet there was something damnably
familiar about the new writing. It had crabbed and archaic tendencies of a very curious
sort, and seemed to result from a type of stroke utterly different from that which the
youth had always used. It was strange--but where had he seen it before? On the whole, it
was obvious that Charles was insane. Of that there could be no doubt. And since it
appeared unlikely that he could handle his property or continue to deal with the outside
world much longer, something must quickly be done toward his oversight and possible
cure. It was then that the alienists were called in, Drs. Peck and Waite of Providence
and Dr. Lyman of Boston, to whom Mr. Ward and Dr. Willett gave the most exhaustive
possible history of the case, and who conferred at length in the now unused library of
their young patient, examining what books and papers of his were left in order to gain
some further notion of his habitual mental cast. After scanning this material and
examining the ominous note to Willett they all agreed that Charles Ward's studies had
been enough to unseat or at least to warp any ordinary intellect, and wished most
heartily that they could see his more intimate volumes and documents; but this latter
they knew they could do, if at all, only after a scene at the bungalow itself. Willett now
reviewed the whole case with febrile energy; it being at this time that he obtained the
statements of the workmen who had seen Charles find the Curwen documents, and that
he collated the incidents of the destroyed newspaper items, looking up the latter at the
Journal office.

On Thursday, the eighth of March, Drs. Willett, Peck, Lyman, and Waite, accompanied
by Mr. Ward, paid the youth their momentous call; making no concealment of their
object and questioning the now acknowledged patient with extreme minuteness.
Charles, although he was inordinately long in answering the summons and was still
redolent of strange and noxious laboratory odours when he did finally make his agitated
appearance, proved a far from recalcitrant subject; and admitted freely that his memory
and balance had suffered somewhat from close application to abstruse studies. He
offered no resistance when his removal to other quarters was insisted upon; and seemed,
indeed, to display a high degree of intelligence as apart from mere memory. His conduct
would have sent his interviewers away in bafflement had not the persistently archaic
trend of his speech and unmistakable replacement of modern by ancient ideas in his
consciousness marked him out as one definitely removed from the normal. Of his work
he would say no more to the group of doctors than he had formerly said to his family
and to Dr. Willett, and his frantic note of the previous month he dismissed as mere
nerves and hysteria. He insisted that this shadowy bungalow possessed no library or
laboratory beyond the visible ones, and waxed abstruse in explaining the absence from
the house of such odours as now saturated all his clothing. Neighbourhood gossip he
attributed to nothing more than the cheap inventiveness of baffled curiousity. Of the
whereabouts of Dr. Allen he said he did not feel at liberty to speak definitely, but
assured his inquisitors that the bearded and spectacled man would return when needed.
In paying off the stolid Brava who resisted all questioning by the visitors, and in closing
the bungalow which still seemed to hold such nighted secrets, Ward shewed no signs of
nervousness save a barely noticed tendency to pause as though listening for something
very faint. He was apparently animated by a calmly philosophic resignation, as if he
removal were the merest transient incident which would cause the least trouble if
facilitated and disposed of once and for all. It was clear that he trusted to his obviously
unimpaired keenness of absolute mentality to overcome all the embarrassments into
which his twisted memory, his lost voice and handwriting, and his secretive and
eccentric behaviour had led him. His mother, it was agreed, was not to be told of the
change; his father supplying typed notes in his name. Ward was taken to the restfully
and picturesquely situated private hospital maintained by Dr. Waite on Conanicut Island
in the bay, and subjected to the closest scrutiny and questioning by all the physicians
connected with the case. It was then that the physical oddities were noticed; the
slackened metabolism, the altered skin, and the disproportionate neural reactions. Dr.
Willett was the most perturbed of the various examiners, for he had attended Ward all
his life and could appreciate with terrible keenness the extent of his physical
disorganisation. Even the familiar olive mark on his hip was gone, while on his chest
was a great black mole or cicatrice which had never been there before, and which made
Willett wonder whether the youth had ever submitted to any of the witch markings
reputed to be inflicted at certain unwholesome nocturnal meetings in wild and lonely
places. The doctor could not keep his mind off a certain transcribed witch-trial record
from Salem which Charles had shewn him in the old non-secretive days, and which
read: 'Mr. G. B. on that Nighte putt ye Divell his Marke upon Bridget S., Jonathan A.,
Simon O., Deliverance W., Joseph C., Susan P., Mehitable C., and Deborah B.' Ward's
face, too, troubled him horribly, till at length he suddenly discovered why he was
horrified. For above the young man's right eye was something which he had never
previously noticed--a small scar or pit precisely like that in the crumbled painting of old
Joseph Curwen, and perhaps attesting some hideous ritualistic inoculation to which both
had submitted at a certain stage of their occult careers.

While Ward himself was puzzling all the doctors at the hospital a very strict watch was
kept on all mail addressed either to him or to Dr. Allen, which Mr. Ward had ordered
delivered at the family home. Willett had predicted that very little would be found, since
any communications of a vital nature would probably have been exchanged by
messenger; but in the latter part of March there did come a letter from Prague for Dr.
Allen which gave both the doctor and the father deep thought. It was in a very crabbed
and archaic hand; and though clearly not the effort of a foreigner, shewed almost as
singular a departure from modern English as the speech of young Ward himself. It read:

Kleinstrasse 11, Altstadt, Prague, 11th Feby. 1928.

Brother in Almonsin-Metraton:-

I this day receiv'd yr mention of what came up from the Saltes I sent you. It was wrong,
and meanes clearly that ye Headstones had been chang'd when Barnabas gott me the
Specimen. It is often so, as you must be sensible of from the Thing you gott from ye
Kings Chapell ground in 1769 and what H. gott from Olde Bury'g Point in 1690, that
was like to ende him. I gott such a Thing in Aegypt 75 yeares gone, from the which
came that Scar ye Boy saw on me here in 1924. As I told you longe ago, do not calle up
That which you can not put downe; either from dead Saltes or out of ye Spheres beyond.
Have ye Wordes for laying at all times readie, and stopp not to be sure when there is
any Doubte of Whom you have. Stones are all chang'd now in Nine groundes out of 10.
You are never sure till you question. I this day heard from H., who has had Trouble with
the Soldiers. He is like to be sorry Transylvania is pass't from Hungary to Roumania,
and wou'd change his Seat if the Castel weren't so fulle of What we Knowe. But of this
he hath doubtless writ you. In my next Send'g there will be Somewhat from a Hill tomb
from ye East that will delight you greatly. Meanwhile forget not I am desirous of B. F.
if you can possibly get him for me. You know G. in Philada. better than I. Have him
upp firste if you will, but doe not use him soe hard he will be Difficult, for I must
speake to him in ye End.

Yogg-Sothoth Neblod Zin Simon O.

To Mr. J. C. in Providence.

Mr. Ward and Dr. Willett paused in utter chaos before this apparent bit of unrelieved
insanity. Only by degrees did they absorb what it seemed to imply. So the absent Dr.
Allen, and not Charles Ward, had come to be the leading spirit at Pawtuxet? That must
explain the wild reference and denunciation in the youth's last frantic letter. And what of
this addressing of the bearded and spectacled stranger as "Mr. J. C."? There was no
escaping the inference, but there are limits to possible monstrosity. Who was "Simon
O."; the old man Ward had visited in Prague four years previously? Perhaps, but in the
centuries behind there had been another Simon O.--Simon Orne, alias Jedediah, of
Salem, who vanished in 1771, and whose peculiar handwriting Dr. Willett now
unmistakably recognised from the photostatic copies of the Orne formulae which
Charles had once shown him. What horrors and mysteries, what contradictions and
contraventions of Nature, had come back after a century and a half to harass Old
Providence with her clustered spires and domes?

The father and the old physician, virtually at a loss what to do or think, went to see
Charles at the hospital and questioned him as delicately as they could about Dr. Allen,
about the Prague visit, and about what he had learned of Simon or Jedediah Orne of
Salem. To all these enquiries the youth was politely non-committal, merely barking in
his hoarse whisper that he had found Dr. Allen to have a remarkable spiritual rapport
with certain souls from the past, and that any correspondent the bearded man might
have in Prague would probably be similarly gifted. When they left, Mr. Ward and Dr.
Willett realised to their chagrin that they had really been the ones under catechism; and
that without imparting anything vital himself, the confined youth had adroitly pumped
them of everything the Prague letter had contained.

Drs. Peck, Waite, and Lyman were not inclined to attach much importance to the
strange correspondence of young Ward's companion; for they knew the tendency of
kindred eccentrics and monomaniacs to band together, and believed that Charles or
Allen had merely unearthed an expatriated counterpart--perhaps one who had seen
Orne's handwriting and copied it in an attempt to pose as the bygone character's
reincarnation. Allen himself was perhaps a similar case, and may have persuaded the
youth into accepting him as an avatar of the long-dead Curwen. Such things had been
known before, and on the same basis the hard-headed doctors disposed of Willett's
growing disquiet about Charles Ward's present handwriting, as studied from
unpremeditated specimens obtained by various ruses. Willett thought he had placed its
odd familiarity at last, and that what it vaguely resembled was the bygone penmanship
of old Joseph Curwen himself; but this the other physicians regarded as a phase of
imitativeness only to be expected in a mania of this sort, and refused to grant it any
importance either favourable or unfavourable. Recognising this prosaic attitude in his
colleagues, Willett advised Mr. Ward to keep to himself the letter which arrived for Dr.
Allen on the second of April from Rakus, Transylvania, in a handwriting so intensely
and fundamentally like that of the Hutchinson cipher that both father and physician
paused in awe before breaking the seal. This read as follows:

Castle Ferenczy 7 March 1928.

Dear C.:--

Hadd a Squad of 20 Militia up to talk about what the Country Folk say. Must digg
deeper and have less Hearde. These Roumanians plague me damnably, being officious
and particular where you cou'd buy a Magyar off with a Drinke and Food.

Last monthe M. got me ye Sarcophagus of ye Five Sphinxes from ye Acropolis where

He whome I call'd up say'd it wou'd be, and I have hadde 3 Talkes with What was
therein inhum'd. It will go to S. O. in Prague directly, and thence to you. It is stubborn
but you know ye Way with Such.
You shew Wisdom in having lesse about than Before; for there was no Neede to keep
the Guards in Shape and eat'g off their Heads, and it made Much to be founde in Case of
Trouble, as you too welle knowe. You can now move and worke elsewhere with no
Kill'g Trouble if needful, tho' I hope no Thing will soon force you to so Bothersome a
Course.

I rejoice that you traffick not so much with Those Outside; for there was ever a Mortall
Peril in it, and you are sensible what it did when you ask'd Protection of One not
dispos'd to give it.

You excel me in gett'g ye Formulae so another may saye them with Success, but
Borellus fancy'd it wou'd be so if just ye right Wordes were hadd. Does ye Boy use 'em
often? I regret that he growes squeamish, as I fear'd he wou'd when I hadde him here
nigh 15 Monthes, but am sensible you knowe how to deal with him. You can't saye him
down with ye Formula, for that will Worke only upon such as ye other Formula hath
call'd up from Saltes; but you still have strong Handes and Knife and Pistol, and Graves
are not harde to digg, nor Acids loth to burne.

O. sayes you have promis'd him B. F. I must have him after. B. goes to you soone, and
may he give you what you wishe of that Darke Thing belowe Memphis. Imploy care in
what you calle up, and beware of ye Boy.

It will be ripe in a yeare's time to have up ye Legions from Underneath, and then there
are no Boundes to what shal be oures. Have Confidence in what I saye, for you knowe
O. and I have hadd these 150 yeares more than you to consulte these Matters in.

Nephreu--Ka nai Hadoth Edw. H.

For J Curwen, Esq. Providence.

But if Willett and Mr. Ward refrained from shewing this letter to the alienists, they did
not refrain from acting upon it themselves. No amount of learned sophistry could
controvert the fact that the strangely bearded and spectacled Dr. Allen, of whom
Charles's frantic letter had spoken as such a monstrous menace, was in close and sinister
correspondence with two inexplicable creatures whom Ward had visited in his travels
and who plainly claimed to be survivals or avatars of Curwen's old Salem colleagues;
that he was regarding himself as the reincarnation of Joseph Curwen, and that he
entertained--or was at least advised to entertain--murderous designs against a "boy" who
could scarcely be other than Charles Ward. There was organised horror afoot; and no
matter who had started it, the missing Allen was by this time at the bottom of it.
Therefore, thanking heaven that Charles was now safe in the hospital, Mr. Ward lost no
time in engaging detectives to learn all they could of the cryptic, bearded doctor; finding
whence he had come and what Pawtuxet knew of him, and if possible discovering his
present whereabouts. Supplying the men with one of the bungalow keys which Charles
yielded up, he urged them to explore Allen's vacant room which had been identified
when the patient's belongings had been packed; obtaining what clues they could from
any effects he might have left about. Mr. Ward talked with the detectives in his son's old
library, and they felt a marked relief when they left it at last; for there seemed to hover
about the place a vague aura of evil. Perhaps it was what they had heard of the infamous
old wizard whose picture had once stared from the panelled overmantel, and perhaps it
was something different and irrelevant; but in any case they all half sensed an intangible
miasma which centred in that carven vestige of an older dwelling and which at times
almost rose to the intensity of a material emanation.

V. A Nightmare and a Cataclysm

And now swiftly followed that hideous experience which has left its indelible mark of
fear on the soul of Marinus Bicknell Willett, and has added a decade to the visible age
of one whose youth was even then far behind. Dr. Willett had conferred at length with
Mr. Ward, and had come to an agreement with him on several points which both felt the
alienists would ridicule. There was, they conceded, a terrible movement alive in the
world, whose direct connexion with a necromancy even older than the Salem witchcraft
could not be doubted. That at least two living men--and one other of whom they dared
not think--were in absolute possession of minds or personalities which had functioned
as early as 1690 or before was likewise almost unassailably proved even in the face of
all known natural laws. What these horrible creatures--and Charles Ward as well--were
doing or trying to do seemed fairly clear from their letters and from every bit of light
both old and new which had filtered in upon the case. They were robbing the tombs of
all the ages, including those of the world's wisest and greatest men, in the hope of
recovering from the bygone ashes some vestige of the consciousness and lore which had
once animated and informed them.

A hideous traffic was going on among these nightmare ghouls, whereby illustrious
bones were bartered with the calm calculativeness of schoolboys swapping books; and
from what was extorted from this centuried dust there was anticipated a power and a
wisdom beyond anything which the cosmos had ever seen concentred in one man or
group. They had found unholy ways to keep their brains alive, either in the same body
or different bodies; and had evidently achieved a way of tapping the consciousness of
the dead whom they gathered together. There had, it seems, been some truth in
chimerical old Borellus when he wrote of preparing from even the most antique remains
certain "Essential Saltes" from which the shade of a long-dead living thing might be
raised up. There was a formula for evoking such a shade, and another for putting it
down; and it had now been so perfected that it could be taught successfully. One must
be careful about evocations, for the markers of old graves are not always accurate.

Willett and Mr. Ward shivered as they passed from conclusion to conclusion. Things--
presences or voices of some sort--could be drawn down from unknown places as well as
from the grave, and in this process also one must be careful. Joseph Curwen had
indubitably evoked many forbidden things, and as for Charles--what might one think of
him? What forces "outside the spheres" had reached him from Joseph Curwen's day and
turned his mind on forgotten things? He had been led to find certain directions, and he
had used them. He had talked with the man of horror in Prague and stayed long with the
creature in the mountains of Transylvania. And he must have found the grave of Joseph
Curwen at last. That newspaper item and what his mother had heard in the night were
too significant to overlook. Then he had summoned something, and it must have come.
That mighty voice aloft on Good Friday, and those different tones in the locked attic
laboratory. What were they like, with their depth and hollowness? Was there not here
some awful foreshadowing of the dreaded stranger Dr. Allen with his spectral bass?
Yes, that was what Mr. Ward had felt with vague horror in his single talk with the man--
if man it were--over the telephone!

What hellish consciousness or voice, what morbid shade or presence, had come to
answer Charles Ward's secret rites behind that locked door? Those voices heard in
argument--"must have it red for three months"--Good God! Was not that just before the
vampirism broke out? The rifling of Ezra Weeden's ancient grave, and the cries later at
Pawtuxet--whose mind had planned the vengeance and rediscovered the shunned seat of
elder blasphemies? And then the bungalow and the bearded stranger, and the gossip,
and the fear. The final madness of Charles neither father nor doctor could attempt to
explain, but they did feel sure that the mind of Joseph Curwen had come to earth again
and was following its ancient morbidities. Was daemoniac possession in truth a
possibility? Allen had something to do with it, and the detectives must find out more
about one whose existence menaced the young man's life. In the meantime, since the
existence of some vast crypt beneath the bungalow seemed virtually beyond dispute,
some effort must be made to find it. Willett and Mr. Ward, conscious of the sceptical
attitude of the alienists, resolved during their final conference to undertake a joint secret
exploration of unparalleled thoroughness; and agreed to meet at the bungalow on the
following morning with valises and with certain tools and accessories suited to
architectural search and underground exploration.

The morning of April 6th dawned clear, and both explorers were at the bungalow by ten
o'clock. Mr. Ward had the key, and an entry and cursory survey were made. From the
disordered condition of Dr. Allen's room it was obvious that the detectives had been
there before, and the later searchers hoped that they had found some clue which might
prove of value. Of course the main business lay in the cellar; so thither they descended
without much delay, again making the circuit which each had vainly made before in the
presence of the mad young owner. For a time everything seemed baffling, each inch of
the earthen floor and stone walls having so solid and innocuous an aspect that the
thought of a yawning aperture was scarcely to be entertained. Willett reflected that since
the original cellar was dug without knowledge of any catacombs beneath, the beginning
of the passage would represent the strictly modern delving of young Ward and his
associates, where they had probed for the ancient vaults whose rumour could have
reached them by no wholesome means.

The doctor tried to put himself in Charles's place to see how a delver would be likely to
start, but could not gain much inspiration from this method. Then he decided on
elimination as a policy, and went carefully over the whole subterranean surface both
vertical and horizontal, trying to account for every inch separately. He was soon
substantially narrowed down, and at last had nothing left but the small platform before
the washtubs, which he tried once before in vain. Now experimenting in every possible
way, and exerting a double strength, he finally found that the top did indeed turn and
slide horizontally on a corner pivot. Beneath it lay a trim concrete surface with an iron
manhole, to which Mr. Ward at once rushed with excited zeal. The cover was not hard
to lift, and the father had quite removed it when Willett noticed the queerness of his
aspect. He was swaying and nodding dizzily, and in the gust of noxious air which swept
up from the black pit beneath the doctor soon recognised ample cause.

In a moment Dr. Willett had his fainting companion on the floor above and was
reviving him with cold water. Mr. Ward responded feebly, but it could be seen that the
mephitic blast from the crypt had in some way gravely sickened him. Wishing to take
no chances, Willett hastened out to Broad Street for a taxicab and had soon dispatched
the sufferer home despite his weak-voiced protests; after which he produced an electric
torch, covered his nostrils with a band of sterile gauze, and descended once more to peer
into the new-found depths. The foul air had now slightly abated, and Willett was able to
send a beam of light down the Stygian hold. For about ten feet, he saw, it was a sheer
cylindrical drop with concrete walls and an iron ladder; after which the hole appeared to
strike a flight of old stone steps which must originally have emerged to earth somewhat
southwest of the present building.

Willett freely admits that for a moment the memory of the old Curwen legends kept him
from climbing down alone into that malodorous gulf. He could not help thinking of
what Luke Fenner had reported on that last monstrous night. Then duty asserted itself
and he made the plunge, carrying a great valise for the removal of whatever papers
might prove of supreme importance. Slowly, as befitted one of his years, he descended
the ladder and reached the slimy steps below. This was ancient masonry, his torch told
him; and upon the dripping walls he saw the unwholesome moss of centuries. Down,
down, ran the steps; not spirally, but in three abrupt turns; and with such narrowness
that two men could have passed only with difficulty. He had counted about thirty when
a sound reached him very faintly; and after that he did not feel disposed to count any
more.

It was a godless sound; one of those low-keyed, insidious outrages of Nature which are
not meant to be. To call it a dull wail, a doom-dragged whine, or a hopeless howl of
chorused anguish and stricken flesh without mind would be to miss its quintessential
loathsomeness and soul-sickening overtones. Was it for this that Ward had seemed to
listen on that day he was removed? It was the most shocking thing that Willett had ever
heard, and it continued from no determinate point as the doctor reached the bottom of
the steps and cast his torchlight around on lofty corridor walls surmounted by
Cyclopean vaulting and pierced by numberless black archways. The hall in which he
stood was perhaps fourteen feet high in the middle of the vaulting and ten or twelve feet
broad. Its pavement was of large chipped flagstone, and its walls and roof were of
dressed masonry. Its length he could not imagine, for it stretched ahead indefinitely into
the blackness. Of the archways, some had doors of the old six-panelled colonial type,
whilst others had none.

Overcoming the dread induced by the smell and the howling, Willett began to explore
these archways one by one; finding beyond them rooms with groined stone ceilings,
each of medium size and apparently of bizarre uses. Most of them had fireplaces, the
upper courses of whose chimneys would have formed an interesting study in
engineering. Never before or since had he seen such instruments or suggestions of
instruments as here loomed up on every hand through the burying dust and cobwebs of
a century and a half, in many cases evidently shattered as if by the ancient raiders. For
many of the chambers seemed wholly untrodden by modern feet, and must have
represented the earliest and most obsolete phases of Joseph Curwen's experimentation.
Finally there came a room of obvious modernity, or at least of recent occupancy. There
were oil heaters, bookshelves and tables, chairs and cabinets, and a desk piled high with
papers of varying antiquity and contemporaneousness. Candlesticks and oil lamps stood
about in several places; and finding a match-safe handy, Willett lighted such as were
ready for use.

In the fuller gleam it appeared that this apartment was nothing less than the latest study
or library of Charles Ward. Of the books the doctor had seen many before, and a good
part of the furniture had plainly come from the Prospect Street mansion. Here and there
was a piece well known to Willett, and the sense of familiarity became so great that he
half forgot the noisomness and the wailing, both of which were plainer here than they
had been at the foot of the steps. His first duty, as planned long ahead, was to find and
seize any papers which might seem of vital importance; especially those portentous
documents found by Charles so long ago behind the picture in Olney Court. As he
search he perceived how stupendous a task the final unravelling would be; for file on
file was stuffed with papers in curious hands and bearing curious designs, so that
months or even years might be needed for a thorough deciphering and editing. Once he
found three large packets of letters with Prague and Rakus postmarks, and in writing
clearly recognisable as Orne's and Hutchinson's; all of which he took with him as part of
the bundle to be removed in his valise.

At last, in a locked mahogany cabinet once gracing the Ward home, Willett found the
batch of old Curwen papers; recognising them from the reluctant glimpse Charles had
granted him so many years ago. The youth had evidently kept them together very much
as they had been when first he found them, since all the titles recalled by the workmen
were present except the papers addressed to Orne and Hutchinson, and the cipher with
its key. Willett placed the entire lot in his valise and continued his examination of the
files. Since young Ward's immediate condition was the greatest matter at stake, the
closest searching was done among the most obviously recent matter; and in this
abundance of contemporary manuscript one very baffling oddity was noted. The oddity
was the slight amount in Charles's normal writing, which indeed included nothing more
recent than two months before. On the other hand, there were literally reams of symbols
and formulae, historical notes and philosophical comment, in a crabbed penmanship
absolutely identical with the ancient script of Joseph Curwen, though of undeniably
modern dating. Plainly, a part of the latter-day programme had been a sedulous
imitation of the old wizard's writing, which Charles seemed to have carried to a
marvellous state of perfection. Of any third hand which might have been Allen's there
was not a trace. If he had indeed come to be the leader, he must have forced young
Ward to act as his amanuensis.

In this new material one mystic formula, or rather pair of formulae, recurred so often
that Willett had it by heart before he had half finished his quest. It consisted of two
parallel columns, the left-hand one surmounted by the archaic symbol called "Dragon's
Head" and used in almanacs to indicate the ascending node, and the right-hand one
headed by a corresponding sign of "Dragon's Tail" or descending node. The appearance
of the whole was something like this, and almost unconsciously the doctor realised that
the second half was no more than the first written syllabically backward with the
exception of the final monosyllables and of the odd name Yog-Sothoth, which he had
come to recognise under various spellings from other things he had seen in connexion
with this horrible matter. The formulae were as follows--exactly so, as Willett is
abundantly able to testify--and the first one struck an odd note of uncomfortable latent
memory in his brain, which he recognised later when reviewing the events of that
horrible Good Friday of the previous year.
Y'AI 'NG'NGAH, YOG-SOTHOTH H'EE-L'GEB F'AI THRODOG UAAAH

OGTHROD AI'F GEB'L-EE'H YOG-SOTHOTH 'NGAH'NG AI'Y ZHRO

So haunting were these formulae, and so frequently did he come upon them, that before
the doctor knew it he was repeating them under his breath. Eventually, however, he felt
he had secured all the papers he could digest to advantage for the present; hence
resolved to examine no more till he could bring the sceptical alienists en masse for an
ampler and more systematic raid. He had still to find the hidden laboratory, so leaving
his valise in the lighted room he emerged again into the black noisome corridor whose
vaulting echoed ceaseless with that dull and hideous whine.

The next few rooms he tried were all abandoned, or filled only with crumbling boxes
and ominous-looking leaden coffins; but impressed him deeply with the magnitude of
Joseph Curwen's original operations. He thought of the slaves and seamen who had
disappeared, of the graves which had been violated in every part of the world, and of
what that final raiding party must have seen; and then he decided it was better not to
think any more. Once a great stone staircase mounted at his right, and he deduced that
this must have reached to one of the Curwen outbuildings--perhaps the famous stone
edifice with the high slit-like windows--provided the steps he had descended had led
from the steep-roofed farmhouse. Suddenly the walls seemed to fall away ahead, and
the stench and the wailing grew stronger. Willett saw that he had come upon a vast open
space, so great that his torchlight would not carry across it; and as he advanced he
encountered occasional stout pillars supporting the arches of the roof.

After a time he reached a circle of pillars grouped like the monoliths of Stonehenge,
with a large carved altar on a base of three steps in the centre; and so curious were the
carvings on that altar that he approached to study them with his electric light. But when
he saw what they were he shrank away shuddering, and did not stop to investigate the
dark stains which discoloured the upper surface and had spread down the sides in
occasional thin lines. Instead, he found the distant wall and traced it as it swept round in
a gigantic circle perforated by occasional black doorways and indented by a myriad of
shallow cells with iron gratings and wrist and ankle bonds on chains fastened to the
stone of the concave rear masonry. These cells were empty, but still the horrible odour
and the dismal moaning continued, more insistent now than ever, and seemingly varied
at time by a sort of slippery thumping.

From that frightful smell and that uncanny noise Willett's attention could no longer be
diverted. Both were plainer and more hideous in the great pillared hall than anywhere
else, and carried a vague impression of being far below, even in this dark nether world
of subterrene mystery. Before trying any of the black archways for steps leading further
down, the doctor cast his beam of light about the stone-flagged floor. It was very
loosely paved, and at irregular intervals there would occur a slab curiously pierced by
small holes in no definite arrangement, while at one point there lay a very long ladder
carelessly flung down. To this ladder, singularly enough, appeared to cling a
particularly large amount of the frightful odour which encompassed everything. As he
walked slowly about it suddenly occurred to Willett that both the noise and the odour
seemed strongest above the oddly pierced slabs, as if they might be crude trap-doors
leading down to some still deeper region of horror. Kneeling by one, he worked at it
with his hands, and found that with extreme difficulty he could budge it. At his touch
the moaning beneath ascended to a louder key, and only with vast trepidation did he
persevere in the lifting of the heavy stone. A stench unnameable now rose up from
below, and the doctor's head reeled dizzily as he laid back the slab and turned his torch
upon the exposed square yard of gaping blackness.

If he had expected a flight of steps to some wide gulf of ultimate abomination, Willett
was destined to be disappointed; for amidst that foetor and cracked whining he
discerned only the brick-faced top of a cylindrical well perhaps a yard and a half in
diameter and devoid of any ladder or other means of descent. As the light shone down,
the wailing changed suddenly to a series of horrible yelps; in conjunction with which
there came again that sound of blind, futile scrambling and slippery thumping. The
explorer trembled, unwilling even to imagine what noxious thing might be lurking in
that abyss, but in a moment mustered up the courage to peer over the rough-hewn brink;
lying at full length and holding the torch downward at arm's length to see what might lie
below. For a second he could distinguish nothing but the slimy, moss-grown brick walls
sinking illimitably into that half-tangible miasma of murk and foulness and anguished
frenzy; and then he saw that something dark was leaping clumsily and frantically up and
down at the bottom of the narrow shaft, which must have been from twenty to twenty-
five feet below the stone floor where he lay. The torch shook in his hand, but he looked
again to see what manner of living creature might be immured there in the darkness of
that unnatural well; left starving by young Ward through all the long month since the
doctors had taken him away, and clearly only one of a vast number prisoned in the
kindred wells whose pierced stone covers so thickly studded the floor of the great
vaulted cavern. Whatever the things were, they could not lie down in their cramped
spaces; but must have crouched and whined and waited and feebly leaped all those
hideous weeks since their master had abandoned them unheeded.

But Marinus Bicknell Willett was sorry that he looked again; for surgeon and veteran of
the dissecting-room though he was, he has not been the same since. It is hard to explain
just how a single sight of a tangible object with measurable dimensions could so shake
and change a man; and we may only say that there is about certain outlines and entities
a power of symbolism and suggestion which acts frightfully on a sensitive thinker's
perspective and whispers terrible hints of obscure cosmic relationships and unnameable
realities behind the protective illusions of common vision. In that second look Willett
saw such an outline or entity, for during the next few instants he was undoubtedly as
stark raving mad as any inmate of Dr. Waite's private hospital. He dropped the electric
torch from a hand drained of muscular power or nervous coördination, nor heeded the
sound of crunching teeth which told of its fate at the bottom of the pit. He screamed and
screamed and screamed in a voice whose falsetto panic no acquaintance of his would
ever have recognised; and though he could not rise to his feet he crawled and rolled
desperately away from the damp pavement where dozens of Tartarean wells poured
forth their exhausted whining and yelping to answer his own insane cries. He tore his
hands on the rough, loose stones, and many times bruised his head against the frequent
pillars, but still he kept on. Then at last he slowly came to himself in the utter blackness
and stench, and stopped his ears against the droning wail into which the burst of yelping
had subsided. He was drenched with perspiration and without means of producing a
light; stricken and unnerved in the abysmal blackness and horror, and crushed with a
memory he never could efface. Beneath him dozens of those things still lived, and from
one of those shafts the cover was removed. He knew that what he had seen could never
climb up the slippery walls, yet shuddered at the thought that some obscure foot-hold
might exist.

What the thing was, he would never tell. It was like some of the carvings on the hellish
altar, but it was alive. Nature had never made it in this form, for it was too palpably
unfinished. The deficiencies were of the most surprising sort, and the abnormalities of
proportion could not be described. Willett consents only to say that this type of thing
must have represented entities which Ward called up from imperfect salts, and which he
kept for servile or ritualistic purposes. If it had not had a certain significance, its image
would not have been carved on that damnable stone. It was not the worst thing depicted
on that stone--but Willett never opened the other pits. At the time, the first connected
idea in his mind was an idle paragraph from some of the old Curwen data he had
digested long before; a phrase used by Simon or Jedediah Orne in that portentous
confiscated letter to the bygone sorcerer:

'Certainely, there was Noth'g but ye liveliest Awfulness in that which H. rais'd upp from
What he cou'd gather onlie a part of.'

Then, horribly supplementing rather than displacing this image, there came a
recollection of those ancient lingering rumours anent the burned, twisted thing found in
the fields a week after the Curwen raid. Charles Ward had once told the doctor what old
Slocum said of that object; that it was neither thoroughly human, nor wholly allied to
any animal which Pawtuxet folk had ever seen or read about.

These words hummed in the doctor's mind as he rocked to and fro, squatting on the
nitrous stone floor. He tried to drive them out, and repeated the Lord's Prayer to himself;
eventually trailing off into a mnemonic hodge-podge like the modernistic Waste Land
of Mr. T. S. Eliot, and finally reverting to the oft-repeated dual formula he had lately
found in Ward's underground library: 'Y'ai 'ng'ngah, Yog-Sothoth' and so on till the final
underlined Zhro.

It seemed to soothe him, and he staggered to his feet after a time; lamenting bitterly his
fright-lost torch and looking wildly about for any gleam of light in the clutching
inkiness of the chilly air. Think he would not; but he strained his eyes in every direction
for some faint glint or reflection of the bright illumination he had left in the library.
After a while he thought he detected a suspicion of a glow infinitely far away, and
toward this he crawled in agonised caution on hands and knees amidst the stench and
howling, always feeling ahead lest he collide with the numerous great pillars or stumble
into the abominable pit he had uncovered.

Once his shaking fingers touched something which he knew must be the steps leading to
the hellish altar, and from this spot he recoiled in loathing. At another time he
encountered the pierced slab he had removed, and here his caution became almost
pitiful. But he did not come upon the dread aperture after all, nor did anything issue
from that aperture to detain him. What had been down there made no sound nor stir.
Evidently its crunching of the fallen electric torch had not been good for it. Each time
Willett's fingers felt a perforated slab he trembled. His passage over it would sometimes
increase the groaning below, but generally it would produce no effect at all, since he
moved very noiselessly. Several times during his progress the glow ahead diminished
perceptibly, and he realised that the various candles and lamps he had left must be
expiring one by one. The thought of being lost in utter darkness without matches amidst
this underground world of nightmare labyrinths impelled him to rise to his feet and run,
which he could safely do now that he had passed the open pit; for he knew that once the
light failed, his only hope of rescue and survival would lie in whatever relief party Mr.
Ward might send after missing him for a sufficient period. Presently, however, he
emerged from the open space into the narrower corridor and definitely located the glow
as coming from a door on his right. In a moment he had reached it and was standing
once more in young Ward's secret library, trembling with relief, and watching the
sputterings of that last lamp which had brought him to safety.

In another moment he was hastily filling the burned-out lamps from an oil supply he
had previously noticed, and when the room was bright again he looked about to see if he
might find a lantern for further exploration. For racked though he was with horror, his
sense of grim purpose was still uppermost; and he was firmly determined to leave no
stone unturned in his search for the hideous facts behind Charles Ward's bizarre
madness. Failing to find a lantern, he chose the smallest of the lamps to carry; also
filling his pockets with candles and matches, and taking with him a gallon can of oil,
which he proposed to keep for reserve use in whatever hidden laboratory he might
uncover beyond the terrible open space with its unclean altar and nameless covered
wells. To traverse that space again would require his utmost fortitude, but he knew it
must be done. Fortunately neither the frightful altar nor the opened shaft was near the
vast cell-indented wall which bounded the cavern area, and whose black mysterious
archways would form the next goals of a logical search.

So Willett went back to that great pillared hall of stench and anguished howling; turning
down his lamp to avoid any distant glimpse of the hellish altar, or of the uncovered pit
with the pierced stone slab beside it. Most of the black doorways led merely to small
chambers, some vacant and some evidently used as storerooms; and in several of the
latter he saw some very curious accumulations of various objects. One was packed with
rotting and dust-draped bales of spare clothing, and the explorer thrilled when he saw
that it was unmistakably the clothing of a century and a half before. In another room he
found numerous odds and ends of modern clothing, as if gradual provisions were being
made to equip a large body of men. But what he disliked most of all were the huge
copper vats which occasionally appeared; these, and the sinister incrustations upon
them. He liked them even less than the weirdly figured leaden bowls whose rims
retained such obnoxious deposits and around which clung repellent odours perceptible
above even the general noisomness of the crypt. When he had completed about half the
entire circuit of the wall he found another corridor like that from which he had come,
and out of which many doors opened. This he proceeded to investigate; and after
entering three rooms of medium size and of no significant contents, he came at last to a
large oblong apartment whose business-like tanks and tables, furnaces and modern
instruments, occasional books and endless shelves of jars and bottles proclaimed it
indeed the long-sought laboratory of Charles Ward--and no doubt of old Joseph Curwen
before him.

After lighting the three lamps which he found filled and ready, Dr. Willett examined the
place and all the appurtenances with the keenest interest; noting from the relative
quantities of various reagents on the shelves that young Ward's dominant concern must
have been with some branch of organic chemistry. On the whole, little could be learned
from the scientific ensemble, which included a gruesome-looking dissecting-table; so
that the room was really rather a disappointment. Among the books was a tattered old
copy of Borellus in black-letter, and it was weirdly interesting to note that Ward had
underlined the same passage whose marking had so perturbed good Mr. Merritt in
Curwen's farmhouse more than a century and half before. That old copy, of course, must
have perished along with the rest of Curwen's occult library in the final raid. Three
archways opened off the laboratory, and these the doctor proceeded to sample in turn.
From his cursory survey he saw that two led merely to small storerooms; but these he
canvassed with care, remarking the piles of coffins in various stages of damage and
shuddering violently at two or three of the few coffin-plates he could decipher. There
was much clothing also stored in these rooms, and several new and tightly nailed boxes
which he did not stop to investigate. Most interesting of all, perhaps, were some odd
bits which he judged to be fragments of old Joseph Curwen's laboratory appliances.
These had suffered damage at the hands of the raiders, but were still partly recognisable
as the chemical paraphernalia of the Georgian period.

The third archway led to a very sizeable chamber entirely lined with shelves and having
in the centre a table bearing two lamps. These lamps Willett lighted, and in their
brilliant glow studied the endless shelving which surrounded him. Some of the upper
levels were wholly vacant, but most of the space was filled with small odd-looking
leaden jars of two general types; one tall and without handles like a Grecian lekythos or
oil-jug, and the other with a single handle and proportioned like a Phaleron jug. All had
metal stoppers, and were covered with peculiar-looking symbols moulded in low relief.
In a moment the doctor noticed that these jugs were classified with great rigidity; all the
lekythoi being on one side of the room with a large wooden sign reading 'Custodes'
above them, and all the Phalerons on the other, correspondingly labelled with a sign
reading 'Materia'.

Each of the jars of jugs, except some on the upper shelves that turned out to be vacant,
bore a cardboard tag with a number apparently referring to a catalogue; and Willett
resolved to look for the latter presently. For the moment, however, he was more
interested in the nature of the array as a whole, and experimentally opened several of the
lekythoi and Phalerons at random with a view to a rough generalisation. The result was
invariable. Both types of jar contained a small quantity of a single kind of substance; a
fine dusty powder of very light weight and of many shades of dull, neutral colour. To
the colours which formed the only point of variation there was no apparent method of
disposal; and no distinction between what occurred in the lekythoi and what occurred in
the Phalerons. A bluish-grey powder might be by the side of a pinkish-white one, and
any one in a Phaleron might have its exact counterpart in a lekythos. The most
individual feature about the powders was their non-adhesiveness. Willett would pour
one into his hand, and upon returning it to its jug would find that no residue whatever
remained on his palm.

The meaning of the two signs puzzled him, and he wondered why this battery of
chemicals was separated so radically from those in glass jars on the shelves of the
laboratory proper. "Custodes", "Materia"; that was the Latin for "Guards" and
"Materials", respectively--and then there came a flash of memory as to where he had
seen that word "Guards" before in connexion with this dreadful mystery. It was, of
course, in the recent letter to Dr. Allen purporting to be from old Edwin Hutchinson;
and the phrase had read: 'There was no Neede to keep the Guards in Shape and eat'g off
their Heads, and it made Much to be founde in Case of Trouble, as you too welle
knowe.' What did this signify? But wait--was there not still another reference to
"guards" in this matter which he had failed wholly to recall when reading the
Hutchinson letter? Back in the old non-secretive days Ward had told him of the Eleazar
Smith diary recording the spying of Smith and Weeden on the Curwen farm, and in that
dreadful chronicle there had been a mention of conversations overheard before the old
wizard betook himself wholly beneath the earth. There had been, Smith and Weeden
insisted, terrible colloquies wherein figured Curwen, certain captives of his, and the
guards of those captives. Those guards, according to Hutchinson or his avatar, had
"eaten their heads off", so that now Dr. Allen did not keep them in shape. And if not in
shape, how save as the "salts" to which it appears this wizard band was engaged in
reducing as many human bodies or skeletons as they could?

So that was what these lekythoi contained; the monstrous fruit of unhallowed rites and
deeds, presumably won or cowed to such submission as to help, when called up by
some hellish incantation, in the defence of their blasphemous master or the questioning
of those who were not so willing? Willett shuddered at the thought of what he had been
pouring in and out of his hands, and for a moment felt an impulse to flee in panic from
that cavern of hideous shelves with their silent and perhaps watching sentinels. Then he
thought of the "Materia"--in the myriad Phaleron jugs on the other side of the room.
Salts too--and if not the salts of "guards", then the salts of what? God! Could it be
possible that here lay the mortal relics of half the titan thinkers of all the ages; snatched
by supreme ghouls from crypts where the world thought them safe, and subject to the
beck and call of madmen who sought to drain their knowledge for some still wilder end
whose ultimate effect would concern, as poor Charles had hinted in his frantic note, "all
civilisation, all natural law, perhaps even the fate of the solar system and the universe"?
And Marinus Bicknell Willett had sifted their dust through his hands!

Then he noticed a small door at the further end of the room, and calmed himself enough
to approach it and examine the crude sign chiselled above. It was only a symbol, but it
filled him with vague spiritual dread; for a morbid, dreaming friend of his had once
drawn it on paper and told him a few of the things it means in the dark abyss of sleep. It
was the sign of Koth, that dreamers see fixed above the archway of a certain black
tower standing alone in twilight--and Willett did not like what his friend Randolph
Carter had said of its powers. But a moment later he forgot the sign as he recognised a
new acrid odour in the stench-filled air. This was a chemical rather than animal smell,
and came clearly from the room beyond the door. And it was, unmistakably, the same
odour which had saturated Charles Ward's clothing on the day the doctors had taken
him away. So it was here that the youth had been interrupted by the final summons? He
was wiser that old Joseph Curwen, for he had not resisted. Willett, boldly determined to
penetrate every wonder and nightmare this nether realm might contain, seized the small
lamp and crossed the threshold. A wave of nameless fright rolled out to meet him, but
he yielded to no whim and deferred to no intuition. There was nothing alive here to
harm him, and he would not be stayed in his piercing of the eldritch cloud which
engulfed his patient.

The room beyond the door was of medium size, and had no furniture save a table, a
single chair, and two groups of curious machines with clamps and wheels, which Willett
recognised after a moment as mediaeval instruments of torture. On one side of the door
stood a rack of savage whips, above which were some shelves bearing empty rows of
shallow pedestalled cups of lead shaped like Grecian kylikes. On the other side was the
table; with a powerful Argand lamp, a pad and pencil, and two of the stoppered lekythoi
from the shelves outside set down at irregular places as if temporarily or in haste.
Willett lighted the lamp and looked carefully at the pad, to see what notes Ward might
have been jotting down when interrupted; but found nothing more intelligible than the
following disjointed fragments in that crabbed Curwen chirography, which shed no light
on the case as a whole:

'B. dy'd not. Escap'd into walls and founde Place below.' 'Sawe olde V. saye ye Sabaoth
and learnt yee Way.' 'Rais'd Yog-Sothoth thrice and was ye nexte Day deliver'd.' 'F.
soughte to wipe out all know'g howe to raise Those from Outside.'

As the strong Argand blaze lit up the entire chamber the doctor saw that the wall
opposite the door, between the two groups of torturing appliances in the corners, was
covered with pegs from which hung a set of shapeless-looking robes of a rather dismal
yellowish-white. But far more interesting were the two vacant walls, both of which were
thickly covered with mystic symbols and formulae roughly chiselled in the smooth
dressed stone. The damp floor also bore marks of carving; and with but little difficulty
Willett deciphered a huge pentagram in the centre, with a plain circle about three feet
wide half way between this and each corner. In one of these four circles, near where a
yellowish robe had been flung carelessly down, there stood a shallow kylix of the sort
found on the shelves above the whip-rack; and just outside the periphery was one of the
Phaleron jugs from the shelves in the other room, its tag numbered 118. This was
unstoppered, and proved upon inspection to be empty; but the explorer saw with a
shiver that the kylix was not. Within its shallow area, and saved from scattering only by
the absence of wind in this sequestered cavern, lay a small amount of a dry, dull-
greenish efflorescent powder which must have belonged in the jug; and Willett almost
reeled at the implications that came sweeping over him as he correlated little by little
the several elements and antecedents of the scene. The whips and the instruments of
torture, the dust or salts from the jug of "Materia", the two lekythoi from the "Custodes"
shelf, the robes, the formulae on the walls, the notes on the pad, the hints from letters
and legends, and the thousand glimpses, doubts, and suppositions which had come to
torment the friends and parents of Charles Ward--all these engulfed the doctor in a tidal
wave of horror as he looked at that dry greenish powder outspread in the pedestalled
leaden kylix on the floor.

With an effort, however, Willett pulled himself together and began studying the
formulae chiselled on the walls. From the stained and incrusted letters it was obvious
that they were carved in Joseph Curwen's time, and their text was such as to be vaguely
familiar to one who had read much Curwen material or delved extensively into the
history of magic. One the doctor clearly recognised as what Mrs. Ward heard her son
chanting on that ominous Good Friday a year before, and what an authority had told
him was a very terrible invocation addressed to secret gods outside the normal spheres.
It was not spelled here exactly as Mrs. Ward had set it down from memory, nor yet as
the authority had shewn it to him in the forbidden pages of "Eliphas Levi"; but its
identity was unmistakable, and such words as Sabaoth, Metraton, Almousin, and
Zariatnatmik sent a shudder of fright through the search who had seen and felt so much
of cosmic abomination just around the corner.
This was on the left-hand wall as one entered the room. The right-hand wall was no less
thickly inscribed, and Willett felt a start of recognition when he came up the pair of
formulae so frequently occurring in the recent notes in the library. They were, roughly
speaking, the same; with the ancient symbols of "Dragon's Head" and "Dragon's Tail"
heading them as in Ward's scribblings. But the spelling differed quite widely from that
of the modern versions, as if old Curwen had had a different way of recording sound, or
as if later study had evolved more powerful and perfected variants of the invocations in
question. The doctor tried to reconcile the chiselled version with the one which still ran
persistently in his head, and found it hard to do. Where the script he had memorised
began "Y'ai 'ng'ngah, Yog-Sothoth", this epigraph started out as "Aye, engengah,
Yogge-Sothotha"; which to his mind would seriously interfere with the syllabification
of the second word.

Ground as the later text was into his consciousness, the discrepancy disturbed him; and
he found himself chanting the first of the formulae aloud in an effort to square the sound
he conceived with the letters he found carved. Weird and menacing in that abyss of
antique blasphemy rang his voice; its accents keyed to a droning sing-song either
through the spell of the past and the unknown, or through the hellish example of that
dull, godless wail from the pits whose inhuman cadences rose and fell rhythmically in
the distance through the stench and the darkness.

Y'AI 'NG'NGAH, YOG-SOTHOTH H'EE-L'GEB F'AI THRODOG UAAAH!

But what was this cold wind which had sprung into life at the very outset of the chant?
The lamps were sputtering woefully, and the gloom grew so dense that the letters on the
wall nearly faded from sight. There was smoke, too, and an acrid odour which quite
drowned out the stench from the far-away wells; an odour like that he had smelt before,
yet infinitely stronger and more pungent. He turned from the inscriptions to face the
room with its bizarre contents, and saw that the kylix on the floor, in which the ominous
efflorescent powder had lain, was giving forth a cloud of thick, greenish-black vapour
of surprising volume and opacity. That powder--Great God! it had come from the shelf
of "Materia"--what was it doing now, and what had started it? The formula he had been
chanting--the first of the pair--Dragon's Head, ascending node--Blessed Saviour, could
it be ...

The doctor reeled, and through his head raced wildly disjointed scraps from all he had
seen, heard, and read of the frightful case of Joseph Curwen and Charles Dexter Ward.
"I say to you againe, doe not call up Any that you can not put downe...Have ye Wordes
for laying at all times readie, and stopp not to be sure when there is any Doubte of
Whom you have...3 Talkes with What was therein inhum'd ..." Mercy of Heaven, what
is that shape behind the parting smoke?

Marinus Bicknell Willett has not hope that any part of his tale will be believed except
by certain sympathetic friends, hence he has made no attempt to tell it beyond his most
intimate circle. Only a few outsiders have ever heard it repeated, and of these the
majority laugh and remark that the doctor surely is getting old. He has been advised to
take a long vacation and to shun future cases dealing with mental disturbance. But Mr.
Ward knows that the veteran physician speaks only a horrible truth. Did not he himself
see the noisome aperture in the bungalow cellar? Did not Willett send him home
overcome and ill at eleven o'clock that portentous morning? Did he not telephone the
doctor in vain that evening, and again the next day, and had he not driven to the
bungalow itself on that following noon, finding his friend unconscious but unharmed on
one of the beds upstairs? Willett had been breathing stertorously, and opened his eyes
slowly when Mr. Ward gave him some brandy fetched from the car. Then he shuddered
and screamed, crying out, 'That beard...those eyes...God, who are you?' A very strange
thing to say to a trim, blue-eyed, clean-shaven gentleman whom he had known from the
latter's boyhood.

In the bright noon sunlight the bungalow was unchanged since the previous morning.
Willett's clothing bore no disarrangement beyond certain smudges and worn places at
the knees, and only a faint acrid odour reminded Mr. Ward of what he had smelt on his
son that day he was taken to the hospital. The doctor's flashlight was missing, but his
valise was safely there, as empty as when he had brought it. Before indulging in any
explanations, and obviously with great moral effort, Willett staggered dizzily down to
the cellar and tried the fateful platform before the tubs. It was unyielding. Crossing to
where he had left his yet unused tool satchel the day before, he obtained a chisel and
began to pry up the stubborn planks one by one. Underneath the smooth concrete was
still visible, but of any opening or perforation there was no longer a trace. Nothing
yawned this time to sicken the mystified father who had followed the doctor downstairs;
only the smooth concrete underneath the planks--no noisome well, no world of
subterrene horrors, no secret library, no Curwen papers, no nightmare pits of stench and
howling, no laboratory or shelves or chiselled formulae, no...Dr. Willett turned pale, and
clutched at the younger man. 'Yesterday,' he asked softly, 'did you see it here...and smell
it?' And when Mr. Ward, himself transfixed with dread and wonder, found strength to
nod an affirmative, the physician gave a sound half a sigh and half a gasp, and nodded
in turn. 'Then I will tell you', he said.

So for an hour, in the sunniest room they could find upstairs, the physician whispered
his frightful tale to the wondering father. There was nothing to relate beyond the
looming up of that form when the greenish-black vapour from the kylix parted, and
Willett was too tired to ask himself what had really occurred. There were futile,
bewildered head-shakings from both men, and once Mr. Ward ventured a hushed
suggestion, 'Do you suppose it would be of any use to dig?' The doctor was silent, for it
seemed hardly fitting for any human brain to answer when powers of unknown spheres
had so vitally encroached on this side of the Great Abyss. Again Mr. Ward asked, 'But
where did it go? It brought you here, you know, and it sealed up the hole somehow.'
And Willett again let silence answer for him.

But after all, this was not the final phase of the matter. Reaching for his handkerchief
before rising to leave, Dr. Willett's fingers closed upon a piece of paper in his pocket
which had not been there before, and which was companioned by the candles and
matches he had seized in the vanished vault. It was a common sheet, torn obviously
from the cheap pad in that fabulous room of horror somewhere underground, and the
writing upon it was that of an ordinary lead pencil--doubtless the one which had lain
beside the pad. It was folded very carelessly, and beyond the faint acrid scent of the
cryptic chamber bore no print or mark of any world but this. But in the text itself it did
indeed reek with wonder; for here was no script of any wholesome age, but the laboured
strokes of mediaeval darkness, scarcely legible to the laymen who now strained over it,
yet having combinations of symbols which seemed vaguely familiar. The briefly
scrawled message was this, and its mystery lent purpose to the shaken pair, who
forthwith walked steadily out to the Ward car and gave orders to be driven first to a
quiet dining place and then to the John Hay Library on the hill.

At the library it was easy to find good manuals of palaeography, and over these the two
men puzzled till the lights of evening shone out from the great chandelier. In the end
they found what was needed. The letters were indeed no fantastic invention, but the
normal script of a very dark period. They were the pointed Saxon minuscules of the
eighth or ninth century A.D., and brought with them memories of an uncouth time when
under a fresh Christian veneer ancient faiths and ancient rites stirred stealthily, and the
pale moon of Britain looked sometimes on strange deeds in the Roman ruins of
Caerleon and Hexham, and by the towers along Hadrian's crumbling wall. The words
were in such Latin as a barbarous age might remember--'Corvinus necandus est.
Cadaver aq(ua) forti dissolvendum, nec aliq(ui)d retinendum. Tace ut potes.'--which
may roughly be translated, "Curwen must be killed. The body must be dissolved in aqua
fortis, nor must anything be retained. Keep silence as best you are able."

Willett and Mr. Ward were mute and baffled. They had met the unknown, and found
that they lacked emotions to respond to it as they vaguely believed they ought. With
Willett, especially, the capacity for receiving fresh impressions of awe was well-nigh
exhausted; and both men sat still and helpless till the closing of the library forced them
to leave. Then they drove listlessly to the Ward mansion in Prospect Street, and talked
to no purpose into the night. The doctor rested toward morning, but did not go home.
And he was still there Sunday noon when a telephone message came from the detectives
who had been assigned to look up Dr. Allen.

Mr. Ward, who was pacing nervously about in a dressing-gown, answered the call in
person; and told the men to come up early the next day when he heard their report was
almost ready. Both Willett and he were glad that this phase of the matter was taking
form, for whatever the origin of the strange minuscule message, it seemed certain the
"Curwen" who must be destroyed could be no other than the bearded and spectacled
stranger. Charles had feared this man, and had said in the frantic note that he must be
killed and dissolved in acid. Allen, moreover, had been receiving letters from the
strange wizards in Europe under the name of Curwen, and palpably regarded himself as
an avatar of the bygone necromancer. And now from a fresh and unknown source had
come a message saying that "Curwen" must be killed and dissolved in acid. The linkage
was too unmistakable to be factitious; and besides, was not Allen planning to murder
young Ward upon the advice of the creature called Hutchinson? Of course, the letter
they had seen had never reached the bearded stranger; but from its text they could see
that Allen had already formed plans for dealing with the youth if he grew too
"squeamish". Without doubt, Allen must be apprehended; and even if the most drastic
directions were not carried out, he must be placed where he could inflict no harm upon
Charles Ward.

That afternoon, hoping against hope to extract some gleam of information anent the
inmost mysteries from the only available one capable of giving it, the father and the
doctor went down the bay and called on young Charles at the hospital. Simply and
gravely Willett told him all he had found, and noticed how pale he turned as each
description made certain the truth of the discovery. The physician employed as much
dramatic effect as he could, and watched for a wincing on Charles's part when he
approached the matter of the covered pits and the nameless hybrids within. But Ward
did not wince. Willett paused, and his voice grew indignant as he spoke of how the
things were starving. He taxed the youth with shocking inhumanity, and shivered when
only a sardonic laugh came in reply. For Charles, having dropped as useless his
pretence that the crypt did not exist, seemed to see some ghastly jest in this affair; and
chucked hoarsely at something which amused him. Then he whispered, in accents
doubly terrible because of the cracked voice he used, 'Damn 'em, they do eat, but they
don't need to! That's the rare part! A month, you say, without food? Lud, Sir, you be
modest! D'ye know, that was the joke on poor old Whipple with his virtuous bluster!
Kill everything off, would he? Why, damme, he was half-deaf with noise from Outside
and never saw or heard aught from the wells! He never dreamed they were there at all!
Devil take ye, those cursed things have been howling down there ever since Curwen
was done for a hundred and fifty-seven years gone!'

But no more than this could Willett get from the youth. Horrified, yet almost convinced
against his will, he went on with his tale in the hope that some incident might startle his
auditor out of the mad composure he maintained. Looking at the youth's face, the doctor
could not but feel a kind of terror at the changes which recent months had wrought.
Truly, the boy had drawn down nameless horrors from the skies. When the room with
the formulae and the greenish dust was mentioned, Charles shewed his first sign of
animation. A quizzical look overspread his face as he heard what Willett had read on the
pad, and he ventured the mild statement that those notes were old ones, of no possible
significance to anyone not deeply initiated in the history of magic. But, he added, 'had
you but known the words to bring up that which I had out in the cup, you had not been
here to tell me this. 'Twas Number 118, and I conceive you would have shook had you
looked it up in my list in t'other room. 'Twas never raised by me, but I meant to have it
up that day you came to invite me hither.'

Then Willett told of the formula he had spoken and of the greenish-black smoke which
had arisen; and as he did so he saw true fear dawn for the first time on Charles Ward's
face. 'It came, and you be here alive?' As Ward croaked the words his voice seemed
almost to burst free of its trammels and sink to cavernous abysses of uncanny
resonance. Willett, gifted with a flash of inspiration, believed he saw the situation, and
wove into his reply a caution from a letter he remembered. 'No. 118, you say? But don't
forget that stones are all changed now in nine grounds out of ten. You are never sure till
you question!' And then, without warning, he drew forth the minuscule message and
flashed it before the patient's eyes. He could have wished no stronger result, for Charles
Ward fainted forthwith.

All this conversation, of course, had been conducted with the greatest secrecy lest the
resident alienists accuse the father and the physician of encouraging a madman in his
delusions. Unaided, too, Dr. Willett and Mr. Ward picked up the stricken youth and
placed him on the couch. In reviving, the patient mumbled many times of some word
which he must get to Orne and Hutchinson at once; so when his consciousness seemed
fully back the doctor told him that of those strange creatures at least one was his bitter
enemy, and had given Dr. Allen advice for his assassination. This revelation produced
no visible effect, and before it was made the visitors could see that their host had
already the look of a hunted man. After that he would converse no more, so Willett and
the father departed presently; leaving behind a caution against the bearded Allen, to
which the youth only replied that this individual was very safely taken care of, and
could do no one any harm even if he wished. This was said with an almost evil chuckle
very painful to hear. They did not worry about any communications Charles might
indite to that monstrous pair in Europe, since they knew that the hospital authorities
seized all outgoing mail for censorship and would pass no wild or outré-looking
missive.

There is, however, a curious sequel to the matter of Orne and Hutchinson, if such
indeed the exiled wizards were. Moved by some vague presentiment amidst the horrors
of that period, Willett arranged with an international press-cutting bureau for accounts
of notable current crimes and accidents in Prague and in eastern Transylvania; and after
six months believed that he had found two very significant things amongst the
multifarious items he received and had translated. One was the total wrecking of a
house by night in the oldest quarter of Prague, and the disappearance of the evil old man
called Josef Nadek, who had dwelt in it alone ever since anyone could remember. The
other was a titan explosion in the Transylvanian mountains east of Rakus, and the utter
extirpation with all its inmates of the ill-regarded Castle Ferenczy, whose master was so
badly spoken of by peasants and soldiery alike that he would shortly have been
summoned to Bucharest for serious questioning had not this incident cut off a career
already so long as to antedate all common memory. Willett maintains that the hand
which wrote those minuscules was able to wield stronger weapons as well; and that
while Curwen was left to him to dispose of, the writer felt able to find and deal with
Orne and Hutchinson itself. Of what their fate may have been the doctor strives
sedulously not to think.

The following morning Dr. Willett hastened to the Ward home to be present when the
detectives arrived. Allen's destruction or imprisonment--or Curwen's if one might regard
the tacit claim to reincarnation as valid--he felt must be accomplished at any cost, and
he communicated this conviction to Mr. Ward as they sat waiting for the men to come.
They were downstairs this time, for the upper parts of the house were beginning to be
shunned because of a particular nauseousness which hung indefinitely about; a
nauseousness which the older servants connected with some curse left by the vanished
Curwen portrait.

At nine o'clock the three detectives presented themselves and immediately delivered all
that they had to say. They had not, regrettably enough, located the Brava Tony Gomes
as they had wished, nor had they found the least trace of Dr. Allen's source or present
whereabouts; but they had managed to unearth a considerable number of local
impressions and facts concerning the reticent stranger. Allen had struck Pawtuxet
people as a vaguely unnatural being, and there was a universal belief that his thick
sandy beard was either dyed or false--a belief conclusively upheld by the finding of
such a false beard, together with a pair of dark glasses, in his room at the fateful
bungalow. His voice, Mr. Ward could well testify from his one telephone conversation,
had a depth and hollowness that could not be forgotten; and his glanced seemed malign
even through his smoked and horn-rimmed glasses. One shopkeeper, in the course of
negotiations, had seen a specimen of his handwriting and declared it was very queer and
crabbed; this being confirmed by pencilled notes of no clear meaning found in his room
and identified by the merchant. In connexion with the vampirism rumours of the
preceding summer, a majority of the gossips believed that Allen rather than Ward was
the actual vampire. Statements were also obtained from the officials who had visited the
bungalow after the unpleasant incident of the motor truck robbery. They had felt less of
the sinister in Dr. Allen, but had recognised him as the dominant figure in the queer
shadowy cottage. The place had been too dark for them to observe him clearly, but they
would know him again if they saw him. His beard had looked odd, and they thought he
had some slight scar above his dark spectacled right eye. As for the detectives' search of
Allen's room, it yielded nothing definite save the beard and glasses, and several
pencilled notes in a crabbed writing which Willett at once saw was identical with that
shared by the old Curwen manuscripts and by the voluminous recent notes of young
Ward found in the vanished catacombs of horror.

Dr. Willett and Mr. Ward caught something of a profound, subtle, and insidious cosmic
fear from this data as it was gradually unfolded, and almost trembled in following up
the vague, mad thought which had simultaneously reached their minds. The false beard
and glasses--the crabbed Curwen penmanship--the old portrait and its tiny scar--and the
altered youth in the hospital with such a scar--that deep, hollow voice on the telephone--
was it not of this that Mr. Ward was reminded when his son barked forth those pitiable
tones to which he now claimed to be reduced? Who had ever seen Charles and Allen
together? Yes, the officials had once, but who later on? Was it not when Allen left that
Charles suddenly lost his growing fright and began to live wholly at the bungalow?
Curwen--Allen--Ward--in what blasphemous and abominable fusion had two ages and
two persons become involved? That damnable resemblance of the picture to Charles--
had it not used to stare and stare, and follow the boy around the room with its eyes?
Why, too, did both Allen and Charles copy Joseph Curwen's handwriting, even when
alone and off guard? And then the frightful work of those people--the lost crypt of
horrors that had aged the doctor overnight; the starving monsters in the noisome pits;
the awful formula which had yielded such nameless results; the message in minuscules
found in Willett's pocket; the papers and the letters and all the talk of graves and "salts"
and discoveries--whither did everything lead? In the end Mr. Ward did the most
sensible thing. Steeling himself against any realisation of why he did it, he gave the
detectives an article to be shewn to such Pawtuxet shopkeepers as had seen the
portentous Dr. Allen. That article was a photograph of his luckless son, on which he
now carefully drew in ink the pair of heavy glasses and the black pointed beard which
the men had brought from Allen's room.

For two hours he waited with the doctor in the oppressive house where fear and miasma
were slowly gathering as the empty panel in the upstairs library leered and leered and
leered. Then the men returned. Yes. The altered photograph was a very passable
likeness of Dr. Allen. Mr. Ward turned pale, and Willett wiped a suddenly dampened
brow with his handkerchief. Allen--Ward--Curwen--it was becoming too hideous for
coherent thought. What had the boy called out of the void, and what had it done to him?
What, really, had happened from first to last? Who was this Allen who sought to kill
Charles as too "squeamish", and why had his destined victim said in the postscript to
that frantic letter that he must be so completely obliterated in acid? Why, too, had the
minuscule message, of whose origin no one dared think, said that "Curwen" must be
likewise obliterated? What was the change, and when had the final stage occurred? That
day when his frantic note was received--he had been nervous all the morning, then there
was an alteration. He had slipped out unseen and swaggered boldly in past the men
hired to guard him. That was the time, when he was out. But no--had he not cried out in
terror as he entered his study--this very room? What had he found there? Or wait--what
had found him? That simulacrum which brushed boldly in without having been seen to
go--was that an alien shadow and a horror forcing itself upon a trembling figure which
had never gone out at all? Had not the butler spoken of queer noises?

Willett rang for the man and asked him some low-toned questions. It had, surely
enough, been a bad business. There had been noises--a cry, a gasp, a choking, and a sort
of clattering or creaking or thumping, or all of these. And Mr. Charles was not the same
when he stalked out without a word. The butler shivered as he spoke, and sniffed at the
heavy air that blew down from some open window upstairs. Terror had settled definitely
upon the house, and only the business-like detectives failed to imbibe a full measure of
it. Even they were restless, for this case had held vague elements in the background
which pleased them not at all. Dr. Willett was thinking deeply and rapidly, and his
thoughts were terrible ones. Now and then he would almost break into muttering as he
ran over in his head a new, appalling, and increasingly conclusive chain of nightmare
happenings.

Then Mr. Ward made a sign that the conference was over, and everyone save him and
the doctor left the room. It was noon now, but shadows as of coming night seemed to
engulf the phantom-haunted mansion. Willett began talking very seriously to his host,
and urged that he leave a great deal of the future investigation to him. There would be,
he predicted, certain obnoxious elements which a friend could bear better than a
relative. As family physician he must have a free hand, and the first thing he required
was a period alone and undisturbed in the abandoned library upstairs, where the ancient
overmantel had gathered about itself an aura of noisome horror more intense than when
Joseph Curwen's features themselves glanced slyly down from the painted panel.

Mr. Ward, dazed by the flood of grotesque morbidities and unthinkably maddening
suggestions that poured in upon him from every side, could only acquiesce; and half an
hour later the doctor was locked in the shunned room with the panelling from Olney
Court. The father, listening outside, heard fumbling sounds of moving and rummaging
as the moments passed; and finally a wrench and a creak, as if a tight cupboard door
were being opened. Then there was a muffled cry, a kind of snorting choke, and a hasty
slamming of whatever had been opened. Almost at once the key rattled and Willett
appeared in the hall, haggard and ghastly, and demanding wood for the real fireplace on
the south wall of the room. The furnace was not enough, he said; and the electric log
had little practical use. Longing yet not daring to ask questions, Mr. Ward gave the
requisite orders and a man brought some stout pine logs, shuddering as he entered the
tainted air of the library to place them in the grate. Willett meanwhile had gone up to the
dismantled laboratory and brought down a few odds and ends not included in the
moving of the July before. They were in a covered basket, and Mr. Ward never saw
what they were.

Then the doctor locked himself in the library once more, and by the clouds of smoke
which rolled down past the windows from the chimney it was known that he had lighted
the fire. Later, after a great rustling of newspapers, that odd wrench and creaking were
heard again; followed by a thumping which none of the eavesdroppers liked. Thereafter
two suppressed cries of Willett's were heard, and hard upon these came a swishing
rustle of indefinable hatefulness. Finally the smoke that the wind beat down from the
chimney grew very dark and acrid, and everyone wished that the weather had spared
them this choking and venomous inundation of peculiar fumes. Mr. Ward's head reeled,
and the servants all clustered together in a knot to watch the horrible black smoke
swoop down. After an age of waiting the vapours seemed to lighted, and half-formless
sounds of scraping, sweeping, and other minor operations were heard behind the bolted
door. And at last, after the slamming of some cupboard within, Willett made his
appearance--sad, pale, and haggard, and bearing the cloth-draped basket he had taken
from the upstairs laboratory. He had left the window open, and into that once accursed
room was pouring a wealth of pure, wholesome air to mix with a queer new smell of
disinfectants. The ancient overmantel still lingered; but it seemed robbed of malignity
now, and rose as calm and stately in its white panelling as if it had never borne the
picture of Joseph Curwen. Night was coming on, yet this time its shadows held no latent
fright, but only a gentle melancholy. Of what he had done the doctor would never
speak. To Mr. Ward he said, 'I can answer no questions, but I will say that there are
different kinds of magic. I have made a great purgation, and those in this house will
sleep the better for it.'

That Dr. Willett's "purgation" had been an ordeal almost as nerve-racking in its way as
his hideous wandering in the vanished crypt is shewn by the fact that the elderly
physician gave out completely as soon as he reached home that evening. For three days
he rested constantly in his room, though servants later muttered something about having
heard him after midnight on Wednesday, when the outer door softly opened and closed
with phenomenal softness. Servants' imaginations, fortunately, are limited, else
comment might have been excited by an item in Thursday's Evening Bulletin which ran
as follows:

North End Ghouls Again Active

After a lull of ten months since the dastardly vandalism in the Weeden lot at the North
Burial Ground, a nocturnal prowler was glimpsed early this morning in the same
cemetery by Robert Hart, the night watchman. Happening to glance for a moment from
his shelter at about 2 a.m., Hart observed the glow of a lantern or pocket torch not far to
the northwest, and upon opening the door detected the figure of a man with a trowel
very plainly silhouetted against a nearby electric light. At once starting in pursuit, he
saw the figure dart hurriedly toward the main entrance, gaining the street and losing
himself among the shadows before approach or capture was possible.

Like the first of the ghouls active during the past year, this intruder had done no real
damage before detection. A vacant part of the Ward lot shewed signs of a little
superficial digging, but nothing even nearly the size of a grave had been attempted, and
no previous grave had been disturbed.

Hart, who cannot describe the prowler except as a small man probably having a full
beard, inclines to the view that all three of the digging incidents have a common source;
but police from the Second Station think otherwise on account of the savage nature of
the second incident, where an ancient coffin was removed and its headstone violently
shattered.
The first of the incidents, in which it is thought an attempt to bury something was
frustrated, occurred a year ago last March, and has been attributed to bootleggers
seeking a cache. It is possible, says Sergt. Riley, that this third affair is of similar nature.
Officers at the Second Station are taking especial pains to capture the gang of
miscreants responsible for these repeated outrages.

All day Thursday Dr. Willett rested as if recuperating from something past or nerving
himself for something to come. In the evening he wrote a note to Mr. Ward, which was
delivered the next morning and which caused the half-dazed parent to ponder long and
deeply. Mr. Ward had not been able to go down to business since the shock of Monday
with its baffling reports and its sinister "purgation", but he found something calming
about the doctor's letter in spite of the despair it seemed to promise and the fresh
mysteries it seemed to evoke.

10 Barnes St., Providence, R. I.

April 12, 1928.

Dear Theodore:-

I feel that I must say a word to you before doing what I am going to do tomorrow. It
will conclude the terrible business we have been going through (for I feel that no spade
is ever likely to reach that monstrous place we know of), but I'm afraid it won't set your
mind at rest unless I expressly assure you how very conclusive it is.

You have known me ever since you were a small boy, so I think you will not distrust me
when I hint that some matters are best left undecided and unexplored. It is better that
you attempt no further speculation as to Charles's case, and almost imperative that you
tell his mother nothing more than she already suspects. When I call on you tomorrow
Charles will have escaped. That is all which need remain in anyone's mind. He was
mad, and he escaped. You can tell his mother gently and gradually about the mad part
when you stop sending the typed notes in his name. I'd advise you to join her in Atlantic
City and take a rest yourself. God knows you need one after this shock, as I do myself. I
am going South for a while to calm down and brace up.

So don't ask me any questions when I call. It may be that something will go wrong, but
I'll tell you if it does. I don't think it will. There will be nothing more to worry about, for
Charles will be very, very safe. He is now--safer than you dream. You need hold no
fears about Allen, and who or what he is. He forms as much a part of the past as Joseph
Curwen's picture, and when I ring your doorbell you may feel certain that there is no
such person. And what wrote that minuscule message will never trouble you or yours.

But you must steel yourself to melancholy, and prepare your wife to do the same. I must
tell you frankly that Charles's escape will not mean his restoration to you. He has been
afflicted with a peculiar disease, as you must realise from the subtle physical as well as
mental changes in him, and you must not hope to see him again. Have only this
consolation--that he was never a fiend or even truly a madman, but only an eager,
studious, and curious boy whose love of mystery and of the past was his undoing. He
stumbled on things no mortal ought ever to know, and reached back through the years
as no one ever should reach; and something came out of those years to engulf him.
And now comes the matter in which I must ask you to trust me most of all. For there
will be, indeed, no uncertainty about Charles's fate. In about a year, say, you can if you
wish devise a suitable account of the end; for the boy will be no more. You can put up a
stone in your lot at the North Burial Ground exactly ten feet west of your father's and
facing the same way, and that will mark the true resting-place of your son. Nor need you
fear that it will mark any abnormality or changeling. The ashes in that grave will be
those of your own unaltered bone and sinew--of the real Charles Dexter Ward whose
mind you watched from infancy--the real Charles with the olive-mark on his hip and
without the black witch-mark on his chest or the pit on his forehead. The Charles who
never did actual evil, and who will have paid with his life for his "squeamishness".

That is all. Charles will have escaped, and a year from now you can put up his stone. Do
not question me tomorrow. And believe that the honour of your ancient family remains
untainted now, as it has been at all times in the past.

With profoundest sympathy, and exhortations to fortitude, calmness, and resignation, I

am ever

Sincerely your friend, Marinus B. Willett.

So on the morning of Friday, April 13, 1928, Marinus Bicknell Willett visited the room
of Charles Dexter Ward at Dr. Waite's private hospital on Conanicut Island. The youth,
though making no attempt to evade his caller, was in a sullen mood; and seemed
disinclined to open the conversation which Willett obviously desired. The doctor's
discovery of the crypt and his monstrous experience therein had of course created a new
source of embarrassment, so that both hesitated perceptibly after the interchange of a
few strained formalities. Then a new element of constraint crept in, as Ward seemed to
read behind the doctor's mask-like face a terrible purpose which had never been there
before. The patient quailed, conscious that since the last visit there had been a change
whereby the solicitous family physician had given place to the ruthless and implacable
avenger.

Ward actually turned pale, and the doctor was the first to speak. 'More,' he said, 'has
been found out, and I must warn you fairly that a reckoning is due.'

'Digging again, and coming upon more poor starving pets?' was the ironic reply. It was
evident that the youth meant to shew bravado to the last.

'No,' Willett slowly rejoined, 'this time I did not have to dig. We have had men looking
up Dr. Allen, and they found the false beard and spectacles in the bungalow.'

'Excellent,' commented the disquieted host in an effort to be wittily insulting, 'and I trust
they proved more becoming than the beard and glasses you now have on!'

'They would become you very well,' came the even and studied response, 'as indeed
they seem to have done.'

As Willett said this, it almost seemed as though a cloud passed over the sun; though
there was no change in the shadows on the floor. Then Ward ventured:
'And is this what asks so hotly for a reckoning? Suppose a man does find it now and
then useful to be twofold?'

'No', said Willett gravely, 'again you are wrong. It is no business of mine if any man
seeks duality; provided he has any right to exist at all, and provided he does not destroy
what called him out of space.'

Ward now started violently. 'Well, Sir, what have ye found, and what d'ye want of me?'

The doctor let a little time elapse before replying, as if choosing his words for an
effective answer.

'I have found', he finally intoned, 'something in a cupboard behind an ancient

overmantel where a picture once was, and I have burned it and buried the ashes where
the grave of Charles Dexter Ward ought to be.'

The madman choked and sprang from the chair in which he had been sitting:

'Damn ye, who did ye tell--and who'll believe it was he after these two full months, with
me alive? What d'ye mean to do?'

Willett, though a small man, actually took on a kind of judicial majesty as he calmed the
patient with a gesture.

'I have told no one. This is no common case--it is a madness out of time and a horror
from beyond the spheres which no police or lawyers or courts or alienists could ever
fathom or grapple with. Thank God some chance has left inside me the spark of
imagination, that I might not go astray in thinking out this thing. You cannot deceive
me, Joseph Curwen, for I know that your accursed magic is true!

'I know how you wove the spell that brooded outside the years and fastened on your
double and descendant; I know how you drew him into the past and got him to raise you
up from your detestable grave; I know how he kept you hidden in his laboratory while
you studied modern things and roved abroad as a vampire by night, and how you later
shewed yourself in beard and glasses that no one might wonder at your godless likeness
to him; I know what you resolved to do when he balked at your monstrous rifling of the
world's tombs, and at what you planned afterward , and I know how you did it.

'You left off your beard and glasses and fooled the guards around the house. They
thought it was he who went in, and they thought it was he who came out when you had
strangled and hidden him. But you hadn't reckoned on the different contents of two
minds. You were a fool, Joseph Curwen, to fancy that a mere visual identity would be
enough. Why didn't you think of the speech and the voice and the handwriting? It hasn't
worked, you see, after all. You know better than I who or what wrote that message in
minuscules, but I will warn you it was not written in vain. There are abominations and
blasphemies which must be stamped out, and I believe that the writer of those words
will attend to Orne and Hutchinson. One of those creatures wrote you once, "do not call
up any that you can not put down". You were undone once before, perhaps in that very
way, and it may be that your own evil magic will undo you all again. Curwen, a man
can't tamper with Nature beyond certain limits, and every horror you have woven will
rise up to wipe you out.'

But here the doctor was cut short by a convulsive cry from the creature before him.
Hopelessly at bay, weaponless, and knowing that any show of physical violence would
bring a score of attendants to the doctor's rescue, Joseph Curwen had recourse to his one
ancient ally, and began a series of cabbalistic motions with his forefingers as his deep,
hollow voice, now unconcealed by feigned hoarseness, bellowed out the opening words
of a terrible formula.

'PER ADONAI ELOIM, ADONAI JEHOVA, ADONAI SABAOTH, METRATON ...'

But Willett was too quick for him. Even as the dogs in the yard outside began to howl,
and even as a chill wind sprang suddenly up from the bay, the doctor commenced the
solemn and measured intonation of that which he had meant all along to recite. An eye
for an eye--magic for magic--let the outcome shew how well the lesson of the abyss had
been learned! So in a clear voice Marinus Bicknell Willett began the second of that pair
of formulae whose first had raised the writer of those minuscules--the cryptic invocation
whose heading was the Dragon's Tail, sign of the descending node--

OGTHROD AI'F GEB'L-EE'H YOG-SOTHOTH 'NGAH'NG AI'Y ZHRO!

At the very first word from Willett's mouth the previously commenced formula of the
patient stopped short. Unable to speak, the monster made wild motions with his arms
until they too were arrested. When the awful name of Yog-Sothoth was uttered, the
hideous change began. It was not merely a dissolution, but rather a transformation or
recapitulation; and Willett shut his eyes lest he faint before the rest of the incantation
could be pronounced.

But he did not faint, and that man of unholy centuries and forbidden secrets never
troubled the world again. The madness out of time had subsided, and the case of Charles
Dexter Ward was closed. Opening his eyes before staggering out of that room of horror,
Dr. Willett saw that what he had kept in memory had not been kept amiss. There had, as
he had predicted, been no need for acids. For like his accursed picture a year before,
Joseph Curwen now lay scattered on the floor as a thin coating of fine bluish-grey dust.

AZATHOTH
When age fell upon the world, and wonder went out of the minds of men; when grey
cities reared to smoky skies tall towers grim and ugly, in whose shadow none might
dream of the sun or of Spring's flowering meads; when learning stripped the Earth of
her mantle of beauty and poets sang no more of twisted phantoms seen with bleared and
inward looking eyes; when these things had come to pass, and childish hopes had gone
forever, there was a man who traveled out of life on a quest into spaces whither the
world's dreams had fled.

Of the name and abode of this man little is written, for they were of the waking world
only; yet it is said that both were obscure. It is enough to say that he dwelt in a city of
high walls where sterile twilight reigned, that he toiled all day among shadow and
turmoil, coming home at evening to a room whose one window opened not to open
fields and groves but on to a dim court where other windows stared in dull despair.
From that casement one might see only walls and windows, except sometimes when one
leaned so far out and peered at the small stars that passed. And because mere walls and
windows must soon drive a man to madness who dreams and reads much, the dweller in
that room used night after night to lean out and peer aloft to glimpse some fragment of
things beyond the waking world and the tall cities. After years he began to call the slow
sailing stars by name, and to follow them in fancy when they glided regretfully out of
sight; till at length his vision opened to many secret vistas whose existance no common
eye suspected. And one night a mighty gulf was bridged, and the dream haunted skies
swelled down to the lonely watcher's window to merge with the close air of his room
and to make him a part of their fabulous wonder.

There came to that room wild streams of violet midnight glittering with dust of gold,
vortices of dust and fire, swirling out of the ultimate spaces and heavy perfumes from
beyond the worlds. Opiate oceans poured there, litten by suns that the eye may never
behold and having in their whirlpools strange dolphins and sea-nymphs of
unrememberable depths. Noiseless infinity eddied around the dreamer and wafted him
away without touching the body that leaned stiffly from the lonely window; and for
days not counted in men's calendars the tides of far spheres that bore him gently to join
the course of other cycles that tenderly left him sleeping on a green sunrise shore, a
green shore fragrant with lotus blossoms and starred by red camalotes...

BEYOND THE WALL OF SLEEP

I have often wondered if the majority of mankind ever pause to reflect upon the
occasionally titanic significance of dreams, and of the obscure world to which they
belong. Whilst the greater number of our nocturnal visions are perhaps no more than
faint and fantastic reflections of our waking experiences--Freud to the contrary with his
puerile symbolism--there are still a certain remainder whose immundane and ethereal
character permit of no ordinary interpretation, and whose vaguely exciting and
disquieting effect suggests possible minute glimpses into a sphere of mental existence
no less important than physical life, yet separated from that life by an all but impassable
barrier. From my experience I cannot doubt but that man, when lost to terrestrial
consciousness, is indeed sojourning in another and uncorporeal life of far different
nature from the life we know, and of which only the slightest and most indistinct
memories linger after waking. From those blurred and fragmentary memories we may
infer much, yet prove little. We may guess that in dreams life, matter, and vitality, as the
earth knows such things, are not necessarily constant; and that time and space do not
exist as our waking selves comprehend them. Sometimes I believe that this less material
life is our truer life, and that our vain presence on the terraqueous globe is itself the
secondary or merely virtual phenomenon.

It was from a youthful revery filled with speculations of this sort that I arose one
afternoon in the winter of 1900-01, when to the state psychopathic institution in which I
served as an interne was brought the man whose case has ever since haunted me so
unceasingly. His name, as given on the records, was Joe Slater, or Slaader, and his
appearance was that of the typical denizen of the Catskill Mountain region; one of those
strange, repellent scions of a primitive Colonial peasant stock whose isolation for nearly
three centuries in the hilly fastnesses of a little-traveled countryside has caused them to
sink to a kind of barbaric degeneracy, rather than advance with their more fortunately
placed brethren of the thickly settled districts. Among these odd folk, who correspond
exactly to the decadent element of "white trash" in the South, law and morals are non-
existent; and their general mental status is probably below that of any other section of
native American people.

Joe Slater, who came to the institution in the vigilant custody of four state policemen,
and who was described as a highly dangerous character, certainly presented no evidence
of his perilous disposition when I first beheld him. Though well above the middle
stature, and of somewhat brawny frame, he was given an absurd appearance of harmless
stupidity by the pale, sleepy blueness of his small watery eyes, the scantiness of his
neglected and never-shaven growth of yellow beard, and the listless drooping of his
heavy nether lip. His age was unknown, since among his kind neither family records nor
permanent family ties exist; but from the baldness of his head in front, and from the
decayed condition of his teeth, the head surgeon wrote him down as a man of about
forty.

From the medical and court documents we learned all that could be gathered of his case:
this man, a vagabond, hunter and trapper, had always been strange in the eyes of his
primitive associates. He had habitually slept at night beyond the ordinary time, and
upon waking would often talk of unknown things in a manner so bizarre as to inspire
fear even in the hearts of an unimaginative populace. Not that his form of language was
at all unusual, for he never spoke save in the debased patois of his environment; but the
tone and tenor of his utterances were of such mysterious wildness, that none might
listen without apprehension. He himself was generally as terrified and baffled as his
auditors, and within an hour after awakening would forget all that he had said, or at
least all that had caused him to say what he did; relapsing into a bovine, half-amiable
normality like that of the other hill-dwellers.

As Slater grew older, it appeared, his matutinal aberrations had gradually increased in
frequency and violence; till about a month before his arrival at the institution had
occurred the shocking tragedy which caused his arrest by the authorities. One day near
noon, after a profound sleep begun in a whiskey debauch at about five of the previous
afternoon, the man had roused himself most suddenly, with ululations so horrible and
unearthly that they brought several neighbors to his cabin--a filthy sty where he dwelt
with a family as indescribable as himself. Rushing out into the snow, he had flung his
arms aloft and commenced a series of leaps directly upward in the air; the while
shouting his determination to reach some "big, big cabin with brightness in the roof and
walls and floor and the loud queer music far away". As two men of moderate size
sought to restrain him, he had struggled with maniacal force and fury, screaming of his
desire and need to find and kill a certain "thing that shines and shakes and laughs". At
length, after temporarily felling one of his detainers with a sudden blow, he had flung
himself upon the other in a demoniac ecstasy of blood-thirstiness, shrieking fiendishly
that he would "jump high in the air and burn his way through anything that stopped
him".

Family and neighbors had now fled in a panic, and when the more courageous of them
returned, Slater was gone, leaving behind an unrecognizable pulp-like thing that had
been a living man but an hour before. None of the mountaineers had dared to pursue
him, and it is likely that they would have welcomed his death from the cold; but when
several mornings later they heard his screams from a distant ravine they realized that he
had somehow managed to survive, and that his removal in one way or another would be
necessary. Then had followed an armed searching-party, whose purpose (whatever it
may have been originally) became that of a sheriff's posse after one of the seldom
popular state troopers had by accident observed, then questioned, and finally joined the
seekers.

On the third day Slater was found unconscious in the hollow of a tree, and taken to the
nearest jail, where alienists from Albany examined him as soon as his senses returned.
To them he told a simple story. He had, he said, gone to sleep one afternoon about
sundown after drinking much liquor. He had awakened to find himself standing bloody-
handed in the snow before his cabin, the mangled corpse of his neighbor Peter Slader at
his feet. Horrified, he had taken to the woods in a vague effort to escape from the scene
of what must have been his crime. Beyond these things he seemed to know nothing, nor
could the expert questioning of his interrogators bring out a single additional fact.

That night Slater slept quietly, and the next morning he awakened with no singular
feature save a certain alteration of expression. Doctor Barnard, who had been watching
the patient, thought he noticed in the pale blue eyes a certain gleam of peculiar quality,
and in the flaccid lips an all but imperceptible tightening, as if of intelligent
determination. But when questioned, Slater relapsed into the habitual vacancy of the
mountaineer, and only reiterated what he had said on the preceding day.

On the third morning occurred the first of the man's mental attacks. After some show of
uneasiness in sleep, he burst forth into a frenzy so powerful that the combined efforts of
four men were needed to bind him in a straightjacket. The alienists listened with keen
attention to his words, since their curiosity had been aroused to a high pitch by the
suggestive yet mostly conflicting and incoherent stories of his family and neighbors.
Slater raved for upward of fifteen minutes, babbling in his backwoods dialect of green
edifices of light, oceans of space, strange music, and shadowy mountains and valleys.
But most of all did he dwell upon some mysterious blazing entity that shook and
laughed and mocked at him. This vast, vague personality seemed to have done him a
terrible wrong, and to kill it in triumphant revenge was his paramount desire. In order to
reach it, he said, he would soar through abysses of emptiness, burning every obstacle
that stood in his way. Thus ran his discourse, until with the greatest suddenness he
ceased. The fire of madness died from his eyes, and in dull wonder he looked at his
questioners and asked why he was bound. Dr. Barnard unbuckled the leather harness
and did not restore it till night, when he succeeded in persuading Slater to don it of his
own volition, for his own good. The man had now admitted that he sometimes talked
queerly, though he knew not why.

Within a week two more attacks appeared, but from them the doctors learned little. On
the source of Slater's visions they speculated at length, for since he could neither read
nor write, and had apparently never heard a legend or fairy-tale, his gorgeous imagery
was quite inexplicable. That it could not come from any known myth or romance was
made especially clear by the fact that the unfortunate lunatic expressed himself only in
his own simple manner. He raved of things he did not understand and could not
interpret; things which he claimed to have experienced, but which he could not have
learned through any normal or connected narration. The alienists soon agreed that
abnormal dreams were the foundation of the trouble; dreams whose vividness could for
a time completely dominate the waking mind of this basically inferior man. With due
formality Slater was tried for murder, acquitted on the ground of insanity, and
committed to the institution wherein I held so humble a post.

I have said that I am a constant speculator concerning dream-life, and from this you may
judge of the eagerness with which I applied myself to the study of the new patient as
soon as I had fully ascertained the facts of his case. He seemed to sense a certain
friendliness in me, born no doubt of the interest I could not conceal, and the gentle
manner in which I questioned him. Not that he ever recognized me during his attacks,
when I hung breathlessly upon his chaotic but cosmic word-pictures; but he knew me in
his quiet hours, when he would sit by his barred window weaving baskets of straw and
willow, and perhaps pining for the mountain freedom he could never again enjoy. His
family never called to see him; probably it had found another temporary head, after the
manner of decadent mountain folk.

By degrees I commenced to feel an overwhelming wonder at the mad and fantastic

conceptions of Joe Slater. The man himself was pitiably inferior in mentality and
language alike; but his glowing, titanic visions, though described in a barbarous
disjointed jargon, were assuredly things which only a superior or even exceptional brain
could conceive. How, I often asked myself, could the stolid imagination of a Catskill
degenerate conjure up sights whose very possession argued a lurking spark of genius?
How could any backwoods dullard have gained so much as an idea of those glittering
realms of supernal radiance and space about which Slater ranted in his furious delirium?
More and more I inclined to the belief that in the pitiful personality who cringed before
me lay the disordered nucleus of something beyond my comprehension; something
infinitely beyond the comprehension of my more experienced but less imaginative
medical and scientific colleagues.

And yet I could extract nothing definite from the man. The sum of all my investigation
was, that in a kind of semi-corporeal dream-life Slater wandered or floated through
resplendent and prodigious valleys, meadows, gardens, cities, and palaces of light, in a
region unbounded and unknown to man; that there he was no peasant or degenerate, but
a creature of importance and vivid life, moving proudly and dominantly, and checked
only by a certain deadly enemy, who seemed to be a being of visible yet ethereal
structure, and who did not appear to be of human shape, since Slater never referred to it
as a man, or as aught save a thing. This thing had done Slater some hideous but
unnamed wrong, which the maniac (if maniac he were) yearned to avenge.

From the manner in which Slater alluded to their dealings, I judged that he and the
luminous thing had met on equal terms; that in his dream existence the man was himself
a luminous thing of the same race as his enemy. This impression was sustained by his
frequent references to flying through space and burning all that impeded his progress.
Yet these conceptions were formulated in rustic words wholly inadequate to convey
them, a circumstance which drove me to the conclusion that if a dream world indeed
existed, oral language was not its medium for the transmission of thought. Could it be
that the dream soul inhabiting this inferior body was desperately struggling to speak
things which the simple and halting tongue of dullness could not utter? Could it be that I
was face to face with intellectual emanations which would explain the mystery if I could
but learn to discover and read them? I did not tell the older physicians of these things,
for middle age is skeptical, cynical, and disinclined to accept new ideas. Besides, the
head of the institution had but lately warned me in his paternal way that I was
overworking; that my mind needed a rest.

It had long been my belief that human thought consists basically of atomic or molecular
motion, convertible into ether waves or radiant energy like heat, light and electricity.
This belief had early led me to contemplate the possibility of telepathy or mental
communication by means of suitable apparatus, and I had in my college days prepared a
set of transmitting and receiving instruments somewhat similar to the cumbrous devices
employed in wireless telegraphy at that crude, pre--radio period. These I had tested with
a fellow-student, but achieving no result, had soon packed them away with other
scientific odds and ends for possible future use.

Now, in my intense desire to probe into the dream-life of Joe Slater, I sought these
instruments again, and spent several days in repairing them for action. When they were
complete once more I missed no opportunity for their trial. At each outburst of Slater's
violence, I would fit the transmitter to his forehead and the receiver to my own,
constantly making delicate adjustments for various hypothetical wave--lengths of
intellectual energy. I had but little notion of how the thought-impressions would, if
successfully conveyed, arouse an intelligent response in my brain, but I felt certain that I
could detect and interpret them. Accordingly I continued my experiments, though
informing no one of their nature.

It was on the twenty-first of February, 1901, that the thing occurred. As I look back
across the years I realize how unreal it seems, and sometimes wonder if old Doctor
Fenton was not right when he charged it all to my excited imagination. I recall that he
listened with great kindness and patience when I told him, but afterward gave me a
nerve--powder and arranged for the half-year's vacation on which I departed the next
week.

That fateful night I was wildly agitated and perturbed, for despite the excellent care he
had received, Joe Slater was unmistakably dying. Perhaps it was his mountain freedom
that he missed, or perhaps the turmoil in his brain had grown too acute for his rather
sluggish physique; but at all events the flame of vitality flickered low in the decadent
body. He was drowsy near the end, and as darkness fell he dropped off into a troubled
sleep.

I did not strap on the straightjacket as was customary when he slept, since I saw that he
was too feeble to be dangerous, even if he woke in mental disorder once more before
passing away. But I did place upon his head and mine the two ends of my cosmic
"radio", hoping against hope for a first and last message from the dream world in the
brief time remaining. In the cell with us was one nurse, a mediocre fellow who did not
understand the purpose of the apparatus, or think to inquire into my course. As the hours
wore on I saw his head droop awkwardly in sleep, but I did not disturb him. I myself,
lulled by the rhythmical breathing of the healthy and the dying man, must have nodded
a little later.

The sound of weird lyric melody was what aroused me. Chords, vibrations, and
harmonic ecstasies echoed passionately on every hand, while on my ravished sight burst
the stupendous spectacle of ultimate beauty. Walls, columns, and architraves of living
fire blazed effulgently around the spot where I seemed to float in air, extending upward
to an infinitely high vaulted dome of indescribable splendor. Blending with this display
of palatial magnificence, or rather, supplanting it at times in kaleidoscopic rotation,
were glimpses of wide plains and graceful valleys, high mountains and inviting
grottoes, covered with every lovely attribute of scenery which my delighted eyes could
conceive of, yet formed wholly of some glowing, ethereal plastic entity, which in
consistency partook as much of spirit as of matter. As I gazed, I perceived that my own
brain held the key to these enchanting metamorphoses; for each vista which appeared to
me was the one my changing mind most wished to behold. Amidst this elysian realm I
dwelt not as a stranger, for each sight and sound was familiar to me; just as it had been
for uncounted eons of eternity before, and would be for like eternities to come.

Then the resplendent aura of my brother of light drew near and held colloquy with me,
soul to soul, with silent and perfect interchange of thought. The hour was one of
approaching triumph, for was not my fellow-being escaping at last from a degrading
periodic bondage; escaping forever, and preparing to follow the accursed oppressor
even unto the uttermost fields of ether, that upon it might be wrought a flaming cosmic
vengeance which would shake the spheres? We floated thus for a little time, when I
perceived a slight blurring and fading of the objects around us, as though some force
were recalling me to earth--where I least wished to go. The form near me seemed to feel
a change also, for it gradually brought its discourse toward a conclusion, and itself
prepared to quit the scene, fading from my sight at a rate somewhat less rapid than that
of the other objects. A few more thoughts were exchanged, and I knew that the
luminous one and I were being recalled to bondage, though for my brother of light it
would be the last time. The sorry planet shell being well-nigh spent, in less than an hour
my fellow would be free to pursue the oppressor along the Milky Way and past the
hither stars to the very confines of infinity.

A well-defined shock separates my final impression of the fading scene of light from
my sudden and somewhat shamefaced awakening and straightening up in my chair as I
saw the dying figure on the couch move hesitantly. Joe Slater was indeed awaking,
though probably for the last time. As I looked more closely, I saw that in the sallow
cheeks shone spots of color which had never before been present. The lips, too, seemed
unusual, being tightly compressed, as if by the force of a stronger character than had
been Slater's. The whole face finally began to grow tense, and the head turned restlessly
with closed eyes.

I did not rouse the sleeping nurse, but readjusted the slightly disarranged headband of
my telepathic "radio", intent to catch any parting message the dreamer might have to
deliver. All at once the head turned sharply in my direction and the eyes fell open,
causing me to stare in blank amazement at what I beheld. The man who had been Joe
Slater, the Catskill decadent, was gazing at me with a pair of luminous, expanding eyes
whose blue seemed subtly to have deepened. Neither mania nor degeneracy was visible
in that gaze, and I felt beyond a doubt that I was viewing a face behind which lay an
active mind of high order.

At this juncture my brain became aware of a steady external influence operating upon it.
I closed my eyes to concentrate my thoughts more profoundly and was rewarded by the
positive knowledge that my long--sought mental message had come at last. Each
transmitted idea formed rapidly in my mind, and though no actual language was
employed, my habitual association of conception and expression was so great that I
seemed to be receiving the message in ordinary English.

"Joe Slater is dead," came the soul-petrifying voice of an agency from beyond the wall
of sleep. My opened eyes sought the couch of pain in curious horror, but the blue eyes
were still calmly gazing, and the countenance was still intelligently animated. "He is
better dead, for he was unfit to bear the active intellect of cosmic entity. His gross body
could not undergo the needed adjustments between ethereal life and planet life. He was
too much an animal, too little a man; yet it is through his deficiency that you have come
to discover me, for the cosmic and planet souls rightly should never meet. He has been
my torment and diurnal prison for forty-two of your terrestrial years.

"I am an entity like that which you yourself become in the freedom of dreamless sleep. I
am your brother of light, and have floated with you in the effulgent valleys. It is not
permitted me to tell your waking earth-self of your real self, but we are all roamers of
vast spaces and travelers in many ages. Next year I may be dwelling in the Egypt which
you call ancient, or in the cruel empire of Tsan Chan which is to come three thousand
years hence. You and I have drifted to the worlds that reel about the red Arcturus, and
dwelt in the bodies of the insect-philosophers that crawl proudly over the fourth moon
of Jupiter. How little does the earth self know life and its extent! How little, indeed,
ought it to know for its own tranquility!

"Of the oppressor I cannot speak. You on earth have unwittingly felt its distant
presence--you who without knowing idly gave the blinking beacon the name of Algol,
the Demon-Star. It is to meet and conquer the oppressor that I have vainly striven for
eons, held back by bodily encumbrances. Tonight I go as a Nemesis bearing just and
blazingly cataclysmic vengeance. Watch me in the sky close by the Demon-Star.

"I cannot speak longer, for the body of Joe Slater grows cold and rigid, and the coarse
brains are ceasing to vibrate as I wish. You have been my only friend on this planet--the
only soul to sense and seek for me within the repellent form which lies on this couch.
We shall meet again--perhaps in the shining mists of Orion's Sword, perhaps on a bleak
plateau in prehistoric Asia, perhaps in unremembered dreams tonight, perhaps in some
other form an eon hence, when the solar system shall have been swept away."

At this point the thought-waves abruptly ceased, the pale eyes of the dreamer--or can I
say dead man?--commenced to glaze fishily. In a half-stupor I crossed over to the couch
and felt of his wrist, but found it cold, stiff, and pulseless. The sallow cheeks paled
again, and the thick lips fell open, disclosing the repulsively rotten fangs of the
degenerate Joe Slater. I shivered, pulled a blanket over the hideous face, and awakened
the nurse. Then I left the cell and went silently to my room. I had an instant and
unaccountable craving for a sleep whose dreams I should not remember.

The climax? What plain tale of science can boast of such a rhetorical effect? I have
merely set down certain things appealing to me as facts, allowing you to construe them
as you will. As I have already admitted, my superior, old Doctor Fenton, denies the
reality of everything I have related. He vows that I was broken down with nervous
strain, and badly in need of a long vacation on full pay which he so generously gave me.
He assures me on his professional honor that Joe Slater was but a low-grade paranoiac,
whose fantastic notions must have come from the crude hereditary folk-tales which
circulated in even the most decadent of communities. All this he tells me--yet I cannot
forget what I saw in the sky on the night after Slater died. Lest you think me a biased
witness, another pen must add this final testimony, which may perhaps supply the
climax you expect. I will quote the following account of the star Nova Persei verbatim
from the pages of that eminent astronomical authority, Professor Garrett P. Serviss:

"On February 22, 1901, a marvelous new star was discovered by Doctor Anderson of
Edinburgh, not very far from Algol. No star had been visible at that point before. Within
twenty-four hours the stranger had become so bright that it outshone Capella. In a week
or two it had visibly faded, and in the course of a few months it was hardly discernible
with the naked eye."

CELEPHAIS
In a dream Kuranes saw the city in the valley, and the seacoast beyond, and the snowy
peak overlooking the sea, and the gaily painted galleys that sail out of the harbour
toward distant regions where the sea meets the sky. In a dream it was also that he came
by his name of Kuranes, for when awake he was called by another name.

Perhaps it was natural for him to dream a new name; for he was the last of his family,
and alone among the indifferent millions of London, so there were not many to speak to
him and to remind him who he had been. His money and lands were gone, and he did
not care for the ways of the people about him, but preferred to dream and write of his
dreams. What he wrote was laughed at by those to whom he showed it, so that after a
time he kept his writings to himself, and finally ceased to write.

The more he withdrew from the world about him, the more wonderful became his
dreams; and it would have been quite futile to try to describe them on paper. Kuranes
was not modern, and did not think like others who wrote. Whilst they strove to strip
from life its embroidered robes of myth and to show in naked ugliness the foul thing
that is reality, Kuranes sought for beauty alone. When truth and experience failed to
reveal it, he sought it in fancy and illusion, and found it on his very doorstep, amid the
nebulous memories of childhood tales and dreams.

There are not many persons who know what wonders are opened to them in the stories
and visions of their youth; for when as children we listen and dream, we think but half-
formed thoughts, and when as men we try to remember, we are dulled and prosaic with
the poison of life. But some of us awake in the night with strange phantasms of
enchanted hills and gardens, of fountains that sing in the sun, of golden cliffs
overhanging murmuring seas, of plains that stretch down to sleeping cities of bronze
and stone, and of shadowy companies of heroes that ride caparisoned white horses
along the edges of thick forests; and then we know that we have looked back through
the ivory gates into that world of wonder which was ours before we were wise and
unhappy.

Kuranes came very suddenly upon his old world of childhood. He had been dreaming of
the house where he had been born; the great stone house covered with ivy, where
thirteen generations of his ancestors had lived, and where he had hoped to die. It was
moonlight, and he had stolen out into the fragrant summer night, through the gardens,
down the terraces, past the great oaks of the park, and along the long white road to the
village. The village seemed very old, eaten away at the edge like the moon which had
commenced to wane, and Kuranes wondered whether the peaked roofs of the small
houses hid sleep or death. In the streets were spears of long grass, and the window-
panes on either side broken or filmily staring. Kuranes had not lingered, but had
plodded on as though summoned toward some goal. He dared not disobey the summons
for fear it might prove an illusion like the urges and aspirations of waking life, which do
not lead to any goal. Then he had been drawn down a lane that led off from the village
street toward the channel cliffs, and had come to the end of things to the precipice and
the abyss where all the village and all the world fell abruptly into the unechoing
emptiness of infinity, and where even the sky ahead was empty and unlit by the
crumbling moon and the peering stars. Faith had urged him on, over the precipice and
into the gulf, where he had floated down, down, down; past dark, shapeless, undreamed
dreams, faintly glowing spheres that may have been partly dreamed dreams, and
laughing winged things that seemed to mock the dreamers of all the worlds. Then a rift
seemed to open in the darkness before him, and he saw the city of the valley, glistening
radiantly far, far below, with a background of sea and sky, and a snowcapped mountain
near the shore.

Kuranes had awakened the very moment he beheld the city, yet he knew from his brief
glance that it was none other than Celephais, in the Valley of Ooth-Nargai beyond the
Tanarian Hills where his spirit had dwelt all the eternity of an hour one summer
afternoon very long ago, when he had slipt away from his nurse and let the warm sea-
breeze lull him to sleep as he watched the clouds from the cliff near the village. He had
protested then, when they had found him, waked him, and carried him home, for just as
he was aroused he had been about to sail in a golden galley for those alluring regions
where the sea meets the sky. And now he was equally resentful of awaking, for he had
found his fabulous city after forty weary years.

But three nights afterward Kuranes came again to Celephais. As before, he dreamed
first of the village that was asleep or dead, and of the abyss down which one must float
silently; then the rift appeared again, and he beheld the glittering minarets of the city,
and saw the graceful galleys riding at anchor in the blue harbour, and watched the
gingko trees of Mount Aran swaying in the sea-breeze. But this time he was not
snatched away, and like a winged being settled gradually over a grassy hillside til
finally his feet rested gently on the turf. He had indeed come back to the Valley of
Ooth-Nargai and the splendid city of Celephais.

Down the hill amid scented grasses and brilliant flowers walked Kuranes, over the
bubbling Naraxa on the small wooden bridge where he had carved his name so many
years ago, and through the whispering grove to the great stone bridge by the city gate.
All was as of old, nor were the marble walls discoloured, nor the polished bronze
statues upon them tarnished. And Kuranes saw that he need not tremble lest the things
he knew be vanished; for even the sentries on the ramparts were the same, and still as
young as he remembered them. When he entered the city, past the bronze gates and over
the onyx pavements, the merchants and camel-drivers greeted him as if he had never
been away; and it was the same at the turquoise temple of Nath-Horthath, where the
orchid-wreathed priests told him that there is no time in Ooth--Nargai, but only
perpetual youth. Then Kuranes walked through the Street of Pillars to the seaward wall,
where gathered the traders and sailors, and strange men from the regions where the sea
meets the sky. There he stayed long, gazing out over the bright harbour where the
ripples sparkled beneath an unknown sun, and where rode lightly the galleys from far
places over the water. And he gazed also upon Mount Aran rising regally from the
shore, its lower slopes green with swaying trees and its white summit touching the sky.

More than ever Kuranes wished to sail in a galley to the far places of which he had
heard so many strange tales, and he sought again the captain who had agreed to carry
him so long ago. He found the man, Athib, sitting on the same chest of spice he had sat
upon before, and Athib seemed not to realize that any time had passed. Then the two
rowed to a galley in the harbour, and giving orders to the oarmen, commenced to sail
out into the billowy Cerenarian Sea that leads to the sky. For several days they glided
undulatingly over the water, till finally they came to the horizon, where the sea meets
the sky. Here the galley paused not at all, but floated easily in the blue of the sky among
fleecy clouds tinted with rose. And far beneath the keel Kuranes could see strange lands
and rivers and cities of surpassing beauty, spread indolently in the sunshine which
seemed never to lessen or disappear. At length Athib told him that their journey was
near its end, and that they would soon enter the harbour of Serannian, the pink marble
city of the clouds, which is built on that ethereal coast where the west wind flows into
the sky; but as the highest of the city's carven towers came into sight there was a sound
somewhere in space, and Kuranes awaked in his London garret.

For many months after that Kuranes sought the marvellous city of Celephais and its
sky-bound galleys in vain; and though his dreams carried him to many gorgeous and
unheard-of places, no one whom he met could tell him how to find Ooth-Nargai beyond
the Tanarian Hills. One night he went flying over dark mountains where there were
faint, lone campfires at great distances apart, and strange, shaggy herds with tinkling
bells on the leaders, and in the wildest part of this hilly country, so remote that few men
could ever have seen it, he found a hideously ancient wall or causeway of stone
zigzagging along the ridges and valleys; too gigantic ever to have risen by human
hands, and of such a length that neither end of it could be seen. Beyond that wall in the
grey dawn he came to a land of quaint gardens and cherry trees, and when the sun rose
he beheld such beauty of red and white flowers, green foliage and lawns, white paths,
diamond brooks, blue lakelets, carven bridges, and red-roofed pagodas, that he for a
moment forgot Celephais in sheer delight. But he remembered it again when he walked
down a white path toward a red-roofed pagoda, and would have questioned the people
of this land about it, had he not found that there were no people there, but only birds and
bees and butterflies. On another night Kuranes walked up a damp stone spiral stairway
endlessly, and came to a tower window overlooking a mighty plain and river lit by the
full moon; and in the silent city that spread away from the river bank he thought he
beheld some feature or arrangement which he had known before. He would have
descended and asked the way to Ooth-Nargai had not a fearsome aurora sputtered up
from some remote place beyond the horizon, showing the ruin and antiquity of the city,
and the stagnation of the reedy river, and the death lying upon that land, as it had lain
since King Kynaratholis came home from his conquests to find the vengeance of the
gods.

So Kuranes sought fruitlessly for the marvellous city of Celephais and its galleys that
sail to Serannian in the sky, meanwhile seeing many wonders and once barely escaping
from the high-priest not to be described, which wears a yellow silken mask over its face
and dwells all alone in a prehistoric stone monastery in the cold desert plateau of Leng.
In time he grew so impatient of the bleak intervals of day that he began buying drugs in
order to increase his periods of sleep. Hasheesh helped a great deal, and once sent him
to a part of space where form does not exist, but where glowing gases study the secrets
of existence. And a violet-coloured gas told him that this part of space was outside what
he had called infinity. The gas had not heard of planets and organisms before, but
identified Kuranes merely as one from the infinity where matter, energy, and gravitation
exist. Kuranes was now very anxious to return to minaret-studded Celephais, and
increased his doses of drugs; but eventually he had no more money left, and could buy
no drugs. Then one summer day he was turned out of his garret, and wandered aimlessly
through the streets, drifting over a bridge to a place where the houses grew thinner and
thinner. And it was there that fulfillment came, and he met the cortege of knights come
from Celephais to bear him thither forever.

Handsome knights they were, astride roan horses and clad in shining armour with
tabards of cloth-of-gold curiously emblazoned. So numerous were they, that Kuranes
almost mistook them for an army, but they were sent in his honour; since it was he who
had created Ooth-Nargai in his dreams, on which account he was now to be appointed
its chief god for evermore. Then they gave Kuranes a horse and placed him at the head
of the cavalcade, and all rode majestically through the downs of Surrey and onward
toward the region where Kuranes and his ancestors were born. It was very strange, but
as the riders went on they seemed to gallop back through time; for whenever they
passed through a village in the twilight they saw only such houses and villagers as
Chaucer or men before him might have seen, and sometimes they saw knights on
horseback with small companies of retainers. When it grew dark they travelled more
swiftly, till soon they were flying uncannily as if in the air. In the dim dawn they came
upon the village which Kuranes had seen alive in his childhood, and asleep or dead in
his dreams. It was alive now, and early villagers curtsied as the horsemen clattered
down the street and turned off into the lane that ends in the abyss of dreams. Kuranes
had previously entered that abyss only at night, and wondered what it would look like
by day; so he watched anxiously as the column approached its brink. Just as they
galloped up the rising ground to the precipice a golden glare came somewhere out of the
west and hid all the landscape in effulgent draperies. The abyss was a seething chaos of
roseate and cerulean splendour, and invisible voices sang exultantly as the knightly
entourage plunged over the edge and floated gracefully down past glittering clouds and
silvery coruscations. Endlessly down the horsemen floated, their chargers pawing the
aether as if galloping over golden sands; and then the luminous vapours spread apart to
reveal a greater brightness, the brightness of the city Celephais, and the sea coast
beyond, and the snowy peak overlooking the sea, and the gaily painted galleys that sail
out of the harbour toward distant regions where the sea meets the sky.

And Kuranes reigned thereafter over Ooth-Nargai and all the neighboring regions of
dream, and held his court alternately in Celephais and in the cloud-fashioned Serannian.
He reigns there still, and will reign happily for ever, though below the cliffs at
Innsmouth the channel tides played mockingly with the body of a tramp who had
stumbled through the half-deserted village at dawn; played mockingly, and cast it upon
the rocks by ivy-covered Trevor Towers, where a notably fat and especially offensive
millionaire brewer enjoys the purchased atmosphere of extinct nobility.

COOL AIR
You ask me to explain why I am afraid of a draught of cool air; why I shiver more than
others upon entering a cold room, and seem nauseated and repelled when the chill of
evening creeps through the heat of a mild autumn day. There are those who say I
respond to cold as others do to a bad odour, and I am the last to deny the impression.
What I will do is to relate the most horrible circumstance I ever encountered, and leave
it to you to judge whether or not this forms a suitable explanation of my peculiarity.

It is a mistake to fancy that horror is associated inextricably with darkness, silence, and
solitude. I found it in the glare of mid-afternoon, in the clangour of a metropolis, and in
the teeming midst of a shabby and commonplace rooming-house with a prosaic
landlady and two stalwart men by my side. In the spring of 1923 I had secured some
dreary and unprofitable magazine work in the city of New York; and being unable to
pay any substantial rent, began drifting from one cheap boarding establishment to
another in search of a room which might combine the qualities of decent cleanliness,
endurable furnishings, and very reasonable price. It soon developed that I had only a
choice between different evils, but after a time I came upon a house in West Fourteenth
Street which disgusted me much less than the others I had sampled.

The place was a four-story mansion of brownstone, dating apparently from the late
forties, and fitted with woodwork and marble whose stained and sullied splendour
argued a descent from high levels of tasteful opulence. In the rooms, large and lofty, and
decorated with impossible paper and ridiculously ornate stucco cornices, there lingered
a depressing mustiness and hint of obscure cookery; but the floors were clean, the linen
tolerably regular, and the hot water not too often cold or turned off, so that I came to
regard it as at least a bearable place to hibernate till one might really live again. The
landlady, a slatternly, almost bearded Spanish woman named Herrero, did not annoy me
with gossip or with criticisms of the late-burning electric light in my third-floor front
hall room; and my fellow-lodgers were as quiet and uncommunicative as one might
desire, being mostly Spaniards a little above the coarsest and crudest grade. Only the
din of street cars in the thoroughfare below proved a serious annoyance.

I had been there about three weeks when the first odd incident occurred. One evening at
about eight I heard a spattering on the floor and became suddenly aware that I had been
smelling the pungent odour of ammonia for some time. Looking about, I saw that the
ceiling was wet and dripping; the soaking apparently proceeding from a corner on the
side toward the street. Anxious to stop the matter at its source, I hastened to the
basement to tell the landlady; and was assured by her that the trouble would quickly be
set right.

"Doctair Muñoz," she cried as she rushed upstairs ahead of me, "he have speel hees
chemicals. He ees too seeck for doctair heemself--seecker and seecker all the time--but
he weel not have no othair for help. He ees vairy queer in hees seeckness--all day he
take funnee--smelling baths, and he cannot get excite or warm. All hees own housework
he do--hees leetle room are full of bottles and machines, and he do not work as doctair.
But he was great once--my fathair in Barcelona have hear of heem--and only joost now
he feex a arm of the plumber that get hurt of sudden. He nevair go out, only on roof, and
my boy Esteban he breeng heem hees food and laundry and mediceens and chemicals.
My Gawd, the sal-ammoniac that man use for keep heem cool!"
Mrs. Herrero disappeared up the staircase to the fourth floor, and I returned to my room.
The ammonia ceased to drip, and as I cleaned up what had spilled and opened the
window for air, I heard the landlady's heavy footsteps above me. Dr. Muñoz I had never
heard, save for certain sounds as of some gasoline-driven mechanism; since his step was
soft and gentle. I wondered for a moment what the strange affliction of this man might
be, and whether his obstinate refusal of outside aid were not the result of a rather
baseless eccentricity. There is, I reflected tritely, an infinite deal of pathos in the state of
an eminent person who has come down in the world.

I might never have known Dr. Muñoz had it not been for the heart attack that suddenly
seized me one forenoon as I sat writing in my room. Physicians had told me of the
danger of those spells, and I knew there was no time to be lost; so remembering what
the landlady had said about the invalid's help of the injured workman, I dragged myself
upstairs and knocked feebly at the door above mine. My knock was answered in good
English by a curious voice some distance to the right, asking my name and business;
and these things being stated, there came an opening of the door next to the one I had
sought.

A rush of cool air greeted me; and though the day was one of the hottest of late June, I
shivered as I crossed the threshold into a large apartment whose rich and tasteful
decoration surprised me in this nest of squalor and seediness. A folding couch now
filled its diurnal role of sofa, and the mahogany furniture, sumptuous hangings, old
paintings, and mellow bookshelves all bespoke a gentleman's study rather than a
boarding-house bedroom. I now saw that the hall room above mine--the "leetle room" of
bottles and machines which Mrs. Herrero had mentioned was merely the laboratory of
the doctor; and that his main living quarters lay in the spacious adjoining room whose
convenient alcoves and large contiguous bathroom permitted him to hide all dressers
and obtrusively utilitarian devices. Dr. Muñoz, most certainly, was a man of birth,
cultivation, and discrimination.

The figure before me was short but exquisitely proportioned, and clad in somewhat
formal dress of perfect cut and fit. A high-bred face of masterful though not arrogant
expression was adorned by a short iron--grey full beard, and an old-fashioned pince-nez
shielded the full, dark eyes and surmounted an aquiline nose which gave a Moorish
touch to a physiognomy otherwise dominantly Celtiberian. Thick, well-trimmed hair
that argued the punctual calls of a barber was parted gracefully above a high forehead;
and the whole picture was one of striking intelligence and superior blood and breeding.

Nevertheless, as I saw Dr. Muñoz in that blast of cool air, I felt a repugnance which
nothing in his aspect could justify. Only his lividly inclined complexion and coldness of
touch could have afforded a physical basis for this feeling, and even these things should
have been excusable considering the man's known invalidism. It might, too, have been
the singular cold that alienated me; for such chilliness was abnormal on so hot a day,
and the abnormal always excites aversion, distrust, and fear.

But repugnance was soon forgotten in admiration, for the strange physician's extreme
skill at once became manifest despite the ice-coldness and shakiness of his bloodless-
looking hands. He clearly understood my needs at a glance, and ministered to them with
a master's deftness; the while reassuring me in a finely modulated though oddly hollow
and timbreless voice that he was the bitterest of sworn enemies to death, and had sunk
his fortune and lost all his friends in a lifetime of bizarre experiment devoted to its
bafflement and extirpation. Something of the benevolent fanatic seemed to reside in
him, and he rambled on almost garrulously as he sounded my chest and mixed a suitable
draught of drugs fetched from the smaller laboratory room. Evidently he found the
society of a well-born man a rare novelty in this dingy environment, and was moved to
unaccustomed speech as memories of better days surged over him.

His voice, if queer, was at least soothing; and I could not even perceive that he breathed
as the fluent sentences rolled urbanely out. He sought to distract my mind from my own
seizure by speaking of his theories and experiments; and I remember his tactfully
consoling me about my weak heart by insisting that will and consciousness are stronger
than organic life itself, so that if a bodily frame be but originally healthy and carefully
preserved, it may through a scientific enhancement of these qualities retain a kind of
nervous animation despite the most serious impairments, defects, or even absences in
the battery of specific organs. He might, he half jestingly said, some day teach me to
live--or at least to possess some kind of conscious existence--without any heart at all!
For his part, he was afflicted with a complication of maladies requiring a very exact
regimen which included constant cold. Any marked rise in temperature might, if
prolonged, affect him fatally; and the frigidity of his habitation--some 55 or 56 degrees
Fahrenheit--was maintained by an absorption system of ammonia cooling, the gasoline
engine of whose pumps I had often heard in my own room below.

Relieved of my seizure in a marvellously short while, I left the shivery place a disciple
and devotee of the gifted recluse. After that I paid him frequent overcoated calls;
listening while he told of secret researches and almost ghastly results, and trembling a
bit when I examined the unconventional and astonishingly ancient volumes on his
shelves. I was eventually, I may add, almost cured of my disease for all time by his
skillful ministrations. It seems that he did not scorn the incantations of the
mediaevalists, since he believed these cryptic formulae to contain rare psychological
stimuli which might conceivably have singular effects on the substance of a nervous
system from which organic pulsations had fled. I was touched by his account of the
aged Dr. Torres of Valencia, who had shared his earlier experiments and nursed him
through the great illness of eighteen years before, whence his present disorders
proceeded. No sooner had the venerable practitioner saved his colleague than he himself
succumbed to the grim enemy he had fought. Perhaps the strain had been too great; for
Dr. Muñoz made it whisperingly clear--though not in detail--that the methods of healing
had been most extraordinary, involving scenes and processes not welcomed by elderly
and conservative Galens.

As the weeks passed, I observed with regret that my new friend was indeed slowly but
unmistakably losing ground physically, as Mrs. Herrero had suggested. The livid aspect
of his countenance was intensified, his voice became more hollow and indistinct, his
muscular motions were less perfectly coordinated, and his mind and will displayed less
resilience and initiative. Of this sad change he seemed by no means unaware, and little
by little his expression and conversation both took on a gruesome irony which restored
in me something of the subtle repulsion I had originally felt.

He developed strange caprices, acquiring a fondness for exotic spices and Egyptian
incense till his room smelled like a vault of a sepulchred Pharaoh in the Valley of
Kings. At the same time his demands for cold air increased, and with my aid he
amplified the ammonia piping of his room and modified the pumps and feed of his
refrigerating machine till he could keep the temperature as low as 34 degrees or 40
degrees, and finally even 28 degrees; the bathroom and laboratory, of course, being less
chilled, in order that water might not freeze, and that chemical processes might not be
impeded. The tenant adjoining him complained of the icy air from around the
connecting door, so I helped him fit heavy hangings to obviate the difficulty. A kind of
growing horror, of outre and morbid cast, seemed to possess him. He talked of death
incessantly, but laughed hollowly when such things as burial or funeral arrangements
were gently suggested.

All in all, he became a disconcerting and even gruesome companion; yet in my gratitude
for his healing I could not well abandon him to the strangers around him, and was
careful to dust his room and attend to his needs each day, muffled in a heavy ulster
which I bought especially for the purpose. I likewise did much of his shopping, and
gasped in bafflement at some of the chemicals he ordered from druggists and laboratory
supply houses.

An increasing and unexplained atmosphere of panic seemed to rise around his

apartment. The whole house, as I have said, had a musty odour; but the smell in his
room was worse--and in spite of all the spices and incense, and the pungent chemicals
of the now incessant baths which he insisted on taking unaided. I perceived that it must
be connected with his ailment, and shuddered when I reflected on what that ailment
might be. Mrs. Herrero crossed herself when she looked at him, and gave him up
unreservedly to me; not even letting her son Esteban continue to run errands for him.
When I suggested other physicians, the sufferer would fly into as much of a rage as he
seemed to dare to entertain. He evidently feared the physical effect of violent emotion,
yet his will and driving force waxed rather than waned, and he refused to be confined to
his bed. The lassitude of his earlier ill days gave place to a return of his fiery purpose,
so that he seemed about to hurl defiance at the death-daemon even as that ancient
enemy seized him. The pretence of eating, always curiously like a formality with him,
he virtually abandoned; and mental power alone appeared to keep him from total
collapse.

He acquired a habit of writing long documents of some sort, which he carefully sealed
and filled with injunctions that I transmit them after his death to certain persons whom
he named--for the most part lettered East Indians, but including a once celebrated
French physician now generally thought dead, and about whom the most inconceivable
things had been whispered. As it happened, I burned all these papers undelivered and
unopened. His aspect and voice became utterly frightful, and his presence almost
unbearable. One September day an unexpected glimpse of him induced an epileptic fit
in a man who had come to repair his electric desk lamp; a fit for which he prescribed
effectively whilst keeping himself well out of sight. That man, oddly enough, had been
through the terrors of the Great War without having incurred any fright so thorough.

Then, in the middle of October, the horror of horrors came with stupefying suddenness.
One night about eleven the pump of the refrigerating machine broke down, so that
within three hours the process of ammonia cooling became impossible. Dr. Muñoz
summoned me by thumping on the floor, and I worked desperately to repair the injury
while my host cursed in a tone whose lifeless, rattling hollowness surpassed description.
My amateur efforts, however, proved of no use; and when I had brought in a mechanic
from a neighbouring all-night garage, we learned that nothing could be done till
morning, when a new piston would have to be obtained. The moribund hermit's rage
and fear, swelling to grotesque proportions, seemed likely to shatter what remained of
his failing physique, and once a spasm caused him to clap his hands to his eyes and rush
into the bathroom. He groped his way out with face tightly bandaged, and I never saw
his eyes again.

The frigidity of the apartment was now sensibly diminishing, and at about 5 a.m. the
doctor retired to the bathroom, commanding me to keep him supplied with all the ice I
could obtain at all-night drug stores and cafeterias. As I would return from my
sometimes discouraging trips and lay my spoils before the closed bathroom door, I
could hear a restless splashing within, and a thick voice croaking out the order for
"More--more!" At length a warm day broke, and the shops opened one by one. I asked
Esteban either to help with the ice-fetching whilst I obtained the pump piston, or to
order the piston while I continued with the ice; but instructed by his mother, he
absolutely refused.

Finally I hired a seedy-looking loafer whom I encountered on the corner of Eighth

Avenue to keep the patient supplied with ice from a little shop where I introduced him,
and applied myself diligently to the task of finding a pump piston and engaging
workmen competent to install it. The task seemed interminable, and I raged almost as
violently as the hermit when I saw the hours slipping by in a breathless, foodless round
of vain telephoning, and a hectic quest from place to place, hither and thither by subway
and surface car. About noon I encountered a suitable supply house far downtown, and at
approximately 1:30 p.m. arrived at my boarding-place with the necessary paraphernalia
and two sturdy and intelligent mechanics. I had done all I could, and hoped I was in
time.

Black terror, however, had preceded me. The house was in utter turmoil, and above the
chatter of awed voices I heard a man praying in a deep basso. Fiendish things were in
the air, and lodgers told over the beads of their rosaries as they caught the odour from
beneath the doctor's closed door. The lounger I had hired, it seems, had fled screaming
and mad-eyed not long after his second delivery of ice; perhaps as a result of excessive
curiosity. He could not, of course, have locked the door behind him; yet it was now
fastened, presumably from the inside. There was no sound within save a nameless sort
of slow, thick dripping.

Briefly consulting with Mrs. Herrero and the workmen despite a fear that gnawed my
inmost soul, I advised the breaking down of the door; but the landlady found a way to
turn the key from the outside with some wire device. We had previously opened the
doors of all the other rooms on that hall, and flung all the windows to the very top.
Now, noses protected by handkerchiefs, we tremblingly invaded the accursed south
room which blazed with the warm sun of early afternoon.

A kind of dark, slimy trail led from the open bathroom door to the hall door, and thence
to the desk, where a terrible little pool had accumulated. Something was scrawled there
in pencil in an awful, blind hand on a piece of paper hideously smeared as though by the
very claws that traced the hurried last words. Then the trail led to the couch and ended
unutterably.
What was, or had been, on the couch I cannot and dare not say here. But this is what I
shiveringly puzzled out on the stickily smeared paper before I drew a match and burned
it to a crisp; what I puzzled out in terror as the landlady and two mechanics rushed
frantically from that hellish place to babble their incoherent stories at the nearest police
station. The nauseous words seemed well-nigh incredible in that yellow sunlight, with
the clatter of cars and motor trucks ascending clamorously from crowded Fourteenth
Street, yet I confess that I believed them then. Whether I believe them now I honestly do
not know. There are things about which it is better not to speculate, and all that I can
say is that I hate the smell of ammonia, and grow faint at a draught of unusually cool
air.

"The end," ran that noisome scrawl, "is here. No more ice--the man looked and ran
away. Warmer every minute, and the tissues can't last. I fancy you know what I said
about the will and the nerves and the preserved body after the organs ceased to work. It
was good theory, but couldn't keep up indefinitely. There was a gradual deterioration I
had not foreseen. Dr. Torres knew, but the shock killed him. He couldn't stand what he
had to do--he had to get me in a strange, dark place when he minded my letter and
nursed me back. And the organs never would work again. It had to be done my way--
preservation--for you see I died that time eighteen years ago."

DAGON
I am writing this under an appreciable mental strain, since by tonight I shall be no more.
Penniless, and at the end of my supply of the drug which alone makes life endurable, I
can bear the torture no longer; and shall cast myself from this garret window into the
squalid street below. Do not think from my slavery to morphine that I am a weakling or
a degenerate. When you have read these hastily scrawled pages you may guess, though
never fully realise, why it is that I must have forgetfulness or death.

It was in one of the most open and least frequented parts of the broad Pacific that the
packet of which I was supercargo fell a victim to the German sea-raider. The great war
was then at its very beginning, and the ocean forces of the Hun had not completely sunk
to their later degradation; so that our vessel was made legitimate prize, whilst we of her
crew were treated with all the fairness and consideration due us as naval prisoners. So
liberal, indeed, was the discipline of our captors, that five days after we were taken I
managed to escape alone in a small boat with water and provisions for a good length of
time.

When I finally found myself adrift and free, I had but little idea of my surroundings.
Never a competent navigator, I could only guess vaguely by the sun and stars that I was
somewhat south of the equator. Of the longitude I knew nothing, and no island or coast-
line was in sight. The weather kept fair, and for uncounted days I drifted aimlessly
beneath the scorching sun; waiting either for some passing ship, or to be cast on the
shores of some habitable land. But neither ship nor land appeared, and I began to
despair in my solitude upon the heaving vastnesses of unbroken blue.

The change happened whilst I slept. Its details I shall never know; for my slumber,
though troubled and dream-infested, was continuous. When at last I awaked, it was to
discover myself half sucked into a slimy expanse of hellish black mire which extended
about me in monotonous undulations as far as I could see, and in which my boat lay
grounded some distance away.

Though one might well imagine that my first sensation would be of wonder at so
prodigious and unexpected a transformation of scenery, I was in reality more horrified
than astonished; for there was in the air and in the rotting soil a sinister quality which
chilled me to the very core. The region was putrid with the carcasses of decaying fish,
and of other less describable things which I saw protruding from the nasty mud of the
unending plain. Perhaps I should not hope to convey in mere words the unutterable
hideousness that can dwell in absolute silence and barren immensity. There was nothing
within hearing, and nothing in sight save a vast reach of black slime; yet the very
completeness of the stillness and homogeneity of the landscape oppressed me with a
nauseating fear.

The sun was blazing down from a sky which seemed to me almost black in its cloudless
cruelty; as though reflecting the inky marsh beneath my feet. As I crawled into the
stranded boat I realised that only one theory could explain my position. Through some
unprecedented volcanic upheaval, a portion of the ocean floor must have been thrown to
the surface, exposing regions which for innumerable millions of years had lain hidden
under unfathomable watery depths. So great was the extent of the new land which had
risen beneath me, that I could not detect the faintest noise of the surging ocean, strain
my ears as I might. Nor were there any sea-fowl to prey upon the dead things.

For several hours I sat thinking or brooding in the boat, which lay upon its side and
afforded a slight shade as the sun moved across the heavens. As the day progressed, the
ground lost some of its stickiness, and seemed likely to dry sufficiently for travelling
purposes in a short time. That night I slept but little, and the next day I made for myself
a pack containing food and water, preparatory to an overland journey in search of the
vanished sea and possible rescue.

On the third morning I found the soil dry enough to walk upon with ease. The odour of
the fish was maddening; but I was too much concerned with graver things to mind so
slight an evil, and set out boldly for an unknown goal. All day I forged steadily
westward, guided by a far-away hummock which rose higher than any other elevation
on the rolling desert. That night I encamped, and on the following day still travelled
toward the hummock, though that object seemed scarcely nearer than when I had first
espied it. By the fourth evening I attained the base of the mound which turned out to be
much higher than it had appeared from a distance, an intervening valley setting it out in
sharper relief from the general surface. Too weary to ascend, I slept in the shadow of the
hill.

I know not why my dreams were so wild that night; but ere the waning and fantastically
gibbous moon had risen far above the eastern plain, I was awake in a cold perspiration,
determined to sleep no more. Such visions as I had experienced were too much for me
to endure again. And in the glow of the moon I saw how unwise I had been to travel by
day. Without the glare of the parching sun, my journey would have cost me less energy;
indeed, I now felt quite able to perform the ascent which had deterred me at sunset.
Picking up my pack , I started for the crest of the eminence.
I have said that the unbroken monotony of the rolling plain was a source of vague
horror to me; but I think my horror was greater when I gained the summit of the mound
and looked down the other side into an immeasurable pit or canyon, whose black
recesses the moon had not yet soard high enough to illuminate. I felt myself on the edge
of the world; peering over the rim into a fathomless chaos of eternal night. Through my
terror ran curious reminiscences of Paradise Lost, and of Satan's hideous climb through
the unfashioned realms of darkness.

As the moon climbed higher in the sky, I began to see that the slopes of the valley were
not quite so perpendicular as I had imagined. Ledges and outcroppings of rock afforded
fairly easy foot-holds for a descent, whilst after a drop of a few hundred feet, the
declivity became very gradual. Urged on by an impulse which I cannot definitely
analyse, I scrambled with difficulty down the rocks and stood on the gentler slope
beneath, gazing into the Stygian deeps where no light had yet penetrated.

All at once my attention was captured by a vast and singular object on the opposite
slope, which rose steeply about an hundred yards ahead of me; an object that gleamed
whitely in the newly bestowed rays of the ascending moon. That it was merely a
gigantic piece of stone, I soon assured myself; but I was conscious of a distinct
impression that its contour and position were not altogether the work of Nature. A
closer scrutiny filled me with sensations I cannot express; for despite its enormous
magnitude, and its position in an abyss which had yawned at the bottom of the sea since
the world was young, I perceived beyond a doubt that the strange object was a well-
shaped monolith whose massive bulk had known the workmanship and perhaps the
worship of living and thinking creatures.

Dazed and frightened, yet not without a certain thrill of the scientist's or archaeologist's
delight, I examined my surroundings more closely. The moon, now near the zenith,
shone weirdly and vividly above the towering steeps that hemmed in the chasm, and
revealed the fact that a far-flung body of water flowed at the bottom, winding out of
sight in both directions, and almost lapping my feet as I stood on the slope. Across the
chasm, the wavelets washed the base of the Cyclopean monolith; on whose surface I
could now trace both inscriptions and crude sculptures. The writing was in a system of
hieroglyphics unknown to me, and unlike anything I had ever seen in books; consisting
for the most part of conventionalised aquatic symbols such as fishes, eels, octopi,
crustaceans, molluscs, whales, and the like. Several characters obviously represented
marine things which are unknown to the modern world, but whose decomposing forms I
had observed on the ocean-risen plain.

It was the pictorial carving, however, that did most to hold me spellbound. Plainly
visible across the intervening water on account of their enormous size, were an array of
bas-reliefs whose subjects would have excited the envy of Doré. I think that these things
were supposed to depict men--at least, a certain sort of men; though the creatures were
shewn disporting like fishes in waters of some marine grotto, or paying homage at some
monolithic shrine which appeared to be under the waves as well. Of their faces and
forms I dare not speak in detail; for the mere remembrance makes me grow faint.
Grotesque beyond the imagination of a Poe or a Bulwer, they were damnably human in
general outline despite webbed hands and feet, shockingly wide and flabby lips, glassy,
bulging eyes, and other features less pleasant to recall. Curiously enough, they seemed
to have been chiselled badly out of proportion with their scenic background; for one of
the creatures was shewn in the act of killing a whale represented as but little larger than
himself. I remarked, as I say, their grotesqueness and strange size, but in a moment
decided that they were merely the imaginary gods of some primitive fishing or seafaring
tribe; some tribe whose last descendant had perished eras before the first ancestor of the
Piltdown or Neanderthal Man was born. Awestruck at this unexpected glimpse into a
past beyond the conception of the most daring anthropologist, I stood musing whilst the
moon cast queer reflections on the silent channel before me.

Then suddenly I saw it. With only a slight churning to mark its rise to the surface, the
thing slid into view above the dark waters. Vast, Polyphemus-like, and loathsome, it
darted like a stupendous monster of nightmares to the monolith, about which it flung its
gigantic scaly arms, the while it bowed its hideous head and gave vent to certain
measured sounds. I think I went mad then.

Of my frantic ascent of the slope and cliff, and of my delirious journey back to the
stranded boat, I remember little. I believe I sang a great deal, and laughed oddly when I
was unable to sing. I have indistinct recollections of a great storm some time after I
reached the boat; at any rate, I know that I heard peals of thunder and other tones which
Nature utters only in her wildest moods.

When I came out of the shadows I was in a San Francisco hospital; brought thither by
the captain of the American ship which had picked up my boat in mid-ocean. In my
delirium I had said much, but found that my words had been given scant attention. Of
any land upheaval in the Pacific, my rescuers knew nothing; nor did I deem it necessary
to insist upon a thing which I knew they could not believe. Once I sought out a
celebrated enthnologist, and amused him with peculiar questions regarding the ancient
Philistine legend of Dagon, the Fish-God; but soon perceiving that he was hopelessly
conventional, I did not press my inquiries.

It is at night, especially when the moon is gibbous and waning, that I see the thing. I
tried morphine; but the drug has given only transient surcease, and has drawn me into
its clutches as a hopeless slave. So now I am to end it all, having written a full account
for the information or the contemptuous amusement of my fellow-men. Often I ask
myself if it could not all have been a pure phantasm--a mere freak of fever as I lay sun-
stricken and raving in the open boat after my escape from the German man-of-war. This
I ask myself, but ever does there come before me a hideously vivid vision in reply. I
cannot think of the deep sea without shuddering at the nameless things that may at this
very moment be crawling and floundering on its slimy bed, worshipping their ancient
stone idols and carving their own detestable likenesses on the submarine obelisks of
water-soaked granite. I dream of a day when they may rise above the billows to drag
down in their reeking talons the remnants of puny, war-exhausted mankind--of a day
when the land shall sink, and the dark ocean floor shall ascend amidst universal
pandemonium.

The end is near. I hear a noise at the door, as of some immense slippery body lumbering
against it. It shall find me. God, that hand! The window! The window!

EX OBLIVIONE
When the last days were upon me, and the ugly trifles of existence began to drive me to
madness like the small drops of water that torturers let fall ceaselessly upon one spot of
their victims body, I loved the irradiate refuge of sleep. In my dreams I found a little of
the beauty I had vainly sought in life, and wandered through old gardens and enchanted
woods.

Once when the wind was soft and scented I heard the south calling, and sailed endlessly
and languorously under strange stars.

Once when the gentle rain fell I glided in a barge down a sunless stream under the earth
till I reached another world of purple twilight, iridescent arbours, and undying roses.

And once I walked through a golden valley that led to shadowy groves and ruins, and
ended in a mighty wall green with antique vines, and pierced by a little gate of bronze.

Many times I walked through that valley, and longer and longer would I pause in the
spectral half-light where the giant trees squirmed and twisted grotesquely, and the grey
ground stretched damply from trunk to trunk, sometimes disclosing the mould-stained
stones of buried temples. And always the goal of my fancies was the mighty vine-grown
wall with the little gate of bronze therein.

After awhile, as the days of waking became less and less bearable from their greyness
and sameness, I would often drift in opiate peace through the valley and the shadowy
groves, and wonder how I might seize them for my eternal dwelling-place, so that I
need no more crawl back to a dull world stript of interest and new colours. And as I
looked upon the little gate in the mighty wall, I felt that beyond it lay a dream-country
from which, once it was entered, there would be no return.

So each night in sleep I strove to find the hidden latch of the gate in the ivied antique
wall, though it was exceedingly well hidden. And I would tell myself that the realm
beyond the wall was not more lasting merely, but more lovely and radiant as well.

Then one night in the dream-city of Zakarion I found a yellowed papyrus filled with the
thoughts of dream-sages who dwelt of old in that city, and who were too wise ever to be
born in the waking world. Therein were written many things concerning the world of
dream, and among them was lore of a golden valley and a sacred grove with temples,
and a high wall pierced by a little bronze gate. When I saw this lore, I knew that it
touched on the scenes I had haunted, and I therefore read long in the yellowed papyrus.

Some of the dream-sages wrote gorgeously of the wonders beyond the irrepassable gate,
but others told of horror and disappointment. I knew not which to believe, yet longed
more and more to cross forever into the unknown land; for doubt and secrecy are the
lure of lures, and no new horror can be more terrible than the daily torture of the
commonplace. So when I learned of the drug which would unlock the gate and drive me
through, I resolved to take it when next I awaked.

Last night I swallowed the drug and floated dreamily into the golden valley and the
shadowy groves; and when I came this time to the antique wall, I saw that the small gate
of bronze was ajar. From beyond came a glow that weirdly lit the giant twisted trees and
the tops of the buried temples, and I drifted on songfully, expectant of the glories of the
land from whence I should never return.

But as the gate swung wider and the sorcery of the drug and the dream pushed me
through, I knew that all sights and glories were at an end; for in that new realm was
neither land nor sea, but only the white void of unpeopled and illimitable space. So,
happier than I had ever dared hope to be, I dissolved again into that native infinity of
crystal oblivion from which the daemon Life had called me for one brief and desolate
hour.

FACTS CONCERNING THE LATE ARTHUR

JERMYN AND HIS FAMILY
I

Life is a hideous thing, and from the background behind what we know of it peer
daemoniacal hints of truth which make it sometimes a thousandfold more hideous.
Science, already oppressive with its shocking revelations, will perhaps be the ultimate
exterminator of our human species--if separate species we be--for its reserve of
unguessed horrors could never be borne by mortal brains if loosed upon the world. If we
knew what we are, we should do as Sir Arthur Jermyn did; and Arthur Jermyn soaked
himself in oil and set fire to his clothing one night. No one placed the charred fragments
in an urn or set a memorial to him who had been; for certain papers and a certain boxed
object were found which made men wish to forget. Some who knew him do not admit
that he ever existed.

Arthur Jermyn went out on the moor and burned himself after seeing the boxed object
which had come from Africa. It was this object, and not his peculiar personal
appearance, which made him end his life. Many would have disliked to live if possessed
of the peculiar features of Arthur Jermyn, but he had been a poet and scholar and had
not minded. Learning was in his blood, for his great-grandfather, Sir Robert Jermyn,
Bt., had been an anthropologist of note, whilst his great--great-great-grandfather, Sir
Wade Jermyn, was one of the earliest explorers of the Congo region, and had written
eruditely of its tribes, animals, and supposed antiquities. Indeed, old Sir Wade had
possessed an intellectual zeal amounting almost to a mania; his bizarre conjectures on a
prehistoric white Congolese civilisation earning him much ridicule when his book,
Observation on the Several Parts of Africa, was published. In 1765 this fearless explorer
had been placed in a madhouse at Huntingdon.

Madness was in all the Jermyns, and people were glad there were not many of them.
The line put forth no branches, and Arthur was the last of it. If he had not been, one can
not say what he would have done when the object came. The Jermyns never seemed to
look quite right--something was amiss, though Arthur was the worst, and the old family
portraits in Jermyn House showed fine faces enough before Sir Wade's time. Certainly,
the madness began with Sir Wade, whose wild stories of Africa were at once the delight
and terror of his few friends. It showed in his collection of trophies and specimens,
which were not such as a normal man would accumulate and preserve, and appeared
strikingly in the Oriental seclusion in which he kept his wife. The latter, he had said,
was the daughter of a Portuguese trader whom he had met in Africa; and did not like
English ways. She, with an infant son born in Africa, had accompanied him back from
the second and longest of his trips, and had gone with him on the third and last, never
returning. No one had ever seen her closely, not even the servants; for her disposition
had been violent and singular. During her brief stay at Jermyn House she occupied a
remote wing, and was waited on by her husband alone. Sir Wade was, indeed, most
peculiar in his solicitude for his family; for when he returned to Africa he would permit
no one to care for his young son save a loathsome black woman from Guinea. Upon
coming back, after the death of Lady Jermyn, he himself assumed complete care of the
boy.

But it was the talk of Sir Wade, especially when in his cups, which chiefly led his
friends to deem him mad. In a rational age like the eighteenth century it was unwise for
a man of learning to talk about wild sights and strange scenes under a Congo moon; of
the gigantic walls and pillars of a forgotten city, crumbling and vine-grown, and of
damp, silent, stone steps leading interminably down into the darkness of abysmal
treasure-vaults and inconceivable catacombs. Especially was it unwise to rave of the
living things that might haunt such a place; of creatures half of the jungle and half of the
impiously aged city--fabulous creatures which even a Pliny might describe with
scepticism; things that might have sprung up after the great apes had overrun the dying
city with the walls and the pillars, the vaults and the weird carvings. Yet after he came
home for the last time Sir Wade would speak of such matters with a shudderingly
uncanny zest, mostly after his third glass at the Knight's Head; boasting of what he had
found in the jungle and of how he had dwelt among terrible ruins known only to him.
And finally he had spoken of the living things in such a manner that he was taken to the
madhouse. He had shown little regret when shut into the barred room at Huntingdon, for
his mind moved curiously. Ever since his son had commenced to grow out of infancy,
he had liked his home less and less, till at last he had seemed to dread it. The Knight's
Head had been his headquarters, and when he was confined he expressed some vague
gratitude as if for protection. Three years later he died.

Wade Jermyn's son Philip was a highly peculiar person. Despite a strong physical
resemblance to his father, his appearance and conduct were in many particulars so
coarse that he was universally shunned. Though he did not inherit the madness which
was feared by some, he was densely stupid and given to brief periods of uncontrollable
violence. In frame he was small, but intensely powerful, and was of incredible agility.
Twelve years after succeeding to his title he married the daughter of his gamekeeper, a
person said to be of gypsy extraction, but before his son was born joined the navy as a
common sailor, completing the general disgust which his habits and misalliance had
begun. After the close of the American war he was heard of as sailor on a merchantman
in the African trade, having a kind of reputation for feats of strength and climbing, but
finally disappearing one night as his ship lay off the Congo coast.

In the son of Sir Philip Jermyn the now accepted family peculiarity took a strange and
fatal turn. Tall and fairly handsome, with a sort of weird Eastern grace despite certain
slight oddities of proportion, Robert Jermyn began life as a scholar and investigator. It
was he who first studied scientifically the vast collection of relics which his mad
grandfather had brought from Africa, and who made the family name as celebrated in
ethnology as in exploration. In 1815 Sir Robert married a daughter of the seventh
Viscount Brightholme and was subsequently blessed with three children, the eldest and
youngest of whom were never publicly seen on account of deformities in mind and
body. Saddened by these family misfortunes, the scientist sought relief in work, and
made two long expeditions in the interior of Africa. In 1849 his second son, Nevil, a
singularly repellent person who seemed to combine the surliness of Philip Jermyn with
the hauteur of the Brightholmes, ran away with a vulgar dancer, but was pardoned upon
his return in the following year. He came back to Jermyn House a widower with an
infant son, Alfred, who was one day to be the father of Arthur Jermyn.

Friends said that it was this series of griefs which unhinged the mind of Sir Robert
Jermyn, yet it was probably merely a bit of African folklore which caused the disaster.
The elderly scholar had been collecting legends of the Onga tribes near the field of his
grandfather's and his own explorations, hoping in some way to account for Sir Wade's
wild tales of a lost city peopled by strange hybrid creatures. A certain consistency in the
strange papers of his ancestor suggested that the madman's imagination might have been
stimulated by native myths. On October 19, 1852, the explorer Samuel Seaton called at
Jermyn House with a manuscript of notes collected among the Ongas, believing that
certain legends of a gray city of white apes ruled by a white god might prove valuable to
the ethnologist. In his conversation he probably supplied many additional details; the
nature of which will never be known, since a hideous series of tragedies suddenly burst
into being. When Sir Robert Jermyn emerged from his library he left behind the
strangled corpse of the explorer, and before he could be restrained, had put an end to all
three of his children; the two who were never seen, and the son who had run away.
Nevil Jermyn died in the successful defence of his own two-year-old son, who had
apparently been included in the old man's madly murderous scheme. Sir Robert himself,
after repeated attempts at suicide and a stubborn refusal to utter an articulate sound, died
of apoplexy in the second year of his confinement.

Sir Alfred Jermyn was a baronet before his fourth birthday, but his tastes never matched
his title. At twenty he had joined a band of music-hall performers, and at thirty-six had
deserted his wife and child to travel with an itinerant American circus. His end was very
revolting. Among the animals in the exhibition with which he travelled was a huge bull
gorilla of lighter colour than the average; a surprisingly tractable beast of much
popularity with the performers. With this gorilla Alfred Jermyn was singularly
fascinated, and on many occasions the two would eye each other for long periods
through the intervening bars. Eventually Jermyn asked and obtained permission to train
the animal, astonishing audiences and fellow performers alike with his success. One
morning in Chicago, as the gorilla and Alfred Jermyn were rehearsing an exceedingly
clever boxing match, the former delivered a blow of more than the usual force, hurting
both the body and the dignity of the amateur trainer. Of what followed, members of
"The Greatest Show On Earth" do not like to speak. They did not expect to hear Sir
Alfred Jermyn emit a shrill, inhuman scream, or to see him seize his clumsy antagonist
with both hands, dash it to the floor of the cage, and bite fiendishly at its hairy throat.
The gorilla was off its guard, but not for long, and before anything could be done by the
regular trainer, the body which had belonged to a baronet was past recognition.

II

Arthur Jermyn was the son of Sir Alfred Jermyn and a music-hall singer of unknown
origin. When the husband and father deserted his family, the mother took the child to
Jermyn House; where there was none left to object to her presence. She was not without
notions of what a nobleman's dignity should be, and saw to it that her son received the
best education which limited money could provide. The family resources were now
sadly slender, and Jermyn House had fallen into woeful disrepair, but young Arthur
loved the old edifice and all its contents. He was not like any other Jermyn who had
ever lived, for he was a poet and a dreamer. Some of the neighbouring families who had
heard tales of old Sir Wade Jermyn's unseen Portuguese wife declared that her Latin
blood must be showing itself; but most persons merely sneered at his sensitiveness to
beauty, attributing it to his music--hall mother, who was socially unrecognised. The
poetic delicacy of Arthur Jermyn was the more remarkable because of his uncouth
personal appearance. Most of the Jermyns had possessed a subtly odd and repellent cast,
but Arthur's case was very striking. It is hard to say just what he resembled, but his
expression, his facial angle, and the length of his arms gave a thrill of repulsion to those
who met him for the first time.

It was the mind and character of Arthur Jermyn which atoned for his aspect. Gifted and
learned, he took highest honours at Oxford and seemed likely to redeem the intellectual
fame of his family. Though of poetic rather than scientific temperament, he planned to
continue the work of his forefathers in African ethnology and antiquities, utilising the
truly wonderful though strange collection of Sir Wade. With his fanciful mind he
thought often of the prehistoric civilisation in which the mad explorer had so implicitly
believed, and would weave tale after tale about the silent jungle city mentioned in the
latter's wilder notes and paragraphs. For the nebulous utterances concerning a nameless,
unsuspected race of jungle hybrids he had a peculiar feeling of mingled terror and
attraction, speculating on the possible basis of such a fancy, and seeking to obtain light
among the more recent data gleaned by his great-grandfather and Samuel Seaton
amongst the Ongas.

In 1911, after the death of his mother, Sir Arthur Jermyn determined to pursue his
investigations to the utmost extent. Selling a portion of his estate to obtain the requisite
money, he outfitted an expedition and sailed for the Congo. Arranging with the Belgian
authorities for a party of guides, he spent a year in the Onga and Kahn country, finding
data beyond the highest of his expectations. Among the Kaliris was an aged chief called
Mwanu, who possessed not only a highly retentive memory, but a singular degree of
intelligence and interest in old legends. This ancient confirmed every tale which Jermyn
had heard, adding his own account of the stone city and the white apes as it had been
told to him.

According to Mwanu, the gray city and the hybrid creatures were no more, having been
annihilated by the warlike N'bangus many years ago. This tribe, after destroying most of
the edifices and killing the live beings, had carried off the stuffed goddess which had
been the object of their quest; the white ape-goddess which the strange beings
worshipped, and which was held by Congo tradition to be the form of one who had
reigned as a princess among these beings. Just what the white apelike creatures could
have been, Mwanu had no idea, but he thought they were the builders of the ruined city.
Jermyn could form no conjecture, but by close questioning obtained a very picturesque
legend of the stuffed goddess.

The ape-princess, it was said, became the consort of a great white god who had come
out of the West. For a long time they had reigned over the city together, but when they
had a son, all three went away. Later the god and princess had returned, and upon the
death of the princess her divine husband had mummified the body and enshrined it in a
vast house of stone, where it was worshipped. Then he departed alone. The legend here
seemed to present three variants. According to one story, nothing further happened save
that the stuffed goddess became a symbol of supremacy for whatever tribe might
possess it. It was for this reason that the N'bangus carried it off. A second story told of a
god's return and death at the feet of his enshrined wife. A third told of the return of the
son, grown to manhood--or apehood or godhood, as the case might be--yet unconscious
of his identity. Surely the imaginative blacks had made the most of whatever events
might lie behind the extravagant legendry.

Of the reality of the jungle city described by old Sir Wade, Arthur Jermyn had no
further doubt; and was hardly astonished when early in 1912 he came upon what was
left of it. Its size must have been exaggerated, yet the stones lying about proved that it
was no mere Negro village. Unfortunately no carvings could be found, and the small
size of the expedition prevented operations toward clearing the one visible passageway
that seemed to lead down into the system of vaults which Sir Wade had mentioned. The
white apes and the stuffed goddess were discussed with all the native chiefs of the
region, but it remained for a European to improve on the data offered by old Mwanu. M.
Verhaeren, Belgian agent at a trading-post on the Congo, believed that he could not
only locate but obtain the stuffed goddess, of which he had vaguely heard; since the
once mighty N'bangus were now the submissive servants of King Albert's government,
and with but little persuasion could be induced to part with the gruesome deity they had
carried off. When Jermyn sailed for England, therefore, it was with the exultant
probability that he would within a few months receive a priceless ethnological relic
confirming the wildest of his great--great-great-grandfather's narratives--that is, the
wildest which he had ever heard. Countrymen near Jermyn House had perhaps heard
wilder tales handed down from ancestors who had listened to Sir Wade around the
tables of the Knight's Head.

Arthur Jermyn waited very patiently for the expected box from M. Verhaeren,
meanwhile studying with increased diligence the manuscripts left by his mad ancestor.
He began to feel closely akin to Sir Wade, and to seek relics of the latter's personal life
in England as well as of his African exploits. Oral accounts of the mysterious and
secluded wife had been numerous, but no tangible relic of her stay at Jermyn House
remained. Jermyn wondered what circumstance had prompted or permitted such an
effacement, and decided that the husband's insanity was the prime cause. His great-
great-great-grandmother, he recalled, was said to have been the daughter of a
Portuguese trader in Africa. No doubt her practical heritage and superficial knowledge
of the Dark Continent had caused her to flout Sir Wade's tales of the interior, a thing
which such a man would not be likely to forgive. She had died in Africa, perhaps
dragged thither by a husband determined to prove what he had told. But as Jermyn
indulged in these reflections he could not but smile at their futility, a century and a half
after the death of both his strange progenitors.

In June, 1913, a letter arrived from M. Verhaeren, telling of the finding of the stuffed
goddess. It was, the Belgian averred, a most extraordinary object; an object quite
beyond the power of a layman to classify. Whether it was human or simian only a
scientist could determine, and the process of determination would be greatly hampered
by its imperfect condition. Time and the Congo climate are not kind to mummies;
especially when their preparation is as amateurish as seemed to be the case here.
Around the creature's neck had been found a golden chain bearing an empty locket on
which were armorial designs; no doubt some hapless traveller's keepsake, taken by the
N'bangus and hung upon the goddess as a charm. In commenting on the contour of the
mummy's face, M. Verhaeren suggested a whimsical comparison; or rather, expressed a
humorous wonder just how it would strike his corespondent, but was too much
interested scientifically to waste many words in levity. The stuffed goddess, he wrote,
would arrive duly packed about a month after receipt of the letter.

The boxed object was delivered at Jermyn House on the afternoon of August 3, 1913,
being conveyed immediately to the large chamber which housed the collection of
African specimens as arranged by Sir Robert and Arthur. What ensued can best be
gathered from the tales of servants and from things and papers later examined. Of the
various tales, that of aged Soames, the family butler, is most ample and coherent.
According to this trustworthy man, Sir Arthur Jermyn dismissed everyone from the
room before opening the box, though the instant sound of hammer and chisel showed
that he did not delay the operation. Nothing was heard for some time; just how long
Soames cannot exactly estimate, but it was certainly less than a quarter of an hour later
that the horrible scream, undoubtedly in Jermyn's voice, was heard. Immediately
afterward Jermyn emerged from the room, rushing frantically toward the front of the
house as if pursued by some hideous enemy. The expression on his face, a face ghastly
enough in repose, was beyond description. When near the front door he seemed to think
of something, and turned back in his flight, finally disappearing down the stairs to the
cellar. The servants were utterly dumbfounded, and watched at the head of the stairs,
but their master did not return. A smell of oil was all that came up from the regions
below. After dark a rattling was heard at the door leading from the cellar into the
courtyard; and a stable-boy saw Arthur Jermyn, glistening from head to foot with oil
and redolent of that fluid, steal furtively out and vanish on the black moor surrounding
the house. Then, in an exaltation of supreme horror, everyone saw the end. A spark
appeared on the moor, a flame arose, and a pillar of human fire reached to the heavens.
The house of Jermyn no longer existed.

The reason why Arthur Jermyn's charred fragments were not collected and buried lies in
what was found afterward, principally the thing in the box. The stuffed goddess was a
nauseous sight, withered and eaten away, but it was clearly a mummified white ape of
some unknown species, less hairy than any recorded variety, and infinitely nearer
mankind--quite shockingly so. Detailed description would be rather unpleasant, but two
salient particulars must be told, for they fit in revoltingly with certain notes of Sir Wade
Jermyn's African expeditions and with the Congolese legends of the white god and the
ape-princess. The two particulars in question are these: the arms on the golden locket
about the creature's neck were the Jermyn arms, and the jocose suggestion of M.
Verhaeren about certain resemblance as connected with the shrivelled face applied with
vivid, ghastly, and unnatural horror to none other than the sensitive Arthur Jermyn,
great-great-great-grandson of Sir Wade Jermyn and an unknown wife. Members of the
Royal Anthropological Institute burned the thing and threw the locket into a well, and
some of them do not admit that Arthur Jermyn ever existed.

FROM BEYOND
That Crawford Tillinghast should ever have studied science and philosophy was a
mistake. These things should be left to the frigid and impersonal investigator for they
offer two equally tragic alternatives to the man of feeling and action; despair, if he fail
in his quest, and terrors unutterable and unimaginable if he succeed. Tillinghast had
once been the prey of failure, solitary and melancholy; but now I knew, with nauseating
fears of my own, that he was the prey of success. I had indeed warned him ten weeks
before, when he burst forth with his tale of what he felt himself about to discover. He
had been flushed and excited then, talking in a high and unnatural, though always
pedantic, voice.

"What do we know," he had said, "of the world and the universe about us? Our means
of receiving impressions are absurdly few, and our notions of surrounding objects
infinitely narrow. We see things only as we are constructed to see them, and can gain no
idea of their absolute nature. With five feeble senses we pretend to comprehend the
boundlessly complex cosmos, yet other beings with wider, stronger, or different range
of senses might not only see very differently the things we see, but might see and study
whole worlds of matter, energy, and life which lie close at hand yet can never be
detected with the senses we have. I have always believed that such strange, inaccessible
worlds exist at our very elbows, and now I believe I have found a way to break dawn
the barriers. I am not joking. Within twenty-four hours that machine near the table will
generate waves acting on unrecognized sense organs that exist in us as atrophied or
rudimentary vestiges. Those waves will open up to us many vistas unknown to man and
several unknown to anything we consider organic life. We shall see that at which dogs
howl in the dark, and that at which cats prick up their ears after midnight. We shall see
these things, and other things which no breathing creature has yet seen. We shall
overleap time, space, and dimensions, and without bodily motion peer to the bottom of
creation."

When Tillinghast said these things I remonstrated, for I knew him well enough to be
frightened rather than amused; but he was a fanatic, and drove me from the house. Now
he was no less a fanatic, but his desire to speak had conquered his resentment, and he
had written me imperatively in a hand I could scarcely recognize. As I entered the abode
of the friend so suddenly metamorphosed to a shivering gargoyle, I became infected
with the terror which seemed stalking in all the shadows. The words and beliefs
expressed ten weeks before seemed bodied forth in the darkness beyond the small circle
of candle light, and I sickened at the hollow, altered voice of my host. I wished the
servants were about, and did not like it when he said they had all left three days
previously. It seemed strange that old Gregory, at least, should desert his master without
telling as tried a friend as I. It was he who had given me all the information I had of
Tillinghast after I was repulsed in rage.

Yet I soon subordinated all my fears to my growing curiosity and fascination. Just what
Crawford Tillinghast now wished of me I could only guess, but that he had some
stupendous secret or discovery to impart, I could not doubt. Before I had protested at his
unnatural pryings into the unthinkable; now that he had evidently succeeded to some
degree I almost shared his spirit, terrible though the cost of victory appeared. Up
through the dark emptiness of the house I followed the bobbing candle in the hand of
this shaking parody on man. The electricity seemed to be turned off, and when I asked
my guide he said it was for a definite reason.

"It would be too much...I would not dare," he continued to mutter. I especially noted his
new habit of muttering, for it was not like him to talk to himself. We entered the
laboratory in the attic, and I observed that detestable electrical machine, glowing with a
sickly, sinister violet luminosity. It was connected with a powerful chemical battery, but
seemed to be receiving no current; for I recalled that in its experimental stage it had
sputtered and purred when in action. In reply to my question Tillinghast mumbled that
this permanent glow was not electrical in any sense that I could understand.

He now seated me near the machine, so that it was on my right, and turned a switch
somewhere below the crowning cluster of glass bulbs. The usual sputtering began,
turned to a whine, and terminated in a drone so soft as to suggest a return to silence.
Meanwhile the luminosity increased, waned again, then assumed a pale, outrè colour or
blend of colours which I could neither place nor describe. Tillinghast had been watching
me, and noted my puzzled expression.

"Do you know what that is?" he whispered, "That is ultra-violet."He chuckled oddly at
my surprise. "You thought ultra-violet was invisible, and so it is--but you can see that
and many other invisible things now.

"Listen to me! The waves from that thing are waking a thousand sleeping senses in us;
senses which we inherit from aeons of evolution from the state of detached electrons to
the state of organic humanity. I have seen the truth, and I intend to show it to you. Do
you wonder how it will seem? I will tell you."Here Tillinghast seated himself directly
opposite me, blowing out his candle and staring hideously into my eyes. "Your existing
sense-organs--ears first, I think--will pick up many of the impressions, for they are
closely connected with the dormant organs. Then there will be others. You have heard
of the pineal gland? I laugh at the shallow endocrinologist, fellow-dupe and fellow-
parvenu of the Freudian. That gland is the great sense organ of organs--I have found
out. It is like sight in the end, and transmits visual pictures to the brain. If you are
normal, that is the way you ought to get most of it...I mean get most of the evidence
from beyond."

I looked about the immense attic room with the sloping south wall, dimly lit by rays
which the every day eye cannot see. The far corners were all shadows and the whole
place took on a hazy unreality which obscured its nature and invited the imagination to
symbolism and phantasm. During the interval that Tillinghast was long silent I fancied
myself in some vast incredible temple of long-dead gods; some vague edifice of
innumerable black stone columns reaching up from a floor of damp slabs to a cloudy
height beyond the range of my vision. The picture was very vivid for a while, but
gradually gave way to a more horrible conception; that of utter, absolute solitude in
infinite, sightless, soundless space. There seemed to be a void, and nothing more, and I
felt a childish fear which prompted me to draw from my hip pocket the revolver I
carried after dark since the night I was held up in East Providence. Then from the
farthermost regions of remoteness, the sound softly glided into existence. It was
infinitely faint, subtly vibrant, and unmistakably musical, but held a quality of
surpassing wildness which made its impact feel like a delicate torture of my whole
body. I felt sensations like those one feels when accidentally scratching ground glass.
Simultaneously there developed something like a cold draught, which apparently swept
past me from the direction of the distant sound. As I waited breathlessly I perceived that
both sound and wind were increasing; the effect being to give me an odd notion of
myself as tied to a pair of rails in the path of a gigantic approaching locomotive. I began
to speak to Tillinghast, and as I did so all the unusual impressions abruptly vanished. I
saw only the man, the glowing machines, and the dim apartment. Tillinghast was
grinning repulsively at the revolver which I had almost unconsciously drawn, but from
his expression I was sure he had seen and heard as much as I, if not a great deal more. I
whispered what I had experienced and he bade me to remain as quiet and receptive as
possible.

"Don't move," he cautioned, "for in these rays we are able to be seen as well as to see. I
told you the servants left, but I didn't tell you how. It was that thick-witted house-
keeper--she turned on the lights downstairs after I had warned her not to, and the wires
picked up sympathetic vibrations. It must have been frightful--I could hear the screams
up here in spite of all I was seeing and hearing from another direction, and later it was
rather awful to find those empty heaps of clothes around the house. Mrs. Updike's
clothes were close to the front hall switch--that's how I know she did it. It got them all.
But so long as we don't move we're fairly safe. Remember we're dealing with a hideous
world in which we are practically helpless...Keep still!"

The combined shock of the revelation and of the abrupt command gave me a kind of
paralysis, and in my terror my mind again opened to the impressions coming from what
Tillinghast called "beyond."I was now in a vortex of sound and motion, with confused
pictures before my eyes. I saw the blurred outlines of the room, but from some point in
space there seemed to be pouring a seething column of unrecognizable shapes or clouds,
penetrating the solid roof at a point ahead and to the right of me. Then I glimpsed the
temple-like effect again, but this time the pillars reached up into an aerial ocean of light,
which sent down one blinding beam along the path of the cloudy column I had seen
before. After that the scene was almost wholly kaleidoscopic, and in the jumble of
sights, sounds, and unidentified sense-impressions I felt that I was about to dissolve or
in some way lose the solid form. One definite flash I shall always remember. I seemed
for an instant to behold a patch of strange night sky filled with shining, revolving
spheres, and as it receded I saw that the glowing suns formed a constellation or galaxy
of settled shape; this shape being the distorted face of Crawford Tillinghast. At another
time I felt the huge animate things brushing past me and occasionally walking or
drifting through my supposedly solid body, and thought I saw Tillinghast look at them
as though his better trained senses could catch them visually. I recalled what he had said
of the pineal gland, and wondered what he saw with this preternatural eye.

Suddenly I myself became possessed of a kind of augmented sight. Over and above the
luminous and shadowy chaos arose a picture which, though vague, held the elements of
consistency and permanence. It was indeed somewhat familiar, for the unusual part was
superimposed upon the usual terrestrial scene much as a cinema view may be thrown
upon the painted curtain of a theater. I saw the attic laboratory, the electrical machine,
and the unsightly form of Tillinghast opposite me; but of all the space unoccupied by
familiar objects not one particle was vacant. Indescribable shapes both alive and
otherwise were mixed in disgusting disarray, and close to every known thing were
whole worlds of alien, unknown entities. It likewise seemed that all the known things
entered into the composition of other unknown things and vice versa. Foremost among
the living objects were inky, jellyfish monstrosities which flabbily quivered in harmony
with the vibrations from the machine. They were present in loathsome profusion, and I
saw to my horror that they overlapped; that they were semi-fluid and capable of passing
through one another and through what we know as solids. These things were never still,
but seemed ever floating about with some malignant purpose. Sometimes they appeared
to devour one another, the attacker launching itself at its victim and instantaneously
obliterating the latter from sight. Shudderingly I felt that I knew what had obliterated
the unfortunate servants, and could not exclude the thing from my mind as I strove to
observe other properties of the newly visible world that lies unseen around us. But
Tillinghast had been watching me and was speaking.

"You see them? You see them? You see the things that float and flop about you and
through you every moment of your life? You see the creatures that form what men call
the pure air and the blue sky? Have I not succeeded in breaking down the barrier; have I
not shown you worlds that no other living men have seen?" I heard his scream through
the horrible chaos, and looked at the wild face thrust so offensively close to mine. His
eyes were pits of flame, and they glared at me with what I now saw was overwhelming
hatred. The machine droned detestably.

"You think those floundering things wiped out the servants? Fool, they are harmless!
But the servants are gone, aren't they? You tried to stop me; you discouraged me when I
needed every drop of encouragement I could get; you were afraid of the cosmic truth,
you damned coward, but now I've got you! What swept up the servants? What made
them scream so loud?...Don't know, eh! You'll know soon enough. Look at me--listen to
what I say--do you suppose there are really any such things as time and magnitude? Do
you fancy there are such things as form or matter? I tell you, I have struck depths that
your little brain can't picture. I have seen beyond the bounds of infinity and drawn down
demons from the stars...I have harnessed the shadows that stride from world to world to
sow death and madness...Space belongs to me, do you hear? Things are hunting me
now--the things that devour and dissolve--but I know how to elude them. It is you they
will get, as they got the servants...Stirring, dear sir? I told you it was dangerous to
move, I have saved you so far by telling you to keep still--saved you to see more sights
and to listen to me. If you had moved, they would have been at you long ago. Don't
worry, they won't hurt you. They didn't hurt the servants--it was the seeing that made
the poor devils scream so. My pets are not pretty, for they come out of places where
aesthetic standards are--very different. Disintegration is quite painless, I assure you--but
I want you to see them. I almost saw them, but I knew how to stop. You are curious? I
always knew you were no scientist. Trembling, eh. Trembling with anxiety to see the
ultimate things I have discovered. Why don't you move, then? Tired? Well, don't worry,
my friend, for they are coming...Look, look, curse you, look...it's just over your left
shoulder..."

What remains to be told is very brief, and may be familiar to you from the newspaper
accounts. The police heard a shot in the old Tillinghast house and found us there--
Tillinghast dead and me unconscious. They arrested me because the revolver was in my
hand, but released me in three hours, after they found it was apoplexy which had
finished Tillinghast and saw that my shot had been directed at the noxious machine
which now lay hopelessly shattered on the laboratory floor. I did not tell very much of
what I had seen, for I feared the coroner would be skeptical; but from the evasive
outline I did give, the doctor told me that I had undoubtedly been hypnotized by the
vindictive and homicidal madman.

I wish I could believe that doctor. It would help my shaky nerves if I could dismiss what
I now have to think of the air and the sky about and above me. I never feel alone or
comfortable, and a hideous sense of pursuit sometimes comes chillingly on me when I
am weary. What prevents me from believing the doctor is one simple fact--that the
police never found the bodies of those servants whom they say Crawford Tillinghast
murdered.

HE
I saw him on a sleepless night when I was walking desperately to save my soul and my
vision. My coming to New York had been a mistake; for whereas I had looked for
poignant wonder and inspiration in the teeming labyrinths of ancient streets that twist
endlessly from forgotten courts and squares and waterfronts to courts and squares and
waterfronts equally forgotten, and in the Cyclopean modern towers and pinnacles that
rise blackly Babylonian under waning moons, I had found instead only a sense of horror
and oppression which threatened to master, paralyze, and annihilate me.

The disillusion had been gradual. Coming for the first time upon the town, I had seen it
in the sunset from a bridge, majestic above its waters, its incredible peaks and pyramids
rising flowerlike and delicate from pools of violet mist to play with the flaming clouds
and the first stars of evening. Then it had lighted up window by window above the
shimmering tides where lanterns nodded and glided and deep horns bayed weird
harmonies, and had itself become a starry firmament of dream, redolent of faery music,
and one with the marvels of Carcassonne and Samarcand and El Dorado and all glorious
and half- fabulous cities. Shortly afterward I was taken through those antique ways so
dear to my fancy--narrow, curving alleys and passages where rows of red Georgian
brick blinked with small-paned dormers above pillared doorways that had looked on
gilded sedans and paneled coaches--and in the first flush of realization of these long-
wished things I thought I had indeed achieved such treasures as would make me in time
a poet.

But success and happiness were not to be. Garish daylight showed only squalor and
alienage and the noxious elephantiasis of climbing, spreading stone where the moon had
hinted of loveliness and elder magic; and the throngs of people that seethed through the
flume-like streets were squat, swarthy strangers with hardened faces and narrow eyes,
shrewd strangers without dreams and without kinship to the scenes about them, who
could never mean aught to a blue-eyed man of the old folk, with the love of fair green
lanes and white New England village steeples in his heart.

So instead of the poems I had hoped for, there came only a shuddering blackness and
ineffable loneliness; and I saw at last a fearful truth which no one had ever dared to
breathe before--the unwhisperable secret of secrets--the fact that this city of stone and
stridor is not a sentient perpetuation of Old New York as London is of Old London and
Paris of Old Paris, but that it is in fact quite dead, its sprawling body imperfectly
embalmed and infested with queer animate things which have nothing to do with it as it
was in life. Upon making this discovery I ceased to sleep comfortably; though
something of resigned tranquillity came back as I gradually formed the habit of keeping
off the streets by day and venturing abroad only at night, when darkness calls forth what
little of the past still hovers wraith-like about, and old white doorways remember the
stalwart forms that once passed through them. With this mode of relief I even wrote a
few poems, and still refrained from going home to my people lest I seem to crawl back
ignobly in defeat.
Then, on a sleepless night's walk, I met the man. It was in a grotesque hidden courtyard
of the Greenwich section, for there in my ignorance I had settled, having heard of the
place as the natural home of poets and artists. The archaic lanes and houses and
unexpected bits of square and court had indeed delighted me, and when I found the
poets and artists to be loud-voiced pretenders whose quaintness is tinsel and whose lives
are a denial of all that pure beauty which is poetry and art, I stayed on for love of these
venerable things. I fancied them as they were in their prime, when Greenwich was a
placid village not yet engulfed by the town; and in the hours before dawn, when all the
revellers had slunk away, I used to wander alone among their cryptical windings and
brood upon the curious arcana which generations must have deposited there. This kept
my soul alive, and gave me a few of those dreams and visions for which the poet far
within me cried out.

The man came upon me at about two one cloudy August morning, as I was threading a
series of detached courtyards; now accessible only through the unlighted hallways of
intervening buildings, but once forming parts of a continuous network of picturesque
alleys. I had heard of them by vague rumor, and realized that they could not be upon
any map of today; but the fact that they were forgotten only endeared them to me, so
that I had sought them with twice my usual eagerness. Now that I had found them, my
eagerness was again redoubled; for something in their arrangement dimly hinted that
they might be only a few of many such, with dark, dumb counterparts wedged obscurely
betwixt high blank walls and deserted rear tenements, or lurking lamplessly behind
archways unbetrayed by hordes of the foreign-speaking or guarded by furtive and
uncommunicative artists whose practises do not invite publicity or the light of day.

He spoke to me without invitation, noting my mood and glances as I studied certain

knockered doorways above iron-railed steps, the pallid glow of traceried transoms
feebly lighting my face. His own face was in shadow, and he wore a wide-brimmed hat
which somehow blended perfectly with the out-of-date cloak he affected; but I was
subtly disquieted even before he addressed me. His form was very slight; thin almost to
cadaverousness; and his voice proved phenomenally soft and hollow, though not
particularly deep. He had, he said, noticed me several times at my wanderings; and
inferred that I resembled him in loving the vestiges of former years. Would I not like the
guidance of one long practised in these explorations, and possessed of local information
profoundly deeper than any which an obvious newcomer could possibly have gained?

As he spoke, I caught a glimpse of his face in the yellow beam from a solitary attic
window. It was a noble, even a handsome elderly countenance; and bore the marks of a
lineage and refinement unusual for the age and place. Yet some quality about it
disturbed me almost as much as its features pleased me--perhaps it was too white, or too
expressionless, or too much out of keeping with the locality, to make me feel easy or
comfortable. Nevertheless I followed him; for in those dreary days my quest for antique
beauty and mystery was all that I had to keep my soul alive, and I reckoned it a rare
favor of Fate to fall in with one whose kindred seekings seemed to have penetrated so
much farther than mine.

Something in the night constrained the cloaked man to silence and for a long hour he
led me forward without needless words; making only the briefest of comments
concerning ancient names and dates and changes, and directing my progress very
largely by gestures as we squeezed through interstices, tiptoed through corridors
clambered over brick walls, and once crawled on hands and knees through a low, arched
passage of stone whose immense length and tortuous twistings effaced at last every hint
of geographical location I had managed to preserve. The things we saw were very old
and marvelous, or at least they seemed so in the few straggling rays of light by which I
viewed them, and I shall never forget the tottering Ionic columns and fluted pilasters
and urn-headed iron fenceposts and flaring-linteled windows and decorative fanlights
that appeared to grow quainter and stranger the deeper we advanced into this
inexhaustible maze of unknown antiquity.

We met no person, and as time passed the lighted windows became fewer and fewer.
The streetlights we first encountered had been of oil, and of the ancient lozenge pattern.
Later I noticed some with candles; and at last, after traversing a horrible unlighted court
where my guide had to lead with his gloved hand through total blackness to a narrow
wooded gate in a high wall, we came upon a fragment of alley lit only by lanterns in
front of every seventh house--unbelievably Colonial tin lanterns with conical tops and
holes punched in the sides. This alley led steeply uphill--more steeply than I thought
possible in this part of New York--and the upper end was blocked squarely by the ivy-
clad wall of a private estate, beyond which I could see a pale cupola, and the tops of
trees waving against a vague lightness in the sky. In this wall was a small, low-arched
gate of nail-studded black oak, which the man proceeded to unlock with a ponderous
key. Leading me within, he steered a course in utter blackness over what seemed to be a
gravel path, and finally up a flight of stone steps to the door of the house, which he
unlocked and opened for me.

We entered, and as we did so I grew faint from a reek of infinite mustiness which
welled out to meet us, and which must have been the fruit of unwholesome centuries of
decay. My host appeared not to notice this, and in courtesy I kept silent as he piloted me
up a curving stairway, across a hall, and into a room whose door I heard him lock
behind us. Then I saw him pull the curtains of the three small-paned windows that
barely showed themselves against the lightening sky; after which he crossed to the
mantel, struck flint and steel, lighted two candles of a candelabrum of twelve sconces,
and made a gesture enjoining soft-toned speech.

In this feeble radiance I saw that we were in a spacious, well-furnished and paneled
library dating from the first quarter of the Eighteenth Century, with splendid doorway
pediments, a delightful Doric cornice, and a magnificently carved overmantel with
scroll-and-urn top. Above the crowded bookshelves at intervals along the walls were
well-wrought family portraits; all tarnished to an enigmatical dimness, and bearing an
unmistakable likeness to the man who now motioned me to a chair beside the graceful
Chippendale table. Before seating himself across the table from me, my host paused for
a moment as if in embarrassment; then, tardily removing his gloves, wide-brimmed hat,
and cloak, stood theatrically revealed in full mid-Georgian costume from queued hair
and neck ruffles to knee-breeches, silk hose, and the buckled shoes I had not previously
noticed. Now slowly sinking into a lyre-back chair, he commenced to eye me intently.

Without his hat he took on an aspect of extreme age which was scarcely visible before,
and I wondered if this unperceived mark of singular longevity were not one of the
sources of my disquiet. When he spoke at length, his soft, hollow, and carefully muffled
voice not infrequently quavered; and now and then I had great difficulty in following
him as I listened with a thrill of amazement and half-disavowed alarm which grew each
instant.

"You behold, Sir," my host began, "a man of very eccentrical habits for whose costume
no apology need be offered to one with your wit and inclinations. Reflecting upon better
times, I have not scrupled to ascertain their ways, and adopt their dress and manners; an
indulgence which offends none if practised without ostentation. It hath been my good
fortune to retain the rural seat of my ancestors, swallowed though it was by two towns,
first Greenwich, which built up hither after 1800, then New York, which joined on near
1830. There were many reasons for the close keeping of this place in my family, and I
have not been remiss in discharging such obligations. The squire who succeeded to it in
1768 studied sartain arts and made sartain discoveries, all connected with influences
residing in this particular plot of ground, and eminently desarving of the strongest
guarding. Some curious effects of these arts and discoveries I now purpose to show you,
under the strictest secrecy; and I believe I may rely on my judgement of men enough to
have no distrust of either your interest or your fidelity."

He paused, but I could only nod my head. I have said that I was alarmed, yet to my soul
nothing was more deadly than the material daylight world of New York, and whether
this man were a harmless eccentric or a wielder of dangerous arts, I had no choice save
to follow him and slake my sense of wonder on whatever he might have to offer. So I
listened.

"To--my ancestor--," he softly continued, "there appeared to reside some very

remarkable qualities in the will of mankind; qualities having a little-suspected
dominance not only over the acts of one's self and of others, but over every variety of
force and substance in Nature, and over many elements and dimensions deemed more
universal than Nature herself. May I say that he flouted the sanctity of things as great as
space and time and that he put to strange uses the rites of sartain half-breed red Indians
once encamped upon this hill? These Indians showed choler when the place was built,
and were plaguey pestilent in asking to visit the grounds at the full of the moon. For
years they stole over the wall each month when they could, and by stealth performed
sartain acts. Then, in '68, the new squire catched them at their doings, and stood still at
what he saw. Thereafter he bargained with them and exchanged the free access of his
grounds for the exact inwardness of what they did, larning that their grandfathers got
part of their custom from red ancestors and part from an old Dutchman in the time of
the States-General. Arid pox on him, I'm afeared the squire must have sarved them
monstrous bad rum--whether or not by intent--for a week after he larnt the secret he was
the only man living that knew it. You, Sir, are the first outsider to be told there is a
secret, and split me if I'd have risked tampering that much with--the powers--had ye not
been so hot after bygone things."

I shuddered as the man grew colloquial--and with the familiar speech of another day. He
went on.

"But you must know, Sir, that what--the squire--got from those mongrel savages was
but a small part of the larning he came to have. He had not been at Oxford for nothing,
nor talked to no account with an ancient chymist and astrologer in Paris. He was, in
fine, made sensible that all the world is but the smoke of our intellects; past the bidding
of the vulgar, but by the wise to be puffed out and drawn in like any cloud of prime
Virginia tobacco. What we want, we may make about us; and what we don't want, we
may sweep away. I won't say that all this is wholly true in body, but 'tis sufficient true to
furnish a very pretty spectacle now and then. You, I conceive, would be tickled by a
better sight of sartain other years than your fancy affords you; so be pleased to hold
back any fright at what I design to show. Come to the window and be quiet."

My host now took my hand to draw me to one of the two windows on the long side of
the malodorous room, and at the first touch of his ungloved fingers I turned cold. His
flesh, though dry and firm, was of the quality of ice; and I almost shrank away from his
pulling. But again I thought of the emptiness and horror of reality, and boldly prepared
to follow whithersoever I might be led. Once at the window, the man drew apart the
yellow silk curtains and directed my stare into the blackness outside. For a moment I
saw nothing save a myriad of tiny dancing lights, far, far before me. Then, as if in
response to an insidious motion of my host's hand, a flash of heat-lightning played over
the scene, and I looked out upon a sea of luxuriant foliage--foliage unpolluted, and not
the sea of roofs to be expected by any normal mind. On my right the Hudson glittered
wickedly, and in the distance ahead I saw the unhealthy shimmer of a vast salt marsh
constellated with nervous fireflies. The flash died, and an evil smile illumined the waxy
face of the aged necromancer.

"That was before my time--before the new squire's time. Pray let us try again."

I was faint, even fainter than the hateful modernity of that accursed city had made me.

"Good God!" I whispered, "can you do that for any time?" And as he nodded, and bared
the black stumps of what had once been yellow fangs, I clutched at the curtains to
prevent myself from falling. But he steadied me with that terrible, ice-cold claw, and
once more made his insidious gesture.

Again the lightning flashed--but this time upon a scene not wholly strange. It was
Greenwich, the Greenwich that used to be, with here and there a roof or row of houses
as we see it now, yet with lovely green lanes and fields and bits of grassy common. The
marsh still glittered beyond, but in the farther distance I saw the steeples of what was
then all of New York; Trinity and St. Paul's and the Brick Church dominating their
sisters, and a faint haze of wood smoke hovering over the whole. I breathed hard, hut
not so much from the sight itself as from the possibilities my imagination terrifiedly
conjured up.

"Can you--dare you--go far?" I spoke with awe and I think he shared it for a second, but
the evil grin returned.

"Far? What I have seen would blast ye to a mad statue of stone! Back, back--forward,
forward--look, ye puling lackwit!"

And as he snarled the phrase under his breath he gestured anew bringing to the sky a
flash more blinding than either which had come before. For full three seconds I could
glimpse that pandemoniac sight, and in those seconds I saw a vista which will ever
afterward torment me in dreams. I saw the heavens verminous with strange flying
things, and beneath them a hellish black city of giant stone terraces with impious
pyramids flung savagely to the moon, and devil-lights burning from unnumbered
windows. And swarming loathsomely on aerial galleries I saw the yellow, squint-eyed
people of that city, robed horribly in orange and red, and dancing insanely to the
pounding of fevered kettle-drums, the clatter of obscene crotala, and the maniacal
moaning of muted horns whose ceaseless dirges rose and fell undulantly like the wave
of an unhallowed ocean of bitumen.

I saw this vista, I say, and heard as with the mind's ear the blasphemous domdaniel of
cacophony which companioned it. It was the shrieking fulfilment of all the horror which
that corpse-city had ever stirred in my soul, and forgetting every injunction to silence I
screamed and screamed and screamed as my nerves gave way and the walls quivered
about me.

Then, as the flash subsided, I saw that my host was trembling too; a look of shocking
fear half-blotting from his face the serpent distortion of rage which my screams had
excited. He tottered, clutched at the curtains as I had done before, and wriggled his head
wildly, like a hunted animal. God knows he had cause, for as the echoes of my
screaming died away there came another sound so hellishly suggestive that only
numbed emotion kept me sane and conscious. It was the steady, stealthy creaking of the
stairs beyond the locked door, as with the ascent of a barefoot or skin-shod horde; and at
last the cautious, purposeful rattling of the brass latch that glowed in the feeble
candlelight. The old man clawed and spat at me through the moldy air, and barked
things in his throat as he swayed with the yellow curtain he clutched.

"The full moon--damn ye--ye...ye yelping dog--ye called 'em, and they've come for me!
Moccasined feet--dead men--Gad sink ye, ye red devils, but I poisoned no rum o' yours-
-han't I kept your pox-rotted magic safe--ye swilled yourselves sick, curse ye, and yet
must needs blame the squire--let go, you! Unhand that latch--I've naught for ye here--"

At this point three slow and very deliberate raps shook the panels of the door, and a
white foam gathered at the mouth of the frantic magician. His fright, turning to steely
despair, left room for a resurgence of his rage against me; and he staggered a step
toward the table on whose edge I was steadying myself. The curtains, still clutched in
his right hand as his left clawed out at me, grew taut and finally crashed down from
their lofty fastenings; admitting to the room a flood of that full moonlight which the
brightening of the sky had presaged. In those greenish beams the candles paled, and a
new semblance of decay spread over the musk-reeking room with its wormy paneling,
sagging floor, battered mantel, rickety furniture, and ragged draperies. It spread over the
old man, too, whether from the same source or because of his fear and vehemence, and I
saw him shrivel and blacken as he lurched near and strove to rend me with vulturine
talons. Only his eyes stayed whole, and they glared with a propulsive, dilated
incandescence which grew as the face around them charred and dwindled.

The rapping was now repeated with greater insistence, and this time bore a hint of
metal. The black thing facing me had become only a head with eyes, impotently trying
to wriggle across the sinking floor in my direction, and occasionally emitting feeble
little spits of immortal malice. Now swift and splintering blows assailed the sickly
panels, and I saw the gleam of a tomahawk as it cleft the rending wood. I did not move,
for I could not; but watched dazedly as the door fell in pieces to admit a colossal,
shapeless influx of inky substance starred with shining, malevolent eyes. It poured
thickly, like a flood of oil bursting a rotten bulkhead, overturned a chair as it spread, and
finally flowed under the table and across the room to where the blackened head with the
eyes still glared at me. Around that head it closed, totally swallowing it up, and in
another moment it had begun to recede; bearing away its invisible burden without
touching me, and flowing again out that black doorway and down the unseen stairs,
which creaked as before, though in reverse order.

Then the floor gave way at last, and I slid gaspingly down into the nighted chamber
below, choking with cobwebs and half-swooning with terror. The green moon, shining
through broken windows, showed me the hall door half open; and as I rose from the
plaster-strewn floor and twisted myself free from the sagged ceiling, I saw sweep past it
an awful torrent of blackness, with scores of baleful eyes glowing in it. It was seeking
the door to the cellar, and when it found it, vanished therein. I now felt the floor of this
lower room giving as that of the upper chamber had done, and once a crashing above
had been followed by the fall past the west window of some thing which must have
been the cupola. Now liberated for the instant from the wreckage, I rushed through the
hall to the front door and finding myself unable to open it, seized a chair and broke a
window, climbing frenziedly out upon the unkempt lawn where moon light danced over
yard-high grass and weeds. The wall was high and all the gates were locked but moving
a pile of boxes in a corner I managed to gain the top and cling to the great stone urn set
there.

About me in my exhaustion I could see only strange walls and windows and old
gambrel roofs. The steep street of my approach was nowhere visible, and the little I did
see succumbed rapidly to a mist that rolled in from the river despite the glaring
moonlight. Suddenly the urn to which I clung began to tremble, as if sharing my own
lethal dizziness; and in another instant my body was plunging downward to I knew not
what fate.

The man who found me said that I must have crawled a long way despite my broken
bones, for a trail of blood stretched off as far as he dared look. The gathering rain soon
effaced this link with the scene of my ordeal, and reports could state no more than that I
had appeared from a place unknown, at the entrance to a little black court off Perry
Street.

I never sought to return to those tenebrous labyrinths, nor would I direct any sane man
thither if I could. Of who or what that ancient creature was, I have no idea; but I repeat
that the city is dead and full of unsuspected horrors. Whither he has gone, I do not
know; but I have gone home to the pure New England lanes up which fragrant sea-
winds sweep at evening.

HERBERT WEST: REANIMATOR

To be dead, to be truly dead, must be glorious. There are far worse things awaiting man
than death.--Count Dracula

Contents

Part I: From the Dark

Part II: The Plague-Daemon
Part III: Six Shots by Moonlight
Part IV: The Scream of the Dead
Part V: The Horror From the Shadows
Part VI: The Tomb-Legions

Part I: From the Dark

First published in February 1922, "Home Brew" Vol. 1, No. 1, pp. 19--25.

Of Herbert West, who was my friend in college and in after life, I can speak only with
extreme terror. This terror is not due altogether to the sinister manner of his recent
disappearance, but was engendered by the whole nature of his life-work, and first
gained its acute form more than seventeen years ago, when we were in the third year of
our course at the Miskatonic University Medical School in Arkham. While he was with
me, the wonder and diabolism of his experiments fascinated me utterly, and I was his
closest companion. Now that he is gone and the spell is broken, the actual fear is
greater. Memories and possibilities are ever more hideous than realities.

The first horrible incident of our acquaintance was the greatest shock I ever
experienced, and it is only with reluctance that I repeat it. As I have said, it happened
when we were in the medical school where West had already made himself notorious
through his wild theories on the nature of death and the possibility of overcoming it
artificially. His views, which were widely ridiculed by the faculty and by his fellow-
students, hinged on the essentially mechanistic nature of life; and concerned means for
operating the organic machinery of mankind by calculated chemical action after the
failure of natural processes. In his experiments with various animating solutions, he had
killed and treated immense numbers of rabbits, guinea-pigs, cats, dogs, and monkeys,
till he had become the prime nuisance of the college. Several times he had actually
obtained signs of life in animals supposedly dead; in many cases violent signs but he
soon saw that the perfection of his process, if indeed possible, would necessarily
involve a lifetime of research. It likewise became clear that, since the same solution
never worked alike on different organic species, he would require human subjects for
further and more specialised progress. It was here that he first came into conflict with
the college authorities, and was debarred from future experiments by no less a dignitary
than the dean of the medical school himself--the learned and benevolent Dr. Allan
Halsey, whose work in behalf of the stricken is recalled by every old resident of
Arkham.

I had always been exceptionally tolerant of West's pursuits, and we frequently discussed
his theories, whose ramifications and corollaries were almost infinite. Holding with
Haeckel that all life is a chemical and physical process, and that the so-called "soul" is a
myth, my friend believed that artificial reanimation of the dead can depend only on the
condition of the tissues; and that unless actual decomposition has set in, a corpse fully
equipped with organs may with suitable measures be set going again in the peculiar
fashion known as life. That the psychic or intellectual life might be impaired by the
slight deterioration of sensitive brain-cells which even a short period of death would be
apt to cause, West fully realised. It had at first been his hope to find a reagent which
would restore vitality before the actual advent of death, and only repeated failures on
animals had shewn him that the natural and artificial life-motions were incompatible.
He then sought extreme freshness in his specimens, injecting his solutions into the
blood immediately after the extinction of life. It was this circumstance which made the
professors so carelessly sceptical, for they felt that true death had not occurred in any
case. They did not stop to view the matter closely and reasoningly.

It was not long after the faculty had interdicted his work that West confided to me his
resolution to get fresh human bodies in some manner, and continue in secret the
experiments he could no longer perform openly. To hear him discussing ways and
means was rather ghastly, for at the college we had never procured anatomical
specimens ourselves. Whenever the morgue proved inadequate, two local negroes
attended to this matter, and they were seldom questioned. West was then a small,
slender, spectacled youth with delicate features, yellow hair, pale blue eyes, and a soft
voice, and it was uncanny to hear him dwelling on the relative merits of Christchurch
Cemetery and the potter's field. We finally decided on the potter's field, because
practically every body in Christchurch was embalmed; a thing of course ruinous to
West's researches.

I was by this time his active and enthralled assistant, and helped him make all his
decisions, not only concerning the source of bodies but concerning a suitable place for
our loathsome work. It was I who thought of the deserted Chapman farmhouse beyond
Meadow Hill, where we fitted up on the ground floor an operating room and a
laboratory, each with dark curtains to conceal our midnight doings. The place was far
from any road, and in sight of no other house, yet precautions were none the less
necessary; since rumours of strange lights, started by chance nocturnal roamers, would
soon bring disaster on our enterprise. It was agreed to call the whole thing a chemical
laboratory if discovery should occur. Gradually we equipped our sinister haunt of
science with materials either purchased in Boston or quietly borrowed from the college-
-materials carefully made unrecognisable save to expert eyes--and provided spades and
picks for the many burials we should have to make in the cellar. At the college we used
an incinerator, but the apparatus was too costly for our unauthorised laboratory. Bodies
were always a nuisance--even the small guinea-pig bodies from the slight clandestine
experiments in West's room at the boarding-house.

We followed the local death-notices like ghouls, for our specimens demanded particular
qualities. What we wanted were corpses interred soon after death and without artificial
preservation; preferably free from malforming disease, and certainly with all organs
present. Accident victims were our best hope. Not for many weeks did we hear of
anything suitable; though we talked with morgue and hospital authorities, ostensibly in
the college's interest, as often as we could without exciting suspicion. We found that the
college had first choice in every case, so that it might be necessary to remain in Arkham
during the summer, when only the limited summer-school classes were held. In the end,
though, luck favoured us; for one day we heard of an almost ideal case in the potter's
field; a brawny young workman drowned only the morning before in Summer's Pond,
and buried at the town's expense without delay or embalming. That afternoon we found
the new grave, and determined to begin work soon after midnight.

It was a repulsive task that we undertook in the black small hours, even though we
lacked at that time the special horror of graveyards which later experiences brought to
us. We carried spades and oil dark lanterns, for although electric torches were then
manufactured, they were not as satisfactory as the tungsten contrivances of today. The
process of unearthing was slow and sordid--it might have been gruesomely poetical if
we had been artists instead of scientists--and we were glad when our spades struck
wood. When the pine box was fully uncovered, West scrambled down and removed the
lid, dragging out and propping up the contents. I reached down and hauled the contents
out of the grave, and then both toiled hard to restore the spot to its former appearance.
The affair made us rather nervous, especially the stiff form and vacant face of our first
trophy, but we managed to remove all traces of our visit. When we had patted down the
last shovelful of earth, we put the specimen in a canvas sack and set out for the old
Chapman place beyond Meadow Hill.

On an improvised dissecting-table in the old farmhouse, by the light of a powerful

acetylene lamp, the specimen was not very spectral looking. It had been a sturdy and
apparently unimaginative youth of wholesome plebeian type--large-framed, grey-eyed,
and brown-haired--a sound animal without psychological subtleties, and probably
having vital processes of the simplest and healthiest sort. Now, with the eyes closed, it
looked more asleep than dead; though the expert test of my friend soon left no doubt on
that score. We had at last what West had always longed for--a real dead man of the ideal
kind, ready for the solution as prepared according to the most careful calculations and
theories for human use. The tension on our part became very great. We knew that there
was scarcely a chance for anything like complete success, and could not avoid hideous
fears at possible grotesque results of partial animation. Especially were we apprehensive
concerning the mind and impulses of the creature, since in the space following death
some of the more delicate cerebral cells might well have suffered deterioration. I,
myself, still held some curious notions about the traditional "soul" of man, and felt an
awe at the secrets that might be told by one returning from the dead. I wondered what
sights this placid youth might have seen in inaccessible spheres, and what he could
relate if fully restored to life. But my wonder was not overwhelming, since for the most
part I shared the materialism of my friend. He was calmer than I as he forced a large
quantity of his fluid into a vein of the body's arm, immediately binding the incision
securely.

The waiting was gruesome, but West never faltered. Every now and then he applied his
stethoscope to the specimen, and bore the negative results philosophically. After about
three-quarters of an hour without the least sign of life he disappointedly pronounced the
solution inadequate, but determined to make the most of his opportunity and try one
change in the formula before disposing of his ghastly prize. We had that afternoon dug a
grave in the cellar, and would have to fill it by dawn--for although we had fixed a lock
on the house, we wished to shun even the remotest risk of a ghoulish discovery.
Besides, the body would not be even approximately fresh the next night. So taking the
solitary acetylene lamp into the adjacent laboratory, we left our silent guest on the slab
in the dark, and bent every energy to the mixing of a new solution; the weighing and
measuring supervised by West with an almost fanatical care.

The awful event was very sudden, and wholly unexpected. I was pouring something
from one test-tube to another, and West was busy over the alcohol blast-lamp which had
to answer for a Bunsen burner in this gasless edifice, when from the pitch-black room
we had left there burst the most appalling and daemoniac succession of cries that either
of us had ever heard. Not more unutterable could have been the chaos of hellish sound if
the pit itself had opened to release the agony of the damned, for in one inconceivable
cacophony was centered all the supernal terror and unnatural despair of animate nature.
Human it could not have been--it is not in man to make such sounds--and without a
thought of our late employment or its possible discovery, both West and I leaped to the
nearest window like stricken animals; overturning tubes, lamp, and retorts, and vaulting
madly into the starred abyss of the rural night. I think we screamed ourselves as we
stumbled frantically toward the town, though as we reached the outskirts we put on a
semblance of restraint--just enough to seem like belated revellers staggering home from
a debauch.

We did not separate, but managed to get to West's room, where we whispered with the
gas up until dawn. By then we had calmed ourselves a little with rational theories and
plans for investigation, so that we could sleep through the day--classes being
disregarded. But that evening two items in the paper, wholly unrelated, made it again
impossible for us to sleep. The old deserted Chapman house had inexplicably burned to
an amorphous heap of ashes; that we could understand because of the upset lamp. Also,
an attempt had been made to disturb a new grave in the potter's field, as if by futile and
spadeless clawing at the earth. That we could not understand, for we had patted down
the mould very carefully.

And for seventeen years after that West would look frequently over his shoulder, and
complain of fancied footsteps behind him. Now he has disappeared.

Part II: The Plague-Daemon

I shall never forget that hideous summer sixteen years ago, when like a noxious afrite
from the halls of Eblis typhoid stalked leeringly through Arkham. It is by that satanic
scourge that most recall the year, for truly terror brooded with bat-wings over the piles
of coffins in the tombs of Christchurch Cemetery; yet for me there is a greater horror in
that time--a horror known to me alone now that Herbert West has disappeared.

West and I were doing post-graduate work in summer classes at the medical school of
Miskatonic University, and my friend had attained a wide notoriety because of his
experiments leading toward the revivification of the dead. After the scientific slaughter
of uncounted small animals the freakish work had ostensibly stopped by order of our
sceptical dean, Dr. Allan Halsey; though West had continued to perform certain secret
tests in his dingy boarding-house room, and had on one terrible and unforgettable
occasion taken a human body from its grave in the potter's field to a deserted farmhouse
beyond Meadow Hill.

I was with him on that odious occasion, and saw him inject into the still veins the elixir
which he thought would to some extent restore life's chemical and physical processes. It
had ended horribly--in a delirium of fear which we gradually came to attribute to our
own overwrought nerves--and West had never afterward been able to shake off a
maddening sensation of being haunted and hunted. The body had not been quite fresh
enough; it is obvious that to restore normal mental attributes a body must be very fresh
indeed; and the burning of the old house had prevented us from burying the thing. It
would have been better if we could have known it was underground.

After that experience West had dropped his researches for some time; but as the zeal of
the born scientist slowly returned, he again became importunate with the college
faculty, pleading for the use of the dissecting-room and of fresh human specimens for
the work he regarded as so overwhelmingly important. His pleas, however, were wholly
in vain; for the decision of Dr. Halsey was inflexible, and the other professors all
endorsed the verdict of their leader. In the radical theory of reanimation they saw
nothing but the immature vagaries of a youthful enthusiast whose slight form, yellow
hair, spectacled blue eyes, and soft voice gave no hint of the supernormal--almost
diabolical--power of the cold brain within. I can see him now as he was then--and I
shiver. He grew sterner of face, but never elderly. And now Sefton Asylum has had the
mishap and West has vanished.

West clashed disagreeably with Dr. Halsey near the end of our last undergraduate term
in a wordy dispute that did less credit to him than to the kindly dean in point of
courtesy. He felt that he was needlessly and irrationally retarded in a supremely great
work; a work which he could of course conduct to suit himself in later years, but which
he wished to begin while still possessed of the exceptional facilities of the university.
That the tradition-bound elders should ignore his singular results on animals, and persist
in their denial of the possibility of reanimation, was inexpressibly disgusting and almost
incomprehensible to a youth of West's logical temperament. Only greater maturity could
help him understand the chronic mental limitations of the "professor-doctor" type--the
product of generations of pathetic Puritanism; kindly, conscientious, and sometimes
gentle and amiable, yet always narrow, intolerant, custom-ridden, and lacking in
perspective. Age has more charity for these incomplete yet high--souled characters,
whose worst real vice is timidity, and who are ultimately punished by general ridicule
for their intellectual sins--sins like Ptolemaism, Calvinism, anti-Darwinism, anti-
Nietzscheism, and every sort of Sabbatarianism and sumptuary legislation. West, young
despite his marvellous scientific acquirements, had scant patience with good Dr. Halsey
and his erudite colleagues; and nursed an increasing resentment, coupled with a desire
to prove his theories to these obtuse worthies in some striking and dramatic fashion.
Like most youths, he indulged in elaborate daydreams of revenge, triumph, and final
magnanimous forgiveness.

And then had come the scourge, grinning and lethal, from the nightmare caverns of
Tartarus. West and I had graduated about the time of its beginning, but had remained for
additional work at the summer school, so that we were in Arkham when it broke with
full daemoniac fury upon the town. Though not as yet licenced physicians, we now had
our degrees, and were pressed frantically into public service as the numbers of the
stricken grew. The situation was almost past management, and deaths ensued too
frequently for the local undertakers fully to handle. Burials without embalming were
made in rapid succession, and even the Christchurch Cemetery receiving tomb was
crammed with coffins of the unembalmed dead. This circumstance was not without
effect on West, who thought often of the irony of the situation--so many fresh
specimens, yet none for his persecuted researches! We were frightfully overworked, and
the terrific mental and nervous strain made my friend brood morbidly.

But West's gentle enemies were no less harassed with prostrating duties. College had all
but closed, and every doctor of the medical faculty was helping to fight the typhoid
plague. Dr. Halsey in particular had distinguished himself in sacrificing service,
applying his extreme skill with whole-hearted energy to cases which many others
shunned because of danger or apparent hopelessness. Before a month was over the
fearless dean had become a popular hero, though he seemed unconscious of his fame as
he struggled to keep from collapsing with physical fatigue and nervous exhaustion.
West could not withhold admiration for the fortitude of his foe, but because of this was
even more determined to prove to him the truth of his amazing doctrines. Taking
advantage of the disorganisation of both college work and municipal health regulations,
he managed to get a recently deceased body smuggled into the university dissecting-
room one night, and in my presence injected a new modification of his solution. The
thing actually opened its eyes, but only stared at the ceiling with a look of soul-
petrifying horror before collapsing into an inertness from which nothing could rouse it.
West said it was not fresh enough--the hot summer air does not favour corpses. That
time we were almost caught before we incinerated the thing, and West doubted the
advisability of repeating his daring misuse of the college laboratory.

The peak of the epidemic was reached in August. West and I were almost dead, and Dr.
Halsey did die on the 14th. The students all attended the hasty funeral on the 15th, and
bought an impressive wreath, though the latter was quite overshadowed by the tributes
sent by wealthy Arkham citizens and by the municipality itself. It was almost a public
affair, for the dean had surely been a public benefactor. After the entombment we were
all somewhat depressed, and spent the afternoon at the bar of the Commercial House;
where West, though shaken by the death of his chief opponent, chilled the rest of us
with references to his notorious theories. Most of the students went home, or to various
duties, as the evening advanced; but West persuaded me to aid him in "making a night
of it."West's landlady saw us arrive at his room about two in the morning, with a third
man between us; and told her husband that we had all evidently dined and wined rather
well.

Apparently this acidulous matron was right; for about 3 a.m. the whole house was
aroused by cries coming from West's room, where when they broke down the door, they
found the two of us unconscious on the blood-stained carpet, beaten, scratched, and
mauled, and with the broken remnants of West's bottles and instruments around us.
Only an open window told what had become of our assailant, and many wondered how
he himself had fared after the terrific leap from the second story to the lawn which he
must have made. There were some strange garments in the room, but West upon
regaining consciousness said they did not belong to the stranger, but were specimens
collected for bacteriological analysis in the course of investigations on the transmission
of germ diseases. He ordered them burnt as soon as possible in the capacious fireplace.
To the police we both declared ignorance of our late companion's identity. He was,
West nervously said, a congenial stranger whom we had met at some downtown bar of
uncertain location. We had all been rather jovial, and West and I did not wish to have
our pugnacious companion hunted down.

That same night saw the beginning of the second Arkham horror--the horror that to me
eclipsed the plague itself. Christchurch Cemetery was the scene of a terrible killing; a
watchman having been clawed to death in a manner not only too hideous for
description, but raising a doubt as to the human agency of the deed. The victim had
been seen alive considerably after midnight--the dawn revealed the unutterable thing.
The manager of a circus at the neighbouring town of Bolton was questioned, but he
swore that no beast had at any time escaped from its cage. Those who found the body
noted a trail of blood leading to the receiving tomb, where a small pool of red lay on the
concrete just outside the gate. A fainter trail led away toward the woods, but it soon
gave out.

The next night devils danced on the roofs of Arkham, and unnatural madness howled in
the wind. Through the fevered town had crept a curse which some said was greater than
the plague, and which some whispered was the embodied daemon-soul of the plague
itself. Eight houses were entered by a nameless thing which strewed red death in its
wake--in all, seventeen maimed and shapeless remnants of bodies were left behind by
the voiceless, sadistic monster that crept abroad. A few persons had half seen it in the
dark, and said it was white and like a malformed ape or anthropomorphic fiend. It had
not left behind quite all that it had attacked, for sometimes it had been hungry. The
number it had killed was fourteen; three of the bodies had been in stricken homes and
had not been alive.

On the third night frantic bands of searchers, led by the police, captured it in a house on
Crane Street near the Miskatonic campus. They had organised the quest with care,
keeping in touch by means of volunteer telephone stations, and when someone in the
college district had reported hearing a scratching at a shuttered window, the net was
quickly spread. On account of the general alarm and precautions, there were only two
more victims, and the capture was effected without major casualties. The thing was
finally stopped by a bullet, though not a fatal one, and was rushed to the local hospital
amidst universal excitement and loathing.

For it had been a man. This much was clear despite the nauseous eyes, the voiceless
simianism, and the daemoniac savagery. They dressed its wound and carted it to the
asylum at Sefton, where it beat its head against the walls of a padded cell for sixteen
years--until the recent mishap, when it escaped under circumstances that few like to
mention. What had most disgusted the searchers of Arkham was the thing they noticed
when the monster's face was cleaned--the mocking, unbelievable resemblance to a
learned and self-sacrificing martyr who had been entombed but three days before--the
late Dr. Allan Halsey, public benefactor and dean of the medical school of Miskatonic
University.

To the vanished Herbert West and to me the disgust and horror were supreme. I shudder
tonight as I think of it; shudder even more than I did that morning when West muttered
through his bandages, "Damn it, it wasn't quite fresh enough!"

Part III: Six Shots by Moonlight

Published April 1922 in Home Brew Vol. 1, No. 3, p. 21-26.

It is uncommon to fire all six shots of a revolver with great suddenness when one would
probably be sufficient, but many things in the life of Herbert West were uncommon. It
is, for instance, not often that a young physician leaving college is obliged to conceal
the principles which guide his selection of a home and office, yet that was the case with
Herbert West. When he and I obtained our degrees at the medical school of Miskatonic
University, and sought to relieve our poverty by setting up as general practitioners, we
took great care not to say that we chose our house because it was fairly well isolated,
and as near as possible to the potter's field.

Reticence such as this is seldom without a cause, nor indeed was ours; for our
requirements were those resulting from a life-work distinctly unpopular. Outwardly we
were doctors only, but beneath the surface were aims of far greater and more terrible
moment--for the essence of Herbert West's existence was a quest amid black and
forbidden realms of the unknown, in which he hoped to uncover the secret of life and
restore to perpetual animation the graveyard's cold clay. Such a quest demands strange
materials, among them fresh human bodies; and in order to keep supplied with these
indispensable things one must live quietly and not far from a place of informal
interment.

West and I had met in college, and I had been the only one to sympathise with his
hideous experiments. Gradually I had come to be his inseparable assistant, and now that
we were out of college we had to keep together. It was not easy to find a good opening
for two doctors in company, but finally the influence of the university secured us a
practice in Bolton--a factory town near Arkham, the seat of the college. The Bolton
Worsted Mills are the largest in the Miskatonic Valley, and their polyglot employees are
never popular as patients with the local physicians. We chose our house with the
greatest care, seizing at last on a rather run-down cottage near the end of Pond Street;
five numbers from the closest neighbour, and separated from the local potter's field by
only a stretch of meadow land, bisected by a narrow neck of the rather dense forest
which lies to the north. The distance was greater than we wished, but we could get no
nearer house without going on the other side of the field, wholly out of the factory
district. We were not much displeased, however, since there were no people between us
and our sinister source of supplies. The walk was a trifle long, but we could haul our
silent specimens undisturbed.

Our practice was surprisingly large from the very first--large enough to please most
young doctors, and large enough to prove a bore and a burden to students whose real
interest lay elsewhere. The mill-hands were of somewhat turbulent inclinations; and
besides their many natural needs, their frequent clashes and stabbing affrays gave us
plenty to do. But what actually absorbed our minds was the secret laboratory we had
fitted up in the cellar--the laboratory with the long table under the electric lights, where
in the small hours of the morning we often injected West's various solutions into the
veins of the things we dragged from the potter's field. West was experimenting madly to
find something which would start man's vital motions anew after they had been stopped
by the thing we call death, but had encountered the most ghastly obstacles. The solution
had to be differently compounded for different types--what would serve for guinea-pigs
would not serve for human beings, and different human specimens required large
modifications.

The bodies had to be exceedingly fresh, or the slight decomposition of brain tissue
would render perfect reanimation impossible. Indeed, the greatest problem was to get
them fresh enough--West had had horrible experiences during his secret college
researches with corpses of doubtful vintage. The results of partial or imperfect
animation were much more hideous than were the total failures, and we both held
fearsome recollections of such things. Ever since our first daemoniac session in the
deserted farmhouse on Meadow Hill in Arkham, we had felt a brooding menace; and
West, though a calm, blond, blue-eyed scientific automaton in most respects, often
confessed to a shuddering sensation of stealthy pursuit. He half felt that he was
followed--a psychological delusion of shaken nerves, enhanced by the undeniably
disturbing fact that at least one of our reanimated specimens was still alive--a frightful
carnivorous thing in a padded cell at Sefton. Then there was another--our first--whose
exact fate we had never learned.
We had fair luck with specimens in Bolton--much better than in Arkham. We had not
been settled a week before we got an accident victim on the very night of burial, and
made it open its eyes with an amazingly rational expression before the solution failed. It
had lost an arm--if it had been a perfect body we might have succeeded better. Between
then and the next January we secured three more; one total failure, one case of marked
muscular motion, and one rather shivery thing--it rose of itself and uttered a sound.
Then came a period when luck was poor; interments fell off, and those that did occur
were of specimens either too diseased or too maimed for use. We kept track of all the
deaths and their circumstances with systematic care.

One March night, however, we unexpectedly obtained a specimen which did not come
from the potter's field. In Bolton the prevailing spirit of Puritanism had outlawed the
sport of boxing--with the usual result. Surreptitious and ill-conducted bouts among the
mill-workers were common, and occasionally professional talent of low grade was
imported. This late winter night there had been such a match; evidently with disastrous
results, since two timorous Poles had come to us with incoherently whispered entreaties
to attend to a very secret and desperate case. We followed them to an abandoned barn,
where the remnants of a crowd of frightened foreigners were watching a silent black
form on the floor.

The match had been between Kid O'Brien--a lubberly and now quaking youth with a
most un-Hibernian hooked nose--and Buck Robinson, "The Harlem Smoke."The negro
had been knocked out, and a moment's examination shewed us that he would
permanently remain so. He was a loathsome, gorilla-like thing, with abnormally long
arms which I could not help calling fore legs, and a face that conjured up thoughts of
unspeakable Congo secrets and tom-tom poundings under an eerie moon. The body
must have looked even worse in life--but the world holds many ugly things. Fear was
upon the whole pitiful crowd, for they did not know what the law would exact of them
if the affair were not hushed up; and they were grateful when West, in spite of my
involuntary shudders, offered to get rid of the thing quietly--for a purpose I knew too
well.

There was bright moonlight over the snowless landscape, but we dressed the thing and
carried it home between us through the deserted streets and meadows, as we had carried
a similar thing one horrible night in Arkham. We approached the house from the field in
the rear, took the specimen in the back door and down the cellar stairs, and prepared it
for the usual experiment. Our fear of the police was absurdly great, though we had
timed our trip to avoid the solitary patrolman of that section.

The result was wearily anticlimactic. Ghastly as our prize appeared, it was wholly
unresponsive to every solution we injected in its black arm; solutions prepared from
experience with white specimens only. So as the hour grew dangerously near to dawn,
we did as we had done with the others--dragged the thing across the meadows to the
neck of the woods near the potter's field, and buried it there in the best sort of grave the
frozen ground would furnish. The grave was not very deep, but fully as good as that of
the previous specimen--the thing which had risen of itself and uttered a sound. In the
light of our dark lanterns we carefully covered it with leaves and dead vines, fairly
certain that the police would never find it in a forest so dim and dense.
The next day I was increasingly apprehensive about the police, for a patient brought
rumours of a suspected fight and death. West had still another source of worry, for he
had been called in the afternoon to a case which ended very threateningly. An Italian
woman had become hysterical over her missing child--a lad of five who had strayed off
early in the morning and failed to appear for dinner--and had developed symptoms
highly alarming in view of an always weak heart. It was a very foolish hysteria, for the
boy had often run away before; but Italian peasants are exceedingly superstitious, and
this woman seemed as much harassed by omens as by facts. About seven o'clock in the
evening she had died, and her frantic husband had made a frightful scene in his efforts
to kill West, whom he wildly blamed for not saving her life. Friends had held him when
he drew a stiletto, but West departed amidst his inhuman shrieks, curses and oaths of
vengeance. In his latest affliction the fellow seemed to have forgotten his child, who
was still missing as the night advanced. There was some talk of searching the woods,
but most of the family's friends were busy with the dead woman and the screaming man.
Altogether, the nervous strain upon West must have been tremendous. Thoughts of the
police and of the mad Italian both weighed heavily.

We retired about eleven, but I did not sleep well. Bolton had a surprisingly good police
force for so small a town, and I could not help fearing the mess which would ensue if
the affair of the night before were ever tracked down. It might mean the end of all our
local work--and perhaps prison for both West and me. I did not like those rumours of a
fight which were floating about. After the clock had struck three the moon shone in my
eyes, but I turned over without rising to pull down the shade. Then came the steady
rattling at the back door.

I lay still and somewhat dazed, but before long heard West's rap on my door. He was
clad in dressing-gown and slippers, and had in his hands a revolver and an electric
flashlight. From the revolver I knew that he was thinking more of the crazed Italian than
of the police.

"We'd better both go," he whispered. "It wouldn't do not to answer it anyway, and it
may be a patient--it would be like one of those fools to try the back door."

So we both went down the stairs on tiptoe, with a fear partly justified and partly that
which comes only from the soul of the weird small hours. The rattling continued,
growing somewhat louder. When we reached the door I cautiously unbolted it and threw
it open, and as the moon streamed revealingly down on the form silhouetted there, West
did a peculiar thing. Despite the obvious danger of attracting notice and bringing down
on our heads the dreaded police investigation--a thing which after all was mercifully
averted by the relative isolation of our cottage--my friend suddenly, excitedly, and
unnecessarily emptied all six chambers of his revolver into the nocturnal visitor.

For that visitor was neither Italian nor policeman. Looming hideously against the
spectral moon was a gigantic misshapen thing not to be imagined save in nightmares--a
glassy-eyed, ink-black apparition nearly on all fours, covered with bits of mould, leaves,
and vines, foul with caked blood, and having between its glistening teeth a snow--white,
terrible, cylindrical object terminating in a tiny hand.

Part IV: The Scream of the Dead

Published May 1922 in Home Brew Vol. 1, No. 4, p. 53-58.

The scream of a dead man gave to me that acute and added horror of Dr. Herbert West
which harassed the latter years of our companionship. It is natural that such a thing as a
dead man's scream should give horror, for it is obviously, not a pleasing or ordinary
occurrence; but I was used to similar experiences, hence suffered on this occasion only
because of a particular circumstance. And, as I have implied, it was not of the dead man
himself that I became afraid.

Herbert West, whose associate and assistant I was, possessed scientific interests far
beyond the usual routine of a village physician. That was why, when establishing his
practice in Bolton, he had chosen an isolated house near the potter's field. Briefly and
brutally stated, West's sole absorbing interest was a secret study of the phenomena of
life and its cessation, leading toward the reanimation of the dead through injections of
an excitant solution. For this ghastly experimenting it was necessary to have a constant
supply of very fresh human bodies; very fresh because even the least decay hopelessly
damaged the brain structure, and human because we found that the solution had to be
compounded differently for different types of organisms. Scores of rabbits and guinea-
pigs had been killed and treated, but their trail was a blind one. West had never fully
succeeded because he had never been able to secure a corpse sufficiently fresh. What he
wanted were bodies from which vitality had only just departed; bodies with every cell
intact and capable of receiving again the impulse toward that mode of motion called
life. There was hope that this second and artificial life might be made perpetual by
repetitions of the injection, but we had learned that an ordinary natural life would not
respond to the action. To establish the artificial motion, natural life must be extinct--the
specimens must be very fresh, but genuinely dead.

The awesome quest had begun when West and I were students at the Miskatonic
University Medical School in Arkham, vividly conscious for the first time of the
thoroughly mechanical nature of life. That was seven years before, but West looked
scarcely a day older now--he was small, blond, clean-shaven, soft-voiced, and
spectacled, with only an occasional flash of a cold blue eye to tell of the hardening and
growing fanaticism of his character under the pressure of his terrible investigations. Our
experiences had often been hideous in the extreme; the results of defective reanimation,
when lumps of graveyard clay had been galvanised into morbid, unnatural, and
brainless motion by various modifications of the vital solution.

One thing had uttered a nerve-shattering scream; another had risen violently, beaten us
both to unconsciousness, and run amuck in a shocking way before it could be placed
behind asylum bars; still another, a loathsome African monstrosity, had clawed out of
its shallow grave and done a deed--West had had to shoot that object. We could not get
bodies fresh enough to shew any trace of reason when reanimated, so had perforce
created nameless horrors. It was disturbing to think that one, perhaps two, of our
monsters still lived--that thought haunted us shadowingly, till finally West disappeared
under frightful circumstances. But at the time of the scream in the cellar laboratory of
the isolated Bolton cottage, our fears were subordinate to our anxiety for extremely
fresh specimens. West was more avid than I, so that it almost seemed to me that he
looked half-covetously at any very healthy living physique.
It was in July, 1910, that the bad luck regarding specimens began to turn. I had been on
a long visit to my parents in Illinois, and upon my return found West in a state of
singular elation. He had, he told me excitedly, in all likelihood solved the problem of
freshness through an approach from an entirely new angle--that of artificial
preservation. I had known that he was working on a new and highly unusual embalming
compound, and was not surprised that it had turned out well; but until he explained the
details I was rather puzzled as to how such a compound could help in our work, since
the objectionable staleness of the specimens was largely due to delay occurring before
we secured them. This, I now saw, West had clearly recognised; creating his embalming
compound for future rather than immediate use, and trusting to fate to supply again
some very recent and unburied corpse, as it had years before when we obtained the
negro killed in the Bolton prize-fight. At last fate had been kind, so that on this occasion
there lay in the secret cellar laboratory a corpse whose decay could not by any
possibility have begun. What would happen on reanimation, and whether we could hope
for a revival of mind and reason, West did not venture to predict. The experiment would
be a landmark in our studies, and he had saved the new body for my return, so that both
might share the spectacle in accustomed fashion.

West told me how he had obtained the specimen. It had been a vigorous man; a well-
dressed stranger just off the train on his way to transact some business with the Bolton
Worsted Mills. The walk through the town had been long, and by the time the traveller
paused at our cottage to ask the way to the factories, his heart had become greatly
overtaxed. He had refused a stimulant, and had suddenly dropped dead only a moment
later. The body, as might be expected, seemed to West a heaven--sent gift. In his brief
conversation the stranger had made it clear that he was unknown in Bolton, and a search
of his pockets subsequently revealed him to be one Robert Leavitt of St. Louis,
apparently without a family to make instant inquiries about his disappearance. If this
man could not be restored to life, no one would know of our experiment. We buried our
materials in a dense strip of woods between the house and the potter's field. If, on the
other hand, he could be restored, our fame would be brilliantly and perpetually
established. So without delay West had injected into the body's wrist the compound
which would hold it fresh for use after my arrival. The matter of the presumably weak
heart, which to my mind imperilled the success of our experiment, did not appear to
trouble West extensively. He hoped at last to obtain what he had never obtained before--
a rekindled spark of reason and perhaps a normal, living creature.

So on the night of July 18, 1910, Herbert West and I stood in the cellar laboratory and
gazed at a white, silent figure beneath the dazzling arc-light. The embalming compound
had worked uncannily well, for as I stared fascinatedly at the sturdy frame which had
lain two weeks without stiffening, I was moved to seek West's assurance that the thing
was really dead. This assurance he gave readily enough; reminding me that the
reanimating solution was never used without careful tests as to life, since it could have
no effect if any of the original vitality were present. As West proceeded to take
preliminary steps, I was impressed by the vast intricacy of the new experiment; an
intricacy so vast that he could trust no hand less delicate than his own. Forbidding me to
touch the body, he first injected a drug in the wrist just beside the place his needle had
punctured when injecting the embalming compound. This, he said, was to neutralise the
compound and release the system to a normal relaxation so that the reanimating solution
might freely work when injected. Slightly later, when a change and a gentle tremor
seemed to affect the dead limbs; West stuffed a pillow-like object violently over the
twitching face, not withdrawing it until the corpse appeared quiet and ready for our
attempt at reanimation. The pale enthusiast now applied some last perfunctory tests for
absolute lifelessness, withdrew satisfied, and finally injected into the left arm an
accurately measured amount of the vital elixir, prepared during the afternoon with a
greater care than we had used since college days, when our feats were new and groping.
I cannot express the wild, breathless suspense with which we waited for results on this
first really fresh specimen--the first we could reasonably expect to open its lips in
rational speech, perhaps to tell of what it had seen beyond the unfathomable abyss.

West was a materialist, believing in no soul and attributing all the working of
consciousness to bodily phenomena; consequently he looked for no revelation of
hideous secrets from gulfs and caverns beyond death's barrier. I did not wholly disagree
with him theoretically, yet held vague instinctive remnants of the primitive faith of my
forefathers; so that I could not help eyeing the corpse with a certain amount of awe and
terrible expectation. Besides--I could not extract from my memory that hideous,
inhuman shriek we heard on the night we tried our first experiment in the deserted
farmhouse at Arkham.

Very little time had elapsed before I saw the attempt was not to be a total failure. A
touch of colour came to cheeks hitherto chalk-white, and spread out under the curiously
ample stubble of sandy beard. West, who had his hand on the pulse of the left wrist,
suddenly nodded significantly; and almost simultaneously a mist appeared on the mirror
inclined above the body's mouth. There followed a few spasmodic muscular motions,
and then an audible breathing and visible motion of the chest. I looked at the closed
eyelids, and thought I detected a quivering. Then the lids opened, shewing eyes which
were grey, calm, and alive, but still unintelligent and not even curious.

In a moment of fantastic whim I whispered questions to the reddening ears; questions of

other worlds of which the memory might still be present. Subsequent terror drove them
from my mind, but I think the last one, which I repeated, was: "Where have you been?"
I do not yet know whether I was answered or not, for no sound came from the well--
shaped mouth; but I do know that at that moment I firmly thought the thin lips moved
silently, forming syllables which I would have vocalised as "only now" if that phrase
had possessed any sense or relevancy. At that moment, as I say, I was elated with the
conviction that the one great goal had been attained; and that for the first time a
reanimated corpse had uttered distinct words impelled by actual reason. In the next
moment there was no doubt about the triumph; no doubt that the solution had truly
accomplished, at least temporarily, its full mission of restoring rational and articulate
life to the dead. But in that triumph there came to me the greatest of all horrors--not
horror of the thing that spoke, but of the deed that I had witnessed and of the man with
whom my professional fortunes were joined.

For that very fresh body, at last writhing into full and terrifying consciousness with eyes
dilated at the memory of its last scene on earth, threw out its frantic hands in a life and
death struggle with the air, and suddenly collapsing into a second and final dissolution
from which there could be no return, screamed out the cry that will ring eternally in my
aching brain:

"Help! Keep off, you cursed little tow-head fiend--keep that damned needle away from
me!"
Part V: The Horror From the Shadows

Published June 1922 in Home Brew Vol. 1, No. 5, p. 45-50.

Many men have related hideous things, not mentioned in print, which happened on the
battlefields of the Great War. Some of these things have made me faint, others have
convulsed me with devastating nausea, while still others have made me tremble and
look behind me in the dark; yet despite the worst of them I believe I can myself relate
the most hideous thing of all--the shocking, the unnatural, the unbelievable horror from
the shadows.

In 1915 I was a physician with the rank of First Lieutenant in a Canadian regiment in
Flanders, one of many Americans to precede the government itself into the gigantic
struggle. I had not entered the army on my own initiative, but rather as a natural result
of the enlistment of the man whose indispensable assistant I was--the celebrated Boston
surgical specialist, Dr. Herbert West. Dr. West had been avid for a chance to serve as
surgeon in a great war, and when the chance had come, he carried me with him almost
against my will. There were reasons why I could have been glad to let the war separate
us; reasons why I found the practice of medicine and the companionship of West more
and more irritating; but when he had gone to Ottawa and through a colleague's influence
secured a medical commission as Major, I could not resist the imperious persuasion of
one determined that I should accompany him in my usual capacity.

When I say that Dr. West was avid to serve in battle, I do not mean to imply that he was
either naturally warlike or anxious for the safety of civilisation. Always an ice-cold
intellectual machine; slight, blond, blue-eyed, and spectacled; I think he secretly sneered
at my occasional martial enthusiasms and censures of supine neutrality. There was,
however, something he wanted in embattled Flanders; and in order to secure it had had
to assume a military exterior. What he wanted was not a thing which many persons
want, but something connected with the peculiar branch of medical science which he
had chosen quite clandestinely to follow, and in which he had achieved amazing and
occasionally hideous results. It was, in fact, nothing more or less than an abundant
supply of freshly killed men in every stage of dismemberment.

Herbert West needed fresh bodies because his life-work was the reanimation of the
dead. This work was not known to the fashionable clientele who had so swiftly built up
his fame after his arrival in Boston; but was only too well known to me, who had been
his closest friend and sole assistant since the old days in Miskatonic University Medical
School at Arkham. It was in those college days that he had begun his terrible
experiments, first on small animals and then on human bodies shockingly obtained.
There was a solution which he injected into the veins of dead things, and if they were
fresh enough they responded in strange ways. He had had much trouble in discovering
the proper formula, for each type of organism was found to need a stimulus especially
adapted to it. Terror stalked him when he reflected on his partial failures; nameless
things resulting from imperfect solutions or from bodies insufficiently fresh. A certain
number of these failures had remained alive--one was in an asylum while others had
vanished--and as he thought of conceivable yet virtually impossible eventualities he
often shivered beneath his usual stolidity.
West had soon learned that absolute freshness was the prime requisite for useful
specimens, and had accordingly resorted to frightful and unnatural expedients in body-
snatching. In college, and during our early practice together in the factory town of
Bolton, my attitude toward him had been largely one of fascinated admiration; but as his
boldness in methods grew, I began to develop a gnawing fear. I did not like the way he
looked at healthy living bodies; and then there came a nightmarish session in the cellar
laboratory when I learned that a certain specimen had been a living body when he
secured it. That was the first time he had ever been able to revive the quality of rational
thought in a corpse; and his success, obtained at such a loathsome cost, had completely
hardened him.

Of his methods in the intervening five years I dare not speak. I was held to him by sheer
force of fear, and witnessed sights that no human tongue could repeat. Gradually I came
to find Herbert West himself more horrible than anything he did--that was when it
dawned on me that his once normal scientific zeal for prolonging life had subtly
degenerated into a mere morbid and ghoulish curiosity and secret sense of charnel
picturesqueness. His interest became a hellish and perverse addiction to the repellently
and fiendishly abnormal; he gloated calmly over artificial monstrosities which would
make most healthy men drop dead from fright and disgust; he became, behind his pallid
intellectuality, a fastidious Baudelaire of physical experiment--a languid Elagabalus of
the tombs.

Dangers he met unflinchingly; crimes he committed unmoved. I think the climax came
when he had proved his point that rational life can be restored, and had sought new
worlds to conquer by experimenting on the reanimation of detached parts of bodies. He
had wild and original ideas on the independent vital properties of organic cells and
nerve-tissue separated from natural physiological systems; and achieved some hideous
preliminary results in the form of never-dying, artificially nourished tissue obtained
from the nearly hatched eggs of an indescribable tropical reptile. Two biological points
he was exceedingly anxious to settle--first, whether any amount of consciousness and
rational action be possible without the brain, proceeding from the spinal cord and
various nerve-centres; and second, whether any kind of ethereal, intangible relation
distinct from the material cells may exist to link the surgically separated parts of what
has previously been a single living organism. All this research work required a
prodigious supply of freshly slaughtered human flesh--and that was why Herbert West
had entered the Great War.

The phantasmal, unmentionable thing occurred one midnight late in March, 1915, in a
field hospital behind the lines of St. Eloi. I wonder even now if it could have been other
than a daemoniac dream of delirium. West had a private laboratory in an east room of
the barn-like temporary edifice, assigned him on his plea that he was devising new and
radical methods for the treatment of hitherto hopeless cases of maiming. There he
worked like a butcher in the midst of his gory wares--I could never get used to the levity
with which he handled and classified certain things. At times he actually did perform
marvels of surgery for the soldiers; but his chief delights were of a less public and
philanthropic kind, requiring many explanations of sounds which seemed peculiar even
amidst that babel of the damned. Among these sounds were frequent revolver-shots--
surely not uncommon on a battlefield, but distinctly uncommon in an hospital. Dr.
West's reanimated specimens were not meant for long existence or a large audience.
Besides human tissue, West employed much of the reptile embryo tissue which he had
cultivated with such singular results. It was better than human material for maintaining
life in organless fragments, and that was now my friend's chief activity. In a dark corner
of the laboratory, over a queer incubating burner, he kept a large covered vat full of this
reptilian cell-matter; which multiplied and grew puffily and hideously.

On the night of which I speak we had a splendid new specimen--a man at once
physically powerful and of such high mentality that a sensitive nervous system was
assured. It was rather ironic, for he was the officer who had helped West to his
commission, and who was now to have been our associate. Moreover, he had in the past
secretly studied the theory of reanimation to some extent under West. Major Sir Eric
Moreland Clapham-Lee, D.S.O., was the greatest surgeon in our division, and had been
hastily assigned to the St. Eloi sector when news of the heavy fighting reached
headquarters. He had come in an aeroplane piloted by the intrepid Lieut. Ronald Hill,
only to be shot down when directly over his destination. The fall had been spectacular
and awful; Hill was unrecognisable afterward, but the wreck yielded up the great
surgeon in a nearly decapitated but otherwise intact condition. West had greedily seized
the lifeless thing which had once been his friend and fellow-scholar; and I shuddered
when he finished severing the head, placed it in his hellish vat of pulpy reptile--tissue to
preserve it for future experiments, and proceeded to treat the decapitated body on the
operating table. He injected new blood, joined certain veins, arteries, and nerves at the
headless neck, and closed the ghastly aperture with engrafted skin from an unidentified
specimen which had borne an officer's uniform. I knew what he wanted--to see if this
highly organised body could exhibit, without its head, any of the signs of mental life
which had distinguished Sir Eric Moreland Clapham-Lee. Once a student of
reanimation, this silent trunk was now gruesomely called upon to exemplify it.

I can still see Herbert West under the sinister electric light as he injected his reanimating
solution into the arm of the headless body. The scene I cannot describe--I should faint if
I tried it, for there is madness in a room full of classified charnel things, with blood and
lesser human debris almost ankle-deep on the slimy floor, and with hideous reptilian
abnormalities sprouting, bubbling, and baking over a winking bluish-green spectre of
dim flame in a far corner of black shadows.

The specimen, as West repeatedly observed, had a splendid nervous system. Much was
expected of it; and as a few twitching motions began to appear, I could see the feverish
interest on West's face. He was ready, I think, to see proof of his increasingly strong
opinion that consciousness, reason, and personality can exist independently of the brain-
-that man has no central connective spirit, but is merely a machine of nervous matter,
each section more or less complete in itself. In one triumphant demonstration West was
about to relegate the mystery of life to the category of myth. The body now twitched
more vigorously, and beneath our avid eyes commenced to heave in a frightful way. The
arms stirred disquietingly, the legs drew up, and various muscles contracted in a
repulsive kind of writhing. Then the headless thing threw out its arms in a gesture which
was unmistakably one of desperation--an intelligent desperation apparently sufficient to
prove every theory of Herbert West. Certainly, the nerves were recalling the man's last
act in life; the struggle to get free of the falling aeroplane.

What followed, I shall never positively know. It may have been wholly an hallucination
from the shock caused at that instant by the sudden and complete destruction of the
building in a cataclysm of German shell-fire--who can gainsay it, since West and I were
the only proved survivors? West liked to think that before his recent disappearance, but
there were times when he could not; for it was queer that we both had the same
hallucination. The hideous occurrence itself was very simple, notable only for what it
implied.

The body on the table had risen with a blind and terrible groping, and we had heard a
sound. I should not call that sound a voice, for it was too awful. And yet its timbre was
not the most awful thing about it. Neither was its message--it had merely screamed,
"Jump, Ronald, for God's sake, jump!" The awful thing was its source.

For it had come from the large covered vat in that ghoulish corner of crawling black
shadows.

Part VI: The Tomb-Legions

Published July 1922 in Home Brew Vol. 1, No. 6, p. 57-62.>

When Dr. Herbert West disappeared a year ago, the Boston police questioned me
closely. They suspected that I was holding something back, and perhaps suspected
graver things; but I could not tell them the truth because they would not have believed
it. They knew, indeed, that West had been connected with activities beyond the
credence of ordinary men; for his hideous experiments in the reanimation of dead
bodies had long been too extensive to admit of perfect secrecy; but the final soul-
shattering catastrophe held elements of daemoniac phantasy which make even me doubt
the reality of what I saw.

I was West's closest friend and only confidential assistant. We had met years before, in
medical school, and from the first I had shared his terrible researches. He had slowly
tried to perfect a solution which, injected into the veins of the newly deceased, would
restore life; a labour demanding an abundance of fresh corpses and therefore involving
the most unnatural actions. Still more shocking were the products of some of the
experiments--grisly masses of flesh that had been dead, but that West waked to a blind,
brainless, nauseous animation. These were the usual results, for in order to reawaken the
mind it was necessary to have specimens so absolutely fresh that no decay could
possibly affect the delicate brain-cells.

This need for very fresh corpses had been West's moral undoing. They were hard to get,
and one awful day he had secured his specimen while it was still alive and vigorous. A
struggle, a needle, and a powerful alkaloid had transformed it to a very fresh corpse, and
the experiment had succeeded for a brief and memorable moment; but West had
emerged with a soul calloused and seared, and a hardened eye which sometimes glanced
with a kind of hideous and calculating appraisal at men of especially sensitive brain and
especially vigorous physique. Toward the last I became acutely afraid of West, for he
began to look at me that way. People did not seem to notice his glances, but they
noticed my fear; and after his disappearance used that as a basis for some absurd
suspicions.

West, in reality, was more afraid than I; for his abominable pursuits entailed a life of
furtiveness and dread of every shadow. Partly it was the police he feared; but sometimes
his nervousness was deeper and more nebulous, touching on certain indescribable things
into which he had injected a morbid life, and from which he had not seen that life
depart. He usually finished his experiments with a revolver, but a few times he had not
been quick enough. There was that first specimen on whose rifled grave marks of
clawing were later seen. There was also that Arkham professor's body which had done
cannibal things before it had been captured and thrust unidentified into a madhouse cell
at Sefton, where it beat the walls for sixteen years. Most of the other possibly surviving
results were things less easy to speak of--for in later years West's scientific zeal had
degenerated to an unhealthy and fantastic mania, and he had spent his chief skill in
vitalising not entire human bodies but isolated parts of bodies, or parts joined to organic
matter other than human. It had become fiendishly disgusting by the time he
disappeared; many of the experiments could not even be hinted at in print. The Great
War, through which both of us served as surgeons, had intensified this side of West.

In saying that West's fear of his specimens was nebulous, I have in mind particularly its
complex nature. Part of it came merely from knowing of the existence of such nameless
monsters, while another part arose from apprehension of the bodily harm they might
under certain circumstances do him. Their disappearance added horror to the situation--
of them all, West knew the whereabouts of only one, the pitiful asylum thing. Then
there was a more subtle fear--a very fantastic sensation resulting from a curious
experiment in the Canadian army in 1915. West, in the midst of a severe battle, had
reanimated Major Sir Eric Moreland Clapham-Lee, D.S.O., a fellow-physician who
knew about his experiments and could have duplicated them. The head had been
removed, so that the possibilities of quasi-intelligent life in the trunk might be
investigated. Just as the building was wiped out by a German shell, there had been a
success. The trunk had moved intelligently; and, unbelievable to relate, we were both
sickeningly sure that articulate sounds had come from the detached head as it lay in a
shadowy corner of the laboratory. The shell had been merciful, in a way--but West
could never feel as certain as he wished, that we two were the only survivors. He used
to make shuddering conjectures about the possible actions of a headless physician with
the power of reanimating the dead.

West's last quarters were in a venerable house of much elegance, overlooking one of the
oldest burying-grounds in Boston. He had chosen the place for purely symbolic and
fantastically aesthetic reasons, since most of the interments were of the colonial period
and therefore of little use to a scientist seeking very fresh bodies. The laboratory was in
a sub-cellar secretly constructed by imported workmen, and contained a huge
incinerator for the quiet and complete disposal of such bodies, or fragments and
synthetic mockeries of bodies, as might remain from the morbid experiments and
unhallowed amusements of the owner. During the excavation of this cellar the workmen
had struck some exceedingly ancient masonry; undoubtedly connected with the old
burying-ground, yet far too deep to correspond with any known sepulchre therein. After
a number of calculations West decided that it represented some secret chamber beneath
the tomb of the Averills, where the last interment had been made in 1768. I was with
him when he studied the nitrous, dripping walls laid bare by the spades and mattocks of
the men, and was prepared for the gruesome thrill which would attend the uncovering of
centuried grave-secrets; but for the first time West's new timidity conquered his natural
curiosity, and he betrayed his degenerating fibre by ordering the masonry left intact and
plastered over. Thus it remained till that final hellish night; part of the walls of the
secret laboratory. I speak of West's decadence, but must add that it was a purely mental
and intangible thing. Outwardly he was the same to the last--calm, cold, slight, and
yellow-haired, with spectacled blue eyes and a general aspect of youth which years and
fears seemed never to change. He seemed calm even when he thought of that clawed
grave and looked over his shoulder; even when he thought of the carnivorous thing that
gnawed and pawed at Sefton bars.

The end of Herbert West began one evening in our joint study when he was dividing his
curious glance between the newspaper and me. A strange headline item had struck at
him from the crumpled pages, and a nameless titan claw had seemed to reach down
through sixteen years. Something fearsome and incredible had happened at Sefton
Asylum fifty miles away, stunning the neighbourhood and baffling the police. In the
small hours of the morning a body of silent men had entered the grounds, and their
leader had aroused the attendants. He was a menacing military figure who talked
without moving his lips and whose voice seemed almost ventriloquially connected with
an immense black case he carried. His expressionless face was handsome to the point of
radiant beauty, but had shocked the superintendent when the hall light fell on it--for it
was a wax face with eyes of painted glass. Some nameless accident had befallen this
man. A larger man guided his steps; a repellent hulk whose bluish face seemed half
eaten away by some unknown malady. The speaker had asked for the custody of the
cannibal monster committed from Arkham sixteen years before; and upon being
refused, gave a signal which precipitated a shocking riot. The fiends had beaten,
trampled, and bitten every attendant who did not flee; killing four and finally
succeeding in the liberation of the monster. Those victims who could recall the event
without hysteria swore that the creatures had acted less like men than like unthinkable
automata guided by the wax-faced leader. By the time help could be summoned, every
trace of the men and of their mad charge had vanished.

From the hour of reading this item until midnight, West sat almost paralysed. At
midnight the doorbell rang, startling him fearfully. All the servants were asleep in the
attic, so I answered the bell. As I have told the police, there was no wagon in the street,
but only a group of strange-looking figures bearing a large square box which they
deposited in the hallway after one of them had grunted in a highly unnatural voice,
"Express--prepaid."They filed out of the house with a jerky tread, and as I watched them
go I had an odd idea that they were turning toward the ancient cemetery on which the
back of the house abutted. When I slammed the door after them West came downstairs
and looked at the box. It was about two feet square, and bore West's correct name and
present address. It also bore the inscription, "From Eric Moreland Clapham-Lee, St.
Eloi, Flanders."Six years before, in Flanders, a shelled hospital had fallen upon the
headless reanimated trunk of Dr. Clapham-Lee, and upon the detached head which--
perhaps--had uttered articulate sounds.

West was not even excited now. His condition was more ghastly. Quickly he said, "It's
the finish--but let's incinerate--this."We carried the thing down to the laboratory--
listening. I do not remember many particulars--you can imagine my state of mind--but it
is a vicious lie to say it was Herbert West's body which I put into the incinerator. We
both inserted the whole unopened wooden box, closed the door, and started the
electricity. Nor did any sound come from the box, after all.

It was West who first noticed the falling plaster on that part of the wall where the
ancient tomb masonry had been covered up. I was going to run, but he stopped me.
Then I saw a small black aperture, felt a ghoulish wind of ice, and smelled the charnel
bowels of a putrescent earth. There was no sound, but just then the electric lights went
out and I saw outlined against some phosphorescence of the nether world a horde of
silent toiling things which only insanity--or worse--could create. Their outlines were
human, semi-human, fractionally human, and not human at all--the horde was
grotesquely heterogeneous. They were removing the stones quietly, one by one, from
the centuried wall. And then, as the breach became large enough, they came out into the
laboratory in single file; led by a talking thing with a beautiful head made of wax. A
sort of mad-eyed monstrosity behind the leader seized on Herbert West. West did not
resist or utter a sound. Then they all sprang at him and tore him to pieces before my
eyes, bearing the fragments away into that subterranean vault of fabulous abominations.
West's head was carried off by the wax-headed leader, who wore a Canadian officer's
uniform. As it disappeared I saw that the blue eyes behind the spectacles were hideously
blazing with their first touch of frantic, visible emotion.

Servants found me unconscious in the morning. West was gone. The incinerator
contained only unidentifiable ashes. Detectives have questioned me, but what can I say?
The Sefton tragedy they will not connect with West; not that, nor the men with the box,
whose existence they deny. I told them of the vault, and they pointed to the unbroken
plaster wall and laughed. So I told them no more. They imply that I am either a madman
or a murderer--probably I am mad. But I might not be mad if those accursed tomb-
legions had not been so silent.

HYPNOS
May the merciful gods, if indeed there be such, guard those hours when no power of the
will, or drug that the cunning of man devises, can keep me from the chasm of sleep.
Death is merciful, for there is no return therefrom, but with him who has come back out
of the nethermost chambers of night, haggard and knowing, peace rests nevermore. Fool
that I was to plunge with such unsanctioned frensy into mysteries no man was meant to
penetrate; fool or god that he was--my only friend, who led me and went before me, and
who in the end passed into terrors which may yet be mine!

We met, I recall, in a railway station, where he was the center of a crowd of the vulgarly
curious. He was unconscious, having fallen in a kind of convulsion which imparted to
his slight black-clad body a strange rigidity. I think he was then approaching forty years
of age, for there were deep lines in the face, wan and hollow-cheeked, but oval and
actually beautiful; and touches of gray in the thick, waving hair and small full beard
which had once been of the deepest raven black. His brow was white as the marble of
Pentelicus, and of a height and breadth almost god-like.

I said to myself, with all the ardor of a sculptor, that this man was a faun's statue out of
antique Hellas, dug from a temple's ruins and brought somehow to life in our stifling
age only to feel the chill and pressure of devastating years. And when he opened his
immense, sunken, and wildly luminous black eyes I knew he would be thenceforth my
only friend--the only friend of one who had never possessed a friend before--for I saw
that such eyes must have looked fully upon the grandeur and the terror of realms beyond
normal consciousness and reality; realms which I had cherished in fancy, but vainly
sought. So as I drove the crowd away I told him he must come home with me and be my
teacher and leader in unfathomed mysteries, and he assented without speaking a word.
Afterward I found that his voice was music--the music of deep viols and of crystalline
spheres. We talked often in the night, and in the day, when I chiseled busts of him and
carved miniature heads in ivory to immortalize his different expressions.

Of our studies it is impossible to speak, since they held so slight a connection with
anything of the world as living men conceive it. They were of that vaster and more
appalling universe of dim entity and consciousness which lies deeper than matter, time,
and space, and whose existence we suspect only in certain forms of sleep-those rare
dreams beyond dreams which come never to common men, and but once or twice in the
lifetime of imaginative men. The cosmos of our waking knowledge, born from such an
universe as a bubble is born from the pipe of a jester, touches it only as such a bubble
may touch its sardonic source when sucked back by the jester's whim. Men of learning
suspect it little and ignore it mostly. Wise men have interpreted dreams, and the gods
have laughed. One man with Oriental eyes has said that all time and space are relative,
and men have laughed. But even that man with Oriental eyes has done no more than
suspect. I had wished and tried to do more than suspect, and my friend had tried and
partly succeeded. Then we both tried together, and with exotic drugs courted terrible
and forbidden dreams in the tower studio chamber of the old manor-house in hoary
Kent.

Among the agonies of these after days is that chief of torments- inarticulateness. What I
learned and saw in those hours of impious exploration can never be told--for want of
symbols or suggestions in any language. I say this because from first to last our
discoveries partook only of the nature of sensations; sensations correlated with no
impression which the nervous system of normal humanity is capable of receiving. They
were sensations, yet within them lay unbelievable elements of time and space--things
which at bottom possess no distinct and definite existence. Human utterance can best
convey the general character of our experiences by calling them plungings or soarings;
for in every period of revelation some part of our minds broke boldly away from all that
is real and present, rushing aerially along shocking, unlighted, and fear-haunted abysses,
and occasionally tearing through certain well-marked and typical obstacles describable
only as viscous, uncouth clouds of vapors.

In these black and bodiless flights we were sometimes alone and sometimes together.
When we were together, my friend was always far ahead; I could comprehend his
presence despite the absence of form by a species of pictorial memory whereby his face
appeared to me, golden from a strange light and frightful with its weird beauty, its
anomalously youthful cheeks, its burning eyes, its Olympian brow, and its shadowing
hair and growth of beard.

Of the progress of time we kept no record, for time had become to us the merest
illusion. I know only that there must have been something very singular involved, since
we came at length to marvel why we did not grow old. Our discourse was unholy, and
always hideously ambitious--no god or demon could have aspired to discoveries and
conquest like those which we planned in whispers. I shiver as I speak of them, and dare
not be explicit; though I will say that my friend once wrote on paper a wish which he
dared not utter with his tongue, and which made me burn the paper and look
affrightedly out of the window at the spangled night sky. I will hint--only hint--that he
had designs which involved the rulership of the visible universe and more; designs
whereby the earth and the stars would move at his command, and the destinies of all
living things be his. I affirm--I swear--that I had no share in these extreme aspirations.
Anything my friend may have said or written to the contrary must be erroneous, for I
am no man of strength to risk the unmentionable spheres by which alone one might
achieve success.

There was a night when winds from unknown spaces whirled us irresistibly into
limitless vacuum beyond all thought and entity. Perceptions of the most maddeningly
untransmissible sort thronged upon us; perceptions of infinity which at the time
convulsed us with joy, yet which are now partly lost to my memory and partly incapable
of presentation to others. Viscous obstacles were clawed through in rapid succession,
and at length I felt that we had been borne to realms of greater remoteness than any we
had previously known.

My friend was vastly in advance as we plunged into this awesome ocean of virgin
aether, and I could see the sinister exultation on his floating, luminous, too-youthful
memory-face. Suddenly that face became dim and quickly disappeared, and in a brief
space I found myself projected against an obstacle which I could not penetrate. It was
like the others, yet incalculably denser; a sticky clammy mass, if such terms can be
applied to analogous qualities in a non-material sphere.

I had, I felt, been halted by a barrier which my friend and leader had successfully
passed. Struggling anew, I came to the end of the drug--dream and opened my physical
eyes to the tower studio in whose opposite corner reclined the pallid and still
unconscious form of my fellow dreamer, weirdly haggard and wildly beautiful as the
moon shed gold-green light on his marble features.

Then, after a short interval, the form in the corner stirred; and may pitying heaven keep
from my sight and sound another thing like that which took place before me. I cannot
tell you how he shrieked, or what vistas of unvisitable hells gleamed for a second in
black eyes crazed with fright. I can only say that I fainted, and did not stir till he himself
recovered and shook me in his frensy for someone to keep away the horror and
desolation.

That was the end of our voluntary searchings in the caverns of dream. Awed, shaken,
and portentous, my friend who had been beyond the barrier warned me that we must
never venture within those realms again. What he had seen, he dared not tell me; but he
said from his wisdom that we must sleep as little as possible, even if drugs were
necessary to keep us awake. That he was right, I soon learned from the unutterable fear
which engulfed me whenever consciousness lapsed.

After each short and inevitable sleep I seemed older, whilst my friend aged with a
rapidity almost shocking. It is hideous to see wrinkles form and hair whiten almost
before one's eyes. Our mode of life was now totally altered. Heretofore a recluse so far
as I know-his true name and origin never having passed his lips--my friend now became
frantic in his fear of solitude. At night he would not be alone, nor would the company of
a few persons calm him. His sole relief was obtained in revelry of the most general and
boisterous sort; so that few assemblies of the young and gay were unknown to us.

Our appearance and age seemed to excite in most cases a ridicule which I keenly
resented, but which my friend considered a lesser evil than solitude. Especially was he
afraid to be out of doors alone when the stars were shining, and if forced to this
condition he would often glance furtively at the sky as if hunted by some monstrous
thing therein. He did not always glance at the same place in the sky-it seemed to be a
different place at different times. On spring evenings it would be low in the northeast. In
the summer it would be nearly overhead. In the autumn it would be in the northwest. In
winter it would be in the east, but mostly if in the small hours of morning.

Midwinter evenings seemed least dreadful to him. Only after two years did I connect
this fear with anything in particular; but then I began to see that he must be looking at a
special spot on the celestial vault whose position at different times corresponded to the
direction of his glance--a spot roughly marked by the constellation Corona Borealis.

We now had a studio in London, never separating, but never discussing the days when
we had sought to plumb the mysteries of the unreal world. We were aged and weak
from our drugs, dissipations, and nervous overstrain, and the thinning hair and beard of
my friend had become snow-white. Our freedom from long sleep was surprising, for
seldom did we succumb more than an hour or two at a time to the shadow which had
now grown so frightful a menace.

Then came one January of fog and rain, when money ran low and drugs were hard to
buy. My statues and ivory heads were all sold, and I had no means to purchase new
materials, or energy to fashion them even had I possessed them. We suffered terribly,
and on a certain night my friend sank into a deep-breathing sleep from which I could
not awaken him. I can recall the scene now--the desolate, pitch-black garret studio
under the eaves with the rain beating down; the ticking of our lone clock; the fancied
ticking of our watches as they rested on the dressing-table; the creaking of some
swaying shutter in a remote part of the house; certain distant city noises muffled by fog
and space; and, worst of all, the deep, steady, sinister breathing of my friend on the
couch--a rhythmical breathing which seemed to measure moments of supernal fear and
agony for his spirit as it wandered in spheres forbidden, unimagined, and hideously
remote.

The tension of my vigil became oppressive, and a wild train of trivial impressions and
associations thronged through my almost unhinged mind. I heard a clock strike
somewhere--not ours, for that was not a striking clock--and my morbid fancy found in
this a new starting-point for idle wanderings. Clocks--time--space--infinity-and then my
fancy reverted to the locale as I reflected that even now, beyond the roof and the fog and
the rain and the atmosphere, Corona Borealis was rising in the northeast. Corona
Borealis, which my friend had appeared to dread, and whose scintillant semicircle of
stars must even now be glowing unseen through the measureless abysses of aether. All
at once my feverishly sensitive ears seemed to detect a new and wholly distinct
component in the soft medley of drug-magnified sounds--a low and damnably insistent
whine from very far away; droning, clamoring, mocking, calling, from the northeast.

But it was not that distant whine which robbed me of my faculties and set upon my soul
such a seal of fright as may never in life be removed; not that which drew the shrieks
and excited the convulsions which caused lodgers and police to break down the door. It
was not what I heard, but what I saw; for in that dark, locked, shuttered, and curtained
room there appeared from the black northeast corner a shaft of horrible red-gold light--a
shaft which bore with it no glow to disperse the darkness, but which streamed only upon
the recumbent head of the troubled sleeper, bringing out in hideous duplication the
luminous and strangely youthful memory-face as I had known it in dreams of abysmal
space and unshackled time, when my friend had pushed behind the barrier to those
secret, innermost and forbidden caverns of nightmare.

And as I looked, I beheld the head rise, the black, liquid, and deep--sunken eyes open in
terror, and the thin, shadowed lips part as if for a scream too frightful to be uttered.
There dwelt in that ghastly and flexible face, as it shone bodiless, luminous, and
rejuvenated in the blackness, more of stark, teeming, brain-shattering fear than all the
rest of heaven and earth has ever revealed to me.

No word was spoken amidst the distant sound that grew nearer and nearer, but as I
followed the memory-face's mad stare along that cursed shaft of light to its source, the
source whence also the whining came, I, too, saw for an instant what it saw, and fell
with ringing ears in that fit of shrieking epilepsy which brought the lodgers and the
police. Never could I tell, try as I might, what it actually was that I saw; nor could the
still face tell, for although it must have seen more than I did, it will never speak again.
But always I shall guard against the mocking and insatiate Hypnos, lord of sleep,
against the night sky, and against the mad ambitions of knowledge and philosophy.

Just what happened is unknown, for not only was my own mind unseated by the strange
and hideous thing, but others were tainted with a forgetfulness which can mean nothing
if not madness. They have said, I know not for what reason, that I never had a friend;
but that art, philosophy, and insanity had filled all my tragic life. The lodgers and police
on that night soothed me, and the doctor administered something to quiet me, nor did
anyone see what a nightmare event had taken place. My stricken friend moved them to
no pity, but what they found on the couch in the studio made them give me a praise
which sickened me, and now a fame which I spurn in despair as I sit for hours, bald,
gray-bearded, shriveled, palsied, drug-crazed, and broken, adoring and praying to the
object they found.

For they deny that I sold the last of my statuary, and point with ecstasy at the thing
which the shining shaft of light left cold, petrified, and unvocal. It is all that remains of
my friend; the friend who led me on to madness and wreckage; a godlike head of such
marble as only old Hellas could yield, young with the youth that is outside time, and
with beauteous bearded face, curved, smiling lips, Olympian brow, and dense locks
waving and poppy-crowned. They say that that haunting memory-face is modeled from
my own, as it was at twenty--five; but upon the marble base is carven a single name in
the letters of Attica--HYPNOS.

IMPRISONED WITH THE PHARAOHS

Mystery attracts mystery. Ever since the wide appearance of my name as a performer of
unexplained feats, I have encountered strange narratives and events which my calling
has led people to link with my interests and activities. Some of these have been trivial
and irrelevant, some deeply dramatic and absorbing, some productive of weird and
perilous experiences and some involving me in extensive scientific and historical
research. Many of these matters I have told and shall continue to tell very freely; but
there is one of which I speak with great reluctance, and which I am now relating only
after a session of grilling persuasion from the publishers of this magazine, who had
heard vague rumors of it from other members of my family.
The hitherto guarded subject pertains to my non-professional visit to Egypt fourteen
years ago, and has been avoided by me for several reasons. For one thing, I am averse to
exploiting certain unmistakably actual facts and conditions obviously unknown to the
myriad tourists who throng about the pyramids and apparently secreted with much
diligence by the authorities at Cairo, who cannot be wholly ignorant of them. For
another thing, I dislike to recount an incident in which my own fantastic imagination
must have played so great a part. What I saw--or thought I saw--certainly did not take
place; but is rather to be viewed as a result of my then recent readings in Egyptology,
and of the speculations anent this theme which my environment naturally prompted.
These imaginative stimuli, magnified by the excitement of an actual event terrible
enough in itself, undoubtedly gave rise to the culminating horror of that grotesque night
so long past.

In January, 1910, I had finished a professional engagement in England and signed a

contract for a tour of Australian theatres. A liberal time being allowed for the trip, I
determined to make the most of it in the sort of travel which chiefly interests me; so
accompanied by my wife I drifted pleasantly down the Continent and embarked at
Marseilles on the P & O Steamer Malwa, bound for Port Said. From that point I
proposed to visit the principal historical localities of lower Egypt before leaving finally
for Australia.

The voyage was an agreeable one, and enlivened by many of the amusing incidents
which befall a magical performer apart from his work. I had intended, for the sake of
quiet travel, to keep my name a secret; but was goaded into betraying myself by a
fellow-magician whose anxiety to astound the passengers with ordinary tricks tempted
me to duplicate and exceed his feats in a manner quite destructive of my incognito. I
mention this because of its ultimate effect--an effect I should have foreseen before
unmasking to a shipload of tourists about to scatter throughout the Nile valley. What it
did was to herald my identity wherever I subsequently went, and deprive my wife and
me of all the placid inconspicuousness we had sought. Traveling to seek curiosities, I
was often forced to stand inspection as a sort of curiosity myself!

We had come to Egypt in search of the picturesque and the mystically impressive, but
found little enough when the ship edged up to Port Said and discharged its passengers in
small boats. Low dunes of sand, bobbing buoys in shallow water, and a drearily
European small town with nothing of interest save the great De Lesseps statue, made us
anxious to get to something more worth our while. After some discussion we decided to
proceed at once to Cairo and the Pyramids, later going to Alexandria for the Australian
boat and for whatever Greco-Roman sights that ancient metropolis might present.

The railway journey was tolerable enough, and consumed only four hours and a half.
We saw much of the Suez Canal, whose route we followed as far as Ismailiya and later
had a taste of Old Egypt in our glimpse of the restored fresh-water canal of the Middle
Empire. Then at last we saw Cairo glimmering through the growing dusk; a winkling
constellation which became a blaze as we halted at the great Gare Centrale.

But once more disappointment awaited us, for all that we beheld was European save the
costumes and the crowds. A prosaic subway led to a square teeming with carriages,
taxicabs, and trolley-cars and gorgeous with electric lights shining on tall buildings;
whilst the very theatre where I was vainly requested to play and which I later attended
as a spectator, had recently been renamed the 'American Cosmograph'. We stopped at
Shepheard's Hotel, reached in a taxi that sped along broad, smartly built-up streets; and
amidst the perfect service of its restaurant, elevators and generally Anglo-American
luxuries the mysterious East and immemorial past seemed very far away.

The next day, however, precipitated us delightfully into the heart of the Arabian Nights
atmosphere; and in the winding ways and exotic skyline of Cairo, the Bagdad of Harun-
al-Rashid seemed to live again. Guided by our Baedeker, we had struck east past the
Ezbekiyeh Gardens along the Mouski in quest of the native quarter, and were soon in
the hands of a clamorous cicerone who--notwithstanding later developments--was
assuredly a master at his trade.

Not until afterward did I see that I should have applied at the hotel for a licensed guide.
This man, a shaven, peculiarly hollow-voiced and relatively cleanly fellow who looked
like a Pharaoh and called himself 'Abdul Reis el Drogman' appeared to have much
power over others of his kind; though subsequently the police professed not to know
him, and to suggest that reis is merely a name for any person in authority, whilst
'Drogman' is obviously no more than a clumsy modification of the word for a leader of
tourist parties--dragoman.

Abdul led us among such wonders as we had before only read and dreamed of. Old
Cairo is itself a story-book and a dream--labyrinths of narrow alleys redolent of
aromatic secrets; Arabesque balconies and oriels nearly meeting above the cobbled
streets; maelstroms of Oriental traffic with strange cries, cracking whips, rattling carts,
jingling money, and braying donkeys; kaleidoscopes of polychrome robes, veils,
turbans, and tarbushes; water-carriers and dervishes, dogs and cats, soothsayers and
barbers; and over all the whining of blind beggars crouched in alcoves, and the sonorous
chanting of muezzins from minarets limned delicately against a sky of deep, unchanging
blue.

The roofed, quieter bazaars were hardly less alluring. Spice, perfume, incense beads,
rugs, silks, and brass--old Mahmoud Suleiman squats cross-legged amidst his gummy
bottles while chattering youths pulverize mustard in the hollowed-out capital of an
ancient classic column--a Roman Corinthian, perhaps from neighboring Heliopolis,
where Augustus stationed one of his three Egyptian legions. Antiquity begins to mingle
with exoticism. And then the mosques and the museum--we saw them all, and tried not
to let our Arabian revel succumb to the darker charm of Pharaonic Egypt which the
museum's priceless treasures offered. That was to be our climax, and for the present we
concentrated on the mediaeval Saracenic glories of the Califs whose magnificent tomb-
mosques form a glittering faery necropolis on the edge of the Arabian Desert.

At length Abdul took us along the Sharia Mohammed Ali to the ancient mosque of
Sultan Hassan, and the tower-flanked Babel-Azab, beyond which climbs the steep-
walled pass to the mighty citadel that Saladin himself built with the stones of forgotten
pyramids. It was sunset when we scaled that cliff, circled the modern mosque of
Mohammed Ali, and looked down from the dizzy parapet over mystic Cairo--mystic
Cairo all golden with its carven domes, its ethereal minarets and its flaming gardens.

Far over the city towered the great Roman dome of the new museum; and beyond it--
across the cryptic yellow Nile that is the mother of eons and dynasties--lurked the
menacing sands of the Libyan Desert, undulant and iridescent and evil with older
arcana.

The red sun sank low, bringing the relentless chill of Egyptian dusk; and as it stood
poised on the world's rim like that ancient god of Heliopolis--Re-Harakhte, the Horizon-
Sun--we saw silhouetted against its vermeil holocaust the black outlines of the Pyramids
of Gizeh--the palaeogean tombs there were hoary with a thousand years when Tut-
Ankh--Amen mounted his golden throne in distant Thebes. Then we knew that we were
done with Saracen Cairo, and that we must taste the deeper mysteries of primal Egypt--
the black Kem of Re and Amen, Isis and Osiris.

The next morning we visited the Pyramids, riding out in a Victoria across the island of
Chizereh with its massive lebbakh trees, and the smaller English bridge to the western
shore. Down the shore road we drove, between great rows of lebbakhs and past the vast
Zoological Gardens to the suburb of Gizeh, where a new bridge to Cairo proper has
since been built. Then, turning inland along the Sharia-el-Haram, we crossed a region of
glassy canals and shabby native villages till before us loomed the objects of our quest,
cleaving the mists of dawn and forming inverted replicas in the roadside pools. Forty
centuries, as Napoleon had told his campaigners there, indeed looked down upon us.

The road now rose abruptly, till we finally reached our place of transfer between the
trolley station and the Mena House Hotel. Abdul Reis, who capably purchased our
Pyramid tickets, seemed to have an understanding with the crowding, yelling and
offensive Bedouins who inhabited a squalid mud village some distance away and
pestiferously assailed every traveler; for he kept them very decently at bay and secured
an excellent pair of camels for us, himself mounting a donkey and assigning the
leadership of our animals to a group of men and boys more expensive than useful. The
area to be traversed was so small that camels were hardly needed, but we did not regret
adding to our experience this troublesome form of desert navigation.

The pyramids stand on a high rock plateau, this group forming next to the northernmost
of the series of regal and aristocratic cemeteries built in the neighborhood of the extinct
capital Memphis, which lay on the same side of the Nile, somewhat south of Gizeh, and
which flourished between 3400 and 2000 B.C. The greatest pyramid, which lies nearest
the modern road, was built by King Cheops or Khufu about 2800 B.C., and stands more
than 450 feet in perpendicular height. In a line southwest from this are successively the
Second Pyramid, built a generation later by King Khephren, and though slightly
smaller, looking even larger because set on higher ground, and the radically smaller
Third Pyramid of King Mycerinus, built about 2700 B.C. Near the edge of the plateau
and due east of the Second Pyramid, with a face probably altered to form a colossal
portrait of Khephren, its royal restorer, stands the monstrous Sphinx--mute, sardonic,
and wise beyond mankind and memory.

Minor pyramids and the traces of ruined minor pyramids are found in several places,
and the whole plateau is pitted with the tombs of dignitaries of less than royal rank.
These latter were originally marked by mastabas, or stone bench-like structures about
the deep burial shafts, as found in other Memphian cemeteries and exemplified by
Perneb's Tomb in the Metropolitan Museum of New York. At Gizeh, however, all such
visible things have been swept away by time and pillage; and only the rock-hewn shafts,
either sand-filled or cleared out by archaeologists, remain to attest their former
existence. Connected with each tomb was a chapel in which priests and relatives offered
food and prayer to the hovering ka or vital principle of the deceased. The small tombs
have their chapels contained in their stone mastabas or superstructures, but the mortuary
chapels of the pyramids, where regal Pharaohs lay, were separate temples, each to the
east of its corresponding pyramid, and connected by a causeway to a massive gate-
chapel or propylon at the edge of the rock plateau.

The gate-chapel leading to the Second Pyramid, nearly buried in the drifting sands,
yawns subterraneously south-east of the Sphinx. Persistent tradition dubs it the 'Temple
of the Sphinx'; and it may perhaps be rightly called such if the Sphinx indeed represents
the Second Pyramid's builder Khephren. There are unpleasant tales of the Sphinx before
Khephren--but whatever its elder features were, the monarch replaced them with his
own that men might look at the colossus without fear.

It was in the great gateway-temple that the life-size diorite statue of Khephren now in
the Cairo museum was found; a statue before which I stood in awe when I beheld it.
Whether the whole edifice is now excavated I am not certain, but in 1910 most of it was
below ground, with the entrance heavily barred at night. Germans were in charge of the
work, and the war or other things may have stopped them. I would give much, in view
of my experience and of certain Bedouin whisperings discredited or unknown in Cairo,
to know what has developed in connection with a certain well in a transverse gallery
where statues of the Pharaoh were found in curious juxtaposition to the statues of
baboons.

The road, as we traversed it on our camels that morning, curved sharply past the
wooden police quarters, post office, drug store and shops on the left, and plunged south
and east in a complete bend that scaled the rock plateau and brought us face to face with
the desert under the lee of the Great Pyramid. Past Cyclopean masonry we rode,
rounding the eastern face and looking down ahead into a valley of minor pyramids
beyond which the eternal Nile glistened to the east, and the eternal desert shimmered to
the west. Very close loomed the three major pyramids, the greatest devoid of outer
casing and showing its bulk of great stones, but the others retaining here and there the
neatly fitted covering which had made them smooth and finished in their day.

Presently we descended toward the Sphinx, and sat silent beneath the spell of those
terrible unseeing eyes. On the vast stone breast we faintly discerned the emblem of Re-
Harakhte, for whose image the Sphinx was mistaken in a late dynasty; and though sand
covered the tablet between the great paws, we recalled what Thutmosis IV inscribed
thereon, and the dream he had when a prince. It was then that the smile of the Sphinx
vaguely displeased us, and made us wonder about the legends of subterranean passages
beneath the monstrous creature, leading down, down, to depths none might dare hint at-
-depths connected with mysteries older than the dynastic Egypt we excavate, and having
a sinister relation to the persistence of abnormal, animal--headed gods in the ancient
Nilotic pantheon. Then, too, it was I asked myself in idle question whose hideous
significance was not to appear for many an hour.

Other tourists now began to overtake us, and we moved on to the sand--choked Temple
of the Sphinx, fifty yards to the southeast, which I have previously mentioned as the
great gate of the causeway to the Second Pyramid's mortuary chapel on the plateau.
Most of it was still underground, and although we dismounted and descended through a
modern passageway to its alabaster corridor and pillared hall, I felt that Abdul and the
local German attendant had not shown us all there was to see.

After this we made the conventional circuit of the pyramid plateau, examining the
Second Pyramid and the peculiar ruins of its mortuary chapel to the east, the Third
Pyramid and its miniature southern satellites and ruined eastern chapel, the rock tombs
and the honeycombings of the Fourth and Fifth dynasties, and the famous Campbell's
Tomb whose shadowy shaft sinks precipitously for fifty-three feet to a sinister
sarcophagus which one of our camel drivers divested of the cumbering sand after a
vertiginous descent by rope.

Cries now assailed us from the Great Pyramid, where Bedouins were besieging a party
of tourists with offers of speed in the performance of solitary trips up and down. Seven
minutes is said to be the record for such an ascent and descent, but many lusty sheiks
and sons of sheiks assured us they could cut it to five if given the requisite impetus of
liberal baksheesh. They did not get this impetus, though we did let Abdul take us up,
thus obtaining a view of unprecedented magnificence which included not only remote
and glittering Cairo with its crowned citadel background of gold-violet hills, but all the
pyramids of the Memphian district as well, from Abu Roash on the north to the Dashur
on the south. The Sakkara step-pyramid, which marks the evolution of the low mastaba
into the true pyramid, showed clearly and alluringly in the sandy distance. It is close to
this transition--monument that the famed tomb of Perneb was found--more than four
hundred miles north of the Theban rock valley where Tut-Ankh-Amen sleeps. Again I
was forced to silence through sheer awe. The prospect of such antiquity, and the secrets
each hoary monument seemed to hold and brood over, filled me with a reverence and
sense of immensity nothing else ever gave me.

Fatigued by our climb, and disgusted with the importunate Bedouins whose actions
seemed to defy every rule of taste, we omitted the arduous detail of entering the
cramped interior passages of any of the pyramids, though we saw several of the hardiest
tourists preparing for the suffocating crawl through Cheops' mightiest memorial. As we
dismissed and overpaid our local bodyguard and drove back to Cairo with Abdul Reis
under the afternoon sun, we half regretted the omission we had made. Such fascinating
things were whispered about lower pyramid passages not in the guidebooks; passages
whose entrances had been hastily blocked up and concealed by certain
uncommunicative archaeologists who had found and begun to explore them.

Of course, this whispering was largely baseless on the face of it; but it was curious to
reflect how persistently visitors were forbidden to enter the Pyramids at night, or to visit
the lowest burrows and crypt of the Great Pyramid. Perhaps in the latter case it was the
psychological effect which was feared--the effect on the visitor of feeling himself
huddled down beneath a gigantic world of solid masonry; joined to the life he has
known by the merest tube, in which he may only crawl, and which any accident or evil
design might block. The whole subject seemed so weird and alluring that we resolved to
pay the pyramid plateau another visit at the earliest possible opportunity. For me this
opportunity came much earlier than I expected.

That evening, the members of our party feeling some what tired after the strenuous
program of the day, I went alone with Abdul Reis for a walk through the picturesque
Arab quarter. Though I had seen it by day, I wished to study the alleys and bazaars in
the dusk, when rich shadows and mellow gleams of light would add to their glamor and
fantastic illusion. The native crowds were thinning, but were still very noisy and
numerous when we came upon a knot of reveling Bedouins in the Suken-Nahhasin, or
bazaar of the coppersmiths. Their apparent leader, an insolent youth with heavy features
and saucily cocked tarbush, took some notice of us, and evidently recognized with no
great friendliness my competent but admittedly supercilious and sneeringly disposed
guide.

Perhaps, I thought, he resented that odd reproduction of the Sphinx's half-smile which I
had often remarked with amused irritation; or perhaps he did not like the hollow and
sepulchral resonance of Abdul's voice. At any rate, the exchange of ancestrally
opprobrious language became very brisk; and before long Ali Ziz, as I heard the
stranger called when called by no worse name, began to pull violently at Abdul's robe,
an action quickly reciprocated and leading to a spirited scuffle in which both
combatants lost their sacredly cherished headgear and would have reached an even direr
condition had I not intervened and separated them by main force.

My interference, at first seemingly unwelcome on both sides, succeeded at last in

effecting a truce. Sullenly each belligerent composed his wrath and his attire, and with
an assumption of dignity as profound as it was sudden, the two formed a curious pact of
honor which I soon learned is a custom of great antiquity in Cairo--a pact for the
settlement of their difference by means of a nocturnal fist fight atop the Great Pyramid,
long after the departure of the last moonlight sightseer. Each duelist was to assemble a
party of seconds, and the affair was to begin at midnight, proceeding by rounds in the
most civilized possible fashion.

In all this planning there was much which excited my interest. The fight itself promised
to be unique and spectacular, while the thought of the scene on that hoary pile
overlooking the antediluvian plateau of Gizeh under the wan moon of the pallid small
hours appealed to every fiber of imagination in me. A request found Abdul exceedingly
willing to admit me to his party of seconds; so that all the rest of the early evening I
accompanied him to various dens in the most lawless regions of the town--mostly
northeast of the Ezbekiyeh--where he gathered one by one a select and formidable band
of congenial cutthroats as his pugilistic background.

Shortly after nine our party, mounted on donkeys bearing such royal or tourist-
reminiscent names as 'Rameses,' 'Mark Twain,' 'J. P. Morgan,' and 'Minnehaha,' edged
through street labyrinths both Oriental and Occidental, crossed the muddy and mast-
forested Nile by the bridge of the bronze lions, and cantered philosophically between
the lebbakhs on the road to Gizeh. Slightly over two hours were consumed by the trip,
toward the end of which we passed the last of the returning tourists, saluted the last
inbound trolley-car, and were alone with the night and the past and the spectral moon.

Then we saw the vast pyramids at the end of the avenue, ghoulish with a dim atavistical
menace which I had not seemed to notice in the daytime. Even the smallest of them held
a hint of the ghastly--for was it not in this that they had buried Queen Nitocris alive in
the Sixth Dynasty; subtle Queen Nitocris, who once invited all her enemies to a feast in
a temple below the Nile, and drowned them by opening the water-gates? I recalled that
the Arabs whisper things about Nitocris, and shun the Third Pyramid at certain phases
of the moon. It must have been over her that Thomas Moore was brooding when he
wrote a thing muttered about by Memphian boatmen: 'The subterranean nymph that
dwells 'Mid sunless gems and glories hid--The lady of the Pyramid!'

Early as we were, Ali Ziz and his party were ahead of us; for we saw their donkeys
outlined against the desert plateau at Kafrel-Haram; toward which squalid Arab
settlement, close to the Sphinx, we had diverged instead of following the regular road to
the Mena House, where some of the sleepy, inefficient police might have observed and
halted us. Here, where filthy Bedouins stabled camels and donkeys in the rock tombs of
Khephren's courtiers, we were led up the rocks and over the sand to the Great Pyramid,
up whose time-worn sides the Arabs swarmed eagerly, Abdul Reis offering me the
assistance I did not need.

As most travelers know, the actual apex of this structure has long been worn away,
leaving a reasonably flat platform twelve yards square. On this eery pinnacle a squared
circle was formed, and in a few moments the sardonic desert moon leered down upon a
battle which, but for the quality of the ringside cries, might well have occurred at some
minor athletic club in America. As I watched it, I felt that some of our less-desirable
institutions were not lacking; for every blow, feint, and defense bespoke 'stalling' to my
not inexperienced eye. It was quickly over, and despite my misgivings as to methods I
felt a sort of proprietary pride when Abdul Reis was adjudged the winner.

Reconciliation was phenomenally rapid, and amidst the singing, fraternizing and
drinking that followed, I found it difficult to realize that a quarrel had ever occurred.
Oddly enough, I myself seemed to be more a center of notice than the antagonists; and
from my smattering of Arabic I judged that they were discussing my professional
performances and escapes from every sort of manacle and confinement, in a manner
which indicated not only a surprising knowledge of me, but a distinct hostility and
skepticism concerning my feats of escape. It gradually dawned on me that the elder
magic of Egypt did not depart without leaving traces, and that fragments of a strange
secret lore and priestly cult-practices have survived surreptitiously amongst the
fellaheen to such an extent that the prowess of a strange hahwi or magician is resented
and disputed. I thought of how much my hollow-voiced guide Abdul Reis looked like
an old Egyptian priest or Pharaoh or smiling Sphinx...and wondered.

Suddenly something happened which in a flash proved the correctness of my reflections

and made me curse the denseness whereby I had accepted this night's events as other
than the empty and malicious 'frame-up' they now showed themselves to be. Without
warning, and doubtless in answer to some subtle sign from Abdul, the entire band of
Bedouins precipitated itself upon me; and having produced heavy ropes, soon had me
bound as securely as I was ever bound in the course of my life, either on the stage or
off.

I struggled at first, but soon saw that one man could make no headway against a band of
over twenty sinewy barbarians. My hands were tied behind my back, my knees bent to
their fullest extent, and my wrists and ankles stoutly linked together with unyielding
cords. A stifling gag was forced into my mouth, and a blindfold fastened tightly over
my eyes. Then, as Arabs bore me aloft on their shoulders and began a jouncing descent
of the pyramid, I heard the taunts of my late guide Abdul, who mocked and jeered
delightedly in his hollow voice, and assured me that I was soon to have my 'magic-
powers' put to a supreme test--which would quickly remove any egotism I might have
gained through triumphing over all the tests offered by America and Europe. Egypt, he
reminded me, is very old, and full of inner mysteries and antique powers not even
conceivable to the experts of today, whose devices had so uniformly failed to entrap me.

How far or in what direction I was carried, I cannot tell; for the circumstances were all
against the formation of any accurate judgment. I know, however, that it could not have
been a great distance; since my bearers at no point hastened beyond a walk, yet kept me
aloft a surprisingly short time. It is this perplexing brevity which makes me feel almost
like shuddering whenever I think of Gizeh and its plateau--for one is oppressed by hints
of the closeness to everyday tourist routes of what existed then and must exist still.

The evil abnormality I speak of did not become manifest at first. Setting me down on a
surface which I recognized as sand rather than rock, my captors passed a rope around
my chest and dragged me a few feet to a ragged opening in the ground, into which they
presently lowered me with much rough handling. For apparent eons I bumped against
the stony irregular sides of a narrow hewn well which I took to be one of the numerous
burial-shafts of the plateau until the prodigious, almost incredible depth of it robbed me
of all bases of conjecture.

The horror of the experience deepened with every dragging second. That any descent
through the sheer solid rock could be so vast without reaching the core of the planet
itself, or that any rope made by man could be so long as to dangle me in these unholy
and seemingly fathomless profundities of nether earth, were beliefs of such
grotesqueness that it was easier to doubt my agitated senses than to accept them. Even
now I am uncertain, for I know how deceitful the sense of time becomes when one is
removed or distorted. But I am quite sure that I preserved a logical consciousness that
far; that at least I did not add any fullgrown phantoms of imagination to a picture
hideous enough in its reality, and explicable by a type of cerebral illusion vastly short of
actual hallucination.

All this was not the cause of my first bit of fainting. The shocking ordeal was
cumulative, and the beginning of the later terrors was a very perceptible increase in my
rate of descent. They were paying out that infinitely long rope very swiftly now, and I
scraped cruelly against the rough and constricted sides of the shaft as I shot madly
downward. My clothing was in tatters, and I felt the trickle of blood all over, even
above the mounting and excruciating pain. My nostrils, too, were assailed by a scarcely
definable menace: a creeping odor of damp and staleness curiously unlike anything I
had ever smelled before, and having faint overtones of spice and incense that lent an
element of mockery.

Then the mental cataclysm came. It was horrible--hideous beyond all articulate
description because it was all of the soul, with nothing of detail to describe. It was the
ecstasy of nightmare and the summation of the fiendish. The suddenness of it was
apocalyptic and demoniac--one moment I was plunging agonizingly down that narrow
well of million-toothed torture, yet the next moment I was soaring on bat--wings in the
gulfs of hell; swinging free and swooping through illimitable miles of boundless, musty
space; rising dizzily to measureless pinnacles of chilling ether, then diving gaspingly to
sucking nadirs of ravenous, nauseous lower vacua...Thank God for the mercy that shut
out in oblivion those clawing Furies of consciousness which half unhinged my faculties,
and tore harpy-like at my spirit! That one respite, short as it was, gave me the strength
and sanity to endure those still greater sublimations of cosmic panic that lurked and
gibbered on the road ahead. II

It was very gradually that I regained my senses after that eldritch flight through stygian
space. The process was infinitely painful, and colored by fantastic dreams in which my
bound and gagged condition found singular embodiment. The precise nature of these
dreams was very clear while I was experiencing them, but became blurred in my
recollection almost immediately afterward, and was soon reduced to the merest outline
by the terrible events--real or imaginary--which followed. I dreamed that I was in the
grasp of a great and horrible paw; a yellow, hairy, five-clawed paw which had reached
out of the earth to crush and engulf me. And when I stopped to reflect what the paw
was, it seemed to me that it was Egypt. In the dream I looked back at the events of the
preceding weeks, and saw myself lured and enmeshed little by little, subtly and
insidiously, by some hellish ghoul-spirit of the elder Nile sorcery; some spirit that was
in Egypt before ever man was, and that will be when man is no more.

I saw the horror and unwholesome antiquity of Egypt, and the grisly alliance it has
always had with the tombs and temples of the dead. I saw phantom processions of
priests with the heads of bulls, falcons, cats, and ibises; phantom processions marching
interminably through subterraneous labyrinths and avenues of titanic propylaea beside
which a man is as a fly, and offering unnamable sacrifice to indescribable gods. Stone
colossi marched in endless night and drove herds of grinning androsphinxes down to the
shores of illimitable stagnant rivers of pitch. And behind it all I saw the ineffable
malignity of primordial necromancy, black and amorphous, and fumbling greedily after
me in the darkness to choke out the spirit that had dared to mock it by emulation.

In my sleeping brain there took shape a melodrama of sinister hatred and pursuit, and I
saw the black soul of Egypt singling me out and calling me in inaudible whispers;
calling and luring me, leading me on with the glitter and glamor of a Saracenic surface,
but ever pulling me down to the age-mad catacombs and horrors of its dead and
abysmal pharaonic heart.

Then the dream faces took on human resemblances, and I saw my guide Abdul Reis in
the robes of a king, with the sneer of the Sphinx on his features. And I knew that those
features were the features of Khephren the Great, who raised the Second Pyramid,
carved over the Sphinx's face in the likeness of his own and built that titanic gateway
temple whose myriad corridors the archaeologists think they have dug out of the
cryptical sand and the uninformative rock. And I looked at the long, lean rigid hand of
Khephren; the long, lean, rigid hand as I had seen it on the diorite statue in the Cairo
Museum--the statue they had found in the terrible gateway temple--and wondered that I
had not shrieked when I saw it on Abdul Reis...That hand! It was hideously cold, and it
was crushing me; it was the cold and cramping of the sarcophagus the chill and
constriction of unrememberable Egypt...It was nighted, necropolitan Egypt itself.., that
yellow paw.. and they whisper such things of Khephren...

But at this juncture I began to wake--or at least, to assume a condition less completely
that of sleep than the one just preceding. I recalled the fight atop the pyramid, the
treacherous Bedouins and their attack, my frightful descent by rope through endless
rock depths, and my mad swinging and plunging in a chill void redolent of aromatic
putrescence. I perceived that I now lay on a damp rock floor, and that my bonds were
still biting into me with unloosened force. It was very cold, and I seemed to detect a
faint current of noisome air sweeping across me. The cuts and bruises I had received
from the jagged sides of the rock shaft were paining me woefully, their soreness
enhanced to a stinging or burning acuteness by some pungent quality in the faint draft,
and the mere act of rolling over was enough to set my whole frame throbbing with
untold agony.

As I turned I felt a tug from above, and concluded that the rope whereby I was lowered
still reached to the surface. Whether or not the Arabs still held it, I had no idea; nor had
I any idea how far within the earth I was. I knew that the darkness around me was
wholly or nearly total, since no ray of moonlight penetrated my blindfold; but I did not
trust my senses enough to accept as evidence of extreme depth the sensation of vast
duration which had characterized my descent.

Knowing at least that I was in a space of considerable extent reached from the above
surface directly by an opening in the rock, I doubtfully conjectured that my prison was
perhaps the buried gateway chapel of old Khephren--the Temple of the Sphinx--perhaps
some inner corridors which the guides had not shown me during my morning visit, and
from which I might easily escape if I could find my way to the barred entrance. It would
be a labyrinthine wandering, but no worse than others out of which I had in the past
found my way.

The first step was to get free of my bonds, gag, and blindfold; and this I knew would be
no great task, since subtler experts than these Arabs had tried every known species of
fetter upon me during my long and varied career as an exponent of escape, yet had
never succeeded in defeating my methods.

Then it occurred to me that the Arabs might be ready to meet and attack me at the
entrance upon any evidence of my probable escape from the binding cords, as would be
furnished by any decided agitation of the rope which they probably held. This, of
course, was taking for granted that my place of confinement was indeed Khephren's
Temple of the Sphinx. The direct opening in the roof, wherever it might lurk, could not
be beyond easy reach of the ordinary modern entrance near the Sphinx; if in truth it
were any great distance at all on the surface, since the total area known to visitors is not
at all enormous. I had not noticed any such opening during my daytime pilgrimage, but
knew that these things are easily overlooked amidst the drifting sands.

Thinking these matters over as I lay bent and bound on the rock floor, I nearly forgot
the horrors of abysmal descent and cavernous swinging which had so lately reduced me
to a coma. My present thought was only to outwit the Arabs, and I accordingly
determined to work myself free as quickly as possible, avoiding any tug on the
descending line which might betray an effective or even problematical attempt at
freedom.

This, however, was more easily determined than effected. A few preliminary trials made
it clear that little could be accomplished without considerable motion; and it did not
surprise me when, after one especially energetic struggle, I began to feel the coils of
falling rope as they piled up about me and upon me. Obviously, I thought, the Bedouins
had felt my movements and released their end of the rope; hastening no doubt to the
temple's true entrance to lie murderously in wait for me.
The prospect was not pleasing--but I had faced worse in my time without flinching, and
would not flinch now. At present I must first of all free myself of bonds, then trust to
ingenuity to escape from the temple unharmed. It is curious how implicitly I had come
to believe myself in the old temple of Khephren beside the Sphinx, only a short distance
below the ground.

That belief was shattered, and every pristine apprehension of preternatural depth and
demoniac mystery revived, by a circumstance which grew in horror and significance
even as I formulated my philosophical plan. I have said that the falling rope was piling
up about and upon me. Now I saw that it was continuing to pile, as no rope of normal
length could possibly do. It gained in momentum and became an avalanche of hemp,
accumulating mountainously on the floor and half burying me beneath its swiftly
multiplying coils. Soon I was completely engulfed and gasping for breath as the
increasing convolutions submerged and stifled me.

My senses tottered again, and I vaguely tried to fight off a menace desperate and
ineluctable. It was not merely that I was tortured beyond human endurance--not merely
that life and breath seemed to be crushed slowly out of me--it was the knowledge of
what those unnatural lengths of rope implied, and the consciousness of what unknown
and incalculable gulfs of inner earth must at this moment be surrounding me. My
endless descent and swinging flight through goblin space, then, must have been real,
and even now I must be lying helpless in some nameless cavern world toward the core
of the planet. Such a sudden confirmation of ultimate horror was insupportable, and a
second time I lapsed into merciful oblivion.

When I say oblivion, I do not imply that I was free from dreams. On the contrary, my
absence from the conscious world was marked by visions of the most unutterable
hideousness. God!...If only I had not read so much Egyptology before coming to this
land which is the fountain of all darkness and terror! This second spell of fainting filled
my sleeping mind anew with shivering realization of the country and its archaic secrets,
and through some damnable chance my dreams turned to the ancient notions of the dead
and their sojournings in soul and body beyond those mysterious tombs which were more
houses than graves. I recalled, in dream-shapes which it is well that I do not remember,
the peculiar and elaborate construction of Egyptian sepulchers; and the exceedingly
singular and terrific doctrines which determined this construction.

All these people thought of was death and the dead. They conceived of a literal
resurrection of the body which made them mummify it with desperate care, and
preserve all the vital organs in canopic jars near the corpse; whilst besides the body they
believed in two other elements, the soul, which after its weighing and approval by
Osiris dwelt in the land of the blest, and the obscure and portentous ka or life-principle
which wandered about the upper and lower worlds in a horrible way, demanding
occasional access to the preserved body, consuming the food offerings brought by
priests and pious relatives to the mortuary chapel, and sometimes--as men whispered--
taking its body or the wooden double always buried beside it and stalking noxiously
abroad on errands peculiarly repellent.

For thousands of years those bodies rested gorgeously encased and staring glassily
upward when not visited by the ka, awaiting the day when Osiris should restore both ka
and soul, and lead forth the stiff legions of the dead from the sunken houses of sleep. It
was to have been a glorious rebirth--but not all souls were approved, nor were all tombs
inviolate, so that certain grotesque mistakes and fiendish abnormalities were to be
looked for. Even today the Arabs murmur of unsanctified convocations and
unwholesome worship in forgotten nether abysses, which only winged invisible kas and
soulless mummies may visit and return unscathed.

Perhaps the most leeringly blood-congealing legends are those which relate to certain
perverse products of decadent priestcraft--composite mummies made by the artificial
union of human trunks and limbs with the heads of animals in imitation of the elder
gods. At all stages of history the sacred animals were mummified, so that consecrated
bulls, cats, ibises, crocodiles and the like might return some day to greater glory. But
only in the decadence did they mix the human and the animal in the same mummy--only
in the decadence, when they did not understand the rights and prerogatives of the ka and
the soul.

What happened to those composite mummies is not told of--at least publicly--and it is
certain that no Egyptologist ever found one. The whispers of Arabs are very wild, and
cannot be relied upon. They even hint that old Khephren--he of the Sphinx, the Second
Pyramid and the yawning gateway temple--lives far underground wedded to the ghoul-
queen Nitocris and ruling over the mummies that are neither of man nor of beast.

It was of these--of Khephren and his consort and his strange armies of the hybrid dead--
that I dreamed, and that is why I am glad the exact dream-shapes have faded from my
memory. My most horrible vision was connected with an idle question I had asked
myself the day before when looking at the great carven riddle of the desert and
wondering with what unknown depth the temple close to it might be secretly connected.
That question, so innocent and whimsical then, assumed in my dream a meaning of
frenetic and hysterical madness...what huge and loathsome abnormality was the Sphinx
originally carven to represent?

My second awakening--if awakening it was--is a memory of stark hideousness which

nothing else in my life--save one thing which came after--can parallel; and that life has
been full and adventurous beyond most men's. Remember that I had lost consciousness
whilst buried beneath a cascade of falling rope whose immensity revealed the
cataclysmic depth of my present position. Now, as perception returned, I felt the entire
weight gone; and realized upon rolling over that although I was still tied, gagged and
blindfolded, some agency had removed completely the suffocating hempen landslide
which had overwhelmed me. The significance of this condition, of course, came to me
only gradually; but even so I think it would have brought unconsciousness again had I
not by this time reached such a state of emotional exhaustion that no new horror could
make much difference. I was alone...with what?

Before I could torture myself with any new reflection, or make any fresh effort to
escape from my bonds, an additional circumstance became manifest. Pains not formerly
felt were racking my arms and legs, and I seemed coated with a profusion of dried blood
beyond anything my former cuts and abrasions could furnish. My chest, too, seemed
pierced by a hundred wounds, as though some malign, titanic ibis had been pecking at
it. Assuredly the agency which had removed the rope was a hostile one, and had begun
to wreak terrible injuries upon me when somehow impelled to desist. Yet at the same
time my sensations were distinctly the reverse of what one might expect. Instead of
sinking into a bottomless pit of despair, I was stirred to a new courage and action; for
now I felt that the evil forces were physical things which a fearless man might
encounter on an even basis.

On the strength of this thought I tugged again at my bonds, and used all the art of a
lifetime to free myself as I had so often done amidst the glare of lights and the applause
of vast crowds. The familiar details of my escaping process commenced to engross me,
and now that the long rope was gone I half regained my belief that the supreme horrors
were hallucinations after all, and that there had never been any terrible shaft,
measureless abyss or interminable rope. Was I after all in the gateway temple of
Khephren beside the Sphinx, and had the sneaking Arabs stolen in to torture me as I lay
helpless there? At any rate, I must be free. Let me stand up unbound, ungagged, and
with eyes open to catch any glimmer of light which might come trickling from any
source, and I could actually delight in the combat against evil and treacherous foes!

How long I took in shaking off my encumbrances I cannot tell. It must have been longer
than in my exhibition performances, because I was wounded, exhausted, and enervated
by the experiences I had passed through. When I was finally free, and taking deep
breaths of a chill, damp, evilly spiced air all the more horrible when encountered
without the screen of gag and blindfold edges, I found that I was too cramped and
fatigued to move at once. There I lay, trying to stretch a frame bent and mangled, for an
indefinite period, and straining my eyes to catch a glimpse of some ray of light which
would give a hint as to my position.

By degrees my strength and flexibility returned, but my eyes beheld nothing. As I

staggered to my feet I peered diligently in every direction, yet met only an ebony
blackness as great as that I had known when blindfolded. I tried my legs, blood-
encrusted beneath my shredded trousers, and found that I could walk; yet could not
decide in what direction to go. Obviously I ought not to walk at random, and perhaps
retreat directly from the entrance I sought; so I paused to note the difference of the cold,
fetid, natron-scented air-current which I had never ceased to feel. Accepting the point of
its source as the possible entrance to the abyss, I strove to keep track of this landmark
and to walk consistently toward it.

I had a match-box with me, and even a small electric flashlight; but of course the
pockets of my tossed and tattered clothing were long since emptied of all heavy articles.
As I walked cautiously in the blackness, the draft grew stronger and more offensive, till
at length I could regard it as nothing less than a tangible stream of detestable vapor
pouring out of some aperture like the smoke of the genie from the fisherman's jar in the
Eastern tale. The East...Egypt...truly, this dark cradle of civilization was ever the
wellspring of horrors and marvels unspeakable!

The more I reflected on the nature of this cavern wind, the greater my sense of disquiet
became; for although despite its odor I had sought its source as at least an indirect clue
to the outer world, I now saw plainly that this foul emanation could have no admixture
or connection whatsoever with the clean air of the Libyan Desert, but must be
essentially a thing vomited from sinister gulfs still lower down. I had, then, been
walking in the wrong direction!
After a moment's reflection I decided not to retrace my steps. Away from the draft I
would have no landmarks, for the roughly level rock floor was devoid of distinctive
configurations. If, however, I followed up the strange current, I would undoubtedly
arrive at an aperture of some sort, from whose gate I could perhaps work round the
walls to the opposite side of this Cyclopean and otherwise unnavigable hall. That I
might fail, I well realized. I saw that this was no part of Khephren's gateway temple
which tourists know, and it struck me that this particular hall might be unknown even to
archaeologists, and merely stumbled upon by the inquisitive and malignant Arabs who
had imprisoned me. If so, was there any present gate of escape to the known parts or to
the outer air?

What evidence, indeed, did I now possess that this was the gateway temple at all? For a
moment all my wildest speculations rushed back upon me, 'and I thought of that vivid
melange of impressions--descent, suspension in space, the rope, my wounds, and the
dreams that were frankly dreams. Was this the end of life for me? Or indeed, would it
be merciful if this moment were the end? I could answer none of my own questions, but
merely kept on, till Fate for a third time reduced me to oblivion.

This time there were no dreams, for the suddenness of the incident shocked me out of
all thought either conscious or subconscious. Tripping on an unexpected descending
step at a point where the offensive draft became strong enough to offer an actual
physical resistance, I was precipitated headlong down a black flight of huge stone stairs
into a gulf of hideousness unrelieved.

That I ever breathed again is a tribute to the inherent vitality of the healthy human
organism. Often I look back to that night and feel a touch of actual humor in those
repeated lapses of consciousness; lapses whose succession reminded me at the time of
nothing more than the crude cinema melodramas of that period. Of course, it is possible
that the repeated lapses never occurred; and that all the features of that underground
nightmare were merely the dreams of one long coma which began with the shock of my
descent into that abyss and ended with the healing balm of the outer air and of the rising
sun which found me stretched on the sands of Gizeh before the sardonic and dawn--
flushed face of the Great Sphinx.

I prefer to believe this latter explanation as much as I can, hence was glad when the
police told me that the barrier to Krephren's gateway temple had been found unfastened,
and that a sizeable rift to the surface did actually exist in one corner of the still buried
part. I was glad, too, when the doctors pronounced my wounds only those to be
expected from my seizure, blindfolding, lowering, struggling with bonds, falling some
distance--perhaps into a depression in the temple's inner gallery--dragging myself to the
outer barrier and escaping from it, and experiences like that.., a very soothing diagnosis.
And yet I know that there must be more than appears on the surface. That extreme
descent is too vivid a memory to be dismissed--and it is odd that no one has ever been
able to find a man answering the description of my guide, Abdul Reis el Drogman--the
tomb-throated guide who looked and smiled like King Khephren.

I have digressed from my connected narrative--perhaps in the vain hope of evading the
telling of that final incident; that incident which of all is most certainly an hallucination.
But I promised to relate it, and I do not break promises. When I recovered--or seemed to
recover--my senses after that fall down the black stone stairs, I was quite as alone and in
darkness as before. The windy stench, bad enough before, was now fiendish; yet I had
acquired enough familiarity by this time to bear it stoically. Dazedly I began to crawl
away from the place whence the putrid wind came, and with my bleeding hands felt the
colossal blocks of a mighty pavement. Once my head struck against a hard object, and
when I felt of it I learned that it was the base of a column--a column of unbelievable
immensity--whose surface was covered with gigantic chiseled hieroglyphics very
perceptible to my touch.

Crawling on, I encountered other titan columns at incomprehensible distances apart;

when suddenly my attention was captured by the realization of something which must
have been impinging on my subconscious hearing long before the conscious sense was
aware of it.

From some still lower chasm in earth's bowels were proceeding certain sounds,
measured and definite, and like nothing I had ever heard before. That they were very
ancient and distinctly ceremonial I felt almost intuitively; and much reading in
Egyptology led me to associate them with the flute, the sambuke, the sistrum, and the
tympanum. In their rhythmic piping, droning, rattling and beating I felt an element of
terror beyond all the known terrors of earth--a terror peculiarly dissociated from
personal fear, and taking the form of a sort of objective pity for our planet, that it should
hold within its depths such horrors as must lie beyond these aegipanic cacophonies. The
sounds increased in volume, and I felt that they were approaching. Then--and may all
the gods of all pantheons unite to keep the like from my ears again--I began to hear,
faintly and afar off, the morbid and millennial tramping of the marching things.

It was hideous that footfalls so dissimilar should move in such perfect rhythm. The
training of unhallowed thousands of years must lie behind that march of earth's inmost
monstrosities...padding, clicking, walking, stalking, rumbling, lumbering, crawling...and
all to the abhorrent discords of those mocking instruments. And then--God keep the
memory of those Arab legends out of my head!--the mummies without souls...the
meeting-place of the wandering kas....the hordes of the devil-cursed pharaonic dead of
forty centuries...the composite mummies led through the uttermost onyx voids by King
Khephren and his ghoul--queen Nitocris..

The tramping drew nearer--Heaven save me from the sound of those feet and paws and
hooves and pads and talons as it commenced to acquire detail! Down limitless reaches
of sunless pavement a spark of light flickered in the malodorous wind and I drew behind
the enormous circumference of a Cyclopic column that I might escape for a while the
horror that was stalking million-footed toward me through gigantic hypostyles of
inhuman dread and phobic antiquity. The flickers increased, and the tramping and
dissonant rhythm grew sickeningly loud. In the quivering orange light there stood
faintly forth a scene of such stony awe that I gasped from sheer wonder that conquered
even fear and repulsion. Bases of columns whose middles were higher than human
sight, mere bases of things that must each dwarf the Eiffel Tower to
insignificance...hieroglyphics carved by unthinkable hands in caverns where daylight
can be only a remote legend...

I would not look at the marching things. That I desperately resolved as I heard their
creaking joints and nitrous wheezing above the dead music and the dead tramping. It
was merciful that they did not speak...but God! their crazy torches began to cast
shadows on the surface of those stupendous columns. Hippopotami should not have
human hands and carry torches...men should not have the heads of crocodiles...

I tried to turn away, but the shadows and the sounds and the stench were everywhere.
Then I remembered something I used to do in half--conscious nightmares as a boy, and
began to repeat to myself, 'This is a dream! This is a dream!' But it was of no use, and I
could only shut my eyes and pray...at least, that is what I think I did, for one is never
sure in visions--and I know this can have been nothing more. I wondered whether I
should ever reach the world again, and at times would furtively open my eyes to see if I
could discern any feature of the place other than the wind of spiced putrefaction, the
topless columns, and the thaumatropically grotesque shadows of abnormal horror. The
sputtering glare of multiplying torches now shone, and unless this hellish place were
wholly without walls, I could not fail to see some boundary or fixed landmark soon. But
I had to shut my eyes again when I realized how many of the things were assembling--
and when I glimpsed a certain object walking solemnly and steadily without any body
above the waist.

A fiendish and ululant corpse-gurgle or death-rattle now split the very atmosphere--the
charnel atmosphere poisonous with naftha and bitumen blasts--in one concerted chorus
from the ghoulish legion of hybrid blasphemies. My eyes, perversely shaken open,
gazed for an instant upon a sight which no human creature could even imagine without
panic, fear and physical exhaustion. The things had filed ceremonially in one direction,
the direction of the noisome wind, where the light of their torches showed their bended
heads--or the bended heads of such as had heads. They were worshipping before a great
black fetor-belching aperture which reached up almost out of sight, and which I could
see was flanked at right angles by two giant staircases whose ends were far away in
shadow. One of these was indubitably the staircase I had fallen down.

The dimensions of the hole were fully in proportion with those of the columns--an
ordinary house would have been lost in it, and any average public building could easily
have been moved in and out. It was so vast a surface that only by moving the eye could
one trace its boundaries...so vast, so hideously black, and so aromatically stinking.
Directly in front of this yawning Polyphemus-door the things were throwing objects--
evidently sacrifices or religious offerings, to judge by their gestures. Khephren was their
leader; sneering King Khephren or the guide Abdul Reis, crowned with a golden pshent
and intoning endless formulae with the hollow voice of the dead. By his side knelt
beautiful Queen Nitocris, whom I saw in profile for a moment, noting that the right half
of her face was eaten away by rats or other ghouls. And I shut my eyes again when I
saw what objects were being thrown as offerings to the fetid aperture or its possible
local deity.

It occurred to me that, judging from the elaborateness of this worship, the concealed
deity must be one of considerable importance. Was it Osiris or Isis, Horus or Anubis, or
some vast unknown God of the Dead still more central and supreme? There is a legend
that terrible altars and colossi were reared to an Unknown One before ever the known
gods were worshipped...

And now, as I steeled myself to watch the rapt and sepulchral adorations of those
nameless things, a thought of escape flashed upon me. The hall was dim, and the
columns heavy with shadow. With every creature of that nightmare throng absorbed in
shocking raptures, it might be barely possible for me to creep past to the far-away end
of one of the staircases and ascend unseen; trusting to Fate and skill to deliver me from
the upper reaches. Where I was, I neither knew nor seriously reflected upon--and for a
moment it struck me as amusing to plan a serious escape from that which I knew to be a
dream. Was I in some hidden and unsuspected lower realm of Khephren's gateway
temple--that temple which generations have persistently called the Temple of the
Sphinx? I could not conjecture, but I resolved to ascend to life and consciousness if wit
and muscle could carry me.

Wriggling flat on my stomach, I began the anxious journey toward the foot of the left-
hand staircase, which seemed the more accessible of the two. I cannot describe the
incidents and sensations of that crawl, but they may be guessed when one reflects on
what I had to watch steadily in that malign, wind-blown torchlight in order to avoid
detection. The bottom of the staircase was, as I have said, far away in shadow, as it had
to be to rise without a bend to the dizzy parapeted landing above the titanic aperture.
This placed the last stages of my crawl at some distance from the noisome herd, though
the spectacle chilled me even when quite remote at my right.

At length I succeeded in reaching the steps and began to climb; keeping close to the
wall, on which I observed decorations of the most hideous sort, and relying for safety on
the absorbed, ecstatic interest with which the monstrosities watched the foul-breezed
aperture and the impious objects of nourishment they had flung on the pavement before
it. Though the staircase was huge and steep, fashioned of vast porphyry blocks as if for
the feet of a giant, the ascent seemed virtually interminable. Dread of discovery and the
pain which renewed exercise had brought to my wounds combined to make that upward
crawl a thing of agonizing memory. I had intended, on reaching the landing, to climb
immediately onward along whatever upper staircase might mount from there; stopping
for no last look at the carrion abominations that pawed and genuflected some seventy or
eighty feet below--yet a sudden repetition of that thunderous corpse-gurgle and death-
rattle chorus, coming as I had nearly gained the top of the flight and showing by its
ceremonial rhythm that it was not an alarm of my discovery, caused me to pause and
peer cautiously over the parapet.

The monstrosities were hailing something which had poked itself out of the nauseous
aperture to seize the hellish fare proffered it. It was something quite ponderous, even as
seen from my height; something yellowish and hairy, and endowed with a sort of
nervous motion. It was as large, perhaps, as a good-sized hippopotamus, but very
curiously shaped. It seemed to have no neck, but five separate shaggy heads springing
in a row from a roughly cylindrical trunk; the first very small, the second good-sized,
the third and fourth equal and largest of all, and the fifth rather small, though not so
small as the first.

Out of these heads darted curious rigid tentacles which seized ravenously on the
excessively great quantities of unmentionable food placed before the aperture. Once in a
while the thing would leap up, and occasionally it would retreat into its den in a very
odd manner. Its locomotion was so inexplicable that I stared in fascination, wishing it
would emerge farther from the cavernous lair beneath me.

Then it did emerge...it did emerge, and at the sight I turned and fled into the darkness up
the higher staircase that rose behind me; fled unknowingly up incredible steps and
ladders and inclined planes to which no human sight or logic guided me, and which I
must ever relegate to the world of dreams for want of any confirmation. It must have
been a dream, or the dawn would never have found me breathing on the sands of Gizeh
before the sardonic dawn-flushed face of the Great Sphinx.

The Great Sphinx! God!--that idle question I asked myself on that sun--blest morning
before...what huge and loathsome abnormality was the Sphinx originally carven to
represent?

Accursed is the sight, be it in dream or not, that revealed to me the supreme horror--the
unknown God of the Dead, which licks its colossal chops in the unsuspected abyss, fed
hideous morsels by soulless absurdities that should not exist. The five-headed monster
that emerged...that five-headed monster as large as a hippopotamus...the five headed
monster--and that of which it is the merest forepaw...

But I survived, and I know it was only a dream.

IN THE VAULT
Birch acquired a limitation and changed his business in 1881, yet never discussed the
case when he could avoid it. Neither did his old physician Dr. Davis, who died years
ago. It was generally stated that the affliction and shock were results of an unlucky slip
whereby Birch had locked himself for nine hours in the receiving tomb of Peck Valley
Cemetery, escaping only by crude and disastrous mechanical means; but while this
much was undoubtedly true, there were other and blacker things which the man used to
whisper to me in his drunken delirium toward the last. He confided in me because I was
his doctor, and because he probably felt the need of confiding in someone else after
Davis died. He was a bachelor, wholly without relatives.

Birch, before 1881, had been the village undertaker of Peck Valley; and was a very
calloused and primitive specimen even as such specimens go. The practices I heard
attributed to him would be unbelievable today, at least in a city; and even Peck Valley
would have shuddered a bit had it known the easy ethics of its mortuary artist in such
debatable matters as the ownership of costly "laying-out" apparel invisible beneath the
casket's lid, and the degree of dignity to be maintained in posing and adapting the
unseen members of lifeless tenants to containers not always calculated with sublimest
accuracy. Most distinctly Birch was lax, insensitive, and professionally undesirable; yet
I still think he was not an evil man. He was merely crass of fibre and function--
thoughtless, careless, and liquorish, as his easily avoidable accident proves, and without
that modicum of imagination which holds the average citizen within certain limits fixed
by taste.

Just where to begin Birch's story I can hardly decide, since I am no practiced teller of
tales. I suppose one should start in the cold December of 1880, when the ground froze
and the cemetery delvers found they could dig no more graves till spring. Fortunately
the village was small and the death rate low, so that it was possible to give all of Birch's
inanimate charges a temporary haven in the single antiquated receiving tomb. The
undertaker grew doubly lethargic in the bitter weather, and seemed to outdo even
himself in carelessness. Never did he knock together flimsier and ungainlier caskets, or
disregard more flagrantly the needs of the rusty lock on the tomb door which he
slammed open and shut with such nonchalant abandon.

At last the spring thaw came, and graves were laboriously prepared for the nine silent
harvests of the grim reaper which waited in the tomb. Birch, though dreading the bother
of removal and interment, began his task of transference one disagreeable April
morning, but ceased before noon because of a heavy rain that seemed to irritate his
horse, after having laid but one mortal tenent to its permanent rest. That was Darius
Peck, the nonagenarian, whose grave was not far from the tomb. Birch decided that he
would begin the next day with little old Matthew Fenner, whose grave was also near by;
but actually postponed the matter for three days, not getting to work till Good Friday,
the 15th. Being without superstition, he did not heed the day at all; though ever
afterward he refused to do anything of importance on that fateful sixth day of the week.
Certainly, the events of that evening greatly changed George Birch.

On the afternoon of Friday, April 15th, then, Birch set out for the tomb with horse and
wagon to transfer the body of Matthew Fenner. That he was not perfectly sober, he
subsequently admitted; though he had not then taken to the wholesale drinking by which
he later tried to forget certain things. He was just dizzy and careless enough to annoy his
sensitive horse, which as he drew it viciously up at the tomb neighed and pawed and
tossed its head, much as on that former occasion when the rain had vexed it. The day
was clear, but a high wind had sprung up; and Birch was glad to get to shelter as he
unlocked the iron door and entered the side-hill vault. Another might not have relished
the damp, odorous chamber with the eight carelessly placed coffins; but Birch in those
days was insensitive, and was concerned only in getting the right coffin for the right
grave. He had not forgotten the criticism aroused when Hannah Bixby's relatives,
wishing to transport her body to the cemetery in the city whither they had moved, found
the casket of Judge Capwell beneath her headstone.

The light was dim, but Birch's sight was good, and he did not get Asaph Sawyer's coffin
by mistake, although it was very similar. He had, indeed, made that coffin for Matthew
Fenner; but had cast it aside at last as too awkward and flimsy, in a fit of curious
sentimentality aroused by recalling how kindly and generous the little old man had been
to him during his bankruptcy five years before. He gave old Matt the very best his skill
could produce, but was thrifty enough to save the rejected specimen, and to use it when
Asaph Sawyer died of a malignant fever. Sawyer was not a lovable man, and many
stories were told of his almost inhuman vindictiveness and tenacious memory for
wrongs real or fancied. To him Birch had felt no compunction in assigning the
carelessly made coffin which he now pushed out of the way in his quest for the Fenner
casket.

It was just as he had recognised old Matt's coffin that the door slammed to in the wind,
leaving him in a dusk even deeper than before. The narrow transom admitted only the
feeblest of rays, and the overhead ventilation funnel virtually none at all; so that he was
reduced to a profane fumbling as he made his halting way among the long boxes toward
the latch. In this funereal twilight he rattled the rusty handles, pushed at the iron panels,
and wondered why the massive portal had grown so suddenly recalcitrant. In this
twilight too, he began to realise the truth and to shout loudly as if his horse outside
could do more than neigh an unsympathetic reply. For the long--neglected latch was
obviously broken, leaving the careless undertaker trapped in the vault, a victim of his
own oversight.

The thing must have happened at about three-thirty in the afternoon. Birch, being by
temperament phlegmatic and practical, did not shout long; but proceeded to grope about
for some tools which he recalled seeing in a corner of the tomb. It is doubtful whether
he was touched at all by the horror and exquisite weirdness of his position, but the bald
fact of imprisonment so far from the daily paths of men was enough to exasperate him
thoroughly. His day's work was sadly interrupted, and unless chance presently brought
some rambler hither, he might have to remain all night or longer. The pile of tools soon
reached, and a hammer and chisel selected, Birch returned over the coffins to the door.
The air had begun to be exceedingly unwholesome; but to this detail he paid no
attention as he toiled, half by feeling, at the heavy and corroded metal of the latch. He
would have given much for a lantern or bit of candle; but lacking these, bungled semi--
sightlessly as best he might.

When he perceived that the latch was hopelessly unyielding, at least to such meagre
tools and under such tenebrous conditions as these, Birch glanced about for other
possible points of escape. The vault had been dug from a hillside, so that the narrow
ventilation funnel in the top ran through several feet of earth, making this direction
utterly useless to consider. Over the door, however, the high, slit-like transom in the
brick facade gave promise of possible enlargement to a diligent worker; hence upon this
his eyes long rested as he racked his brains for means to reach it. There was nothing like
a ladder in the tomb, and the coffin niches on the sides and rear--which Birch seldom
took the trouble to use--afforded no ascent to the space above the door. Only the coffins
themselves remained as potential stepping--stones, and as he considered these he
speculated on the best mode of transporting them. Three coffin-heights, he reckoned,
would permit him to reach the transom; but he could do better with four. The boxes
were fairly even, and could be piled up like blocks; so he began to compute how he
might most stably use the eight to rear a scalable platform four deep. As he planned, he
could not but wish that the units of his contemplated staircase had been more securely
made. Whether he had imagination enough to wish they were empty, is strongly to be
doubted.

Finally he decided to lay a base of three parallel with the wall, to place upon this two
layers of two each, and upon these a single box to serve as the platform. This
arrangement could be ascended with a minimum of awkwardness, and would furnish the
desired height. Better still, though, he would utilise only two boxes of the base to
support the superstructure, leaving one free to be piled on top in case the actual feat of
escape required an even greater altitude. And so the prisoner toiled in the twilight,
heaving the unresponsive remnants of mortality with little ceremony as his miniature
Tower of Babel rose course by course. Several of the coffins began to split under the
stress of handling, and he planned to save the stoutly built casket of little Matthew
Fenner for the top, in order that his feet might have as certain a surface as possible. In
the semi-gloom he trusted mostly to touch to select the right one, and indeed came upon
it almost by accident, since it tumbled into his hands as if through some odd volition
after he had unwittingly placed it beside another on the third layer.

The tower at length finished, and his aching arms rested by a pause during which he sat
on the bottom step of his grim device, Birch cautiously ascended with his tools and
stood abreast of the narrow transom. The borders of the space were entirely of brick,
and there seemed little doubt but that he could shortly chisel away enough to allow his
body to pass. As his hammer blows began to fall, the horse outside whinnied in a tone
which may have been encouraging and to others may have been mocking. In either case
it would have been appropriate; for the unexpected tenacity of the easy-looking
brickwork was surely a sardonic commentary on the vanity of mortal hopes, and the
source of a task whose performance deserved every possible stimulus.

Dusk fell and found Birch still toiling. He worked largely by feeling now, since newly
gathered clouds hid the moon; and though progress was still slow, he felt heartened at
the extent of his encroachments on the top and bottom of the aperture. He could, he was
sure, get out by midnight--though it is characteristic of him that this thought was
untinged with eerie implications. Undisturbed by oppressive reflections on the time, the
place, and the company beneath his feet, he philosophically chipped away the stony
brickwork; cursing when a fragment hit him in the face, and laughing when one struck
the increasingly excited horse that pawed near the cypress tree. In time the hole grew so
large that he ventured to try his body in it now and then, shifting about so that the
coffins beneath him rocked and creaked. He would not, he found, have to pile another
on his platform to make the proper height; for the hole was on exactly the right level to
use as soon as its size might permit.

It must have been midnight at least when Birch decided he could get through the
transom. Tired and perspiring despite many rests, he descended to the floor and sat a
while on the bottom box to gather strength for the final wriggle and leap to the ground
outside. The hungry horse was neighing repeatedly and almost uncannily, and he
vaguely wished it would stop. He was curiously unelated over his impending escape,
and almost dreaded the exertion, for his form had the indolent stoutness of early middle
age. As he remounted the splitting coffins he felt his weight very poignantly; especially
when, upon reaching the topmost one, he heard that aggravated crackle which bespeaks
the wholesale rending of wood. He had, it seems, planned in vain when choosing the
stoutest coffin for the platform; for no sooner was his full bulk again upon it than the
rotting lid gave way, jouncing him two feet down on a surface which even he did not
care to imagine. Maddened by the sound, or by the stench which billowed forth even to
the open air, the waiting horse gave a scream that was too frantic for a neigh, and
plunged madly off through the night, the wagon rattling crazily behind it.

Birch, in his ghastly situation, was now too low for an easy scramble out of the enlarged
transom; but gathered his energies for a determined try. Clutching the edges of the
aperture, he sought to pull himself up, when he noticed a queer retardation in the form
of an apparent drag on both his ankles. In another moment he knew fear for the first
time that night; for struggle as he would, he could not shake clear of the unknown grasp
which held his feet in relentless captivity. Horrible pains, as of savage wounds, shot
through his calves; and in his mind was a vortex of fright mixed with an unquenchable
materialism that suggested splinters, loose nails, or some other attribute of a breaking
wooden box. Perhaps he screamed. At any rate he kicked and squirmed frantically and
automatically whilst his consciousness was almost eclipsed in a half-swoon.

Instinct guided him in his wriggle through the transom, and in the crawl which followed
his jarring thud on the damp ground. He could not walk, it appeared, and the emerging
moon must have witnessed a horrible sight as he dragged his bleeding ankles toward the
cemetery lodge; his fingers clawing the black mould in brainless haste, and his body
responding with that maddening slowness from which one suffers when chased by the
phantoms of nightmare. There was evidently, however, no pursuer; for he was alone and
alive when Armington, the lodge-keeper, answered his feeble clawing at the door.

Armington helped Birch to the outside of a spare bed and sent his little son Edwin for
Dr. Davis. The afflicted man was fully conscious, but would say nothing of any
consequence; merely muttering such things as "Oh, my ankles!", "Let go!", or "Shut in
the tomb". Then the doctor came with his medicine-case and asked crisp questions, and
removed the patient's outer clothing, shoes, and socks. The wounds--for both ankles
were frightfully lacerated about the Achilles' tendons--seemed to puzzle the old
physician greatly, and finally almost to frighten him. His questioning grew more than
medically tense, and his hands shook as he dressed the mangled members; binding them
as if he wished to get the wounds out of sight as quickly as possible.

For an impersonal doctor, Davis' ominous and awestruck cross-examination became

very strange indeed as he sought to drain from the weakened undertaker every least
detail of his horrible experience. He was oddly anxious to know if Birch were sure--
absolutely sure--of the identity of that top coffin of the pile; how he had chosen it, how
he had been certain of it as the Fenner coffin in the dusk, and how he had distinguished
it from the inferior duplicate coffin of vicious Asaph Sawyer. Would the firm Fenner
casket have caved in so readily? Davis, an old-time village practitioner, had of course
seen both at the respective funerals, as indeed he had attended both Fenner and Sawyer
in their last illnesses. He had even wondered, at Sawyer's funeral, how the vindictive
farmer had managed to lie straight in a box so closely akin to that of the diminutive
Fenner.

After a full two hours Dr. Davis left, urging Birch to insist at all times that his wounds
were caused entirely by loose nails and splintering wood. What else, he added, could
ever in any case be proved or believed? But it would be well to say as little as could be
said, and to let no other doctor treat the wounds. Birch heeded this advice all the rest of
his life till he told me his story; and when I saw the scars--ancient and whitened as they
then were--I agreed that he was wise in so doing. He always remained lame, for the
great tendons had been severed; but I think the greatest lameness was in his soul. His
thinking processes, once so phlegmatic and logical, had become ineffaceably scarred;
and it was pitiful to note his response to certain chance allusions such as "Friday",
"Tomb", "Coffin", and words of less obvious concatenation. His frightened horse had
gone home, but his frightened wits never quite did that. He changed his business, but
something always preyed upon him. It may have been just fear, and it may have been
fear mixed with a queer belated sort of remorse for bygone crudities. His drinking, of
course, only aggravated what it was meant to alleviate.

When Dr. Davis left Birch that night he had taken a lantern and gone to the old
receiving tomb. The moon was shining on the scattered brick fragments and marred
facade, and the latch of the great door yielded readily to a touch from the outside.
Steeled by old ordeals in dissecting rooms, the doctor entered and looked about, stifling
the nausea of mind and body that everything in sight and smell induced. He cried aloud
once, and a little later gave a gasp that was more terrible than a cry. Then he fled back
to the lodge and broke all the rules of his calling by rousing and shaking his patient, and
hurling at him a succession of shuddering whispers that seared into the bewildered ears
like the hissing of vitriol.

"It was Asaph's coffin, Birch, just as I thought! I knew his teeth, with the front ones
missing on the upper jaw--never, for God's sake, show those wounds! The body was
pretty badly gone, but if ever I saw vindictiveness on any face--or former face...You
know what a fiend he was for revenge--how he ruined old Raymond thirty years after
their boundary suit, and how he stepped on the puppy that snapped at him a year ago
last August...He was the devil incarnate, Birch, and I believe his eye-for-an-eye fury
could beat old Father Death himself. God, what a rage! I'd hate to have it aimed at me!

"Why did you do it, Birch? He was a scoundrel, and I don't blame you for giving him a
cast-aside coffin, but you always did go too damned far! Well enough to skimp on the
thing some way, but you knew what a little man old Fenner was.

"I'll never get the picture out of my head as long as I live. You kicked hard, for Asaph's
coffin was on the floor. His head was broken in, and everything was tumbled about. I've
seen sights before, but there was one thing too much here. An eye for an eye! Great
heavens, Birch, but you got what you deserved. The skull turned my stomach, but the
other was worse--those ankles cut neatly off to fit Matt Fenner's cast-aside coffin!"

MEDUSA'S COIL
It was a lonely and deserted country, but at last I spied a roof among a clump of trees
near the small river on my right; perhaps a full half-mile from the road, and probably
reachable by some path or drive which I would presently come upon. In the absence of
any nearer dwelling, I resolved to try my luck there; and was glad when the bushes by
the roadside revealed the ruin of a carved stone gateway, covered with dry, dead vines
and choked with undergrowth which explained why I had not been able to trace the path
across the fields in my first distant view. I saw that I could not drive the car in, so I
parked it very carefully near the gate--where a thick evergreen would shield it in case of
rain--and got out for the long walk to the house.

Traversing that brush-grown path in the gathering twilight I was conscious of a distinct
sense of foreboding, probably induced by the air of sinister decay hovering about the
gate and the former driveway. From the carvings on the old stone pillars I inferred that
this place was once an estate of manorial dignity; and I could clearly see that the
driveway had originally boasted guardian lines of linden trees, some of which had died,
while others had lost their special identity among the wild scrub growths of the region.

As I ploughed onward, cockleburs and stickers clung to my clothes, and I began to

wonder whether the place could be inhabited after all. Was I tramping on a vain errand?
For a moment I was tempted to go back and try some farm farther along the road, when
a view of the house ahead aroused my curiosity and stimulated my venturesome spirit.

There was something provocatively fascinating in the tree-girt, decrepit pile before me,
for it spoke of the graces and spaciousness of a bygone era and a far more southerly
environment. It was a typical wooden plantation house of the classic, early nineteenth-
century pattern, with two and a half stories and a great Ionic portico whose pillars
reached up as far as the attic and supported a triangular pediment. Its state of decay was
extreme and obvious; one of the vast columns having rotted and fallen to the ground,
while the upper piazza or balcony had sagged dangerously low. Other buildings, I
judged, had formerly stood near it.

As I mounted the broad stone steps to the low porch and the carved and fanlighted
doorway I felt distinctly nervous, and started to light a cigarette--desisting when I saw
how dry and inflammable everything about me was. Though now convinced that the
house was deserted, I nevertheless hesitated to violate its dignity without knocking; so
tugged at the rusty iron knocker until I could get it to move, and finally set up a cautious
rapping which seemed to make the whole place shake and rattle. There was no response,
yet once more I plied the cumbrous, creaking device--as much to dispel the sense of
unholy silence and solitude as to arouse any possible occupant of the ruin.

Somewhere near the river I heard the mournful note of a dove, and it seemed as if the
coursing water itself were faintly audible. Half in a dream, I seized and rattled the
ancient latch, and finally gave the great six-panelled door a frank trying. It was
unlocked, as I could see in a moment; and though it stuck and grated on its hinges I
began to push it open, stepping through it into a vast shadowy hall as I did so.

But the moment I took this step I regretted it. It was not that a legion of specters
confronted me in that dim and dusty hall with the ghostly Empire furniture; but that I
knew all at once that the place was not deserted at all. There was a creaking on the great
curved staircase, and the sound of faltering footsteps slowly descending. Then I saw a
tall, bent figure silhouetted for an instant against the great Palladian window on the
landing.

My first start of terror was soon over, and as the figure descended the final flight I was
ready to greet the householder whose privacy I had invaded. In the semi-darkness I
could see him reach in his pocket for a match. There came a flare as he lighted a small
kerosene lamp which stood on a rickety console table near the foot of the stairs. In the
feeble glow was revealed the stooping figure of a very tall, emaciated old man;
disordered as to dress and unshaved as to face, yet for all that with the bearing and
expression of a gentleman.

I did not wait for him to speak, but at once began to explain my presence.

"You'll pardon my coming in like this, but when my knocking didn't raise anybody I
concluded that no one lived here. What I wanted originally was to know the right road
to Cape Girardeau--the shortest road, that is. I wanted to get there before dark, but now,
of course--"

As I paused, the man spoke; in exactly the cultivated tone I had expected, and with a
mellow accent as unmistakably Southern as the house he inhabited.

"Rather, you must pardon me for not answering your knock more promptly. I live in a
very retired way, and am not usually expecting visitors. At first I thought you were a
mere curiosity-seeker. Then when you knocked again I started to answer, but I am not
well and have to move very slowly. Spinal neuritis--very troublesome case.
"But as for your getting to town before dark--it's plain you can't do that. The road you
are on--for I suppose you came from the gate--isn't the best or shortest way. What you
must do is to take your first left after you leave the gate--that is, the first real road to
your left. There are three or four cart paths you can ignore, but you can't mistake the
real road because of the extra large willow tree on the right just opposite it. Then when
you've turned, keep on past two roads and turn to the right along the third. After that--"

"Please wait a moment! How can I follow all these clues in pitch darkness, without ever
having been near here before, and with only an indifferent pair of headlights to tell me
what is and what isn't a road? Besides, I think it's going to storm pretty soon, and my car
is an open one. It looks as if I were in a bad fix if I want to get to Cape Girardeau
tonight. The fact is, I don't think I'd better try to make it. I don't like to impose burdens,
or anything like that--but in view of the circumstances, do you suppose you could put
me up for the night? I won't be any trouble--no meals or anything. Just let me have a
corner to sleep in till daylight, and I'm all right. I can leave the car in the road where it
is--a bit of wet weather won't hurt it if worst comes to worst."

As I made my sudden request I could see the old man's face lose its former expression
of quiet resignation and take on an odd, surprised look.

"Sleep--here?"

He seemed so astonished at my request that I repeated it.

"Yes, why not? I assure you I won't be any trouble. What else can I do? I'm a stranger
hereabouts, these roads are a labyrinth in the dark, and I'll wager it'll be raining torrents
outside of an hour--"

This time it my host's turn to interrupt, and as he did so I could feel a peculiar quality in
his deep, musical voice.

"A stranger--of course you must be, else you wouldn't think of sleeping here, wouldn't
think of coming here at all. People don't come here nowadays."

He paused, and my desire to stay was increased a thousandfold by the sense of mystery
his laconic words seemed to evoke. There was surely something alluringly queer about
this place, and the pervasive musty smell seemed to cloak a thousand secrets. Again I
noticed the extreme decrepitude of everything about me; manifest even in the feeble
rays of the single small lamp. I felt woefully chilly, and saw with regret that no heating
was provided, and yet so great was my curiosity that I still wished most ardently to stay
and learn something of the recluse and his dismal abode.

"Let that be as it may," I replied. "I can't help about other people. But I surely would
like to have a spot to stop till daylight. Still--if people don't relish this place, mayn't it be
because it's getting so run-down? Of course I suppose it would a take a fortune to keep
such an estate up, but if the burden's too great why don't you look for smaller quarters?
Why try to stick it out here in this way--with all the hardships and discomforts?"

The man did not seem offended, but answered me very gravely.
"Surely you may stay if you really wish to--you can come to no harm that I know of.
But others claim there are certain peculiarly undesirable influences here. As for me--I
stay here because I have to. There is something I feel it a duty to guard--something that
holds me. I wish I had the money and health and ambition to take decent care of the
house and grounds."

With my curiosity still more heightened, I prepared to take my host at his word; and
followed him slowly upstairs when he motioned me to do so. It was very dark now, and
a faint pattering outside told me that the threatened rain had come. I would have been
glad of any shelter, but this was doubly welcome because of the hints of mystery about
the place and its master. For an incurable lover of the grotesque, no more fitting haven
could have been provided.

There was a second-floor corner room in less unkempt shape than the rest of the house,
and into this my host led me, setting down his small lamp and lighting a somewhat
larger one. From the cleanliness and contents of the room, and from the books ranged
along the walls, I could see that I had not guessed amiss in thinking the man a
gentleman of taste and of breeding. He was a hermit and eccentric, no doubt, but he still
had standards and intellectual interests. As he waved me to a seat I began a conversation
on general topics, and was pleased to find him not at all taciturn. If anything, he seemed
glad of someone to talk to, and did not even attempt to swerve the discussion from
personal topics.

He was, I learned, one Antoine de Russy, of an ancient, powerful, and cultivated line of
Louisiana planters. More than a century ago his grandfather, a younger son, had
migrated to southern Missouri and founded a new estate in the lavish ancestral manner;
building this pillared mansion and surrounding it with all the accessories of a great
plantation. There had been, at one time, as many as 200 negroes in the cabins which
stood on the flat ground in the rear--ground that the river had now invaded--and to hear
them singing and laughing and playing the banjo at night was to know the fullest charm
of a civilization and social order now sadly extinct. In front of the house, where the
great guardian oaks and willows stood, there had been a lawn like a broad green carpet,
always watered and trimmed and with flagstoned, flower-bordered walks curving
through it. "Riverside"--for such the place was called--had been a lovely and idyllic
homestead in its day; and my host could recall it when many traces of its best period
remained.

It was raining hard now, with dense sheets of water beating against the insecure roof,
walls, and windows, and sending in drops through a thousand chinks and crevices.
Moisture trickled down to the floor from unsuspected places, and the mounting wind
rattled the rotting, loose-hinged shutters outside. But I minded none of this, for I saw
that a story was coming. Incited to reminiscence, my host made a move to shew me to
sleeping-quarters; but kept on recalling the older, better days. Soon, I saw, I would
receive an inkling of why he lived alone in that ancient place, and why his neighbours
thought it full of undesirable influences. His voice was very musical as he spoke on, and
his tale soon took a turn which left me no chance to grow drowsy.

"Yes--Riverside was built in 1816, and my father was born in 1828. He'd be over a
century old now if he were alive, but he died young--so young I can just barely
remember him. In '64 that was--he was killed in the war, Seventh Louisiana Infantry
C.S.A., for he went back to the old home to enlist. My grandfather was too old to fight,
yet he lived on to be ninety-five, and helped my mother bring me up. A good bringing-
up, too--I'll give them credit. We always had strong traditions--high notions of honor--
and my grandfather saw to it that I grew up the way de Russys have grown up,
generation after generation, ever since the Crusades. We weren't quite wiped out
financially, but managed to get on very comfortable after the war. I went to a good
school in Louisiana, and later to Princeton. Later on I was able to get the plantation on a
fairly profitable basis--though you see what it's come to now.

"My mother died when I was twenty, and my grandfather two years later. It was rather
lonely after that; and in '85 I married a distant cousin in New Orleans. Things might
have been different if she'd lived, but she died when my son Denis was born. Then I had
only Denis. I didn't try marriage again, but gave all my time to the boy. He was like me-
-like all the de Russys--darkish and tall and thin, and with the devil of a temper. I gave
him the same training my grandfather had give me, but he didn't need much training
when it came to points of honor. It was in him, I reckon. Never saw such high spirit--all
I could do to keep him from running away to the Spanish War when he was eleven!
Romantic young devil, too--full of high notions--you'd call 'em Victorian, now--no
trouble at all to make him let the nigger wenches alone. I sent him to the same school I'd
gone to, and to Princeton, too. He was Class of 1909.

"In the end he decided to be a doctor, and went a year to the Harvard Medical School.
Then he hit on the idea of keeping to the old French tradition of the family, and argued
me into sending him across to the Sorbonne. I did--and proudly enough, though I knew
how lonely I'd be with him so far off. Would to God I hadn't! I thought he was the safest
kind of boy to be in Paris. He had a room in the Rue St. Jacques--that's near the
University in the 'Latin Quarter'--but according to his letters and his friends he didn't cut
up with the gayer dogs at all. The people he knew were mostly young fellows from
home--serious students and artists who thought more of their work than of striking
attitudes and painting the town red.

"But of course there were lots of fellows who were on a sort of dividing line between
serious studies and the devil. The aesthetes--the decadents, you know. Experiments in
life and sensation--the Baudelaire kind of a chap. Naturally Denis ran up against a good
many of these, and saw a good deal of their life. They had all sorts of crazy circles and
cults--imitation devil-worship, fake Black Masses, and the like. Doubt if it did them
much harm on the whole--probably most of 'em forgot all about it in a year or two. One
of the deepest in this queer stuff was a fellow Denis had known at school--for that
matter, whose father I'd known myself. Frank Marsh, of New Orleans. Disciple of
Lafcadio Hearn and Gauguin and Van Gogh--regular epitome of the yellow 'nineties.
Poor devil--he had the makings of a great artist, at that.

"Marsh was the oldest friend Denis had in Paris, so as a matter of course they saw a
good deal of each other--to talk over old times at St. Clair academy, and all that. The
boy wrote me a good deal about him, and I didn't see any especial harm when he spoke
of the group of mystics Marsh ran with. It seems there was some cult of prehistoric
Egyptian and Carthaginian magic having a rage among the Bohemian element on the
left bank--some nonsensical thing that pretended to reach back to forgotten sources of
hidden truth in lost African civilisations--the great Zimbabwe, the dead Atlantean cities
in the Haggar region of the Sahara--and they had a lot of gibberish concerned with
snakes and human hair. At least, I called it gibberish, then. Denis used to quote Marsh
as saying odd things about the veiled facts behind the legend of Medusa's snaky locks--
and behind the later Ptolemaic myth of Berenice, who offered up her hair to save her
husband-brother, and had it set in the sky as the constellation Coma Berenices.

"I don't think this business made much impression on Denis until the night of the queer
ritual at Marsh's rooms when he met the priestess. Most of the devotees of the cult were
young fellows, but the head of it was a young woman who called herself 'Tanit-Isis'--
letting it be known that her real name--her name in this latest incarnation, as she put it--
was Marceline Bedard. She claimed to be the left-handed daughter of Marquis de
Chameaux, and seemed to have been both a petty artist and an artist's model before
adopting this more lucrative magical game. Someone said she had lived for a time in the
West Indies--Martinique, I think--but she was very reticent about herself. Part of her
pose was a great show of austerity and holiness, but I don't think the more experienced
students took that very seriously.

"Denis, though, was far from experienced, and wrote me fully ten pages of slush about
the goddess he had discovered. If I'd only realised his simplicity I might have done
something, but I never thought a puppy infatuation like could mean much. I felt
absurdly sure that Denis' touchy personal honour and family pride would always keep
him out of the most serious complications.

"As time went, though, his letters began to make me nervous. He mentioned this
Marceline more and more, and his friends less and less, and began talking about the
'cruel and silly way' they declined to introduce her to their mothers and sisters. He
seems to have asked her no questions about herself, and I don't doubt but that she filled
him full of romantic legendry concerning her origin and divine revelations and the way
people slighted her. At length I could see that Denis was altogether cutting his own
crowd and spending the bulk of his time with his alluring priestess. At her especial
request he never told the old crowd of their continual meetings; so nobody over there
tried to break the affair up.

"I suppose she thought he was fabulously rich; for he had the air of a patrician, and
people of a certain class think all aristocratic Americans are wealthy. In any case, she
probably thought this a rare chance to contract a genuine right-handed alliance with a
really eligible young man. By the time my nervousness burst into open advice, it was
too late. The boy had lawfully married her, and wrote that he was dropping his studies
and bringing the woman home to Riverside. He said she had made a great sacrifice and
resigned her leadership of the magical cult, and that henceforward she would be merely
a private gentlewoman--the future mistress of Riverside, and mother of de Russys to
come.

"Well, sir, I took it the best way I could. I knew that sophisticated Continentals have
different standards from our old American ones--and anyway, I really knew nothing
against the woman. A charlatan, perhaps, but why necessarily any worse? I suppose I
tried to keep as naïve as possible about such things in those days, for the boy's sake.
Clearly, there was nothing for a man of sense to do but let Denis alone so long as his
new wife conformed to de Russy ways. Let her have a chance to prove herself--perhaps
she wouldn't hurt the family as much as some might fear. So I didn't raise any
objections or ask any penitence. The thing was done, and I stood ready to welcome the
boy back, whatever he brought with him.

"They got here three weeks after the telegram telling of marriage. Marceline was
beautiful--there was no denying that--and I could see how the boy might very well get
foolish about her. She did have an air of breeding, and I think to this day she must have
had some strains of good blood in her. She was apparently not much over twenty; of
medium size, fairly slim, and as graceful as a tigress in posture and motion. Her
complexion was a deep olive--like old ivory--and her eyes were large and very dark.
She had small, classically regular features--though not quite clean-cut enough to suit my
taste--and the most singular braid of jet black hair that I ever saw.

"I didn't wonder that she had dragged the subject of hair into her magical cult, for with
that heavy profusion of it the idea must have occurred to her naturally. Coiled up, it
made her look like some Oriental princess in a drawing of Aubrey Beardsley's. Hanging
down her back, it came well below her knees and shone in the light as if it had
possessed some separate, unholy vitality of its own. I would almost have thought of
Medusa or Berenice myself--without having such things suggested to me--upon seeing
and studying that hair.

"Sometimes I thought it moved slightly of itself, and tended to arrange itself in distinct
ropes or strands, but this may have been sheer illusion. She braided it incessantly, and
seemed to use some sort of preparation on it. I got the notion once--a curious, whimsical
notion--that it was a living being which she had to feed in some strange way. All
nonsense--but it added to my feeling of constraint about her and her hair.

"For I can't deny that I failed to like her wholly, no matter how hard I tried. I couldn't
tell what the trouble was, but it was there. Something about her repelled me very subtly,
and I could not help weaving morbid and macabre associations about everything
connected with her. Her complexion called up thoughts of Babylon, Atlantis, Lemuria,
and the terrible forgotten dominations of an elder world; her eyes struck me sometimes
as the eyes of some unholy forest creature or animal goddess too immeasurably ancient
to be fully human; and her hair--that dense, exotic, overnourished growth of oily
inkiness--made one shiver as a great black python might have done. There was no doubt
but that she realised my involuntary attitude--though I tried to hide it, and she tried to
hide the fact that she noticed it.

"Yet the boy's infatuation lasted. He positively fawned on her, and overdid all the little
gallantries of daily life to a sickening degree. She appeared to return the feeling, though
I could see it took a conscious effort to make her duplicate his enthusiasms and
extravagances. For one thing, I think she was piqued to learn we weren't as wealthy as
she had expected.

"It was a bad business all told. I could see that sad undercurrents were arising. Denis
was half-hypnotised with puppy-love, and began to grow away from me as he felt my
shrinking from his wife. This kind of thing went on for months, and I saw that I was
losing my only son--the boy who had formed the centre of all my thoughts and acts for
the past quarter century. I'll own that I felt bitter about it--what father wouldn't? And yet
I could do nothing.
"Marceline seemed to be a good wife enough in those early months, and our friends
received her without any quibbling or questioning. I was always nervous, though, about
what some of the young fellows in Paris might write home to their relatives after the
news of the marriage spread around. Despite the woman's love of secrecy, it couldn't
remain hidden forever--indeed, Denis had written a few of his closest friends, in strict
confidence, as soon as he was settled with her at Riverside.

"I got to staying alone in my room more and more, with my failing health as an excuse.
It was about that time that my present spinal neuritis began to develop--which made the
excuse a pretty good one. Denis didn't seem to notice the trouble, or take any interest in
me and my habits and affairs; and it hurt me to see how callous he was getting. I began
to get sleepless, and often racked my brain in the night to try to find out what made my
new daughter-in-law so repulsive and even dimly horrible to me. It surely wasn't her old
mystical nonsense, for she had left all the past behind her and never mentioned it once.
She didn't even do any painting, although I understood that she had once dabbled in art.

"Oddly, the only ones who seemed to share my uneasiness were the servants. The
darkies around the house seemed very sullen in their attitude toward her, and in a few
weeks all save the few who were strongly attached to our family had left. These few--
old Scipio and his wife Sarah, the cook Delilah, and Mary, Scipio's daughter--were as
civil as possible; but plainly revealed that their new mistress commanded their duty
rather than their affection. They stayed in their own remote part of the house as much as
possible. McCabe, our white chauffeur, was insolently admiring rather than hostile; and
another exception was a very old Zulu woman, said to have been a sort of leader in her
small cabin as a kind of family pensioner. Old Sophonisba always shewed reverence
whenever Marceline came near her, and one time I saw her kiss the ground where her
mistress had walked. Blacks are superstitious animals, and I wondered whether
Marceline had been talking any of her mystical nonsense to our hands in order to
overcome their evident dislike.

"Well, that's how we went on for nearly half a year. Then, in the summer of 1916,
things began to happen. Toward the middle of June Denis got a note from his old friend
Frank Marsh, telling of a sort of nervous breakdown which made him want to take a rest
in the country. It was postmarked New Orleans--for Marsh had gone home from Paris
when he felt the collapse coming on--and seemed a very plain though polite bid for an
invitation from us. Marsh, of course, knew that Marceline was here; and asked very
courteously after her. Denis was sorry to hear of his trouble and told him at once to
come along for an indefinite visit.

"Marsh came--and I was shocked to notice how he had changed since I had seen him in
his earlier days. He was a smallish, lightish fellow, with blue eyes and an undecided
chin; and now I could see the effects of drink and I don't know what else in his puffy
eyelids, enlarged nose-pores, and heavy lines around the mouth. I reckon he had taken
his dose of decadence pretty seriously, and set out to be as much of a Rimbaud,
Baudelaire, or Lautreamont as he could. And yet he was delightful to talk to--for like all
decadents he was exquisitely sensitive to the color and atmosphere and names of things;
admirably, thoroughly alive, and with whole records of conscious experience in
obscure, shadowy fields of living and feeling which most of us pass over without
knowing they exist. Poor young devil--if only his father had lived longer and taken him
in hand! There was great stuff in the boy!
"I was glad of the visit, for I felt it would help to set up a normal atmosphere in the
house again. And that's what it really seemed to do at first; for as I said, Marsh was a
delight to have around. He was as sincere and profound an artist as I ever saw in my
life, and I certainly believe that nothing on earth mattered to him except the perception
and expression of beauty. When he saw an exquisite thing, or was creating one, his eyes
would dilate until the light irises were nearly out of sight--leaving two mystical black
pits in that weak, delicate, chalk-like face; black pits opening on strange worlds which
none of us could guess about.

"When he reached here, though, he didn't have many chances to shew this tendency; for
he had, as he told Denis, gone quite stale. It seems he had been very successful as an
artist of a bizarre kind--like Fuseli or Goya or Sime or Clark Ashton Smith--but had
suddenly become played out. The world of ordinary things around him had ceased to
hold anything he could recognize as beauty--beauty, that is, of enough force and
poignancy to arouse his creative faculty. He had often been this way before--all
decadents are--but this time he could not invent any new, strange, or outré sensation or
experience which would supply the needed illusion of fresh beauty or stimulatingly
adventurous expectancy. He was like a Durtal or a des Esseintes at the most jaded point
of his curious orbit.

"Marceline was away when Marsh arrived. She hadn't been enthusiastic about his
coming, and had refused to decline an invitation from some of our friends in St. Louis
which came about that time for her and Denis. Denis, of course, stayed to receive his
guest; but Marceline had gone on alone. It was the first time they had ever been
separated, and I hoped the interval would help to dispel the daze that was making such a
fool of the boy. Marceline shewed no hurry to get back, but seemed to me to prolong
her absence as much as she could. Denis stood it better than one would have expected
from such a doting husband, and seemed more like his old self as he talked over other
days with Marsh and tried to cheer the listless aesthete up.

"It was Marsh who seemed most impatient to see the woman; perhaps because he
thought her strange beauty, or some phase of the mysticism which had gone into her
one-time magical cult, might help to reawaken his interest in things and give him
another start toward artistic creation. That there was no baser reason, I was absolutely
certain from what I knew of Marsh's character. With all his weaknesses, he was a
gentleman--and it had indeed relieved me when I first learned that he wanted to come
here because his willingness to accept Denis' hospitality proved that there was no reason
why he shouldn't.

"When, at last, Marceline did return, I could see that Marsh was tremendously affected.
He did not attempt to make her talk of the bizarre thing which she had so definitely
abandoned, but was unable to hide a powerful admiration which kept his eyes--now
dilated in that curious way for the first time during his visit--riveted to her every
moment she was in the room. She, however, seemed uneasy rather than pleased by his
steady scrutiny--that is, she seemed so at first, though this feeling of hers wore away in
a few days, and left the two on a basis of the most cordial and voluble congeniality. I
could see Marsh studying her constantly when he thought no one was watching; and I
wondered how long it would be that only the artist, and not the primitive man, would be
aroused by her mysterious graces.
"Denis naturally felt some irritation at this turn of affairs; though he realised that his
guest was a man of honour and that, as kindred mystics and aesthetes, Marceline and
Marsh would naturally have things and interests to discuss in which a more or less
conventional person could have no part. He didn't hold anything against anybody, but
merely regretted that his own imagination was too limited and traditional to let him talk
with Marceline as Marsh talked. At this stage of things I began to see more of the boy.
With his wife otherwise busy, he had time to remember that he had a father--and a
father who was ready to help him in any sort of perplexity or difficulty.

"We often sat together on the veranda watching Marsh and Marceline as they rode up or
down the drive on horseback, or played tennis on the court that used to stretch south of
the house. They talked mostly in French, which Marsh, though he hadn't more than a
quarter-portion of French blood, handled more glibly than either Denis or I could speak
it. Marceline's English, always academically correct, was rapidly improving in accent;
but it was plain that she relished dropping back into her mother-tongue. As we looked at
the congenial couple they made, I could see the boy's cheek and throat muscles tighten--
though he wasn't a whit less ideal a host to Marsh, or a whit less considerate husband to
Marceline.

"All this was generally in the afternoon; for Marceline rose very late, had breakfast in
bed, and took an immense amount of time preparing to come downstairs. I never knew
of anyone so wrapped up in cosmetics, beauty exercises, hair-oils, unguents, and
everything of that kind. It was in these morning hours that Denis and Marsh did their
real visiting, and exchanged the close confidences which kept their friendship up despite
the strain that jealousy imposed.

"Well, it was in one of those morning talks on the veranda that Marsh made the
proposition which brought on the end. I was laid up with some of my neuritis, but had
managed to get downstairs and stretch out on the front parlour sofa near the long
window. Denis and Marsh were just outside; so I couldn't help hearing all they said.
They had been talking about art, and the curious, capricious elements needed to jolt an
artist into producing the real article, when Marsh suddenly swerved from abstractions to
the personal application he must have had in mind from the start.

"'I suppose,' he was saying, 'that nobody can tell just what it is in some scenes or objects
that makes them aesthetic stimuli for certain individuals. Basically, of course, it must
have some reference to each man's background of stored-up mental associations, for no
two people have the same scale of sensitiveness and responses. We decadents are artists
for whom all ordinary things have ceased to have any emotional or imaginative
significance, but no one of us responds in the same way to exactly the same
extraordinary. Now take me, for instance.'"

"He paused and resumed.

"'I know, Denny, that I can say these things to you because you such a preternaturally
unspoiled mind--clean, fine, direct, objective, and all that. You won't misunderstand as
an oversubtilised, effete man of the world might.'"

"He paused once more.

"'The fact is, I think I know what's needed to set my imagination working again. I've
had a dim idea of it ever since we were in Paris, but I'm sure now. It's Marceline, old
chap--that face and that hair, and the train of shadowy images they bring up. Not merely
visible beauty--though God knows there's enough of that--but something peculiar and
individualised, that can't exactly be explained. Do you know, in the last few days I've
felt the existence of such a stimulus so keenly that I honestly think I could outdo
myself--break into the real masterpiece class if I could get ahold of paint and canvas at
just the time when her face and hair set my fancy stirring and weaving. There's
something weird and other-worldly about it--something joined up with the dim ancient
thing Marceline represents. I don't know how much she's told you about that side of her,
but I can assure you there's plenty of it. She has some marvellous links with the outside.'

"Some change in Denis' expression must have halted the speaker here, for there was a
considerable spell of silence before the words went on. I was utterly taken aback, for I'd
expected no such overt development like this; and I wondered what my son could be
thinking. My heart began to pound violently, and I strained my ears in the frankest of
intentional eavesdropping. Then Marsh resumed.

"'Of course you're jealous--I know how a speech like mine must sound--but I can swear
to you that you needn't be.'

"Denis did not answer, and Marsh went on.

"' To tell the truth, I could never be in love with Marceline--I couldn't even be a cordial
friend of hers in the warmest sense. Why, damn it all, I felt like a hypocrite talking with
her these days as I've been doing.

"'The case simply is, that one of her phase of her half hyponotises me in a certain way--
a very strange, fantastic, and dimly terrible way--just as another phase half hypnotises
you in a much more normal way. I see something in her--or to be psychologically exact,
something through her or beyond her--that you didn't see at all. Something that brings
up a vast pageantry of shapes from forgotten abysses, and makes me want to paint
incredible things whose outlines vanish the instant I try to envisage them clearly. Don't
mistake, Denny, your wife is a magnificent being, a splendid focus of cosmic forces
who has a right to be called divine if anything on earth has!'

"I felt a clearing of the situation at this point, for the abstract strangeness of Marsh's
statement, plus the flattery he was now heaping on Marceline, could not fail to disarm
and mollify one as fondly proud of his consort as Denis always was. Marsh evidently
caught the change himself, for there was more confidence in his tone as he continued.

"'I must paint her, Denny--must paint that hair--and you won't regret. There's something
more than mortal about that hair--something more than beautiful--'

"He paused, and I wondered what Denis could be thinking. I wondered, indeed, what I
was really thinking myself. Was Marsh's interest actually that of the artist alone, or was
he merely infatuated as Denis had been? I had thought, in their schooldays, that he had
envied my boy; and I dimly felt that it might be the same now. On the other hand,
something in that talk of artistic stimulus had rung amazingly true; so that the more I
pondered, the more I was inclined to take the stuff at face value. Denis seemed to do so,
too, for although I could not catch his low-spoken reply, I could tell by the effect it
produced that it must have been affirmative.

"There was a sound of someone slapping another on the back, and then a grateful
speech from Marsh that I was long to remember.

"'That's great, Denny, and just as I told you, you'll never regret it. In a sense, I'm half
doing it for you. You'll be a different man when you see it. I'll put you back where you
used to be--give you a waking-up and a sort of salvation--but you can't see what I mean
as yet. Just remember old friendship, and don't get the idea that I'm not the same old
bird!'

"I rose perplexedly as I saw the two stroll off across the lawn, arm in arm, and smoking
in unison. What could Marsh have meant by his strange and almost ominous
reassurance? The more my fears were quieted in one direction, the more they were
aroused in another. Look at it any way I could, it seemed to be a rather bad business.

"But matters got started just the same. Denis fixed up an attic room with skylights, and
Marsh sent for all sorts of painting equipment. Everyone was rather excited about the
new venture, and I was at least glad that something was on foot to break the brooding
tension. Soon the sittings began, and we all took them quite seriously--for we could see
that Marsh regarded them as important artistic events. Denny and I used to go quietly
about the house as though something sacred were occurring, and we knew that it was
sacred as far as Marsh was concerned.

"With Marceline, though, it was a different matter, as I began to see at once. Whatever
Marsh's reactions to the sittings may have been, hers were painfully obvious. Every
possible way she betrayed a frank and commonplace infatuation for the artist, and
would repulse Denis' marks of affection whenever she dared. Oddly, I noticed this more
vividly than Denis himself, and tried to devise some plan for keeping the boy's mind
easy until the matter could be straightened out. There was no use in having him excited
about it if it could be helped.

"In the end I decided that Denis had better be away while the disagreeable situation
existed. I could represent his interests well enough at this end, and sooner or later Marsh
would finish the picture and go. My view of Marsh's honour was such that I did not look
for any worse developments. When the matter had blown over, and Marceline had
forgotten about her new infatuation, it would be time enough to have Denis on hand
again.

"So I wrote a long letter to my marketing and financial agent in New York, and cooked
up a plan to have the boy summoned there for an indefinite time. I had the agent write
him that our affairs absolutely required one of us to go East, and of course my illness
made it clear that I could not be the one. It was arranged that when Denis got to New
York he would find enough plausible matters to keep him busy as long as I thought he
ought to be away.

"The plan worked perfectly, and Denis started for New York without the least
suspicion; Marceline and Marsh going with him in the car to Cape Girardeau, where he
caught the afternoon train to St. Louis. They returned after dark, and as McCabe drove
the car back to the stables I could hear them talking on the veranda--in those same
chairs near the long parlour window where Marsh and Denis had sat when I overheard
them talk about the portrait. This time I resolved to do some intentional eavesdropping,
so quietly went down to the front parlour and stretched out on the sofa near the window.

"At first I could not hear anything but very shortly there came the sound of a chair being
shifted, followed by a short, sharp breath and a sort of inarticulately hurt exclamation
from Marceline. Then I heard Marsh speaking in a strained, almost formal voice.

"'I'd enjoy working tonight if you aren't too tired.'

"Marceline's reply was in the same hurt tone which had marked her exclamation. She
used English as he had done.

"'Oh, Frank, is that really all you care about? Forever working! Can't we just sit out here
in this glorious moonlight?'

"He answered impatiently, his voice shewing a certain contempt beneath the dominant
quality of artistic enthusiasm.

"'Moonlight! Good God, what cheap sentimentality! For a supposedly sophisticated

person you surely do hang on to some of the crudest claptrap that ever escaped from the
dime novels! With art at your elbow, you have to think of the moon--cheap as a
spotlight at the varieties! Or perhaps it makes you think of the Roodmas dance around
the stone pillars at Auteiul. Hell, how you used to make those goggle-eyed yaps stare!
But not--I suppose you've dropped all that now. No more Atlantean magic or hair-snake
rites for Madame de Russy! I'm the only one to remember the ld things--the things that
came down through the temples of Tanit and echoed on the ramparts of Zimbabwe. But
I won't be cheated of that remembrance--all that is weaving itself into the thing on my
canvas--the thing that is going to capture wonder and crystallise the secrets of 75,000
years.'

"Marceline interrupted in a voice full of mixed emotions.

"'It's you who are cheaply sentimental now! You know well that the old things had
better be let alone. All of you had better watch out if ever I chant the old rites or try to
call up what lies hidden in Yuggoth, Zimbabwe, and R'lyeh. I thought you had more
sense!

"'You lack logic. You want me to be interested in this precious painting of yours, yet
you never let me see what you're doing. Always that black cloth over it! It's of me--I
shouldn't think it would matter if I saw it.'

"Marsh was interrupting this time, his voice curiously hard and strained.

"'No. Not now. You'll see it in due course of time. You say it's of you--yes, it's that, but
it's more. If you knew, you mightn't be so impatient. Poor Denis! My God, it's a shame!'

"My throat was suddenly dry as the words rose to an almost febrile pitch. What could
Marsh mean? Suddenly I saw that he had stopped and was entering the house alone. I
heard the front door slam, and listened as his footsteps ascended the stairs. Outside on
the veranda I could still hear Marceline's heavy, angry breathing. I crept away sick at
heart, feeling that there were grave things to ferret out before I could safely let Denis
come back.

"After that evening the tension around the place was even worse than before. Marceline
had always lived on flattery and fawning and the shock of those few blunt words from
Marsh was too much for her temperament. There was no living in the house with her
anymore, for with poor Denis gone she took out her abusiveness on everybody. When
she could find no one indoors to quarrel with she would go out to Sophonisba's cabin
and spend hours talking with the queer old Zulu woman. Aunt Sophy was the only
person who would fawn abjectly enough to suit her, and when I tried once to overhear
their conversation I found Marceline whispering about 'elder secrets' and 'unknown
Kadath' while the negress rocked to and fro in her chair, making inarticulate sounds of
reverence and admiration every now and then.

"But nothing could break her dog-like infatuation for Marsh. She would talk bitterly and
sullenly to him, yet was getting more and more obedient to his wishes. It was very
convenient for him, since he now became able to make her pose for the picture
whenever he felt like painting. He tried to shew gratitude for this willingness, but I
thought I could detect a kind of contempt or even loathing beneath his careful
politeness. For my part, I frankly hated Marceline! There was no use in calling my
attitude anything as mild as dislike these days. Certainly, I was glad Denis was away.
His letters, not nearly so frequent as I wished, shewed signs of strain and worry.

"As the middle of August went by I gathered from Marsh's remarks that the portrait was
nearly done. His mood seemed increasingly sardonic, though Marceline's temper
improved a bit as the prospect of seeing the thing tickled her vanity. I can still recall the
day when Marsh said he'd have everything finished within a week. Marceline
brightened up perceptibly, though not without a venomous look at me. It seemed as if
her coiled hair visibly tightened around her head.

"'I'm to be the first to see it!' she snapped. Then, smiling at Marsh, she said, 'And if I
don't like it I shall slash it to pieces!'

"Marsh's face took on the most curious look I have ever seen it wear as he answered her.

"'I can't vouch for your taste, Marceline, but I swear it will be magnificent! Not that I
want to take much credit--art creates itself--and this thing had to be done. Just wait!'"

"During the next few days I felt a queer sense of foreboding, as if the completion of the
picture meant a kind of catastrophe instead of a relief. Denis, too, had not written me,
and my agent in New York said he was planning some trip to the country. I wondered
what the outcome of the whole thing would be. What a queer mixture of elements--
Marsh and Marceline, Denis and I! How would all these ultimately react on one
another? When my fears grew too great I tried to lay them all to my infirmity, but that
explanation never quite satisfied me."

"Well, the thing exploded on Tuesday, the twenty-sixth of August. I had risen at my
usual time and had breakfast, but was not good for much because of the pain in my
spine. It had been troubling me badly of late, and forcing me to take opiates when it got
too unbearable; nobody else was downstairs except the servants, though I could hear
Marceline moving about in her room. Marsh slept in the attic next his studio, and had
begun to keep such late hours that he was seldom up till noon. About ten o'clock the
pain got the better of me, so that I took a double dose of my opiate and lay down on the
parlour sofa. The last I heard was Marceline's pacing overhead. Poor creature--if I had
known! She must have been walking before the long mirror admiring herself. That was
like her. Vain from start to finish--revelling in her own beauty, just as she revelled in all
the little luxuries Denis was able to give her.

"I didn't wake up till near sunset, and knew instantly how long I had slept from the
golden light and long shadows outside the long window. Nobody was about, and a sort
of unnatural stillness seemed to be hovering over everything. From afar, though, I
thought I could sense a faint howling, wild and intermittent, whose quality had a slight
but baffling familiarity about it. I'm not much for psychic premonitions, but I was
frightfully uneasy from the start. There had been dreams--even worse than the ones I
had been dreaming in the weeks before--and this time they seemed hideously linked to
some black and festering reality. The whole place had a poisonous air. Afterward I
reflected that certain sounds must have filtered through into my unconscious brain
during those hours of drugged sleep. My pain, though, was very much eased; and I rose
and walked without difficulty.

"Soon enough I began to see that something was wrong. Marsh and Marceline might
have been riding, but someone ought to have been getting dinner in the kitchen. Instead,
there was only silence, except for that faint, distant howl or wail; and nobody answered
when I pulled the old-fashioned bell-cord to summon Scipio. Then, chancing to look up,
I saw the spreading stain on the ceiling--the bright red stain, that must have come
through the floor of Marceline's room.

"In an instant I forgot my crippled back and hurried upstairs to find out the worst.
Everything under the sun raced through my mind as I struggled with the dampness-
warped door of that silent chamber, and most hideous of all was a terrible sense of
malign fulfilment and fatal expectedness. I had, it struck me, known all along that
nameless horrors were gathering; that something profoundly and cosmically evil had
gained a foot-hold under my roof from which only blood and tragedy could result.

"The door gave at last, and I stumbled into the large room beyond--all dim from the
branches of the great trees outside the windows. For a moment I could do nothing but
flinch at the faint evil odour that immediately struck my nostrils. Then, turning on the
electric light and glancing around, I glimpsed a nameless blasphemy on the yellow and
blue rug.

"It lay face down in a great pool of dark, thickened blood, and had the gory print of a
shod human foot in the middle of its naked back. Blood was spattered everywhere--on
the walls, furniture, and floor. My knees gave way as I took in the sight, so that I had to
stumble to a chair and slump down. The thing had obviously been a human being,
though its identity was not easy to establish at first; since it was without clothes, and
had most of its hair hacked and torn from the scalp in a very crude way. It was of a deep
ivory colour, and I knew that it must have been Marceline. The shoe-print on the back
made the thing seem all the more hellish. I could not even picture the strange, loathsome
tragedy which must have taken place while I slept in the room below. When I raised my
hand to wipe my dripping forehead I saw that my fingers were sticky with blood. I
shuddered, then realised that it must have come from the knob of the door which the
unknown murderer had forced shut behind him as he left. He had taken his weapon with
him, it seemed, for no instrument of death was visible here.

"As I studied the floor I saw that a line of sticky footprints like the one on the body led
away from the horror to the door. There was another blood-trail, too, and of a less easily
explainable kind; a broadish, continuous line, as if marking the path of some huge
snake. At first I concluded it must be due to something the murderer had dragged after
him. Then, noting the way some of the footprints seemed to be superimposed on it, I
was forced to believe that it could have been there when the murderer left. But what
crawling entity could have been in that room with the victim and her assassin, leaving
before the killer when the deed was done? As I asked myself this question I thought I
heard fresh bursts of that faint, distant wailing.

"Finally, rousing myself from a lethargy of horror, I got on my feet again and began
following the footprints. Who the murderer was, I could not even faintly guess, nor
could I try to explain the absence of the servants. I vaguely felt that I ought to go up to
Marsh's attic quarters, but before I had fully formulated the idea I saw that the bloody
trail was indeed taking me there. Was he himself the murderer? Had he gone mad under
the strain of the morbid situation and suddenly run amok?

"In the attic corridor the trail became faint, the prints almost ceasing as they merged
with the dark carpet. I could still, however, discern the strange single path of the entity
who had gone first; and this led straight to the closed door of Marsh's studio,
disappearing beneath it at a point about half way from side to side. Evidently it had
crossed the threshold at a time when the door was wide open.

"Sick at heart, I tried the knob and found the door unlocked. Opening it, I paused in the
waning north light to see what fresh nightmare might be awaiting me. There was
certainly something human on the floor, and I reached for the switch to turn on the
chandelier.

"But as the light flashed up my gaze left the floor and its horror--that was Marsh, poor
devil--to fix itself frantically and incredulously upon the living thing that cowered and
stared in the open doorway leading to Marsh's bedroom. It was a tousled, wild-eyed
thing, crusted with dried blood and carrying in its hand a wicked machete which had
been one of the ornaments of the studio wall. Yet even in that awful moment I
recognised it as one whom I had thought more than a thousand miles away. It was my
own boy Denis--or the maddened wreck which had once been Denis.

"The sight of me seemed to bring back a trifle of sanity--or at least of memory--in the
poor boy. He straightened up and began to toss his head about as if trying to shake free
from some enveloping influence. I could not speak a word, but moved my lips in an
effort to get back my voice. My eyes wandered for a moment to the figure on the floor
in front of the heavily draped easel--the figure toward which the strange blood-trail led,
and which seemed to be tangled in the coils of some dark, ropy object. The shifting of
my glance apparently produced some impression in the twisted brain of the boy, for
suddenly he began to mutter in a hoarse whisper whose purport I was soon able to catch.
"'I had to exterminate her--she was the devil--the summit and high-priestess of all evil--
the spawn of the pit--Marsh knew, and tried to warn me. Good old Frank--I didn't kill
him, though I was ready to before I realised. But I went down there and killed her--then
that cursed hair--'

"I listened in horror as Denis choked, paused, and began again.

"'You didn't know--her letters got queer and I knew she was in love with Marsh. Then
she nearly stopped writing. He never mentioned her--I felt something was wrong, and
thought I ought to come back and find out. Couldn't tell you--your manner would have
given it away. Wanted to surprise them. Got here about noon today--came in a cab and
sent the house-servants all off--let the field hands alone, for their cabins are all out of
earshot. Told McCabe to get me some things in Cape Girardeau and not bother to come
back until tomorrow. Had all the niggers take the old car and let Mary drive them to
Bend Village for a vacation--told 'em we were all going on some sort of outing and
wouldn't need help. Said they'd better stay all night with Uncle Scip's cousin, who keeps
that nigger boarding house.'

"Denis was getting very incoherent now, and I strained my ears to grasp every word.
Again I thought I heard that wild, far-off wail, but the story had first place for the
present.

"'Saw you sleeping in the parlour, and took a chance you wouldn't wake up. Then went
upstairs on the quiet to hunt up Marsh and that woman!'

"The boy shuddered as he avoided pronouncing Marceline's name. At the same time I
saw his eyes dilate in unison with a bursting of the distant crying, whose vague
familiarity had now become very great.

"'She was not in her room, so I went up to the studio. Door was shut, and I could hear
voices inside. Didn't knock--just burst in and found her posing for the picture. Nude, but
with the hellish hair all draped around her. And making all sorts of sheep's eyes at
Marsh. He had the easel turned half away from the door, so I couldn't see the picture.
Both of them were pretty well jolted when I shewed up, and Marsh dropped his brush. I
was in a rage and told him he'd have to shew me the portrait, but he got calmer every
minute. Told me it wasn't quite done, but would be in a day or two--said I could see it
then--she--hadn't seen it.

"'But that didn't go with me. I stepped up, and he dropped a velvet curtain over the thing
before I could see it. He was ready to fight before letting me see it, but that--that--she--
stepped up and sided with me. Said we ought to see it. Frank got horrible worked up,
and gave me a punch when I tried to get at the curtain. I punched back and seemed to
have knocked him out. Then I was almost knocked out myself by the shriek that--that
creature--gave. She'd drawn aside the hangings herself, and caught a look at what Marsh
had been painting. I wheeled around and saw her rushing like mad out of the room--then
I saw the picture.'

"Madness flared up in the boy's eyes again as he got to this place, and I thought for a
minute he was going to spring at me with his machete. But after a pause he partly
steadied himself.
"'Oh, God--that thing! Don't ever look at it! Burn it with the hangings around it and
throw the ashes into the river! Marsh knew--and was warning me. He knew what it was-
-what that woman--that leopardess, or gorgon, or lamia, or whatever she was--actually
represented. He'd tried to hint to me ever since I met her in his Paris studio, but it
couldn't be told in words. I thought they all wronged her when they whispered horrors
about her--she had me hypnotised so that I couldn't believe the plain facts--but this
picture has caught the whole secret--the whole monstrous background!

"'God, but Frank is an artist! That thing is the greatest piece any living soul has
produced since Rembrandt! It's a crime to burn it--but it would be a greater crime to let
it exist--just as it would have been an abhorrent sin to let--that she-daemon--exist any
longer. The minute I saw it I understood what--she--was, and what part she played in
the frightful secret that has come down from the days of Cthulhu and the Elder Ones--
the secret that was nearly wiped out when Atlantis sank, but that kept half alive in
hidden traditions and allegorical myths and furtive, midnight cult-practices. For you
know she was the real thing. It wasn't any fake. It would have been merciful if it had
been a fake. It was the old, hideous shadow that philosophers never dared mention--the
thing hinted at in the Necronomicon and symbolised in the Easter Island colossi.

"'She thought we couldn't see through--that the false front would hold till we had
bartered away our immortal souls. And she was half right--she'd have got me in the end.
She was only--waiting. But Frank--good old Frank--was too much for me. He knew
what it all meant, and painted it. I don't wonder she shrieked and ran off when she saw
it. It wasn't quite done, but God knows enough was there.

"'Then I knew I'd got to kill her--kill her, and everything connected with her. It was a
taint that wholesome human blood couldn't bear. There was something else, too--but
you'll never know that if you burn the picture without looking. I staggered down to her
room with this machete that I got off the wall here, leaving Frank still knocked out. He
was breathing, though, and I knew and thanked heaven I hadn't killed him.

"'I found her in front of the mirror braiding that accursed hair. She turned on me like a
wild beast, and began spitting out her hatred of Marsh. The fact that she'd been in love
with him--and I knew she had--only made it worse. For a minute I couldn't move, and
she came within an ace of completely hypnotising me. Then I thought of the picture,
and the spell broke. She saw the breaking in my eyes, and must have noticed the
machete, too. I never saw anything give such a wild jungle beast look as she did then.
She sprang for me with claws out like a leopard's, but I was too quick. I swung the
machete, and it was all over.'

"Denis had to stop again, and I saw the perspiration running down his forehead through
the spattered blood. But in a moment he hoarsely resumed.

"'I said it was all over--but God! some of it had only just begun! I felt I had fought the
legions of Satan, and put my foot on the back of the thing I had annihilated. Then I saw
that blasphemous braid of coarse black hair begin to twist and squirm of itself.

"'I might have known it. It was all in the old tales. That damnable hair had a life of its
own, that couldn't be ended by killing the creature itself. I knew I'd have to burn it, so I
started to hack it off with the machete. God, but it was devilish work! Tough--like iron
wires--but I managed to do it. And it was loathsome the way the big braid writhed and
struggled in my grasp.

"'About the time I had the last strand cut or pulled off I heard that eldritch wailing from
behind the house. You know--it's still going off and on. I don't know what it is, but it
must be something springing from this hellish business. It half seems like something I
ought to know but can't quite place. It got my nerves the first time I heard it, and I
dropped the severed braid in my fright. Then, I got a worse fright--for in another second
the braid had turned on me and began to strike venomously with one of its ends which
had knotted itself up like a sort of grotesque head. I struck out with the machete, and it
turned away. Then, when I had my breath again, I saw that the monstrous thing was
crawling along the floor by itself like a great black snake. I couldn't do anything for a
while, but when it vanished through the door I managed to pull myself together and
stumble after it. I could follow the broad, bloody trail, and I saw it led upstairs. It
brought me here--and may heaven curse me if I didn't see it through the doorway,
striking at poor dazed Marsh like a maddened rattler as it had struck at me, finally
coiling around him as a python would. He had begun to come to, but that abominable
serpent got him before he was on his feet. I knew that all of the woman's hatred was
behind it, but I hadn't the power to pull it off. I tried, but it was too much for me. Even
the machete was no good--I couldn't swing it freely or it would have slashed Frank to
pieces. So I saw those monstrous coils tighten--saw poor Frank crushed to death before
my eyes--and all the time that awful faint howling came from somewhere beyond the
fields.

"'That's all. I pulled the velvet cloth over the picture and hope it'll never be lifted. The
thing must be burnt. I couldn't pry the coils off poor, dead Frank--they cling to him like
a leech, and seem to have lost their motion altogether. It's as if that snaky rope of hair
has a kind of perverse fondness for the man it killed--it's clinging to him--embracing
him. You'll have to burn poor Frank with it--but for God's sake don't forget to see it in
ashes. That and the picture. They must both go. The safety of the world demands that
they go.

"Denis might have whispered more, but a fresh burst of distant wailing cut us short. For
the first time we knew what it was, for a westerly veering wind brought articulate words
at last. We ought to have known long before, since sounds much like it had often come
from the same source. It was wrinkled Sophonisba, the ancient Zulu witch-woman who
had fawned on Marceline, keening from her cabin in a way which crowned the horrors
of this nightmare tragedy. We could both hear some of the things she howled, and knew
that secret and primordial bonds linked this savage sorceress with that other inheritor of
elder secrets who had just been extirpated. Some of the words she used betrayed her
closeness to daemonic and palaeogean traditions.

"'Iä! Iä! Shub-Niggurath! Ya-R'lyeh! N'gagi n'bulu bwana n'lolo! Ya, yo, poor Missy
Tanit, poor Missy Isis! Marse Clooloo, come up outen de water an' git yo chile--she
done daid! She done daid! De hair ain' got no missus no mo', Marse Clooloo. Ol' Sophy,
she know! Ol' Sophy, she done got de black stone outen Big Zimbabwe in ol' Affriky!
Ol' Sophy, she done dance in de moonshine roun' de crocodile-stone befo' de N'bangus
cotch her and sell her to de ship folks! No mo' Tanit! No mo' Isis! No mo' witch-woman
to keep de fire a-goin' in de big stone place! Ya, yo! N'gagi n'bulu bwana n'lolo! Iä!
Shub-Niggurath! She daid! Ol' Sophy know!'
"That wasn't the end of the wailing, but it was all I could pay attention to. The
expression on my boy's face shewed that it had reminded him of something frightful,
and the tightening of his hand on the machete boded no good. I knew he was desperate,
and sprang to disarm him before he could do anything more.

"But I was too late. An old man with a bad spine doesn't count for much physically.
There was a terrible struggle, but he had done for himself before many seconds were
over. I'm not sure yet but that he tried to kill me, too. His last panting words were
something about the need of wiping out everything that had been connected with
Marceline, either by blood or marriage."

"I wonder to this day that I didn't go stark mad in that instant--or in the moments and
hours afterward. In front of me was the slain body of my boy--the only human being I
had to cherish--and ten feet away, in front of that shrouded easel, was the body of his
best friend, with a nameless coil of horror wound around it. Below was the scalped
corpse of that she-monster, about whom I was half-ready to believe anything. I was too
dazed to analyse the probability of the hair story--and even if I had not been, that dismal
howling coming from Aunt Sophy's cabin would have been enough to quiet doubt for
the nonce.

"If I'd been wise, I'd have done just what poor Denis told me to--burned the picture and
the body-grasping hair at once and without curiosity--but I was too shaken to be wise. I
suppose I muttered foolish things over my boy--and then I remembered that the night
was wearing on and that the servants would be back in the morning. It was plain that a
matter like this could never be explained, and I knew that I must cover things up and
invent a story.

"That coil of hair around Marsh was a monstrous thing. As I poked at it with a sword
which I took from the wall I almost thought I felt it tighten its grip on the dead man. I
didn't dare touch it--and the longer I looked at it the more horrible things I noticed about
it. One thing gave me a start. I won't mention it--but it partly explained the need for
feeding the hair with queer oils as Marceline had always done.

"In the end I decided to bury all three bodies in the cellar--with quicklime, which I knew
we had in the storehouse. It was a night of hellish work. I dug three graves--my boy's a
long way from the other two, for I didn't want him to be near either the woman's body
or her hair. I was sorry I couldn't get the coil from around poor Marsh. It was terrible
work getting them all down to the cellar. I used blankets in carting the woman and the
poor devil with the coil around him. Then I had to get two barrels of lime from the
storehouse. God must have given me strength, for I not only moved them but filled all
three graves without a hitch.

"Some of the lime I made into whitewash. I had to take a stepladder and fix over the
parlour ceiling where the blood had oozed through. And I burned nearly everything in
Marceline's room, scrubbing the walls and floor and heavy furniture. I washed up the
attic studio, too, and the trail and footprints that led there. And all the time I could hear
old Sophy's wailing in the distance. The devil must have been in that creature to let her
voice go on like that. But she always was howling queer things. That's why the field
niggers didn't get scared or curious that night. I locked the studio door and took the key
to my room. Then I burned all my stained clothes in the fireplace. By dawn the whole
house looked quite normal so far as any casual eye could tell. I hadn't dared touch the
covered easel, but meant to attend to that later.

"Well, the servants came back the next day, and I told them all the young folks had gone
to St. Louis. None of the field hands seemed to have seen or heard anything, and old
Sophonisba's wailing had stopped at the instant of sunrise. She was like a sphinx after
that, and never let out a word of what had been on her brooding brain the day and night
before.

"Later on I pretended that Denis and Marsh and Marceline had gone back to Paris and
had a certain discreet agency mail me letters from there--letters I had fixed up in forged
handwriting. It took a good deal of deceit and reticence in several things to various
friends, and I knew people have secretly suspected me of holding something back. I had
the deaths of Marsh and Denis reported during the war, and later said Marceline had
entered a convent. Fortunately Marsh was an orphan whose eccentric ways had
alienated him from his people in Louisiana. Things might have been patched up a good
deal better for me if I had had the sense to burn the picture, sell the plantation, and give
up trying to manage things with a shaken and overstrained mind. You see what my folly
has brought me to. Failing crops--hands discharged one by one--place falling apart to
ruin--and myself a hermit and a target for dozens of queer countryside stories. Nobody
will come around here after dark anymore--or any other time if it can be helped. That's
why I knew you must be a stranger.

"And why do I stay here? I can't wholly tell you that. It's bound up too closely with
things at the very rim of sane reality. It wouldn't have been so, perhaps, if I hadn't
looked at the picture. I ought to have done as poor Denis told me. I honestly meant to
burn it when I went up to that locked studio a week after the horror, but I looked first--
and that changed everything.

"No--there's no use telling what I saw. You can, in a way, see for yourself presently;
though time and dampness have done their work. I don't think it can hurt you if you
want to take a look, but it was different with me. I knew too much of what it all meant.

"Denis had been right--it was the greatest triumph of human art since Rembrandt, even
though still unfinished. I grasped that at the start, and knew that poor Marsh had
justified his decadent philosophy. He was to painting what Baudelaire was to poetry--
and Marceline was the key that had unlocked his inmost stronghold of genius.

"The thing almost stunned me when I pulled aside the hangings--stunned me before I
half knew what the whole thing was. You know, it's only partly a portrait. Marsh had
been pretty literal when he hinted that he wasn't painting Marceline alone, but what he
saw through her and beyond her.

"Of course she was in it--was the key to it, in a sense--but her figure only formed one
point in a vast composition. She was nude except for that hideous web of hair spun
around her, and was half-seated, half-reclining on a sort of bench or divan, carved in
patterns unlike those of any known decorative tradition. There was a monstrously
shaped goblet in one hand, from which was spilling fluid whose colour I haven't been
able to place or classify to this day--I don't know where Marsh even got the pigments.
"The figure and the divan were in the left-hand foreground of the strangest sort of scene
I ever saw in my life. I think there was a faint suggestion of its all being a kind of
emanation from the woman's brain, yet there was also a directly opposite suggestion--as
if she were just an evil image or hallucination conjured up by the scene itself.

"I can't tell you know whether it's an exterior or an interior--whether those hellish
Cyclopean vaultings are seen from the outside or the inside, or whether they are indeed
carven stone and not merely a morbid fungous arborescence. The geometry of the whole
thing is crazy--one gets the acute and obtuse angles all mixed up.

"And God! The shapes of nightmare that float around in that perpetual daemon twilight!
The blasphemies that lurk and leer and hold a Witches' Sabbat with that woman as a
high-priestess! The black shaggy entities that are not quite goats--the crocodile-headed
beast with three legs and a dorsal row of tentacles--and the flat-nosed Egyptians dancing
in a pattern that Egypt's priests knew and called accursed!

"But the scene wasn't Egypt--it was behind Egypt; behind even Atlantis; behind fabled
Mu, and myth--whispered Lemuria. It was the ultimate fountainhead of all horror on
this earth, and the symbolism shewed only too clearly how integral a part of it
Marceline was. I think it must be the unmentionable R'lyeh, that was not built by any
creatures of this planet--the thing Marsh and Denis used to talk about in the shadows
with hushed voices. In the picture it appears that the whole scene is deep under water--
though everybody seems to be breathing freely.

"Well--I couldn't do anything but look and shudder, and finally I saw that Marceline
was watching me craftily out of those monstrous, dilated eyes on the canvas. It was no
mere superstition--Marsh had actually caught something of her horrible vitality in his
symphonies of line and color, so that she still brooded and hated, just as if most of her
weren't down in the cellar under quicklime. And it was worst of all when some of those
Hecate-born snaky strands of hair began to lift themselves up from the surface and
grope out into the room toward me.

"Then it was that I knew the last final horror, and realised I was a guardian and a
prisoner forever. she was the thing from which the first dim legends of Medusa and the
Gorgons had sprung, and something in my shaken will had been captured and turned to
stone at last. Never again would I be safe from those coiling snaky strands--the strands
in the picture, and those that lay brooding under the lime near the wine casks. All too
late I recalled the tales of the virtual indestructibility, even through centuries of burial,
of the hair of the dead.

"My life since has been nothing but horror and slavery. Always there had lurked the fear
of what broods down in the cellar. In less than a month the niggers began whispering
about the great black snake that crawled around near the wine casks after dark, and
about the curious way its trail would lead to another spot six feet away. Finally I had to
move everything to another part of the cellar, for not a darky could be induced to go
near the place where the snake was seen.

"Then the field hands began talking about the black snake that visited old Sophonisba's
cabin every night after midnight. One of them shewed me its trail--and not long
afterward I found out that Aunt Sophy herself had begun to pay strange visits to the
cellar of the big house, lingering and muttering for hours in the very spot where none of
the other blacks would go near. God, but I was glad when that old witch died! I honestly
believe she had been a priestess of some ancient and terrible tradition back in Africa.
She must have lived to be almost a hundred and fifty years old.

"Sometimes I think I hear something gliding around the house at night. There will be a
queer noise on the stairs, where the boards are loose, and the latch of my room will
rattle as if with an inward pressure. I always keep my door locked, of course. Then there
are certain mornings when I seem to catch a sickish musty odour in the corridors, and
notice a faint, ropy trail through the dust of the floors. I know I must guard the hair in
the picture, for if anything were to happen to it, there are entities in this house which
would take a sure and terrible revenge. I don't even dare to die--for life and death are all
one to those in the clutch of what came out of R'lyeh. Something would be on hand to
punish my neglect. Medusa's coil has got me, and it will always be the same. Never mix
up with secret and ultimate horror, young man, if you value your immortal soul."

As the old man finished his story I saw that the small lamp had long since burned dry,
and that the large one was nearly empty. It must, I knew, be near dawn, and my ears told
me that the storm was over. The tale had held me in a half-daze, and I almost feared to
glance at the door lest it reveal an inward pressure from some unnamable source. It
would be hard to say which had the greatest hold on me--stark horror, incredulity, or a
kind of morbid fantastic curiosity. I was wholly beyond speech and had to wait for my
strange host to break the spell.

"Do you want to see--the thing?"

His voice was low and hesitant, and I saw he was tremendously in earnest. Of my
various emotions, curiosity gained the upper hand; and I nodded silently. He rose,
lighting a candle on a nearby table and holding it high before him as he opened the
door.

"Come with me--upstairs."

I dreaded to brave those musty corridors again, but fascination downed all my qualms.
The boards creaked beneath our feet, and I trembled once when I thought I saw a faint,
rope-like line trace in the dust near the staircase.

The steps of the attic were noisy and rickety, with several of the treads missing. I was
just glad of the need of looking sharply to my footing, for it gave me an excuse not to
glance about. The attic corridor was pitch-black and heavily cobwebbed, and inch-deep
with dust except where a beaten trail led to a door on the left at the farther end. As I
noticed the rotting remains of a thick carpet I thought of the other feet which had
pressed it in bygone decades--of these, and of one thing which did not have feet.

The old man took me straight to the door at the end of the beaten path, and fumbled a
second with the rusty latch. I was acutely frightened now that I knew the picture was so
close, yet dared not retreat at this stage. In another moment my host was ushering me
into the deserted studio.
The candle light was very faint, yet served to shew most of the principal features. I
noticed the low, slanting roof, the huge enlarged dormer, the curios and trophies hung
on the wall--and most of all, the great shrouded easel in the centre of the floor. To that
easel de Russy now walked, drawing aside the dusty velvet hangings on the side turned
away from me, and motioning me silently to approach. It took a good deal of courage to
make me obey, especially when I saw how my guide's eyes dilated in the wavering
candle light as he looked at the unveiled canvas. But again curiosity conquered
everything, and I walked around to where de Russy stood. Then I saw the damnable
thing.

I did not faint--though no reader can possibly realise the effort it took to keep me from
doing so. I did cry out, but stopped short when I saw the frightened look on the old
man's face. as I had expected, the canvas was warped, mouldy, and scabrous from
dampness and neglect; but for all that I could trace the monstrous hints of evil cosmic
outsideness that lurked all through the nameless scene's morbid content and perverted
geometry.

It was as the old man had said--a vaulted, columned hell of mumbled Black Masses and
Witches' Sabbaths--and what perfect completion could have added to it was beyond my
power to guess. Decay had only increased the utter hideousness of its wicked
symbolism and diseased suggestion, for the parts most affected by time were just those
parts of the picture which in Nature--or in the extra-cosmic realm that mocked Nature--
would be apt to decay and disintegrate.

The utmost horror of all, of course, was Marceline--and as I saw the bloated,
discoloured flesh I formed the odd fancy that perhaps the figure on the canvas had some
obscure, occult linkage with the figure which lay in quicklime under the cellar floor.
Perhaps the lime had preserved the corpse instead of destroying it--but could it have
preserved those black, malign eyes that glared and mocked at me from their painted
hell?

And there was something else about the creature which I could not fail to notice--
something which de Russy had not been able to put into words, but which perhaps had
something to do with Denis' wish to kill all those of his blood who had dwelt under the
same roof with her. Whether Marsh knew, or whether the genius in him painted it
without his knowing, none could say. But Denis and his father could not have known till
they saw the picture.

Surpassing all in horror was the streaming black hair--which covered the rotting body,
but which was itself not even slightly decayed. All I had heard of it was amply verified.
It was nothing human, this ropy, sinuous, half-oily, half-crinkly flood of serpent
darkness. Vile, independent life proclaimed itself at every unnatural twist and
convolution, and the suggestion of numberless reptilian heads at the out-turned ends
was far too marked to be illusory or accidental.

The blasphemous thing held me like a magnet. I was helpless, and did not wonder at the
myth of the gorgon's glance which turned all beholders to stone. Then I thought I saw a
change come over the thing. The leering features perceptibly moved, so that the rotting
jaw fell, allowing the thick, beast-like lips to disclose a row of pointed yellow fangs.
The pupils of the fiendish eyes dilated, and the eyes themselves seemed to bulge
outward. And the hair--that accursed hair! It had begun to rustle and wave perceptibly,
the snake-heads all turning toward de Russy and vibrating as if to strike!

Reason deserted me altogether, and before I knew what I was doing I drew my
automatic and sent a shower of twelve steel-jacketed bullets through the shocking
canvas. The whole thing at once fell to pieces, even the frame toppling from the easel
and clattering to the dust-covered floor. But though this horror was shattered, another
had risen before me in the form of de Russy himself, whose maddened shrieks as he saw
the picture vanish were almost as terrible as the picture itself had been.

With a half-articulate scream of "God, now you've done it!" the frantic old man seized
me violently by the arm and commenced to drag me out of the room and down the
rickety stairs. He had dropped the candle in his panic; but dawn was near, and some
faint grey light was filtering in through the dust-covered windows. I tripped and
stumbled repeatedly, but never for a moment would my guide slacken his pace.

"Run!" he shrieked, "run for your life! You don't know what you've done! I never told
you the whole thing! There were things I had to do--the picture talked to me and told
me. I had to guard and keep it--now the worst will happen! She and that hair will come
up out of their graves, for God knows what purpose!

"Hurry, man! For God's sake let's get out of here while there's time. If you have a car
take me along to Cape Girardeau with you. It may well get me in the end, anywhere, but
I'll give it a run for its money. Out of here--quick!"

As we reached the ground floor I became aware of a slow, curious thumping from the
rear of the house, followed by a sound of a door shutting. De Russy had not heard the
thumping, but the other noise caught his ear and drew from him the most terrible shriek
that ever sounded in human throat.

"Oh, God--great God--that was the cellar door--she's coming--"

By this time I was desperately wrestling with the rusty latch and sagging hinges of the
great front door--almost as frantic as my host now that I heard the slow, thumping tread
approaching from the unknown rear rooms of the accursed mansion. The night's rain
had warped the oaken planks, and the heavy door stuck and resisted even more strongly
than it had when I forced an entrance the evening before.

Somewhere a plank creaked beneath the foot of whatever was walking, and the sound
seemed to snap the last cord of sanity in the poor old man. With a roar like that of a
maddened bull he released his grip on me and made a plunge to the right, through the
open door of a room which I judged had been a parlour. A second later, just as I got the
front door open and was making my own escape, I heard the tinkling clatter of broken
glass and knew he had leapt through a window. And as I bounded off the sagging porch
to commence my mad race down the long, weed-grown drive I thought I could catch the
thud of dead, dogged footsteps which did not follow me, but which kept leadenly on
through the door of the cobwebbed parlour.

I looked backward only twice as I plunged heedlessly through the burrs and briers of
that abandoned drive, past the dying lindens and grotesque scrub-oaks, in the grey pallor
of a cloudy November dawn. The first time was when an acrid smell overtook me, and I
thought of the candle de Russy had dropped in the attic studio. By then I was
comfortably near the road, on the high place from which the roof of the distant house
was clearly visible above its encircling trees; and just as I expected, thick clouds of
smoke were billowing out of the attic dormers and curling upward into the leaden
heavens. I thanked the powers of creation that an immemorial curse was about to be
purged by fire and blotted from the earth.

But in the next instant came that second backward look in which I glimpsed two other
things--things that cancelled most of the relief and gave me a supreme shock from
which I shall never recover. I have said that I was on a high part of the drive, from
which much of the plantation behind me was visible. This vista included not only the
house and its trees but some of the abandoned and partly flooded land beside the river,
and several bends of the weed-choked drive I had been so hastily traversing. In both of
these latter places I now beheld sights--or suspicions of sights--which I wish devoutly I
could deny.

It was a faint, distant scream which made me turn back again, and as I did so I caught a
trace of motion on the dull grey marshy plain behind the house. At that human figures
are very small, yet I thought the motion resolved itself into two of these--pursuer and
pursued. I even thought I saw the dark-clothed leading figure overtaken, seized, and
dragged violently in the direction of the now burning house.

But I could not watch the outcome, for at once a nearer sight obtruded itself--a
suggestion of motion among the underbrush at a point some distance back along the
deserted drive. Unmistakably, the weeds and bushes and briers were swaying as no
wind could sway them; swaying as if some large, swift serpent were wriggling
purposefully along on the ground in pursuit of me.

That was all I could stand. I scrambled along madly for the gate, heedless of torn
clothing and bleeding scratches, and jumped into the roadster parked under the great
evergreen tree. It was a bedraggled, rain-drenched sight; but the works were unharmed
and I had no trouble in starting the thing. I went on blindly in the direction the car was
headed for nothing was in my mind but to get away from that frightful region of
nightmares and cacodaemons--to get away as quickly and as far as gasoline could take
me.

About three or four miles along the road a farmer hailed me--a kindly, drawling fellow
of middle age and considerable native intelligence. I was glad to slow down and ask
directions, though I knew I must present a strange enough aspect. The man readily told
me the way to Cape Girardeau, and inquired where I had come from in such a state at
such an early hour. Thinking it best to say little, I merely mentioned that I had been
caught in the night's rain and had taken shelter at a nearby farmhouse, afterward losing
my way in the underbrush trying to find my car.

"At a farmhouse, eh? Wonder whose it could'a been. Ain't nothin' standin' this side o'
Jim Ferris' place acrost Barker's Crick, an' that's all o' twenty miles by the rud."
I gave a start, and wondered what fresh mystery this portended. Then I asked my
informant if he had overlooked the large ruined plantation house whose ancient gate
bordered the road not far back.

"Funny ye sh'd recolleck that, stranger! Must a ben here afore some time. But that house
ain't here now. Burnt down five or six years ago--and they did tell some queer stories
about it."

I shuddered.

"You mean Riverside--ol' man de Russy's place. Queer goin's on there fifteen or twenty
years ago. Ol' man's boy married a gal from abroad, and some folks thought she was a
mighty odd sort. Didn't like the looks of her, then she and the boy went off sudden, and
later on the ol' man said he was kilt in the war. But some o' the niggers hinted queer
things. Got around at last that the ol' fellow fell in love with the gal himself and kilt her
and the boy. That place was sure enough haunted by a black snake, mean that what it
may.

"Then five or six years ago the ol' man disappeared and the house burned down. Some
do say he was burnt up in it. It was a mornin' after a rainy night just like this, when lots
o' folks heard an awful yellin' across the fields in old de Russy's voice. When they
stopped and looked, they see the house goin' up in smoke quick as a wink--that place
was all like tinder anyhow, rain or no rain. Nobody never seen the ol' man again, but
onct in a while they tell of the ghost of that big black snake glidin' aroun'.

"What d'ye make of it, anyhow? You seem to hev knowed the place. Didn't ye ever hear
tell of the de Russys? What d'ye reckon was the trouble with that gal young Denis
married? She kinder made everybody shiver and feel hateful, though ye couldn't never
tell why."

I was trying to think, but that process was almost beyond me now. The house burned
down years ago? Then where, and under what conditions, had I passed the night? And
why did I know what I knew of these things? Even as I pondered I saw a hair on my
coat sleeve--the short, grey hair of an old man.

In the end I drove on without telling anything. But did I hint that gossip was wronging
the poor old planter who had suffered so much. I made it clear--as if from distant but
authentic reports wafted among friends--that if anyone was to blame for the trouble at
Riverside it was the woman, Marceline. She was not suited to Missouri ways, I said, and
it was too bad that Denis had ever married her.

More I did not intimate, for I felt that the de Russys, with their proudly cherished
honour and high, sensitive spirits, would not wish me to say more. They had borne
enough, God knows, without the countryside guessing what a daemon of the pit--what a
gorgon of the elder blasphemies--had come to flaunt their ancient and stainless name.

Nor was it right that the neighbours should know that other horror which my strange
host of the night could not bring himself to tell me--that horror which he must have
learned, as I learned it, from details in the lost masterpiece of poor Frank Marsh.
It would be too hideous if they knew that the one-time heiress of Riverside--the
accursed gorgon or lamia whose hateful crinkly coil of serpent-hair must even now be
brooding and twining vampirically around an artist's skeleton in a lime-packed grave
beneath a charred foundation--was faintly, subtly, yet to the eyes of genius
unmistakably the scion of Zimbabwe's most primal grovellers. No wonder she owned a
link with that old witch-woman--for, though in deceitfully slight proportion, Marceline
was a negress.

MEMORY
In the valley of Nis the accursed waning moon shines thinly, tearing a path for its light
with feeble horns through the lethal foliage of a great upas-tree. And within the depths
of the valley, where the light reaches not, move forms not meant to be beheld. Rank is
the herbage on each slope, where evil vines and creeping plants crawl amidst the stones
of ruined palaces, twining tightly about broken columns and strange monoliths, and
heaving up marble pavements laid by forgotten hands. And in trees that grow gigantic in
crumbling courtyards leap little apes, while in and out of deep treasure-vaults writhe
poison serpents and scaly things without a name. Vast are the stones which sleep
beneath coverlets of dank moss, and mighty were the walls from which they fell. For all
time did their builders erect them, and in sooth they yet serve nobly, for beneath them
the grey toad makes his habitation.

At the very bottom of the valley lies the river Than, whose waters are slimy and filled
with weeds. From hidden springs it rises, and to subterranean grottoes it flows, so that
the Daemon of the Valley knows not why its waters are red, nor whither they are bound.

The Genie that haunts the moonbeams spake to the Daemon of the Valley, saying, "I am
old, and forget much. Tell me the deeds and aspect and name of them who built these
things of Stone."And the Daemon replied, "I am Memory, and am wise in lore of the
past, but I too am old. These beings were like the waters of the river Than, not to be
understood. Their deeds I recall not, for they were but of the moment. Their aspect I
recall dimly, it was like to that of the little apes in the trees. Their name I recall clearly,
for it rhymed with that of the river. These beings of yesterday were called Man."

So the Genie flew back to the thin horned moon, and the Daemon looked intently at a
little ape in a tree that grew in a crumbling courtyard.

NYARLATHOTEP
Nyarlathotep...the crawling chaos...I am the last...I will tell the audient void....

I do not recall distinctly when it began, but it was months ago. The general tension was
horrible. To a season of political and social upheaval was added a strange and brooding
apprehension of hideous physical danger; a danger widespread and all-embracing, such
a danger as may be imagined only in the most terrible phantasms of the night. I recall
that the people went about with pale and worried faces, and whispered warnings and
prophecies which no one dared consciously repeat or acknowledge to himself that he
had heard. A sense of monstrous guilt was upon the land, and out of the abysses
between the stars swept chill currents that made men shiver in dark and lonely places.
There was a daemoniac alteration in the sequence of the seasons--the autumn heat
lingered fearsomely, and everyone felt that the world and perhaps the universe had
passed from the control of known gods or forces to that of gods or forces which were
unknown.

And it was then that Nyarlathotep came out of Egypt. Who he was, none could tell, but
he was of the old native blood and looked like a Pharaoh. The fellahin knelt when they
saw him, yet could not say why. He said he had risen up out of the blackness of twenty-
seven centuries, and that he had heard messages from places not on this planet. Into the
lands of civilisation came Nyarlathotep, swarthy, slender, and sinister, always buying
strange instruments of glass and metal and combining them into instruments yet
stranger. He spoke much of the sciences--of electricity and psychology--and gave
exhibitions of power which sent his spectators away speechless, yet which swelled his
fame to exceeding magnitude. Men advised one another to see Nyarlathotep, and
shuddered. And where Nyarlathotep went, rest vanished; for the small hours were rent
with the screams of nightmare. Never before had the screams of nightmare been such a
public problem; now the wise men almost wished they could forbid sleep in the small
hours, that the shrieks of cities might less horribly disturb the pale, pitying moon as it
glimmered on green waters gliding under bridges, and old steeples crumbling against a
sickly sky.

I remember when Nyarlathotep came to my city--the great, the old, the terrible city of
unnumbered crimes. My friend had told me of him, and of the impelling fascination and
allurement of his revelations, and I burned with eagerness to explore his uttermost
mysteries. My friend said they were horrible and impressive beyond my most fevered
imaginings; and what was thrown on a screen in the darkened room prophesied things
none but Nyarlathotep dared prophesy, and in the sputter of his sparks there was taken
from men that which had never been taken before yet which shewed only in the eyes.
And I heard it hinted abroad that those who knew Nyarlathotep looked on sights which
others saw not.

It was in the hot autumn that I went through the night with the restless crowds to see
Nyarlathotep; through the stifling night and up the endless stairs into the choking room.
And shadowed on a screen, I saw hooded forms amidst ruins, and yellow evil faces
peering from behind fallen monuments. And I saw the world battling against blackness;
against the waves of destruction from ultimate space; whirling, churning, struggling
around the dimming, cooling sun. Then the sparks played amazingly around the heads
of the spectators, and hair stood up on end whilst shadows more grotesque than I can
tell came out and squatted on the heads. And when I, who was colder and more
scientific than the rest, mumbled a trembling protest about "imposture" and "static
electricity," Nyarlathotep drove us all out, down the dizzy stairs into the damp, hot,
deserted midnight streets. I screamed aloud that I was not afraid; that I never could be
afraid; and others screamed with me for solace. We swore to one another that the city
was exactly the same, and still alive; and when the electric lights began to fade we
cursed the company over and over again, and laughed at the queer faces we made.

I believe we felt something coming down from the greenish moon, for when we began
to depend on its light we drifted into curious involuntary marching formations and
seemed to know our destinations though we dared not think of them. Once we looked at
the pavement and found the blocks loose and displaced by grass, with scarce a line of
rusted metal to shew where the tramways had run. And again we saw a tram-car, lone,
windowless, dilapidated, and almost on its side. When we gazed around the horizon, we
could not find the third tower by the river, and noticed that the silhouette of the second
tower was ragged at the top. Then we split up into narrow columns, each of which
seemed drawn in a different direction. One disappeared in a narrow alley to the left,
leaving only the echo of a shocking moan. Another filed down a weed-choked subway
entrance, howling with a laughter that was mad. My own column was sucked toward the
open country, and presently I felt a chill which was not of the hot autumn; for as we
stalked out on the dark moor, we beheld around us the hellish moon-glitter of evil
snows. Trackless, inexplicable snows, swept asunder in one direction only, where lay a
gulf all the blacker for its glittering walls. The column seemed very thin indeed as it
plodded dreamily into the gulf. I lingered behind, for the black rift in the green-litten
snow was frightful, and I thought I had heard the reverberations of a disquieting wail as
my companions vanished; but my power to linger was slight. As if beckoned by those
who had gone before, I half-floated between the titanic snowdrifts, quivering and afraid,
into the sightless vortex of the unimaginable.

Screamingly sentient, dumbly delirious, only the gods that were can tell. A sickened,
sensitive shadow writhing in hands that are not hands, and whirled blindly past ghastly
midnights of rotting creation, corpses of dead worlds with sores that were cities, charnel
winds that brush the pallid stars and make them flicker low. Beyond the worlds vague
ghosts of monstrous things; half-seen columns of unsanctifled temples that rest on
nameless rocks beneath space and reach up to dizzy vacua above the spheres of light
and darkness. And through this revolting graveyard of the universe the muffled,
maddening beating of drums, and thin, monotonous whine of blasphemous flutes from
inconceivable, unlighted chambers beyond Time; the detestable pounding and piping
whereunto dance slowly, awkwardly, and absurdly the gigantic, tenebrous ultimate
gods--the blind, voiceless, mindless gargoyles whose soul is Nyarlathotep.

PICKMAN'S MODEL
I know I'm more nervous than I was when you saw me last year, but you don't need to
hold a clinic over it. There's plenty of reason, God knows, and I fancy I'm lucky to be
sane at all. Why the third degree? You didn't use to be so inquisitive.

Well, if you must hear it, I don't know why you shouldn't. Maybe you ought to, anyhow,
for you kept writing me like a grieved parent when you heard I'd begun to cut the Art
Club and keep away from Pickman. Now that he's disappeared I go round to the club
once in a while, but my nerves aren't what they were.

No, I don't know what's become of Pickman, and I don't like to guess. You might have
surmised I had some inside information when I dropped him--and that's why I don't
want to think where he's gone. Let the police find what they can--it won't be much,
judging from the fact that they don't know yet of the old North End place he hired under
the name of Peters.

I'm not sure that I could find it again myself--not that I'd ever try, even in broad
daylight!
Yes, I do know, or am afraid I know, why he maintained it. I'm coming to that. And I
think you'll understand before I'm through why I don't tell the police. They would ask
me to guide them, but I couldn't go back there even if I knew the way. There was
something there--and now I can't use the subway or (and you may as well have your
laugh at this, too) go down into cellars any more.

I should think you'd have known I didn't drop Pickman for the same silly reasons that
fussy old women like Dr. Reid or Joe Minot or Rosworth did. Morbid art doesn't shock
me, and when a man has the genius Pickman had I feel it an honour to know him, no
matter what direction his work takes. Boston never had a greater painter than Richard
Upton Pickman. I said it at first and I say it still, and I never swerved an inch, either,
when he showed that 'Ghoul Feeding'. That, you remember, was when Minot cut him.

You know, it takes profound art and profound insight into Nature to turn out stuff like
Pickman's. Any magazine-cover hack can splash paint around wildly and call it a
nightmare or a Witches' Sabbath or a portrait of the devil, but only a great painter can
make such a thing really scare or ring true. That's because only a real artist knows the
actual anatomy of the terrible or the physiology of fear-the exact sort of lines and
proportions that connect up with latent instincts or hereditary memories of fright, and
the proper colour contrasts and lighting effects to stir the dormant sense of strangeness.
I don't have to tell you why a Fuseli really brings a shiver while a cheap ghost-story
frontispiece merely makes us laugh. There's something those fellows catch--beyond life-
-that they're able to make us catch for a second. Doré had it. Sime has it. Angarola of
Chicago has it. And Pickman had it as no man ever had it before or--I hope to Heaven--
ever will again.

Don't ask me what it is they see. You know, in ordinary art, there's all the difference in
the world between the vital, breathing things drawn from Nature or models and the
artificial truck that commercial small fry reel off in a bare studio by rule. Well, I should
say that the really weird artist has a kind of vision which makes models, or summons up
what amounts to actual scenes from the spectral world he lives in. Anyhow, he manages
to turn out results that differ from the pretender's mince-pie dreams in just about the
same way that the life painter's results differ from the concoctions of a correspondence--
school cartoonist. If I had ever seen what Pickman saw--but no! Here, let's have a drink
before we get any deeper. God, I wouldn't be alive if I'd ever seen what that man--if he
was a man--saw !

You recall that Pickman's forte was faces. I don't believe anybody since Goya could put
so much of sheer hell into a set of features or a twist of expression. And before Goya
you have to go back to the mediaeval chaps who did the gargoyles and chimaeras on
Notre Dame and Mont Saint-Michel. They believed all sorts of things--and maybe they
saw all sorts of things, too, for the Middle Ages had some curious phases I remember
your asking Pickman yourself once, the year before you went away, wherever in
thunder he got such ideas and visions. Wasn't that a nasty laugh he gave you? It was
partly because of that laugh that Reid dropped him. Reid, you know, had just taken up
comparative pathology, and was full of pompous 'inside stuff' about the biological or
evolutionary significance of this or that mental or physical symptom. He said Pickman
repelled him more and more every day, and almost frightened him towards the last--that
the fellow's features and expression were slowly developing in a way he didn't like; in a
way that wasn't human. He had a lot of talk about diet, and said Pickman must be
abnormal and eccentric to the last degree. I suppose you told Reid, if you and he had
any correspondence over it, that he'd let Pickman's paintings get on his nerves or harrow
up his imagination. I know I told him that myself--then.

But keep in mind that I didn't drop Pickman for anything like this. On the contrary, my
admiration for him kept growing; for that 'Ghoul Feeding' was a tremendous
achievement. As you know, the club wouldn't exhibit it, and the Museum of Fine Arts
wouldn't accept it as a gift; and I can add that nobody would buy it, so Pickman had it
right in his house till he went. Now his father has it in Salem--you know Pickman
comes of old Salem stock, and had a witch ancestor hanged in 1692.

I got into the habit of calling on Pickman quite often, especially after I began making
notes for a monograph on weird art. Probably it was his work which put the idea into
my head, and anyhow, I found him a mine of data and suggestions when I came to
develop it. He showed me all the paintings and drawings he had about; including some
pen-and--ink sketches that would, I verily believe, have got him kicked out of the club if
many of the members had seen them. Before long I was pretty nearly a devotee, and
would listen for hours like a schoolboy to art theories and philosophic speculations wild
enough to qualify him for the Danvers asylum. My hero-worship, coupled with the fact
that people generally were commencing to have less and less to do with him, made him
get very confidential with me; and one evening he hinted that if I were fairly close-
mouthed and none too squeamish, he might show me something rather unusual--
something a bit stronger than anything he had in the house.

'You know,' he said, 'there are things that won't do for Newbury Street--things that are
out of place here, and that can't be conceived here, anyhow. It's my business to catch the
overtones of the soul, and you won't find those in a parvenu set of artificial streets on
made land. Back Bay isn't Boston--it isn't anything yet, because it's had no time to pick
up memories and attract local spirits. If there are any ghosts here, they're the tame
ghosts of a salt marsh and a shallow cove; and I want human ghosts--the ghosts of
beings highly organized enough to have looked on hell and known the meaning of what
they saw.

'The place for an artist to live is the North End. If any aesthete were sincere, he'd put up
with the slums for the sake of the massed traditions. God, man! Don't you realize that
places like that weren't merely made, but actually grew? Generation after generation
lived and felt and died there, and in days when people weren't afraid to live and fed and
die. Don't you know there was a mill on Copp's Hill in 1632, and that half the present
streets were laid out by 1650? I can show you houses that have stood two centuries and
a half and more; houses that have witnessed what would make a modern house crumble
into powder. What do moderns know of life and the forces behind it? You call the
Salem witchcraft a delusion, but I'll wager my four-times--great-grandmother could
have told you things. They hanged her on Gallows Hill, with Cotton Mather looking
sanctimoniously on. Mather, damn him, was afraid somebody might succeed in kicking
free of this accursed cage of monotony--I wish someone had laid a spell on him or
sucked his blood in the night!

'I can show you a house he lived in, and I can show you another one he was afraid to
enter in spite of all his fine bold talk. He knew things he didn't dare put into that stupid
Magnalia or that puerile Wonders of the Invisible World. Look here, do you know the
whole North End once had a set of tunnels that kept certain people in touch with each
other's houses, and the burying ground, and the sea? Let them prosecute and persecute
above ground--things went on every day that they couldn't reach, and voices laughed at
night that they couldn't place!

'Why, man, out of ten surviving houses built before 1700 and not moved since I'll wager
that in eight I can show you something queer in the cellar. There's hardly a month that
you don't read of workmen finding bricked-up arches and wells leading nowhere in this
or that old place as it comes down--you could see one near Henchman Street from the
elevated last year. There were witches and what their spells summoned; pirates and
what they brought in from the sea; smugglers; privateers--and I tell you, people knew
how to live, and how to enlarge the bounds of life, in the old time! This wasn't the only
world a bold and wise man could know--faugh! And to think of today in contrast, with
such pale-pink brains that even a club of supposed artists gets shudders and convulsions
if a picture goes beyond the feelings of a Beacon Street tea-table!

'The only saving grace of the present is that it's too damned stupid to question the past
very closely. What do maps and records and guide--books really tell of the North End?
Bah! At a guess I'll guarantee to lead you to thirty or forty alleys and networks of alleys
north of Prince Street that aren't suspected by ten living beings outside of the foreigners
that swarm them. And what do those Dagoes know of their meaning? No, Thurber,
these ancient places are dreaming gorgeously and over-flowing with wonder and terror
and escapes from the commonplace, and yet there's not a living soul to understand or
profit by them. Or rather, there's only one living soul--for I haven't been digging around
in the past for nothing !

'See here, you're interested in this sort of thing. What if I told you that I've got another
studio up there, where I can catch the night--spirit of antique horror and paint things that
I couldn't even think of in Newbury Street? Naturally I don't tell those cursed old maids
at the club--with Reid, damn him, whispering even as it is that I'm a sort of monster
bound down the toboggan of reverse evolution. Yes, Thurber, I decided long ago that
one must paint terror as well as beauty from life, so I did some exploring in places
where I had reason to know terror lives.

'I've got a place that I don't believe three living Nordic men besides myself have ever
seen. It isn't so very far from the elevated as distance goes, but it's centuries away as the
soul goes. I took it because of the queer old brick well in the cellar--one of the sort I
told you about. The shack's almost tumbling down so that nobody else would live there,
and I'd hate to tell you how little I pay for it. The windows are boarded up, but I like
that all the better, since I don't want daylight for what I do. I paint in the cellar, where
the inspiration is thickest, but I've other rooms furnished on the ground floor. A Sicilian
owns it, and I've hired it under the name of Peters.

'Now, if you're game, I'll take you there tonight. I think you'd enjoy the pictures, for, as
I said, I've let myself go a bit there. It's no vast tour--I sometimes do it on foot, for I
don't want to attract attention with a taxi in such a place. We can take the shuttle at the
South Station for Battery Street, and after that the walk isn't much.'

Well, Eliot, there wasn't much for me to do after that harangue but to keep myself from
running instead of walking for the first vacant cab we could sight. We changed to the
elevated at the South Station, and at about twelve o'clock had climbed down the steps at
Battery Street and struck along the old waterfront past Constitution Wharf. I didn't keep
track of the cross streets, and can't tell you yet which it was we turned up, but I know it
wasn't Greenough Lane.

When we did turn, it was to climb through the deserted length of the oldest and dirtiest
alley I ever saw in my life, with crumbling-looking gables, broken small-paned
windows, and archaic chimneys that stood out half-disintegrated against the moonlit
sky. I don't believe there were three houses in sight that hadn't been standing in Cotton
Mather's time--certainly I glimpsed at least two with an overhang, and once I thought I
saw a peaked roof-line of the almost forgotten pre--gambrel type, though antiquarians
tell us there are none left in Boston.

From that alley, which had a dim light, we turned to the left into an equally silent and
still narrower alley with no light at all: and in a minute made what I think was an
obtuse-angled bend towards the right in the dark. Not long after this Pickman produced
a flashlight and revealed an antediluvian ten-panelled door that looked damnably worm-
-eaten. Unlocking it, he ushered me into a barren hallway with what was once splendid
dark-oak panelling--simple, of course, but thrillingly suggestive of the times of Andros
and Phipps and the Witchcraft. Then he took me through a door on the left, lighted an
oil lamp, and told me to make myself at home.

Now, Eliot, I'm what the man in the street would call fairly 'hard--boiled,' but I'll
confess that what I saw on the walls of that room gave me a bad turn. They were his
pictures, you know--the ones he couldn't paint or even show in Newbury Street--and he
was right when he said he had 'let himself go.' Here--have another drink--I need one
anyhow!

There's no use in my trying to tell you what they were like, because the awful, the
blasphemous horror, and the unbelievable loathsomeness and moral foetor came from
simple touches quite beyond the power of words to classify. There was none of the
exotic technique you see in Sidney Sime, none of the trans-Saturnian landscapes and
lunar fungi that Clark Ashton Smith uses to freeze the blood. The backgrounds were
mostly old churchyards, deep woods, cliffs by the sea, brick tunnels, ancient panelled
rooms, or simple vaults of masonry. Copp's Hill Burying Ground, which could not be
many blocks away from this very house, was a favourite scene.

The madness and monstrosity lay in the figures in the foreground-for Pickman's morbid
art was pre-eminently one of demoniac portraiture. These figures were seldom
completely human, but often approached humanity in varying degree. Most of the
bodies, while roughly bipedal, had a forward slumping, and a vaguely canine cast. The
texture of the majority was a kind of unpleasant rubberiness. Ugh! I can see them now!
Their occupations--well, don't ask me to be too precise. They were usually feeding--I
won't say on what. They were sometimes shown in groups in cemeteries or underground
passages, and often appeared to be in battle over their prey--or rather, their treasure-
trove. And what damnable expressiveness Pickman sometimes gave the sightless faces
of this charnel booty! Occasionally the things were shown leaping through open
windows at night, or squatting on the chests of sleepers, worrying at their throats. One
canvas showed a ring of them baying about a hanged witch on Gallows Hill, whose
dead face held a close kinship to theirs.
But don't get the idea that it was all this hideous business of theme and setting which
struck me faint. I'm not a three-year-old kid, and I'd seen much like this before. It was
the faces, Eliot, those accursed faces, that leered and slavered out of the canvas with the
very breath of life! By God, man, I verily believe they were alive! That nauseous wizard
had waked the fires of hell in pigment, and his brush had been a nightmare-spawning
wand. Give me that decanter, Eliot!

There was one thing called 'The Lesson'--Heaven pity me, that I ever saw it! Listen--can
you fancy a squatting circle of nameless dog-like things in a churchyard teaching a
small child how to feed like themselves? The price of a changeling, I suppose--you
know the old myth about how the weird people leave their spawn in cradles in exchange
for the human babes they steal. Pickman was showing what happens to those stolen
babes--how they grow up--and then I began to see a hideous relationship in the faces of
the human and non-human figures. He was, in all his gradations of morbidity between
the frankly non-human and the degradedly human, establishing a sardonic linkage and
evolution. The dog-things were developed from mortals!

And no sooner had I wondered what he made of their own young as left with mankind
in the form of changelings, than my eye caught a picture embodying that very thought.
It was that of an ancient Puritan interior--a heavily beamed room with lattice windows,
a settle, and clumsy seventeenth-century furniture, with the family sitting about while
the father read from the Scriptures. Every face but one showed nobility and reverence,
but that one reflected the mockery of the pit. It was that of a young man in years, and no
doubt belonged to a supposed son of that pious father, but in essence it was the kin of
the unclean things. It was their changeling--and in a spirit of supreme irony Pickman
had given the features a very perceptible resemblance to his own.

By this time Pickman had lighted a lamp in an adjoining room and was politely holding
open the door for me; asking me if I would care to see his 'modern studies.' I hadn't been
able to give him much of my opinions--I was too speechless with fright and loathing--
but I think he fully understood and felt highly complimented. And now I want to assure
you again, Eliot, that I'm no mollycoddle to scream at anything which shows a bit of
departure from the usual. I'm middle-aged and decently sophisticated, and I guess you
saw enough of me in France to know I'm not easily knocked out. Remember, too, that
I'd just about recovered my wind and gotten used to those frightful pictures which
turned colonial New England into a kind of annex of hell. Well, in spite of all this, that
next room forced a real scream out of me, and I had to clutch at the doorway to keep
from keeling over. The other chamber had shown a pack of ghouls and witches over-
running the world of our forefathers, but this one brought the horror right into our own
daily life!

God, how that man could paint! There was a study called 'Subway Accident,' in which a
flock of the vile things were clambering up from some unknown catacomb through a
crack in the floor of the Boston Street subway and attacking a crowd of people on the
platform. Another showed a dance on Copp's Hill among the tombs with the
background of today. Then there were any number of cellar views, with monsters
creeping in through holes and rifts in the masonry and grinning as they squatted behind
barrels or furnaces and waited for their first victim to descend the stairs.
One disgusting canvas seemed to depict a vast cross-section of Beacon Hill, with ant-
like armies of the mephitic monsters squeezing themselves through burrows that
honeycombed the ground. Dances in the modern cemeteries were freely pictured, and
another conception somehow shocked me more than all the rest--a scene in an unknown
vault, where scores of the beasts crowded about one who had a well-known Boston
guidebook and was evidently reading aloud. All were pointing to a certain passage, and
every face seemed so distorted with epileptic and reverberant laughter that I almost
thought I heard the fiendish echoes. The title of the picture was, 'Holmes, Lowell and
Longfellow Lie Buried in Mount Auburn.'

As I gradually steadied myself and got readjusted to this second room of deviltry and
morbidity, I began to analyse some of the points in my sickening loathing. In the first
place, I said to myself, these things repelled because of the utter inhumanity and callous
crudity they showed in Pickman. The fellow must be a relentless enemy of all mankind
to take such glee in the torture of brain and flesh and the degradation of the mortal
tenement. In the second place, they terrified because of their very greatness. Their art
was the art that convinced--when we saw the pictures we saw the demons themselves
and were afraid of them. And the queer part was, that Pickman got none of his power
from the use of selectiveness or bizarrerie. Nothing was blurred, distorted, or
conventionalized; outlines were sharp and lifelike, and details were almost painfully
defined. And the faces!

It was not any mere artist's interpretation that we saw; it was pandemonium itself,
crystal clear in stark objectivity. That was it, by Heaven! The man was not a fantaisiste
or romanticist at all--he did not even try to give us the churning, prismatic ephemera of
dreams, but coldly and sardonically reflected some stable, mechanistic, and well-
established horror--world which he saw fully, brilliantly, squarely, and unfalteringly.
God knows what that world can have been, or where he ever glimpsed the blasphemous
shapes that loped and trotted and crawled through it; but whatever the baffling source of
his images, one thing was plain. Pickman was in every sense--in conception and in
execution--a thorough, painstaking, and almost scientific realist.

My host was now leading the way down the cellar to his actual studio, and I braced
myself for some hellish efforts among the unfinished canvases. As we reached the
bottom of the damp stairs he fumed his flash-light to a corner of the large open space at
hand, revealing the circular brick curb of what was evidently a great well in the earthen
floor. We walked nearer, and I saw that it must be five feet across, with walls a good
foot thick and some six inches above the ground level--solid work of the seventeenth
century, or I was much mistaken. That, Pickman said, was the kind of thing he had been
talking about--an aperture of the network of tunnels that used to undermine the hill. I
noticed idly that it did not seem to be bricked up, and that a heavy disc of wood formed
the apparent cover. Thinking of the things this well must have been connected with if
Pickman's wild hints had not been mere rhetoric, I shivered slightly; then turned to
follow him up a step and through a narrow door into a room of fair size, provided with a
wooden floor and furnished as a studio. An acetylene gas outfit gave the light necessary
for work.

The unfinished pictures on easels or propped against the walls were as ghastly as the
finished ones upstairs, and showed the painstaking methods of the artist. Scenes were
blocked out with extreme care, and pencilled guide lines told of the minute exactitude
which Pickman used in getting the right perspective and proportions. The man was
great--I say it even now, knowing as much as I do. A large camera on a table excited my
notice, and Pickman told me that he used it in taking scenes for backgrounds, so that he
might paint them from photographs in the studio instead of carting his oufit around the
town for this or that view. He thought a photograph quite as good as an actual scene or
model for sustained work, and declared he employed them regularly.

There was something very disturbing about the nauseous sketches and half-finished
monstrosities that leered round from every side of the room, and when Pickman
suddenly unveiled a huge canvas on the side away from the light I could not for my life
keep back a loud scream--the second I had emitted that night. It echoed and echoed
through the dim vaultings of that ancient and nitrous cellar, and I had to choke back a
flood of reaction that threatened to burst out as hysterical laughter. Merciful Creator!
Eliot, but I don't know how much was real and how much was feverish fancy. It doesn't
seem to me that earth can hold a dream like that!

It was a colossal and nameless blasphemy with glaring red eyes, and it held in bony
claws a thing that had been a man, gnawing at the head as a child nibbles at a stick of
candy. Its position was a kind of crouch, and as one looked one felt that at any moment
it might drop its present prey and seek a juicier morsel. But damn it all, it wasn't even
the fiendish subject that made it such an immortal fountain--head of all panic--not that,
nor the dog face with its pointed ears, bloodshot eyes, flat nose, and drooling lips. It
wasn't the scaly claws nor the mould-caked body nor the half-hooved feet-none of these,
though any one of them might well have driven an excitable man to madness.

It was the technique, Eliot--the cursed, the impious, the unnatural technique! As I am a
living being, I never elsewhere saw the actual breath of life so fused into a canvas. The
monster was there--it glared and gnawed and gnawed and glared--and I knew that only a
suspension of Nature's laws could ever let a man paint a thing like that without a model-
-without some glimpse of the nether world which no mortal unsold to the Fiend has ever
had.

Pinned with a thumb-tack to a vacant part of the canvas was a piece of paper now badly
curled up--probably, I thought, a photograph from which Pickman meant to paint a
background as hideous as the nightmare it was to enhance. I reached out to uncurl and
look at it, when suddenly I saw Pickman start as if shot. He had been listening with
peculiar intensity ever since my shocked scream had waked unaccustomed echoes in the
dark cellar, and now he seemed struck with a fright which, though not comparable to
my own, had in it more of the physical than of the spiritual. He drew a revolver and
motioned me to silence, then stepped out into the main cellar and closed the door behind
him.

I think I was paralysed for an instant. Imitating Pickman's listening, I fancied I heard a
faint scurrying sound somewhere, and a series of squeals or beats in a direction I
couldn't determine. I thought of huge rats and shuddered. Then there came a subdued
sort of clatter which somehow set me all in gooseflesh--a furtive, groping kind of
clatter, though I can't attempt to convey what I mean in words. It was like heavy wood
falling on stone or brick--wood on brick--what did that make me think of?
It came again, and louder. There was a vibration as if the wood had fallen farther than it
had fallen before. After that followed a sharp grating noise, a shouted gibberish from
Pickman, and the deafening discharge of all six chambers of a revolver, fired
spectacularly as a lion tamer might fire in the air for effect. A muffled squeal or squawk,
and a thud. Then more wood and brick grating, a pause, and the opening of the door--at
which I'll confess I started violently. Pickman reappeared with his smoking weapon,
cursing the bloated rats that infested the ancient well.

'The deuce knows what they eat, Thurber,' he grinned, 'for those archaic tunnels touched
graveyard and witch-den and sea-coast. But whatever it is, they must have run short, for
they were devilish anxious to get out. Your yelling stirred them up, I fancy. Better be
cautious in these old places--our rodent friends are the one drawback, though I
sometimes think they're a positive asset by way of atmosphere and colour.'

Well, Eliot, that was the end of the night's adventure. Pickman had promised to show
me the place, and Heaven knows he had done it. He led me out of that tangle of alleys in
another direction, it seems, for when we sighted a lamp-post we were in a half-familiar
street with monotonous rows of mingled tenement blocks and old houses. Charter
Street, it turned out to be, but I was too flustered to notice just where we hit it. We were
too late for the elevated, and walked back downtown through Hanover Street. I
remember that wall. We switched from Tremont up Beacon, and Pickman left me at the
corner of Joy, where I turned off. I never spoke to him again.

Why did I drop him? Don't be impatient. Wait till I ring for coffee. We've had enough of
the other stuff, but I for one need something. No--it wasn't the paintings I saw in that
place; though I'll swear they were enough to get him ostracised in nine-tenths of the
homes and clubs of Boston, and I guess you won't wonder now why I have to steer clear
of subways and cellars. It was--something I found in my coat the next morning. You
know, the curled-up paper tacked to the frightful canvas in the cellar; the thing I thought
was a photograph of some scene he meant to use as a background for that monster. That
last scare had come while I was reaching to uncurl it, and it seems I had vacantly
crumpled it into my pocket. But here's the coffee--take it black, Eliot, if you're wise.

Yes, that paper was the reason I dropped Pickman; Richard Upton Pickman, the greatest
artist I have ever known--and the foulest being that ever leaped the bounds of life into
the pits of myth and madness. Eliot--old Reid was right. He wasn't strictly human.
Either he was born in strange shadow, or he'd found a way to unlock the forbidden gate.
It's all the same now, for he's gone--back into the fabulous darkness he loved to haunt.
Here, let's have the chandelier going.

Don't ask me to explain or even conjecture about what I burned. Don't ask me, either,
what lay behind that mole-like scrambling Pickman was so keen to pass off as rats.
There are secrets, you know, which might have come down from old Salem times, and
Cotton Mather tells even stranger things. You know how damned lifelike Pickman's
paintings were--how we all wondered where he got those faces.

Well--that paper wasn't a photograph of any background, after all. What it showed was
simply the monstrous being he was painting on that awful canvas. It was the model he
was using--and its background was merely the wall of the cellar studio in minute detail.
But by God, Eliot, it was a photograph from life!
 POETRY OF THE GODS
Attired simply, in a low-cut black evening dress, she appeared outwardly a typical
product of modern civilization; but tonight she felt the immeasurable gulf that separated
her soul from all her prosaic surroundings. Was it because of the strange home in which
she lived, that abode of coldness where relations were always strained and the inmates
scarcely more than strangers? Was it that, or was it some greater and less explicable
misplacement in time and space, whereby she had been born too late, too early, or too
far away from the haunts of her spirit ever to harmonize with the unbeautiful things of
contemporary reality? To dispel the mood which was engulfing her more and more
deeply each moment, she took a magazine from the table and searched for some healing
bit of poetry. Poetry had always relieved her troubled mind better than anything else,
though many things in the poetry she had seen detracted from the influence. Over parts
of even the sublimest verses hung a chill vapor of sterile ugliness and restraint, like dust
on a window-pane through which one views a magnificent sunset.

Listlessly turning the magazine's pages, as if searching for an elusive treasure, she
suddenly came upon something which dispelled her languor. An observer could have
read her thoughts and told that she had discovered some image or dream which brought
her nearer to her unattained goal than any image or dream she had seen before. It was
only a bit of vers libre, that pitiful compromise of the poet who overleaps prose yet falls
short of the divine melody of numbers; but it had in it all the unstudied music of a bard
who lives and feels, who gropes ecstatically for unveiled beauty. Devoid of regularity, it
yet had the harmony of winged, spontaneous words, a harmony missing from the
formal, convention-bound verse she had known. As she read on, her surroundings
gradually faded, and soon there lay about her only the mists of dream, the purple, star-
strewn mists beyond time, where only Gods and dreamers walk.

Amid the mists of dream the reader cried to the rhythmical stars, of her delight at the
coming of a new age of song, a rebirth of Pan. Half closing her eyes, she repeated words
whose melody lay hidden like crystals at the bottom of a stream before dawn, hidden
but to gleam effulgently at the birth of day.

Out of the mists gleamed godlike the torm ot a youth, in winged helmet and sandals,
caduceus-bearing, and of a beauty like to nothing on earth. Before the face of the
sleeper he thrice waved the rod which Apollo had given him in trade for the nine-corded
shell of melody, and upon her brow he placed a wreath of myrtle and roses. Then,
adoring, Hermes spoke:

"0 Nymph more fair than the golden-haired sisters of Cyene or the sky--inhabiting
Atlantides, beloved of Aphrodite and blessed of Pallas, thou hast indeed discovered the
secret of the Gods, which lieth in beauty and song. 0 Prophetess more lovely than the
Sybil of Cumae when Apollo first knew her, thou has truly spoken of the new age, for
even now on Maenalus, Pan sighs and stretches in his sleep, wishful to wake and behold
about him the little rose-crowned fauns and the antique Satyrs. In thy yearning hast thou
divined what no mortal, saving only a few whom the world rejects, remembereth: that
the Gods were never dead, but only sleeping the sleep and dreaming the dreams of Gods
in lotos-filled Hesperian gardens beyond the golden sunset. And now draweth nigh the
time of their awakening, when coldness and ugliness shall perish, and Zeus sit once
more on Olympus. Already the sea about Paphos trembleth into a foam which only
ancient skies have looked on before, and at night on Helicon the shepherds hear strange
murmurings and half-remembered notes. Woods and fields are tremulous at twilight
with the shimmering of white saltant forms, and immemorial Ocean yields up curious
sights beneath thin moons. The Gods are patient, and have slept long, but neither man
nor giant shall defy the Gods forever. In Tartarus the Titans writhe and beneath the fiery
Aetna groan the children of Uranus and Gaea. The day now dawns when man must
answer for centuries of denial, but in sleeping the Gods have grown kind and will not
hurl him to the gulf made for deniers of Gods. Instead will their vengeance smite the
darkness, fallacy and ugliness which have turned the mind of man; and under the sway
of bearded Saturnus shall mortals, once more sacrificing unto him, dwell in beauty and
delight. This night shalt thou know the favour of the Gods, and behold on Parnassus
those dreams which the Gods have through ages sent to earth to show that they are not
dead. For poets are the dreams of Gods, and in each and every age someone hath sung
unknowingly the message and the promise from the lotosgardens beyond the sunset."

Then in his arms Hermes bore the dreaming maiden through the skies. Gentle breezes
from the tower of Aiolas wafted them high above warm, scented seas, till suddenly they
came upon Zeus, holding court upon double-headed Parnassus, his golden throne
flanked by Apollo and the Muses on the right hand, and by ivy-wreathed Dionysus and
pleasure--flushed Bacchae on the left hand. So much of splendour Marcia had never
seen before, either awake or in dreams, but its radiance did her no injury, as would have
the radiance of lofty Olympus; for in this lesser court the Father of Gods had tempered
his glories for the sight of mortals. Before the laurel-draped mouth of the Corycian cave
sat in a row six noble forms with the aspect of mortals, but the countenances of Gods.
These the dreamer recognized from images of them which she had beheld, and she
knew that they were none else than the divine Maeonides, the avernian Dante, the more
than mortal Shakespeare, the chaos-exploring Milton, the cosmic Goethe and the
musalan Keats. These were those messengers whom the Gods had sent to tell men that
Pan had passed not away, but only slept; for it is in poetry that Gods speak to men. Then
spake the Thunderer:

"0 Daughter--for, being one of my endless line, thou art indeed my daughter--behold
upon ivory thrones of honour the august messengers Gods have sent down that in the
words and writing of men there may be still some traces of divine beauty. Other bards
have men justly crowned with enduring laurels, but these hath Apollo crowned, and
these have I set in places apart, as mortals who have spoken the language of the Gods.
Long have we dreamed in lotosgardens beyond the West, and spoken only through our
dreams; but the time approaches when our voices shall not be silent. It is a time of
awakening and change. Once more hath Phaeton ridden low, searing the fields and
drying the streams. In Gaul lone nymphs with disordered hair weep beside fountains
that are no more, and pine over rivers turned red with the blood of mortals. Ares and his
train have gone forth with the madness of Gods and have returned Deimos and Phobos
glutted with unnatural delight. Tellus moons with grief, and the faces of men are as the
faces of Erinyes, even as when Astraea fled to the skies, and the waves of our bidding
encompassed all the land saving this high peak alone. Amidst this chaos, prepared to
herald his coming yet to conceal his arrival, even now toileth our latest born messenger,
in whose dreams are all the images which other messengers have dreamed before him.
He it is that we have chosen to blend into one glorious whole all the beauty that the
world hath known before, and to write words wherein shall echo all the wisdom and the
loveliness of the past. He it is who shall proclaim our return and sing of the days to
come when Fauns and Dryads shall haunt their accustomed groves in beauty. Guided
was our choice by those who now sit before the Corycian grotto on thrones of ivory, and
in whose songs thou shalt hear notes of sublimity by which years hence thou shalt know
the greater messenger when he cometh. Attend their voices as one by one they sing to
thee here. Each note shall thou hear again in the poetry which is to come, the poetry
which shall bring peace and pleasure to thy soul, though search for it through bleak
years thou must. Attend with diligence, for each chord that vibrates away into hiding
shall appear again to thee after thou hast returned to earth, as Alpheus, sinking his
waters into the soul of Hellas, appears as the crystal arethusa in remote Sicilia."

Then arose Homeros, the ancient among bards, who took his lyre and chanted his hymn
to Aphrodite. No word of Greek did Marcia know, yet did the message not fall vainly
upon her ears, for in the cryptic rhythm was that which spake to all mortals and Gods,
and needed no interpreter.

So too the songs of Dante and Goethe, whose unknown words dave the ether with
melodies easy to ready and adore. But at last remembered accents resounded before the
listener. It was the Swan of Avon, once a God among men, and still a God among Gods:

Accents still more familiar arose as Milton, blind no more, declaimed immortal
harmony:

Last of all came the young voice of Keats, closest of all the messengers to the beauteous
faun-folk:

As the singer ceased, there came a sound in the wind blowing from far Egypt, where at
night Aurora mourns by the Nile for her slain Memnon. To the feet of the Thunderer
flew the rosy-fingered Goddess and, kneeling, cried, "Master, it is time I unlocked the
Gates of the East."And Phoebus, handing his lyre to Calliope, his bride among the
Muses, prepared to depart for the jewelled and column-raised Palace of the Sun, where
fretted the steeds already harnessed to the golden car of Day. So Zeus descended from
his cavern throne and placed his hand upon the head of Marcia, saying:

"Daughter, the dawn is nigh, and it is well that thou shouldst return before the
awakening of mortals to thy home. Weep not at the bleakness of thy life, for the shadow
of false faiths will soon be gone and the Gods shall once more walk among men. Search
thou unceasingly for our messenger, for in him wilt thou find peace and comfort. By his
word shall thy steps be guided to happiness, and in his dreams of beauty shall thy spirit
find that which it craveth."As Zeus ceased, the young Hermes gently seized the maiden
and bore her up toward the fading stars, up and westward over unseen seas.

And as she speaks there comes again a vision of Parnassus and the far--off sound of a
mighty voice saying, "By his word shall thy steps be guided to happiness, and in his
dreams of beauty shall thy spirit find all that it craveth."

THE ALCHEMIST
High up, crowning the grassy summit of a swelling mount whose sides are wooded near
the base with the gnarled trees of the primeval forest stands the old chateau of my
ancestors. For centuries its lofty battlements have frowned down upon the wild and
rugged countryside about, serving as a home and stronghold for the proud house whose
honored line is older even than the moss-grown castle walls. These ancient turrets,
stained by the storms of generations and crumbling under the slow yet mighty pressure
of time, formed in the ages of feudalism one of the most dreaded and formidable
fortresses in all France. From its machicolated parapets and mounted battlements
Barons, Counts, and even Kings had been defied, yet never had its spacious halls
resounded to the footsteps of the invader.

But since those glorious years, all is changed. A poverty but little above the level of dire
want, together with a pride of name that forbids its alleviation by the pursuits of
commercial life, have prevented the scions of our line from maintaining their estates in
pristine splendour; and the falling stones of the walls, the overgrown vegetation in the
parks, the dry and dusty moat, the ill-paved courtyards, and toppling towers without, as
well as the sagging floors, the worm-eaten wainscots, and the faded tapestries within, all
tell a gloomy tale of fallen grandeur. As the ages passed, first one, then another of the
four great turrets were left to ruin, until at last but a single tower housed the sadly
reduced descendants of the once mighty lords of the estate.

It was in one of the vast and gloomy chambers of this remaining tower that I, Antoine,
last of the unhappy and accursed Counts de C-, first saw the light of day, ninety long
years ago. Within these walls and amongst the dark and shadowy forests, the wild
ravines and grottos of the hillside below, were spent the first years of my troubled life.
My parents I never knew. My father had been killed at the age of thirty--two, a month
before I was born, by the fall of a stone somehow dislodged from one of the deserted
parapets of the castle. And my mother having died at my birth, my care and education
devolved solely upon one remaining servitor, an old and trusted man of considerable
intelligence, whose name I remember as Pierre. I was an only child and the lack of
companionship which this fact entailed upon me was augmented by the strange care
exercised by my aged guardian, in excluding me from the society of the peasant
children whose abodes were scattered here and there upon the plains that surround the
base of the hill. At that time, Pierre said that this restriction was imposed upon me
because my noble birth placed me above association with such plebeian company. Now
I know that its real object was to keep from my ears the idle tales of the dread curse
upon our line that were nightly told and magnified by the simple tenantry as they
conversed in hushed accents in the glow of their cottage hearths.

Thus isolated, and thrown upon my own resources, I spent the hours of my childhood in
poring over the ancient tomes that filled the shadow-haunted library of the chateau, and
in roaming without aim or purpose through the perpetual dust of the spectral wood that
clothes the side of the hill near its foot. It was perhaps an effect of such surroundings
that my mind early acquired a shade of melancholy. Those studies and pursuits which
partake of the dark and occult in nature most strongly claimed my attention.

Of my own race I was permitted to learn singularly little, yet what small knowledge of it
I was able to gain seemed to depress me much. Perhaps it was at first only the manifest
reluctance of my old preceptor to discuss with me my paternal ancestry that gave rise to
the terror which I ever felt at the mention of my great house, yet as I grew out of
childhood, I was able to piece together disconnected fragments of discourse, let slip
from the unwilling tongue which had begun to falter in approaching senility, that had a
sort of relation to a certain circumstance which I had always deemed strange, but which
now became dimly terrible. The circumstance to which I allude is the early age at which
all the Counts of my line had met their end. Whilst I had hitherto considered this but a
natural attribute of a family of short-lived men, I afterward pondered long upon these
premature deaths, and began to connect them with the wanderings of the old man, who
often spoke of a curse which for centuries had prevented the lives of the holders of my
title from much exceeding the span of thirty-two years. Upon my twenty-first birthday,
the aged Pierre gave to me a family document which he said had for many generations
been handed down from father to son, and continued by each possessor. Its contents
were of the most startling nature, and its perusal confirmed the gravest of my
apprehensions. At this time, my belief in the supernatural was firm and deep-seated,
else I should have dismissed with scorn the incredible narrative unfolded before my
eyes.

The paper carried me back to the days of the thirteenth century, when the old castle in
which I sat had been a feared and impregnable fortress. It told of a certain ancient man
who had once dwelled on our estates, a person of no small accomplishments, though
little above the rank of peasant, by name, Michel, usually designated by the surname of
Mauvais, the Evil, on account of his sinister reputation. He had studied beyond the
custom of his kind, seeking such things as the Philosopher's Stone or the Elixir of
Eternal Life, and was reputed wise in the terrible secrets of Black Magic and Alchemy.
Michel Mauvais had one son, named Charles, a youth as proficient as himself in the
hidden arts, who had therefore been called Le Sorcier, or the Wizard. This pair, shunned
by all honest folk, were suspected of the most hideous practices. Old Michel was said to
have burnt his wife alive as a sacrifice to the Devil, and the unaccountable
disappearance of many small peasant children was laid at the dreaded door of these two.
Yet through the dark natures of the father and son ran one redeeming ray of humanity;
the evil old man loved his offspring with fierce intensity, whilst the youth had for his
parent a more than filial affection.

One night the castle on the hill was thrown into the wildest confusion by the vanishment
of young Godfrey, son to Henri, the Count. A searching party, headed by the frantic
father, invaded the cottage of the sorcerers and there came upon old Michel Mauvais,
busy over a huge and violently boiling cauldron. Without certain cause, in the
ungoverned madness of fury and despair, the Count laid hands on the aged wizard, and
ere he released his murderous hold, his victim was no more. Meanwhile, joyful servants
were proclaiming the finding of young Godfrey in a distant and unused chamber of the
great edifice, telling too late that poor Michel had been killed in vain. As the Count and
his associates turned away from the lowly abode of the alchemist, the form of Charles
Le Sorcier appeared through the trees. The excited chatter of the menials standing about
told him what had occurred, yet he seemed at first unmoved at his father's fate. Then,
slowly advancing to meet the Count, he pronounced in dull yet terrible accents the curse
that ever afterward haunted the house of C-.

'May ne'er a noble of thy murd'rous line Survive to reach a greater age than thine!'

spake he, when, suddenly leaping backwards into the black woods, he drew from his
tunic a phial of colourless liquid which he threw into the face of his father's slayer as he
disappeared behind the inky curtain of the night. The Count died without utterance, and
was buried the next day, but little more than two and thirty years from the hour of his
birth. No trace of the assassin could be found, though relentless bands of peasants
scoured the neighboring woods and the meadowland around the hill.

Thus time and the want of a reminder dulled the memory of the curse in the minds of
the late Count's family, so that when Godfrey, innocent cause of the whole tragedy and
now bearing the title, was killed by an arrow whilst hunting at the age of thirty-two,
there were no thoughts save those of grief at his demise. But when, years afterward, the
next young Count, Robert by name, was found dead in a nearby field of no apparent
cause, the peasants told in whispers that their seigneur had but lately passed his thirty-
second birthday when surprised by early death. Louis, son to Robert, was found
drowned in the moat at the same fateful age, and thus down through the centuries ran
the ominous chronicle: Henris, Roberts, Antoines, and Armands snatched from happy
and virtuous lives when little below the age of their unfortunate ancestor at his murder.

That I had left at most but eleven years of further existence was made certain to me by
the words which I had read. My life, previously held at small value, now became dearer
to me each day, as I delved deeper and deeper into the mysteries of the hidden world of
black magic. Isolated as I was, modern science had produced no impression upon me,
and I laboured as in the Middle Ages, as wrapt as had been old Michel and young
Charles themselves in the acquisition of demonological and alchemical learning. Yet
read as I might, in no manner could I account for the strange curse upon my line. In
unusually rational moments I would even go so far as to seek a natural explanation,
attributing the early deaths of my ancestors to the sinister Charles Le Sorcier and his
heirs; yet, having found upon careful inquiry that there were no known descendants of
the alchemist, I would fall back to occult studies, and once more endeavor to find a
spell, that would release my house from its terrible burden. Upon one thing I was
absolutely resolved. I should never wed, for, since no other branch of my family was in
existence, I might thus end the curse with myself.

As I drew near the age of thirty, old Pierre was called to the land beyond. Alone I buried
him beneath the stones of the courtyard about which he had loved to wander in life.
Thus was I left to ponder on myself as the only human creature within the great fortress,
and in my utter solitude my mind began to cease its vain protest against the impending
doom, to become almost reconciled to the fate which so many of my ancestors had met.
Much of my time was now occupied in the exploration of the ruined and abandoned
halls and towers of the old chateau, which in youth fear had caused me to shun, and
some of which old Pierre had once told me had not been trodden by human foot for over
four centuries. Strange and awesome were many of the objects I encountered. Furniture,
covered by the dust of ages and crumbling with the rot of long dampness, met my eyes.
Cobwebs in a profusion never before seen by me were spun everywhere, and huge bats
flapped their bony and uncanny wings on all sides of the otherwise untenanted gloom.

Of my exact age, even down to days and hours, I kept a most careful record, for each
movement of the pendulum of the massive clock in the library told off so much of my
doomed existence. At length I approached that time which I had so long viewed with
apprehension. Since most of my ancestors had been seized some little while before they
reached the exact age of Count Henri at his end, I was every moment on the watch for
the coming of the unknown death. In what strange form the curse should overtake me, I
knew not; but I was resolved at least that it should not find me a cowardly or a passive
victim. With new vigour I applied myself to my examination of the old chateau and its
contents.

It was upon one of the longest of all my excursions of discovery in the deserted portion
of the castle, less than a week before that fatal hour which I felt must mark the utmost
limit of my stay on earth, beyond which I could have not even the slightest hope of
continuing to draw breath that I came upon the culminating event of my whole life. I
had spent the better part of the morning in climbing up and down half ruined staircases
in one of the most dilapidated of the ancient turrets. As the afternoon progressed, I
sought the lower levels, descending into what appeared to be either a mediaeval place of
confinement, or a more recently excavated storehouse for gunpowder. As I slowly
traversed the nitre-encrusted passageway at the foot of the last staircase, the paving
became very damp, and soon I saw by the light of my flickering torch that a blank,
water-stained wall impeded my journey. Turning to retrace my steps, my eye fell upon a
small trapdoor with a ring, which lay directly beneath my foot. Pausing, I succeeded
with difficulty in raising it, whereupon there was revealed a black aperture, exhaling
noxious fumes which caused my torch to sputter, and disclosing in the unsteady glare
the top of a flight of stone steps.

As soon as the torch which I lowered into the repellent depths burned freely and
steadily, I commenced my descent. The steps were many, and led to a narrow stone-
flagged passage which I knew must be far underground. This passage proved of great
length, and terminated in a massive oaken door, dripping with the moisture of the place,
and stoutly resisting all my attempts to open it. Ceasing after a time my efforts in this
direction, I had proceeded back some distance toward the steps when there suddenly fell
to my experience one of the most profound and maddening shocks capable of reception
by the human mind. Without warning, I heard the heavy door behind me creak slowly
open upon its rusted hinges. My immediate sensations were incapable of analysis. To be
confronted in a place as thoroughly deserted as I had deemed the old castle with
evidence of the presence of man or spirit produced in my brain a horror of the most
acute description. When at last I turned and faced the seat of the sound, my eyes must
have started from their orbits at the sight that they beheld.

There in the ancient Gothic doorway stood a human figure. It was that of a man clad in
a skull-cap and long mediaeval tunic of dark colour. His long hair and flowing beard
were of a terrible and intense black hue, and of incredible profusion. His forehead, high
beyond the usual dimensions; his cheeks, deep-sunken and heavily lined with wrinkles;
and his hands, long, claw-like, and gnarled, were of such a deadly marble-like whiteness
as I have never elsewhere seen in man. His figure, lean to the proportions of a skeleton,
was strangely bent and almost lost within the voluminous folds of his peculiar garment.
But strangest of all were his eyes, twin caves of abysmal blackness, profound in
expression of understanding, yet inhuman in degree of wickedness. These were now
fixed upon me, piercing my soul with their hatred, and rooting me to the spot whereon I
stood.

At last the figure spoke in a rumbling voice that chilled me through with its dull
hollowness and latent malevolence. The language in which the discourse was clothed
was that debased form of Latin in use amongst the more learned men of the Middle
Ages, and made familiar to me by my prolonged researches into the works of the old
alchemists and demonologists. The apparition spoke of the curse which had hovered
over my house, told me of my coming end, dwelt on the wrong perpetrated by my
ancestor against old Michel Mauvais, and gloated over the revenge of Charles Le
Sorcier. He told how young Charles has escaped into the night, returning in after years
to kill Godfrey the heir with an arrow just as he approached the age which had been his
father's at his assassination; how he had secretly returned to the estate and established
himself, unknown, in the even then deserted subterranean chamber whose doorway now
framed the hideous narrator, how he had seized Robert, son of Godfrey, in a field,
forced poison down his throat, and left him to die at the age of thirty-two, thus
maintaining the foul provisions of his vengeful curse. At this point I was left to imagine
the solution of the greatest mystery of all, how the curse had been fulfilled since that
time when Charles Le Sorcier must in the course of nature have died, for the man
digressed into an account of the deep alchemical studies of the two wizards, father and
son, speaking most particularly of the researches of Charles Le Sorcier concerning the
elixir which should grant to him who partook of it eternal life and youth.

His enthusiasm had seemed for the moment to remove from his terrible eyes the black
malevolence that had first so haunted me, but suddenly the fiendish glare returned and,
with a shocking sound like the hissing of a serpent, the stranger raised a glass phial with
the evident intent of ending my life as had Charles Le Sorcier, six hundred years before,
ended that of my ancestor. Prompted by some preserving instinct of self-defense, I
broke through the spell that had hitherto held me immovable, and flung my now dying
torch at the creature who menaced my existence. I heard the phial break harmlessly
against the stones of the passage as the tunic of the strange man caught fire and lit the
horrid scene with a ghastly radiance. The shriek of fright and impotent malice emitted
by the would-be assassin proved too much for my already shaken nerves, and I fell
prone upon the slimy floor in a total faint.

When at last my senses returned, all was frightfully dark, and my mind, remembering
what had occurred, shrank from the idea of beholding any more; yet curiosity over-
mastered all. Who, I asked myself, was this man of evil, and how came he within the
castle walls? Why should he seek to avenge the death of Michel Mauvais, and how had
the curse been carried on through all the long centuries since the time of Charles Le
Sorcier? The dread of years was lifted from my shoulder, for I knew that he whom I had
felled was the source of all my danger from the curse; and now that I was free, I burned
with the desire to learn more of the sinister thing which had haunted my line for
centuries, and made of my own youth one long-continued nightmare. Determined upon
further exploration, I felt in my pockets for flint and steel, and lit the unused torch
which I had with me.

First of all, new light revealed the distorted and blackened form of the mysterious
stranger. The hideous eyes were now closed. Disliking the sight, I turned away and
entered the chamber beyond the Gothic door. Here I found what seemed much like an
alchemist's laboratory. In one corner was an immense pile of shining yellow metal that
sparkled gorgeously in the light of the torch. It may have been gold, but I did not pause
to examine it, for I was strangely affected by that which I had undergone. At the farther
end of the apartment was an opening leading out into one of the many wild ravines of
the dark hillside forest. Filled with wonder, yet now realizing how the man had obtained
access to the chateau, I proceeded to return. I had intended to pass by the remains of the
stranger with averted face but, as I approached the body, I seemed to hear emanating
from it a faint sound, as though life were not yet wholly extinct. Aghast, I turned to
examine the charred and shrivelled figure on the floor.

Then all at once the horrible eyes, blacker even than the seared face in which they were
set, opened wide with an expression which I was unable to interpret. The cracked lips
tried to frame words which I could not well understand. Once I caught the name of
Charles Le Sorcier, and again I fancied that the words 'years' and 'curse' issued from the
twisted mouth. Still I was at a loss to gather the purport of his disconnected speech. At
my evident ignorance of his meaning, the pitchy eyes once more flashed malevolently at
me, until, helpless as I saw my opponent to be, I trembled as I watched him.

Suddenly the wretch, animated with his last burst of strength, raised his piteous head
from the damp and sunken pavement. Then, as I remained, paralyzed with fear, he
found his voice and in his dying breath screamed forth those words which have ever
afterward haunted my days and nights. 'Fool!' he shrieked, 'Can you not guess my
secret? Have you no brain whereby you may recognize the will which has through six
long centuries fulfilled the dreadful curse upon the house? Have I not told you of the
great elixir of eternal life? Know you not how the secret of Alchemy was solved? I tell
you, it is I! I! I! that have lived for six hundred years to maintain my revenge, for I am
Charles Le Sorcier!'

THE BEAST IN THE CAVE

The horrible conclusion which had been gradually intruding itself upon my confused
and reluctant mind was now an awful certainty. I was lost, completely, hopelessly lost
in the vast and labyrinthine recess of the Mammoth Cave. Turn as I might, in no
direction could my straining vision seize on any object capable of serving as a guidepost
to set me on the outward path. That nevermore should I behold the blessed light of day,
or scan the pleasant hills and dales of the beautiful world outside, my reason could no
longer entertain the slightest unbelief. Hope had departed. Yet, indoctrinated as I was by
a life of philosophical study, I derived no small measure of satisfaction from my
unimpassioned demeanour; for although I had frequently read of the wild frenzies into
which were thrown the victims of similar situations, I experienced none of these, but
stood quiet as soon as I clearly realised the loss of my bearings.

Nor did the thought that I had probably wandered beyond the utmost limits of an
ordinary search cause me to abandon my composure even for a moment. If I must die, I
reflected, then was this terrible yet majestic cavern as welcome a sepulchre as that
which any churchyard might afford, a conception which carried with it more of
tranquillity than of despair.

Starving would prove my ultimate fate; of this I was certain. Some, I knew, had gone
mad under circumstances such as these, but I felt that this end would not be mine. My
disaster was the result of no fault save my own, since unknown to the guide I had
separated myself from the regular party of sightseers; and, wandering for over an hour
in forbidden avenues of the cave, had found myself unable to retrace the devious
windings which I had pursued since forsaking my companions.

Already my torch had begun to expire; soon I would be enveloped by the total and
almost palpable blackness of the bowels of the earth. As I stood in the waning, unsteady
light, I idly wondered over the exact circumstances of my coming end. I remembered
the accounts which I had heard of the colony of consumptives, who, taking their
residence in this gigantic grotto to find health from the apparently salubrious air of the
underground world, with its steady, uniform temperature, pure air, and peaceful quiet,
had found, instead, death in strange and ghastly form. I had seen the sad remains of their
ill-made cottages as I passed them by with the party, and had wondered what unnatural
influence a long sojourn in this immense and silent cavern would exert upon one as
healthy and vigorous as I. Now, I grimly told myself, my opportunity for settling this
point had arrived, provided that want of food should not bring me too speedy a
departure from this life.

As the last fitful rays of my torch faded into obscurity, I resolved to leave no stone
unturned, no possible means of escape neglected; so, summoning all the powers
possessed by my lungs, I set up a series of loud shoutings, in the vain hope of attracting
the attention of the guide by my clamour. Yet, as I called, I believed in my heart that my
cries were to no purpose, and that my voice, magnified and reflected by the numberless
ramparts of the black maze about me, fell upon no ears save my own.

All at once, however, my attention was fixed with a start as I fancied that I heard the
sound of soft approaching steps on the rocky floor of the cavern.

Was my deliverance about to be accomplished so soon? Had, then, all my horrible

apprehensions been for naught, and was the guide, having marked my unwarranted
absence from the party, following my course and seeking me out in this limestone
labyrinth? Whilst these joyful queries arose in my brain, I was on the point of renewing
my cries, in order that my discovery might come the sooner, when in an instant my
delight was turned to horror as I listened; for my ever acute ear, now sharpened in even
greater degree by the complete silence of the cave, bore to my benumbed understanding
the unexpected and dreadful knowledge that these footfalls were not like those of any
mortal man. In the unearthly stillness of this subterranean region, the tread of the booted
guide would have sounded like a series of sharp and incisive blows. These impacts were
soft, and stealthy, as of the paws of some feline. Besides, when I listened carefully, I
seemed to trace the falls of four instead of two feet.

I was now convinced that I had by my own cries aroused and attracted some wild beast,
perhaps a mountain lion which had accidentally strayed within the cave. Perhaps, I
considered, the Almighty had chosen for me a swifter and more merciful death than that
of hunger; yet the instinct of self-preservation, never wholly dormant, was stirred in my
breast, and though escape from the on-coming peril might but spare me for a sterner and
more lingering end, I determined nevertheless to part with my life at as high a price as I
could command. Strange as it may seem, my mind conceived of no intent on the part of
the visitor save that of hostility. Accordingly, I became very quiet, in the hope that the
unknown beast would, in the absence of a guiding sound, lose its direction as had I, and
thus pass me by. But this hope was not destined for realisation, for the strange footfalls
steadily advanced, the animal evidently having obtained my scent, which in an
atmosphere so absolutely free from all distracting influences as is that of the cave, could
doubtless be followed at great distance.

Seeing therefore that I must be armed for defense against an uncanny and unseen attack
in the dark, I groped about me the largest of the fragments of rock which were strewn
upon all parts of the floor of the cavern in the vicinity, and grasping one in each hand
for immediate use, awaited with resignation the inevitable result. Meanwhile the
hideous pattering of the paws drew near. Certainly, the conduct of the creature was
exceedingly strange. Most of the time, the tread seemed to be that of a quadruped,
walking with a singular lack of unison betwixt hind and fore feet, yet at brief and
infrequent intervals I fancied that but two feet were engaged in the process of
locomotion. I wondered what species of animal was to confront me; it must, I thought,
be some unfortunate beast who had paid for its curiosity to investigate one of the
entrances of the fearful grotto with a life--long confinement in its interminable recesses.
It doubtless obtained as food the eyeless fish, bats and rats of the cave, as well as some
of the ordinary fish that are wafted in at every freshet of Green River, which
communicates in some occult manner with the waters of the cave. I occupied my
terrible vigil with grotesque conjectures of what alteration cave life might have wrought
in the physical structure of the beast, remembering the awful appearances ascribed by
local tradition to the consumptives who had died after long residence in the cave. Then I
remembered with a start that, even should I succeed in felling my antagonist, I should
never behold its form, as my torch had long since been extinct, and I was entirely
unprovided with matches. The tension on my brain now became frightful. My
disordered fancy conjured up hideous and fearsome shapes from the sinister darkness
that surrounded me, and that actually seemed to press upon my body. Nearer, nearer, the
dreadful footfalls approached. It seemed that I must give vent to a piercing scream, yet
had I been sufficiently irresolute to attempt such a thing, my voice could scarce have
responded. I was petrified, rooted to the spot. I doubted if my right arm would allow me
to hurl its missile at the oncoming thing when the crucial moment should arrive. Now
the steady pat, pat, of the steps was close at hand; now very close. I could hear the
laboured breathing of the animal, and terror-struck as I was, I realised that it must have
come from a considerable distance, and was correspondingly fatigued. Suddenly the
spell broke. My right hand, guided by my ever trustworthy sense of hearing, threw with
full force the sharp-angled bit of limestone which it contained, toward that point in the
darkness from which emanated the breathing and pattering, and, wonderful to relate, it
nearly reached its goal, for I heard the thing jump, landing at a distance away, where it
seemed to pause.

Having readjusted my aim, I discharged my second missile, this time most effectively,
for with a flood of joy I listened as the creature fell in what sounded like a complete
collapse and evidently remained prone and unmoving. Almost overpowered by the great
relief which rushed over me, I reeled back against the wall. The breathing continued, in
heavy, gasping inhalations and expirations, whence I realised that I had no more than
wounded the creature. And now all desire to examine the thing ceased. At last
something allied to groundless, superstitious fear had entered my brain, and I did not
approach the body, nor did I continue to cast stones at it in order to complete the
extinction of its life. Instead, I ran at full speed in what was, as nearly as I could
estimate in my frenzied condition, the direction from which I had come. Suddenly I
heard a sound or rather, a regular succession of sounds. In another instant they had
resolved themselves into a series of sharp, metallic clicks. This time there was no doubt.
It was the guide. And then I shouted, yelled, screamed, even shrieked with joy as I
beheld in the vaulted arches above the faint and glimmering effulgence which I knew to
be the reflected light of an approaching torch. I ran to meet the flare, and before I could
completely understand what had occurred, was lying upon the ground at the feet of the
guide, embracing his boots and gibbering, despite my boasted reserve, in a most
meaningless and idiotic manner, pouring out my terrible story, and at the same time
overwhelming my auditor with protestations of gratitude. At length, I awoke to
something like my normal consciousness. The guide had noted my absence upon the
arrival of the party at the entrance of the cave, and had, from his own intuitive sense of
direction, proceeded to make a thorough canvass of by-passages just ahead of where he
had last spoken to me, locating my whereabouts after a quest of about four hours.

By the time he had related this to me, I, emboldened by his torch and his company,
began to reflect upon the strange beast which I had wounded but a short distance back in
the darkness, and suggested that we ascertain, by the flashlight's aid, what manner of
creature was my victim. Accordingly I retraced my steps, this time with a courage born
of companionship, to the scene of my terrible experience. Soon we descried a white
object upon the floor, an object whiter even than the gleaming limestone itself.
Cautiously advancing, we gave vent to a simultaneous ejaculation of wonderment, for
of all the unnatural monsters either of us had in our lifetimes beheld, this was in
surpassing degree the strangest. It appeared to be an anthropoid ape of large
proportions, escaped, perhaps, from some itinerant menagerie. Its hair was snow-white,
a thing due no doubt to the bleaching action of a long existence within the inky confines
of the cave, but it was also surprisingly thin, being indeed largely absent save on the
head, where it was of such length and abundance that it fell over the shoulders in
considerable profusion. The face was turned away from us, as the creature lay almost
directly upon it. The inclination of the limbs was very singular, explaining, however, the
alternation in their use which I had before noted, whereby the beast used sometimes all
four, and on other occasions but two for its progress. From the tips of the fingers or
toes, long rat-like claws extended. The hands or feet were not prehensile, a fact that I
ascribed to that long residence in the cave which, as I before mentioned, seemed evident
from the all-pervading and almost unearthly whiteness so characteristic of the whole
anatomy. No tail seemed to be present.

The respiration had now grown very feeble, and the guide had drawn his pistol with the
evident intent of despatching the creature, when a sudden sound emitted by the latter
caused the weapon to fall unused. The sound was of a nature difficult to describe. It was
not like the normal note of any known species of simian, and I wonder if this unnatural
quality were not the result of a long continued and complete silence, broken by the
sensations produced by the advent of the light, a thing which the beast could not have
seen since its first entrance into the cave. The sound, which I might feebly attempt to
classify as a kind of deep-tone chattering, was faintly continued.

All at once a fleeting spasm of energy seemed to pass through the frame of the beast.
The paws went through a convulsive motion, and the limbs contracted. With a jerk, the
white body rolled over so that its face was turned in our direction. For a moment I was
so struck with horror at the eyes thus revealed that I noted nothing else. They were
black, those eyes, deep jetty black, in hideous contrast to the snow--white hair and flesh.
Like those of other cave denizens, they were deeply sunken in their orbits, and were
entirely destitute of iris. As I looked more closely, I saw that they were set in a face less
prognathous than that of the average ape, and infinitely less hairy. The nose was quite
distinct. As we gazed upon the uncanny sight presented to our vision, the thick lips
opened, and several sounds issued from them, after which the thing relaxed in death.
The guide clutched my coat sleeve and trembled so violently that the light shook
fitfully, casting weird moving shadows on the walls.

I made no motion, but stood rigidly still, my horrified eyes fixed upon the floor ahead.

The fear left, and wonder, awe, compassion, and reverence succeeded in its place, for
the sounds uttered by the stricken figure that lay stretched out on the limestone had told
us the awesome truth. The creature I had killed, the strange beast of the unfathomed
cave, was, or had at one time been a MAN!!!

THE BOOK
My memories are very confused. There is even much doubt as to where they begin; for
at times I feel appalling vistas of years stretching behind me, while at other times it
seems as if the present moment were an isolated point in a grey, formless infinity. I am
not even certain how I am communicating this message. While I know I am speaking, I
have a vague impression that some strange and perhaps terrible mediation will be
needed to bear what I say to the points where I wish to be heard. My identity, too, is
bewilderingly cloudy. I seem to have suffered a great shock--perhaps from some utterly
monstrous outgrowth of my cycles of unique, incredible experience.

These cycles of experience, of course, all stem from that worm-riddled book. I
remember when I found it--in a dimly lighted place near the black, oily river where the
mists always swirl. That place was very old, and the ceiling-high shelves full of rotting
volumes reached back endlessly through windowless inner rooms and alcoves. There
were, besides, great formless heaps of books on the floor and in crude bins; and it was
in one of these heaps that I found the thing. I never learned its title, for the early pages
were missing; but it fell open toward the end and gave me a glimpse of something
which sent my senses reeling.

There was a formula--a sort of list of things to say and do--which I recognized as
something black and forbidden; something which I had read of before in furtive
paragraphs of mixed abhorrence and fascination penned by those strange ancient delvers
into the universe's guarded secrets whose decaying texts I loved to absorb. It was a key-
-a guide--to certain gateways and transitions of which mystics have dreamed and
whispered since the race was young, and which lead to freedoms and discoveries
beyond the three dimensions and realms of life and matter that we know. Not for
centuries had any man recalled its vital substance or known where to find it, but this
book was very old indeed. No printing-press, but the hand of some half--crazed monk,
had traced these ominous Latin phrases in uncials of awesome antiquity.

I remember how the old man leered and tittered, and made a curious sign with his hand
when I bore it away. He had refused to take pay for it, and only long afterwards did I
guess why. As I hurried home through those narrow, winding, mist-cloaked waterfront
streets I had a frightful impression of being stealthily followed by softly padding feet.
The centuried, tottering houses on both sides seemed alive with a fresh and morbid
malignity--as if some hitherto closed channel of evil understanding had abruptly been
opened. I felt that those walls and over-hanging gables of mildewed brick and fungoid
plaster and timber--with eyelike, diamond-paned windows that leered--could hardly
desist from advancing and crushing me yet I had read only the least fragment of that
blasphemous rune before closing the book and bringing it away.

I remember how I read the book at last--white-faced, and locked in the attic room that I
had long devoted to strange searchings. The great house was very still, for I had not
gone up till after midnight. I think I had a family then--though the details are very
uncertain--and I know there were many servants. Just what the year was I cannot say;
for since then I have known many ages and dimensions, and have had all my notions of
time dissolved and refashioned. It was by the light of candles that I read--I recall the
relentless dripping of the wax--and there were chimes that came every now and then
from distant belfries. I seemed to keep track of those chimes with a peculiar intentness,
as if I feared to hear some very remote, intruding note among them.

Then came the first scratching and fumbling at the dormer window that looked out high
above the other roofs of the city. It came as I droned aloud the ninth verse of that primal
lay, and I knew amidst my shudders what it meant. For he who passes the gateways
always wins a shadow, and never again can he be alone. I had evoked--and the book
was indeed all I had suspected. That night I passed the gateway to a vortex of twisted
time and vision, and when morning found me in the attic room I saw in the walls and
shelves and fittings that which I had never seen before.

Nor could I ever after see the world as I had known it. Mixed with the present scene was
always a little of the past and a little of the future, and every once-familiar object
loomed alien in the new perspective brought by my widened sight. From then on I
walked in a fantastic dream of unknown and half-known shapes; and with each new
gateway crossed, the less plainly could I recognise the things of the narrow sphere to
which I had so long been bound. What I saw about me, none else saw; and I grew
doubly silent and aloof lest I be thought mad. Dogs had a fear of me, for they felt the
outside shadow which never left my side. But still I read more--in hidden, forgotten
books and scrolls to which my new vision led me--and pushed through fresh gateways
of space and being and life-patterns toward the core of the unknown cosmos.

I remember the night I made the five concentric circles of fire on the floor, and stood in
the innermost one chanting that monstrous litany the messenger from Tartary had
brought. The walls melted away, and I was swept by a black wind through gulfs of
fathomless grey with the needle-like pinnacles of unknown mountains miles below me.
After a while there was utter blackness, and then the light of myriad stars forming
strange, alien constellations. Finally I saw a green-litten plain far below me, and
discerned on it the twisted towers of a city built in no fashion I had ever known or read
or dreamed of. As I floated closer to that city I saw a great square building of stone in an
open space, and felt a hideous fear clutching at me. I screamed and struggled, and after
a blankness was again in my attic room sprawled flat over the five phosphorescent
circles on the floor. In that night's wandering there was no more of strangeness than in
many a former night's wandering; but there was more of terror because I knew I was
closer to those outside gulfs and worlds than I had ever been before. Thereafter I was
more cautious with my incantations, for I had no wish to be cut off from my body and
from the earth in unknown abysses whence I could never return...

THE CATS OF ULTHAR

It is said that in Ulthar, which lies beyond the river Skai, no man may kill a cat; and this
I can verily believe as I gaze upon him who sitteth purring before the fire. For the cat is
cryptic, and close to strange things which men cannot see. He is the soul of antique
Aegyptus, and bearer of tales from forgotten cities in Meroe and Ophir. He is the kin of
the jungle's lords, and heir to the secrets of hoary and sinister Africa. The Sphinx is his
cousin, and he speaks her language; but he is more ancient than the Sphinx, and
remembers that which she hath forgotten.

In Ulthar, before ever the burgesses forbade the killing of cats, there dwelt an old cotter
and his wife who delighted to trap and slay the cats of their neighbors. Why they did
this I know not; save that many hate the voice of the cat in the night, and take it ill that
cats should run stealthily about yards and gardens at twilight. But whatever the reason,
this old man and woman took pleasure in trapping and slaying every cat which came
near to their hovel; and from some of the sounds heard after dark, many villagers
fancied that the manner of slaying was exceedingly peculiar. But the villagers did not
discuss such things with the old man and his wife; because of the habitual expression on
the withered faces of the two, and because their cottage was so small and so darkly
hidden under spreading oaks at the back of a neglected yard. In truth, much as the
owners of cats hated these odd folk, they feared them more; and instead of berating
them as brutal assassins, merely took care that no cherished pet or mouser should stray
toward the remote hovel under the dark trees. When through some unavoidable
oversight a cat was missed, and sounds heard after dark, the loser would lament
impotently; or console himself by thanking Fate that it was not one of his children who
had thus vanished. For the people of Ulthar were simple, and knew not whence it is all
cats first came.

One day a caravan of strange wanderers from the South entered the narrow cobbled
streets of Ulthar. Dark wanderers they were, and unlike the other roving folk who
passed through the village twice every year. In the market-place they told fortunes for
silver, and bought gay beads from the merchants. What was the land of these wanderers
none could tell; but it was seen that they were given to strange prayers, and that they
had painted on the sides of their wagons strange figures with human bodies and the
heads of cats, hawks, rams and lions. And the leader of the caravan wore a headdress
with two horns and a curious disk betwixt the horns.

There was in this singular caravan a little boy with no father or mother, but only a tiny
black kitten to cherish. The plague had not been kind to him, yet had left him this small
furry thing to mitigate his sorrow; and when one is very young, one can find great relief
in the lively antics of a black kitten. So the boy whom the dark people called Menes
smiled more often than he wept as he sat playing with his graceful kitten on the steps of
an oddly painted wagon.

On the third morning of the wanderers' stay in Ulthar, Menes could not find his kitten;
and as he sobbed aloud in the market-place certain villagers told him of the old man and
his wife, and of sounds heard in the night. And when he heard these things his sobbing
gave place to meditation, and finally to prayer. He stretched out his arms toward the sun
and prayed in a tongue no villager could understand; though indeed the villagers did not
try very hard to understand, since their attention was mostly taken up by the sky and the
odd shapes the clouds were assuming. It was very peculiar, but as the little boy uttered
his petition there seemed to form overhead the shadowy, nebulous figures of exotic
things; of hybrid creatures crowned with horn-flanked disks. Nature is full of such
illusions to impress the imaginative.

That night the wanderers left Ulthar, and were never seen again. And the householders
were troubled when they noticed that in all the village there was not a cat to be found.
From each hearth the familiar cat had vanished; cats large and small, black, grey,
striped, yellow and white. Old Kranon, the burgomaster, swore that the dark folk had
taken the cats away in revenge for the killing of Menes' kitten; and cursed the caravan
and the little boy. But Nith, the lean notary, declared that the old cotter and his wife
were more likely persons to suspect; for their hatred of cats was notorious and
increasingly bold. Still, no one durst complain to the sinister couple; even when little
Atal, the innkeeper's son, vowed that he had at twilight seen all the cats of Ulthar in that
accursed yard under the trees, pacing very slowly and solemnly in a circle around the
cottage, two abreast, as if in performance of some unheard-of rite of beasts. The
villagers did not know how much to believe from so small a boy; and though they
feared that the evil pair had charmed the cats to their death, they preferred not to chide
the old cotter till they met him outside his dark and repellent yard.

So Ulthar went to sleep in vain anger; and when the people awakened at dawn--behold!
every cat was back at his accustomed hearth! Large and small, black, grey, striped,
yellow and white, none was missing. Very sleek and fat did the cats appear, and
sonorous with purring content. The citizens talked with one another of the affair, and
marveled not a little. Old Kranon again insisted that it was the dark folk who had taken
them, since cats did not return alive from the cottage of the ancient man and his wife.
But all agreed on one thing: that the refusal of all the cats to eat their portions of meat or
drink their saucers of milk was exceedingly curious. And for two whole days the sleek,
lazy cats of Ulthar would touch no food, but only doze by the fire or in the sun.

It was fully a week before the villagers noticed that no lights were appearing at dusk in
the windows of the cottage under the trees. Then the lean Nith remarked that no one had
seen the old man or his wife since the night the cats were away. In another week the
burgomaster decided to overcome his fears and call at the strangely silent dwelling as a
matter of duty, though in so doing he was careful to take with him Shang the blacksmith
and Thul the cutter of stone as witnesses. And when they had broken down the frail
door they found only this: two cleanly picked human skeletons on the earthen floor, and
a number of singular beetles crawling in the shadowy corners.

There was subsequently much talk among the burgesses of Ulthar. Zath, the coroner,
disputed at length with Nith, the lean notary; and Kranon and Shang and Thul were
overwhelmed with questions. Even little Atal, the innkeeper's son, was closely
questioned and given a sweetmeat as reward. They talked of the old cotter and his wife,
of the caravan of dark wanderers, of small Menes and his black kitten, of the prayer of
Menes and of the sky during that prayer, of the doings of the cats on the night the
caravan left, and of what was later found in the cottage under the dark trees in the
repellent yard.

And in the end the burgesses passed that remarkable law which is told of by traders in
Hatheg and discussed by travelers in Nir; namely, that in Ulthar no man may kill a cat.

THE CRAWLING CHAOS

Of the pleasures and pains of opium much has been written. The ecstasies and horrors
of De Quincey and the paradis artificiels of Baudelaire are preserved and interpreted
with an art which makes them immortal, and the world knows well the beauty, the terror
and the mystery of those obscure realms into which the inspired dreamer is transported.
But much as has been told, no man has yet dared intimate the nature of the phantasms
thus unfolded to the mind, or hint at the direction of the unheard-of roads along whose
ornate and exotic course the partaker of the drug is so irresistibly borne. De Quincey
was drawn back into Asia, that teeming land of nebulous shadows whose hideous
antiquity is so impressive that "the vast age of the race and name overpowers the sense
of youth in the individual," but farther than that he dared not go. Those who have gone
farther seldom returned, and even when they have, they have been either silent or quite
mad. I took opium but once--in the year of the plague, when doctors sought to deaden
the agonies they could not cure. There was an overdose--my physician was worn out
with horror and exertion--and I travelled very far indeed. In the end I returned and lived,
but my nights are filled with strange memories, nor have I ever permitted a doctor to
give me opium again.

The pain and pounding in my head had been quite unendurable when the drug was
administered, Of the future I had no heed; to escape, whether by cure, unconsciousness,
or death, was all that concerned me. I was partly delirious, so that it is hard to place the
exact moment of transition, but I think the effect must have begun shortly before the
pounding ceased to be painful. As I have said, there was an overdose; so my reactions
were probably far from normal. The sensation of falling, curiously dissociated from the
idea of gravity or direction, was paramount; though there was subsidiary impression of
unseen throngs in incalculable profusion, throngs of infinitely diverse nature, but all
more or less related to me. Sometimes it seemed less as though I were falling, than as
though the universe or the ages were falling past me. Suddenly my pain ceased, and I
began to associate the pounding with an external rather than internal force. The falling
had ceased also, giving place to a sensation of uneasy, temporary rest; and when I
listened closely, I fancied the pounding was that of the vast, inscrutable sea as its
sinister, colossal breakers lacerated some desolate shore after a storm of titanic
magnitude. Then I opened my eyes. For a moment my surroundings seemed confused,
like a projected image hopelessly out of focus, but gradually I realised my solitary
presence in a strange and beautiful room lighted by many windows. Of the exact nature
of the apartment I could form no idea, for my thoughts were still far from settled, but I
noticed vari-coloured rugs and draperies, elaborately fashioned tables, chairs, ottomans,
and divans, and delicate vases and ornaments which conveyed a suggestion of the exotic
without being actually alien. These things I noticed, yet they were not long uppermost
in my mind. Slowly but inexorably crawling upon my consciousness and rising above
every other impression, came a dizzying fear of the unknown; a fear all the greater
because I could not analyse it, and seeming to concern a stealthily approaching menace;
not death, but some nameless, unheard--of thing inexpressibly more ghastly and
abhorrent. Presently I realised that the direct symbol and excitant of my fear was the
hideous pounding whose incessant reverberations throbbed maddeningly against my
exhausted brain. It seemed to come from a point outside and below the edifice in which
I stood, and to associate itself with the most terrifying mental images. I felt that some
horrible scene or object lurked beyond the silk-hung walls, and shrank from glancing
through the arched, latticed windows that opened so bewilderingly on every hand.
Perceiving shutters attached to these windows, I closed them all, averting my eyes from
the exterior as I did so. Then, employing a flint and steel which I found on one of the
small tables, I lit the many candles reposing about the walls in arabesque sconces. The
added sense of security brought by closed shutters and artificial light calmed my nerves
to some degree, but I could not shut out the monotonous pounding. Now that I was
calmer, the sound became as fascinating as it was fearful, and I felt a contradictory
desire to seek out its source despite my still powerful shrinking. Opening a portiere at
the side of the room nearest the pounding, I beheld a small and richly draped corridor
ending in a cavern door and large oriel window. To this window I was irresistibly
drawn, though my ill-defined apprehensions seemed almost equally bent on holding me
back. As I approached it I could see a chaotic whirl of waters in the distance. Then, as I
attained it and glanced out on all sides, the stupendous picture of my surroundings burst
upon me with full and devastating force.

I beheld such a sight as I had never beheld before, and which no living person can have
seen save in the delirium of fever or the inferno of opium. The building stood on a
narrow point of land--or what was now a narrow point of land--fully three hundred feet
above what must lately have been a seething vortex of mad waters. On either side of the
house there fell a newly washed-out precipice of red earth, whilst ahead of me the
hideous waves were still rolling in frightfully, eating away the land with ghastly
monotony and deliberation. Out a mile or more there rose and fell menacing breakers at
least fifty feet in height, and on the far horizon ghoulish black clouds of grotesque
contour were resting and brooding like unwholesome vultures. The waves were dark
and purplish, almost black, and clutched at the yielding red mud of the bank as if with
uncouth, greedy hands. I could not but feel that some noxious marine mind had declared
a war of extermination upon all the solid ground, perhaps abetted by the angry sky.

Recovering at length from the stupor into which this unnatural spectacle had thrown me,
I realized that my actual physical danger was acute. Even whilst I gazed, the bank had
lost many feet, and it could not be long before the house would fall undermined into the
awful pit of lashing waves. Accordingly I hastened to the opposite side of the edifice,
and finding a door, emerged at once, locking it after me with a curious key which had
hung inside. I now beheld more of the strange region about me, and marked a singular
division which seemed to exist in the hostile ocean and firmament. On each side of the
jutting promontory different conditions held sway. At my left as I faced inland was a
gently heaving sea with great green waves rolling peacefully in under a brightly shining
sun. Something about that sun's nature and position made me shudder, but I could not
then tell, and cannot tell now, what it was. At my right also was the sea, but it was blue,
calm, and only gently undulating, while the sky above it was darker and the washed-out
bank more nearly white than reddish. I now turned my attention to the land, and found
occasion for fresh surprise; for the vegetation resembled nothing I had ever seen or read
about. It was apparently tropical or at least sub-tropical--a conclusion borne out by the
intense heat of the air. Sometimes I thought I could trace strange analogies with the
flora of my native land, fancying that the well-known plants and shrubs might assume
such forms under a radical change of climate; but the gigantic and omnipresent palm
trees were plainly foreign. The house I had just left was very small--hardly more than a
cottage--but its material was evidently marble, and its architecture was weird and
composite, involving a quaint fusion of Western and Eastern forms. At the corners were
Corinthian columns, but the red tile roof was like that of a Chinese pagoda. From the
door inland there stretched a path of singularly white sand, about four feet wide, and
lined on either side with stately palms and unidentifiable flowering shrubs and plants. It
lay toward the side of the promontory where the sea was blue and the bank rather
whitish. Down this path I felt impelled to flee, as if pursued by some malignant spirit
from the pounding ocean. At first it was slightly uphill, then I reached a gentle crest.
Behind me I saw the scene I had left; the entire point with the cottage and the black
water, with the green sea on one side and the blue sea on the other, and a curse unnamed
and unnamable lowering over all. I never saw it again, and often wonder....After this last
look I strode ahead and surveyed the inland panorama before me.

The path, as I have intimated, ran along the right-hand shore as one went inland. Ahead
and to the left I now viewed a magnificent valley comprising thousands of acres, and
covered with a swaying growth of tropical grass higher than my head. Almost at the
limit of vision was a colossal palm tree which seemed to fascinate and beckon me. By
this time wonder and escape from the imperilled peninsula had largely dissipated my
fear, but as I paused and sank fatigued to the path, idly digging with my hands into the
warm, whitish-golden sand, a new and acute sense of danger seized me. Some terror in
the swishing tall grass seemed added to that of the diabolically pounding sea, and I
started up crying aloud and disjointedly, "Tiger? Tiger? Is it Tiger? Beast? Beast? Is it a
Beast that I am afraid of?" My mind wandered back to an ancient and classical story of
tigers which I had read; I strove to recall the author, but had difficulty. Then in the
midst of my fear I remembered that the tale was by Rudyard Kipling; nor did the
grotesqueness of deeming him an ancient author occur to me; I wished for the volume
containing this story, and had almost started back toward the doomed cottage to procure
it when my better sense and the lure of the palm prevented me.

Whether or not I could have resisted the backward beckoning without the counter-
fascination of the vast palm tree, I do not know. This attraction was now dominant, and
I left the path and crawled on hands and knees down the valley's slope despite my fear
of the grass and of the serpents it might contain. I resolved to fight for life and reason as
long as possible against all menaces of sea or land, though I sometimes feared defeat as
the maddening swish of the uncanny grasses joined the still audible and irritating
pounding of the distant breakers. I would frequently pause and put my hands to my ears
for relief, but could never quite shut out the detestable sound. It was, as it seemed to me,
only after ages that I finally dragged myself to the beckoning palm tree and lay quiet
beneath its protecting shade.

There now ensued a series of incidents which transported me to the opposite extremes
of ecstasy and horror; incidents which I tremble to recall and dare not seek to interpret.
No sooner had I crawled beneath the overhanging foliage of the palm, than there
dropped from its branches a young child of such beauty as I never beheld before.
Though ragged and dusty, this being bore the features of a faun or demigod, and seemed
almost to diffuse a radiance in the dense shadow of the tree. It smiled and extended its
hand, but before I could arise and speak I heard in the upper air the exquisite melody of
singing; notes high and low blent with a sublime and ethereal harmoniousness. The sun
had by this time sunk below the horizon, and in the twilight I saw an aureole of lambent
light encircled the child's head. Then in a tone of silver it addressed me: "It is the end.
They have come down through the gloaming from the stars. Now all is over, and
beyond the Arinurian streams we shall dwell blissfully in Teloe. " As the child spoke, I
beheld a soft radiance through the leaves of the palm tree, and rising, greeted a pair
whom I knew to be the chief singers among those I had heard. A god and goddess they
must have been, for such beauty is not mortal; and they took my hands, saying, "Come,
child, you have heard the voices, and all is well. In Teloe beyond the Milky Way and
the Arinurian streams are cities all of amber and chalcedony. And upon their domes of
many facets glisten the images of strange and beautiful stars. Under the ivory bridges of
Teloe flow rivers of liquid gold bearing pleasure-barges bound for blossomy Cytharion
of the Seven Suns. And in Teloe and Cytharion abide only youth, beauty, and pleasure,
nor are any sounds heard, save of laughter, song, and the lute. Only the gods dwell in
Teloe of the golden rivers, but among them shalt thou dwell."

As I listened, enchanted, I suddenly became aware of a change in my surroundings. The

palm tree, so lately overshadowing my exhausted form, was now some distance to my
left and considerably below me. I was obviously floating in the atmosphere;
companioned not only by the strange child and the radiant pair, but by a constantly
increasing throng of half-luminous, vine-crowned youths and maidens with wind-blown
hair and joyful countenance. We slowly ascended together, as if borne on a fragrant
breeze which blew not from the earth but from the golden nebulae, and the child
whispered in my ear that I must look always upward to the pathways of light, and never
backward to the sphere I had just left. The youths and maidens now chanted mellifluous
choriambics to the accompaniment of lutes, and I felt enveloped in a peace and
happiness more profound than any I had in life imagined, when the intrusion of a single
sound altered my destiny and shattered my soul. Through the ravishing strains of the
singers and the lutanists, as if in mocking, daemoniac concord, throbbed from gulfs
below the damnable, the detestable pounding of that hideous ocean. As those black
breakers beat their message into my ears I forgot the words of the child and looked
back, down upon the doomed scene from which I thought I had escaped.

Down through the aether I saw the accursed earth slowly turning, ever turning, with
angry and tempestuous seas gnawing at wild desolate shores and dashing foam against
the tottering towers of deserted cities. And under a ghastly moon there gleamed sights I
can never describe, sights I can never forget; deserts of corpselike clay and jungles of
ruin and decadence where once stretched the populous plains and villages of my native
land, and maelstroms of frothing ocean where once rose the mighty temples of my
forefathers. Around the northern pole steamed a morass of noisome growths and
miasmal vapours, hissing before the onslaught of the ever-mounting waves that curled
and fretted from the shuddering deep. Then a rending report clave the night, and athwart
the desert of deserts appeared a smoking rift. Still the black ocean foamed and gnawed,
eating away the desert on either side as the rift in the center widened and widened.
There was now no land left but the desert, and still the fuming ocean ate and ate. All at
once I thought even the pounding sea seemed afraid of something, afraid of dark gods
of the inner earth that are greater than the evil god of waters, but even if it was it could
not turn back; and the desert had suffered too much from those nightmare waves to help
them now. So the ocean ate the last of the land and poured into the smoking gulf,
thereby giving up all it had ever conquered. From the new-flooded lands it flowed
again, uncovering death and decay; and from its ancient and immemorial bed it trickled
loathsomely, uncovering nighted secrets of the years when Time was young and the
gods unborn. Above the waves rose weedy remembered spires. The moon laid pale lilies
of light on dead London, and Paris stood up from its damp grave to be sanctified with
star-dust. Then rose spires and monoliths that were weedy but not remembered; terrible
spires and monoliths of lands that men never knew were lands. There was not any
pounding now, but only the unearthly roaring and hissing of waters tumbling into the
rift. The smoke of that rift had changed to steam, and almost hid the world as it grew
denser and denser. It seared my face and hands, and when I looked to see how it
affected my companions I found they had all disappeared. Then very suddenly it ended,
and I knew no more till I awaked upon a bed of convalescence. As the cloud of steam
from the Plutonic gulf finally concealed the entire surface from my sight, all the
firmament shrieked at a sudden agony of mad reverberations which shook the trembling
aether. In one delirious flash and burst it happened; one blinding, deafening holocaust of
fire, smoke, and thunder that dissolved the wan moon as it sped outward to the void.

And when the smoke cleared away, and I sought to look upon the earth, I beheld against
the background of cold, humorous stars only the dying sun and the pale mournful
planets searching for their sister.

THE DESCENDANT
Writing on what my doctor tells me is my deathbed, my most hideous fear is that the
man is wrong. I suppose I shall seem to be buried next week, but...

In London there is a man who screams when the church bells ring. He lives all alone
with his streaked cat in Gray's Inn, and people call him harmlessly mad. His room is
filled with books of the tamest and most puerile kind, and hour after hour he tries to lose
himself in their feeble pages. All he seeks from life is not to think. For some reason
thought is very horrible to him, and anything which stirs the imagination he flees as a
plague. He is very thin and grey and wrinkled, but there are those who declare he is not
nearly so old as he looks. Fear has its grisly claws upon him, and a sound will make him
start with staring eyes and sweat-beaded forehead. Friends and companions he shuns,
for he wishes to answer no questions. Those who once knew him as scholar and aesthete
say it is very pitiful to see him now. He dropped them all years ago, and no one feels
sure whether he left the country or merely sank from sight in some hidden byway. It is a
decade now since he moved into Gray's Inn, and of where he had been he would say
nothing till the night young Williams bought the Necronomicon.

Williams was a dreamer, and only twenty-three, and when he moved into the ancient
house he felt a strangeness and a breath of cosmic wind about the grey wizened man in
the next room. He forced his friendship where old friends dared not force theirs, and
marvelled at the fright that sat upon this gaunt, haggard watcher and listener. For that
the man always watched and listened no one could doubt. He watched and listened with
his mind more than with his eyes and ears, and strove every moment to drown
something in his ceaseless poring over gay, insipid novels. And when the church bells
rang he would stop his ears and scream, and the grey cat that dwelt with him would
howl in unison till the last peal died reverberantly away.

But try as Williams would, he could not make his neighbour speak of anything profound
or hidden. The old man would not live up to his aspect and manner, but would feign a
smile and a light tone and prattle feverishly and frantically of cheerful trifles; his voice
every moment rising and thickening till at last it would split in a piping and incoherent
falsetto. That his learning was deep and thorough, his most trivial remarks made
abundantly clear; and Williams was not surprised to hear that he had been to Harrow
and Oxford. Later it developed that he was none other than Lord Northam, of whose
ancient hereditary castle on the Yorkshire coast so many odd things were told; but when
Williams tried to talk of the castle, and of its reputed Roman origin, he refused to admit
that there was anything unusual about it. He even tittered shrilly when the subject of the
supposed under-crypts, hewn out of the solid crag that frowns on the North Sea, was
brought up.

So matters went till that night when Williams brought home the infamous
Necronomicon of the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred. He had known of the dreaded volume
since his sixteenth year, when his dawning love of the bizarre had led him to ask queer
questions of a bent old bookseller in Chandos Street; and he had always wondered why
men paled when they spoke of it. The old bookseller had told him that only five copies
were known to have survived the shocked edicts of the priests and lawgivers against it
and that all of these were locked up with frightened care by custodians who had
ventured to begin a reading of the hateful black-letter. But now, at last, he had not only
found an accessible copy but had made it his own at a ludicrously low figure. It was at a
Jew's shop in the squalid precincts of Clare Market, where he had often bought strange
things before, and he almost fancied the gnarled old Levite smiled amidst tangles of
beard as the great discovery was made. The bulky leather cover with the brass clasp had
been so prominently visible, and the price was so absurdly slight.

The one glimpse he had had of the title was enough to send him into transports, and
some of the diagrams set in the vague Latin text excited the tensest and most disquieting
recollections in his brain. He felt it was highly necessary to get the ponderous thing
home and begin deciphering it, and bore it out of the shop with such precipitate haste
that the old Jew chuckled disturbingly behind him. But when at last it was safe in his
room he found the combination of black-letter and debased idiom too much for his
powers as a linguist, and reluctantly called on his strange, frightened friend for help
with the twisted, mediaeval Latin. Lord Northam was simpering inanities to his streaked
cat, and started violently when the young man entered. Then he saw the volume and
shuddered wildly, and fainted altogether when Williams uttered the title. It was when he
regained his senses that he told his story; told his fantastic figment of madness in frantic
whispers, lest his friend be not quick to burn the accursed book and give wide scattering
to its ashes.

There must, Lord Northam whispered, have been something wrong at the start; but it
would never have come to a head if he had not explored too far. He was the nineteenth
Baron of a line whose beginnings went uncomfortably far back into the past--
unbelievably far, if vague tradition could be heeded, for there were family tales of a
descent from pre-Saxon times, when a certain Lunaeus Gabinius Capito, military
tribune in the Third Augustan Legion then stationed at Lindum in Roman Britain, had
been summarily expelled from his command for participation in certain rites
unconnected with any known religion. Gabinius had, the rumour ran, come upon a
cliffside cavern where strange folk met together and made the Elder Sign in the dark;
strange folk whom the Britons knew not save in fear, and who were the last to survive
from a great land in the west that had sunk, leaving only the islands with the roths and
circles and shrines of which Stonehenge was the greatest. There was no certainty, of
course, in the legend that Gabinius had built an impregnable fortress over the forbidden
cave and founded a line which Pict and Saxon, Dane and Norman were powerless to
obliterate; or in the tacit assumption that from this line sprang the bold companion and
lieutenant of the Black Prince whom Edward Third created Baron of Northam. These
things were not certain, yet they were often told; and in truth the stonework of Northam
Keep did look alarmingly like the masonry of Hadrian's Wall. As a child Lord Northam
had had peculiar dreams when sleeping in the older parts of the castle, and had acquired
a constant habit of looking back through his memory for half-amorphous scenes and
patterns and impressions which formed no part of his waking experience. He became a
dreamer who found life tame and unsatisfying; a searcher for strange realms and
relationships once familiar, yet lying nowhere in the visible regions of earth.

Filled with a feeling that our tangible world is only an atom in a fabric vast and
ominous, and that unknown demesnes press on and permeate the sphere of the known at
every point, Northam in youth and young manhood drained in turn the founts of formal
religion and occult mystery. Nowhere, however, could he find ease and content; and as
he grew older the staleness and limitations of life became more and more maddening to
him. During the 'nineties he dabbled in Satanism, and at all times he devoured avidly
any doctrine or theory which seemed to promise escape from the close vistas of science
and the dully unvarying laws of Nature. Books like Ignatius Donnelly's commercial
account of Atlantis he absorbed with zest, and a dozen obscure precursors of Charles
Fort enthralled him with their vagaries. He would travel leagues to follow up a furtive
village tale of abnormal wonder, and once went into the desert of Araby to seek a
Nameless City of faint report, which no man has ever beheld. There rose within him the
tantalising faith that somewhere an easy gate existed, which if one found would admit
him freely to those outer deeps whose echoes rattled so dimly at the back of his
memory. It might be in the visible world, yet it might be only in his mind and soul.
Perhaps he held within his own half-explored brain that cryptic link which would
awaken him to elder and future lives in forgotten dimensions; which would bind him to
the stars, and to the infinities and eternities beyond them.

THE DOOM THAT CAME TO SARNATH

Written on December 3, 1919. Published June 1920 in The Scot

There is in the land of Mnar a vast still lake that is fed by no stream, and out of which
no stream flows. Ten thousand years ago there stood by its shore the mighty city of
Sarnath, but Sarnath stands there no more.

It is told that in the immemorial years when the world was young, before ever the men
of Sarnath came to the land of Mnar, another city stood beside the lake; the gray stone
city of Ib, which was old as the lake itself, and peopled with beings not pleasing to
behold. Very odd and ugly were these beings, as indeed are most beings of a world yet
inchoate and rudely fashioned. It is written on the brick cylinders of Kadatheron that the
beings of Ib were in hue as green as the lake and the mists that rise above it; that they
had bulging eyes, pouting, flabby lips, and curious ears, and were without voice. It is
also written that they descended one night from the moon in a mist; they and the vast
still lake and gray stone city Ib. However this may be, it is certain that they worshipped
a sea-green stone idol chiseled in the likeness of Bokrug, the great water-lizard; before
which they danced horribly when the moon was gibbous. And it is written in the
papyrus of Ilarnek, that they one day discovered fire, and thereafter kindled flames on
many ceremonial occasions. But not much is written of these beings, because they lived
in very ancient times, and man is young, and knows but little of the very ancient living
things.

After many eons men came to the land of Mnar, dark shepherd folk with their fleecy
flocks, who built Thraa, Ilarnek, and Kadatheron on the winding river Ai. And certain
tribes, more hardy than the rest, pushed on to the border of the lake and built Sarnath at
a spot where precious metals were found in the earth.

Not far from the gray city of Ib did the wandering tribes lay the first stones of Sarnath,
and at the beings of Ib they marveled greatly. But with their marveling was mixed hate,
for they thought it not meet that beings of such aspect should walk about the world of
men at dusk. Nor did they like the strange sculptures upon the gray monoliths of Ib, for
why those sculptures lingered so late in the world, even until the coming men, none can
tell; unless it was because the land of Mnar is very still, and remote from most other
lands, both of waking and of dream.

As the men of Sarnath beheld more of the beings of Ib their hate grew, and it was not
less because they found the beings weak, and soft as jelly to the touch of stones and
arrows. So one day the young warriors, the slingers and the spearmen and the bowmen,
marched against Ib and slew all the inhabitants thereof, pushing the queer bodies into
the lake with long spears, because they did not wish to touch them. And because they
did not like the gray sculptured monoliths of Ib they cast these also into the lake;
wondering from the greatness of the labor how ever the stones were brought from afar,
as they must have been, since there is naught like them in the land of Mnar or in the
lands adjacent.

Thus of the very ancient city of Ib was nothing spared, save the sea--green stone idol
chiseled in the likeness of Bokrug, the water-lizard. This the young warriors took back
with them as a symbol of conquest over the old gods and beings of Th, and as a sign of
leadership in Mnar. But on the night after it was set up in the temple, a terrible thing
must have happened, for weird lights were seen over the lake, and in the morning the
people found the idol gone and the high-priest Taran-Ish lying dead, as from some fear
unspeakable. And before he died, Taran-Ish had scrawled upon the altar of chrysolite
with coarse shaky strokes the sign of DOOM.

After Taran-Ish there were many high-priests in Sarnath but never was the sea-green
stone idol found. And many centuries came and went, wherein Sarnath prospered
exceedingly, so that only priests and old women remembered what Taran-Ish had
scrawled upon the altar of chrysolite. Betwixt Sarnath and the city of Ilarnek arose a
caravan route, and the precious metals from the earth were exchanged for other metals
and rare cloths and jewels and books and tools for artificers and all things of luxury that
are known to the people who dwell along the winding river Ai and beyond. So Sarnath
waxed mighty and learned and beautiful, and sent forth conquering armies to subdue the
neighboring cities; and in time there sate upon a throne in Sarnath the kings of all the
land of Mnar and of many lands adjacent.

The wonder of the world and the pride of all mankind was Sarnath the magnificent. Of
polished desert-quarried marble were its walls, in height three hundred cubits and in
breadth seventy-five, so that chariots might pass each other as men drove them along
the top. For full five hundred stadia did they run, being open only on the side toward the
lake where a green stone sea-wall kept back the waves that rose oddly once a year at the
festival of the destroying of Ib. In Sarnath were fifty streets from the lake to the gates of
the caravans, and fifty more intersecting them. With onyx were they paved, save those
whereon the horses and camels and elephants trod, which were paved with granite. And
the gates of Sarnath were as many as the landward ends of the streets, each of bronze,
and flanked by the figures of lions and elephants carven from some stone no longer
known among men. The houses of Sarnath were of glazed brick and chalcedony, each
having its walled garden and crystal lakelet. With strange art were they builded, for no
other city had houses like them; and travelers from Thraa and Ilarnek and Kadatheron
marveled at the shining domes wherewith they were surmounted.

But more marvelous still were the palaces and the temples, and the gardens made by
Zokkar the olden king. There were many palaces, the last of which were mightier than
any in Thraa or Ilarnek or Kadatheron. So high were they that one within might
sometimes fancy himself beneath only the sky; yet when lighted with torches dipt in the
oil of Dother their walls showed vast paintings of kings and armies, of a splendor at
once inspiring and stupefying to the beholder. Many were the pillars of the palaces, all
of tinted marble, and carven into designs of surpassing beauty. And in most of the
palaces the floors were mosaics of beryl and lapis lazuli and sardonyx and carbuncle
and other choice materials, so disposed that the beholder might fancy himself walking
over beds of the rarest flowers. And there were likewise fountains, which cast scented
waters about in pleasing jets arranged with cunning art. Outshining all others was the
palace of the kings of Mnar and of the lands adjacent. On a pair of golden crouching
lions rested the throne, many steps above the gleaming floor. And it was wrought of one
piece of ivory, though no man lives who knows whence so vast a piece could have
come. In that palace there were also many galleries, and many amphitheaters where
lions and men and elephants battled at the pleasure of the kings. Sometimes the
amphitheaters were flooded with water conveyed from the lake in mighty aqueducts,
and then were enacted stirring sea-fights, or combats betwixt swimmers and deadly
marine things.

Lofty and amazing were the seventeen tower-like temples of Sarnath, fashioned of a
bright multi-colored stone not known elsewhere. A full thousand cubits high stood the
greatest among them, wherein the high--priests dwelt with a magnificence scarce less
than that of the kings. On the ground were halls as vast and splendid as those of the
palaces; where gathered throngs in worship of Zo-Kalar and Tamash and Lobon, the
chief gods of Sarnath, whose incense-enveloped shrines were as the thrones of
monarchs. Not like the eikons of other gods were those of Zo-Kalar and Tamash and
Lobon. For so close to life were they that one might swear the graceful bearded gods
themselves sate on the ivory thrones. And up unending steps of zircon was the tower-
chamber, wherefrom the high-priests looked out over the city and the plains and the lake
by day; and at the cryptic moon and significant stars and planets, and their reflections in
the lake, at night. Here was done the very secret and ancient rite in detestation of
Bokrug, the water--lizard, and here rested the altar of chrysolite which bore the Doom--
scrawl of Taran-Ish.

Wonderful likewise were the gardens made by Zokkar the olden king. In the center of
Sarnath they lay, covering a great space and encircled by a high wall. And they were
surmounted by a mighty dome of glass, through which shone the sun and moon and
planets when it was clear, and from which were hung fulgent images of the sun and
moon and stars and planets when it was not clear. In summer the gardens were cooled
with fresh odorous breezes skilfully wafted by fans, and in winter they were heated with
concealed fires, so that in those gardens it was always spring. There ran little streams
over bright pebbles, dividing meads of green and gardens of many hues, and spanned by
a multitude of bridges. Many were the waterfalls in their courses, and many were the
hued lakelets into which they expanded. Over the streams and lakelets rode white
swans, whilst the music of rare birds chimed in with the melody of the waters. In
ordered terraces rose the green banks, adorned here and there with bowers of vines and
sweet blossoms, and seats and benches of marble and porphyry. And there were many
small shrines and temples where one might rest or pray to small gods.

Each year there was celebrated in Sarnath the feast of the destroying of Ib, at which
time wine, song, dancing, and merriment of every kind abounded. Great honors were
then paid to the shades of those who had annihilated the odd ancient beings, and the
memory of those beings and of their elder gods was derided by dancers and lutanists
crowned with roses from the gardens of Zokkar. And the kings would look out over the
lake and curse the bones of the dead that lay beneath it.

At first the high-priests liked not these festivals, for there had descended amongst them
queer tales of how the sea-green eikon had vanished, and how Taran-Ish had died from
fear and left a warning. And they said that from their high tower they sometimes saw
lights beneath the waters of the lake. But as many years passed without calamity even
the priests laughed and cursed and joined in the orgies of the feasters. Indeed, had they
not themselves, in their high tower, often performed the very ancient and secret rite in
detestation of Bokrug, the water-lizard? And a thousand years of riches and delight
passed over Sarnath, wonder of the world.

Gorgeous beyond thought was the feast of the thousandth year of the destroying of Ib.
For a decade had it been talked of in the land of Mnar, and as it drew nigh there came to
Sarnath on horses and camels and elephants men from Thraa, Ilarnek, and Kadetheron,
and all the cities of Mnar and the lands beyond. Before the marble walls on the
appointed night were pitched the pavilions of princes and the tents of travelers. Within
his banquet-hall reclined Nargis-Hei, the king, drunken with ancient wine from the
vaults of conquered Pnoth, and surrounded by feasting nobles and hurrying slaves.
There were eaten many strange delicacies at that feast; peacocks from the distant hills of
Linplan, heels of camels from the Bnazic desert, nuts and spices from Sydathrian
groves, and pearls from wave-washed Mtal dissolved in the vinegar of Thraa. Of sauces
there were an untold number, prepared by the subtlest cooks in all Mnar, and suited to
the palate of every feaster. But most prized of all the viands were the great fishes from
the lake, each of vast size, and served upon golden platters set with rubies and
diamonds.

Whilst the king and his nobles feasted within the palace, and viewed the crowning dish
as it awaited them on golden platters, others feasted elsewhere. In the tower of the great
temple the priests held revels, and in pavilions without the walls the princes of
neighboring lands made merry. And it was the high-priest Gnai-Kah who first saw the
shadows that descended from the gibbous moon into the lake, and the damnable green
mists that arose from the lake to meet the moon and to shroud in a sinister haze the
towers and the domes of fated Sarnath. Thereafter those in the towers and without the
walls beheld strange lights on the water, and saw that the gray rock Akurion, which was
wont to rear high above it near the shore, was almost submerged. And fear grew
vaguely yet swiftly, so that the princes of Ilarnek and of far Rokol took down and folded
their tents and pavilions and departed, though they scarce knew the reason for their
departing.
Then, close to the hour of midnight, all the bronze gates of Sarnath burst open and
emptied forth a frenzied throng that blackened the plain, so that all the visiting princes
and travelers fled away in fright. For on the faces of this throng was writ a madness
born of horror unendurable, and on their tongues were words so terrible that no hearer
paused for proof. Men whose eyes were wild with fear shrieked aloud of the sight
within the king's banquet-hall, where through the windows were seen no longer the
forms of Nargis-Hei and his nobles and slaves, but a horde of indescribable green
voiceless things with bulging eyes, pouting, flabby lips, and curious ears; things which
danced horribly, bearing in their paws golden platters set with rubies and diamonds and
containing uncouth flames. And the princes and travelers, as they fled from the doomed
city of Sarnath on horses and camels and elephants, looked again upon the mist-
begetting lake and saw the gray rock Akurion was quite submerged. Through all the
land of Mnar and the land adjacent spread the tales of those who had fled from Sarnath,
and caravans sought that accursed city and its precious metals no more. It was long ere
any travelers went thither, and even then only the brave and adventurous young men of
yellow hair and blue eyes, who are no kin to the men of Mnar. These men indeed went
to the lake to view Sarnath; but though they found the vast still lake itself, and the gray
rock Akurion which rears high above it near the shore, they beheld not the wonder of
the world and pride of all mankind. Where once had risen walls of three hundred cubits
and towers yet higher, now stretched only the marshy shore, and where once had dwelt
fifty million of men now crawled the detestable water-lizard. Not even the mines of
precious metal remained. DOOM had come to Sarnath.

But half buried in the rushes was spied a curious green idol; an exceedingly ancient idol
chiseled in the likeness of Bokrug, the great water-lizard. That idol, enshrined in the
high temple at Ilarnek, was subsequently worshipped beneath the gibbous moon
throughout the land of Mnar.

THE DREAM QUEST OF UNKNOWN KADATH

Three times Randolph Carter dreamed of the marvelous city, and three times was he
snatched away while still he paused on the high terrace above it. All golden and lovely
it blazed in the sunset, with walls, temples, colonnades and arched bridges of veined
marble, silver--basined fountains of prismatic spray in broad squares and perfumed
gardens, and wide streets marching between delicate trees and blossom--laden urns and
ivory statues in gleaming rows; while on steep northward slopes climbed tiers of red
roofs and old peaked gables harbouring little lanes of grassy cobbles. It was a fever of
the gods, a fanfare of supernal trumpets and a clash of immortal cymbals. Mystery hung
about it as clouds about a fabulous unvisited mountain; and as Carter stood breathless
and expectant on that balustraded parapet there swept up to him the poignancy and
suspense of almost--vanished memory, the pain of lost things and the maddening need
to place again what once had been an awesome and momentous place.

He knew that for him its meaning must once have been supreme; though in what cycle
or incarnation he had known it, or whether in dream or in waking, he could not tell.
Vaguely it called up glimpses of a far forgotten first youth, when wonder and pleasure
lay in all the mystery of days, and dawn and dusk alike strode forth prophetic to the
eager sound of lutes and song, unclosing fiery gates toward further and surprising
marvels. But each night as he stood on that high marble terrace with the curious urns
and carven rail and looked off over that hushed sunset city of beauty and unearthly
immanence he felt the bondage of dream's tyrannous gods; for in no wise could he leave
that lofty spot, or descend the wide marmoreal fights flung endlessly down to where
those streets of elder witchery lay outspread and beckoning.

When for the third time he awakened with those flights still undescended and those
hushed sunset streets still untraversed, he prayed long and earnestly to the hidden gods
of dream that brood capricious above the clouds on unknown Kadath, in the cold waste
where no man treads. But the gods made no answer and shewed no relenting, nor did
they give any favouring sign when he prayed to them in dream, and invoked them
sacrificially through the bearded priests of Nasht and Kaman-Thah, whose cavern-
temple with its pillar of flame lies not far from the gates of the waking world. It seemed,
however, that his prayers must have been adversely heard, for after even the first of
them he ceased wholly to behold the marvellous city; as if his three glimpses from afar
had been mere accidents or oversights, and against some hidden plan or wish of the
gods.

At length, sick with longing for those glittering sunset streets and cryptical hill lanes
among ancient tiled roofs, nor able sleeping or waking to drive them from his mind,
Carter resolved to go with bold entreaty whither no man had gone before, and dare the
icy deserts through the dark to where unknown Kadath, veiled in cloud and crowned
with unimagined stars, holds secret and nocturnal the onyx castle of the Great Ones.

In light slumber he descended the seventy steps to the cavern of flame and talked of this
design to the bearded priests Nasht and Kaman-Thah. And the priests shook their
pshent-bearing heads and vowed it would be the death of his soul. They pointed out that
the Great Ones had shown already their wish, and that it is not agreeable to them to be
harassed by insistent pleas. They reminded him, too, that not only had no man ever been
to Kadath, but no man had ever suspected in what part of space it may lie; whether it be
in the dreamlands around our own world, or in those surrounding some unguessed
companion of Fomalhaut or Aldebaran. If in our dreamland, it might conceivably be
reached, but only three human souls since time began had ever crossed and recrossed
the black impious gulfs to other dreamlands, and of that three, two had come back quite
mad. There were, in such voyages, incalculable local dangers; as well as that shocking
final peril which gibbers unmentionably outside the ordered universe, where no dreams
reach; that last amorphous blight of nethermost confusion which blasphemes and
bubbles at the centre of all infinity--the boundless daemon sultan Azathoth, whose name
no lips dare speak aloud, and who gnaws hungrily in inconceivable, unlighted chambers
beyond time amidst the muffled, maddening beating of vile drums and the thin,
monotonous whine of accursed flutes; to which detestable pounding and piping dance
slowly, awkwardly, and absurdly the gigantic Ultimate gods, the blind, voiceless,
tenebrous, mindless Other gods whose soul and messenger is the crawling chaos
Nyarlathotep.

Of these things was Carter warned by the priests Nasht and Kaman-Thah in the cavern
of flame, but still he resolved to find the gods on unknown Kadath in the cold waste,
wherever that might be, and to win from them the sight and remembrance and shelter of
the marvellous sunset city. He knew that his journey would be strange and long, and
that the Great Ones would be against it; but being old in the land of dream he counted
on many useful memories and devices to aid him. So asking a formal blessing of the
priests and thinking shrewdly on his course, he boldly descended the seven hundred
steps to the Gate of Deeper Slumber and set out through the Enchanted Wood.

In the tunnels of that twisted wood, whose low prodigious oaks twine groping boughs
and shine dim with the phosphorescence of strange fungi, dwell the furtive and secretive
Zoogs; who know many obscure secrets of the dream world and a few of the waking
world, since the wood at two places touches the lands of men, though it would be
disastrous to say where. Certain unexplained rumours, events, and vanishments occur
among men where the Zoogs have access, and it is well that they cannot travel far
outside the world of dreams. But over the nearer parts of the dream world they pass
freely, flitting small and brown and unseen and bearing back piquant tales to beguile the
hours around their hearths in the forest they love. Most of them live in burrows, but
some inhabit the trunks of the great trees; and although they live mostly on fungi it is
muttered that they have also a slight taste for meat, either physical or spiritual, for
certainly many dreamers have entered that wood who have not come out. Carter,
however, had no fear; for he was an old dreamer and had learnt their fluttering language
and made many a treaty with them; having found through their help the splendid city of
Celephais in Ooth-Nargai beyond the Tanarian Hills, where reigns half the year the
great King Kuranes, a man he had known by another name in life. Kuranes was the one
soul who had been to the star-gulls and returned free from madness.

Threading now the low phosphorescent aisles between those gigantic trunks, Carter
made fluttering sounds in the manner of the Zoogs, and listened now and then for
responses. He remembered one particular village of the creatures was in the centre of
the wood, where a circle of great mossy stones in what was once a cleaning tells of
older and more terrible dwellers long forgotten, and toward this spot he hastened. He
traced his way by the grotesque fungi, which always seem better nourished as one
approaches the dread circle where elder beings danced and sacrificed. Finally the great
light of those thicker fungi revealed a sinister green and grey vastness pushing up
through the roof of the forest and out of sight. This was the nearest of the great ring of
stones, and Carter knew he was close to the Zoog village. Renewing his fluttering
sound, he waited patiently; and was at last rewarded by an impression of many eyes
watching him. It was the Zoogs, for one sees their weird eyes long before one can
discern their small, slippery brown outlines.

Out they swarmed, from hidden burrow and honeycombed tree, till the whole dim-litten
region was alive with them. Some of the wilder ones brushed Carter unpleasantly, and
one even nipped loathsomely at his ear; but these lawless spirits were soon restrained by
their elders. The Council of Sages, recognizing the visitor, offered a gourd of fermented
sap from a haunted tree unlike the others, which had grown from a seed dropt down by
someone on the moon; and as Carter drank it ceremoniously a very strange colloquy
began. The Zoogs did not, unfortunately, know where the peak of Kadath lies, nor could
they even say whether the cold waste is in our dream world or in another. Rumours of
the Great Ones came equally from all points; and one might only say that they were
likelier to be seen on high mountain peaks than in valleys, since on such peaks they
dance reminiscently when the moon is above and the clouds beneath.

Then one very ancient Zoog recalled a thing unheard-of by the others; and said that in
Ulthar, beyond the River Skai, there still lingered the last copy of those inconceivably
old Pnakotic Manuscripts made by waking men in forgotten boreal kingdoms and borne
into the land of dreams when the hairy cannibal Gnophkehs overcame many-templed
Olathoe and slew all the heroes of the land of Lomar. Those manuscripts he said, told
much of the gods, and besides, in Ulthar there were men who had seen the signs of the
gods, and even one old priest who had scaled a great mountain to behold them dancing
by moonlight. He had failed, though his companion had succeeded and perished
namelessly.

So Randolph Carter thanked the Zoogs, who fluttered amicably and gave him another
gourd of moon-tree wine to take with him, and set out through the phosphorescent wood
for the other side, where the rushing Skai flows down from the slopes of Lerion, and
Hatheg and Nir and Ulthar dot the plain. Behind him, furtive and unseen, crept several
of the curious Zoogs; for they wished to learn what might befall him, and bear back the
legend to their people. The vast oaks grew thicker as he pushed on beyond the village,
and he looked sharply for a certain spot where they would thin somewhat, standing
quite dead or dying among the unnaturally dense fungi and the rotting mould and mushy
logs of their fallen brothers. There he would turn sharply aside, for at that spot a mighty
slab of stone rests on the forest floor; and those who have dared approach it say that it
bears an iron ring three feet wide. Remembering the archaic circle of great mossy rocks,
and what it was possibly set up for, the Zoogs do not pause near that expansive slab
with its huge ring; for they realise that all which is forgotten need not necessarily be
dead, and they would not like to see the slab rise slowly and deliberately.

Carter detoured at the proper place, and heard behind him the frightened fluttering of
some of the more timid Zoogs. He had known they would follow him, so he was not
disturbed; for one grows accustomed to the anomalies of these prying creatures. It was
twilight when he came to the edge of the wood, and the strengthening glow told him it
was the twilight of morning. Over fertile plains rolling down to the Skai he saw the
smoke of cottage chimneys, and on every hand were the hedges and ploughed fields and
thatched roofs of a peaceful land. Once he stopped at a farmhouse well for a cup of
water, and all the dogs barked affrightedly at the inconspicuous Zoogs that crept
through the grass behind. At another house, where people were stirring, he asked
questions about the gods, and whether they danced often upon Lerion; but the farmer
and his wife would only make the Elder Sign and tell him the way to Nir and Ulthar.

At noon he walked through the one broad high street of Nir, which he had once visited
and which marked his farthest former travels in this direction; and soon afterward he
came to the great stone bridge across the Skai, into whose central piece the masons had
sealed a living human sacrifice when they built it thirteen-hundred years before. Once
on the other side, the frequent presence of cats (who all arched their backs at the trailing
Zoogs) revealed the near neighborhood of Ulthar; for in Ulthar, according to an ancient
and significant law, no man may kill a cat. Very pleasant were the suburbs of Ulthar,
with their little green cottages and neatly fenced farms; and still pleasanter was the
quaint town itself, with its old peaked roofs and overhanging upper stories and
numberless chimney-pots and narrow hill streets where one can see old cobbles
whenever the graceful cats afford space enough. Carter, the cats being somewhat
dispersed by the half-seen Zoogs, picked his way directly to the modest Temple of the
Elder Ones where the priests and old records were said to be; and once within that
venerable circular tower of ivied stone--which crowns Ulthar's highest hill--he sought
out the patriarch Atal, who had been up the forbidden peak Hatheg-Kia in the stony
desert and had come down again alive.
Atal, seated on an ivory dais in a festooned shrine at the top of the temple, was fully
three centuries old; but still very keen of mind and memory. From him Carter learned
many things about the gods, but mainly that they are indeed only Earth's gods, ruling
feebly our own dreamland and having no power or habitation elsewhere. They might,
Atal said, heed a man's prayer if in good humour; but one must not think of climbing to
their onyx stronghold atop Kadath in the cold waste. It was lucky that no man knew
where Kadath towers, for the fruits of ascending it would be very grave. Atal's
companion Banni the Wise had been drawn screaming into the sky for climbing merely
the known peak of Hatheg-Kia. With unknown Kadath, if ever found, matters would be
much worse; for although Earth's gods may sometimes be surpassed by a wise mortal,
they are protected by the Other Gods from Outside, whom it is better not to discuss. At
least twice in the world's history the Other Gods set their seal upon Earth's primal
granite; once in antediluvian times, as guessed from a drawing in those parts of the
Pnakotic Manuscripts too ancient to be read, and once on Hatheg-Kia when Barzai the
Wise tried to see Earth's gods dancing by moonlight. So, Atal said, it would be much
better to let all gods alone except in tactful prayers.

Carter, though disappointed by Atal's discouraging advice and by the meagre help to be
found in the Pnakotic Manuscripts and the Seven Cryptical Books of Hsan, did not
wholly despair. First he questioned the old priest about that marvellous sunset city seen
from the railed terrace, thinking that perhaps he might find it without the gods' aid; but
Atal could tell him nothing. Probably, Atal said, the place belonged to his especial
dream world and not to the general land of vision that many know; and conceivably it
might be on another planet. In that case Earth's gods could not guide him if they would.
But this was not likely, since the stopping of the dreams shewed pretty clearly that it
was something the Great Ones wished to hide from him.

Then Carter did a wicked thing, offering his guileless host so many draughts of the
moon-wine which the Zoogs had given him that the old man became irresponsibly
talkative. Robbed of his reserve, poor Atal babbled freely of forbidden things; telling of
a great image reported by travellers as carved on the solid rock of the mountain
Ngranek, on the isle of Oriab in the Southern Sea, and hinting that it may be a likeness
which Earth's gods once wrought of their own features in the days when they danced by
moonlight on that mountain. And he hiccoughed likewise that the features of that image
are very strange, so that one might easily recognize them, and that they are sure signs of
the authentic race of the gods.

Now the use of all this in finding the gods became at once apparent to Carter. It is
known that in disguise the younger among the Great Ones often espouse the daughters
of men, so that around the borders of the cold waste wherein stands Kadath the peasants
must all bear their blood. This being so, the way to find that waste must be to see the
stone face on Ngranek and mark the features; then, having noted them with care, to
search for such features among living men. Where they are plainest and thickest, there
must the gods dwell nearest; and whatever stony waste lies back of the villages in that
place must be that wherein stands Kadath.

Much of the Great Ones might be learnt in such regions, and those with their blood
might inherit little memories very useful to a seeker. They might not know their
parentage, for the gods so dislike to be known among men that none can be found who
has seen their faces wittingly; a thing which Carter realized even as he sought to scale
Kadath. But they would have queer lofty thoughts misunderstood by their fellows, and
would sing of far places and gardens so unlike any known even in the dreamland that
common folk would call them fools; and from all this one could perhaps learn old
secrets of Kadath, or gain hints of the marvellous sunset city which the gods held secret.
And more, one might in certain cases seize some well-loved child of a god as hostage;
or even capture some young god himself, disguised and dwelling amongst men with a
comely peasant maiden as his bride.

Atal, however, did not know how to find Ngranek on its isle of Oriab; and
recommended that Carter follow the singing Skai under its bridges down to the
Southern Sea; where no burgess of Ulthar has ever been, but whence the merchants
come in boats or with long caravans of mules and two-wheeled carts. There is a great
city there, Dylath-Leen, but in Ulthar its reputation is bad because of the black three-
banked galleys that sail to it with rubies from no clearly named shore. The traders that
come from those galleys to deal with the jewellers are human, or nearly so, but the
rowers are never beheld; and it is not thought wholesome in Ulthar that merchants
should trade with black ships from unknown places whose rowers cannot be exhibited.

By the time he had given this information Atal was very drowsy, and Carter laid him
gently on a couch of inlaid ebony and gathered his long beard decorously on his chest.
As he turned to go, he observed that no suppressed fluttering followed him, and
wondered why the Zoogs had become so lax in their curious pursuit. Then he noticed all
the sleek complacent cats of Ulthar licking their chops with unusual gusto, and recalled
the spitting and caterwauling he had faintly heard, in lower parts of the temple while
absorbed in the old priest's conversation. He recalled, too, the evilly hungry way in
which an especially impudent young Zoog had regarded a small black kitten in the
cobbled street outside. And because he loved nothing on earth more than small black
kittens, he stooped and petted the sleek cats of Ulthar as they licked their chops, and did
not mourn because those inquisitive Zoogs would escort him no farther.

It was sunset now, so Carter stopped at an ancient inn on a steep little street overlooking
the lower town. And as he went out on the balcony of his room and gazed down at the
sea of red tiled roofs and cobbled ways and the pleasant fields beyond, all mellow and
magical in the slanted light, he swore that Ulthar would be a very likely place to dwell
in always, were not the memory of a greater sunset city ever goading one onward
toward unknown perils. Then twilight fell, and the pink walls of the plastered gables
turned violet and mystic, and little yellow lights floated up one by one from old lattice
windows. And sweet bells pealed in the temple tower above, and the first star winked
softly above the meadows across the Skai. With the night came song, and Carter nodded
as the lutanists praised ancient days from beyond the filigreed balconies and tesselated
courts of simple Ulthar. And there might have been sweetness even in the voices of
Ulthar's many cats, but that they were mostly heavy and silent from strange feasting.
Some of them stole off to those cryptical realms which are known only to cats and
which villagers say are on the moon's dark side, whither the cats leap from tall
housetops, but one small black kitten crept upstairs and sprang in Carter's lap to purr
and play, and curled up near his feet when he lay down at last on the little couch whose
pillows were stuffed with fragrant, drowsy herbs.

In the morning Carter joined a caravan of merchants bound for Dylath--Leen with the
spun wool of Ulthar and the cabbages of Ulthar's busy farms. And for six days they rode
with tinkling bells on the smooth road beside the Skai; stopping some nights at the inns
of little quaint fishing towns, and on other nights camping under the stars while snatches
of boatmen's songs came from the placid river. The country was very beautiful, with
green hedges and groves and picturesque peaked cottages and octagonal windmills.

On the seventh day a blur of smoke rose on the horizon ahead, and then the tall black
towers of Dylath-Leen, which is built mostly of basalt. Dylath-Leen with its thin
angular towers looks in the distance like a bit of the Giant's Causeway, and its streets
are dark and uninviting. There are many dismal sea-taverns near the myriad wharves,
and all the town is thronged with the strange seamen of every land on earth and of a few
which are said to be not on earth. Carter questioned the oddly robed men of that city
about the peak of Ngranek on the isle of Oriab, and found that they knew of it well.

Ships came from Baharna on that island, one being due to return thither in only a
month, and Ngranek is but two days' zebra-ride from that port. But few had seen the
stone face of the god, because it is on a very difficult side of Ngranek, which overlooks
only sheer crags and a valley of sinister lava. Once the gods were angered with men on
that side, and spoke of the matter to the Other Gods.

It was hard to get this information from the traders and sailors in Dylath-Leen's sea
taverns, because they mostly preferred to whisper of the black galleys. One of them was
due in a week with rubies from its unknown shore, and the townsfolk dreaded to see it
dock. The mouths of the men who came from it to trade were too wide, and the way
their turbans were humped up in two points above their foreheads was in especially bad
taste. And their shoes were the shortest and queerest ever seen in the Six Kingdoms. But
worst of all was the matter of the unseen rowers. Those three banks of oars moved too
briskly and accurately and vigorously to be comfortable, and it was not right for a ship
to stay in port for weeks while the merchants traded, yet to give no glimpse of its crew.
It was not fair to the tavern-keepers of Dylath-Leen, or to the grocers and butchers,
either; for not a scrap of provisions was ever sent aboard. The merchants took only gold
and stout black slaves from Parg across the river. That was all they ever took, those
unpleasantly featured merchants and their unseen rowers; never anything from the
butchers and grocers, but only gold and the fat black men of Parg whom they bought by
the pound. And the odours from those galleys which the south wind blew in from the
wharves are not to be described. Only by constantly smoking strong thagweed could
even the hardiest denizen of the old sea-taverns bear them. Dylath--Leen would never
have tolerated the black galleys had such rubies been obtainable elsewhere, but no mine
in all Barth's dreamland was known to produce their like.

Of these things Dylath-Leen's cosmopolitan folk chiefly gossiped whilst Carter waited
patiently for the ship from Baharna, which might bear him to the isle whereon carven
Ngranek towers lofty and barren. Meanwhile he did not fall to seek through the haunts
of far travellers for any tales they might have concerning Kadath in the cold waste or a
marvellous city of marble walls and silver fountains seen below terraces in the sunset.
Of these things, however, he learned nothing; though he once thought that a certain old
slant-eyed merchant looked queerly intelligent when the cold waste was spoken of. This
man was reputed to trade with the horrible stone villages on the icy desert plateau of
Leng, which no healthy folk visit and whose evil fires are seen at night from afar. He
was even rumoured to have dealt with that High-Priest Not To Be Described, which
wears a yellow silken mask over its face and dwells all alone in a prehistoric stone
monastery. That such a person might well have had nibbling traffick with such beings as
may conceivably dwell in the cold waste was not to be doubted, but Carter soon found
that it was no use questioning him.

Then the black galley slipped into the harbour past the basalt wale and the tall
lighthouse, silent and alien, and with a strange stench that the south wind drove into the
town. Uneasiness rustled through the taverns along that waterfront, and after a while the
dark wide--mouthed merchants with humped turbans and short feet clumped steathily
ashore to seek the bazaars of the jewellers. Carter observed them closely, and disliked
them more the longer he looked at them. Then he saw them drive the stout black men of
Parg up the gangplank grunting and sweating into that singular galley, and wondered in
what lands--or if in any lands at all--those fat pathetic creatures might be destined to
serve.

And on the third evening of that galley's stay one of the uncomfortable merchants spoke
to him, smirking sinfully and hinting of what he had heard in the taverns of Carter's
quest. He appeared to have knowledge too secret for public telling; and although the
sound of his voice was unbearably hateful, Carter felt that the lore of so far a traveller
must not be overlooked. He bade him therefore be his guest in locked chambers above,
and drew out the last of the Zoogs' moon-wine to loosen his tongue. The strange
merchant drank heavily, but smirked unchanged by the draught. Then he drew forth a
curious bottle with wine of his own, and Carter saw that the bottle was a single
hollowed ruby, grotesquely carved in patterns too fabulous to be comprehended. He
offered his wine to his host, and though Carter took only the least sip, he felt the
dizziness of space and the fever of unimagined jungles. All the while the guest had been
smiling more and more broadly, and as Carter slipped into blankness the last thing he
saw was that dark odious face convulsed with evil laughter and something quite
unspeakable where one of the two frontal puffs of that orange turban had become
disarranged with the shakings of that epileptic mirth.

Carter next had consciousness amidst horrible odours beneath a tent--like awning on the
deck of a ship, with the marvellous coasts of the Southern Sea flying by in unnatural
swiftness. He was not chained, but three of the dark sardonic merchants stood grinning
nearby, and the sight of those humps in their turbans made him almost as faint as did the
stench that filtered up through the sinister hatches. He saw slip past him the glorious
lands and cities of which a fellow-dreamer of earth--a lighthouse-keeper in ancient
Kingsport--had often discoursed in the old days, and recognized the templed terraces of
Zak, abode of forgotten dreams; the spires of infamous Thalarion, that daemon-city of a
thousand wonders where the eidolon Lathi reigns; the charnel gardens of Zura, land of
pleasures unattained, and the twin headlands of crystal, meeting above in a resplendent
arch, which guard the harbour of Sona-Nyl, blessed land of fancy.

Past all these gorgeous lands the malodourous ship flew unwholesomely, urged by the
abnormal strokes of those unseen rowers below. And before the day was done Carter
saw that the steersman could have no other goal than the Basalt Pillars of the West,
beyond which simple folk say splendid Cathuria lies, but which wise dreamers well
know are the gates of a monstrous cataract wherein the oceans of earth's dreamland drop
wholly to abysmal nothingness and shoot through the empty spaces toward other worlds
and other stars and the awful voids outside the ordered universe where the daemon
sultan Azathoth gnaws hungrily in chaos amid pounding and piping and the hellish
dancing of the Other Gods, blind, voiceless, tenebrous, and mindless, with their soul
and messenger Nyarlathotep.

Meanwhile the three sardonic merchants would give no word of their intent, though
Carter well knew that they must be leagued with those who wished to hold him from his
quest. It is understood in the land of dream that the Other Gods have many agents
moving among men; and all these agents, whether wholly human or slightly less than
human, are eager to work the will of those blind and mindless things in return for the
favour of their hideous soul and messenger, the crawling chaos Nyarlathotep. So Carter
inferred that the merchants of the humped turbans, hearing of his daring search for the
Great Ones in their castle of Kadath, had decided to take him away and deliver him to
Nyarlathotep for whatever nameless bounty might be offered for such a prize. What
might be the land of those merchants in our known universe or in the eldritch spaces
outside, Carter could not guess; nor could he imagine at what hellish trysting-place they
would meet the crawling chaos to give him up and claim their reward. He knew,
however, that no beings as nearly human as these would dare approach the ultimate
nighted throne of the daemon Azathoth in the formless central void.

At the set of sun the merchants licked their excessively wide lips and glared hungrily
and one of them went below and returned from some hidden and offensive cabin with a
pot and basket of plates. Then they squatted close together beneath the awning and ate
the smoking meat that was passed around. But when they gave Carter a portion, he
found something very terrible in the size and shape of it; so that he turned even paler
than before and cast that portion into the sea when no eye was on him. And again he
thought of those unseen rowers beneath, and of the suspicious nourishment from which
their far too mechanical strength was derived.

It was dark when the galley passed betwixt the Basalt Pillars of the West and the sound
of the ultimate cataract swelled portentous from ahead. And the spray of that cataract
rose to obscure the stars, and the deck grew damp, and the vessel reeled in the surging
current of the brink. Then with a queer whistle and plunge the leap was taken, and
Carter felt the terrors of nightmare as earth fell away and the great boat shot silent and
comet-like into planetary space. Never before had he known what shapeless black
things lurk and caper and flounder all through the aether, leering and grinning at such
voyagers as may pass, and sometimes feeling about with slimy paws when some
moving object excites their curiosity. These are the nameless larvae of the Other Gods,
and like them are blind and without mind, and possessed of singular hungers and thirsts.

But that offensive galley did not aim as far as Carter had feared, for he soon saw that the
helmsman was steering a course directly for the moon. The moon was a crescent shining
larger and larger as they approached it, and shewing its singular craters and peaks
uncomfortably. The ship made for the edge, and it soon became clear that its destination
was that secret and mysterious side which is always turned away from earth, and which
no fully human person, save perhaps the dreamer Snireth-Ko, has ever beheld. The close
aspect of the moon as the galley drew near proved very disturbing to Carter, and he did
not like the size and shape of the ruins which crumbled here and there. The dead
temples on the mountains were so placed that they could have glorified no suitable or
wholesome gods, and in the symmetries of the broken columns there seemed to be some
dark and inner meaning which did not invite solution. And what the structure and
proportions of the olden worshippers could have been, Carter steadily refused to
conjecture.

When the ship rounded the edge, and sailed over those lands unseen by man, there
appeared in the queer landscape certain signs of life, and Carter saw many low, broad,
round cottages in fields of grotesque whitish fungi. He noticed that these cottages had
no windows, and thought that their shape suggested the huts of Esquimaux. Then he
glimpsed the oily waves of a sluggish sea, and knew that the voyage was once more to
be by water--or at least through some liquid. The galley struck the surface with a
peculiar sound, and the odd elastic way the waves received it was very perplexing to
Carter.

They now slid along at great speed, once passing and hailing another galley of kindred
form, but generally seeing nothing but that curious sea and a sky that was black and
star-strewn even though the sun shone scorchingly in it.

There presently rose ahead the jagged hills of a leprous-looking coast, and Carter saw
the thick unpleasant grey towers of a city. The way they leaned and bent, the manner in
which they were clustered, and the fact that they had no windows at all, was very
disturbing to the prisoner; and he bitterly mourned the folly which had made him sip the
curious wine of that merchant with the humped turban. As the coast drew nearer, and
the hideous stench of that city grew stronger, he saw upon the jagged hills many forests,
some of whose trees he recognized as akin to that solitary moon-tree in the enchanted
wood of earth, from whose sap the small brown Zoogs ferment their curious wine.

Carter could now distinguish moving figures on the noisome wharves ahead, and the
better he saw them the worse he began to fear and detest them. For they were not men at
all, or even approximately men, but great greyish-white slippery things which could
expand and contract at will, and whose principal shape--though it often changed--was
that of a sort of toad without any eyes, but with a curious vibrating mass of short pink
tentacles on the end of its blunt, vague snout. These objects were waddling busily about
the wharves, moving bales and crates and boxes with preternatural strength, and now
and then hopping on or off some anchored galley with long oars in their forepaws. And
now and then one would appear driving a herd of clumping slaves, which indeed were
approximate human beings with wide mouths like those merchants who traded in
Dylath-Leen; only these herds, being without turbans or shoes or clothing, did not seem
so very human after all. Some of the slaves--the fatter ones, whom a sort of overseer
would pinch experimentally--were unloaded from ships and nailed in crates which
workers pushed into the low warehouses or loaded on great lumbering vans.

Once a van was hitched and driven off, and the fabulous thing which drew it was such
that Carter gasped, even after having seen the other monstrosities of that hateful place.
Now and then a small herd of slaves dressed and turbaned like the dark merchants
would be driven aboard a galley, followed by a great crew of the slippery toad-things as
officers, navigators, and rowers. And Carter saw that the almost--human creatures were
reserved for the more ignominious kinds of servitude which required no strength, such
as steering and cooking, fetching and carrying, and bargaining with men on the earth or
other planets where they traded. These creatures must have been convenient on earth,
for they were truly not unlike men when dressed and carefully shod and turbaned, and
could haggle in the shops of men without embarrassment or curious explanations. But
most of them, unless lean or ill-favoured, were unclothed and packed in crates and
drawn off in lumbering lorries by fabulous things. Occasionally other beings were
unloaded and crated; some very like these semi-humans, some not so similar, and some
not similar at all. And he wondered if any of the poor stout black men of Parg were left
to be unloaded and crated and shipped inland in those obnoxious drays.

When the galley landed at a greasy-looking quay of spongy rock a nightmare horde of
toad-things wiggled out of the hatches, and two of them seized Carter and dragged him
ashore. The smell and aspect of that city are beyond telling, and Carter held only
scattered images of the tiled streets and black doorways and endless precipices of grey
vertical walls without windows. At length he was dragged within a low doorway and
made to climb infinite steps in pitch blackness. It was, apparently, all one to the toad-
things whether it were light or dark. The odour of the place was intolerable, and when
Carter was locked into a chamber and left alone he scarcely had strength to crawl
around and ascertain its form and dimensions. It was circular, and about twenty feet
across.

From then on time ceased to exist. At intervals food was pushed in, but Carter would
not touch it. What his fate would be, he did not know; but he felt that he was held for
the coming of that frightful soul and messenger of infinity's Other Gods, the crawling
chaos Nyarlathotep. Finally, after an unguessed span of hours or days, the great stone
door swung wide again, and Carter was shoved down the stairs and out into the red-
litten streets of that fearsome city. It was night on the moon, and all through the town
were stationed slaves bearing torches.

In a detestable square a sort of procession was formed; ten of the toad-things and
twenty-four almost human torch-bearers, eleven on either side, and one each before and
behind. Carter was placed in the middle of the line; five toad-things ahead and five
behind, and one almost-human torch-bearer on either side of him. Certain of the toad-
things produced disgustingly carven flutes of ivory and made loathsome sounds. To that
hellish piping the column advanced out of the tiled streets and into nighted plains of
obscene fungi, soon commencing to climb one of the lower and more gradual hills that
lay behind the city. That on some frightful slope or blasphemous plateau the crawling
chaos waited, Carter could not doubt; and he wished that the suspense might soon be
over. The whining of those impious flutes was shocking, and he would have given
worlds for some even half-normal sound; but these toad-things had no voices, and the
slaves did not talk.

Then through that star-specked darkness there did come a normal sound. It rolled from
the higher hills, and from all the jagged peaks around it was caught up and echoed in a
swelling pandaemoniac chorus. It was the midnight yell of the cat, and Carter knew at
last that the old village folk were right when they made low guesses about the cryptical
realms which are known only to cats, and to which the elders among cats repair by
stealth nocturnally, springing from high housetops. Verily, it is to the moon's dark side
that they go to leap and gambol on the hills and converse with ancient shadows, and
here amidst that column of foetid things Carter heard their homely, friendly cry, and
thought of the steep roofs and warm hearths and little lighted windows of home.

Now much of the speech of cats was known to Randolph Carter, and in this far terrible
place he uttered the cry that was suitable. But that he need not have done, for even as his
lips opened he heard the chorus wax and draw nearer, and saw swift shadows against
the stars as small graceful shapes leaped from hill to hill in gathering legions. The call
of the clan had been given, and before the foul procession had time even to be
frightened a cloud of smothering fur and a phalanx of murderous claws were tidally and
tempestuously upon it. The flutes stopped, and there were shrieks in the night. Dying
almost-humans screamed, and cats spit and yowled and roared, but the toad-things made
never a sound as their stinking green ichor oozed fatally upon that porous earth with the
obscene fungi.

It was a stupendous sight while the torches lasted, and Carter had never before seen so
many cats. Black, grey, and white; yellow, tiger, and mixed; common, Persian, and
Marix; Thibetan, Angora, and Egyptian; all were there in the fury of battle, and there
hovered over them some trace of that profound and inviolate sanctity which made their
goddess great in the temples of Bubastis. They would leap seven strong at the throat of
an almost-human or the pink tentacled snout of a toad-thing and drag it down savagely
to the fungous plain, where myriads of their fellows would surge over it and into it with
the frenzied claws and teeth of a divine battle-fury. Carter had seized a torch from a
stricken slave, but was soon overborne by the surging waves of his loyal defenders.
Then he lay in the utter blackness hearing the clangour of war and the shouts of the
victors, and feeling the soft paws of his friends as they rushed to and fro over him in the
fray.

At last awe and exhaustion closed his eyes, and when he opened them again it was upon
a strange scene. The great shining disc of the earth, thirteen times greater than that of
the moon as we see it, had risen with floods of weird light over the lunar landscape; and
across all those leagues of wild plateau and ragged crest there squatted one endless sea
of cats in orderly array. Circle on circle they reached, and two or three leaders out of the
ranks were licking his face and purring to him consolingly. Of the dead slaves and toad-
things there were not many signs, but Carter thought he saw one bone a little way off in
the open space between him and the warriors.

Carter now spoke with the leaders in the soft language of cats, and learned that his
ancient friendship with the species was well known and often spoken of in the places
where cats congregate. He had not been unmarked in Ulthar when he passed through,
and the sleek old cats had remembered how he patted them after they had attended to
the hungry Zoogs who looked evilly at a small black kitten. And they recalled, too, how
he had welcomed the very little kitten who came to see him at the inn, and how he had
given it a saucer of rich cream in the morning before he left. The grandfather of that
very little kitten was the leader of the army now assembled, for he had seen the evil
procession from a far hill and recognized the prisoner as a sworn friend of his kind on
earth and in the land of dream.

A yowl now came from the farther peak, and the old leader paused abruptly in his
conversation. It was one of the army's outposts, stationed on the highest of the
mountains to watch the one foe which Earth's cats fear; the very large and peculiar cats
from Saturn, who for some reason have not been oblivious of the charm of our moon's
dark side. They are leagued by treaty with the evil toad-things, and are notoriously
hostile to our earthly cats; so that at this juncture a meeting would have been a
somewhat grave matter.
After a brief consultation of generals, the cats rose and assumed a closer formation,
crowding protectingly around Carter and preparing to take the great leap through space
back to the housetops of our earth and its dreamland. The old field-marshal advised
Carter to let himself be borne along smoothly and passively in the massed ranks of furry
leapers, and told him how to spring when the rest sprang and land gracefully when the
rest landed. He also offered to deposit him in any spot he desired, and Carter decided on
the city of Dylath-Leen whence the black galley had set out; for he wished to sail thence
for Oriab and the carven crest Ngranek, and also to warn the people of the city to have
no more traffick with black galleys, if indeed that traffick could be tactfully and
judiciously broken off. Then, upon a signal, the cats all leaped gracefully with their
friend packed securely in their midst; while in a black cave on an unhallowed summit of
the moon-mountains still vainly waited the crawling chaos Nyarlathotep.

The leap of the cats through space was very swift; and being surrounded by his
companions Carter did not see this time the great black shapelessnesses that lurk and
caper and flounder in the abyss. Before he fully realised what had happened he was
back in his familiar room at the inn at Dylath-Leen, and the stealthy, friendly cats were
pouring out of the window in streams. The old leader from Ulthar was the last to leave,
and as Carter shook his paw he said he would be able to get home by cockcrow. When
dawn came, Carter went downstairs and learned that a week had elapsed since his
capture and leaving. There was still nearly a fortnight to wait for the ship bound toward
Oriab, and during that time he said what he could against the black galleys and their
infamous ways. Most of the townsfolk believed him; yet so fond were the jewellers of
great rubies that none would wholly promise to cease trafficking with the wide-mouthed
merchants. If aught of evil ever befalls Dylath-Leen through such traffick, it will not be
his fault.

In about a week the desiderate ship put in by the black wale and tall lighthouse, and
Carter was glad to see that she was a barque of wholesome men, with painted sides and
yellow lateen sails and a grey captain in silken robes. Her cargo was the fragrant resin
of Oriab's inner groves, and the delicate pottery baked by the artists of Baharna, and the
strange little figures carved from Ngranek's ancient lava. For this they were paid in the
wool of Ulthar and the iridescent textiles of Hatheg and the ivory that the black men
carve across the river in Parg. Carter made arrangements with the captain to go to
Baharna and was told that the voyage would take ten days. And during his week of
waiting he talked much with that captain of Ngranek, and was told that very few had
seen the carven face thereon; but that most travellers are content to learn its legends
from old people and lava--gatherers and image-makers in Baharna and afterward say in
their far homes that they have indeed beheld it. The captain was not even sure that any
person now living had beheld that carven face, for the wrong side of Ngranek is very
difficult and barren and sinister, and there are rumours of caves near the peak wherein
dwell the night-gaunts. But the captain did not wish to say just what a night-gaunt might
be like, since such cattle are known to haunt most persistently the dreams of those who
think too often of them. Then Carter asked that captain about unknown Kadath in the
cold waste, and the marvellous sunset city, but of these the good man could truly tell
nothing.

Carter sailed out of Dylath-Leen one early morning when the tide turned, and saw the
first rays of sunrise on the thin angular towers of that dismal basalt town. And for two
days they sailed eastward in sight of green coasts, and saw often the pleasant fishing
towns that climbed up steeply with their red roofs and chimney-pots from old dreaming
wharves and beaches where nets lay drying. But on the third day they turned sharply
south where the roll of water was stronger, and soon passed from sight of any land. On
the fifth day the sailors were nervous, but the captain apologized for their fears, saying
that the ship was about to pass over the weedy walls and broken columns of a sunken
city too old for memory, and that when the water was clear one could see so many
moving shadows in that deep place that simple folk disliked it. He admitted, moreover,
that many ships had been lost in that part of the sea; having been hailed when quite
close to it, but never seen again.

That night the moon was very bright, and one could see a great way down in the water.
There was so little wind that the ship could not move much, and the ocean was very
calm. Looking over the rail Carter saw many fathoms deep the dome of the great
temple, and in front of it an avenue of unnatural sphinxes leading to what was once a
public square. Dolphins sported merrily in and out of the ruins, and porpoises revelled
clumsily here and there, sometimes coming to the surface and leaping clear out of the
sea. As the ship drifted on a little the floor of the ocean rose in hills, and one could
clearly mark the lines of ancient climbing streets and the washed-down walls of myriad
little houses.

Then the suburbs appeared, and finally a great lone building on a hill, of simpler
architecture than the other structures, and in much better repair. It was dark and low and
covered four sides of a square, with a tower at each corner, a paved court in the centre,
and small curious round windows all over it. Probably it was of basalt, though weeds
draped the greater part; and such was its lonely and impressive place on that far hill that
it may have been a temple or a monastery. Some phosphorescent fish inside it gave the
small round windows an aspect of shining, and Carter did not blame the sailors much
for their fears. Then by the watery moonlight he noticed an odd high monolith in the
middle of that central court, and saw that something was tied to it. And when after
getting a telescope from the captain's cabin he saw that that bound thing was a sailor in
the silk robes of Oriab, head downward and without any eyes, he was glad that a rising
breeze soon took the ship ahead to more healthy parts of the sea.

The next day they spoke with a ship with violet sails bound for Zar, in the land of
forgotten dreams, with bulbs of strange coloured lilies for cargo. And on the evening of
the eleventh day they came in sight of the isle of Oriab with Ngranek rising jagged and
snow-crowned in the distance. Oriab is a very great isle, and its port of Baharna a
mighty city. The wharves of Baharna are of porphyry, and the city rises in great stone
terraces behind them, having streets of steps that are frequently arched over by buildings
and the bridges between buildings. There is a great canal which goes under the whole
city in a tunnel with granite gates and leads to the inland lake of Yath, on whose farther
shore are the vast clay-brick ruins of a primal city whose name is not remembered. As
the ship drew into the harbour at evening the twin beacons Thon and Thal gleamed a
welcome, and in all the million windows of Baharna's terraces mellow lights peeped out
quietly and gradually as the stars peep out overhead in the dusk, till that steep and
climbing seaport became a glittering constellation hung between the stars of heaven and
the reflections of those stars in the still harbour.

The captain, after landing, made Carter a guest in his own small house on the shores of
Yath where the rear of the town slopes down to it; and his wife and servants brought
strange toothsome foods for the traveller's delight. And in the days after that Carter
asked for rumours and legends of Ngranek in all the taverns and public places where
lava-gatherers and image-makers meet, but could find no one who had been up the
higher slopes or seen the carven face. Ngranek was a hard mountain with only an
accursed valley behind it, and besides, one could never depend on the certainty that
night-gaunts are altogether fabulous.

When the captain sailed hack to Dylath-Leen Carter took quarters in an ancient tavern
opening on an alley of steps in the original part of the town, which is built of brick and
resembles the ruins of Yath's farther shore. Here he laid his plans for the ascent of
Ngranek, and correlated all that he had learned from the lava-gatherers about the roads
thither. The keeper of the tavern was a very old man, and had heard so many legends
that he was a great help. He even took Carter to an upper room in that ancient house and
shewed him a crude picture which a traveller had scratched on the clay wall in the old
days when men were bolder and less reluctant to visit Ngranek's higher slopes. The old
tavern-keeper's great-grandfather had heard from his great--grandfather that the traveller
who scratched that picture had climbed Ngranek and seen the carven face, here drawing
it for others to behold, but Carter had very great doubts, since the large rough features
on the wall were hasty and careless, and wholly overshadowed by a crowd of little
companion shapes in the worst possible taste, with horns and wings and claws and
curling tails.

At last, having gained all the information he was likely to gain in the taverns and public
places of Baharna, Carter hired a zebra and set out one morning on the road by Yath's
shore for those inland parts wherein towers stony Ngranek. On his right were rolling
hills and pleasant orchards and neat little stone farmhouses, and he was much reminded
of those fertile fields that flank the Skai. By evening he was near the nameless ancient
ruins on Yath's farther shore, and though old lava-gatherers had warned him not to camp
there at night, he tethered his zebra to a curious pillar before a crumbling wall and laid
his blanket in a sheltered corner beneath some carvings whose meaning none could
decipher. Around him he wrapped another blanket, for the nights are cold in Oriab; and
when upon awaking once he thought he felt the wings of some insect brushing his face
he covered his head altogether and slept in peace till roused by the magah birds in
distant resin groves.

The sun had just come up over the great slope whereon leagues of primal brick
foundations and worn walls and occasional cracked pillars and pedestals stretched down
desolate to the shore of Yath, and Carter looked about for his tethered zebra. Great was
his dismay to see that docile beast stretched prostrate beside the curious pillar to which
it had been tied, and still greater was he vexed on finding that the steed was quite dead,
with its blood all sucked away through a singular wound in its throat. His pack had been
disturbed, and several shiny knickknacks taken away, and all round on the dusty soil
were great webbed footprints for which he could not in any way account. The legends
and warnings of lava-gatherers occurred to him, and he thought of what had brushed his
face in the night. Then he shouldered his pack and strode on toward Ngranek, though
not without a shiver when he saw close to him as the highway passed through the ruins
a great gaping arch low in the wall of an old temple, with steps leading down into
darkness farther than he could peer.
His course now lay uphill through wilder and partly wooded country, and he saw only
the huts of charcoal-burners and the camp of those who gathered resin from the groves.
The whole air was fragrant with balsam, and all the magah birds sang blithely as they
flashed their seven colours in the sun. Near sunset he came on a new camp of lava--
gatherers returning with laden sacks from Ngranek's lower slopes; and here he also
camped, listening to the songs and tales of the men, and overhearing what they
whispered about a companion they had lost. He had climbed high to reach a mass of
fine lava above him, and at nightfall did not return to his fellows. When they looked for
him the next day they found only his turban, nor was there any sign on the crags below
that he had fallen. They did not search any more, because the old man among them said
it would be of no use.

No one ever found what the night-gaunts took, though those beasts themselves were so
uncertain as to be almost fabulous. Carter asked them if night-gaunts sucked blood and
liked shiny things and left webbed footprints, but they all shook their heads negatively
and seemed frightened at his making such an inquiry. When he saw how taciturn they
had become he asked them no more, but went to sleep in his blanket.

The next day he rose with the lava-gatherers and exchanged farewells as they rode west
and he rode east on a zebra he bought of them. Their older men gave him blessings and
warnings, and told him he had better not climb too high on Ngranek, but while he
thanked them heartily he was in no wise dissuaded. For still did he feel that he must find
the gods on unknown Kadath; and win from them a way to that haunting and marvellous
city in the sunset. By noon, after a long uphill ride, he came upon some abandoned brick
villages of the hill-people who had once dwelt thus close to Ngranek and carved images
from its smooth lava. Here they had dwelt till the days of the old tavernkeeper's
grandfather, but about that time they felt that their presence was disliked. Their homes
had crept even up the mountain's slope, and the higher they built the more people they
would miss when the sun rose. At last they decided it would be better to leave
altogether, since things were sometimes glimpsed in the darkness which no one could
interpret favourably; so in the end all of them went down to the sea and dwelt in
Baharna, inhabiting a very old quarter and teaching their sons the old art of image-
making which to this day they carry on. It was from these children of the exiled hill-
people that Carter had heard the best tales about Ngranek when searching through
Baharna's ancient taverns.

All this time the great gaunt side of Ngranek was looming up higher and higher as
Carter approached it. There were sparse trees on the lower slopes and feeble shrubs
above them, and then the bare hideous rock rose spectral into the sky, to mix with frost
and ice and eternal snow. Carter could see the rifts and ruggedness of that sombre stone,
and did not welcome the prospect of climbing it. In places there were solid streams of
lava, and scoriac heaps that littered slopes and ledges. Ninety aeons ago, before even the
gods had danced upon its pointed peak, that mountain had spoken with fire and roared
with the voices of the inner thunders. Now it towered all silent and sinister, bearing on
the hidden side that secret titan image whereof rumour told. And there were caves in
that mountain, which might be empty and alone with elder darkness, or might--if legend
spoke truly--hold horrors of a form not to be surmised.

The ground sloped upward to the foot of Ngranek, thinly covered with scrub oaks and
ash trees, and strewn with bits of rock, lava, and ancient cinder. There were the charred
embers of many camps, where the lava-gatherers were wont to stop, and several rude
altars which they had built either to propitiate the Great Ones or to ward off what they
dreamed of in Ngranek's high passes and labyrinthine caves. At evening Carter reached
the farthermost pile of embers and camped for the night, tethering his zebra to a sapling
and wrapping himself well in his blankets before going to sleep. And all through the
night a voonith howled distantly from the shore of some hidden pool, but Carter felt no
fear of that amphibious terror, since he had been told with certainty that not one of them
dares even approach the slope of Ngranek.

In the clear sunshine of morning Carter began the long ascent, taking his zebra as far as
that useful beast could go, but tying it to a stunted ash tree when the floor of the thin
wood became too steep. Thereafter he scrambled up alone; first through the forest with
its ruins of old villages in overgrown clearings, and then over the tough grass where
anaemic shrubs grew here and there. He regretted coming clear of the trees, since the
slope was very precipitous and the whole thing rather dizzying. At length he began to
discern all the countryside spread out beneath him whenever he looked about; the
deserted huts of the image-makers, the groves of resin trees and the camps of those who
gathered from them, the woods where prismatic magahs nest and sing, and even a hint
very far away of the shores of Yath and of those forbidding ancient ruins whose name is
forgotten. He found it best not to look around, and kept on climbing and climbing till
the shrubs became very sparse and there was often nothing but the tough grass to cling
to.

Then the soil became meagre, with great patches of bare rock cropping out, and now
and then the nest of a condor in a crevice. Finally there was nothing at all but the bare
rock, and had it not been very rough and weathered, he could scarcely have ascended
farther. Knobs, ledges, and pinnacles, however, helped greatly; and it was cheering to
see occasionally the sign of some lava-gatherer scratched clumsily in the friable stone,
and know that wholesome human creatures had been there before him. After a certain
height the presence of man was further shewn by handholds and footholds hewn where
they were needed, and by little quarries and excavations where some choice vein or
stream of lava had been found. In one place a narrow ledge had been chopped
artificially to an especially rich deposit far to the right of the main line of ascent. Once
or twice Carter dared to look around, and was almost stunned by the spread of
landscape below. All the island betwixt him and the coast lay open to his sight, with
Baharna's stone terraces and the smoke of its chimneys mystical in the distance. And
beyond that the illimitable Southern Sea with all its curious secrets.

Thus far there had been much winding around the mountain, so that the farther and
carven side was still hidden. Carter now saw a ledge running upward and to the left
which seemed to head the way he wished, and this course he took in the hope that it
might prove continuous. After ten minutes he saw it was indeed no cul-de-sac, but that
it led steeply on in an arc which would, unless suddenly interrupted or deflected, bring
him after a few hours' climbing to that unknown southern slope overlooking the desolate
crags and the accursed valley of lava. As new country came into view below him he saw
that it was bleaker and wilder than those seaward lands he had traversed. The
mountain's side, too, was somewhat different; being here pierced by curious cracks and
caves not found on the straighter route he had left. Some of these were above him and
some beneath him, all opening on sheerly perpendicular cliffs and wholly unreachable
by the feet of man. The air was very cold now, but so hard was the climbing that he did
not mind it. Only the increasing rarity bothered him, and he thought that perhaps it was
this which had turned the heads of other travellers and excited those absurd tales of
night-gaunts whereby they explained the loss of such climbers as fell from these
perilous paths. He was not much impressed by travellers' tales, but had a good curved
scimitar in case of any trouble. All lesser thoughts were lost in the wish to see that
carven face which might set him on the track of the gods atop unknown Kadath.

At last, in the fearsome iciness of upper space, he came round fully to the hidden side of
Ngranek and saw in infinite gulfs below him the lesser crags and sterile abysses of lava
which marked olden wrath of the Great Ones. There was unfolded, too, a vast expanse
of country to the south; but it was a desert land without fair fields or cottage chimneys,
and seemed to have no ending. No trace of the sea was visible on this side, for Oriab is a
great island. Black caverns and odd crevices were still numerous on the sheer vertical
cliffs, but none of them was accessible to a climber. There now loomed aloft a great
beetling mass which hampered the upward view, and Carter was for a moment shaken
with doubt lest it prove impassable. Poised in windy insecurity miles above earth, with
only space and death on one side and only slippery walls of rock on the other, he knew
for a moment the fear that makes men shun Ngranek's hidden side. He could not turn
round, yet the sun was already low. If there were no way aloft, the night would find him
crouching there still, and the dawn would not find him at all.

But there was a way, and he saw it in due season. Only a very expert dreamer could
have used those imperceptible footholds, yet to Carter they were sufficient.
Surmounting now the outward-hanging rock, he found the slope above much easier than
that below, since a great glacier's melting had left a generous space with loam and
ledges. To the left a precipice dropped straight from unknown heights to unknown
depths, with a cave's dark mouth just out of reach above him. Elsewhere, however, the
mountain slanted back strongly, and even gave him space to lean and rest.

He felt from the chill that he must be near the snow line, and looked up to see what
glittering pinnacles might be shining in that late ruddy sunlight. Surely enough, there
was the snow uncounted thousands of feet above, and below it a great beetling crag like
that he had just climbed; hanging there forever in bold outline. And when he saw that
crag he gasped and cried out aloud, and clutched at the jagged rock in awe; for the titan
bulge had not stayed as earth's dawn had shaped it, but gleamed red and stupendous in
the sunset with the carved and polished features of a god.

Stern and terrible shone that face that the sunset lit with fire. How vast it was no mind
can ever measure, but Carter knew at once that man could never have fashioned it. It
was a god chiselled by the hands of the gods, and it looked down haughty and majestic
upon the seeker. Rumour had said it was strange and not to be mistaken, and Carter saw
that it was indeed so; for those long narrow eyes and long-lobed ears, and that thin nose
and pointed chin, all spoke of a race that is not of men but of gods.

He clung overawed in that lofty and perilous eyrie, even though it was this which he had
expected and come to find; for there is in a god's face more of marvel than prediction
can tell, and when that face is vaster than a great temple and seen looking downward at
sunset in the scyptic silences of that upper world from whose dark lava it was divinely
hewn of old, the marvel is so strong that none may escape it.
Here, too, was the added marvel of recognition; for although he had planned to search
all dreamland over for those whose likeness to this face might mark them as the god's
children, he now knew that he need not do so. Certainly, the great face carven on that
mountain was of no strange sort, but the kin of such as he had seen often in the taverns
of the seaport Celephais which lies in Ooth-Nargai beyond the Tanarian Hills and is
ruled over by that King Kuranes whom Carter once knew in waking life. Every year
sailors with such a face came in dark ships from the north to trade their onyx for the
carved jade and spun gold and little red singing birds of Celephais, and it was clear that
these could be no others than the half-gods he sought. Where they dwelt, there must the
cold waste lie close, and within it unknown Kadath and its onyx castle for the Great
Ones. So to Celephais he must go, far distant from the isle of Oriab, and in such parts as
would take him back to Dylath-Teen and up the Skai to the bridge by Nir, and again
into the enchanted wood of the Zoogs, whence the way would bend northward through
the garden lands by Oukranos to the gilded spires of Thran, where he might find a
galleon bound over the Cerenarian Sea.

But dusk was now thick, and the great carven face looked down even sterner in shadow.
Perched on that ledge night found the seeker; and in the blackness he might neither go
down nor go up, but only stand and cling and shiver in that narrow place till the day
came, praying to keep awake lest sleep loose his hold and send him down the dizzy
miles of air to the crags and sharp rocks of the accursed valley. The stars came out, but
save for them there was only black nothingness in his eyes; nothingness leagued with
death, against whose beckoning he might do no more than cling to the rocks and lean
back away from an unseen brink. The last thing of earth that he saw in the gloaming
was a condor soaring close to the westward precipice beside him, and darting screaming
away when it came near the cave whose mouth yawned just out of reach.

Suddenly, without a warning sound in the dark, Carter felt his curved scimitar drawn
stealthily out of his belt by some unseen hand. Then he heard it clatter down over the
rocks below. And between him and the Milky Way he thought he saw a very terrible
outline of something noxiously thin and horned and tailed and bat-winged. Other things,
too, had begun to blot out patches of stars west of him, as if a flock of vague entities
were flapping thickly and silently out of that inaccessible cave in the face of the
precipice. Then a sort of cold rubbery arm seized his neck and something else seized his
feet, and he was lifted inconsiderately up and swung about in space. Another minute
and the stars were gone, and Carter knew that the night-gaunts had got him.

They bore him breathless into that cliffside cavern and through monstrous labyrinths
beyond. When he struggled, as at first he did by instinct, they tickled him with
deliberation. They made no sound at all themselves, and even their membranous wings
were silent. They were frightfully cold and damp and slippery, and their paws kneaded
one detestably. Soon they were plunging hideously downward through inconceivable
abysses in a whirling, giddying, sickening rush of dank, tomb-like air; and Carter felt
they were shooting into the ultimate vortex of shrieking and daemonic madness. He
screamed again and again, but whenever he did so the black paws tickled him with
greater subtlety. Then he saw a sort of grey phosphorescence about, and guessed they
were coming even to that inner world of subterrene horror of which dim legends tell,
and which is litten only by the pale death--fire wherewith reeks the ghoulish air and the
primal mists of the pits at earth's core.
At last far below him he saw faint lines of grey and ominous pinnacles which he knew
must be the fabled Peaks of Throk. Awful and sinister they stand in the haunted disc of
sunless and eternal depths; higher than man may reckon, and guarding terrible valleys
where the Dholes crawl and burrow nastily. But Carter preferred to look at them than at
his captors, which were indeed shocking and uncouth black things with smooth, oily,
whale-like surfaces, unpleasant horns that curved inward toward each other, bat wings
whose beating made no sound, ugly prehensile paws, and barbed tails that lashed
needlessly and disquietingly. And worst of all, they never spoke or laughed, and never
smiled because they had no faces at all to smile with, but only a suggestive blankness
where a face ought to be. All they ever did was clutch and fly and tickle; that was the
way of night-gaunts.

As the band flew lower the Peaks of Throk rose grey and towering on all sides, and one
saw clearly that nothing lived on that austere and impressive granite of the endless
twilight. At still lower levels the death-fires in the air gave out, and one met only the
primal blackness of the void save aloft where the thin peaks stood out goblin-like. Soon
the peaks were very far away, and nothing about but great rushing winds with the
dankness of nethermost grottoes in them. Then in the end the night-gaunts landed on a
floor of unseen things which felt like layers of bones, and left Carter all alone in that
black valley. To bring him thither was the duty of the night-gaunts that guard Ngranek;
and this done, they flapped away silently. When Carter tried to trace their flight he
found he could not, since even the Peaks of Throk had faded out of sight. There was
nothing anywhere but blackness and horror and silence and bones.

Now Carter knew from a certain source that he was in the vale of Pnoth, where crawl
and burrow the enormous Dholes; but he did not know what to expect, because no one
has ever seen a Dhole or even guessed what such a thing may be like. Dholes are known
only by dim rumour, from the rustling they make amongst mountains of bones and the
slimy touch they have when they wriggle past one. They cannot be seen because they
creep only in the dark. Carter did not wish to meet a Dhole, so listened intently for any
sound in the unknown depths of bones about him. Even in this fearsome place he had a
plan and an objective, for whispers of Pnoth were not unknown to one with whom he
had talked much in the old days. In brief, it seemed fairly likely that this was the spot
into which all the ghouls of the waking world cast the refuse of their feastings; and that
if he but had good luck he might stumble upon that mighty crag taller even than Throk's
peaks which marks the edge of their domain. Showers of bones would tell him where to
look, and once found he could call to a ghoul to let down a ladder; for strange to say, he
had a very singular link with these terrible creatures.

A man he had known in Boston--a painter of strange pictures with a secret studio in an
ancient and unhallowed alley near a graveyard--had actually made friends with the
ghouls and had taught him to understand the simpler part of their disgusting meeping
and glibbering. This man had vanished at last, and Carter was not sure but that he might
find him now, and use for the first time in dreamland that far-away English of his dim
waking life. In any case, he felt he could persuade a ghoul to guide him out of Pnoth;
and it would be better to meet a ghoul, which one can see, than a Dhole, which one
cannot see.

So Carter walked in the dark, and ran when he thought he heard something among the
bones underfoot. Once he bumped into a stony slope, and knew it must be the base of
one of Throk's peaks. Then at last he heard a monstrous rattling and clatter which
reached far up in the air, and became sure he had come nigh the crag of the ghouls. He
was not sure he could be heard from this valley miles below, but realised that the inner
world has strange laws. As he pondered he was struck by a flying bone so heavy that it
must have been a skull, and therefore realising his nearness to the fateful crag he sent up
as best he might that meeping cry which is the call of the ghoul.

Sound travels slowly, so it was some time before he heard an answering glibber. But it
came at last, and before long he was told that a rope ladder would be lowered. The wait
for this was very tense, since there was no telling what might not have been stirred up
among those bones by his shouting. Indeed, it was not long before he actually did hear a
vague rustling afar off. As this thoughtfully approached, he became more and more
uncomfortable; for he did not wish to move away from the spot where the ladder would
come. Finally the tension grew almost unbearable, and he was about to flee in panic
when the thud of something on the newly heaped bones nearby drew his notice from the
other sound. It was the ladder, and after a minute of groping he had it taut in his hands.
But the other sound did not cease, and followed him even as he climbed. He had gone
fully five feet from the ground when the rattling beneath waxed emphatic, and was a
good ten feet up when something swayed the ladder from below. At a height which
must have been fifteen or twenty feet he felt his whole side brushed by a great slippery
length which grew alternately convex and concave with wriggling; and hereafter he
climbed desperately to escape the unendurable nuzzling of that loathsome and overfed
Dhole whose form no man might see.

For hours he climbed with aching and blistered hands, seeing again the grey death-fire
and Throk's uncomfortable pinnacles. At last he discerned above him the projecting
edge of the great crag of the ghouls, whose vertical side he could not glimpse; and hours
later he saw a curious face peering over it as a gargoyle peers over a parapet of Notre
Dame. This almost made him lose his hold through faintness, but a moment later he was
himself again; for his vanished friend Richard Pickman had once introduced him to a
ghoul, and he knew well their canine faces and slumping forms and unmentionable
idiosyncrasies. So he had himself well under control when that hideous thing pulled him
out of the dizzy emptiness over the edge of the crag, and did not scream at the partly
consumed refuse heaped at one side or at the squatting circles of ghouls who gnawed
and watched curiously.

He was now on a dim-litten plain whose sole topographical features were great boulders
and the entrances of burrows. The ghouls were in general respectful, even if one did
attempt to pinch him while several others eyed his leanness speculatively. Through
patient glibbering he made inquiries regarding his vanished friend, and found he had
become a ghoul of some prominence in abysses nearer the waking world. A greenish
elderly ghoul offered to conduct him to Pickman's present habitation, so despite a
natural loathing he followed the creature into a capacious burrow and crawled after him
for hours in the blackness of rank mould. They emerged on a dim plain strewn with
singular relics of earth--old gravestones, broken urns, and grotesque fragments of
monuments--and Carter realised with some emotion that he was probably nearer the
waking world than at any other time since he had gone down the seven hundred steps
from the cavern of flame to the Gate of Deeper Slumber.
There, on a tombstone of 1768 stolen from the Granary Burying Ground in Boston, sat a
ghoul which was once the artist Richard Upton Pickman. It was naked and rubbery, and
had acquired so much of the ghoulish physiognomy that its human origin was already
obscure. But it still remembered a little English, and was able to converse with Carter in
grunts and monosyllables, helped out now and then by the glibbering of ghouls. When it
learned that Carter wished to get to the enchanted wood and from there to the city
Celephais in Ooth-Nargai beyond the Tanarian Hills, it seemed rather doubtful; for
these ghouls of the waking world do no business in the graveyards of upper dreamland
(leaving that to the red-footed wamps that are spawned in dead cities), and many things
intervene betwixt their gulf and the enchanted wood, including the terrible kingdom of
the Gugs.

The Gugs, hairy and gigantic, once reared stone circles in that wood and made strange
sacrifices to the Other Gods and the crawling chaos Nyarlathotep, until one night an
abomination of theirs reached the ears of earth's gods and they were banished to caverns
below. Only a great trap door of stone with an iron ring connects the abyss of the earth-
ghouls with the enchanted wood, and this the Gugs are afraid to open because of a
curse. That a mortal dreamer could traverse their cavern realm and leave by that door is
inconceivable; for mortal dreamers were their former food, and they have legends of the
toothsomeness of such dreamers even though banishment has restricted their diet to the
ghasts, those repulsive beings which die in the light, and which live in the vaults of Zin
and leap on long hind legs like kangaroos.

So the ghoul that was Pickman advised Carter either to leave the abyss at Sarkomand,
that deserted city in the valley below Leng where black nitrous stairways guarded by
winged diarote lions lead down from dreamland to the lower gulfs, or to return through
a churchyard to the waking world and begin the quest anew down the seventy steps of
light slumber to the cavern of flame and the seven hundred steps to the Gate of Deeper
Slumber and the enchanted wood. This, however, did not suit the seeker; for he knew
nothing of the way from Leng to Ooth-Nargai, and was likewise reluctant to awake lest
he forget all he had so far gained in this dream. It was disastrous to his quest to forget
the august and celestial faces of those seamen from the north who traded onyx in
Celephais, and who, being the sons of gods, must point the way to the cold waste and
Kadath where the Great Ones dwell.

After much persuasion the ghoul consented to guide his guest inside the great wall of
the Gugs' kingdom. There was one chance that Carter might be able to steal through that
twilight realm of circular stone towers at an hour when the giants would be all gorged
and snoring indoors, and reach the central tower with the sign of Koth upon it, which
has the stairs leading up to that stone trap door in the enchanted wood. Pickman even
consented to lend three ghouls to help with a tombstone lever in raising the stone door;
for of ghouls the Gugs are somewhat afraid, and they often flee from their own colossal
graveyards when they see them feasting there.

He also advised Carter to disguise as a ghoul himself; shaving the beard he had allowed
to grow (for ghouls have none), wallowing naked in the mould to get the correct
surface, and loping in the usual slumping way, with his clothing carried in a bundle as if
it were a choice morsel from a tomb. They would reach the city of Gugs--which is
coterminous with the whole kingdom--through the proper burrows, emerging in a
cemetery not far from the stair-containing Tower of Koth. They must beware, however,
of a large cave near the cemetery; for this is the mouth of the vaults of Zin, and the
vindictive ghasts are always on watch there murderously for those denizens of the upper
abyss who hunt and prey on them. The ghasts try to come out when the Gugs sleep and
they attack ghouls as readily as Gugs, for they cannot discriminate. They are very
primitive, and eat one another. The Gugs have a sentry at a narrow in the vaults of Zin,
but he is often drowsy and is sometimes surprised by a party of ghasts. Though ghasts
cannot live in real light, they can endure the grey twilight of the abyss for hours.

So at length Carter crawled through endless burrows with three helpful ghouls bearing
the slate gravestone of Col. Nepemiah Derby, obit 1719, from the Charter Street
Burying Ground in Salem. When they came again into open twilight they were in a
forest of vast lichened monoliths reaching nearly as high as the eye could see and
forming the modest gravestones of the Gugs. On the right of the hole out of which they
wriggled, and seen through aisles of monoliths, was a stupendous vista of cyclopean
round towers mounting up illimitable into the grey air of inner earth. This was the great
city of the Gugs, whose doorways are thirty feet high. Ghouls come here often, for a
buried Gug will feed a community for almost a year, and even with the added peril it is
better to burrow for Gugs than to bother with the graves of men. Carter now understood
the occasional titan bones he had felt beneath him in the vale of Pnoth.

Straight ahead, and just outside the cemetery, rose a sheer perpendicular cliff at whose
base an immense and forbidding cavern yawned. This the ghouls told Carter to avoid as
much as possible, since it was the entrance to the unhallowed vaults of Zin where Gugs
hunt ghasts in the darkness. And truly, that warning was soon well justified; for the
moment a ghoul began to creep toward the towers to see if the hour of the Gugs' resting
had been rightly timed, there glowed in the gloom of that great cavern's mouth first one
pair of yellowish-red eyes and then another, implying that the Gugs were one sentry
less, and that ghasts have indeed an excellent sharpness of smell. So the ghoul returned
to the burrow and motioned his companions to be silent. It was best to leave the ghasts
to their own devices, and there was a possibility that they might soon withdraw, since
they must naturally be rather tired after coping with a Gug sentry in the black vaults.
After a moment something about the size of a small horse hopped out into the grey
twilight, and Carter turned sick at the aspect of that scabrous and unwholesome beast,
whose face is so curiously human despite the absence of a nose, a forehead, and other
important particulars.

Presently three other ghasts hopped out to join their fellow, and a ghoul glibbered softly
at Carter that their absence of battle-scars was a bad sign. It proved that they had not
fought the Gug sentry at all, but had merely slipped past him as he slept, so that their
strength and savagery were still unimpaired and would remain so till they had found and
disposed of a victim. It was very unpleasant to see those filthy and disproportioned
animals which soon numbered about fifteen, grubbing about and making their kangaroo
leaps in the grey twilight where titan towers and monoliths arose, but it was still more
unpleasant when they spoke among themselves in the coughing gutturals of ghasts. And
yet, horrible as they were, they were not so horrible as what presently came out of the
cave after them with disconcerting suddenness.

It was a paw, fully two feet and a half across, and equipped with formidable talons.
After it came another paw, and after that a great black-furred arm to which both of the
paws were attached by short forearms. Then two pink eyes shone, and the head of the
awakened Gug sentry, large as a barrel, wabbled into view. The eyes jutted two inches
from each side, shaded by bony protuberances overgrown with coarse hairs. But the
head was chiefly terrible because of the mouth. That mouth had great yellow fangs and
ran from the top to the bottom of the head, opening vertically instead of horizontally.

But before that unfortunate Gug could emerge from the cave and rise to his full twenty
feet, the vindictive ghasts were upon him. Carter feared for a moment that he would
give an alarm and arouse all his kin, till a ghoul softly glibbered that Gugs have no
voice but talk by means of facial expression. The battle which then ensued was truly a
frightful one. From all sides the venomous ghasts rushed feverishly at the creeping Gug,
nipping and tearing with their muzzles, and mauling murderously with their hard
pointed hooves. All the time they coughed excitedly, screaming when the great vertical
mouth of the Gug would occasionally bite into one of their number, so that the noise of
the combat would surely have aroused the sleeping city had not the weakening of the
sentry begun to transfer the action farther and farther within the cavern. As it was, the
tumult soon receded altogether from sight in the blackness, with only occasional evil
echoes to mark its continuance.

Then the most alert of the ghouls gave the signal for all to advance, and Carter followed
the loping three out of the forest of monoliths and into the dark noisome streets of that
awful city whose rounded towers of cyclopean stone soared up beyond the sight.
Silently they shambled over that rough rock pavement, hearing with disgust the
abominable muffled snortings from great black doorways which marked the slumber of
the Gugs. Apprehensive of the ending of the rest hour, the ghouls set a somewhat rapid
pace; but even so the journey was no brief one, for distances in that town of giants are
on a great scale. At last, however, they came to a somewhat open space before a tower
even vaster than the rest; above whose colossal doorway was fixed a monstrous symbol
in bas-relief which made one shudder without knowing its meaning. This was the
central tower with the sign of Koth, and those huge stone steps just visible through the
dusk within were the beginning of the great flight leading to upper dreamland and the
enchanted wood.

There now began a climb of interminable length in utter blackness: made almost
impossible by the monstrous size of the steps, which were fashioned for Gugs, and were
therefore nearly a yard high. Of their number Carter could form no just estimate, for he
soon became so worn out that the tireless and elastic ghouls were forced to aid him. All
through the endless climb there lurked the peril of detection and pursuit; for though no
Gug dares lift the stone door to the forest because of the Great One's curse, there are no
such restraints concerning the tower and the steps, and escaped ghasts are often chased,
even to the very top. So sharp are the ears of Gugs, that the bare feet and hands of the
climbers might readily be heard when the city awoke; and it would of course take but
little time for the striding giants, accustomed from their ghast-hunts in the vaults of Zin
to seeing without light, to overtake their smaller and slower quarry on those cyclopean
steps. It was very depressing to reflect that the silent pursuing Gugs would not be heard
at all, but would come very suddenly and shockingly in the dark upon the climbers. Nor
could the traditional fear of Gugs for ghouls be depended upon in that peculiar place
where the advantages lay so heavily with the Gugs. There was also some peril from the
furtive and venomous ghasts, which frequently hopped up onto the tower during the
sleep hour of the Gugs. If the Gugs slept long, and the ghasts returned soon from their
deed in the cavern, the scent of the climbers might easily be picked up by those
loathsome and ill-disposed things; in which case it would almost be better to be eaten by
a Gug.

Then, after aeons of climbing, there came a cough from the darkness above; and matters
assumed a very grave and unexpected turn.

It was clear that a ghast, or perhaps even more, had strayed into that tower before the
coming of Carter and his guides; and it was equally clear that this peril was very close.
After a breathless second the leading ghoul pushed Carter to the wall and arranged his
kinfolk in the best possible way, with the old slate tombstone raised for a crushing blow
whenever the enemy might come in sight. Ghouls can see in the dark, so the party was
not as badly off as Carter would have been alone. In another moment the clatter of
hooves revealed the downward hopping of at least one beast, and the slab-bearing
ghouls poised their weapon for a desperate blow. Presently two yellowish-red eyes
flashed into view, and the panting of the ghast became audible above its clattering. As it
hopped down to the step above the ghouls, they wielded the ancient gravestone with
prodigious force, so that there was only a wheeze and a choking before the victim
collapsed in a noxious heap. There seemed to be only this one animal, and after a
moment of listening the ghouls tapped Carter as a signal to proceed again. As before,
they were obliged to aid him; and he was glad to leave that place of carnage where the
ghast's uncouth remains sprawled invisible in the blackness.

At last the ghouls brought their companion to a halt; and feeling above him, Carter
realised that the great stone trap door was reached at last. To open so vast a thing
completely was not to be thought of, but the ghouls hoped to get it up just enough to slip
the gravestone under as a prop, and permit Carter to escape through the crack. They
themselves planned to descend again and return through the city of the Gugs, since their
elusiveness was great, and they did not know the way overland to spectral Sarkomand
with its lion-guarded gate to the abyss.

Mighty was the straining of those three ghouls at the stone of the door above them, and
Carter helped push with as much strength as he had. They judged the edge next the top
of the staircase to be the right one, and to this they bent all the force of their
disreputably nourished muscles. After a few moments a crack of light appeared; and
Carter, to whom that task had been entrusted, slipped the end of the old gravestone in
the aperture. There now ensued a mighty heaving; but progress was very slow, and they
had of course to return to their first position every time they failed to turn the slab and
prop the portal open.

Suddenly their desperation was magnified a thousand fold by a sound on the steps
below them. It was only the thumping and rattling of the slain ghast's hooved body as it
rolled down to lower levels; but of all the possible causes of that body's dislodgement
and rolling, none was in the least reassuring. Therefore, knowing the ways of Gugs, the
ghouls set to with something of a frenzy; and in a surprisingly short time had the door
so high that they were able to hold it still whilst Carter turned the slab and left a
generous opening. They now helped Carter through, letting him climb up to their
rubbery shoulders and later guiding his feet as he clutched at the blessed soil of the
upper dreamland outside. Another second and they were through themselves, knocking
away the gravestone and closing the great trap door while a panting became audible
beneath. Because of the Great One's curse no Gug might ever emerge from that portal,
so with a deep relief and sense of repose Carter lay quietly on the thick grotesque fungi
of the enchanted wood while his guides squatted near in the manner that ghouls rest.

Weird as was that enchanted wood through which he had fared so long ago, it was
verily a haven and a delight after those gulfs he had now left behind. There was no
living denizen about, for Zoogs shun the mysterious door in fear and Carter at once
consulted with his ghouls about their future course. To return through the tower they no
longer dared, and the waking world did not appeal to them when they learned that they
must pass the priests Nasht and Kaman-Thah in the cavern of flame. So at length they
decided to return through Sarkomand and its gate of the abyss, though of how to get
there they knew nothing. Carter recalled that it lies in the valley below Leng, and
recalled likewise that he had seen in Dylath-Leen a sinister, slant-eyed old merchant
reputed to trade on Leng, therefore he advised the ghouls to seek out Dylath-Leen,
crossing the fields to Nir and the Skai and following the river to its mouth. This they at
once resolved to do, and lost no time in loping off, since the thickening of the dusk
promised a full night ahead for travel. And Carter shook the paws of those repulsive
beasts, thanking them for their help and sending his gratitude to the beast which once
was Pickman; but could not help sighing with pleasure when they left. For a ghoul is a
ghoul, and at best an unpleasant companion for man. After that Carter sought a forest
pool and cleansed himself of the mud of nether earth, thereupon reassuming the clothes
he had so carefully carried.

It was now night in that redoubtable wood of monstrous trees, but because of the
phosphorescence one might travel as well as by day; wherefore Carter set out upon the
well-known route toward Celephais, in Ooth-Nargai beyond the Tanarian Hills. And as
he went he thought of the zebra he had left tethered to an ash-tree on Ngranek in far-
away Oriab so many aeons ago, and wondered if any lava-gatherers had fed and
released it. And he wondered, too, if he would ever return to Baharna and pay for the
zebra that was slain by night in those ancient ruins by Yath's shore, and if the old
tavernkeeper would remember him. Such were the thoughts that came to him in the air
of the regained upper dreamland.

But presently his progress was halted by a sound from a very large hollow tree. He had
avoided the great circle of stones, since he did not care to speak with Zoogs just now;
but it appeared from the singular fluttering in that huge tree that important councils were
in session elsewhere. Upon drawing nearer he made out the accents of a tense and
heated discussion; and before long became conscious of matters which he viewed with
the greatest concern. For a war on the cats was under debate in that sovereign assembly
of Zoogs. It all came from the loss of the party which had sneaked after Carter to Ulthar,
and which the cats had justly punished for unsuitable intentions. The matter had long
rankled; and now, or at least within a month, the marshalled Zoogs were about to strike
the whole feline tribe in a series of surprise attacks, taking individual cats or groups of
cats unawares, and giving not even the myriad cats of Ulthar a proper chance to drill
and mobilise. This was the plan of the Zoogs, and Carter saw that he must foil it before
leaving upon his mighty quest.

Very quietly therefore did Randolph Carter steal to the edge of the wood and send the
cry of the cat over the starlit fields. And a great grimalkin in a nearby cottage took up
the burden and relayed it across leagues of rolling meadow to warriors large and small,
black, grey, tiger, white, yellow, and mixed, and it echoed through Nir and beyond the
Skai even into Ulthar, and Ulthar's numerous cats called in chorus and fell into a line of
march. It was fortunate that the moon was not up, so that all the cats were on earth.
Swiftly and silently leaping, they sprang from every hearth and housetop and poured in
a great furry sea across the plains to the edge of the wood. Carter was there to greet
them, and the sight of shapely, wholesome cats was indeed good for his eyes after the
things he had seen and walked with in the abyss. He was glad to see his venerable friend
and one-time rescuer at the head of Ulthar's detachment, a collar of rank around his
sleek neck, and whiskers bristling at a martial angle. Better still, as a sub-lieutenant in
that army was a brisk young fellow who proved to be none other than the very little
kitten at the inn to whom Carter had given a saucer of rich cream on that long-vanished
morning in Ulthar. He was a strapping and promising cat now, and purred as he shook
hands with his friend. His grandfather said he was doing very well in the army, and that
he might well expect a captaincy after one more campaign.

Carter now outlined the peril of the cat tribe, and was rewarded by deep-throated purrs
of gratitude from all sides. Consulting with the generals, he prepared a plan of instant
action which involved marching at once upon the Zoog council and other known
strongholds of Zoogs; forestalling their surprise attacks and forcing them to terms
before the mobilization of their army of invasion. Thereupon without a moment's loss
that great ocean of cats flooded the enchanted wood and surged around the council tree
and the great stone circle. Flutterings rose to panic pitch as the enemy saw the
newcomers and there was very little resistance among the furtive and curious brown
Zoogs. They saw that they were beaten in advance, and turned from thoughts of
vengeance to thoughts of present self-preservation.

Half the cats now seated themselves in a circular formation with the captured Zoogs in
the centre, leaving open a lane down which were marched the additional captives
rounded up by the other cats in other parts of the wood. Terms were discussed at length,
Carter acting as interpreter, and it was decided that the Zoogs might remain a free tribe
on condition of rendering to the cats a large tribute of grouse, quail, and pheasants from
the less fabulous parts of the forest. Twelve young Zoogs of noble families were taken
as hostages to be kept in the Temple of Cats at Ulthar, and the victors made it plain that
any disappearances of cats on the borders of the Zoog domain would be followed by
consequences highly disastrous to Zoogs. These matters disposed of, the assembled cats
broke ranks and permitted the Zoogs to slink off one by one to their respective homes,
which they hastened to do with many a sullen backward glance.

The old cat general now offered Carter an escort through the forest to whatever border
he wished to reach, deeming it likely that the Zoogs would harbour dire resentment
against him for the frustration of their warlike enterprise. This offer he welcomed with
gratitude; not only for the safety it afforded, but because he liked the graceful
companionship of cats. So in the midst of a pleasant and playful regiment, relaxed after
the successful performance of its duty, Randolph Carter walked with dignity through
that enchanted and phosphorescent wood of titan trees, talking of his quest with the old
general and his grandson whilst others of the band indulged in fantastic gambols or
chased fallen leaves that the wind drove among the fungi of that primeval floor. And the
old cat said that he had heard much of unknown Kadath in the cold waste, but did not
know where it was. As for the marvellous sunset city, he had not even heard of that, but
would gladly relay to Carter anything he might later learn.
He gave the seeker some passwords of great value among the cats of dreamland, and
commended him especially to the old chief of the cats in Celephais, whither he was
bound. That old cat, already slightly known to Carter, was a dignified maltese; and
would prove highly influential in any transaction. It was dawn when they came to the
proper edge of the wood, and Carter bade his friends a reluctant farewell. The young
sub-lieutenant he had met as a small kitten would have followed him had not the old
general forbidden it, but that austere patriarch insisted that the path of duty lay with the
tribe and the army. So Carter set out alone over the golden fields that stretched
mysterious beside a willow-fringed river, and the cats went back into the wood.

Well did the traveller know those garden lands that lie betwixt the wood of the
Cerenerian Sea, and blithely did he follow the singing river Oukianos that marked his
course. The sun rose higher over gentle slopes of grove and lawn, and heightened the
colours of the thousand flowers that starred each knoll and dangle. A blessed haze lies
upon all this region, wherein is held a little more of the sunlight than other places hold,
and a little more of the summer's humming music of birds and bees; so that men walk
through it as through a faery place, and feel greater joy and wonder than they ever
afterward remember.

By noon Carter reached the jasper terraces of Kiran which slope down to the river's
edge and bear that temple of loveliness wherein the King of Ilek-Vad comes from his
far realm on the twilight sea once a year in a golden palanquin to pray to the god of
Oukianos, who sang to him in youth when he dwelt in a cottage by its banks. All of
jasper is that temple, and covering an acre of ground with its walls and courts, its seven
pinnacled towers, and its inner shrine where the river enters through hidden channels
and the god sings softly in the night. Many times the moon hears strange music as it
shines on those courts and terraces and pinnacles, but whether that music be the song of
the god or the chant of the cryptical priests, none but the King of Ilek--Vad may say; for
only he had entered the temple or seen the priests. Now, in the drowsiness of day, that
carven and delicate fane was silent, and Carter heard only the murmur of the great
stream and the hum of the birds and bees as he walked onward under the enchanted sun.

All that afternoon the pilgrim wandered on through perfumed meadows and in the lee of
gentle riverward hills bearing peaceful thatched cottages and the shrines of amiable
gods carven from jasper or chrysoberyl. Sometimes he walked close to the bank of
Oukianos and whistled to the sprightly and iridescent fish of that crystal stream, and at
other times he paused amidst the whispering rushes and gazed at the great dark wood on
the farther side, whose trees came down clear to the water's edge. In former dreams he
had seen quaint lumbering buopoths come shyly out of that wood to drink, but now he
could not glimpse any. Once in a while he paused to watch a carnivorous fish catch a
fishing bird, which it lured to the water by showing its tempting scales in the sun, and
grasped by the beak with its enormous mouth as the winged hunter sought to dart down
upon it.

Toward evening he mounted a low grassy rise and saw before him flaming in the sunset
the thousand gilded spires of Thran. Lofty beyond belief are the alabaster walls of that
incredible city, sloping inward toward the top and wrought in one solid piece by what
means no man knows, for they are more ancient than memory. Yet lofty as they are with
their hundred gates and two hundred turrets, the clustered towers within, all white
beneath their golden spires, are loftier still; so that men on the plain around see them
soaring into the sky, sometimes shining clear, sometimes caught at the top in tangles of
cloud and mist, and sometimes clouded lower down with their utmost pinnacles blazing
free above the vapours. And where Thran's gates open on the river are great wharves of
marble, with ornate galleons of fragrant cedar and calamander riding gently at anchor,
and strange bearded sailors sitting on casks and bales with the hieroglyphs of far places.
Landward beyond the walls lies the farm country, where small white cottages dream
between little hills, and narrow roads with many stone bridges wind gracefully among
streams and gardens.

Down through this verdant land Carter walked at evening, and saw twilight float up
from the river to the marvellous golden spires of Thran. And just at the hour of dusk he
came to the southern gate, and was stopped by a red-robed sentry till he had told three
dreams beyond belief, and proved himself a dreamer worthy to walk up Thran's steep
mysterious streets and linger in the bazaars where the wares of the ornate galleons were
sold. Then into that incredible city he walked; through a wall so thick that the gate was
a tunnel, and thereafter amidst curved and undulant ways winding deep and narrow
between the heavenward towers. Lights shone through grated and balconied windows,
and the sound of lutes and pipes stole timid from inner courts where marble fountains
bubbled. Carter knew his way, and edged down through darker streets to the river,
where at an old sea tavern he found the captains and seamen he had known in myriad
other dreams. There he bought his passage to Celephais on a great green galleon, and
there he stopped for the night after speaking gravely to the venerable cat of that inn,
who blinked dozing before an enormous hearth and dreamed of old wars and forgotten
gods.

In the morning Carter boarded the galleon bound for Celephais, and sat in the prow as
the ropes were cast off and the long sail down to the Cerenerian Sea begun. For many
leagues the banks were much as they were above Thran, with now and then a curious
temple rising on the farther hills toward the right, and a drowsy village on the shore,
with steep red roofs and nets spread in the sun. Mindful of his search, Carter questioned
all the mariners closely about those whom they had met in the taverns of Celephais,
asking the names and ways of the strange men with long, narrow eyes, long-lobed ears,
thin noses, and pointed chins who came in dark ships from the north and traded onyx for
the carved jade and spun gold and little red singing birds of Celephais. Of these men the
sailors knew not much, save that they talked but seldom and spread a kind of awe about
them.

Their land, very far away, was called Inquanok, and not many people cared to go thither
because it was a cold twilight land, and said to be close to unpleasant Leng; although
high impassable mountains towered on the side where Leng was thought to lie, so that
none might say whether this evil plateau with its horrible stone villages and
unmentionable monastery were really there, or whether the rumour were only a fear that
timid people felt in the night when those formidable barrier peaks loomed black against
a rising moon. Certainly, men reached Leng from very different oceans. Of other
boundaries of Inquanok those sailors had no notion, nor had they heard of the cold
waste and unknown Kadath save from vague unplaced report. And of the marvellous
sunset city which Carter sought they knew nothing at all. So the traveller asked no more
of far things, but bided his time till he might talk with those strange men from cold and
twilight Inquanok who are the seed of such gods as carved their features on Ngranek.
Late in the day the galleon reached those bends of the river which traverse the perfumed
jungles of Kied. Here Carter wished he might disembark, for in those tropic tangles
sleep wondrous palaces of ivory, lone and unbroken, where once dwelt fabulous
monarchs of a land whose name is forgotten. Spells of the Elder Ones keep those places
unharmed and undecayed, for it is written that there may one day be need of them again;
and elephant caravans have glimpsed them from afar by moonlight, though none dares
approach them closely because of the guardians to which their wholeness is due. But the
ship swept on, and dusk hushed the hum of the day, and the first stars above blinked
answers to the early fireflies on the banks as that jungle fell far behind, leaving only its
fragrance as a memory that it had been. And all through the night that galleon floated on
past mysteries unseen and unsuspected. Once a lookout reported fires on the hills to the
east, but the sleepy captain said they had better not be looked at too much, since it was
highly uncertain just who or what had lit them.

In the morning the river had broadened out greatly, and Carter saw by the houses along
the banks that they were close to the vast trading city of Hlanith on the Cerenerian Sea.
Here the walls are of rugged granite, and the houses peakedly fantastic with beamed and
plastered gables. The men of Hlanith are more like those of the waking world than any
others in dreamland; so that the city is not sought except for barter, but is prized for the
solid work of its artisans. The wharves of Hlanith are of oak, and there the galleon made
fast while the captain traded in the taverns. Carter also went ashore, and looked
curiously upon the rutted streets where wooden ox carts lumbered and feverish
merchants cried their wares vacuously in the bazaars. The sea taverns were all close to
the wharves on cobbled lanes salted with the spray of high tides, and seemed
exceedingly ancient with their low black-beamed ceilings and casements of greenish
bull's-eye panes. Ancient sailors in those taverns talked much of distant ports, and told
many stories of the curious men from twilight Inquanok, but had little to add to what the
seamen of the galleon had told. Then at last, after much unloading and loading, the ship
set sail once more over the sunset sea, and the high walls and gables of Hlanith grew
less as the last golden light of day lent them a wonder and beauty beyond any that men
had given them.

Two nights and two days the galleon sailed over the Cerenerian Sea, sighting no land
and speaking but one other vessel. Then near sunset of the second day there loomed up
ahead the snowy peak of Aran with its gingko-trees swaying on the lower slope, and
Carter knew that they were come to the land of Ooth-Nargai and the marvellous city of
Celephais. Swiftly there came into sight the glittering minarets of that fabulous town,
and the untarnished marble walls with their bronze statues, and the great stone bridge
where Naraxa joins the sea. Then rose the gentle hills behind the town, with their groves
and gardens of asphodels and the small shrines and cottages upon them; and far in the
background the purple ridge of the Tanarians, potent and mystical, behind which lay
forbidden ways into the waking world and toward other regions of dream.

The harbour was full of painted galleys, some of which were from the marble cloud-city
of Serannian, that lies in ethereal space beyond where the sea meets the sky, and some
of which were from more substantial parts of dreamland. Among these the steersman
threaded his way up to the spice-fragrant wharves, where the galleon made fast in the
dusk as the city's million lights began to twinkle out over the water. Ever new seemed
this deathless city of vision, for here time has no power to tarnish or destroy. As it has
always been is still the turquoise of Nath-Horthath, and the eighty orchid-wreathed
priests are the same who builded it ten thousand years ago. Shining still is the bronze of
the great gates, nor are the onyx pavements ever worn or broken. And the great bronze
statues on the walls look down on merchants and camel drivers older than fable, yet
without one grey hair in their forked beards.

Carter did not once seek out the temple or the palace or the citadel, but stayed by the
seaward wall among traders and sailors. And when it was too late for rumours and
legends he sought out an ancient tavern he knew well, and rested with dreams of the
gods on unknown Kadath whom he sought. The next day he searched all along the
quays for some of the strange mariners of Inquanok, but was told that none were now in
port, their galley not being due from the north for full two weeks. He found, however,
one Thorabonian sailor who had been to Inquanok and had worked in the onyx quarries
of that twilight place; and this sailor said there was certainly a descent to the north of
the peopled region, which everybody seemed to fear and shun. The Thorabonian opined
that this desert led around the utmost rim of impassable peaks into Leng's horrible
plateau, and that this was why men feared it; though he admitted there were other vague
tales of evil presences and nameless sentinels. Whether or not this could be the fabled
waste wherein unknown Kadath stands he did not know; but it seemed unlikely that
those presences and sentinels, if indeed they existed, were stationed for nought.

On the following day Carter walked up the Street of the Pillars to the turquoise temple
and talked with the High-Priest. Though Nath-Horthath is chiefly worshipped in
Celephais, all the Great Ones are mentioned in diurnal prayers; and the priest was
reasonably versed in their moods. Like Atal in distant Ulthar, he strongly advised
against any attempts to see them; declaring that they are testy and capricious, and
subject to strange protection from the mindless Other Gods from Outside, whose soul
and messenger is the crawling chaos Nyarlathotep. Their jealous hiding of the
marvellous sunset city shewed clearly that they did not wish Carter to reach it, and it
was doubtful how they would regard a guest whose object was to see them and plead
before them. No man had ever found Kadath in the past, and it might be just as well if
none ever found it in the future. Such rumours as were told about that onyx castle of the
Great Ones were not by any means reassuring.

Having thanked the orchid-crowned High-Priest, Carter left the temple and sought out
the bazaar of the sheep-butchers, where the old chief of Celephais' cats dwelt sleek and
contented. That grey and dignified being was sunning himself on the onyx pavement,
and extended a languid paw as his caller approached. But when Carter repeated the
passwords and introductions furnished him by the old cat general of Ulthar, the furry
patriarch became very cordial and communicative; and told much of the secret lore
known to cats on the seaward slopes of Ooth-Nargai. Best of all, he repeated several
things told him furtively by the timid waterfront cats of Celephais about the men of
Inquanok, on whose dark ships no cat will go.

It seems that these men have an aura not of earth about them, though that is not the
reason why no cat will sail on their ships. The reason for this is that Inquanok holds
shadows which no cat can endure, so that in all that cold twilight realm there is never a
cheering purr or a homely mew. Whether it be because of things wafted over the
impassable peaks from hypothetical Leng, or because of things filtering down from the
chilly desert to the north, none may say; but it remains a fact that in that far land there
broods a hint of outer space which cats do not like, and to which they are more sensitive
than men. Therefore they will not go on the dark ships that seek the basalt quays of
Inquanok.

The old chief of the cats also told him where to find his friend King Kuranes, who in
Carter's latter dreams had reigned alternately in the rose-crystal Palace of the Seventy
Delights at Celephais and in the turreted cloud-castle of sky-floating Serannian. It
seemed that he could no more find content in those places, but had formed a mighty
longing for the English cliffs and downlands of his boyhood; where in little dreaming
villages England's old songs hover at evening behind lattice windows, and where grey
church towers peep lovely through the verdure of distant valleys. He could not go back
to these things in the waking world because his body was dead; but he had done the next
best thing and dreamed a small tract of such countryside in the region east of the city
where meadows roll gracefully up from the sea-cliffs to the foot of the Tanarian Hills.
There he dwelt in a grey Gothic manor-house of stone looking on the sea, and tried to
think it was ancient Trevor Towers, where he was born and where thirteen generations
of his forefathers had first seen the light. And on the coast nearby he had built a little
Cornish fishing village with steep cobbled ways, settling therein such people as had the
most English faces, and seeking ever to teach them the dear remembered accents of old
Cornwall fishers. And in a valley not far off he had reared a great Norman Abbey whose
tower he could see from his window, placing around it in the churchyard grey stones
with the names of his ancestors carved thereon, and with a moss somewhat like Old
England's moss. For though Kuranes was a monarch in the land of dream, with all
imagined pomps and marvels, splendours and beauties, ecstasies and delights, novelties
and excitements at his command, he would gladly have resigned forever the whole of
his power and luxury and freedom for one blessed day as a simple boy in that pure and
quiet England, that ancient, beloved England which had moulded his being and of
which he must always be immutably a part.

So when Carter bade that old grey chief of the cats adieu, he did not seek the terraced
palace of rose crystal but walked out the eastern gate and across the daisied fields
toward a peaked gable which he glimpsed through the oaks of a park sloping up to the
sea-cliffs. And in time he came to a great hedge and a gate with a little brick lodge, and
when he rang the bell there hobbled to admit him no robed and annointed lackey of the
palace, but a small stubby old man in a smock who spoke as best he could in the quaint
tones of far Cornwall. And Carter walked up the shady path between trees as near as
possible to England's trees, and clumbed the terraces among gardens set out as in Queen
Anne's time. At the door, flanked by stone cats in the old way, he was met by a
whiskered butler in suitable livery; and was presently taken to the library where
Kuranes, Lord of Ooth-Nargai and the Sky around Serannian, sat pensive in a chair by
the window looking on his little seacoast village and wishing that his old nurse would
come in and scold him because he was not ready for that hateful lawn-party at the
vicar's, with the carriage waiting and his mother nearly out of patience.

Kuranes, clad in a dressing gown of the sort favoured by London tailors in his youth,
rose eagerly to meet his guest; for the sight of an Anglo-Saxon from the waking world
was very dear to him, even if it was a Saxon from Boston, Massachusetts, instead of
from Cornwall. And for long they talked of old times, having much to say because both
were old dreamers and well versed in the wonders of incredible places. Kuranes, indeed,
had been out beyond the stars in the ultimate void, and was said to be the only one who
had ever returned sane from such a voyage.
At length Carter brought up the subject of his quest, and asked of his host those
questions he had asked of so many others. Kuranes did not know where Kadath was, or
the marvellous sunset city; but he did know that the Great Ones were very dangerous
creatures to seek out, and that the Other Gods had strange ways of protecting them from
impertinent curiosity. He had learned much of the Other Gods in distant parts of space,
especially in that region where form does not exist, and coloured gases study the
innermost secrets. The violet gas S'ngac had told him terrible things of the crawling
chaos Nyarlathotep, and had warned him never to approach the central void where the
daemon sultan Azathoth gnaws hungrily in the dark.

Altogether, it was not well to meddle with the Elder Ones; and if they persistently
denied all access to the marvellous sunset city, it were better not to seek that city.

Kuranes furthermore doubted whether his guest would profit aught by coming to the
city even were he to gain it. He himself had dreamed and yearned long years for lovely
Celephais and the land of Ooth-Nargai, and for the freedom and colour and high
experience of life devoid of its chains, and conventions, and stupidities. But now that he
was come into that city and that land, and was the king thereof, he found the freedom
and the vividness all too soon worn out, and monotonous for want of linkage with
anything firm in his feelings and memories. He was a king in Ooth-Nargai, but found no
meaning therein, and drooped always for the old familiar things of England that had
shaped his youth. All his kingdom would he give for the sound of Cornish church bells
over the downs, and all the thousand minarets of Celephais for the steep homely roofs
of the village near his home. So he told his guest that the unknown sunset city might not
hold quite that content he sought, and that perhaps it had better remain a glorious and
half--remembered dream. For he had visited Carter often in the old waking days, and
knew well the lovely New England slopes that had given him birth.

At the last, he was very certain, the seeker would long only for the early remembered
scenes; the glow of Beacon Hill at evening, the tall steeples and winding hill streets of
quaint Kingsport, the hoary gambrel roofs of ancient and witch-haunted Arkham, and
the blessed meads and valleys where stone walls rambled and white farmhouse gables
peeped out from bowers of verdure. These things he told Randolph Carter, but still the
seeker held to his purpose. And in the end they parted each with his own conviction,
and Carter went back through the bronze gate into Celephais and down the Street of
Pillars to the old sea wall, where he talked more with the mariners of far ports and
waited for the dark ship from cold and twilight Inquanok, whose strange-faced sailors
and onyx-traders had in them the blood of the Great Ones.

One starlit evening when the Pharos shone splendid over the harbour the longed-for ship
put in, and strange-faced sailors and traders appeared one by one and group by group in
the ancient taverns along the sea wall. It was very exciting to see again those living
faces so like the godlike features of Ngranek, but Carter did not hasten to speak with the
silent seamen. He did not know how much of pride and secrecy and dim supernal
memory might fill those children of the Great Ones, and was sure it would not be wise
to tell them of his quest or ask too closely of that cold desert stretching north of their
twilight land. They talked little with the other folk in those ancient sea taverns; but
would gather in groups in remote comers and sing among themselves the haunting airs
of unknown places, or chant long tales to one another in accents alien to the rest of
dreamland. And so rare and moving were those airs and tales that one might guess their
wonders from the faces of those who listened, even though the words came to common
ears only as strange cadence and obscure melody.

For a week the strange seamen lingered in the taverns and traded in the bazaars of
Celephais, and before they sailed Carter had taken passage on their dark ship, telling
them that he was an old onyx miner and wishful to work in their quarries. That ship was
very lovey and cunningly wrought, being of teakwood with ebony fittings and traceries
of gold, and the cabin in which the traveller lodged had hangings of silk and velvet. One
morning at the turn of the tide the sails were raised and the anchor lilted, and as Carter
stood on the high stern he saw the sunrise-blazing walls and bronze statues and golden
minarets of ageless Celephais sink into the distance, and the snowy peak of Mount Man
grow smaller and smaller. By noon there was nothing in sight save the gentle blue of the
Cerenerian Sea, with one painted galley afar off bound for that realm of Serannian
where the sea meets the sky.

And the night came with gorgeous stars, and the dark ship steered for Charles' Wain and
the Little Bear as they swung slowly round the pole. And the sailors sang strange songs
of unknown places, and they stole off one by one to the forecastle while the wistful
watchers murmured old chants and leaned over the rail to glimpse the luminous fish
playing in bowers beneath the sea. Carter went to sleep at midnight, and rose in the
glow of a young morning, marking that the sun seemed farther south than was its wont.
And all through that second day he made progress in knowing the men of the ship,
getting them little by little to talk of their cold twilight land, of their exquisite onyx city,
and of their fear of the high and impassable peaks beyond which Leng was said to be.
They told him how sorry they were that no cats would stay in the land of Inquanok, and
how they thought the hidden nearness of Leng was to blame for it. Only of the stony
desert to the north they would not talk. There was something disquieting about that
desert, and it was thought expedient not to admit its existence.

On later days they talked of the quarries in which Carter said he was going to work.
There were many of them, for all the city of Inquanok was builded of onyx, whilst great
polished blocks of it were traded in Rinar, Ogrothan, and Celephais and at home with
the merchants of Thraa, Flarnek, and Kadatheron, for the beautiful wares of those
fabulous ports. And far to the north, almost in the cold desert whose existence the men
of Inquanok did not care to admit, there was an unused quarry greater than all the rest;
from which had been hewn in forgotten times such prodigious lumps and blocks that the
sight of their chiselled vacancies struck terror to all who beheld. Who had mined those
incredible blocks, and whither they had been transported, no man might say; but it was
thought best not to trouble that quarry, around which such inhuman memories might
conceivably cling. So it was left all alone in the twilight, with only the raven and the
rumoured Shantak-bird to brood on its immensities. when Carter heard of this quarry he
was moved to deep thought, for he knew from old tales that the Great Ones' castle atop
unknown Kadath is of onyx.

Each day the sun wheeled lower and lower in the sky, and the mists overhead grew
thicker and thicker. And in two weeks there was not any sunlight at all, but only a weird
grey twilight shining through a dome of eternal cloud by day, and a cold starless
phosphorescence from the under side of that cloud by night. On the twentieth day a
great jagged rock in the sea was sighted from afar, the first land glimpsed since Man's
snowy peak had dwindled behind the ship. Carter asked the captain the name of that
rock, but was told that it had no name and had never been sought by any vessel because
of the sounds that came from it at night. And when, after dark, a dull and ceaseless
howling arose from that jagged granite place, the traveller was glad that no stop had
been made, and that the rock had no name. The seamen prayed and chanted till the noise
was out of earshot, and Carter dreamed terrible dreams within dreams in the small
hours.

Two mornings after that there loomed far ahead and to the east a line of great grey
peaks whose tops were lost in the changeless clouds of that twilight world. And at the
sight of them the sailors sang glad songs, and some knelt down on the deck to pray, so
that Carter knew they were come to the land of Inquanok and would soon be moored to
the basalt quays of the great town bearing that land's name. Toward noon a dark
coastline appeared, and before three o'clock there stood out against the north the
bulbous domes and fantastic spires of the onyx city. Rare and curious did that archaic
city rise above its walls and quays, all of delicate black with scrolls, flutings, and
arabesques of inlaid gold. Tall and many-windowed were the houses, and carved on
every side with flowers and patterns whose dark symmetries dazzled the eye with a
beauty more poignant than light. Some ended in swelling domes that tapered to a point,
others in terraced pyramids whereon rose clustered minarets displaying every phase of
strangeness and imagination. The walls were low, and pierced by frequent gates, each
under a great arch rising high above the general level and capped by the head of a god
chiselled with that same skill displayed in the monstrous face on distant Ngranek. On a
hill in the centre rose a sixteen-angled tower greater than all the rest and bearing a high
pinnacled belfry resting on a flattened dome. This, the seamen said, was the Temple of
the Elder Ones, and was ruled by an old High-Priest sad with inner secrets.

At intervals the clang of a strange bell shivered over the onyx city, answered each time
by a peal of mystic music made up of horns, viols, and chanting voices. And from a row
of tripods on a galley round the high dome of the temple there burst flares of flame at
certain moments; for the priests and people of that city were wise in the primal
mysteries, and faithful in keeping the rhythms of the Great Ones as set forth in scrolls
older than the Pnakotic Manuscripts. As the ship rode past the great basalt breakwater
into the harbour the lesser noises of the city grew manifest, and Carter saw the slaves,
sailors, and merchants on the docks. The sailors and merchants were of the strange-
faced race of the gods, but the slaves were squat, slant--eyed folk said by rumour to
have drifted somehow across or around the impassable peaks from the valleys beyond
Leng. The wharves reached wide outside the city wall and bore upon them all manner of
merchandise from the galleys anchored there, while at one end were great piles of onyx
both carved and uncarved awaiting shipment to the far markets of Rinar, Ograthan and
Celephais.

It was not yet evening when the dark ship anchored beside a jutting quay of stone, and
all the sailors and traders filed ashore and through the arched gate into the city. The
streets of that city were paved with onyx and some of them were wide and straight
whilst others were crooked and narrow. The houses near the water were lower than the
rest, and bore above their curiously arched doorways certain signs of gold said to be in
honour of the respective small gods that favoured each. The captain of the ship took
Carter to an old sea tavern where flocked the mariners of quaint countries, and promised
that he would next day shew him the wonders of the twilight city, and lead him to the
taverns of the onyx-miners by the northern wall. And evening fell, and little bronze
lamps were lighted, and the sailors in that tavern sang songs of remote places. But when
from its high tower the great bell shivered over the city, and the peal of the horns and
viols and voices rose cryptical in answer thereto, all ceased their songs or tales and
bowed silent till the last echo died away. For there is a wonder and a strangeness on the
twilight city of Inquanok, and men fear to be lax in its rites lest a doom and a vengeance
lurk unsuspectedly close.

Far in the shadows of that tavern Carter saw a squat form he did not like, for it was
unmistakably that of the old slant-eyed merchant he had seen so long before in the
taverns of Dylath-Leen, who was reputed to trade with the horrible stone villages of
Leng which no healthy folk visit and whose evil fires are seen at night from afar, and
even to have dealt with that High-Priest Not To Be Described, which wears a yellow
silken mask over its face and dwells all alone in a prehistoric stone monastery. This man
had seemed to shew a queer gleam of knowing when Carter asked the traders of
DylathLeen about the cold waste and Kadath; and somehow his presence in dark and
haunted Inquanok, so close to the wonders of the north, was not a reassuring thing. He
slipped wholly out of sight before Carter could speak to him, and sailors later said that
he had come with a yak caravan from some point not well determined, bearing the
colossal and rich-flavoured eggs of the rumoured Shantak-bird to trade for the dextrous
jade goblets that merchants brought from Ilarnek.

On the following morning the ship-captain led Carter through the onyx streets of
Inquanok, dark under their twilight sky. The inlaid doors and figured house-fronts,
carven balconies and crystal-paned oriels all gleamed with a sombre and polished
loveliness; and now and then a plaza would open out with black pillars, colonades, and
the statues of curious beings both human and fabulous. Some of the vistas down long
and unbending streets, or through side alleys and over bulbous domes, spires, and
arabesqued roofs, were weird and beautiful beyond words; and nothing was more
splendid than the massive heights of the great central Temple of the Elder Ones with its
sixteen carven sides, its flattened dome, and its lofty pinnacled belfry, overtopping all
else, and majestic whatever its foreground. And always to the east, far beyond the city
walls and the leagues of pasture land, rose the gaunt grey sides of those topless and
impassable peaks across which hideous Leng was said to lie.

The captain took Carter to the mighty temple, which is set with its walled garden in a
great round plaza whence the streets go as spokes from a wheel's hub. The seven arched
gates of that garden, each having over it a carven face like those on the city's gates, are
always open, and the people roam reverently at will down the tiled paths and through
the little lanes lined with grotesque termini and the shrines of modest gods. And there
are fountains, pools, and basins there to reflect the frequent blaze of the tripods on the
high balcony, all of onyx and having in them small luminous fish taken by divers from
the lower bowers of ocean. When the deep clang from the temple belfry shivers over the
garden and the city, and the answer of the horns and viols and voices peals out from the
seven lodges by the garden gates, there issue from the seven doors of the temple long
columns of masked and hooded priests in black, bearing at arm's length before them
great golden bowls from which a curious steam rises. And all the seven columns strut
peculiarly in single file, legs thrown far forward without bending the knees, down the
walks that lead to the seven lodges, wherein they disappear and do not appear again. It
is said that subterrene paths connect the lodges with the temple, and that the long files
of priests return through them; nor is it unwhispered that deep flights of onyx steps go
down to mysteries that are never told. But only a few are those who hint that the priests
in the masked and hooded columns are not human beings.

Carter did not enter the temple, because none but the Veiled King is permitted to do
that. But before he left the garden the hour of the bell came, and he heard the shivering
clang deafening above him, and the wailing of the horns and viols and voices loud from
the lodges by the gates. And down the seven great walks stalked the long files of bowl-
bearing priests in their singular way, giving to the traveller a fear which human priests
do not often give. When the last of them had vanished he left that garden, noting as he
did so a spot on the pavement over which the bowls had passed. Even the ship-captain
did not like that spot, and hurried him on toward the hill whereon the Veiled King's
palace rises many-domed and marvellous.

The ways to the onyx palace are steep and narrow, all but the broad curving one where
the king and his companions ride on yaks or in yak--drawn chariots. Carter and his
guide climbed up an alley that was all steps, between inlaid walls hearing strange signs
in gold, and under balconies and oriels whence sometimes floated soft strains of music
or breaths of exotic fragrance. Always ahead loomed those titan walls, mighty
buttresses, and clustered and bulbous domes for which the Veiled King's palace is
famous; and at length they passed under a great black arch and emerged in the gardens
of the monarch's pleasure. There Carter paused in faintness at so much beauty, for the
onyx terraces and colonnaded walks, the gay porterres and delicate flowering trees
espaliered to golden lattices, the brazen urns and tripods with cunning bas-reliefs, the
pedestalled and almost breathing statues of veined black marble, the basalt-bottomed
lagoon's tiled fountains with luminous fish, the tiny temples of iridescent singing birds
atop carven columns, the marvellous scrollwork of the great bronze gates, and the
blossoming vines trained along every inch of the polished walls all joined to form a
sight whose loveliness was beyond reality, and half-fabulous even in the land of dreams.
There it shimmered like a vision under that grey twilight sky, with the domed and
fretted magnificence of the palace ahead, and the fantastic silhouette of the distant
impassable peaks on the right. And ever the small birds and the fountains sang, while
the perfume of rare blossoms spread like a veil over that incredible garden. No other
human presence was there, and Carter was glad it was so. Then they turned and
descended again the onyx alley of steps, for the palace itself no visitor may enter; and it
is not well to look too long and steadily at the great central dome, since it is said to
house the archaic father of all the rumoured Shantak-birds, and to send out queer
dreams to the curious.

After that the captain took Carter to the north quarter of the town, near the Gate of the
Caravans, where are the taverns of the yak--merchants and the onyx-miners. And there,
in a low-ceiled inn of quarrymen, they said farewell; for business called the captain
whilst Carter was eager to talk with miners about the north. There were many men in
that inn, and the traveller was not long in speaking to some of them; saying that he was
an old miner of onyx, and anxious to know somewhat of Inquanok's quarries. But all
that he learned was not much more than he knew before, for the miners were timid and
evasive about the cold desert to the north and the quarry that no man visits. They had
fears of fabled emissaries from around the mountains where Leng is said to lie, and of
evil presences and nameless sentinels far north among the scattered rocks. And they
whispered also that the rumoured Shantak-birds are no wholesome things; it being.
indeed for the best that no man has ever truly seen one (for that fabled father of
Shantaks in the king's dome is fed in the dark).

The next day, saying that he wished to look over all the various mines for himself and to
visit the scattered farms and quaint onyx villages of Inquanok, Carter hired a yak and
stuffed great leathern saddle-bags for a journey. Beyond the Gate of the Caravans the
road lay straight betwixt tilled fields, with many odd farmhouses crowned by low
domes. At some of these houses the seeker stopped to ask questions; once finding a host
so austere and reticent, and so full of an unplaced majesty like to that in the huge
features on Ngranek, that he felt certain he had come at last upon one of the Great Ones
themselves, or upon one with full nine-tenths of their blood, dwelling amongst men.
And to that austere and reticent cotter he was careful to speak very well of the gods, and
to praise all the blessings they had ever accorded him.

That night Carter camped in a roadside meadow beneath a great lygath--tree to which he
tied his yak, and in the morning resumed his northward pilgrimage. At about ten o'clock
he reached the small-domed village of Urg, where traders rest and miners tell their tales,
and paused in its taverns till noon. It is here that the great caravan road turns west
toward Selarn, but Carter kept on north by the quarry road. All the afternoon he
followed that rising road, which was somewhat narrower than the great highway, and
which now led through a region with more rocks than tilled fields. And by evening the
low hills on his left had risen into sizable black cliffs, so that he knew he was close to
the mining country. All the while the great gaunt sides of the impassable mountains
towered afar off at his right, and the farther he went, the worse tales he heard of them
from the scattered farmers and traders and drivers of lumbering onyx-carts along the
way.

On the second night he camped in the shadow of a large black crag, tethering his yak to
a stake driven in the ground. He observed the greater phosphorescence of the clouds at
his northerly point, and more than once thought he saw dark shapes outlined against
them. And on the third morning he came in sight of the first onyx quarry, and greeted
the men who there laboured with picks and chisels. Before evening he had passed
eleven quarries; the land being here given over altogether to onyx cliffs and boulders,
with no vegetation at all, but only great rocky fragments scattered about a floor of black
earth, with the grey impassable peaks always rising gaunt and sinister on his right. The
third night he spent in a camp of quarry men whose flickering fires cast weird
reflections on the polished cliffs to the west. And they sang many songs and told many
tales, shewing such strange knowledge of the olden days and the habits of gods that
Carter could see they held many latent memories of their sires the Great Ones. They
asked him whither he went, and cautioned him not to go too far to the north; but he
replied that he was seeking new cliffs of onyx, and would take no more risks than were
common among prospectors. In the morning he bade them adieu and rode on into the
darkening north, where they had warned him he would find the feared and unvisited
quarry whence hands older than men's hands had wrenched prodigious blocks. But he
did not like it when, turning back to wave a last farewell, he thought he saw
approaching the camp that squat and evasive old merchant with slanting eyes, whose
conjectured traffick with Leng was the gossip of distant Dylath-Leen.

After two more quarries the inhabited part of Inquanok seemed to end, and the road
narrowed to a steeply rising yak-path among forbidding black cliffs. Always on the
right towered the gaunt and distant peaks, and as Carter climbed farther and farther into
this untraversed realm he found it grew darker and colder. Soon he perceived that there
were no prints of feet or hooves on the black path beneath, and realised that he was
indeed come into strange and deserted ways of elder time. Once in a while a raven
would croak far overhead, and now and then a flapping behind some vast rock would
make him think uncomfortably of the rumoured Shantak-bird. But in the main he was
alone with his shaggy steed, and it troubled him to observe that this excellent yak
became more and more reluctant to advance, and more and more disposed to snort
affrightedly at any small noise along the route.

The path now contracted between sable and glistening walls, and began to display an
even greater steepness than before. It was a bad footing, and the yak often slipped on the
stony fragments strewn thickly about. In two hours Carter saw ahead a definite crest,
beyond which was nothing but dull grey sky, and blessed the prospect of a level or
downward course. To reach this crest, however, was no easy task; for the way had
grown nearly perpendicular, and was perilous with loose black gravel and small stones.
Eventually Carter dismounted and led his dubious yak; pulling very hard when the
animal balked or stumbled, and keeping his own footing as best he might. Then
suddenly he came to the top and saw beyond, and gasped at what he saw.

The path indeed led straight ahead and slightly down, with the same lines of high
natural walls as before; but on the left hand there opened out a monstrous space, vast
acres in extent, where some archaic power had riven and rent the native cliffs of onyx in
the form of a giant's quarry. Far back into the solid precipice ran that cyclopean gouge,
and deep down within earth's bowels its lower delvings yawned. It was no quarry of
man, and the concave sides were scarred with great squares, yards wide, which told of
the size of the blocks once hewn by nameless hands and chisels. High over its jagged
rim huge ravens flapped and croaked, and vague whirrings in the unseen depths told of
bats or urhags or less mentionable presences haunting the endless blackness. There
Carter stood in the narrow way amidst the twilight with the rocky path sloping down
before him; tall onyx cliffs on his right that led on as far as he could see and tall cliffs
on the left chopped off just ahead to make that terrible and unearthly quarry.

All at once the yak uttered a cry and burst from his control, leaping past him and darting
on in a panic till it vanished down the narrow slope toward the north. Stones kicked by
its flying hooves fell over the brink of the quarry and lost themselves in the dark
without any sound of striking bottom; but Carter ignored the perils of that scanty path as
he raced breathlessly after the flying steed. Soon the left--behind cliffs resumed their
course, making the way once more a narrow lane; and still the traveller leaped on after
the yak whose great wide prints told of its desperate flight.

Once he thought he heard the hoofbeats of the frightened beast, and doubled his speed
from this encouragement. He was covering miles, and little by little the way was
broadening in front till he knew he must soon emerge on the cold and dreaded desert to
the north. The gaunt grey flanks of the distant impassable peaks were again visible
above the right-hand crags, and ahead were the rocks and boulders of an open space
which was clearly a foretaste of the dark arid limitless plain. And once more those
hoofbeats sounded in his ears, plainer than before, but this time giving terror instead of
encouragement because he realised that they were not the frightened hoofbeats of his
fleeing yak. The beats were ruthless and purposeful, and they were behind him.
Carter's pursuit of the yak became now a flight from an unseen thing, for though he
dared not glance over his shoulder he felt that the presence behind him could be nothing
wholesome or mentionable. His yak must have heard or felt it first, and he did not like
to ask himself whether it had followed him from the haunts of men or had floundered up
out of that black quarry pit. Meanwhile the cliffs had been left behind, so that the
oncoming night fell over a great waste of sand and spectral rocks wherein all paths were
lost. He could not see the hoofprints of his yak, but always from behind him there came
that detestable clopping; mingled now and then with what he fancied were titanic
flappings and whirrings. That he was losing ground seemed unhappily clear to him, and
he knew he was hopelessly lost in this broken and blasted desert of meaningless rocks
and untravelled sands. Only those remote and impassable peaks on the right gave him
any sense of direction, and even they were less clear as the grey twilight waned and the
sickly phosphorescence of the clouds took its place.

Then dim and misty in the darkling north before him he glimpsed a terrible thing. He
had thought it for some moments a range of black mountains, but now he saw it was
something more. The phosphorescence of the brooding clouds shewed it plainly, and
even silhouetted parts of it as vapours glowed behind. How distant it was he could not
tell, but it must have been very far. It was thousands of feet high, stretching in a great
concave arc from the grey impassable peaks to the unimagined westward spaces, and
had once indeed been a ridge of mighty onyx hills. But now these hills were hills no
more, for some hand greater than man's had touched them. Silent they squatted there
atop the world like wolves or ghouls, crowned with clouds and mists and guarding the
secrets of the north forever. All in a great half circle they squatted, those dog-like
mountains carven into monstrous watching statues, and their right hands were raised in
menace against mankind.

It was only the flickering light of the clouds that made their mitred double heads seem
to move, but as Carter stumbled on he saw arise from their shadowy caps great forms
whose motions were no delusion. Winged and whirring, those forms grew larger each
moment, and the traveller knew his stumbling was at an end. They were not any birds or
bats known elsewhere on earth or in dreamland, for they were larger than elephants and
had heads like a horse's. Carter knew that they must be the Shantak-birds of ill rumour,
and wondered no more what evil guardians and nameless sentinels made men avoid the
boreal rock desert. And as he stopped in final resignation he dared at last to look behind
him, where indeed was trotting the squat slant-eyed trader of evil legend, grinning
astride a lean yak and leading on a noxious horde of leering Shantaks to whose wings
still clung the rime and nitre of the nether pits.

Trapped though he was by fabulous and hippocephalic winged nightmares that pressed
around in great unholy circles, Randolph Carter did not lose consciousness. Lofty and
horrible those titan gargoyles towered above him, while the slant-eyed merchant leaped
down from his yak and stood grinning before the captive. Then the man motioned
Carter to mount one of the repugnant Shantaks, helping him up as his judgement
struggled with his loathing. It was hard work ascending, for the Shantak-bird has scales
instead of feathers, and those scales are very slippery. Once he was seated, the slant-
eyed man hopped up behind him, leaving the lean yak to be led away northward toward
the ring of carven mountains by one of the incredible bird colossi.
There now followed a hideous whirl through frigid space, endlessly up and eastward
toward the gaunt grey flanks of those impassable mountains beyond which Leng was
said to be. Far above the clouds they flew, till at last there lay beneath them those fabled
summits which the folk of Inquanok have never seen, and which lie always in high
vortices of gleaming mist. Carter beheld them very plainly as they passed below, and
saw upon their topmost peaks strange caves which made him think of those on Ngranek;
but he did not question his captor about these things when he noticed that both the man
and the horse--headed Shantak appeared oddly fearful of them, hurrying past nervously
and shewing great tension until they were left far in the rear.

The Shantak now flew lower, revealing beneath the canopy of cloud a grey barren plain
whereon at great distances shone little feeble fires. As they descended there appeared at
intervals lone huts of granite and bleak stone villages whose tiny windows glowed with
pallid light. And there came from those huts and villages a shrill droning of pipes and a
nauseous rattle of crotala which proved at once that Inquanok's people are right in their
geographic rumours. For travellers have heard such sounds before, and know that they
float only from the cold desert plateau which healthy folk never visit; that haunted place
of evil and mystery which is Leng.

Around the feeble fires dark forms were dancing, and Carter was curious as to what
manner of beings they might be; for no healthy folk have ever been to Leng, and the
place is known only by its fires and stone huts as seen from afar. Very slowly and
awkwardly did those forms leap, and with an insane twisting and bending not good to
behold; so that Carter did not wonder at the monstrous evil imputed to them by vague
legend, or the fear in which all dreamland holds their abhorrent frozen plateau. As the
Shantak flew lower, the repulsiveness of the dancers became tinged with a certain
hellish familiarity; and the prisoner kept straining his eyes and racking his memory for
clues to where he had seen such creatures before.

They leaped as though they had hooves instead of feet, and seemed to wear a sort of wig
or headpiece with small horns. Of other clothing they had none, but most of them were
quite furry. Behind they had dwarfish tails, and when they glanced upward he saw the
excessive width of their mouths. Then he knew what they were, and that they did not
wear any wigs or headpieces after all. For the cryptic folk of Leng were of one race with
the uncomfortable merchants of the black galleys that traded rubies at Dylath-Leen;
those not quite human merchants who are the slaves of the monstrous moon-things!
They were indeed the same dark folk who had shanghaied Carter on their noisome
galley so long ago, and whose kith he had seen driven in herds about the unclean
wharves of that accursed lunar city, with the leaner ones toiling and the fatter ones taken
away in crates for other needs of their polypous and amorphous masters. Now he saw
where such ambiguous creatures came from, and shuddered at the thought that Leng
must be known to these formless abominations from the moon.

But the Shantak flew on past the fires and the stone huts and the less than human
dancers, and soared over sterile hills of grey granite and dim wastes of rock and ice and
snow. Day came, and the phosphorescence of low clouds gave place to the misty
twilight of that northern world, and still the vile bird winged meaningly through the cold
and silence. At times the slant-eyed man talked with his steed in a hateful and guttural
language, and the Shantak would answer with tittering tones that rasped like the
scratching of ground glass. AlI this while the land was getting higher, and finally they
came to a wind-swept table--land which seemed the very roof of a blasted and tenantless
world. There, all alone in the hush and the dusk and the cold, rose the uncouth stones of
a squat windowless building, around which a circle of crude monoliths stood. In all this
arrangement there was nothing human, and Carter surmised from old tales that he was
indeed come to that most dreadful and legendary of all places, the remote and
prehistoric monastery wherein dwells uncompanioned the High-Priest Not To Be
Described, which wears a yellow silken mask over its face and prays to the Other Gods
and their crawling chaos Nyarlathotep.

The loathsome bird now settled to the ground, and the slant-eyed man hopped down and
helped his captive alight. Of the purpose of his seizure Carter now felt very sure; for
clearly the slant-eyed merchant was an agent of the darker powers, eager to drag before
his masters a mortal whose presumption had aimed at the finding of unknown Kadath
and the saying of a prayer before the faces of the Great Ones in their onyx castle. It
seemed likely that this merchant had caused his former capture by the slaves of the
moon-things in Dylath-Leen, and that he now meant to do what the rescuing cats had
baffled; taking the victim to some dread rendezvous with monstrous Nyarlathotep and
telling with what boldness the seeking of unknown Kadath had been tried. Leng and the
cold waste north of Inquanok must be close to the Other Gods, and there the passes to
Kadath are well guarded.

The slant-eyed man was small, but the great hippocephalic bird was there to see he was
obeyed; so Carter followed where he led, and passed within the circle of standing rocks
and into the low arched doorway of that windowless stone monastery. There were no
lights inside, but the evil merchant lit a small clay lamp bearing morbid bas-reliefs and
prodded his prisoner on through mazes of narrow winding corridors. On the walls of the
corridors were printed frightful scenes older than history, and in a style unknown to the
archaeologists of earth. After countless aeons their pigments were brilliant still, for the
cold and dryness of hideous Leng keep alive many primal things. Carter saw them
fleetingly in the rays of that dim and moving lamp, and shuddered at the tale they told.

Through those archaic frescoes Leng's annals stalked; and the horned, hooved, and
wide-mouthed almost-humans danced evilly amidst forgotten cities. There were scenes
of old wars, wherein Leng's almost-humans fought with the bloated purple spiders of
the neighbouring vales; and there were scenes also of the coming of the black galleys
from the moon, and of the submission of Leng's people to the polypous and amorphous
blasphemies that hopped and floundered and wriggled out of them. Those slippery
greyish-white blasphemies they worshipped as gods, nor ever complained when scores
of their best and fatted males were taken away in the black galleys. The monstrous
moon-beasts made their camp on a jagged isle in the sea, and Carter could tell from the
frescoes that this was none other than the lone nameless rock he had seen when sailing
to Inquanok; that grey accursed rock which Inquanok's seamen shun, and from which
vile howlings reverberate all through the night.

And in those frescoes was shewn the great seaport and capital of the almost-humans;
proud and pillared betwixt the cliffs and the basalt wharves, and wondrous with high
fanes and carven places. Great gardens and columned streets led from the cliffs and
from each of the six sphinx-crowned gates to a vast central plaza, and in that plaza was
a pair of winged colossal lions guarding the top of a subterrene staircase. Again and
again were those huge winged lions shewn, their mighty flanks of diarite glistening in
the grey twilight of the day and the cloudy phosphorescence of the night. And as Carter
stumbled past their frequent and repeated pictures it came to him at last what indeed
they were, and what city it was that the almost-humans had ruled so anciently before the
coming of the black galleys. There could be no mistake, for the legends of dreamland
are generous and profuse. Indubitably that primal city was no less a place than storied
Sarkomand, whose ruins had bleached for a million years before the first true human
saw the light, and whose twin titan lions guard eternally the steps that lead down from
dreamland to the Great Abyss.

Other views shewed the gaunt grey peaks dividing Leng from Inquanok, and the
monstrous Shantak-birds that build nests on the ledges half way up. And they shewed
likewise the curious caves near the very topmost pinnacles, and how even the boldest of
the Shantaks fly screaming away from them. Carter had seen those caves when he
passed over them, and had noticed their likeness to the caves on Ngranek. Now he knew
that the likeness was more than a chance one, for in these pictures were shewn their
fearsome denizens; and those bat-wings, curving horns, barbed tails, prehensile paws
and rubbery bodies were not strange to him. He had met those silent, flitting and
clutching creatures before; those mindless guardians of the Great Abyss whom even the
Great Ones fear, and who own not Nyarlathotep but hoary Nodens as their lord. For
they were the dreaded night-gaunts, who never laugh or smile because they have no
faces, and who flop unendingly in the dark betwixt the Vale of Pnath and the passes to
the outer world.

The slant-eyed merchant had now prodded Carter into a great domed space whose walls
were carved in shocking bas-reliefs, and whose centre held a gaping circular pit
surrounded by six malignly stained stone altars in a ring. There was no light in this vast
evil-smelling crypt, and the small lamp of the sinister merchant shone so feebly that one
could grasp details only little by little. At the farther end was a high stone dais reached
by five steps; and there on a golden throne sat a lumpish figure robed in yellow silk
figured with red and having a yellow silken mask over its face. To this being the slant--
eyed man made certain signs with his hands, and the lurker in the dark replied by raising
a disgustingly carven flute of ivory in silk--covered paws and blowing certain
loathsome sounds from beneath its flowing yellow mask. This colloquy went on for
some time, and to Carter there was something sickeningly familiar in the sound of that
flute and the stench of the malodorous place. It made him think of a frightful red-litten
city and of the revolting procession that once filed through it; of that, and of an awful
climb through lunar countryside beyond, before the rescuing rush of earth's friendly
cats. He knew that the creature on the dais was without doubt the High--Priest Not To
Be Described, of which legend whispers such fiendish and abnormal possibilities, but
he feared to think just what that abhorred High-Priest might be.

Then the figured silk slipped a trifle from one of the greyish-white paws, and Carter
knew what the noisome High-Priest was. And in that hideous second, stark fear drove
him to something his reason would never have dared to attempt, for in all his shaken
consciousness there was room only for one frantic will to escape from what squatted on
that golden throne. He knew that hopeless labyrinths of stone lay betwixt him and the
cold table-land outside, and that even on that table-land the noxious Shantek still
waited; yet in spite of all this there was in his mind only the instant need to get away
from that wriggling, silk-robed monstrosity.
The slant-eyed man had set the curious lamp upon one of the high and wickedly stained
altar-stones by the pit, and had moved forward somewhat to talk to the High-Priest with
his hands. Carter, hitherto wholly passive, now gave that man a terrific push with all the
wild strength of fear, so that the victim toppled at once into that gaping well which
rumour holds to reach down to the hellish Vaults of Zin where Gugs hunt ghasts in the
dark. In almost the same second he seized the lamp from the altar and darted out into the
frescoed labyrinths, racing this way and that as chance determined and trying not to
think of the stealthy padding of shapeless paws on the stones behind him, or of the silent
wrigglings and crawlings which must be going on back there in lightless corridors.

After a few moments he regretted his thoughtless haste, and wished he had tried to
follow backward the frescoes he had passed on the way in. True, they were so confused
and duplicated that they could not have done him much good, but he wished none the
less he had made the attempt. Those he now saw were even more horrible than those he
had seen then, and he knew he was not in the corridors leading outside. In time he
became quite sure he was not followed, and slackened his pace somewhat; but scarce
had he breathed in half relief when a new peril beset him. His lamp was waning, and he
would soon be in pitch blackness with no means of sight or guidance.

When the light was all gone he groped slowly in the dark, and prayed to the Great Ones
for such help as they might afford. At times he felt the stone floor sloping up or down,
and once he stumbled over a step for which no reason seemed to exist. The farther he
went the damper it seemed to be, and when he was able to feel a junction or the mouth
of a side passage he always chose the way which sloped downward the least. He
believed, though, that his general course was down; and the vault-like smell and
incrustations on the greasy walls and floor alike warned him he was burrowing deep in
Leng's unwholesome table-land. But there was not any warning of the thing which came
at last; only the thing itself with its terror and shock and breath-taking chaos. One
moment he was groping slowly over the slippery floor of an almost level place, and the
next he was shooting dizzily downward in the dark through a burrow which must have
been well-nigh vertical.

Of the length of that hideous sliding he could never be sure, but it seemed to take hours
of delirious nausea and ecstatic frenzy. Then he realized he was still, with the
phosphorescent clouds of a northern night shining sickly above him. All around were
crumbling walls and broken columns, and the pavement on which he lay was pierced by
straggling grass and wrenched asunder by frequent shrubs and roots. Behind him a
basalt cliff rose topless and perpendicular; its dark side sculptured into repellent scenes,
and pierced by an arched and carven entrance to the inner blacknesses out of which he
had come. Ahead stretched double rows of pillars, and the fragments and pedestals of
pillars, that spoke of a broad and bygone street; and from the urns and basins along the
way he knew it had been a great street of gardens. Far off at its end the pillars spread to
mark a vast round plaza, and in that open circle there loomed gigantic under the lurid
night clouds a pair of monstrous things. Huge winged lions of diarite they were, with
blackness and shadow between them. Full twenty feet they reared their grotesque and
unbroken heads, and snarled derisive on the ruins around them. And Carter knew right
well what they must be, for legend tells of only one such twain. They were the
changeless guardians of the Great Abyss, and these dark ruins were in truth primordial
Sarkomand.
Carter's first act was to close and barricade the archway in the cliff with fallen blocks
and odd debris that lay around. He wished no follower from Leng's hateful monastery,
for along the way ahead would lurk enough of other dangers. Of how to get from
Sarkomand to the peopled parts of dreamland he knew nothing at all; nor could he gain
much by descending to the grottoes of the ghouls, since he knew they were no better
informed than he. The three ghouls which had helped him through the city of Gugs to
the outer world had not known how to reach Sarkomand in their journey back, but had
planned to ask old traders in Dylath-Leen. He did not like to think of going again to the
subterrene world of Gugs and risking once more that hellish tower of Koth with its
Cyclopean steps leading to the enchanted wood, yet he felt he might have to try this
course if all else failed. Over Leng's plateau past the lone monastery he dared not go
unaided; for the High-Priest's emissaries must be many, while at the journey's end there
would no doubt be the Shantaks and perhaps other things to deal with. If he could get a
boat he might sail back to Inquanok past the jagged and hideous rock in the sea, for the
primal frescoes in the monastery labyrinth had shewn that this frightful place lies not far
from Sarkomand's basalt quays. But to find a boat in this aeon-deserted city was no
probable thing, and it did not appear likely that he could ever make one.

Such were the thoughts of Randolph Carter when a new impression began beating upon
his mind. All this while there had stretched before him the great corpse-like width of
fabled Sarkomand with its black broken pillars and crumbling sphinx-crowned gates
and titan stones and monstrous winged lions against the sickly glow of those luminous
night clouds. Now he saw far ahead and on the right a glow that no clouds could
account for, and knew he was not alone in the silence of that dead city. The glow rose
and fell fitfully, flickering with a greenish tinge which did not reassure the watcher.
And when he crept closer, down the littered street and through some narrow gaps
between tumbled walls, he perceived that it was a campfire near the wharves with many
vague forms clustered darkly around it; and a lethal odour hanging heavily over all.
Beyond was the oily lapping of the harbour water with a great ship riding at anchor, and
Carter paused in stark terror when he saw that the ship was indeed one of the dreaded
black galleys from the moon.

Then, just as he was about to creep back from that detestable flame, he saw a stirring
among the vague dark forms and heard a peculiar and unmistakable sound. It was the
frightened meeping of a ghoul, and in a moment it had swelled to a veritable chorus of
anguish. Secure as he was in the shadow of monstrous ruins, Carter allowed his
curiosity to conquer his fear, and crept forward again instead of retreating. Once in
crossing an open street he wriggled worm-like on his stomach, and in another place he
had to rise to his feet to avoid making a noise among heaps of fallen marble. But always
he succeeded in avoiding discovery, so that in a short time he had found a spot behind a
titan pillar where he could watch the whole green-litten scene of action. There around a
hideous fire fed by the obnoxious stems of lunar fungi, there squatted a stinking circle
of the toadlike moonbeasts and their almost-human slaves. Some of these slaves were
heating curious iron spears in the leaping flames, and at intervals applying their white--
hot points to three tightly trussed prisoners that lay writhing before the leaders of the
party. From the motions of their tentacles Carter could see that the blunt-snouted
moonbeasts were enjoying the spectacle hugely, and vast was his horror when he
suddenly recognised the frantic meeping and knew that the tortured ghouls were none
other than the faithful trio which had guided him safely from the abyss, and had
thereafter set out from the enchanted wood to find Sarkomand and the gate to their
native deeps.

The number of malodorous moonbeasts about that greenish fire was very great, and
Carter saw that he could do nothing now to save his former allies. Of how the ghouls
had been captured he could not guess; but fancied that the grey toadlike blasphemies
had heard them inquire in Dylath-Leen concerning the way to Sarkomand and had not
wished them to approach so closely the hateful plateau of Leng and the High-Priest Not
To Be Described. For a moment he pondered on what he ought to do, and recalled how
near he was to the gate of the ghouls' black kingdom. Clearly it was wisest to creep east
to the plaza of twin lions and descend at once to the gulf, where assuredly he would
meet no horrors worse than those above, and where he might soon find ghouls eager to
rescue their brethren and perhaps to wipe out the moonbeasts from the black galley. It
occurred to him that the portal, like other gates to the abyss, might be guarded by flocks
of night-gaunts; but he did not fear these faceless creatures now. He had learned that
they are bound by solemn treaties with the ghouls, and the ghoul which was Pickman
had taught him how to glibber a password they understood.

So Carter began another silent crawl through the ruins, edging slowly toward the great
central plaza and the winged lions. It was ticklish work, but the moonbeasts were
pleasantly busy and did not hear the slight noises which he twice made by accident
among the scattered stones. At last he reached the open space and picked his way
among the stunned trees and vines that had grown up therein. The gigantic lions loomed
terrible above him in the sickly glow of the phosphorescent night clouds, but he
manfully persisted toward them and presently crept round to their faces, knowing it was
on that side he would find the mighty darkness which they guard. Ten feet apart
crouched the mocking-faced beasts of diarite, brooding on cyclopean pedestals whose
sides were chiselled in fearsome bas-reliefs. Betwixt them was a tiled court with a
central space which had once been railed with balusters of onyx. Midway in this space a
black well opened, and Carter soon saw that he had indeed reached the yawning gulf
whose crusted and mouldy stone steps lead down to the crypts of nightmare.

Terrible is the memory of that dark descent in which hours wore themselves away
whilst Carter wound sightlessly round and round down a fathomless spiral of steep and
slippery stairs. So worn and narrow were the steps, and so greasy with the ooze of inner
earth, that the climber never quite knew when to expect a breathless fall and hurtling
down to the ultimate pits; and he was likewise uncertain just when or how the guardian
night-gaunts would suddenly pounce upon him, if indeed there were any stationed in
this primeval passage. All about him was a stifling odour of nether gulfs, and he felt that
the air of these choking depths was not made for mankind. In time he became very
numb and somnolent, moving more from automatic impulse than from reasoned will;
nor did he realize any change when he stopped moving altogether as something quietly
seized him from behind. He was flying very rapidly through the air before a malevolent
tickling told him that the rubbery night-gaunts had performed their duty.

Awaked to the fact that he was in the cold, damp clutch of the faceless flutterers, Carter
remembered the password of the ghouls and glibbered it as loudly as he could amidst
the wind and chaos of flight. Mindless though night-gaunts are said to be, the effect was
instantaneous; for all tickling stopped at once, and the creatures hastened to shift their
captive to a more comfortable position. Thus encouraged Carter ventured some
explanations; telling of the seizure and torture of three ghouls by the moonbeasts, and of
the need of assembling a party to rescue them. The night-gaunts, though inarticulate,
seemed to understand what was said; and shewed greater haste and purpose in their
flight. Suddenly the dense blackness gave place to the grey twilight of inner earth, and
there opened up ahead one of those flat sterile plains on which ghouls love to squat and
gnaw. Scattered tombstones and osseous fragments told of the denizens of that place;
and as Carter gave a loud meep of urgent summons, a score of burrows emptied forth
their leathery, dog-like tenants. The night-gaunts now flew low and set their passenger
upon his feet, afterward withdrawing a little and forming a hunched semicircle on the
ground while the ghouls greeted the newcomer.

Carter glibbered his message rapidly and explicitly to the grotesque company, and four
of them at once departed through different burrows to spread the news to others and
gather such troops as might be available for a rescue. After a long wait a ghoul of some
importance appeared, and made significant signs to the night-gaunts, causing two of the
latter to fly off into the dark. Thereafter there were constant accessions to the hunched
flock of night-gaunts on the plain, till at length the slimy soil was fairly black with
them. Meanwhile fresh ghouls crawled out of the burrows one by one, all glibbering
excitedly and forming in crude battle array not far from the huddled night--gaunts. In
time there appeared that proud and influential ghoul which was once the artist Richard
Pickman of Boston, and to him Carter glibbered a very full account of what had
occurred. The erstwhile Pickman, pleased to greet his ancient friend again, seemed very
much impressed, and held a conference with other chiefs a little apart from the growing
throng.

Finally, after scanning the ranks with care, the assembled chiefs all meeped in unison
and began glibbering orders to the crowds of ghouls and night-gaunts. A large
detachment of the horned flyers vanished at once, while the rest grouped themselves
two by two on their knees with extended forelegs, awaiting the approach of the ghouls
one by one. As each ghoul reached the pair of night-gaunts to which he was assigned,
he was taken up and borne away into the blackness; till at last the whole throng had
vanished save for Carter, Pickman, and the other chiefs, and a few pairs of night-gaunts.
Pickman explained that night--gaunts are the advance guard and battle steeds of the
ghouls, and that the army was issuing forth to Sarkomand to deal with the moonbeasts.
Then Carter and the ghoulish chiefs approached the waiting bearers and were taken up
by the damp, slippery paws. Another moment and all were whirling in wind and
darkness; endlessly up, up, up to the gate of the winged and the special ruins of primal
Sarkomand.

When, after a great interval, Carter saw again the sickly light of Sarkomand's nocturnal
sky, it was to behold the great central plaza swarming with militant ghouls and night-
gaunts. Day, he felt sure, must be almost due; but so strong was the army that no
surprise of the enemy would be needed. The greenish flare near the wharves still
glimmered faintly, though the absence of ghoulish meeping shewed that the torture of
the prisoners was over for the nonce. Softly glibbering directions to their steeds and to
the flock of riderless night-gaunts ahead, the ghouls presently rose in wide whirring
columns and swept on over the bleak ruins toward the evil flame. Carter was now
beside Pickman in the front rank of ghouls, and saw as they approached the noisome
camp that the moonbeasts were totally unprepared. The three prisoners lay bound and
inert beside the fire, while their toadlike captors slumped drowsily about in no certain
order. The almost-human slaves were asleep, even the sentinels shirking a duty which in
this realm must have seemed to them merely perfunctory.

The final swoop of the night-gaunts and mounted ghouls was very sudden, each of the
greyish toadlike blasphemies and their almost-human slaves being seized by a group of
night-gaunts before a sound was made. The moonbeasts, of course, were voiceless; and
even the slaves had little chance to scream before rubbery paws choked them into
silence. Horrible were the writhings of those great jellyfish abnormalities as the
sardonic night-gaunts clutched them, but nothing availed against the strength of those
black prehensile talons. When a moonbeast writhed too violently, a night-gaunt would
seize and pull its quivering pink tentacles; which seemed to hurt so much that the victim
would cease its struggles. Carter expected to see much slaughter, but found that the
ghouls were far subtler in their plans. They glibbered certain simple orders to the night-
gaunts which held the captives, trusting the rest to instinct; and soon the hapless
creatures were borne silently away into the Great Abyss, to be distributed impartially
amongst the Dholes, Gugs, ghasts and other dwellers in darkness whose modes of
nourishment are not painless to their chosen victims. Meanwhile the three bound ghouls
had been released and consoled by their conquering kinsfolk, whilst various parties
searched the neighborhood for possible remaining moonbeasts, and boarded the evil-
smelling black galley at the wharf to make sure that nothing had escaped the general
defeat. Surely enough, the capture had been thorough, for not a sign of further life could
the victors detect. Carter, anxious to preserve a means of access to the rest of
dreamland, urged them not to sink the anchored galley; and this request was freely
granted out of gratitude for his act in reporting the plight of the captured trio. On the
ship were found some very curious objects and decorations, some of which Carter cast
at once into the sea.

Ghouls and night-gaunts now formed themselves in separate groups, the former
questioning their rescued fellow anent past happenings. It appeared that the three had
followed Carter's directions and proceeded from the enchanted wood to Dylath-Leen by
way of Nir and the Skin, stealing human clothes at a lonely farmhouse and loping as
closely as possible in the fashion of a man's walk. In Dylath-Leen's taverns their
grotesque ways and faces had aroused much comment; but they had persisted in asking
the way to Sarkomand until at last an old traveller was able to tell them. Then they
knew that only a ship for Lelag-Leng would serve their purpose, and prepared to wait
patiently for such a vessel.

But evil spies had doubtless reported much; for shortly a black galley put into port, and
the wide-mouthed ruby merchants invited the ghouls to drink with them in a tavern.
Wine was produced from one of those sinister bottles grotesquely carven from a single
ruby, and after that the ghouls found themselves prisoners on the black galley as Carter
had found himself. This time, however, the unseen rowers steered not for the moon but
for antique Sarkomand; bent evidently on taking their captives before the High-Priest
Not To Be Described. They had touched at the jagged rock in the northern sea which
Inquanok's mariners shun, and the ghouls had there seen for the first time the red
masters of the ship; being sickened despite their own callousness by such extremes of
malign shapelessness and fearsome odour. There, too, were witnessed the nameless
pastimes of the toadlike resident garrison-such pastimes as give rise to the night-
howlings which men fear. After that had come the landing at ruined Sarkomand and the
beginning of the tortures, whose continuance the present rescue had prevented.
Future plans were next discussed, the three rescued ghouls suggesting a raid on the
jagged rock and the extermination of the toadlike garrison there. To this, however, the
night-gaunts objected; since the prospect of flying over water did not please them. Most
of the ghouls favoured the design, but were at a loss how to follow it without the help of
the winged night-gaunts. Thereupon Carter, seeing that they could not navigate the
anchored galley, offered to teach them the use of the great banks of oars; to which
proposal they eagerly assented. Grey day had now come, and under that leaden northern
sky a picked detachment of ghouls filed into the noisome ship and took their seats on
the rowers' benches. Carter found them fairly apt at learning, and before night had
risked several experimental trips around the harbour. Not till three days later, however,
did he deem it safe to attempt the voyage of conquest. Then, the rowers trained and the
night-gaunts safely stowed in the forecastle, the party set sail at last; Pickman and the
other chiefs gathering on deck and discussing models of approach and procedure.

On the very first night the howlings from the rock were heard. Such was their timbre
that all the galley's crew shook visibly; but most of all trembled the three rescued ghouls
who knew precisely what those howlings meant. It was not thought best to attempt an
attack by night, so the ship lay to under the phosphorescent clouds to wait for the dawn
of a greyish day. when the light was ample and the howlings still the rowers resumed
their strokes, and the galley drew closer and closer to that jagged rock whose granite
pinnacles clawed fantastically at the dull sky. The sides of the rock were very steep; but
on ledges here and there could be seen the bulging walls of queer windowless
dwellings, and the low railings guarding travelled highroads. No ship of men had ever
come so near the place, or at least, had never come so near and departed again; but
Carter and the ghouls were void of fear and kept inflexibly on, rounding the eastern face
of the rock and seeking the wharves which the rescued trio described as being on the
southern side within a harbour formed of steep headlands.

The headlands were prolongations of the island proper, and came so closely together
that only one ship at a time might pass between them. There seemed to be no watchers
on the outside, so the galley was steered boldly through the flume-like strait and into the
stagnant putrid harbour beyond. Here, however, all was bustle and activity; with several
ships lying at anchor along a forbidding stone quay, and scores of almost-human slaves
and moonbeasts by the waterfront handling crates and boxes or driving nameless and
fabulous horrors hitched to lumbering lorries. There was a small stone town hewn out of
the vertical cliff above the wharves, with the start of a winding road that spiralled out of
sight toward higher ledges of the rock. Of what lay inside that prodigious peak of
granite none might say, but the things one saw on the outside were far from
encouraging.

At sight of the incoming galley the crowds on the wharves displayed much eagerness;
those with eyes staring intently, and those without eyes wriggling their pink tentacles
expectantly. They did not, of course, realize that the black ship had changed hands; for
ghouls look much like the horned and hooved almost-humans, and the night-gaunts
were all out of sight below. By this time the leaders had fully formed a plan; which was
to loose the night-gaunts as soon as the wharf was touched, and then to sail directly
away, leaving matters wholly to the instincts of those almost-mindless creatures.
Marooned on the rock, the horned flyers would first of all seize whatever living things
they found there, and afterward, quite helpless to think except in terms of the homing
instinct, would forget their fears of water and fly swiftly back to the abyss; bearing their
noisome prey to appropriate destinations in the dark, from which not much would
emerge alive.

The ghoul that was Pickman now went below and gave the night-gaunts their simple
instructions, while the ship drew very near to the ominous and malodorous wharves.
Presently a fresh stir rose along the waterfront, and Carter saw that the motions of the
galley had begun to excite suspicion. Evidently the steersman was not making for the
right dock, and probably the watchers had noticed the difference between the hideous
ghouls and the almost-human slaves whose places they were taking. Some silent alarm
must have been given, for almost at once a horde of the mephitic moonbeasts began to
pour from the little black doorways of the windowless houses and down the winding
road at the right. A rain of curious javelins struck the galley as the prow hit the wharf
felling two ghouls and slightly wounding another; but at this point all the hatches were
thrown open to emit a black cloud of whirring night-gaunts which swarmed over the
town like a flock of horned and cyclopean bats.

The jellyish moonbeasts had procured a great pole and were trying to push off the
invading ship, but when the night-gaunts struck them they thought of such things no
more. It was a very terrible spectacle to see those faceless and rubbery ticklers at their
pastime, and tremendously impressive to watch the dense cloud of them spreading
through the town and up the winding roadway to the reaches above. Sometimes a group
of the black flutterers would drop a toadlike prisoner from aloft by mistake, and the
manner in which the victim would burst was highly offensive to the sight and smell.
When the last of the night-gaunts had left the galley the ghoulish leaders glibbered an
order of withdrawal, and the rowers pulled quietly out of the harbour between the grey
headlands while still the town was a chaos of battle and conquest.

The Pickman ghoul allowed several hours for the night-gaunts to make up their
rudimentary minds and overcome their fear of flying over the sea, and kept the galley
standing about a mile off the jagged rock while he waited, and dressed the wounds of
the injured men. Night fell, and the grey twilight gave place to the sickly
phosphorescence of low clouds, and all the while the leaders watched the high peaks of
that accursed rock for signs of the night-gaunts' flight. Toward morning a black speck
was seen hovering timidly over the top-most pinnacle, and shortly afterward the speck
had become a swarm. Just before daybreak the swarm seemed to scatter, and within a
quarter of an hour it had vanished wholly in the distance toward the northeast. Once or
twice something seemed to fall from the thing swarm into the sea; but Carter did not
worry, since he knew from observation that the toadlike moonbeasts cannot swim. At
length, when the ghouls were satisfied that all the night-gaunts had left for Sarkomand
and the Great Abyss with their doomed burdens, the galley put back into the harbour
betwixt the grey headlands; and all the hideous company landed and roamed curiously
over the denuded rock with its towers and eyries and fortresses chiselled from the solid
stone.

Frightful were the secrets uncovered in those evil and windowless crypts; for the
remnants of unfinished pastimes were many, and in various stages of departure from
their primal state. Carter put out of the way certain things which were after a fashion
alive, and fled precipitately from a few other things about which he could not be very
positive. The stench-filled houses were furnished mostly with grotesque stools and
benches carven from moon-trees, and were painted inside with nameless and frantic
designs. Countless weapons, implements, and ornaments lay about, including some
large idols of solid ruby depicting singular beings not found on the earth. These latter
did not, despite their material, invite either appropriation or long inspection; and Carter
took the trouble to hammer five of them into very small pieces. The scattered spears and
javelins he collected, and with Pickman's approval distributed among the ghouls. Such
devices were new to the doglike lopers, but their relative simplicity made them easy to
master after a few concise hints.

The upper parts of the rock held more temples than private homes, and in numerous
hewn chambers were found terrible carven altars and doubtfully stained fonts and
shrines for the worship of things more monstrous than the wild gods atop Kadath. From
the rear of one great temple stretched a low black passage which Carter followed far
into the rock with a torch till he came to a lightless domed hall of vast proportions,
whose vaultings were covered with demoniac carvings and in whose centre yawned a
foul and bottomless well like that in the hideous monastery of Leng where broods alone
the High-Priest Not To Be Described. On the distant shadowy side, beyond the noisome
well, he thought he discerned a small door of strangely wrought bronze; but for some
reason he felt an unaccountable dread of opening it or even approaching it, and hastened
back through the cavern to his unlovely allies as they shambled about with an ease and
abandon he could scarcely feel. The ghouls had observed the unfinished pastimes of the
moonbeasts, and had profited in their fashion. They had also found a hogshead of potent
moon-wine, and were rolling it down to the wharves for removal and later use in
diplomatic dealings, though the rescued trio, remembering its effect on them in Dylath-
Leen, had warned their company to taste none of it. Of rubies from lunar mines there
was a great store, both rough and polished, in one of the vaults near the water; but when
the ghouls found they were not good to eat they lost all interest in them. Carter did not
try to carry any away, since he knew too much about those which had mined them.

Suddenly there came an excited meeping from the sentries on the wharves, and all the
loathsome foragers turned from their tasks to stare seaward and cluster round the
waterfront. Betwixt the grey headlands a fresh black galley was rapidly advancing, and
it would be but a moment before the almost-humans on deck would perceive the
invasion of the town and give the alarm to the monstrous things below. Fortunately the
ghouls still bore the spears and javelins which Carter had distributed amongst them; and
at his command, sustained by the being that was Pickman, they now formed a line of
battle and prepared to prevent the landing of the ship. Presently a burst of excitement on
the galley told of the crew's discovery of the changed state of things, and the instant
stoppage of the vessel proved that the superior numbers of the ghouls had been noted
and taken into account. After a moment of hesitation the new comers silently turned and
passed out between the headlands again, but not for an instant did the ghouls imagine
that the conflict was averted. Either the dark ship would seek reinforcements or the crew
would try to land elsewhere on the island; hence a party of scouts was at once sent up
toward the pinnacle to see what the enemy's course would be.

In a very few minutes the ghoul returned breathless to say that the moonbeasts and
almost-humans were landing on the outside of the more easterly of the rugged grey
headlands, and ascending by hidden paths and ledges which a goat could scarcely tread
in safety. Almost immediately afterward the galley was sighted again through the
flume-like strait, but only for a second. Then a few moments later, a second messenger
panted down from aloft to say that another party was landing on the other headland;
both being much more numerous than the size of the galley would seem to allow for.
The ship itself, moving slowly with only one sparsely manned tier of oars, soon hove in
sight betwixt the cliffs, and lay to in the foetid harbour as if to watch the coming fray
and stand by for any possible use.

By this time Carter and Pickman had divided the ghouls into three parties, one to meet
each of the two invading columns and one to remain in the town. The first two at once
scrambled up the rocks in their respective directions, while the third was subdivided
into a land party and a sea party. The sea party, commanded by Carter, boarded the
anchored galley and rowed out to meet the under-manned galley of the newcomers;
whereat the latter retreated through the strait to the open sea. Carter did not at once
pursue it, for he knew he might be needed more acutely near the town.

Meanwhile the frightful detachments of the moonbeasts and almost-humans had

lumbered up to the top of the headlands and were shockingly silhouetted on either side
against the grey twilight sky. The thin hellish flutes of the invaders had now begun to
whine, and the general effect of those hybrid, half-amorphous processions was as
nauseating as the actual odour given off by the toadlike lunar blasphemies. Then the two
parties of the ghouls swarmed into sight and joined the silhouetted panorama. Javelins
began to fly from both sides, and the swelling meeps of the ghouls and the bestial howls
of the almost--humans gradually joined the hellish whine of the flutes to form a frantick
and indescribable chaos of daemon cacophony. Now and then bodies fell from the
narrow ridges of the headlands into the sea outside or the harbour inside, in the latter
case being sucked quickly under by certain submarine lurkers whose presence was
indicated only by prodigious bubbles.

For half an hour this dual battle raged in the sky, till upon the west cliff the invaders
were completely annihilated. On the east cliff, however, where the leader of the
moonbeast party appeared to be present, the ghouls had not fared so well; and were
slowly retreating to the slopes of the pinnacle proper. Pickman had quickly ordered
reinforcements for this front from the party in the town, and these had helped greatly in
the earlier stages of the combat. Then, when the western battle was over, the victorious
survivors hastened across to the aid of their hard-pressed fellows; turning the tide and
forcing the invaders back again along the narrow ridge of the headland. The almost-
humans were by this time all slain, but the last of the toadlike horrors fought desperately
with the great spears clutched in their powerful and disgusting paws. The time for
javelins was now nearly past, and the fight became a hand-to-hand contest of what few
spearmen could meet upon that narrow ridge.

As fury and recklessness increased, the number falling into the sea became very great.
Those striking the harbour met nameless extinction from the unseen bubblers, but of
those striking the open sea some were able to swim to the foot of the cliffs and land on
tidal rocks, while the hovering galley of the enemy rescued several moonbeasts. The
cliffs were unscalable except where the monsters had debarked, so that none of the
ghouls on the rocks could rejoin their battle-line. Some were killed by javelins from the
hostile galley or from the moonbeasts above, but a few survived to be rescued. When
the security of the land parties seemed assured, Carter's galley sallied forth between the
headlands and drove the hostile ship far out to sea; pausing to rescue such ghouls as
were on the rocks or still swimming in the ocean. Several moonbeasts washed on rocks
or reefs were speedily put out of the way.
Finally, the moonbeast galley being safely in the distance and the invading land army
concentrated in one place, Carter landed a considerable force on the eastern headland in
the enemy's rear; after which the fight was short-lived indeed. Attacked from both sides,
the noisome flounderers were rapidly cut to pieces or pushed into the sea, till by
evening the ghoulish chiefs agreed that the island was again clear of them. The hostile
galley, meanwhile, had disappeared; and it was decided that the evil jagged rock had
better be evacuated before any overwhelming horde of lunar horrors might be
assembled and brought against the victors.

So by night Pickman and Carter assembled all the ghouls and counted them with care,
finding that over a fourth had been lost in the day's battles. The wounded were placed
on bunks in the galley, for Pickman always discouraged the old ghoulish custom of
killing and eating one's own wounded, and the able-bodied troops were assigned to the
oars or to such other places as they might most usefully fill. Under the low
phosphorescent clouds of night the galley sailed, and Carter was not sorry to be
departing from the island of unwholesome secrets, whose lightless domed hall with its
bottomless well and repellent bronze door lingered restlessly in his fancy. Dawn found
the ship in sight of Sarkomand's ruined quays of basalt, where a few night-gaunt sentries
still waited, squatting like black horned gargoyles on the broken columns and crumbling
sphinxes of that fearful city which lived and died before the years of man.

The ghouls made camp amongst the fallen stones of Sarkomand, despatching a
messenger for enough night-gaunts to serve them as steeds. Pickman and the other
chiefs were effusive in their gratitude for the aid Carter had lent them. Carter now began
to feel that his plans were indeed maturing well, and that he would be able to command
the help of these fearsome allies not only in quitting this part of dreamland, but in
pursuing his ultimate quest for the gods atop unknown Kadath, and the marvellous
sunset city they so strangely withheld from his slumbers. Accordingly he spoke of these
things to the ghoulish leaders; telling what he knew of the cold waste wherein Kadath
stands and of the monstrous Shantaks and the mountains carven into double-headed
images which guard it. He spoke of the fear of Shantaks for night-gaunts, and of how
the vast hippocephalic birds fly screaming from the black burrows high up on the gaunt
grey peaks that divide Inquanok from hateful Leng. He spoke, too, of the things he had
learned concerning night-gaunts from the frescoes in the windowless monastery of the
High-Priest Not To Be Described; how even the Great Ones fear them, and how their
ruler is not the crawling chaos Nyarlathotep at all, but hoary and immemorial Nodens,
Lord of the Great Abyss.

All these things Carter glibbered to the assembled ghouls, and presently outlined that
request which he had in mind and which he did not think extravagant considering the
services he had so lately rendered the rubbery doglike lopers. He wished very much, he
said, for the services of enough night-gaunts to bear him safely through the aft past the
realm of Shantaks and carven mountains, and up into the old waste beyond the returning
tracks of any other mortal. He desired to fly to the onyx castle atop unknown Kadath in
the cold waste to plead with the Great Ones for the sunset city they denied him, and felt
sure that the night-gaunts could take him thither without trouble; high above the perils
of the plain, and over the hideous double heads of those carven sentinel mountains that
squat eternally in the grey dusk. For the horned and faceless creatures there could be no
danger from aught of earth since the Great Ones themselves dread them. And even were
unexpected things to come from the Other Gods, who are prone to oversee the affairs of
earth's milder gods, the night-gaunts need not fear; for the outer hells are indifferent
matters to such silent and slippery flyers as own not Nyarlathotep for their master, but
bow only to potent and archaic Nodens.

A flock of ten or fifteen night-gaunts, Carter glibbered, would surely be enough to keep
any combination of Shantaks at a distance, though perhaps it might be well to have
some ghouls in the party to manage the creatures, their ways being better known to their
ghoulish allies than to men. The party could land him at some convenient point within
whatever walls that fabulous onyx citadel might have, waiting in the shadows for his
return or his signal whilst he ventured inside the castle to give prayer to the gods of
earth. If any ghouls chose to escort him into the throne-room of the Great Ones, he
would be thankful, for their presence would add weight and importance to his plea. He
would not, however, insist upon this but merely wished transportation to and from the
castle atop unknown Kadath; the final journey being either to the marvellous sunset city
itself, in case of gods proved favourable, or back to the earthward Gate of Deeper
Slumber in the Enchanted Wood in case his prayers were fruitless.

Whilst Carter was speaking all the ghouls listened with great attention, and as the
moments advanced the sky became black with clouds of those night-gaunts for which
messengers had been sent. The winged steeds settled in a semicircle around the ghoulish
army, waiting respectfully as the doglike chieftains considered the wish of the earthly
traveller. The ghoul that was Pickman glibbered gravely with his fellows and in the end
Carter was offered far more than he had at most expected. As he had aided the ghouls in
their conquest of the moonbeasts, so would they aid him in his daring voyage to realms
whence none had ever returned; lending him not merely a few of their allied night-
gaunts, but their entire army as then encamped, veteran fighting ghouls and newly
assembled night-gaunts alike, save only a small garrison for the captured black galley
and such spoils as had come from the jagged rock in the sea. They would set out
through the aft whenever he might wish, and once arrived on Kadath a suitable train of
ghouls would attend him in state as he placed his petition before earth's gods in their
onyx castle.

Moved by a gratitude and satisfaction beyond words, Carter made plans with the
ghoulish leaders for his audacious voyage. The army would fly high, they decided, over
hideous Leng with its nameless monastery and wicked stone villages; stopping only at
the vast grey peaks to confer with the Shantak-frightening night-gaunts whose burrows
honeycombed their summits. They would then, according to what advice they might
receive from those denizens, choose their final course; approaching unknown Kadath
either through the desert of carven mountains north of Inquanok, or through the more
northerly reaches of repulsive Leng itself. Doglike and soulless as they are, the ghouls
and night-gaunts had no dread of what those untrodden deserts might reveal; nor did
they feel any deterring awe at the thought of Kadath towering lone with its onyx castle
of mystery.

About midday the ghouls and night-gaunts prepared for flight, each ghoul selecting a
suitable pair of horned steeds to bear him. Carter was placed well up toward the head of
the column beside Pickman, and in front of the whole a double line of riderless night-
gaunts was provided as a vanguard. At a brisk meep from Pickman the whole shocking
army rose in a nightmare cloud above the broken columns and crumbling sphinxes of
primordial Sarkomand; higher and higher, till even the great basalt cliff behind the town
was cleared, and the cold, sterile table-land of Leng's outskirts laid open to sight. Still
higher flew the black host, till even this table-land grew small beneath them; and as they
worked northward over the wind-swept plateau of horror Carter saw once again with a
shudder the circle of crude monoliths and the squat windowless building which he knew
held that frightful silken-masked blasphemy from whose clutches he had so narrowly
escaped. This time no descent was made as the army swept batlike over the sterile
landscape, passing the feeble fires of the unwholesome stone villages at a great altitude,
and pausing not at all to mark the morbid twistings of the hooved, horned almost-
humans that dance and pipe eternally therein. Once they saw a Shantak-bird flying low
over the plain, but when it saw them it screamed noxiously and flapped off to the north
in grotesque panic.

At dusk they reached the jagged grey peaks that form the barrier of Inquanok, and
hovered about these strange caves near the summits which Carter recalled as so frightful
to the Shantaks. At the insistent meeping of the ghoulish leaders there issued forth from
each lofty burrow a stream of horned black flyers with which the ghouls and night-
gaunts of the party conferred at length by means of ugly gestures. It soon became clear
that the best course would be that over the cold waste north of Inquanok, for Leng's
northward reaches are full of unseen pitfalls that even the night-gaunts dislike; abysmal
influences centering in certain white hemispherical buildings on curious knolls, which
common folklore associates unpleasantly with the Other Gods and their crawling chaos
Nyarlathotep.

Of Kadath the flutterers of the peaks knew almost nothing, save that there must be some
mighty marvel toward the north, over which the Shantaks and the carven mountains
stand guard. They hinted at rumoured abnormalities of proportion in those trackless
leagues beyond, and recalled vague whispers of a realm where night broods eternally;
but of definite data they had nothing to give. So Carter and his party thanked them
kindly; and, crossing the topmost granite pinnacles to the skies of Inquanok, dropped
below the level of the phosphorescent night clouds and beheld in the distance those
terrible squatting gargoyles that were mountains till some titan hand carved fright into
their virgin rock.

There they squatted in a hellish half-circle, their legs on the desert sand and their mitres
piercing the luminous clouds; sinister, wolflike, and double-headed, with faces of fury
and right hands raised, dully and malignly watching the rim of man's world and
guarding with horror the reaches of a cold northern world that is not man's. From their
hideous laps rose evil Shantaks of elephantine bulk, but these all fled with insane titters
as the vanguard of night-gaunts was sighted in the misty sky. Northward above those
gargoyle mountains the army flew, and over leagues of dim desert where never a
landmark rose. Less and less luminous grew the clouds, till at length Carter could see
only blackness around him; but never did the winged steeds falter, bred as they were in
earth's blackest crypts, and seeing not with any eyes, but with the whole dank surface of
their slippery forms. On and on they flew, past winds of dubious scent and sounds of
dubious import; ever in thickest darkness, and covering such prodigious spaces that
Carter wondered whether or not they could still be within earth's dreamland.

Then suddenly the clouds thinned and the stars shone spectrally above. All below was
still black, but those pallid beacons in the sky seemed alive with a meaning and
directiveness they had never possessed elsewhere. It was not that the figures of the
constellations were different, but that the same familiar shapes now revealed a
significance they had formerly failed to make plain. Everything focussed toward the
north; every curve and asterism of the glittering sky became part of a vast design whose
function was to hurry first the eye and then the whole observer onward to some secret
and terrible goal of convergence beyond the frozen waste that stretched endlessly ahead.
Carter looked toward the east where the great ridge of barrier peaks had towered along
all the length of Inquanok and saw against the stars a jagged silhouette which told of its
continued presence. It was more broken now, with yawning clefts and fantastically
erratic pinnacles; and Carter studied closely the suggestive turnings and inclinations of
that grotesque outline, which seemed to share with the stars some subtle northward
urge.

They were flying past at a tremendous speed, so that the watcher had to strain hard to
catch details; when all at once he beheld just above the line of the topmost peaks a dark
and moving object against the stars, whose course exactly paralleled that of his own
bizarre party. The ghouls had likewise glimpsed it, for he heard their low glibbering all
about him, and for a moment he fancied the object was a gigantic Shantak, of a size
vastly greater than that of the average specimen. Soon, however, he saw that this theory
would not hold; for the shape of the thing above the mountains was not that of any
hippocephalic bird. Its outline against the stars, necessarily vague as it was, resembled
rather some huge mitred head, or pair of heads infinitely magnified; and its rapid
bobbing flight through the sky seemed most peculiarly a wingless one. Carter could not
tell which side of the mountains it was on, but soon perceived that it had parts below the
parts he had first seen, since it blotted out all the stars in places where the ridge was
deeply cleft.

Then came a wide gap in the range, where the hideous reaches of transmontane Leng
were joined to the cold waste on this side by a low pass trough which the stars shone
wanly. Carter watched this gap with intense care, knowing that he might see outlined
against the sky beyond it the lower parts of the vast thing that flew undulantly above the
pinnacles. The object had now floated ahead a trifle, and every eye of the party was
fixed on the rift where it would presently appear in full-length silhouette. Gradually the
huge thing above the peaks neared the gap, slightly slackening its speed as if conscious
of having outdistanced the ghoulish army. For another minute suspense was keen, and
then the brief instant of full silhouette and revelation came; bringing to the lips of the
ghouls an awed and half-choked meep of cosmic fear, and to the soul of the traveller a
chill that never wholly left it. For the mammoth bobbing shape that overtopped the ridge
was only a head--a mitred double head--and below it in terrible vastness loped the
frightful swollen body that bore it; the mountain--high monstrosity that walked in
stealth and silence; the hyaena-like distortion of a giant anthropoid shape that trotted
blackly against the sky, its repulsive pair of cone-capped heads reaching half way to the
zenith.

Carter did not lose consciousness or even scream aloud, for he was an old dreamer; but
he looked behind him in horror and shuddered when he saw that there were other
monstrous heads silhouetted above the level of the peaks, bobbing along stealthily after
the first one. And straight in the rear were three of the mighty mountain shapes seen full
against the southern stars, tiptoeing wolflike and lumberingly, their tall mitres nodding
thousands of feet in the aft. The carven mountains, then, had not stayed squatting in that
rigid semicircle north of Inquanok, with right hands uplifted. They had duties to
perform, and were not remiss. But it was horrible that they never spoke, and never even
made a sound in walking.

Meanwhile the ghoul that was Pickman had glibbered an order to the night-gaunts, and
the whole army soared higher into the air. Up toward the stars the grotesque column
shot, till nothing stood out any longer against the sky; neither the grey granite ridge that
was still nor the carven mitred mountains that walked. All was blackness beneath as the
fluttering legion surged northward amidst rushing winds and invisible laughter in the
aether, and never a Shantak or less mentionable entity rose from the haunted wastes to
pursue them. The farther they went, the faster they flew, till soon their dizzying speed
seemed to pass that of a rifle ball and approach that of a planet in its orbit. Carter
wondered how with such speed the earth could still stretch beneath them, but knew that
in the land of dream dimensions have strange properties. That they were in a realm of
eternal night he felt certain, and he fancied that the constellations overhead had subtly
emphasized their northward focus; gathering themselves up as it were to cast the flying
army into the void of the boreal pole, as the folds of a bag are gathered up to cast out the
last bits of substance therein.

Then he noticed with terror that the wings of the night-gaunts were not flapping any
more. The horned and faceless steeds had folded their membranous appendages, and
were resting quite passive in the chaos of wind that whirled and chuckled as it bore
them on. A force not of earth had seized on the army, and ghouls and night-gaunts alike
were powerless before a current which pulled madly and relentlessly into the north
whence no mortal had ever returned. At length a lone pallid light was seen on the
skyline ahead, thereafter rising steadily as they approached, and having beneath it a
black mass that blotted out the stars. Carter saw that it must be some beacon on a
mountain, for only a mountain could rise so vast as seen from so prodigious a height in
the air.

Higher and higher rose the light and the blackness beneath it, till all the northern sky
was obscured by the rugged conical mass. Lofty as the army was, that pale and sinister
beacon rose above it, towering monstrous over all peaks and concernments of earth, and
tasting the atomless aether where the cryptical moon and the mad planets reel. No
mountain known of man was that which loomed before them. The high clouds far below
were but a fringe for its foothills. The groping dizziness of topmost air was but a girdle
for its loins. Scornful and spectral climbed that bridge betwixt earth and heaven, black
in eternal night, and crowned with a pshent of unknown stars whose awful and
significant outline grew every moment clearer. Ghouls meeped in wonder as they saw it,
and Carter shivered in fear lest all the hurtling army be dashed to pieces on the
unyielding onyx of that cyclopean cliff.

Higher and higher rose the light, till it mingled with the loftiest orbs of the zenith and
winked down at the flyers with lurid mockery. All the north beneath it was blackness
now; dread, stony blackness from infinite depths to infinite heights, with only that pale
winking beacon perched unreachably at the top of all vision. Carter studied the light
more closely, and saw at last what lines its inky background made against the stars.
There were towers on that titan mountaintop; horrible domed towers in noxious and
incalculable tiers and clusters beyond any dreamable workmanship of man; battlements
and terraces of wonder and menace, all limned tiny and black and distant against the
starry pshent that glowed malevolently at the uppermost rim of sight. Capping that most
measureless of mountains was a castle beyond all mortal thought, and in it glowed the
daemon-light. Then Randolph Carter knew that his quest was done, and that he saw
above him the goal of all forbidden steps and audacious visions; the fabulous, the
incredible home of the Great Ones atop unknown Kadath.

Even as he realised this thing, Carter noticed a change in the course of the helplessly
wind-sucked party. They were rising abruptly now, and it was plain that the focus of
their flight was the onyx castle where the pale light shone. So close was the great black
mountain that its sides sped by them dizzily as they shot upward, and in the darkness
they could discern nothing upon it. Vaster and vaster loomed the tenebrous towers of
the nighted castle above, and Carter could see that it was well-nigh blasphemous in its
immensity. Well might its stones have been quarried by nameless workmen in that
horrible gulf rent out of the rock in the hill pass north of Inquanok, for such was its size
that a man on its threshold stood even as air out on the steps of earth's loftiest fortress.
The pshent of unknown stars above the myriad domed turrets glowed with a sallow,
sickly flare, so that a kind of twilight hung about the murky walls of slippery onyx. The
pallid beacon was now seen to be a single shining window high up in one of the loftiest
towers, and as the helpless army neared the top of the mountain Carter thought he
detected unpleasant shadows flitting across the feebly luminous expanse. It was a
strangely arched window, of a design wholly alien to earth.

The solid rock now gave place to the giant foundations of the monstrous castle, and it
seemed that the speed of the party was somewhat abated. Vast walls shot up, and there
was a glimpse of a great gate through which the voyagers were swept. All was night in
the titan courtyard, and then came the deeper blackness of inmost things as a huge
arched portal engulfed the column. Vortices of cold wind surged dankly through
sightless labyrinths of onyx, and Carter could never tell what Cyclopean stairs and
corridors lay silent along the route of his endless aerial twisting. Always upward led the
terrible plunge in darkness, and never a sound, touch or glimpse broke the dense pall of
mystery. Large as the army of ghouls and night-gaunts was, it was lost in the prodigious
voids of that more than earthly castle. And when at last there suddenly dawned around
him the lurid light of that single tower room whose lofty window had served as a
beacon, it took Carter long to discern the far walls and high, distant ceiling, and to
realize that he was indeed not again in the boundless air outside.

Randolph Carter had hoped to come into the throne-room of the Great Ones with poise
and dignity, flanked and followed by impressive lines of ghouls in ceremonial order,
and offering his prayer as a free and potent master among dreamers. He had known that
the Great Ones themselves are not beyond a mortal's power to cope with, and had
trusted to luck that the Other Gods and their crawling chaos Nyarlathotep would not
happen to come to their aid at the crucial moment, as they had so often done before
when men sought out earth's gods in their home or on their mountains. And with his
hideous escort he had half hoped to defy even the Other Gods if need were, knowing as
he did that ghouls have no masters, and that night-gaunts own not Nyarlathotep but only
archaic Nodens for their lord. But now he saw that supernal Kadath in its cold waste is
indeed girt with dark wonders and nameless sentinels, and that the Other Gods are of a
surety vigilant in guarding the mild, feeble gods of earth. Void as they are of lordship
over ghouls and night-gaunts, the mindless, shapeless blasphemies of outer space can
yet control them when they must; so that it was not in state as a free and potent master
of dreamers that Randolph Carter came into the Great Ones' throne-room with his
ghouls. Swept and herded by nightmare tempests from the stars, and dogged by unseen
horrors of the northern waste, all that army floated captive and helpless in the lurid
light, dropping numbly to the onyx floor when by some voiceless order the winds of
fright dissolved.

Before no golden dais had Randolph Carter come, nor was there any august circle of
crowned and haloed beings with narrow eyes, long-lobed ears, thin nose, and pointed
chin whose kinship to the carven face on Ngranek might stamp them as those to whom a
dreamer might pray. Save for the one tower room the onyx castle atop Kadath was dark,
and the masters were not there. Carter had come to unknown Kadath in the cold waste,
but he had not found the gods. Yet still the lurid light glowed in that one tower room
whose size was so little less than that of all outdoors, and whose distant walls and roof
were so nearly lost to sight in thin, curling mists. Earth's gods were not there, it was
true, but of subtler and less visible presences there could be no lack. Where the mild
gods are absent, the Other Gods are not unrepresented; and certainly, the onyx castle of
castles was far from tenantless. In what outrageous form or forms terror would next
reveal itself Carter could by no means imagine. He felt that his visit had been expected,
and wondered how close a watch had all along been kept upon him by the crawling
chaos Nyarlathotep. It is Nyarlathotep, horror of infinite shapes and dread soul and
messenger of the Other Gods, that the fungous moonbeasts serve; and Carter thought of
the black galley that had vanished when the tide of battle turned against the toadlike
abnormalities on the jagged rock in the sea.

Reflecting upon these things, he was staggering to his feet in the midst of his nightmare
company when there rang without warning through that pale-litten and limitless
chamber the hideous blast of a daemon trumpet. Three times pealed that frightful brazen
scream, and when the echoes of the third blast had died chucklingly away Randolph
Carter saw that he was alone. Whither, why and how the ghouls and night--gaunts had
been snatched from sight was not for him to divine. He knew only that he was suddenly
alone, and that whatever unseen powers lurked mockingly around him were no powers
of earth's friendly dreamland. Presently from the chamber's uttermost reaches a new
sound came. This, too, was a rhythmic trumpeting; but of a kind far removed from the
three raucous blasts which had dissolved his goodly cohorts. In this low fanfare echoed
all the wonder and melody of ethereal dream; exotic vistas of unimagined loveliness
floating from each strange chord and subtly alien cadence. Odours of incense came to
match the golden notes; and overhead a great light dawned, its colours changing in
cycles unknown to earth's spectrum, and following the song of the trumpets in weird
symphonic harmonies. Torches flared in the distance, and the beat of drums throbbed
nearer amidst waves of tense expectancy.

Out of the thinning mists and the cloud of strange incenses filed twin columns of giant
black slaves with loin-cloths of iridescent silk. Upon their heads were strapped vast
helmet-like torches of glittering metal, from which the fragrance of obscure balsams
spread in fumous spirals. In their right hands were crystal wands whose tips were carven
into leering chimaeras, while their left hands grasped long thin silver trumpets which
they blew in turn. Armlets and anklets of gold they had, and between each pair of
anklets stretched a golden chain that held its wearer to a sober gait. That they were true
black men of earth's dreamland was at once apparent, but it seemed less likely that their
rites and costumes were wholly things of our earth. Ten feet from Carter the columns
stopped, and as they did so each trumpet flew abruptly to its bearer's thick lips. Wild
and ecstatic was the blast that followed, and wilder still the cry that chorused just after
from dark throats somehow made shrill by strange artifice.

Then down the wide lane betwixt the two columns a lone figure strode; a tall, slim
figure with the young face of an antique Pharaoh, gay with prismatic robes and crowned
with a golden pshent that glowed with inherent light. Close up to Carter strode that regal
figure; whose proud carriage and smart features had in them the fascination of a dark
god or fallen archangel, and around whose eyes there lurked the languid sparkle of
capricious humour. It spoke, and in its mellow tones there rippled the wild music of
Lethean streams.

"Randolph Carter," said the voice, "you have come to see the Great Ones whom it is
unlawful for men to see. Watchers have spoken of this thing, and the Other Gods have
grunted as they rolled and tumbled mindlessly to the sound of thin flutes in the black
ultimate void where broods the daemon-sultan whose name no lips dare speak aloud.

"When Barzai the Wise climbed Hatheg-Kia to see the Greater Ones dance and howl
above the clouds in the moonlight he never returned. The Other Gods were there, and
they did what was expected. Zenig of Aphorat sought to reach unknown Kadath in the
cold waste, and his skull is now set in a ring on the little finger of one whom I need not
name.

"But you, Randolph Carter, have braved all things of earth's dreamland, and burn still
with the flame of quest. You came not as one curious, but as one seeking his due, nor
have you failed ever in reverence toward the mild gods of earth. Yet have these gods
kept you from the marvellous sunset city of your dreams, and wholly through their own
small covetousness; for verily, they craved the weird loveliness of that which your
fancy had fashioned, and vowed that henceforward no other spot should be their abode.

"They are gone from their castle on unknown Kadath to dwell in your marvellous city.
All through its palaces of veined marble they revel by day, and when the sun sets they
go out in the perfumed gardens and watch the golden glory on temples and colonnades,
arched bridges and silver-basined fountains, and wide streets with blossom-laden urns
and ivory statues in gleaming rows. And when night comes they climb tall terraces in
the dew, and sit on carved benches of porphyry scanning the stars, or lean over pale
balustrades to gaze at the town's steep northward slopes, where one by one the little
windows in old peaked gables shine softly out with the calm yellow light of homely
candles.

"The gods love your marvellous city, and walk no more in the ways of the gods. They
have forgotten the high places of earth, and the mountains that knew their youth. The
earth has no longer any gods that are gods, and only the Other Ones from outer space
hold sway on unremembered Kadath. Far away in a valley of your own childhood,
Randolph Carter, play the heedless Great Ones. You have dreamed too well, O wise
arch-dreamer, for you have drawn dream's gods away from the world of all men's
visions to that which is wholly yours; having builded out of your boyhood's small
fancies a city more lovely than all the phantoms that have gone before.

"It is not well that earth's gods leave their thrones for the spider to spin on, and their
realm for the Others to sway in the dark manner of Others. Fain would the powers from
outside bring chaos and horror to you, Randolph Carter, who are the cause of their
upsetting, but that they know it is by you alone that the gods may be sent back to their
world. In that half-waking dreamland which is yours, no power of uttermost night may
pursue; and only you can send the selfish Great Ones gently out of your marvellous
sunset city, back through the northern twilight to their wonted place atop unknown
Kadath in the cold waste.

"So. Randolph Carter, in the name of the Other Gods I spare you and charge you to seek
that sunset city which is yours, and to send thence the drowsy truant gods for whom the
dream world waits. Not hard to find is that roseal fever of the gods, that fanfare of
supernal trumpets and clash of immortal cymbals, that mystery whose place and
meaning have haunted you through the halls of waking and the gulfs of dreaming, and
tormented you with hints of vanished memory and the pain of lost things awesome and
momentous. Not hard to find is that symbol and relic of your days of wonder, for truly,
it is but the stable and eternal gem wherein all that wonder sparkles crystallised to light
your evening path. Behold! It is not over unknown seas but back over well-known years
that your quest must go; back to the bright strange things of infancy and the quick sun-
drenched glimpses of magic that old scenes brought to wide young eyes.

"For know you, that your gold and marble city of wonder is only the sum of what you
have seen and loved in youth. It is the glory of Boston's hillside roofs and western
windows aflame with sunset, of the flower-fragrant Common and the great dome on the
hill and the tangle of gables and chimneys in the violet valley where the many-bridged
Charles flows drowsily. These things you saw, Randolph Carter, when your nurse first
wheeled you out in the springtime, and they will be the last things you will ever see
with eyes of memory and of love. And there is antique Salem with its brooding years,
and spectral Marblehead scaling its rocky precipices into past centuries! And the glory
of Salem's towers and spires seen afar from Marblehead's pastures across the harbour
against the setting sun.

"There is Providence quaint and lordly on its seven hills over the blue harbour, with
terraces of green leading up to steeples and citadels of living antiquity, and Newport
climbing wraithlike from its dreaming breakwater. Arkham is there, with its moss-
grown gambrel roofs and the rocky rolling meadows behind it; and antediluvian
Kingsport hoary with stacked chimneys and deserted quays and overhanging gables,
and the marvel of high cliffs and the milky-misted ocean with tolling buoys beyond.

"Cool vales in Concord, cobbled lands in Portsmouth, twilight bends of rustic New
Hampshire roads where giant elms half hide white farmhouse walls and creaking well-
sweeps. Gloucester's salt wharves and Truro's windy willows. Vistas of distant steepled
towns and hills beyond hills along the North Shore, hushed stony slopes and low ivied
cottages in the lee of huge boulders in Rhode Island's back country. Scent of the sea and
fragrance of the fields; spell of the dark woods and joy of the orchards and gardens at
dawn. These, Randolph Carter, are your city; for they are yourself. New England bore
you, and into your soul she poured a liquid loveliness which cannot die. This loveliness,
moulded, crystallised, and polished by years of memory and dreaming, is your terraced
wonder of elusive sunsets; and to find that marble parapet with curious urns and carven
rail, and descend at last these endless balustraded steps to the city of broad squares and
prismatic fountains, you need only to turn back to the thoughts and visions of your
wistful boyhood.
"Look! through that window shine the stars of eternal night. Even now they are shining
above the scenes you have known and cherished, drinking of their charm that they may
shine more lovely over the gardens of dream. There is Antares-he is winking at this
moment over the roofs of Tremont Street, and you could see him from your window on
Beacon Hill. Out beyond those stars yawn the gulfs from whence my mindless masters
have sent me. Some day you too may traverse them, but if you are wise you will beware
such folly; for of those mortals who have been and returned, only one preserves a mind
unshattered by the pounding, clawing horrors of the void. Terrors and blasphemies
gnaw at one another for space, and there is more evil in the lesser ones than in the
greater; even as you know from the deeds of those who sought to deliver you into my
hands, whilst I myself harboured no wish to shatter you, and would indeed have helped
you hither long ago had I not been elsewhere busy, and certain that you would yourself
find the way. Shun then, the outer hells, and stick to the calm, lovely things of your
youth. Seek out your marvellous city and drive thence the recreant Great Ones, sending
them back gently to those scenes which are of their own youth, and which wait uneasy
for their return.

"Easier even then the way of dim memory is the way I will prepare for you. See! There
comes hither a monstrous Shantak, led by a slave who for your peace of mind had best
keep invisible. Mount and be ready--there! Yogash the Black will help you on the scaly
horror. Steer for that brightest star just south of the zenith--it is Vega, and in two hours
will be just above the terrace of your sunset city. Steer for it only till you hear a far-off
singing in the high aether. Higher than that lurks madness, so rein your Shantak when
the first note lures. Look then back to earth, and you will see shining the deathless altar-
-flame of Ired-Naa from the sacred roof of a temple. That temple is in your desiderate
sunset city, so steer for it before you heed the singing and are lost.

"When you draw nigh the city steer for the same high parapet whence of old you
scanned the outspread glory, prodding the Shantak till he cry aloud. That cry the Great
Ones will hear and know as they sit on their perfumed terraces, and there will come
upon them such a homesickness that all of your city's wonders will not console them for
the absence of Kadath's grim castle and the pshent of eternal stars that crowns it.

"Then must you land amongst them with the Shantak, and let them see and touch that
noisome and hippocephalic bird; meanwhile discoursing to them of unknown Kadath,
which you will so lately have left, and telling them how its boundless halls are lovely
and unlighted, where of old they used to leap and revel in supernal radiance. And the
Shantak will talk to them in the manner of Shantaks, but it will have no powers of
persuasion beyond the recalling of elder days.

"Over and over must you speak to the wandering Great Ones of their home and youth,
till at last they will weep and ask to be shewn the returning path they have forgotten.
Thereat can you loose the waiting Shantak, sending him skyward with the homing cry
of his kind; hearing which the Great Ones will prance and jump with antique mirth, and
forthwith stride after the loathly bird in the fashion of gods, through the deep gulfs of
heaven to Kadath's familiar towers and domes.

"Then will the marvellous sunset city be yours to cherish and inhabit for ever, and once
more will earth's gods rule the dreams of men from their accustomed seat. Go now--the
casement is open and the stars await outside. Already your Shantak wheezes and titters
with impatience. Steer for Vega through the night, but turn when the singing sounds.
Forget not this warning, lest horrors unthinkable suck you into the gulf of shrieking and
ululant madness. Remember the Other Gods; they are great and mindless and terrible,
and lurk in the outer voids. They are good gods to shun.

"Hei! Aa-shanta 'nygh! You are off! Send back earth's gods to their haunts on unknown
Kadath, and pray to all space that you may never meet me in my thousand other forms.
Farewell, Randolph Carter, and beware; for I am Nyarlathotep, the Crawling Chaos."

And Randolph Carter, gasping and dizzy on his hideous Shantak, shot screamingly into
space toward the cold blue glare of boreal Vega; looking but once behind him at the
clustered and chaotic turrets of the onyx nightmare wherein still glowed the lone lurid
light of that window above the air and the clouds of earth's dreamland. Great polypous
horrors slid darkly past, and unseen bat wings beat multitudinous around him, but still
he clung to the unwholesome mane of that loathly and hippocephalic scaled bird. The
stars danced mockingly, almost shifting now and then to form pale signs of doom that
one might wonder one had not seen and feared before; and ever the winds of nether
howled of vague blackness and loneliness beyond the cosmos.

Then through the glittering vault ahead there fell a hush of portent, and all the winds
and horrors slunk away as night things slink away before the dawn. Trembling in waves
that golden wisps of nebula made weirdly visible, there rose a timid hint of far-off
melody, droning in faint chords that our own universe of stars knows not. And as that
music grew, the Shantak raised its ears and plunged ahead, and Carter likewise bent to
catch each lovely strain. It was a song, but not the song of any voice. Night and the
spheres sang it, and it was old when space and Nyarlathotep and the Other Gods were
born.

Faster flew the Shantak, and lower bent the rider, drunk with the marvel of strange
gulfs, and whirling in the crystal coils of outer magic. Then came too late the warning
of the evil one, the sardonic caution of the daemon legate who had bidden the seeker
beware the madness of that song. Only to taunt had Nyarlathotep marked out the way to
safety and the marvellous sunset city; only to mock had that black messenger revealed
the secret of these truant gods whose steps he could so easily lead back at will. For
madness and the void's wild vengeance are Nyarlathotep's only gifts to the
presumptuous; and frantick though the rider strove to turn his disgusting steed, that
leering, tittering Shantak coursed on impetuous and relentless, flapping its great slippery
wings in malignant joy and headed for those unhallowed pits whither no dreams reach;
that last amorphous blight of nether-most confusion where bubbles and blasphemes at
infinity's centre the mindless daemon-sultan Azathoth, whose name no lips dare speak
aloud.

Unswerving and obedient to the foul legate's orders, that hellish bird plunged onward
through shoals of shapeless lurkers and caperers in darkness, and vacuous herds of
drifting entities that pawed and groped and groped and pawed; the nameless larvae of
the Other Gods, that are like them blind and without mind, and possessed of singular
hungers and thirsts

Onward unswerving and relentless, and tittering hilariously to watch the chuckling and
hysterics into which the risen song of night and the spheres had turned, that eldritch
scaly monster bore its helpless rider; hurtling and shooting, cleaving the uttermost rim
and spanning the outermost abysses; leaving behind the stars and the realms of matter,
and darting meteor-like through stark formlessness toward those inconceivable,
unlighted chambers beyond time wherein Azathoth gnaws shapeless and ravenous
amidst the muffled, maddening beat of vile drums and the thin, monotonous whine of
accursed flutes.

Onward--onward--through the screaming, cackling, and blackly populous gulfs--and

then from some dim blessed distance there came an image and a thought to Randolph
Carter the doomed. Too well had Nyarlathotep planned his mocking and his tantalising,
for he had brought up that which no gusts of icy terror could quite efface. Home--New
England--Beacon Hill--the waking world.

"For know you, that your gold and marble city of wonder is only the sum of what you
have seen and loved in youth...the glory of Boston's hillside roofs and western windows
aflame with sunset; of the flower--fragrant Common and the great dome on the hill and
the tangle of gables and chimneys in the violet valley where the many-bridged Charles
flows drowsily...this loveliness, moulded, crystallised, and polished by years of memory
and dreaming, is your terraced wonder of elusive sunsets; and to find that marble
parapet with curious urns and carven rail, and descend at last those endless balustraded
steps to the city of broad squares and prismatic fountains, you need only to turn back to
the thoughts and visions of your wistful boyhood."

Onward--onward--dizzily onward to ultimate doom through the blackness where

sightless feelers pawed and slimy snouts jostled and nameless things tittered and tittered
and tittered. But the image and the thought had come, and Randolph Carter knew
clearly that he was dreaming and only dreaming, and that somewhere in the background
the world of waking and the city of his infancy still lay. Words came again--"You need
only turn back to the thoughts and visions of your wistful boyhood."Turn--turn--
blackness on every side, but Randolph Carter could turn.

Thick though the rushing nightmare that clutched his senses, Randolph Carter could
turn and move. He could move, and if he chose he could leap off the evil Shantak that
bore him hurtlingly doomward at the orders of Nyarlathotep. He could leap off and dare
those depths of night that yawned interminably down, those depths of fear whose terrors
yet could not exceed the nameless doom that lurked waiting at chaos' core. He could
turn and move and leap--he could--he would--he would--he would.

Off that vast hippocephalic abomination leaped the doomed and desperate dreamer, and
down through endless voids of sentient blackness he fell. Aeons reeled, universes died
and were born again, stars became nebulae and nebulae became stars, and still Randolph
Carter fell through those endless voids of sentient blackness.

Then in the slow creeping course of eternity the utmost cycle of the cosmos churned
itself into another futile completion, and all things became again as they were
unreckoned kalpas before. Matter and light were born anew as space once had known
them; and comets, suns and worlds sprang flaming into life, though nothing survived to
tell that they had been and gone, been and gone, always and always, back to no first
beginning.
And there was a firmament again, and a wind, and a glare of purple light in the eyes of
the falling dreamer. There were gods and presences and wills; beauty and evil, and the
shrieking of noxious night robbed of its prey. For through the unknown ultimate cycle
had lived a thought and a vision of a dreamer's boyhood, and now there were remade a
waking world and an old cherished city to body and to justify these things. Out of the
void S'ngac the violet gas had pointed the way, and archaic Nodens was bellowing his
guidance from unhinted deeps.

Stars swelled to dawns, and dawns burst into fountains of gold, carmine, and purple,
and still the dreamer fell. Cries rent the aether as ribbons of light beat back the fiends
from outside. And hoary Nodens raised a howl of triumph when Nyarlathotep, close on
his quarry, stopped baffled by a glare that seared his formless hunting-horrors to grey
dust. Randolph Carter had indeed descended at last the wide marmoreal flights to his
marvellous city, for he was come again to the fair New England world that had wrought
him.

So to the organ chords of morning's myriad whistles, and dawn's blaze thrown dazzling
through purple panes by the great gold dome of the State House on the hill, Randolph
Carter leaped shoutingly awake within his Boston room. Birds sang in hidden gardens
and the perfume of trellised vines came wistful from arbours his grandfather had reared.
Beauty and light glowed from classic mantel and carven cornice and walls grotesquely
figured, while a sleek black cat rose yawning from hearthside sleep that his master's
start and shriek had disturbed. And vast infinities away, past the Gate of Deeper
Slumber and the enchanted wood and the garden lands and the Cerenarian Sea and the
twilight reaches of Inquanok, the crawling chaos Nyarlathotep strode brooding into the
onyx castle atop unknown Kadath in the cold waste, and taunted insolently the mild
gods of earth whom he had snatched abruptly from their scented revels in the
marvellous sunset city.

THE EVIL CLERGYMAN

"Yes, he lived here--but I don't advise your doing anything. Your curiosity makes you
irresponsible. We never come here at night, and it's only because of his will that we
keep it this way. You know what he did. That abominable society took charge at last,
and we don't know where he is buried. There was no way the law or anything else could
reach the society.

"I hope you won't stay till after dark. And I beg of you to let that thing on the table--the
thing that looks like a match-box--alone. We don't know what it is, but we suspect it has
something to do with what he did. We even avoid looking at it very steadily."

After a time the man left me alone in the attic room. It was very dingy and dusty, and
only primitively furnished, but it had a neatness which showed it was not a slum-
denizen's quarters. There were shelves full of theological and classical books, and
another bookcase containing treatises on magic--Paracelsus, Albertus Magnus,
Trithemius, Hermes Trismegistus, Borellus, and others in a strange alphabet whose
titles I could not decipher. The furniture was very plain. There was a door, but it led
only into a closet. The only egress was the aperture in the floor up to which the crude,
steep staircase led. The windows were of bull's-eye pattern, and the black oak beams
bespoke unbelievable antiquity. Plainly, this house was of the Old World. I seemed to
know where I was, but cannot recall what I then knew. Certainly the town was not
London. My impression is of a small seaport.

The small object on the table fascinated me intensely. I seemed to know what to do with
it, for I drew a pocket electric light--or what looked like one--out of my pocket and
nervously tested its flashes. The light was not white but violet, and seemed less like true
light than like some radioactive bombardment. I recall that I did not regard it as a
common flashlight--indeed, I had a common flashlight in another pocket.

It was getting dark, and the ancient roofs and chimney-pots outside looked very queer
through the bull's-eye window-panes. Finally I summoned up courage and propped the
small object up on the table against a book--then turned the rays of the peculiar violet
light upon it. The light seemed now to be more like a rain of hail or small violet
particles than like a continuous beam. As the particles struck the glassy surface at the
center of the strange device, they seemed to produce a crackling noise like the
sputtering of a vacuum tube through which sparks are passed. The dark glassy surface
displayed a pinkish glow, and a vague white shape seemed to be taking form at its
center. Then I noticed that I was not alone in the room--and put the ray--projector back
in my pocket.

But the newcomer did not speak--nor did I hear any sound whatever during all the
immediately following moments. Everything was shadowy pantomime, as if seen at a
vast distance through some intervening haze--although on the other hand the newcomer
and all subsequent comers loomed large and close, as if both near and distant, according
to some abnormal geometry.

The newcomer was a thin, dark man of medium height attired in the clerical garb of the
Anglican church. He was apparently about thirty years old, with a sallow, olive
complexion and fairly good features, but an abnormally high forehead. His black hair
was well cut and neatly brushed, and he was clean-shaven though blue-chinned with a
heavy growth of beard. He wore rimless spectacles with steel bows. His build and lower
facial features were like other clergymen I had seen, but he had a vastly higher
forehead, and was darker and more intelligent-looking--also more subtly and
concealedly evil-looking. At the present moment--having just lighted a faint oil lamp--
he looked nervous, and before I knew it he was casting all his magical books into a
fireplace on the window side of the room (where the wall slanted sharply) which I had
not noticed before. The flames devoured the volumes greedily--leaping up in strange
colors and emitting indescribably hideous odors as the strangely hieroglyphed leaves
and wormy bindings succumbed to the devastating element. All at once I saw there were
others in the room--grave-looking men in clerical costume, one of whom wore the
bands and knee-breeches of a bishop. Though I could hear nothing, I could see that they
were bringing a decision of vast import to the first-comer. They seemed to hate and fear
him at the same time, and he seemed to return these sentiments. His face set itself into a
grim expression, but I could see his right hand shaking as he tried to grip the back of a
chair. The bishop pointed to the empty case and to the fireplace (where the flames had
died down amidst a charred, non-committal mass), and seemed filled with a peculiar
loathing. The first-comer then gave a wry smile and reached out with his left hand
toward the small object on the table. Everyone then seemed frightened. The procession
of clerics began filing down the steep stairs through the trapdoor in the floor, turning
and making menacing gestures as they left. The bishop was last to go.
The first-comer now went to a cupboard on the inner side of the room and extracted a
coil of rope. Mounting a chair, he attached one end of the rope to a hook in the great
exposed central beam of black oak, and began making a noose with the other end.
Realizing he was about to hang himself, I started forward to dissuade or save him. He
saw me and ceased his preparations, looking at me with a kind of triumph which
puzzled and disturbed me. He slowly stepped down from the chair and began gliding
toward me with a positively wolfish grin on his dark, thin-lipped face.

I felt somehow in deadly peril, and drew out the peculiar ray-projector as a weapon of
defense. Why I thought it could help me, I do not know. I turned it on--full in his face,
and saw the sallow features glow first with violet and then with pinkish light. His
expression of wolfish exultation began to be crowded aside by a look of profound fear--
which did not, however, wholly displace the exultation. He stopped in his tracks--then,
flailing his arms wildly in the air, began to stagger backwards. I saw he was edging
toward the open stair-well in the floor, and tried to shout a warning, but he did not hear
me. In another instant he had lurched backward through the opening and was lost to
view.

I found difficulty in moving toward the stair-well, but when I did get there I found no
crushed body on the floor below. Instead there was a clatter of people coming up with
lanterns, for the spell of phantasmal silence had broken, and I once more heard sounds
and saw figures as normally tri-dimensional. Something had evidently drawn a crowd to
this place. Had there been a noise I had not heard?

Presently the two people (simple villagers, apparently) farthest in the lead saw me--and
stood paralyzed. One of them shrieked loudly and reverberantly:

"Ahrrh!...It be'ee, zur? Again?"

Then they all turned and fled frantically. All, that is, but one. When the crowd was gone
I saw the grave-bearded man who had brought me to this place--standing alone with a
lantern. He was gazing at me gaspingly and fascinatedly, but did not seem afraid. Then
he began to ascend the stairs, and joined me in the attic. He spoke:

"So you didn't let it alone! I'm sorry. I know what has happened. It happened once
before, but the man got frightened and shot himself. You ought not to have made him
come back. You know what he wants. But you mustn't get frightened like the other man
he got. Something very strange and terrible has happened to you, but it didn't get far
enough to hurt your mind and personality. If you'll keep cool, and accept the need for
making certain radical readjustments in your life, you can keep right on enjoying the
world, and the fruits of your scholarship. But you can't live here--and I don't think you'll
wish to go back to London. I'd advise America.

"You mustn't try anything more with that--thing. Nothing can be put back now. It would
only make matters worse to do--or summon--anything. You are not as badly off as you
might be--but you must get out of here at once and stay away. You'd better thank
Heaven it didn't go further...

"I'm going to prepare you as bluntly as I can. There's been a certain change--in your
personal appearance. He always causes that. But in a new country you can get used to it.
There's a mirror up at the other end of the room, and I'm going to take you to it. You'll
get a shock--though you will see nothing repulsive."

I was now shaking with a deadly fear, and the bearded man almost had to hold me up as
he walked me across the room to the mirror, the faint lamp (i.e., that formerly on the
table, not the still fainter lantern he had brought) in his free hand. This is what I saw in
the glass:

A thin, dark man of medium stature attired in the clerical garb of the Anglican church,
apparently about thirty, and with rimless, steel--bowed glasses glistening beneath a
sallow, olive forehead of abnormal height.

It was the silent first-comer who had burned his books.

For all the rest of my life, in outward form, I was to be that man!

THE HORROR AT MARTIN'S BEACH

I have never heard an even approximately adequate explanation of the horror at Martin's
Beach. Despite the large number of witnesses, no two accounts agree; and the testimony
taken by local authorities contains the most amazing discrepancies.

Perhaps this haziness is natural in view of the unheard-of character of the horror itself,
the almost paralytic terror of all who saw it, and the efforts made by the fashionable
Wavecrest Inn to hush it up after the publicity created by Prof. Ahon's article "Are
Hypnotic Powers Confined to Recognized Humanity?"

Against all these obstacles I am striving to present a coherent version; for I beheld the
hideous occurrence, and believe it should be known in view of the appalling
possibilities it suggests. Martin's Beach is once more popular as a watering-place, but I
shudder when I think of it. Indeed, I cannot look at the ocean at all now without
shuddering.

Fate is not always without a sense of drama and climax, hence the terrible happening of
August 8, 1922, swiftly followed a period of minor and agreeably wonder-fraught
excitement at Martin's Beach. On May 17 the crew of the fishing smack Alma of
Gloucester, under Capt. James P. Orne, killed, after a battle of nearly forty hours, a
marine monster whose size and aspect produced the greatest possible stir in scientific
circles and caused certain Boston naturalists to take every precaution for its taxidermic
preservation.

The object was some fifty feet in length, of roughly cylindrical shape, and about ten feet
in diameter. It was unmistakably a gilled fish in its major affiliations; but with certain
curious modifications such as rudimentary forelegs and six-toed feet in place of pectoral
fins, which prompted the widest speculation. Its extraordinary mouth, its thick and scaly
hide, and its single, deep-set eye were wonders scarcely less remarkable than its
colossal dimensions; and when the naturalists pronounced it an infant organism, which
could not have been hatched more than a few days, public interest mounted to
extraordinary heights.
Capt. Orne, with typical Yankee shrewdness, obtained a vessel large enough to hold the
object in its hull, and arranged for the exhibition of his prize. With judicious carpentry
he prepared what amounted to an excellent marine museum, and, sailing south to the
wealthy resort district of Martin's Beach, anchored at the hotel wharf and reaped a
harvest of admission fees.

The intrinsic marvelousness of the object, and the importance which it clearly bore in
the minds of many scientific visitors from near and far, combined to make it the
season's sensation. That it was absolutely unique--unique to a scientifically
revolutionary degree--was well understood. The naturalists had shown plainly that it
radically differed from the similarly immense fish caught off the Florida coast; that,
while it was obviously an inhabitant of almost incredible depths, perhaps thousands of
feet, its brain and principal organs indicated a development startlingly vast, and out of
all proportion to anything hitherto associated with the fish tribe.

On the morning of July 20 the sensation was increased by the loss of the vessel and its
strange treasure. In the storm of the preceding night it had broken from its moorings and
vanished forever from the sight of man, carrying with it the guard who had slept aboard
despite the threatening weather. Capt. Orne, backed by extensive scientific interests and
aided by large numbers of fishing boats from Gloucester, made a thorough and
exhaustive searching cruise, but with no result other than the prompting of interest and
conversation. By August 7 hope was abandoned, and Capt. Orne had returned to the
Wavecrest Inn to wind up his business affairs at Martin's Beach and confer with certain
of the scientific men who remained there. The horror came on August 8.

It was in the twilight, when grey sea-birds hovered low near the shore and a rising moon
began to make a glittering path across the waters. The scene is important to remember,
for every impression counts. On the beach were several strollers and a few late bathers;
stragglers from the distant cottage colony that rose modestly on a green hill to the north,
or from the adjacent cliff-perched Inn whose imposing towers proclaimed its allegiance
to wealth and grandeur.

Well within viewing distance was another set of spectators, the loungers on the Inn's
high-ceiled and lantern-lighted veranda, who appeared to be enjoying the dance music
from the sumptuous ballroom inside. These spectators, who included Capt. Orne and his
group of scientific confreres, joined the beach group before the horror progressed far; as
did many more from the Inn. Certainly there was no lack of witnesses, confused though
their stories be with fear and doubt of what they saw.

There is no exact record of the time the thing began, although a majority say that the
fairly round moon was "about a foot" above the low-lying vapors of the horizon. They
mention the moon because what they saw seemed subtly connected with it--a sort of
stealthy, deliberate, menacing ripple which rolled in from the far skyline along the
shimmering lane of reflected moonbeams, yet which seemed to subside before it
reached the shore.

Many did not notice this ripple until reminded by later events; but it seems to have been
very marked, differing in height and motion from the normal waves around it. Some
called it cunning and calculating. And as it died away craftily by the black reefs afar
out, there suddenly came belching up out of the glitter-streaked brine a cry of death; a
scream of anguish and despair that moved pity even while it mocked it.

First to respond to the cry were the two life guards then on duty; sturdy fellows in white
bathing attire, with their calling proclaimed in large red letters across their chests.
Accustomed as they were to rescue work, and to the screams of the drowning, they
could find nothing familiar in the unearthly ululation; yet with a trained sense of duty
they ignored the strangeness and proceeded to follow their usual course.

Hastily seizing an air-cushion, which with its attached coil of rope lay always at hand,
one of them ran swiftly along the shore to the scene of the gathering crowd; whence,
after whirling it about to gain momentum, he flung the hollow disc far out in the
direction from which the sound had come. As the cushion disappeared in the waves, the
crowd curiously awaited a sight of the hapless being whose distress had been so great;
eager to see the rescue made by the massive rope.

But that rescue was soon acknowledged to be no swift and easy matter; for, pull as they
might on the rope, the two muscular guards could not move the object at the other end.
Instead, they found that object pulling with equal or even greater force in the very
opposite direction, till in a few seconds they were dragged off their feet and into the
water by the strange power which had seized on the proffered life-preserver.

One of them, recovering himself, called immediately for help from the crowd on the
shore, to whom he flung the remaining coil of rope; and in a moment the guards were
seconded by all the hardier men, among whom Capt. Orne was foremost. More than a
dozen strong hands were now tugging desperately at the stout line, yet wholly without
avail.

Hard as they tugged, the strange force at the other end tugged harder; and since neither
side relaxed for an instant, the rope became rigid as steel with the enormous strain. The
struggling participants, as well as the spectators, were by this time consumed with
curiosity as to the nature of the force in the sea. The idea of a drowning man had long
been dismissed; and hints of whales, submarines, monsters, and demons now passed
freely around. Where humanity had first led the rescuers, wonder kept them at their
task; and they hauled with a grim determination to uncover the mystery.

It being decided at last that a whale must have swallowed the air-cushion, Capt. Orne,
as a natural leader, shouted to those on shore that a boat must be obtained in order to
approach, harpoon, and land the unseen leviathan. Several men at once prepared to
scatter in quest of a suitable craft, while others came to supplant the captain at the
straining rope, since his place was logically with whatever boat party might be formed.
His own idea of the situation was very broad, and by no means limited to whales, since
he had to do with a monster so much stranger. He wondered what might be the acts and
manifestations of an adult of the species of which the fifty-foot creature had been the
merest infant.

And now there developed with appalling suddenness the crucial fact which changed the
entire scene from one of wonder to one of horror, and dazed with fright the assembled
band of toilers and onlookers. Capt. Orne, turning to leave his post at the rope, found his
hands held in their place with unaccountable strength; and in a moment he realized that
he was unable to let go of the rope. His plight was instantly divined, and as each
companion tested his own situation the same condition was encountered. The fact could
not be denied--every struggler was irresistibly held in some mysterious bondage to the
hempen line which was slowly, hideously, and relentlessly pulling them out to sea.

Speechless horror ensued; a horror in which the spectators were petrified to utter
inaction and mental chaos. Their complete demoralization is reflected in the conflicting
accounts they give, and the sheepish excuses they offer for their seemingly callous
inertia. I was one of them, and know.

Even the strugglers, after a few frantic screams and futile groans, succumbed to the
paralyzing influence and kept silent and fatalistic in the face of unknown powers. There
they stood in the pallid moonlight, blindly pulling against a spectral doom and swaying
monotonously backward and forward as the water rose first to their knees, then to their
hips. The moon went partly under a cloud, and in the half-light the line of swaying men
resembled some sinister and gigantic centipede, writhing in the clutch of a terrible
creeping death.

Harder and harder grew the rope, as the tug in both directions increased, and the strands
swelled with the undisturbed soaking of the rising waves. Slowly the tide advanced, till
the sands so lately peopled by laughing children and whispering lovers were now
swallowed by the inexorable flow. The herd of panic-stricken watchers surged blindly
backward as the water crept above their feet, while the frightful line of strugglers
swayed hideously on, half submerged, and now at a substantial distance from their
audience. Silence was complete.

The crowd, having gained a huddling-place beyond reach of the tide, stared in mute
fascination; without offering a word of advice or encouragement, or attempting any kind
of assistance. There was in the air a nightmare fear of impending evils such as the world
had never before known.

Minutes seemed lengthened into hours, and still that human snake of swaying torsos
was seen above the fast rising tide. Rhythmically it undulated; slowly, horribly, with the
seal of doom upon it. Thicker clouds now passed over the ascending moon, and the
glittering path on the waters faded nearly out.

Very dimly writhed the serpentine line of nodding heads, with now and then the livid
face of a backward-glancing victim gleaming pale in the darkness. Faster and faster
gathered the clouds, till at length their angry rifts shot down sharp tongues of febrile
flame. Thunders rolled, softly at first, yet soon increasing to a deafening, maddening
intensity. Then came a culminating crash--a shock whose reverberations seemed to
shake land and sea alike--and on its heels a cloudburst whose drenching violence
overpowered the darkened world as if the heavens themselves had opened to pour forth
a vindictive torrent.

The spectators, instinctively acting despite the absence of conscious and coherent
thought, now retreated up the cliff steps to the hotel veranda. Rumors had reached the
guests inside, so that the refugees found a state of terror nearly equal to their own. I
think a few frightened words were uttered, but cannot be sure.
Some, who were staying at the Inn, retired in terror to their rooms; while others
remained to watch the fast sinking victims as the line of bobbing heads showed above
the mounting waves in the fitful lightning flashes. I recall thinking of those heads, and
the bulging eyes they must contain; eyes that might well reflect all the fright, panic, and
delirium of a malignant universe--all the sorrow, sin, and misery, blasted hopes and
unfulfilled desires, fear, loathing and anguish of the ages since time's beginning; eyes
alight with all the soul-racking pain of eternally blazing infernos.

And as I gazed out beyond the heads, my fancy conjured up still another eye; a single
eye, equally alight, yet with a purpose so revolting to my brain that the vision soon
passed. Held in the clutches of an unknown vise, the line of the damned dragged on;
their silent screams and unuttered prayers known only to the demons of the black waves
and the night-wind.

There now burst from the infuriate sky such a mad cataclysm of satanic sound that even
the former crash seemed dwarfed. Amidst a blinding glare of descending fire the voice
of heaven resounded with the blasphemies of hell, and the mingled agony of all the lost
reverberated in one apocalyptic, planet-rending peal of Cyclopean din. It was the end of
the storm, for with uncanny suddenness the rain ceased and the moon once more cast
her pallid beams on a strangely quieted sea.

There was no line of bobbing heads now. The waters were calm and deserted, and
broken only by the fading ripples of what seemed to be a whirlpool far out in the path of
the moonlight whence the strange cry had first come. But as I looked along that
treacherous lane of silvery sheen, with fancy fevered and senses overwrought, there
trickled upon my ears from some abysmal sunken waste the faint and sinister echoes of
a laugh.

THE HORROR AT RED HOOK

CONTENTS

I
II
III
IV
V
VI
VII

Not many weeks ago, on a street corner in the village of Pascoag, Rhode Island, a tall,
heavily built, and wholesome-looking pedestrian furnished much speculation by a
singular lapse of behaviour. He had, it appears, been descending the hill by the road
from Chepachet; and encountering the compact section, had turned to his left into the
main thoroughfare where several modest business blocks convey a touch of the urban.
At this point, without visible provocation, he committed his astonishing lapse; staring
queerly for a second at the tallest of the buildings before him, and then, with a series of
terrified, hysterical shrieks, breaking into a frantic run which ended in a stumble and fall
at the next crossing. Picked up and dusted off by ready hands, he was found to be
conscious, organically unhurt, and evidently cured of his sudden nervous attack. He
muttered some shamefaced explanations involving a strain he had undergone, and with
downcast glance turned back up the Chepachet road, trudging out of sight without once
looking behind him. It was a strange incident to befall so large, robust, normal-featured,
and capable-looking a man, and the strangeness was not lessened by the remarks of a
bystander who had recognised him as the boarder of a well-known dairyman on the
outskirts of Chepachet.

He was, it developed, a New York police detective named Thomas F. Malone, now on a
long leave of absence under medical treatment after some disproportionately arduous
work on a gruesome local case which accident had made dramatic. There had been a
collapse of several old brick buildings during a raid in which he had shared, and
something about the wholesale loss of life, both of prisoners and of his companions, had
peculiarly appalled him. As a result, he had acquired an acute and anomalous horror of
any buildings even remotely suggesting the ones which had fallen in, so that in the end
mental specialists forbade him the sight of such things for an indefinite period. A police
surgeon with relatives in Chepachet had put forward that quaint hamlet of wooden
colonial houses as an ideal spot for the psychological convalescence; and thither the
sufferer had gone, promising never to venture among the brick-lined streets of larger
villages till duly advised by the Woonsocket specialist with whom he was put in touch.
This walk to Pascoag for magazines had been a mistake, and the patient had paid in
fright, bruises, and humiliation for his disobedience.

So much the gossips of Chepachet and Pascoag knew; and so much, also, the most
learned specialists believed. But Malone had at first told the specialists much more,
ceasing only when he saw that utter incredulity was his portion. Thereafter he held his
peace, protesting not at all when it was generally agreed that the collapse of certain
squalid brick houses in the Red Hook section of Brooklyn, and the consequent death of
many brave officers, had unseated his nervous equilibrium. He had worked too hard, all
said, in trying to clean up those nests of disorder and violence; certain features were
shocking enough, in all conscience, and the unexpected tragedy was the last straw. This
was a simple explanation which everyone could understand, and because Malone was
not a simple person he perceived that he had better let it suffice. To hint to
unimaginative people of a horror beyond all human conception--a horror of houses and
blocks and cities leprous and cancerous with evil dragged from elder worlds--would be
merely to invite a padded cell instead of a restful rustication, and Malone was a man of
sense despite his mysticism. He had the Celt's far vision of weird and hidden things, but
the logician's quick eye for the outwardly unconvincing; an amalgam which had led him
far afield in the forty-two years of his life, and set him in strange places for a Dublin
University man born in a Georgian villa near Phoenix Park.

And now, as he reviewed the things he had seen and felt and apprehended, Malone was
content to keep unshared the secret of what could reduce a dauntless fighter to a
quivering neurotic; what could make old brick slums and seas of dark, subtle faces a
thing of nightmare and eldritch portent. It would not be the first time his sensations had
been forced to bide uninterpreted--for was not his very act of plunging into the polyglot
abyss of New York's underworld a freak beyond sensible explanation? What could he
tell the prosaic of the antique witcheries and grotesque marvels discernible to sensitive
eyes amidst the poison cauldron where all the varied dregs of unwholesome ages mix
their venom and perpetuate their obscene terrors? He had seen the hellish green flame of
secret wonder in this blatant, evasive welter of outward greed and inward blasphemy,
and had smiled gently when all the New-Yorkers he knew scoffed at his experiment in
police work. They had been very witty and cynical, deriding his fantastic pursuit of
unknowable mysteries and assuring him that in these days New York held nothing but
cheapness and vulgarity. One of them had wagered him a heavy sum that he could not--
despite many poignant things to his credit in the Dublin Review--even write a truly
interesting story of New York low life; and now, looking back, he perceived that cosmic
irony had justified the prophet's words while secretly confuting their flippant meaning.
The horror, as glimpsed at last, could not make a story--for like the book cited by Poe's
German authority, 'es lässt sich nicht lesen--it does not permit itself to be read.'

II

To Malone the sense of latent mystery in existence was always present. In youth he had
felt the hidden beauty and ecstasy of things, and had been a poet; but poverty and
sorrow and exile had turned his gaze in darker directions, and he had thrilled at the
imputations of evil in the world around. Daily life had for him come to be a
phantasmagoria of macabre shadow-studies; now glittering and leering with concealed
rottenness as in Beardsley's best manner, now hinting terrors behind the commonest
shapes and objects as in the subtler and less obvious work of Gustave Doré. He would
often regard it as merciful that most persons of high intelligence jeer at the inmost
mysteries; for, he argued, if superior minds were ever placed in fullest contact with the
secrets preserved by ancient and lowly cults, the resultant abnormalities would soon not
only wreck the world, but threaten the very integrity of the universe. All this reflection
was no doubt morbid, but keen logic and a deep sense of humour ably offset it. Malone
was satisfied to let his notions remain as half-spied and forbidden visions to be lightly
played with; and hysteria came only when duty flung him into a hell of revelation too
sudden and insidious to escape.

He had for some time been detailed to the Butler Street station in Brooklyn when the
Red Hook matter came to his notice. Red Hook is a maze of hybrid squalor near the
ancient waterfront opposite Governor's Island, with dirty highways climbing the hill
from the wharves to that higher ground where the decayed lengths of Clinton and Court
Streets lead off toward the Borough Hall. Its houses are mostly of brick, dating from the
first quarter to the middle of the nineteenth century, and some of the obscurer alleys and
byways have that alluring antique flavour which conventional reading leads us to call
'Dickensian'. The population is a hopeless tangle and enigma; Syrian, Spanish, Italian,
and Negro elements impinging upon one another, and fragments of Scandinavian and
American belts lying not far distant. It is a babel of sound and filth, and sends out
strange cries to answer the lapping oily waves at its grimy piers and the monstrous
organ litanies of the harbour whistles. Here long ago a brighter picture dwelt, with clear-
-eyed mariners on the lower streets and homes of taste and substance where the larger
houses line the hill. One can trace the relics of this former happiness in the trim shapes
of the buildings, the occasional graceful churches, and the evidences of original art and
background in bits of detail here and there--a worn flight of steps, a battered doorway, a
wormy pair of decorative columns or pilasters, or a fragment of once green space with
bent and rusted iron railing. The houses are generally in solid blocks, and now and then
a many-windowed cupola arises to tell of days when the households of captains and
ship-owners watched the sea.

From this tangle of material and spiritual putrescence the blasphemies of an hundred
dialects assail the sky. Hordes of prowlers reel shouting and singing along the lanes and
thoroughfares, occasional furtive hands suddenly extinguish lights and pull down
curtains, and swarthy, sin-pitted faces disappear from windows when visitors pick their
way through. Policemen despair of order or reform, and seek rather to erect barriers
protecting the outside world from the contagion. The clang of the patrol is answered by
a kind of spectral silence, and such prisoners as are taken are never communicative.
Visible offences are as varied as the local dialects, and run the gamut from the
smuggling of rum and prohibited aliens through diverse stages of lawlessness and
obscure vice to murder and mutilation in their most abhorrent guises. That these visible
affairs are not more frequent is not to the neighbourhood's credit, unless the power of
concealment be an art demanding credit. More people enter Red Hook than leave it--or
at least, than leave it by the landward side--and those who are not loquacious are the
likeliest to leave.

Malone found in this state of things a faint stench of secrets more terrible than any of
the sins denounced by citizens and bemoaned by priests and philanthropists. He was
conscious, as one who united imagination with scientific knowledge, that modern
people under lawless conditions tend uncannily to repeat the darkest instinctive patterns
of primitive half-ape savagery in their daily life and ritual observances; and he had often
viewed with an anthropologist's shudder the chanting, cursing processions of blear-eyed
and pockmarked young men which wound their way along in the dark small hours of
morning. One saw groups of these youths incessantly; sometimes in leering vigils on
street corners, sometimes in doorways playing eerily on cheap instruments of music,
sometimes in stupefied dozes or indecent dialogues around cafeteria tables near
Borough Hall, and sometimes in whispering converse around dingy taxicabs drawn up
at the high stoops of crumbling and closely shuttered old houses. They chilled and
fascinated him more than he dared confess to his associates on the force, for he seemed
to see in them some monstrous thread of secret continuity; some fiendish, cryptical, and
ancient pattern utterly beyond and below the sordid mass of facts and habits and haunts
listed with such conscientious technical care by the police. They must be, he felt
inwardly, the heirs of some shocking and primordial tradition; the sharers of debased
and broken scraps from cults and ceremonies older than mankind. Their coherence and
definiteness suggested it, and it shewed in the singular suspicion of order which lurked
beneath their squalid disorder. He had not read in vain such treatises as Miss Murray's
Witch-Cult in Western Europe; and knew that up to recent years there had certainly
survived among peasants and furtive folk a frightful and clandestine system of
assemblies and orgies descended from dark religions antedating the Aryan world, and
appearing in popular legends as Black Masses and Witches' Sabbaths. That these hellish
vestiges of old Turanian-Asiatic magic and fertility cults were even now wholly dead he
could not for a moment suppose, and he frequently wondered how much older and how
much blacker than the very worst of the muttered tales some of them might really be.

III

It was the case of Robert Suydam which took Malone to the heart of things in Red
Hook. Suydam was a lettered recluse of ancient Dutch family, possessed originally of
barely independent means, and inhabiting the spacious but ill-preserved mansion which
his grandfather had built in Flatbush when that village was little more than a pleasant
group of colonial cottages surrounding the steepled and ivy-clad Reformed Church with
its iron-railed yard of Netherlandish gravestones. In his lonely house, set back from
Martense Street amidst a yard of venerable trees, Suydam had read and brooded for
some six decades except for a period a generation before, when he had sailed for the old
world and remained there out of sight for eight years. He could afford no servants, and
would admit but few visitors to his absolute solitude; eschewing close friendships and
receiving his rare acquaintances in one of the three ground-floor rooms which he kept in
order--a vast, high-ceiled library whose walls were solidly packed with tattered books of
ponderous, archaic, and vaguely repellent aspect. The growth of the town and its final
absorption in the Brooklyn district had meant nothing to Suydam, and he had come to
mean less and less to the town. Elderly people still pointed him out on the streets, but to
most of the recent population he was merely a queer, corpulent old fellow whose
unkempt white hair, stubbly beard, shiny black clothes, and gold-headed cane earned
him an amused glance and nothing more. Malone did not know him by sight till duty
called him to the case, but had heard of him indirectly as a really profound authority on
mediaeval superstition, and had once idly meant to look up an out-of-print pamphlet of
his on the Kabbalah and the Faustus legend, which a friend had quoted from memory.

Suydam became a case when his distant and only relatives sought court
pronouncements on his sanity. Their action seemed sudden to the outside world, but was
really undertaken only after prolonged observation and sorrowful debate. It was based
on certain odd changes in his speech and habits; wild references to impending wonders,
and unaccountable hauntings of disreputable Brooklyn neighbourhoods. He had been
growing shabbier and shabbier with the years, and now prowled about like a veritable
mendicant; seen occasionally by humiliated friends in subway stations, or loitering on
the benches around Borough Hall in conversation with groups of swarthy, evil-looking
strangers. When he spoke it was to babble of unlimited powers almost within his grasp,
and to repeat with knowing leers such mystical words or names as 'Sephiroth',
'Ashmodai', and 'Samaël'. The court action revealed that he was using up his income and
wasting his principal in the purchase of curious tomes imported from London and Paris,
and in the maintenance of a squalid basement flat in the Red Hook district where he
spent nearly every night, receiving odd delegations of mixed rowdies and foreigners,
and apparently conducting some kind of ceremonial service behind the green blinds of
secretive windows. Detectives assigned to follow him reported strange cries and chants
and prancing of feet filtering out from these nocturnal rites, and shuddered at their
peculiar ecstasy and abandon despite the commonness of weird orgies in that sodden
section. When, however, the matter came to a hearing, Suydam managed to preserve his
liberty. Before the judge his manner grew urbane and reasonable, and he freely admitted
the queerness of demeanour and extravagant cast of language into which he had fallen
through excessive devotion to study and research. He was, he said, engaged in the
investigation of certain details of European tradition which required the closest contact
with foreign groups and their songs and folk dances. The notion that any low secret
society was preying upon him, as hinted by his relatives, was obviously absurd; and
shewed how sadly limited was their understanding of him and his work. Triumphing
with his calm explanations, he was suffered to depart unhindered; and the paid
detectives of the Suydams, Corlears, and Van Brunts were withdrawn in resigned
disgust.
It was here that an alliance of Federal inspectors and police, Malone with them, entered
the case. The law had watched the Suydam action with interest, and had in many
instances been called upon to aid the private detectives. In this work it developed that
Suydam's new associates were among the blackest and most vicious criminals of Red
Hook's devious lanes, and that at least a third of them were known and repeated
offenders in the matter of thievery, disorder, and the importation of illegal immigrants.
Indeed, it would not have been too much to say that the old scholar's particular circle
coincided almost perfectly with the worst of the organized cliques which smuggled
ashore certain nameless and unclassified Asian dregs wisely turned back by Ellis Island.
In the teeming rookeries of Parker Place--since renamed--where Suydam had his
basement flat, there had grown up a very unusual colony of unclassified slant-eyed folk
who used the Arabic alphabet but were eloquently repudiated by the great mass of
Syrians in and around Atlantic Avenue. They could all have been deported for lack of
credentials, but legalism is slow-moving, and one does not disturb Red Hook unless
publicity forces one to.

These creatures attended a tumbledown stone church, used Wednesdays as a dance-hall,

which reared its Gothic buttresses near the vilest part of the waterfront. It was nominally
Catholic; but priests throughout Brooklyn denied the place all standing and authenticity,
and policemen agreed with them when they listened to the noises it emitted at night.
Malone used to fancy he heard terrible cracked bass notes from a hidden organ far
underground when the church stood empty and unlighted, whilst all observers dreaded
the shrieking and drumming which accompanied the visible services. Suydam, when
questioned, said he thought the ritual was some remnant of Nestorian Christianity
tinctured with the Shamanism of Thibet. Most of the people, he conjectured, were of
Mongoloid stock, originating somewhere in or near Kurdistan--and Malone could not
help recalling that Kurdistan is the land of the Yezidis, last survivors of the Persian
devil-worshippers. However this may have been, the stir of the Suydam investigation
made it certain that these unauthorised newcomers were flooding Red Hook in
increasing numbers; entering through some marine conspiracy unreached by revenue
officers and harbour police, overrunning Parker Place and rapidly spreading up the hill,
and welcomed with curious fraternalism by the other assorted denizens of the region.
Their squat figures and characteristic squinting physiognomies, grotesquely combined
with flashy American clothing, appeared more and more numerously among the loafers
and nomad gangsters of the Borough Hall section; till at length it was deemed necessary
to compute their numbers, ascertain their sources and occupations, and find if possible a
way to round them up and deliver them to the proper immigration authorities. To this
task Malone was assigned by agreement of Federal and city forces, and as he
commenced his canvass of Red Hook he felt poised upon the brink of nameless terrors,
with the shabby, unkempt figure of Robert Suydam as arch-fiend and adversary.

IV

Police methods are varied and ingenious. Malone, through unostentatious rambles,
carefully casual conversations, well-timed offers of hip-pocket liquor, and judicious
dialogues with frightened prisoners, learned many isolated facts about the movement
whose aspect had become so menacing. The newcomers were indeed Kurds, but of a
dialect obscure and puzzling to exact philology. Such of them as worked lived mostly as
dock-hands and unlicenced pedlars, though frequently serving in Greek restaurants and
tending corner news stands. Most of them, however, had no visible means of support;
and were obviously connected with underworld pursuits, of which smuggling and
'bootlegging' were the least indescribable. They had come in steamships, apparently
tramp freighters, and had been unloaded by stealth on moonless nights in rowboats
which stole under a certain wharf and followed a hidden canal to a secret subterranean
pool beneath a house. This wharf, canal, and house Malone could not locate, for the
memories of his informants were exceedingly confused, while their speech was to a
great extent beyond even the ablest interpreters; nor could he gain any real data on the
reasons for their systematic importation. They were reticent about the exact spot from
which they had come, and were never sufficiently off guard to reveal the agencies
which had sought them out and directed their course. Indeed, they developed something
like acute fright when asked the reasons for their presence. Gangsters of other breeds
were equally taciturn, and the most that could be gathered was that some god or great
priesthood had promised them unheard-of powers and supernatural glories and
rulerships in a strange land.

The attendance of both newcomers and old gangsters at Suydam's closely guarded
nocturnal meetings was very regular, and the police soon learned that the erstwhile
recluse had leased additional flats to accommodate such guests as knew his password; at
last occupying three entire houses and permanently harbouring many of his queer
companions. He spent but little time now at his Flatbush home, apparently going and
coming only to obtain and return books; and his face and manner had attained an
appalling pitch of wildness. Malone twice interviewed him, but was each time
brusquely repulsed. He knew nothing, he said, of any mysterious plots or movements;
and had no idea how the Kurds could have entered or what they wanted. His business
was to study undisturbed the folklore of all the immigrants of the district; a business
with which policemen had no legitimate concern. Malone mentioned his admiration for
Suydam's old brochure on the Kabbalah and other myths, but the old man's softening
was only momentary. He sensed an intrusion, and rebuffed his visitor in no uncertain
way; till Malone withdrew disgusted, and turned to other channels of information.

What Malone would have unearthed could he have worked continuously on the case, we
shall never know. As it was, a stupid conflict between city and Federal authority
suspended the investigations for several months, during which the detective was busy
with other assignments. But at no time did he lose interest, or fail to stand amazed at
what began to happen to Robert Suydam. Just at the time when a wave of kidnappings
and disappearances spread its excitement over New York, the unkempt scholar
embarked upon a metamorphosis as startling as it was absurd. One day he was seen near
Borough Hall with clean-shaved face, well-trimmed hair, and tastefully immaculate
attire, and on every day thereafter some obscure improvement was noticed in him. He
maintained his new fastidiousness without interruption, added to it an unwonted sparkle
of eye and crispness of speech, and began little by little to shed the corpulence which
had so long deformed him. Now frequently taken for less than his age, he acquired an
elasticity of step and buoyancy of demeanour to match the new tradition, and shewed a
curious darkening of the hair which somehow did not suggest dye. As the months
passed, he commenced to dress less and less conservatively, and finally astonished his
new friends by renovating and redecorating his Flatbush mansion, which he threw open
in a series of receptions, summoning all the acquaintances he could remember, and
extending a special welcome to the fully forgiven relatives who had so lately sought his
restraint. Some attended through curiosity, others through duty; but all were suddenly
charmed by the dawning grace and urbanity of the former hermit. He had, he asserted,
accomplished most of his allotted work; and having just inherited some property from a
half--forgotten European friend, was about to spend his remaining years in a brighter
second youth which ease, care, and diet had made possible to him. Less and less was he
seen at Red Hook, and more and more did he move in the society to which he was born.
Policemen noted a tendency of the gangsters to congregate at the old stone church and
dance-hall instead of at the basement flat in Parker Place, though the latter and its recent
annexes still overflowed with noxious life.

Then two incidents occurred--wide enough apart, but both of intense interest in the case
as Malone envisaged it. One was a quiet announcement in the Eagle of Robert Suydam's
engagement to Miss Cornelia Gerritsen of Bayside, a young woman of excellent
position, and distantly related to the elderly bridegroom-elect; whilst the other was a
raid on the dance-hall church by city police, after a report that the face of a kidnapped
child had been seen for a second at one of the basement windows. Malone had
participated in this raid, and studied the place with much care when inside. Nothing was
found--in fact, the building was entirely deserted when visited--but the sensitive Celt
was vaguely disturbed by many things about the interior. There were crudely painted
panels he did not like--panels which depicted sacred faces with peculiarly worldly and
sardonic expressions, and which occasionally took liberties that even a layman's sense
of decorum could scarcely countenance. Then, too, he did not relish the Greek
inscription on the wall above the pulpit; an ancient incantation which he had once
stumbled upon in Dublin college days, and which read, literally translated,

'O friend and companion of night, thou who rejoicest in the baying of dogs and spilt
blood, who wanderest in the midst of shades among the tombs, who longest for blood
and bringest terror to mortals, Gorgo, Mormo, look favourably on our sacrifices!'

When he read this he shuddered, and thought vaguely of the cracked bass organ notes he
fancied he had heard beneath the church on certain nights. He shuddered again at the
rust around the rim of a metal basin which stood on the altar, and paused nervously
when his nostrils seemed to detect a curious and ghastly stench from somewhere in the
neighbourhood. That organ memory haunted him, and he explored the basement with
particular assiduity before he left. The place was very hateful to him; yet after all, were
the blasphemous panels and inscriptions more than mere crudities perpetrated by the
ignorant?

By the time of Suydam's wedding the kidnapping epidemic had become a popular
newspaper scandal. Most of the victims were young children of the lowest classes, but
the increasing number of disappearances had worked up a sentiment of the strongest
fury. Journals clamoured for action from the police, and once more the Butler Street
Station sent its men over Red Hook for clues, discoveries, and criminals. Malone was
glad to be on the trail again, and took pride in a raid on one of Suydam's Parker Place
houses. There, indeed, no stolen child was found, despite the tales of screams and the
red sash picked up in the areaway; but the paintings and rough inscriptions on the
peeling walls of most of the rooms, and the primitive chemical laboratory in the attic, all
helped to convince the detective that he was on the track of something tremendous. The
paintings were appalling--hideous monsters of every shape and size, and parodies on
human outlines which cannot be described. The writing was in red, and varied from
Arabic to Greek, Roman, and Hebrew letters. Malone could not read much of it, but
what he did decipher was portentous and cabbalistic enough. One frequently repeated
motto was in a Sort of Hebraised Hellenistic Greek, and suggested the most terrible
daemon-evocations of the Alexandrian decadence:

'HEL-HELOYM-SOTHER-EMMANVEL-SABAOTH-AGLA-
TETRAGRAMMATON-AGYROS-OTHEOS-ISCHYROS-
ATHANATOS-IEHOVA-VA-ADONAI-SADAY-HOMOVSION-
MESSIAS-ESCHEREHEYE'

Circles and pentagrams loomed on every hand, and told indubitably of the strange
beliefs and aspirations of those who dwelt so squalidly here. In the cellar, however, the
strangest thing was found--a pile of genuine gold ingots covered carelessly with a piece
of burlap, and bearing upon their shining surfaces the same weird hieroglyphics which
also adorned the walls. During the raid the police encountered only a passive resistance
from the squinting Orientals that swarmed from every door. Finding nothing relevant,
they had to leave all as it was; but the precinct captain wrote Suydam a note advising
him to look closely to the character of his tenants and protégés in view of the growing
public clamour.

Then came the June wedding and the great sensation. Flatbush was gay for the hour
about high noon, and pennanted motors thronged the streets near the old Dutch church
where an awning stretched from door to highway. No local event ever surpassed the
Suydam-Gerritsen nuptials in tone and scale, and the party which escorted bride and
groom to the Cunard Pier was, if not exactly the smartest, at least a solid page from the
Social Register. At five o'clock adieux were waved, and the ponderous liner edged away
from the long pier, slowly turned its nose seaward, discarded its tug, and headed for the
widening water spaces that led to old world wonders. By night the outer harbour was
cleared, and late passengers watched the stars twinkling above an unpolluted ocean.

Whether the tramp steamer or the scream was first to gain attention, no one can say.
Probably they were simultaneous, but it is of no use to calculate. The scream came from
the Suydam stateroom, and the sailor who broke down the door could perhaps have told
frightful things if he had not forthwith gone completely mad--as it is, he shrieked more
loudly than the first victims, and thereafter ran simpering about the vessel till caught
and put in irons. The ship's doctor who entered the stateroom and turned on the lights a
moment later did not go mad, but told nobody what he saw till afterward, when he
corresponded with Malone in Chepachet. It was murder--strangulation--but one need
not say that the claw-mark on Mrs. Suydam's throat could not have come from her
husband's or any other human hand, or that upon the white wall there flickered for an
instant in hateful red a legend which, later copied from memory, seems to have been
nothing less than the fearsome Chaldee letters of the word 'LILITH'. One need not
mention these things because they vanished so quickly--as for Suydam, one could at
least bar others from the room until one knew what to think oneself. The doctor has
distinctly assured Malone that he did not see IT. The open porthole, just before he
turned on the lights, was clouded for a second with a certain phosphorescence, and for a
moment there seemed to echo in the night outside the suggestion of a faint and hellish
tittering; but no real outline met the eye. As proof, the doctor points to his continued
sanity.
Then the tramp steamer claimed all attention. A boat put off, and a horde of swart,
insolent ruffians in officers' dress swarmed aboard the temporarily halted Cunarder.
They wanted Suydam or his body--they had known of his trip, and for certain reasons
were sure he would die. The captain's deck was almost a pandemonium; for at the
instant, between the doctor's report from the stateroom and the demands of the men
from the tramp, not even the wisest and gravest seaman could think what to do.
Suddenly the leader of the visiting mariners, an Arab with a hatefully negroid mouth,
pulled forth a dirty, crumpled paper and handed it to the captain. It was signed by
Robert Suydam, and bore the following odd message.

Captain and doctor looked at each other, and the latter whispered something to the
former. Finally they nodded rather helplessly and led the way to the Suydam stateroom.
The doctor directed the captain's glance away as he unlocked the door and admitted the
strange seamen, nor did he breathe easily till they filed out with their burden after an
unaccountably long period of preparation. It was wrapped in bedding from the berths,
and the doctor was glad that the outlines were not very revealing. Somehow the men got
the thing over the side and away to their tramp steamer without uncovering it. The
Cunarder started again, and the doctor and a ship's undertaker sought out the Suydam
stateroorn to perform what last services they could. Once more the physician was forced
to reticence and even to mendacity, for a hellish thing had happened. When the
undertaker asked him why he had drained off all of Mrs. Suydam's blood, he neglected
to affirm that he had not done so; nor did he point to the vacant bottle-spaces on the
rack, or to the odour in the sink which shewed the hasty disposition of the bottles'
original contents. The pockets of those men--if men they were--had bulged damnably
when they left the ship. Two hours later, and the world knew by radio all that it ought to
know of the horrible affair.

VI

That same June evening, without having heard a word from the sea, Malone was
desperately busy among the alleys of Red Hook. A sudden stir seemed to permeate the
place, and as if apprised by 'grapevine telegraph' of something singular, the denizens
clustered expectantly around the dance-hall church and the houses in Parker Place.
Three children had just disappeared--blue-eyed Norwegians from the streets toward
Gowanus--and there were rumours of a mob forming among the sturdy Vikings of that
section. Malone had for weeks been urging his colleagues to attempt a general cleanup;
and at last, moved by conditions more obvious to their common sense than the
conjectures of a Dublin dreamer, they had agreed upon a final stroke. The unrest and
menace of this evening had been the deciding factor, and just about midnight a raiding
party recruited from three stations descended upon Parker Place and its environs. Doors
were battered in, stragglers arrested, and candlelighted rooms forced to disgorge
unbelievable throngs of mixed foreigners in figured robes, mitres, and other
inexplicable devices. Much was lost in the melee, for objects were thrown hastily down
unexpected shafts, and betraying odours deadened by the sudden kindling of pungent
incense. But spattered blood was everywhere, and Malone shuddered whenever he saw
a brazier or altar from which the smoke was still rising.

He wanted to be in several places at once, and decided on Suydam's basement flat only
after a messenger had reported the complete emptiness of the dilapidated dance-hall
church. The flat, he thought, must hold some clue to a cult of which the occult scholar
had so obviously become the centre and leader; and it was with real expectancy that he
ransacked the musty rooms, noted their vaguely charnel odour, and examined the
curious books, instruments, gold ingots, and glass-stoppered bottles scattered carelessly
here and there. Once a lean, black-and-white cat edged between his feet and tripped
him, overturning at the same time a beaker half full of a red liquid. The shock was
severe, and to this day Malone is not certain of what he saw; but in dreams he still
pictures that cat as it scuttled away with certain monstrous alterations and peculiarities.
Then came the locked cellar door, and the search for something to break it down. A
heavy stool stood near, and its tough seat was more than enough for the antique panels.
A crack formed and enlarged, and the whole door gave way--but from the other side;
whence poured a howling tumult of ice-cold wind with all the stenches of the
bottomless pit, and whence reached a sucking force not of earth or heaven, which,
coiling sentiently about the paralysed detective, dragged him through the aperture and
down unmeasured spaces filled with whispers and wails, and gusts of mocking laughter.

Of course it was a dream. All the specialists have told him so, and he has nothing to
prove the contrary. Indeed, he would rather have it thus; for then the sight of old brick
slums and dark foreign faces would not eat so deeply into his soul. But at the time it was
all horribly real, and nothing can ever efface the memory of those nighted crypts, those
titan arcades, and those half-formed shapes of hell that strode gigantically in silence
holding half-eaten things whose still surviving portions screamed for mercy or laughed
with madness. Odours of incense and corruption joined in sickening concert, and the
black air was alive with the cloudy, semi-visible bulk of shapeless elemental things with
eyes. Somewhere dark sticky water was lapping at onyx piers, and once the shivery
tinkle of raucous little bells pealed out to greet the insane titter of a naked
phosphorescent thing which swam into sight, scrambled ashore, and climbed up to squat
leeringly on a carved golden pedestal in the background.

Avenues of limitless night seemed to radiate in every direction, till one might fancy that
here lay the root of a contagion destined to sicken and swallow cities, and engulf
nations in the foetor of hybrid pestilence. Here cosmic sin had entered, and festered by
unhallowed rites had commenced the grinning march of death that was to rot us all to
fungous abnormalities too hideous for the grave's holding. Satan here held his
Babylonish court, and in the blood of stainless childhood the leprous limbs of
phosphorescent Lilith were laved. Incubi and succubae howled praise to Hecate, and
headless moon-calves bleated to the Magna Mater. Goats leaped to the sound of thin
accursed flutes, and aegipans chased endlessly after misshapen fauns over rocks twisted
like swollen toads. Moloch and Ashtaroth were not absent; for in this quintessence of all
damnation the bounds of consciousness were let down, and man's fancy lay open to
vistas of every realm of horror and every forbidden dimension that evil had power to
mould. The world and Nature were helpless against such assaults from unsealed wells
of night, nor could any sign or prayer check the Walpurgis-riot of horror which had
come when a sage with the hateful key had stumbled on a horde with the locked and
brimming coffer of transmitted daemon-lore.

Suddenly a ray of physical light shot through these phantasms, and Malone heard the
sound of oars amidst the blasphemies of things that should be dead. A boat with a
lantern in its prow darted into sight, made fast to an iron ring in the slimy stone pier,
and vomited forth several dark men bearing a long burden swathed in bedding. They
took it to the naked phosphorescent thing on the carved golden pedestal, and the thing
tittered and pawed at the bedding. Then they unswathed it, and propped upright before
the pedestal the gangrenous corpse of a corpulent old man with stubbly beard and
unkempt white hair. The phosphorescent thing tittered again, and the men produced
bottles from their pockets and anointed its feet with red, whilst they afterward gave the
bottles to the thing to drink from.

All at once, from an arcaded avenue leading endlessly away, there came the daemoniac
rattle and wheeze of a blasphemous organ, choking and rumbling out the mockeries of
hell in a cracked, sardonic bass. In an instant every moving entity was electrified; and
forming at once into a ceremonial procession, the nightmare horde slithered away in
quest of the sound--goat, satyr, and aegipan, incubus, succubus and lemur, twisted toad
and shapeless elemental, dog-faced howler and silent strutter in darkness--all led by the
abominable naked phosphorescent thing that had squatted on the carved golden throne,
and that now strode insolently bearing in its arms the glassy-eyed corpse of the
corpulent old man. The strange dark men danced in the rear, and the whole column
skipped and leaped with Dionysiac fury. Malone staggered after them a few steps,
delirious and hazy, and doubtful of his place in this or in any world. Then he turned,
faltered, and sank down on the cold damp stone, gasping and shivering as the daemon
organ croaked on, and the howling and drumming and tinkling of the mad procession
grew fainter and fainter.

Vaguely he was conscious of chanted horrors and shocking croakings afar off. Now and
then a wail or whine of ceremonial devotion would float to him through the black
arcade, whilst eventually there rose the dreadful Greek incantation whose text he had
read above the pulpit of that dance-hall church.

As the chant closed, a general shout went up, and hissing sounds nearly drowned the
croaking of the cracked bass organ. Then a gasp as from many throats, and a babel of
barked and bleated words--'Lilith, Great Lilith, behold the Bridegroom!' More cries, a
clamour of rioting, and the sharp, clicking footfalls of a running figure. The footfalls
approached, and Malone raised himself to his elbow to look.

The luminosity of the crypt, lately diminished, had now slightly increased; and in that
devil-light there appeared the fleeing form of that which should not flee or feel or
breathe--the glassy-eyed, gangrenous corpse of the corpulent old man, now needing no
support, but animated by some infernal sorcery of the rite just closed. After it raced the
naked, tittering, phosphorescent thing that belonged on the carven pedestal, and still
farther behind panted the dark men, and all the dread crew of sentient loathsomenesses.
The corpse was gaining on its pursuers, and seemed bent on a definite object, straining
with every rotting muscle toward the carved golden pedestal, whose necromantic
importance was evidently so great. Another moment and it had reached its goal, whilst
the trailing throng laboured on with more frantic speed. But they were too late, for in
one final spurt of strength which ripped tendon from tendon and sent its noisome bulk
floundering to the floor in a state of jellyish dissolution, the staring corpse which had
been Robert Suydam achieved its object and its triumph. The push had been
tremendous, but the force had held out; and as the pusher collapsed to a muddy blotch
of corruption the pedestal he had pushed tottered, tipped, and finally careened from its
onyx base into the thick waters below, sending up a parting gleam of carven gold as it
sank heavily to undreamable gulfs of lower Tartarus. In that instant, too, the whole
scene of horror faded to nothingness before Malone's eyes; and he fainted amidst a
thunderous crash which seemed to blot out all the evil universe.

VII

Malone's dream, experienced in full before he knew of Suydam's death and transfer at
sea, was curiously supplemented by some odd realities of the case; though that is no
reason why anyone should believe it. The three old houses in Parker Place, doubtless
long rotten with decay in its most insidious form, collapsed without visible cause while
half the raiders and most of the prisoners were inside; and of both the greater number
were instantly killed. Only in the basements and cellars was there much saving of life,
and Malone was lucky to have been deep below the house of Robert Suydam. For he
really was there, as no one is disposed to deny. They found him unconscious by the
edge of a night-black pool, with a grotesquely horrible jumble of decay and bone,
identifiable through dental work as the body of Suydam, a few feet away. The case was
plain, for it was hither that the smugglers' underground canal led; and the men who took
Suydam from the ship had brought him home. They themselves were never found, or at
least never identified; and the ship's doctor is not yet satisfied with the simple certitudes
of the police.

Suydam was evidently a leader in extensive man-smuggling operations, for the canal to
his house was but one of several subterranean channels and tunnels in the
neighbourhood. There was a tunnel from this house to a crypt beneath the dance-hall
church; a crypt accessible from the church only through a narrow secret passage in the
north wall, and in whose chambers some singular and terrible things were discovered.
The croaking organ was there, as well as a vast arched chapel with wooden benches and
a strangely figured altar. The walls were lined with small cells, in seventeen of which--
hideous to relate--solitary prisoners in a state of complete idiocy were found chained,
including four mothers with infants of disturbingly strange appearance. These infants
died soon after exposure to the light; a circumstance which the doctors thought rather
merciful. Nobody but Malone, among those who inspected them, remembered the
sombre question of old Delrio: 'An sint unquam daemones incubi et succubae, et an ex
tali congressu proles nasci queat?'

Before the canals were filled up they were thoroughly dredged, and yielded forth a
sensational array of sawed and split bones of all sizes. The kidnapping epidemic, very
clearly, had been traced home; though only two of the surviving prisoners could by any
legal thread be connected with it. These men are now in prison, since they failed of
conviction as accessories in the actual murders. The carved golden pedestal or throne so
often mentioned by Malone as of primary occult importance was never brought to light,
though at one place under the Suydam house the canal was observed to sink into a well
too deep for dredging. It was choked up at the mouth and cemented over when the
cellars of the new houses were made, but Malone often speculates on what lies beneath.
The police, satisfied that they had shattered a dangerous gang of maniacs and man-
smugglers, turned over to the Federal authorities the unconvicted Kurds, who before
their deportation were conclusively found to belong to the Yezidi clan of devil-
worshippers. The tramp ship and its crew remain an elusive mystery, though cynical
detectives are once more ready to combat its smuggling and rum-running ventures.
Malone thinks these detectives shew a sadly limited perspective in their lack of wonder
at the myriad unexplainable details, and the suggestive obscurity of the whole case;
though he is just as critical of the newspapers, which saw only a morbid sensation and
gloated over a minor sadist cult which they might have proclaimed a horror from the
universe's very heart. But he is content to rest silent in Chepachet, calming his nervous
system and praying that time may gradually transfer his terrible experience from the
realm of present reality to that of picturesque and semi-mythical remoteness.

Robert Suydam sleeps beside his bride in Greenwood Cemetery. No funeral was held
over the strangely released bones, and relatives are grateful for the swift oblivion which
overtook the case as a whole. The scholar's connexion with the Red Hook horrors,
indeed, was never emblazoned by legal proof; since his death forestalled the inquiry he
would otherwise have faced. His own end is not much mentioned, and the Suydams
hope that posterity may recall him only as a gentle recluse who dabbled in harmless
magic and folklore.

As for Red Hook--it is always the same. Suydam came and went; a terror gathered and
faded; but the evil spirit of darkness and squalor broods on amongst the mongrels in the
old brick houses, and prowling bands still parade on unknown errands past windows
where lights and twisted faces unaccountably appear and disappear. Age-old horror is a
hydra with a thousand heads, and the cults of darkness are rooted in blasphemies deeper
than the well of Democritus. The soul of the beast is omnipresent and triumphant, and
Red Hook's legions of blear-eyed, pockmarked youths still chant and curse and howl as
they file from abyss to abyss, none knows whence or whither, pushed on by blind laws
of biology which they may never understand. As of old, more people enter Red Hook
than leave it on the landward side, and there are already rumours of new canals running
underground to certain centres of traffic in liquor and less mentionable things.

The dance-hall church is now mostly a dance-hall, and queer faces have appeared at
night at the windows. Lately a policeman expressed the belief that the filled-up crypt
has been dug out again, and for no simply explainable purpose. Who are we to combat
poisons older than history and mankind? Apes danced in Asia to those horrors, and the
cancer lurks secure and spreading where furtiveness hides in rows of decaying brick.

Malone does not shudder without cause--for only the other day an officer overheard a
swarthy squinting hag teaching a small child some whispered patois in the shadow of an
areaway. He listened, and thought it very strange when he heard her repeat over and
over again.

'O friend and companion of night, thou who rejoicest in the baying of dogs and spilt
blood, who wanderest in the midst of shades among the tombs, who longest for blood
and bringest terror to mortals, Gorgo, Mormo, look favourably on our sacrifices!'

THE HOUND
In my tortured ears there sounds unceasingly a nightmare whirring and flapping, and a
faint distant baying as of some gigantic hound. It is not dream--it is not, I fear, even
madness--for too much has already happened to give me these merciful doubts.

St John is a mangled corpse; I alone know why, and such is my knowledge that I am
about to blow out my brains for fear I shall be mangled in the same way. Down unlit
and illimitable corridors of eldrith phantasy sweeps the black, shapeless Nemesis that
drives me to self-annihilation.

May heaven forgive the folly and morbidity which led us both to so monstrous a fate!
Wearied with the commonplaces of a prosaic world; where even the joys of romance
and adventure soon grow stale, St John and I had followed enthusiastically every
aesthetic and intellectual movement which promised respite from our devastating ennui.
The enigmas of the symbolists and the ecstasies of the pre-Raphaelites all were ours in
their time, but each new mood was drained too soon, of its diverting novelty and appeal.

Only the somber philosophy of the decadents could help us, and this we found potent
only by increasing gradually the depth and diablism of our penetrations. Baudelaire and
Huysmans were soon exhausted of thrills, till finally there remained for us only the
more direct stimuli of unnatural personal experiences and adventures. It was this
frightful emotional need which led us eventually to that detestable course which even in
my present fear I mention with shame and timidity--that hideous extremity of human
outrage, the abhorred practice of grave-robbing.

I cannot reveal the details of our shocking expedition, or catalogue even partly the worst
of the trophies adorning the nameless museum where we jointly dwelt, alone and
servantless. Our museum was a blasphemous, unthinkable place, where with the satanic
taste of neurotic virtuosi we had assembled an universe of terror and a secret room, far,
far, underground; where huge winged daemons carven of basalt and onyx vomited from
wide grinning mouths weird green and orange light, and hidden pneumatic pipes ruffled
into kaleidoscopic dances of death the line of red charnel things hand in hand woven in
voluminous black hangings. Through these pipes came at will the odors our moods most
craved; sometimes the scent of pale funeral lilies; sometimes the narcotic incense of
imagined Eastern shrines of the kingly dead, and sometimes--how I shudder to recall it!-
-the frightful, soul-upheaving stenches of the uncovered-grave.

Around the walls of this repellent chamber were cases of antique mummies alternating
with comely, lifelike bodies perfectly stuffed and cured by the taxidermist's art, and
with headstones snatched from the oldest churchyards of the world. Niches here and
there contained skulls of all shapes, and heads preserved in various stages of
dissolution. There one might find the rotting, bald pates of famous noblemen, and the
flesh and radiantly golden heads of new-buried children.

Statues and painting there were, all of fiendish subjects and some executed by St John
and myself. A locked portfolio, bound in tanned human skin, held certain unknown and
unnameable drawings which it was rumored Goya had perpetrated but dared not
acknowledge. There were nauseous musical instruments, stringed, brass, wood-wind, on
which St John and I sometimes produced dissonances of exquisite morbidity and
cacodaemoniacal ghastliness; whilst in a multitude of inlaid ebony cabinets reposed the
most incredible and unimaginable variety of tomb-loot ever assembled by human
madness and perversity. It is of this loot in particular that I destroy it long before I
thought of destroying myself!

The predatory excursions on which we collected our unmentionable treasures were

always artistically memorable events. We were no vulgar ghouls, but worked only
under certain conditions of mood, landscape, environment, weather, season, and
moonlight. These pastimes were to us the most exquisite form of aesthetic expression,
and we gave their details a fastidious technical care. An inappropriate hour, a jarring
lighting effect, or a clumsy manipulation of the damp sod, would almost totally destroy
for us that ecstatic titillation which followed the exhumation of some ominous, grinning
secret of the earth. Our quest for novel scenes and piquant conditions was feverish and
insatiate--St John was always the leader, and he it was who led the way at last to that
mocking, accursed spot which brought us our hideous and inevitable doom.

By what malign fatality were we lured to that terrible Holland churchyard? I think it
was the dark rumor and legendry, the tales of one buried for five centuries, who had
himself been a ghoul in his time and had stolen a potent thing from a mighty sepulchre.
I can recall the scene in these final moments--the pale autumnal moon over the graves,
casting long horrible shadows; the grotesque trees, drooping sullenly to meet the
neglected grass and the crumbling slabs; the vast legions of strangely colossal bats that
flew against the moon; the antique ivied church pointing a huge spectral finger at the
livid sky; the phosphorescent insects that danced like death-fires under the yews in a
distant corner; the odors of mould, vegetation, and less explicable things that mingled
feebly with the night-wind from over far swamps and seas; and, worst of all, the faint
deep-toned baying of some gigantic hound which we could neither see nor definitely
place. As we heard this suggestion of baying we shuddered, remembering the tales of
the peasantry; for he whom we sought had centuries before been found in this self same
spot, torn and mangled by the claws and teeth of some unspeakable beast.

I remember how we delved in the ghoul's grave with our spades, and how we thrilled at
the picture of ourselves, the grave, the pale watching moon, the horrible shadows, the
grotesque trees, the titanic bats, the antique church, the dancing death-fires, the
sickening odors, the gently moaning night-wind, and the strange, half-heard
directionless baying of whose objective existence we could scarcely be sure.

Then we struck a substance harder than the damp mould, and beheld a rotting oblong
box crusted with mineral deposits from the long undisturbed ground. It was incredibly
tough and thick, but so old that we finally pried it open and feasted our eyes on what it
held.

Much--amazingly much--was left of the object despite the lapse of five hundred years.
The skeleton, though crushed in places by the jaws of the thing that had killed it, held
together with surprising firmness, and we gloated over the clean white skull and its
long, firm teeth and its eyeless sockets that once had glowed with a charnel fever like
our own. In the coffin lay an amulet of curious and exotic design, which had apparently
been worn around the sleeper's neck. It was the oddly conventionalised figure of a
crouching winged hound, or sphinx with a semi-canine face, and was exquisitely carved
in antique Oriental fashion from a small piece of green jade. The expression of its
features was repellent in the extreme, savoring at once of death, bestiality and
malevolence. Around the base was an inscription in characters which neither St John
nor I could identify; and on the bottom, like a maker's seal, was graven a grotesque and
formidable skull.

Immediately upon beholding this amulet we knew that we must possess it; that this
treasure alone was our logical pelf from the centuried grave. Even had its outlines been
unfamiliar we would have desired it, but as we looked more closely we saw that it was
not wholly unfamiliar. Alien it indeed was to all art and literature which sane and
balanced readers know, but we recognized it as the thing hinted of in the forbidden
Necronomicon of the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred; the ghastly soul-symbol of the corpse-
eating cult of inaccessible Leng, in Central Asia. All too well did we trace the sinister
lineaments described by the old Arab daemonologist; lineaments, he wrote, drawn from
some obscure supernatural manifestation of the souls of those who vexed and gnawed at
the dead.

Seizing the green jade object, we gave a last glance at the bleached and cavern-eyed
face of its owner and closed up the grave as we found it. As we hastened from the
abhorrent spot, the stolen amulet in St John's pocket, we thought we saw the bats
descend in a body to the earth we had so lately rifled, as if seeking for some cursed and
unholy nourishment. But the autumn moon shone weak and pale, and we could not be
sure.

So, too, as we sailed the next day away from Holland to our home, we thought we heard
the faint distant baying of some gigantic hound in the background. But the autumn wind
moaned sad and wan, and we could not be sure.

Less than a week after our return to England, strange things began to happen. We lived
as recluses; devoid of friends, alone, and without servants in a few rooms of an ancient
manor-house on a bleak and unfrequented moor; so that our doors were seldom
disturbed by the knock of the visitor.

Now, however, we were troubled by what seemed to be a frequent fumbling in the

night, not only around the doors but around the windows also, upper as well as lower.
Once we fancied that a large, opaque body darkened the library window when the moon
was shining against it, and another time we thought we heard a whirring or flapping
sound not far off. On each occasion investigation revealed nothing, and we began to
ascribe the occurrences to imagination which still prolonged in our ears the faint far
baying we thought we had heard in the Holland churchyard. The jade amulet now
reposed in a niche in our museum, and sometimes we burned a strangely scented candle
before it. We read much in Alhazred's Necronomicon about its properties, and about the
relation of ghosts' souls to the objects it symbolized; and were disturbed by what we
read.

Then terror came.

On the night of September 24, 19--, I heard a knock at my chamber door. Fancying it St
John's, I bade the knocker enter, but was answered only by a shrill laugh. There was no
one in the corridor. When I aroused St John from his sleep, he professed entire
ignorance of the event, and became as worried as I. It was the night that the faint, distant
baying over the moor became to us a certain and dreaded reality.

Four days later, whilst we were both in the hidden museum, there came a low, cautious
scratching at the single door which led to the secret library staircase. Our alarm was
now divided, for, besides our fear of the unknown, we had always entertained a dread
that our grisly collection might be discovered. Extinguishing all lights, we proceeded to
the door and threw it suddenly open; whereupon we felt an unaccountable rush of air,
and heard, as if receding far away, a queer combination of rustling, tittering, and
articulate chatter. Whether we were mad, dreaming, or in our senses, we did not try to
determine. We only realized, with the blackest of apprehensions, that the apparently
disembodied chatter was beyond a doubt in the Dutch language.

After that we lived in growing horror and fascination. Mostly we held to the theory that
we were jointly going mad from our life of unnatural excitements, but sometimes it
pleased us more to dramatize ourselves as the victims of some creeping and appalling
doom. Bizarre manifestations were now too frequent to count. Our lonely house was
seemingly alive with the presence of some malign being whose nature we could not
guess, and every night that daemoniac baying rolled over the wind-swept moor, always
louder and louder. On October 29 we found in the soft earth underneath the library
window a series of footprints utterly impossible to describe. They were as baffling as
the hordes of great bats which haunted the old manor-house in unprecedented and
increasing numbers.

The horror reached a culmination on November 18, when St John, walking home after
dark from the dismal railway station, was seized by some frightful carnivorous thing
and torn to ribbons. His screams had reached the house, and I had hastened to the
terrible scene in time to hear a whir of wings and see a vague black cloudy thing
silhouetted against the rising moon.

My friend was dying when I spoke to him, and he could not answer coherently. All he
could do was to whisper, "The amulet--that damned thing--"

Then he collapsed, an inert mass of mangled flesh.

I buried him the next midnight in one of our neglected gardens, and mumbled over his
body one of the devilish rituals he had loved in life. And as I pronounced the last
daemoniac sentence I heard afar on the moor the faint baying of some gigantic hound.
The moon was up, but I dared not look at it. And when I saw on the dim-lighted moor a
wide, nebulous shadow sweeping from mound to mound, I shut my eyes and threw
myself face down upon the ground. When I arose, trembling, I know not how much
later, I staggered into the house and made shocking obeisances before the enshrined
amulet of green jade.

Being now afraid to live alone in the ancient house on the moor, I departed on the
following day for London, taking with me the amulet after destroying by fire and burial
the rest of the impious collection in the museum. But after three nights I heard the
baying again, and before a week was over felt strange eyes upon me whenever it was
dark. One evening as I strolled on Victoria Embankment for some needed air, I saw a
black shape obscure one of the reflections of the lamps in the water. A wind, stronger
than the night-wind, rushed by, and I knew that what had befallen St John must soon
befall me.

The next day I carefully wrapped the green jade amulet and sailed for Holland. What
mercy I might gain by returning the thing to its silent, sleeping owner I knew not; but I
felt that I must try any step conceivably logical. What the hound was, and why it had
pursued me, were questions still vague; but I had first heard the baying in that ancient
churchyard, and every subsequent event including St John's dying whisper had served to
connect the curse with the stealing of the amulet. Accordingly I sank into the
nethermost abysses of despair when, at an inn in Rotterdam, I discovered that thieves
had despoiled me of this sole means of salvation.

The baying was loud that evening, and in the morning I read of a nameless deed in the
vilest quarter of the city. The rabble were in terror, for upon an evil tenement had fallen
a red death beyond the foulest previous crime of the neighborhood. In a squalid thieves'
den an entire family had been torn to shreds by an unknown thing which left no trace,
and those around had heard all night a faint, deep, insistent note as of a gigantic hound.

So at last I stood again in the unwholesome churchyard where a pale winter moon cast
hideous shadows and leafless trees drooped sullenly to meet the withered, frosty grass
and cracking slabs, and the ivied church pointed a jeering finger at the unfriendly sky,
and the night--wind howled maniacally from over frozen swamps and frigid seas. The
baying was very faint now, and it ceased altogether as I approached the ancient grave I
had once violated, and frightened away an abnormally large horde of bats which had
been hovering curiously around it.

I know not why I went thither unless to pray, or gibber out insane pleas and apologies to
the calm white thing that lay within; but, whatever my reason, I attacked the half frozen
sod with a desperation partly mine and partly that of a dominating will outside myself.
Excavation was much easier than I expected, though at one point I encountered a queer
interruption; when a lean vulture darted down out of the cold sky and pecked frantically
at the grave-earth until I killed him with a blow of my spade. Finally I reached the
rotting oblong box and removed the damp nitrous cover. This is the last rational act I
ever performed.

For crouched within that centuried coffin, embraced by a closepacked nightmare retinue
of huge, sinewy, sleeping bats, was the bony thing my friend and I had robbed; not
clean and placid as we had seen it then, but covered with caked blood and shreds of
alien flesh and hair, and leering sentiently at me with phosphorescent sockets and sharp
ensanguined fangs yawning twistedly in mockery of my inevitable doom. And when it
gave from those grinning jaws a deep, sardonic bay as of some gigantic hound, and I
saw that it held in its gory filthy claw the lost and fateful amulet of green jade, I merely
screamed and ran away idiotically, my screams soon dissolving into peals of hysterical
laughter.

Madness rides the star-wind...claws and teeth sharpened on centuries of

corpses...dripping death astride a bacchanale of bats from nigh--black ruins of buried
temples of Belial...Now, as the baying of that dead fleshless monstrosity grows louder
and louder, and the stealthy whirring and flapping of those accursed web-wings closer
and closer, I shall seek with my revolver the oblivion which is my only refuge from the
unnamed and unnameable.

THE LURKING FEAR

CONTENTS:

I. The Shadow On The Chimney

II. A Passer In The Storm
III. What The Red Glare Meant
IV. The Horror In The Eyes

I. The Shadow On The Chimney

There was thunder in the air on the night I went to the deserted mansion atop Tempest
Mountain to find the lurking fear. I was not alone, for foolhardiness was not then mixed
with that love of the grotesque and the terrible which has made my career a series of
quests for strange horrors in literature and in life. With me were two faithful and
muscular men for whom I had sent when the time came; men long associated with me in
my ghastly explorations because of their peculiar fitness.

We had started quietly from the village because of the reporters who still lingered about
after the eldritch panic of a month before--the nightmare creeping death. Later, I
thought, they might aid me; but I did not want them then. Would to God I had let them
share the search, that I might not have had to bear the secret alone so long; to bear it
alone for fear the world would call me mad or go mad itself at the demon implications
of the thing. Now that I am telling it anyway, lest the brooding make me a maniac, I
wish I had never concealed it. For I, and I only, know what manner of fear lurked on
that spectral and desolate mountain.

In a small motor-car we covered the miles of primeval forest and hill until the wooded
ascent checked it. The country bore an aspect more than usually sinister as we viewed it
by night and without the accustomed crowds of investigators, so that we were often
tempted to use the acetylene headlight despite the attention it might attract. It was not a
wholesome landscape after dark, and I believe I would have noticed its morbidity even
had I been ignorant of the terror that stalked there. Of wild creatures there were none--
they are wise when death leers close. The ancient lightning-scarred trees seemed
unnaturally large and twisted, and the other vegetation unnaturally thick and feverish,
while curious mounds and hummocks in the weedy, fulgurite-pitted earth reminded me
of snakes and dead men's skulls swelled to gigantic proportions.

Fear had lurked on Tempest Mountain for more than a century. This I learned at once
from newspaper accounts of the catastrophe which first brought the region to the world's
notice. The place is a remote, lonely elevation in that part of the Catskills where Dutch
civilization once feebly and transiently penetrated, leaving behind as it receded only a
few mined mansions and a degenerate squatter population inhabiting pitiful hamlets on
isolated slopes. Normal beings seldom visited the locality till the state police were
formed, and even now only infrequent troopers patrol it. The fear, however, is an old
tradition throughout the neighboring villages; since it is a prime topic in the simple
discourse of the poor mongrels who sometimes leave their valleys to trade handwoven
baskets for such primitive necessities as they cannot shoot, raise, or make.

The lurking fear dwelt in the shunned and deserted Martense mansion, which crowned
the high but gradual eminence whose liability to frequent thunderstorms gave it the
name of Tempest Mountain. For over a hundred years the antique, grove-circled stone
house had been the subject of stories incredibly wild and monstrously hideous; stories
of a silent colossal creeping death which stalked abroad in summer. With whimpering
insistence the squatters told tales of a demon which seized lone wayfarers after dark,
either carrying them off or leaving them in a frightful state of gnawed dismemberment;
while sometimes they whispered of blood trails toward the distant mansion. Some said
the thunder called the lurking fear out of its habitation, while others said the thunder
was its voice.

No one outside the backwoods had believed these varying and conflicting stories, with
their incoherent, extravagant descriptions of the hall-glimpsed fiend; yet not a farmer or
villager doubted that the Martense mansion was ghoulishly haunted. Local history
forbade such a doubt, although no ghostly evidence was ever found by such
investigators as had visited the building after some especially vivid tale of the squatters.
Grandmothers told strange myths of the Martense spectre; myths concerning the
Martense family itself, its queer hereditary dissimilarity of eyes, its long, unnatural
annals, and the murder which had cursed it.

The terror which brought me to the scene was a sudden and portentous confirmation of
the mountaineers' wildest legends. One summer night, after a thunderstorm of
unprecedented violence, the countryside was aroused by a squatter stampede which no
mere delusion could create. The pitiful throngs of natives shrieked and whined of the
unnamable horror which had descended upon them, and they were not doubted. They
had not seen it, but had heard such cries from one of their hamlets that they knew a
creeping death had come.

In the morning citizens and state troopers followed the shuddering mountaineers to the
place where they said the death had come. Death was indeed there. The ground under
one of the squatter's villages had caved in after a lightning stroke, destroying several of
the malodorous shanties; but upon this property damage was superimposed an organic
devastation which paled it to insignificance. Of a possible seventy-five natives who had
inhabited this spot, not one living specimen was visible. The disordered earth was
covered with blood and human debris bespeaking too vividly the ravages of demon
teeth and talons; yet no visible trail led away from the carnage. That some hideous
animal must be the cause, everyone quickly agreed; nor did any tongue now revive the
charge that such cryptic deaths formed merely the sordid murders common in decadent
communities. That charge was revived only when about twenty-five of the estimated
population were found missing from the dead; and even then it was hard to explain the
murder of fifty by half that number. But the fact remained that on a summer night a bolt
had come out of the heavens and left a dead village whose corpses were horribly
mangled, chewed, and clawed.

The excited countryside immediately connected the horror with the haunted Martense
mansion, though the localities were over three miles apart. The troopers were more
skeptical; including the mansion only casually in their investigations, and dropping it
altogether when they found it thoroughly deserted. Country and village people, however
I canvassed the place with infinite care; overturning everything in the house, sounding
ponds and brooks, beating down bushes, and ransacking the nearby forests. All was in
vain; the death that had come had left no trace save destruction itself.

By the second day of the search the affair was fully treated by the newspapers, whose
reporters overran Tempest Mountain. They described it in much detail, and with many
interviews to elucidate the horror's history as told by local grandams. I followed the
accounts languidly at first, for I am a connoisseur in horrors; but after a week I detected
an atmosphere which stirred me oddly, so that on August 5th, 1921, I registered among
the reporters who crowded the hotel at Lefferts Corners, nearest village to Tempest
Mountain and acknowledged headquarters of the searchers. Three weeks more, and the
dispersal of the reporters left me free to begin a terrible exploration based on the minute
inquiries and surveying with which I had meanwhile busied myself.

So on this summer night, while distant thunder rumbled, I left a silent motor-car and
tramped with two armed companions up the last mound-covered reaches of Tempest
Mountain, casting the beams of an electric torch on the spectral grey walls that began to
appear through giant oaks ahead. In this morbid night solitude and feeble shifting
illumination, the vast boxlike pile displayed obscure hints of terror which day could not
uncover; yet I did not hesitate, since I had come with fierce resolution to test an idea. I
believed that the thunder called the death-demon out of some fearsome secret place; and
be that demon solid entity or vaporous pestilence, I meant to see it.

I had thoroughly searched the ruin before, hence knew my plan well; choosing as the
seat of my vigil the old room of Jan Martense, whose murder looms so great in the rural
legends. I felt subtly that the apartment of this ancient victim was best for my purposes.
The chamber, measuring about twenty feet square, contained like the other rooms some
rubbish which had once been furniture. It lay on the second story, on the southeast
corner of the house, and had an immense east window and narrow south window, both
devoid of panes or shutters. Opposite the large window was an enormous Dutch
fireplace with scriptural tiles representing the prodigal son, and opposite the narrow
window was a spacious bed built into the wall.

As the tree-muffled thunder grew louder, I arranged my plan's details. First I fastened
side by side to the ledge of the large window three rope ladders which I had brought
with me. I knew they reached a suitable spot on the grass outside, for I had tested them.
Then the three of us dragged from another room a wide four-poster bedstead, crowding
it laterally against the window. Having strewn it with fir boughs, all now rested on it
with drawn automatics, two relaxing while the third watched. From whatever direction
the demon might come, our potential escape was provided. If it came from within the
house, we had the window ladders; if from outside the door and the stairs. We did not
think, judging from precedent, that it would pursue us far even at worst.

I watched from midnight to one o'clock, when in spite of the sinister house, the
unprotected window, and the approaching thunder and lightning, I felt singularly
drowsy. I was between my two companions, George Bennett being toward the window
and William Tobey toward the fireplace. Bennett was asleep, having apparently felt the
same anomalous drowsiness which affected me, so I designated Tobey for the next
watch although even he was nodding. It is curious how intently I had been watching the
fireplace.

The increasing thunder must have affected my dreams, for in the brief time I slept there
came to me apocalyptic visions. Once I partly awaked, probably because the sleeper
toward the window had restlessly flung an arm across my chest. I was not sufficiently
awake to see whether Tobey was attending to his duties as sentinel, but felt a distinct
anxiety on that score. Never before had the presence of evil so poignantly oppressed me.
Later I must have dropped asleep again, for it was out of a phantasmal chaos that my
mind leaped when the night grew hideous with shrieks beyond anything in my former
experience or imagination.
In that shrieking the inmost soul of human fear and agony clawed hopelessly and
insanely at the ebony gates of oblivion. I awoke to red madness and the mockery of
diabolism, as farther and farther down inconceivable vistas that phobic and crystalline
anguish retreated and reverberated. There was no light, but I knew from the empty space
at my right that Tobey was gone, God alone knew whither. Across my chest still lay the
heavy arm of the sleeper at my left.

Then came the devastating stroke of lightning which shook the whole mountain, lit the
darkest crypts of the hoary grove, and splintered the patriarch of the twisted trees. In the
demon flash of a monstrous fireball the sleeper started up suddenly while the glare from
beyond the window threw his shadow vividly upon the chimney above the fireplace
from which my eyes had never strayed. That I am still alive and sane, is a marvel I
cannot fathom. I cannot fathom it, for the shadow on that chimney was not that of
George Bennett or of any other human creature, but a blasphemous abnormality from
hell's nethermost craters; a nameless, shapeless abomination which no mind could fully
grasp and no pen even partly describe. In another second I was alone in the accursed
mansion, shivering and gibbering. George Bennett and William Tobey had left no trace,
not even of a struggle. They were never heard of again.

II. A Passer In The Storm

For days after that hideous experience in the forest-swathed mansion I lay nervously
exhausted in my hotel room at Lefferts Corners. I do not remember exactly how I
managed to reach the motor-car, start it, and slip unobserved back to the village; for I
retain no distinct impression save of wild-armed titan trees, demoniac mutterings of
thunder, and Charonian shadows athwart the low mounds that dotted and streaked the
region.

As I shivered and brooded on the casting of that brain-blasting shadow, I knew that I
had at last pried out one of earth's supreme horrors--one of those nameless blights of
outer voids whose faint demon scratchings we sometimes hear on the farthest rim of
space, yet from which our own finite vision has given us a merciful immunity. The
shadow I had seen, I hardly dared to analyse or identify. Something had lain between
me and the window that night, but I shuddered whenever I could not cast off the instinct
to classify it. If it had only snarled, or bayed, or laughed titteringly--even that would
have relieved the abysmal hideousness. But it was so silent. It had rested a heavy arm or
foreleg on my chest...

Obviously it was organic, or had once been organic...Jan Martense, whose room I had
invaded, was buried in the grave-yard near the mansion...I must find Bennett and
Tobey, if they lived...why had it picked them, and left me for the last?...Drowsiness is
so stifling, and dreams are so horrible...

In a short time I realised that I must tell my story to someone or break down completely.
I had already decided not to abandon the quest for the lurking fear, for in my rash
ignorance it seemed to me that uncertainty was worse than enlightenment, however
terrible the latter might prove to be. Accordingly I resolved in my mind the best course
to pursue; whom to select for my confidences, and how to track down the thing which
had obliterated two men and cast a nightmare shadow.
My chief acquaintances at Lefferts Corners had been the affable reporters, of whom
several had still remained to collect final echoes of the tragedy. It was from these that I
determined to choose a colleague, and the more I reflected the more my preference
inclined toward one Arthur Munroe, a dark, lean man of about thirty-five, whose
education, taste, intelligence, and temperament all seemed to mark him as one not
bound to conventional ideas and experiences.

On an afternoon in early September, Arthur Munroe listened to my story. I saw from the
beginning that he was both interested and sympathetic, and when I had finished he
analysed and discussed the thing with the greatest shrewdness and judgement. His
advice, moreover, was eminently practical; for he recommended a postponement of
operations at the Martense mansion until we might become fortified with more detailed
historical and geographical data. On his initiative we combed the countryside for
information regarding the terrible Martense family, and discovered a man who
possessed a marvelously illuminating ancestral diary. We also talked at length with such
of the mountain mongrels as had not fled from the terror and confusion to remoter
slopes, and slope again scanned for dens and caves, but all without result. And yet, as I
have said, vague new fears hovered menacingly over us; as if giant bat-winged
gryphons looked on transcosmic gulfs.

As the afternoon advanced, it became increasingly difficult to see; and we heard the
rumble of a thunderstorm gathering over Tempest Mountain. This sound in such a
locality naturally stirred us, though less than it would have done at night. As it was, we
hoped desperately that the storm would last until well after dark; and with that hope
turned from our aimless hillside searching toward the nearest inhabited hamlet to gather
a body of squatters as helpers in the investigation. Timid as they were, a few of the
younger men were sufficiently inspired by our protective leadership to promise such
help.

We had hardly more than turned, however, when there descended such a blinding sheet
of torrential rain that shelter became imperative. The extreme, almost nocturnal
darkness of the sky caused us to stumble badly, but guided by the frequent flashes of
lightning and by our minute knowledge of the hamlet we soon reached the least porous
cabin of the lot; an heterogeneous combination of logs and boards whose still existing
door and single tiny window both faced Maple Hill. Barring the door after us against the
fury of the wind and rain, we put in place the crude window shutter which our frequent
searches had taught us where to find. It was dismal sitting there on rickety boxes in the
pitchy darkness, but we smoked pipes and occasionally flashed our pocket lamps about.
Now and then we could see the lightning through cracks in the wall; the afternoon was
so incredibly dark that each flash was extremely vivid.

The stormy vigil reminded me shudderingly of my ghastly night on Tempest Mountain.

My mind turned to that odd question which had kept recurring ever since the nightmare
thing had happened; and again I wondered why the demon, approaching the three
watchers either from the window or the interior, had begun with the men on each side
and left the middle man till the last, when the titan fireball had scared it away. Why had
it not taken its victims in natural order, with myself second, from whichever direction it
had approached? With what manner of far-reaching tentacles did it prey? Or did it know
that I was the leader, and saved me for a fate worse than that of my companions?
In the midst of these reflections, as if dramatically arranged to intensify them, there fell
nearby a terrific bolt of lightning followed by the sound of sliding earth. At the same
time the wolfish wind rose to demoniac crescendos of ululation. We were sure that the
one tree on Maple Hill had been struck again, and Munroe rose from his box and went
to the tiny window to ascertain the damage. When he took down the shutter the wind,
and rain howled deafeningly in, so that I could not hear what he said; but I waited while
he leaned out and tried to fathom Nature's pandemonium.

Gradually a calming of the wind and dispersal of the unusual darkness told of the
storm's passing. I had hoped it would last into the night to help our quest, but a furtive
sunbeam from a knothole behind me removed the likelihood of such a thing. Suggesting
to Munroe that we had better get some light even if more showers came, I unbarred and
opened the crude door. The ground outside was a singular mass of mud and pools, with
fresh heaps of earth from the slight landslide; but I saw nothing to justify the interest
which kept my companion silently leaning out the window. Crossing to where he
leaned, I touched his shoulder; but he did not move. Then, as I playfully shook him and
turned him around, I felt the strangling tendrils of a cancerous horror whose roots
reached into illimitable pasts and fathomless abysms of the night that broods beyond
time.

For Arthur Munroe was dead. And on what remained of his chewed and gouged head
there was no longer a face.

III. What The Red Glare Meant

On the tempest-racked night of November 8, 1921, with a lantern which cast charnel
shadows, I stood digging alone and idiotically in the grave of Jan Martense. I had begun
to dig in the afternoon, because a thunderstorm was brewing, and now that it was dark
and the storm had burst above the maniacally thick foliage I was glad.

I believe that my mind was partly unhinged by events since August 5th; the demon
shadow in the mansion, the general strain and disappointment, and the thing that
occurred at the hamlet in an October storm. After that thing I had dug a grave for one
whose death I could not understand. I knew that others could not understand either, so
let them think Arthur Munroe had wandered away. They searched, but found nothing.
The squatters might have understood, but I dared not frighten them more. I myself
seemed strangely callous. That shock at the mansion had done something to my brain,
and I could think only of the quest for a horror now grown to cataclysmic stature in my
imagination; a quest which the fate of Arthur Munroe made me vow to keep silent and
solitary.

The scene of my excavations would alone have been enough to unnerve any ordinary
man. Baleful primal trees of unholy size, age, and grotesqueness leered above me like
the pillars of some hellish Druidic temple; muffling the thunder, hushing the clawing
wind, and admitting but little rain. Beyond the scarred trunks in the background,
illumined by faint flashes of filtered lightning, rose the damp ivied stones of the
deserted mansion, while somewhat nearer was the abandoned Dutch garden whose
walks and beds were polluted by a white, fungous, foetid, over-nourished vegetation
that never saw full daylight. And nearest of all was the graveyard, where deformed trees
tossed insane branches as their roots displaced unhallowed slabs and sucked venom
from what lay below. Now and then, beneath the brown pall of leaves that rotted and
festered in the antediluvian forest darkness, I could trace the sinister outlines of some of
those low mounds which characterized the lightning-pierced region.

History had led me to this archaic grave. History, indeed, was all I had after everything
else ended in mocking Satanism. I now believed that the lurking fear was no material
being, but a wolf-fanged ghost that rode the midnight lightning. And I believed, because
of the masses of local tradition I had unearthed in search with Arthur Munroe, that the
ghost was that of Jan Martense, who died in 1762. This is why I was digging idiotically
in his grave.

The Martense mansion was built in 1670 by Gerrit Martense, a wealthy New-
Amsterdam merchant who disliked the changing order under British rule, and had
constructed this magnificent domicile on a remote woodland summit whose untrodden
solitude and unusual scenery pleased him. The only substantial disappointment
encountered in this site was that which concerned the prevalence of violent
thunderstorms in summer. When selecting the hill and building his mansion, Mynheer
Martense had laid these frequent natural outbursts to some peculiarity of the year; but in
time he perceived that the locality was especially liable to such phenomena. At length,
having found these storms injurious to his head, he fitted up a cellar into which he could
retreat from their wildest pandemonium.

Of Gerrit Martense's descendants less is known than of himself; since they were all
reared in hatred of the English civilisation, and trained to shun such of the colonists as
accepted it. Their life was exceedingly secluded, and people declared that their isolation
had made them heavy of speech and comprehension. In appearance all were marked by
a peculiar inherited dissimilarity of eyes; one generally being blue and the other brown.
Their social contacts grew fewer and fewer, till at last they took to intermarrying with
the numerous menial class about the estate. Many of the crowded family degenerated,
moved across the valley, and merged with the mongrel population which was later to
produce the pitiful squatters. The rest had stuck sullenly to their ancestral mansion,
becoming more and more clannish and taciturn, yet developing a nervous
responsiveness to the frequent thunderstorms.

Most of this information reached the outside world through young Jan Martense, who
from some kind of restlessness joined the colonial army when news of the Albany
Convention reached Tempest Mountain. He was the first of Gerrit's descendants to see
much of the world; and when he returned in 1760 after six years of campaigning, he was
hated as an outsider by his father, uncles, and brothers, in spite of his dissimilar
Martense eyes. No longer could he share the peculiarities and prejudices of the
Martenses, while the very mountain thunderstorms failed to intoxicate him as they had
before. Instead, his surroundings depressed him; and he frequently wrote to a friend in
Albany of plans to leave the paternal roof.

In the spring of 1763 Jonathan Gifford, the Albany friend of Jan Martense, became
worried by his correspondent's silence; especially in view of the conditions and quarrels
at the Martense mansion. Determined to visit Jan in person, he went into the mountains
on horseback. His diary states that he reached Tempest Mountain on September 20,
finding the mansion in great decrepitude. The sullen, odd-eyed Martenses, whose
unclean animal aspect shocked him, told him in broken gutterals that Jan was dead. He
had, they insisted, been struck by lightning the autumn before; and now lay buried
behind the neglected sunken gardens. They showed the visitor the grave, barren and
devoid of markers. Something in the Martenses' manner gave Gifford a feeling of
repulsion and suspicion, and a week later he returned with spade and mattock to explore
the sepulchral spot. He found what he expected--a skull crushed cruelly as if by savage
blows--so returning to Albany he openly charged the Martenses with the murder of their
kinsman.

Legal evidence was lacking, but the story spread rapidly round the countryside; and
from that time the Martenses were ostracised by the world. No one would deal with
them, and their distant manor was shunned as an accursed place. Somehow they
managed to live on independently by the product of their estate, for occasional lights
glimpsed from far-away hills attested their continued presence. These lights were seen
as late as 1810, but toward the last they became very infrequent.

Meanwhile there grew up about the mansion and the mountain a body of diabolic
legendry. The place was avoided with doubled assiduousness, and invested with every
whispered myth tradition could supply. It remained unvisited till 1816, when the
continued absence of lights was noticed by the squatters. At that time a party made
investigations, finding the house deserted and partly in ruins.

There were no skeletons about, so that departure rather than death was inferred. The
clan seemed to have left several years before, and improvised penthouses showed how
numerous it had grown prior to its migration. Its cultural level had fallen very low, as
proved by decaying furniture and scattered silverware which must have been long
abandoned when its owners left. But though the dreaded Martenses were gone, the fear
of the haunted house continued; and grew very acute when new and strange stories
arose among the mountain decadents. There it stood; deserted, feared, and linked with
the vengeful ghost of Jan Martense. There it still stood on the night I dug in Jan
Martense's grave.

I have described my protracted digging as idiotic, and such it indeed was in object and
method. The coffin of Jan Martense had soon been unearthed--it now held only dust and
nitre--but in my fury to exhume his ghost I delved irrationally and clumsily down
beneath where he had lain. God knows what I expected to find--I only felt that I was
digging in the grave of a man whose ghost stalked by night.

It is impossible to say what monstrous depth I had attained when my spade, and soon
my feet, broke through the ground beneath. The event, under the circumstances, was
tremendous; for in the existence of a subterranean space here, my mad theories had
terrible confirmation. My slight fall had extinguished the lantern, but I produced an
electric pocket lamp and viewed the small horizontal tunnel which led away indefinitely
in both directions. It was amply large enough for a man to wriggle through; and though
no sane person would have tried at that time, I forgot danger, reason, and cleanliness in
my single-minded fever to unearth the lurking fear. Choosing the direction toward the
house, I scrambled recklessly into the narrow burrow; squirming ahead blindly and
rapidly, and flashing but seldom the lamp I kept before me.

What language can describe the spectacle of a man lost in infinitely abysmal earth;
pawing, twisting, wheezing; scrambling madly through sunken convolutions of
immemorial blackness without an idea of time, safety, direction, or definite object?
There is something hideous in it, but that is what I did. I did it for so long that life faded
to a far memory, and I became one with the moles and grubs of nighted depths. Indeed,
it was only by accident that after interminable writhings I jarred my forgotten electric
lamp alight, so that it shone eerily along the burrow of caked loam that stretched and
curved ahead.

I had been scrambling in this way for some time, so that my battery had burned very
low, when the passage suddenly inclined sharply upward, altering my mode of progress.
And as I raised my glance it was without preparation that I saw glistening in the
distance two demoniac reflections of my expiring lamp; two reflections glowing with a
baneful and unmistakable effulgence, and provoking maddeningly nebulous memories. I
stopped automatically, though lacking the brain to retreat. The eyes approached, yet of
the thing that bore them I could distinguish only a claw. But what a claw! Then far
overhead I heard a faint crashing which I recognized. It was the wild thunder of the
mountain, raised to hysteric fury--I must have been crawling upward for some time, so
that the surface was now quite near. And as the muffled thunder clattered, those eyes
still stared with vacuous viciousness.

Thank God I did not then know what it was, else I should have died. But I was saved by
the very thunder that had summoned it, for after a hideous wait there burst from the
unseen outside sky one of those frequent mountainward bolts whose aftermath I had
noticed here and there as gashes of disturbed earth and fulgurites of various sizes. With
Cyclopean rage it tore through the soil above that damnable pit, blinding and deafening
me, yet not wholly reducing me to a coma. In the chaos of sliding, shifting earth I
clawed and floundered helplessly till the rain on my head steadied me and I saw that I
had come to the surface in a familiar spot; a steep unforested place on the southwest
slope of the mountain. Recurrent sheet lightnings illumed the tumbled ground and the
remains of the curious low hummock which had stretched down from the wooded
higher slope, but there was nothing in the chaos to show my place of egress from the
lethal catacomb. My brain was as great a chaos as the earth, and as a distant red glare
burst on the landscape from the south I hardly realised the horror I had been through.

But when two days later the squatters told me what the red glare meant, I felt more
horror than that which the mould-burrow and the claw and eyes had given; more horror
because of the overwhelming implications. In a hamlet twenty miles away an orgy of
fear had followed the bolt which brought me above ground, and a nameless thing had
dropped from an overhanging tree into a weak-roofed cabin. It had done a deed, but the
squatters had fired the cabin in frenzy before it could escape. It had been doing that
deed at the very moment the earth caved in on the thing with the claw and eyes.

IV. The Horror In The Eyes

There can be nothing normal in the mind of one who, knowing what I knew of the
horrors of Tempest Mountain, would seek alone for the fear that lurked there. That at
least two of the fear's embodiments were destroyed, formed but a slight guarantee of
mental and physical safety in this Acheron of multiform diabolism; yet I continued my
quest with even greater zeal as events and revelations became more monstrous. When,
two days after my frightful crawl through that crypt of the eyes and claw, I learned that
a thing had malignly hovered twenty miles away at the same instant the eyes were
glaring at me, I experienced virtual convulsions of fright. But that fright was so mixed
with wonder and alluring grotesqueness, that it was almost a pleasant sensation.
Sometimes, in the throes of a nightmare when unseen powers whirl one over the roofs
of strange dead cities toward the grinning chasm of Nis, it is a relief and even a delight
to shriek wildly and throw oneself voluntarily along with the hideous vortex of dream-
doom into whatever bottomless gulf may yawn. And so it was with the walking
nightmare of Tempest Mountain; the discovery that two monsters had haunted the spot
gave me ultimately a mad craving to plunge into the very earth of the accursed region,
and with bare hands dig out the death that leered from every inch of the poisonous soil.

As soon as possible I visited the grave of Jan Martense and dug vainly where I had dug
before. Some extensive cave-in had obliterated all trace of the underground passage,
while the rain had washed so much earth back into the excavation that I could not tell
how deeply I had dug that other day. I likewise made a difficult trip to the distant
hamlet where the death-creature had been burnt, and was little repaid for my trouble. In
the ashes of the fateful cabin I found several bones, but apparently none of the
monster's. The squatters said the thing had had only one victim; but in this I judged
them inaccurate, since besides the complete skull of a human being, there was another
bony fragment which seemed certainly to have belonged to a human skull at some time.
Though the rapid drop of the monster had been seen, no one could say just what the
creature was like; those who had glimpsed it called it simply a devil. Examining the
great tree where it had lurked, I could discern no distinctive marks. I tried to find some
trail into the black forest, but on this occasion could not stand the sight of those
morbidly large boles, or of those vast serpent-like roots that twisted so malevolently
before they sank into the earth.

My next step was to reexamine with microscopic care the deserted hamlet where death
had come most abundantly, and where Arthur Munroe had seen something he never
lived to describe. Though my vain previous searches had been exceedingly minute, I
now had new data to test; for my horrible grave-crawl convinced me that at least one of
the phases of the monstrosity had been an underground creature. This time, on the 14th
of November, my quest concerned itself mostly with the slopes of Cone Mountain and
Maple Hill where they overlook the unfortunate hamlet, and I gave particular attention
to the loose earth of the landslide region on the latter eminence.

The afternoon of my search brought nothing to light, and dusk came as I stood on Maple
Hill looking down at the hamlet and across the valley to Tempest Mountain. There had
been a gorgeous sunset, and now the moon came up, nearly full and shedding a silver
flood over the plain, the distant mountainside, and the curious low mounds that rose
here and there. It was a peaceful Arcadian scene, but knowing what it hid I hated it. I
hated the mocking moon, the hypocritical plain, the festering mountain, and those
sinister mounds. Everything seemed to me tainted with a loathsome contagion, and
inspired by a noxious alliance with distorted hidden powers.

Presently, as I gazed abstractedly at the moonlit panorama, my eye became attracted by

something singular in the nature and arrangement of a certain topographical element.
Without having any exact knowledge of geology, I had from the first been interested in
the odd mounds and hummocks of the region. I had noticed that they were pretty widely
distributed around Tempest Mountain, though less numerous on the plain than near the
hilltop itself, where prehistoric glaciation had doubtless found feebler opposition to its
striking and fantastic caprices. Now, in the light of that low moon which cast long weird
shadows, it struck me forcibly that the various points and lines of the mound system had
a peculiar relation to the summit of Tempest Mountain. That summit was undeniably a
centre from which the lines or rows of points radiated indefinitely and irregularly, as if
the unwholesome Martense mansion had thrown visible tentacles of terror. The idea of
such tentacles gave me an unexplained thrill, and I stopped to analyse my reason for
believing these mounds glacial phenomena.

The more I analysed the less I believed, and against my newly opened mind there began
to beat grotesque and horrible analogies based on superficial aspects and upon my
experience beneath the earth. Before I knew it I was uttering frenzied and disjointed
words to myself; "My God!...Molehills...the damned place must be honeycombed...how
many...that night at the mansion...they took Bennett and Tobey first...on each side of
us..."Then I was digging frantically into the mound which had stretched nearest me;
digging desperately, shiveringly, but almost jubilantly; digging and at last shrieking
aloud with some unplaced emotion as I came upon a tunnel or burrow just like the one
through which I had crawled on the other demoniac night.

After that I recall running, spade in hand; a hideous run across moon--litten, mound-
marked meadows and through diseased, precipitous abysses of haunted hillside forest;
leaping screaming, panting, bounding toward the terrible Martense mansion. I recall
digging unreasonably in all parts of the brier-choked cellar; digging to find the core and
centre of that malignant universe of mounds. And then I recall how I laughed when I
stumbled on the passageway; the hole at the base of the old chimney, where the thick
weeds grew and cast queer shadows in the light of the lone candle I had happened to
have with me. What still remained down in that hell-hive, lurking and waiting for the
thunder to arouse it, I did not know. Two had been killed; perhaps that had finished it.
But still there remained that burning determination to reach the innermost secret of the
fear, which I had once more come to deem definite, material, and organic.

My indecisive speculation whether to explore the passage alone and immediately with
my pocket-light or to try to assemble a band of squatters for the quest, was interrupted
after a time by a sudden rush of wind from the outside which blew out the candle and
left me in stark blackness. The moon no longer shone through the chinks and apertures
above me, and with a sense of fateful alarm I heard the sinister and significant rumble of
approaching thunder. A confusion of associated ideas possessed my brain, leading me to
grope back toward the farthest corner of the cellar. My eyes, however, never turned
away from the horrible opening at the base of the chimney; and I began to get glimpses
of the crumbling bricks and unhealthy weeds as faint glows of lightning penetrated the
weeds outside and illumined the chinks in the upper wall. Every second I was consumed
with a mixture of fear and curiosity. What would the storm call forth--or was there
anything left for it to call? Guided by a lightning flash I settled myself down behind a
dense clump of vegetation, through which I could see the opening without being seen.

If heaven is merciful, it will some day efface from my consciousness the sight that I
saw, and let me live my last years in peace. I cannot sleep at night now, and have to take
opiates when it thunders. The thing came abruptly and unannounced; a demon, ratlike
scurrying from pits remote and unimaginable, a hellish panting and stifled grunting, and
then from that opening beneath the chimney a burst of multitudinous and leprous life--a
loathsome night-spawned flood of organic corruption more devastatingly hideous than
the blackest conjurations of mortal madness and morbidity. Seething, stewing, surging,
bubbling like serpents' slime it rolled up and out of that yawning hole, spreading like a
septic contagion and streaming from the cellar at every point of egress--streaming out to
scatter through the accursed midnight forests and strew fear, madness, and death.

God knows how many there were--there must have been thousands. To see the stream
of them in that faint intermittent lightning was shocking. When they had thinned out
enough to be glimpsed as separate organisms, I saw that they were dwarfed, deformed
hairy devils or apes--monstrous and diabolic caricatures of the monkey tribe. They were
so hideously silent; there was hardly a squeal when one of the last stragglers turned with
the skill of long practice to make a meal in accustomed fashion on a weaker companion.
Others snapped up what it left and ate with slavering relish. Then, in spite of my daze of
fright and disgust, my morbid curiosity triumphed; and as the last of the monstrosities
oozed up alone from that nether world of unknown nightmare, I drew my automatic
pistol and shot it under cover of the thunder.

Shrieking, slithering, torrential shadows of red viscous madness chasing one another
through endless, ensanguined corridors of purple fulgurous sky...formless phantasms
and kaleidoscopic mutations of a ghoulish, remembered scene; forests of monstrous
over-nourished oaks with serpent roots twisting and sucking unnamable juices from an
earth verminous with millions of cannibal devils; mound-like tentacles groping from
underground nuclei of polypous perversion... insane lightning over malignant ivied
walls and demon arcades choked with fungous vegetation...Heaven be thanked for the
instinct which led me unconscious to places where men dwell; to the peaceful village
that slept under the calm stars of clearing skies.

I had recovered enough in a week to send to Albany for a gang of men to blow up the
Martense mansion and the entire top of Tempest Mountain with dynamite, stop up all
the discoverable mound-burrows, and destroy certain over-nourished trees whose very
existence seemed an insult to sanity. I could sleep a little after they had done this, but
true rest will never come as long as I remember that nameless secret of the lurking fear.
The thing will haunt me, for who can say the extermination is complete, and that
analogous phenomena do not exist all over the world? Who can, with my knowledge,
think of the earth's unknown caverns without a nightmare dread of future possibilities? I
cannot see a well or a subway entrance without shuddering...why cannot the doctors
give me something to make me sleep, or truly calm my brain when it thunders?

What I saw in the glow of flashlight after I shot the unspeakable straggling object was
so simple that almost a minute elapsed before I understood and went delirious. The
object was nauseous; a filthy whitish gorilla thing with sharp yellow fangs and matted
fur. It was the ultimate product of mammalian degeneration; the frightful outcome of
isolated spawning, multiplication, and cannibal nutrition above and below the ground;
the embodiment of all the snarling and chaos and grinning fear that lurk behind life. It
had looked at me as it died, and its eyes had the same odd quality that marked those
other eyes which had stared at me underground and excited cloudy recollections. One
eye was blue, the other brown. They were the dissimilar Martense eyes of the old
legends, and I knew in one inundating cataclysm of voiceless horror what had become
of that vanished family; the terrible and thunder-crazed house of Martense.

THE MOON BOG

Somewhere, to what remote and fearsome region I know not, Denys Barry has gone. I
was with him the last night he lived among men, and heard his screams when the thing
came to him; but all the peasants and police in County Meath could never find him, or
the others, though they searched long and far. And now I shudder when I hear the frogs
piping in swamps, or see the moon in lonely places.

I had known Denys Barry well in America, where he had grown rich, and had
congratulated him when he bought back the old castle by the bog at sleepy Kilderry. It
was from Kilderry that his father had come, and it was there that he wished to enjoy his
wealth among ancestral scenes. Men of his blood had once ruled over Kilderry and built
and dwelt in the castle, but those days were very remote, so that for generations the
castle had been empty and decaying. After he went to Ireland, Barry wrote me often,
and told me how under his care the gray castle was rising tower by tower to its ancient
splendor, how the ivy was climbing slowly over the restored walls as it had climbed so
many centuries ago, and how the peasants blessed him for bringing back the old days
with his gold from over the sea. But in time there came troubles, and the peasants
ceased to bless him, and fled away instead as from a doom. And then he sent a letter and
asked me to visit him, for he was lonely in the castle with no one to speak to save the
new servants and laborers he had brought from the North.

The bog was the cause of all these troubles, as Barry told me the night I came to the
castle. I had reached Kilderry in the summer sunset, as the gold of the sky lighted the
green of the hills and groves and the blue of the bog, where on a far islet a strange olden
ruin glistened spectrally. That sunset was very beautiful, but the peasants at Ballylough
had warned me against it and said that Kilderry had become accursed, so that I almost
shuddered to see the high turrets of the castle gilded with fire. Barry's motor had met me
at the Ballylough station, for Kilderry is off the railway. The villagers had shunned the
car and the driver from the North, but had whispered to me with pale faces when they
saw I was going to Kilderry. And that night, after our reunion, Barry told me why.

The peasants had gone from Kilderry because Denys Barry was to drain the great bog.
For all his love of Ireland, America had not left him untouched, and he hated the
beautiful wasted space where peat might be cut and land opened up. The legends and
superstitions of Kilderry did not move him, and he laughed when the peasants first
refused to help, and then cursed him and went away to Ballylough with their few
belongings as they saw his determination. In their place he sent for laborers from the
North, and when the servants left he replaced them likewise. But it was lonely among
strangers, so Barry had asked me to come.

When I heard the fears which had driven the people from Kilderry, I laughed as loudly
as my friend had laughed, for these fears were of the vaguest, wildest, and most absurd
character. They had to do with some preposterous legend of the bog, and a grim
guardian spirit that dwelt in the strange olden ruin on the far islet I had seen in the
sunset. There were tales of dancing lights in the dark of the moon, and of chill winds
when the night was warm; of wraiths in white hovering over the waters, and of an
imagined city of stone deep down below the swampy surface. But foremost among the
weird fancies, and alone in its absolute unanimity, was that of the curse awaiting him
who should dare to touch or drain the vast reddish morass. There were secrets, said the
peasants, which must not be uncovered; secrets that had lain hidden since the plague
came to the children of Partholan in the fabulous years beyond history. In the Book of
Invaders it is told that these sons of the Greeks were all buried at Tallaght, but old men
in Kilderry said that one city was overlooked save by its patron moon--goddess; so that
only the wooded hills buried it when the men of Nemed swept down from Scythia in
their thirty ships.

Such were the idle tales which had made the villagers leave Kilderry, and when I heard
them I did not wonder that Denys Barry had refused to listen. He had, however, a great
interest in antiquities, and proposed to explore the bog thoroughly when it was drained.
The white ruins on the islet he had often visited, but though their age was plainly great,
and their contour very little like that of most ruins in Ireland, they were too dilapidated
to tell the days of their glory. Now the work of drainage was ready to begin, and the
laborers from the North were soon to strip the forbidden bog of its green moss and red
heather, and kill the tiny shell-paved streamlets and quiet blue pools fringed with
rushes.

After Barry had told me these things I was very drowsy, for the travels of the day had
been wearying and my host had talked late into the night. A man-servant showed me to
my room, which was in a remote tower overlooking the village and the plain at the edge
of the bog, and the bog itself; so that I could see from my windows in the moonlight the
silent roofs from which the peasants had fled and which now sheltered the laborers from
the North, and too, the parish church with its antique spire, and far out across the
brooding bog the remote olden ruin on the islet gleaming white and spectral. Just as I
dropped to sleep I fancied I heard faint sounds from the distance; sounds that were wild
and half musical, and stirred me with a weird excitement which colored my dreams. But
when I awaked next morning I felt it had all been a dream, for the visions I had seen
were more wonderful than any sound of wild pipes in the night. Influenced by the
legends that Barry had related, my mind had in slumber hovered around a stately city in
a green valley, where marble streets and statues, villas and temples, carvings and
inscriptions, all spoke in certain tones the glory that was Greece. When I told this dream
to Barry we had both laughed; but I laughed the louder, because he was perplexed about
his laborers from the North. For the sixth time they had all overslept, waking very
slowly and dazedly, and acting as if they had not rested, although they were known to
have gone early to bed the night before.

That morning and afternoon I wandered alone through the sun-gilded village and talked
now and then with idle laborers, for Barry was busy with the final plans for beginning
his work of drainage. The laborers were not as happy as they might have been, for most
of them seemed uneasy over some dream which they had had, yet which they tried in
vain to remember. I told them of my dream, but they were not interested till I spoke of
the weird sounds I thought I had heard. Then they looked oddly at me, and said that they
seemed to remember weird sounds, too.

In the evening Barry dined with me and announced that he would begin the drainage in
two days. I was glad, for although I disliked to see the moss and the heather and the
little streams and lakes depart, I had a growing wish to discern the ancient secrets the
deep-matted peat might hide. And that night my dreams of piping flutes and marble
peristyles came to a sudden and disquieting end; for upon the city in the valley I saw a
pestilence descend, and then a frightful avalanche of wooded slopes that covered the
dead bodies in the streets and left unburied only the temple of Artemis on the high peak,
where the aged moon-priestess Cleis lay cold and silent with a crown of ivory on her
silver head.

I have said that I awaked suddenly and in alarm. For some time I could not tell whether
I was waking or sleeping, for the sound of flutes still rang shrilly in my ears; but when I
saw on the floor the icy moonbeams and the outlines of a latticed gothic window, I
decided I must be awake and in the castle of Kilderry. Then I heard a clock from some
remote landing below strike the hour of two, and knew I was awake. Yet still there came
that monstrous piping from afar; wild, weird airs that made me think of some dance of
fauns on distant Maenalus. It would not let me sleep, and in impatience I sprang up and
paced the floor. Only by chance did I go to the north window and look out upon the
silent village and the plain at the edge of the bog. I had no wish to gaze abroad, for I
wanted to sleep; but the flutes tormented me, and I had to do or see something. How
could I have suspected the thing I was to behold?

There in the moonlight that flooded the spacious plain was a spectacle which no mortal,
having seen it, could ever forget. To the sound of reedy pipes that echoed over the bog
there glided silently and eerily a mixed throng of swaying figures, reeling through such
a revel as the Sicilians may have danced to Demeter in the old days under the harvest
moon beside the Cyane. The wide plain, the golden moonlight, the shadowy moving
forms, and above all the shrill monotonous piping, produced an effect which almost
paralyzed me; yet I noted amidst my fear that half of these tireless mechanical dancers
were the laborers whom I had thought asleep, whilst the other half were strange airy
beings in white, half-indeterminate in nature, but suggesting pale wistful naiads from
the haunted fountains of the bog. I do not know how long I gazed at this sight from the
lonely turret window before I dropped suddenly in a dreamless swoon, out of which the
high sun of morning aroused me.

My first impulse on awaking was to communicate all my fears and observations to

Denys Barry, but as I saw the sunlight glowing through the latticed east window I
became sure that there was no reality in what I thought I had seen. I am given to strange
fantasms, yet am never weak enough to believe in them; so on this occasion contented
myself with questioning the laborers, who slept very late and recalled nothing of the
previous night save misty dreams of shrill sounds. This matter of the spectral piping
harassed me greatly, and I wondered if the crickets of autumn had come before their
time to vex the night and haunt the visions of men. Later in the day I watched Barry in
the library poring over his plans for the great work which was to begin on the morrow,
and for the first time felt a touch of the same kind of fear that had driven the peasants
away. For some unknown reason I dreaded the thought of disturbing the ancient bog and
its sunless secrets, and pictured terrible sights lying black under the unmeasured depth
of age-old peat. That these secrets should be brought to light seemed injudicious, and I
began to wish for an excuse to leave the castle and the village. I went so far as to talk
casually to Barry on the subject, but did not dare continue after he gave his resounding
laugh. So I was silent when the sun set fulgently over the far hills, and Kilderry blazed
all red and gold in a flame that seemed a portent.

Whether the events of that night were of reality or illusion I shall never ascertain.
Certainly they transcend anything we dream of in nature and the universe; yet in no
normal fashion can I explain those disappearances which were known to all men after it
was over. I retired early and full of dread, and for a long time could not sleep in the
uncanny silence of the tower. It was very dark, for although the sky was clear the moon
was now well in the wane, and would not rise till the small hours. I thought as I lay
there of Denys Barry, and of what would befall that bog when the day came, and found
myself almost frantic with an impulse to rush out into the night, take Barry's car, and
drive madly to Ballylough out of the menaced lands. But before my fears could
crystallize into action I had fallen asleep, and gazed in dreams upon the city in the
valley, cold and dead under a shroud of hideous shadow.

Probably it was the shrill piping that awaked me, yet that piping was not what I noticed
first when I opened my eyes. I was lying with my back to the east window overlooking
the bog, where the waning moon would rise, and therefore expected to see light cast on
the opposite wall before me; but I had not looked for such a sight as now appeared.
Light indeed glowed on the panels ahead, but it was not any light that the moon gives.
Terrible and piercing was the shaft of ruddy refulgence that streamed through the gothic
window, and the whole chamber was brilliant with a splendor intense and unearthly. My
immediate actions were peculiar for such a situation, but it is only in tales that a man
does the dramatic and foreseen thing. Instead of looking out across the bog toward the
source of the new light, I kept my eyes from the window in panic fear, and clumsily
drew on my clothing with some dazed idea of escape. I remember seizing my revolver
and hat, but before it was over I had lost them both without firing the one or donning the
other. After a time the fascination of the red radiance overcame my fright, and I crept to
the east window and looked out whilst the maddening, incessant piping whined and
reverberated through the castle and over all the village.

Over the bog was a deluge of flaring light, scarlet and sinister, and pouring from the
strange olden ruin on the far islet. The aspect of that ruin I can not describe--I must have
been mad, for it seemed to rise majestic and undecayed, splendid and column-cinctured,
the flame--reflecting marble of its entablature piercing the sky like the apex of a temple
on a mountain-top. Flutes shrieked and drums began to beat, and as I watched in awe
and terror I thought I saw dark saltant forms silhouetted grotesquely against the vision
of marble and effulgence. The effect was titanic--altogether unthinkable--and I might
have stared indefinitely had not the sound of the piping seemed to grow stronger at my
left. Trembling with a terror oddly mixed with ecstasy, I crossed the circular room to the
north window from which I could see the village and the plain at the edge of the bog.
There my eyes dilated again with a wild wonder as great as if I had not just turned from
a scene beyond the pale of nature, for on the ghastly red-litten plain was moving a
procession of beings in such a manner as none ever saw before save in nightmares.

Half gliding, half floating in the air, the white-clad bog-wraiths were slowly retreating
toward the still waters and the island ruin in fantastic formations suggesting some
ancient and solemn ceremonial dance. Their waving translucent arms, guided by the
detestable piping of those unseen flutes, beckoned in uncanny rhythm to a throng of
lurching laborers who followed doglike with blind, brainless, floundering steps as if
dragged by a clumsy but resistless demon-will. As the naiads neared the bog, without
altering their course, a new line of stumbling stragglers zigzagged drunkenly out of the
castle from some door far below my window, groped sightlessly across the courtyard
and through the intervening bit of village, and joined the floundering column of laborers
on the plain. Despite their distance below me I at once knew they were the servants
brought from the North, for I recognized the ugly and unwieldy form of the cook, whose
very absurdness had now become unutterably tragic. The flutes piped horribly, and
again I heard the beating of the drums from the direction of the island ruin. Then
silently and gracefully the naiads reached the water and melted one by one into the
ancient bog; while the line of followers, never checking their speed, splashed
awkwardly after them and vanished amidst a tiny vortex of unwholesome bubbles
which I could barely see in the scarlet light. And as the last pathetic straggler, the fat
cook, sank heavily out of sight in that sullen pool, the flutes and the drums grew silent,
and the blinding red rays from the ruins snapped instantaneously out, leaving the village
of doom lone and desolate in the wan beams of a new-risen moon.

My condition was now one of indescribable chaos. Not knowing whether I was mad or
sane, sleeping or waking, I was saved only by a merciful numbness. I believe I did
ridiculous things such as offering prayers to Artemis, Latona, Demeter, Persephone, and
Plouton. All that I recalled of a classic youth came to my lips as the horrors of the
situation roused my deepest superstitions. I felt that I had witnessed the death of a
whole village, and knew I was alone in the castle with Denys Barry, whose boldness
had brought down a doom. As I thought of him, new terrors convulsed me, and I fell to
the floor; not fainting, but physically helpless. Then I felt the icy blast from the east
window where the moon had risen, and began to hear the shrieks in the castle far below
me. Soon those shrieks had attained a magnitude and quality which can not be written
of, and which makes me faint as I think of them. All I can say is that they came from
something I had known as a friend.

At some time during this shocking period the cold wind and the screaming must have
roused me, for my next impression is of racing madly through inky rooms and corridors
and out across the courtyard into the hideous night. They found me at dawn wandering
mindless near Ballylough, but what unhinged me utterly was not any of the horrors I
had seen or heard before. What I muttered about as I came slowly out of the shadows
was a pair of fantastic incidents which occurred in my flight: incidents of no
significance, yet which haunt me unceasingly when I am alone in certain marshy places
or in the moonlight.

As I fled from that accursed castle along the bog's edge I heard a new sound: common,
yet unlike any I had heard before at Kilderry. The stagnant waters, lately quite devoid of
animal life, now teemed with a horde of slimy enormous frogs which piped shrilly and
incessantly in tones strangely out of keeping with their size. They glistened bloated and
green in the moonbeams, and seemed to gaze up at the fount of light. I followed the
gaze of one very fat and ugly frog, and saw the second of the things which drove my
senses away.

Stretching directly from the strange olden ruin on the far islet to the waning moon, my
eyes seemed to trace a beam of faint quivering radiance having no reflection in the
waters of the bog. And upward along that pallid path my fevered fancy pictured a thin
shadow slowly writhing; a vague contorted shadow struggling as if drawn by unseen
demons. Crazed as I was, I saw in that awful shadow a monstrous resemblance--a
nauseous, unbelievable caricature--a blasphemous effigy of him who had been Denys
Barry.

THE MUSIC OF ERICH ZANN

I have examined maps of the city with the greatest care, yet have never again found the
Rue d'Auseil. These maps have not been modern maps alone, for I know that names
change. I have, on the contrary, delved deeply into all the antiquities of the place, and
have personally explored every region, of whatever name, which could possibly answer
to the street I knew as the Rue d'Auseil. But despite all I have done, it remains an
humiliating fact that I cannot find the house, the street, or even the locality, where,
during the last months of my impoverished life as a student of metaphysics at the
university, I heard the music of Erich Zann.

That my memory is broken, I do not wonder; for my health, physical and mental, was
gravely disturbed throughout the period of my residence in the Rue d'Auseil, and I recall
that I took none of my few acquaintances there. But that I cannot find the place again is
both singular and perplexing; for it was within a half-hour's walk of the university and
was distinguished by peculiarities which could hardly be forgotten by any one who had
been there. I have never met a person who has seen the Rue d'Auseil.

The Rue d'Auseil lay across a dark river bordered by precipitous brick blear-windowed
warehouses and spanned by a ponderous bridge of dark stone. It was always shadowy
along that river, as if the smoke of neighboring factories shut out the sun perpetually.
The river was also odorous with evil stenches which I have never smelled elsewhere,
and which may some day help me to find it, since I should recognize them at once.
Beyond the bridge were narrow cobbled streets with rails; and then came the ascent, at
first gradual, but incredibly steep as the Rue d'Auseil was reached.

I have never seen another street as narrow and steep as the Rue d'Auseil. It was almost a
cliff, closed to all vehicles, consisting in several places of flights of steps, and ending at
the top in a lofty ivied wall. Its paving was irregular, sometimes stone slabs, sometimes
cobblestones, and sometimes bare earth with struggling greenish-grey vegetation. The
houses were tall, peaked-roofed, incredibly old, and crazily leaning backward, forward,
and sidewise. Occasionally an opposite pair, both leaning forward, almost met across
the street like an arch; and certainly they kept most of the light from the ground below.
There were a few overhead bridges from house to house across the street.

The inhabitants of that street impressed me peculiarly; At first I thought it was because
they were all silent and reticent; but later decided it was because they were all very old.
I do not know how I came to live on such a street, but I was not myself when I moved
there. I had been living in many poor places, always evicted for want of money; until at
last I came upon that tottering house in the Rue d'Auseil kept by the paralytic Blandot. It
was the third house from the top of the street, and by far the tallest of them all.

My room was on the fifth story; the only inhabited room there, since the house was
almost empty. On the night I arrived I heard strang music from the peaked garret
overhead, and the next day asked old Blandot about it. He told me it was an old German
viol-player, a strange dumb man who signed his name as Erich Zann, and who played
evenings in a cheap theater orchestra; adding that Zann's desire to play in the night after
his return from the theater was the reason he had chosen this lofty and isolated garret
room, whose single gable window was the only point on the street from which one
could look over the terminating wall at the declivity and panorama beyond.
Thereafter I heard Zann every night, and although he kept me awake, I was haunted by
the weirdness of his music. Knowing little of the art myself, I was yet certain that none
of his harmonies had any relation to music I had heard before; and concluded that he
was a composer of highly original genius. The longer I listened, the more I was
fascinated, until after a week I resolved to make the old man's acquaintance.

One night as he was returning from his work, I intercepted Zann in the hallway and told
him that I would like to know him and be with him when he played. He was a small,
lean, bent person, with shabby clothes, blue eyes, grotesque, satyrlike face, and nearly
bald head; and at my first words seemed both angered and frightened. My obvious
friendliness, however, finally melted him; and he grudgingly motioned to me to follow
him up the dark, creaking and rickety attic stairs. His room, one of only two in the
steeply pitched garret, was on the west side, toward the high wall that formed the upper
end of the street. Its size was very great, and seemed the greater because of its
extraordinary barrenness and neglect. Of furniture there was only a narrow iron
bedstead, a dingy wash-stand, a small table, a large bookcase, an iron music-rack, and
three old-fashioned chairs. Sheets of music were piled in disorder about the floor. The
walls were of bare boards, and had probably never known plaster; whilst the abundance
of dust and cobwebs made the place seem more deserted than inhabited. Evidently Erich
Zann's world of beauty lay in some far cosmos of the imagination.

Motioning me to sit down, the dumb man closed the door, turned the large wooden bolt,
and lighted a candle to augment the one he had brought with him. He now removed his
viol from its motheaten covering, and taking it, seated himself in the least
uncomfortable of the chairs. He did not employ the music-rack, but, offering no choice
and playing from memory, enchanted me for over an hour with strains I had never heard
before; strains which must have been of his own devising. To describe their exact nature
is impossible for one unversed in music. They were a kind of fugue, with recurrent
passages of the most captivating quality, but to me were notable for the absence of any
of the weird notes I had overheard from my room below on other occasions.

Those haunting notes I had remembered, and had often hummed and whistled
inaccurately to myself, so when the player at length laid down his bow I asked him if he
would render some of them. As I began my request the wrinkled satyrlike face lost the
bored placidity it had possessed during the playing, and seemed to show the same
curious mixture of anger and fright which I had noticed when first I accosted the old
man. For a moment I was inclined to use persuasion, regarding rather lightly the whims
of senility; and even tried to awaken my host's weirder mood by whistling a few of the
strains to which I had listened the night before. But I did not pursue this course for more
than a moment; for when the dumb musician recognized the whistled air his face grew
suddenly distorted with an expression wholly beyond analysis, and his long, cold, bony
right hand reached out to stop my mouth and silence the crude imitation. As he did this
he further demonstrated his eccentricity by casting a startled glance toward the lone
curtained window, as if fearful of some intruder--a glance doubly absurd, since the
garret stood high and inaccessible above all the adjacent roofs, this window being the
only point on the steep street, as the concierge had told me, from which one could see
over the wall at the summit.

The old man's glance brought Blandot's remark to my mind, and with a certain
capriciousness I felt a wish to look out over the wide and dizzying panorama of moonlit
roofs and city lights beyond the hilltop, which of all the dwellers in the Rue d'Auseil
only this crabbed musician could see. I moved toward the window and would have
drawn aside the nondescript curtains, when with a frightened rage even greater than
before, the dumb lodger was upon me again; this time motioning with his head toward
the door as he nervously strove to drag me thither with both hands. Now thoroughly
disgusted with my host, I ordered him to release me, and told him I would go at once.
His clutch relaxed, and as he saw my disgust and offense, his own anger seemed to
subside. He tightened his relaxing grip, but this time in a friendly manner, forcing me
into a chair; then with an appearance of wistfulness crossing to the littered table, where
he wrote many words with a pencil, in the labored French of a foreigner.

The note which he finally handed me was an appeal for tolerance and forgiveness. Zann
said that he was old, lonely, and afflicted with strange fears and nervous disorders
connected with his music and with other things. He had enjoyed my listening to his
music, and wished I would come again and not mind his eccentricities. But he could not
play to another his weird harmonies, and could not bear hearing them from another; nor
could he bear having anything in his room touched by another. He had not known until
our hallway conversation that I could overhear his playing in my room, and now asked
me if I would arrange with Blandot to take a lower room where I could not hear him in
the night. He would, he wrote, defray the difference in rent.

As I sat deciphering the execrable French, I felt more lenient toward the old man. He
was a victim of physical and nervous suffering, as was I; and my metaphysical studies
had taught me kindness. In the silence there came a slight sound from the window--the
shutter must have rattled in the night wind, and for some reason I started almost as
violently as did Erich Zann. So when I had finished reading, I shook my host by the
hand, and departed as a friend.

The next day Blandot gave me a more expensive room on the third floor, between the
apartments of an aged money-lender and the room of a respectable upholsterer. There
was no one on the fourth floor.

It was not long before I found that Zann's eagerness for my company was not as great as
it had seemed while he was persuading me to move down from the fifth story. He did
not ask me to call on him, and when I did call he appeared uneasy and played listlessly.
This was always at night--in the day he slept and would admit no one. My liking for
him did not grow, though the attic room and the weird music seemed to hold an odd
fascination for me. I had a curious desire to look out of that window, over the wall and
down the unseen slope at the glittering roofs and spires which must lie outspread there.
Once I went up to the garret during theater hours, when Zann was away, but the door
was locked.

What I did succeed in doing was to overhear the nocturnal playing of the dumb old man.
At first I would tip-toe up to my old fifth floor, then I grew bold enough to climb the
last creaking staircase to the peaked garret. There in the narrow hall, outside the bolted
door with the covered keyhole, I often heard sounds which filled me with an indefinable
dread--the dread of vague wonder and brooding mystery. It was not that the sounds
were hideous, for they were not; but that they held vibrations suggesting nothing on this
globe of earth, and that at certain intervals they assumed a symphonic quality which I
could hardly conceive as produced by one player. Certainly, Erich Zann was a genius of
wild power. As the weeks passed, the playing grew wilder, whilst the old musician
acquired an increasing haggardness and furtiveness pitiful to behold. He now refused to
admit me at any time, and shunned me whenever we met on the stairs.

Then one night as I listened at the door, I heard the shrieking viol swell into a chaotic
babel of sound; a pandemonium which would have led me to doubt my own shaking
sanity had there not come from behind that barred portal a piteous proof that the horror
was real--the awful, inarticulate cry which only a mute can utter, and which rises only in
moments of the most terrible fear or anguish. I knocked repeatedly at the door, but
received no response. Afterward I waited in the black hallway, shivering with cold and
fear, till I heard the poor musician's feeble effort to rise from the floor by the aid of a
chair. Believing him just conscious after a fainting fit, I renewed my rapping, at the
same time calling out my name reassuringly. I heard Zann stumble to the window and
close both shutter and sash, then stumble to the door, which he falteringly unfastened to
admit me. This time his delight at having me present was real; for his distorted face
gleamed with relief while he clutched at my coat as a child clutches at its mother's
skirts.

Shaking pathetically, the old man forced me into a chair whilst he sank into another,
beside which his viol and bow lay carelessly on the floor. He sat for some time inactive,
nodding oddly, but having a paradoxical suggestion of intense and frightened listening.
Subsequently he seemed to be satisfied, and crossing to a chair by the table wrote a brief
note, handed it to me, and returned to the table, where he began to write rapidly and
incessantly. The note implored me in the name of mercy, and for the sake of my own
curiosity, to wait where I was while he prepared a full account in German of all the
marvels and terrors which beset him. I waited, and the dumb man's pencil flew.

It was perhaps an hour later, while I still waited and while the old musician's feverishly
written sheets still continued to pile up, that I saw Zann start as from the hint of a
horrible shock. Unmistakably he was looking at the curtained window and listening
shudderingly. Then I half fancied I heard a sound myself; though it was not a horrible
sound, but rather an exquisitely low and infinitely distant musical note, suggesting a
player in one of the neighboring houses, or in some abode beyond the lofty wall over
which I had never been able to look. Upon Zann the effect was terrible, for, dropping
his pencil, suddenly he rose, seized his viol, and commenced to rend the night with the
wildest playing I had ever heard from his bow save when listening at the barred door.

It would be useless to describe the playing of Erich Zann on that dreadful night. It was
more horrible than anything I had ever overheard, because I could now see the
expression of his face, and could realize that this time the motive was stark fear. He was
trying to make a noise; to ward something off or drown something out--what, I could
not imagine, awesome though I felt it must be. The playing grew fantastic, dehnous, and
hysterical, yet kept to the last the qualities of supreme genius which I knew this strange
old man possessed. I recognized the air--it was a wild Hungarian dance popular in the
theaters, and I reflected for a moment that this was the first time I had ever heard Zann
play the work of another composer.

Louder and louder, wilder and wilder, mounted the shrieking and whining of that
desperate viol. The player was dripping with an uncanny perspiration and twisted like a
monkey, always looking frantically at the curtained window. In his frenzied strains I
could almost see shadowy satyrs and bacchanals dancing and whirling insanely through
seething abysses of clouds and smoke and lightning. And then I thought I heard a
shriller, steadier note that was not from the viol; a calm, deliberate, purposeful, mocking
note from far away in the West.

At this juncture the shutter began to rattle in a howling night wind which had sprung up
outside as if in answer to the mad playing within. Zann's screaming viol now outdid
itself emitting sounds I had never thought a viol could emit. The shutter rattled more
loudly, unfastened, and commenced slamming against the window. Then the glass
broke shiveringly under the persistent impacts, and the chill wind rushed in, making the
candles sputter and rustling the sheets of paper on the table where Zann had begun to
write out his horrible secret. I looked at Zann, and saw that he was past conscious
observation. His blue eyes were bulging, glassy and sightless, and the frantic playing
had become a blind, mechanical, unrecognizable orgy that no pen could even suggest.

A sudden gust, stronger than the others, caught up the manuscript and bore it toward the
window. I followed the flying sheets in desperation, but they were gone before I reached
the demolished panes. Then I remembered my old wish to gaze from this window, the
only window in the Rue d'Auseil from which one might see the slope beyond the wall,
and the city outspread beneath. It was very dark, but the city's lights always burned, and
I expected to see them there amidst the rain and wind. Yet when I looked from that
highest of all gable windows, looked while the candles sputtered and the insane viol
howled with the night-wind, I saw no city spread below, and no friendly lights gleamed
from remembered streets, but only the blackness of space illimitable; unimagined space
alive with motion and music, and having no semblance of anything on earth. And as I
stood there looking in terror, the wind blew out both the candles in that ancient peaked
garret, leaving me in savage and impenetrable darkness with chaos and pandemonium
before me, and the demon madness of that night-baying viol behind me.

I staggered back in the dark, without the means of striking a light, crashing against the
table, overturning a chair, and finally groping my way to the place where the blackness
screamed with shocking music. To save myself and Erich Zann I could at least try,
whatever the powers opposed to me. Once I thought some chill thing brushed me, and I
screamed, but my scream could not be heard above that hideous viol. Suddenly out of
the blackness the madly sawing bow struck me, and I knew I was close to the player. I
felt ahead, touched the back of Zann's chair, and then found and shook his shoulder in
an effort to bring him to his senses.

He did not respond, and still the viol shrieked on without slackening. I moved my hand
to his head, whose mechanical nodding I was able to stop, and shouted in his ear that we
must both flee from the unknown things of the night. But he neither answered me nor
abated the frenzy of his unutterable music, while all through the garret strange currents
of wind seemed to dance in the darkness and babel. When my hand touched his ear I
shuddered, though I knew not why--knew not why till I felt the still face; the ice-cold,
stiffened, unbreathing face whose glassy eyes bulged uselessly into the void. And then,
by some miracle, finding the door and the large wooden bolt, I plunged wildly away
from that glassy-eyed thing in the dark, and from the ghoulish howling of that accursed
viol whose fury increased even as I plunged.
Leaping, floating, flying down those endless stairs through the dark house; racing
mindlessly out into the narrow, steep, and ancient street of steps and tottering houses;
clattering down steps and over cobbles to the lower streets and the putrid canyon-walled
river; panting across the great dark bridge to the broader, healthier streets and
boulevards we know; all these are terrible impressions that linger with me. And I recall
that there was no wind, and that the moon was out, and that all the lights of the city
twinkled.

Despite my most careful searches and investigations, I have never since been able to
find the Rue d'Auseil. But I am not wholly sorry; either for this or for the loss in
undreamable abysses of the closely--written sheets which alone could have explained
the music of Erich Zann.

THE OTHER GODS

But now they have betaken themselves to unknown Kadath in the cold waste where no
man treads, and are grown stern, having no higher peak whereto to flee at the coming of
men. They are grown stern, and where once they suffered men to displace them, they
now forbid men to come; or coming, to depart. It is well for men that they know not of
Kadath in the cold waste; else they would seek injudiciously to scale it.

Sometimes when earth's gods are homesick they visit in the still of the night the peaks
where once they dwelt, and weep softly as they try to play in the olden way on
remembered slopes. Men have felt the tears of the gods on white-capped Thurai, though
they have thought it rain; and have heard the sighs of the gods in the plaintive dawn-
winds of Lerion. In cloud-ships the gods are wont to travel, and wise cotters have
legends that keep them from certain high peaks at night when it is cloudy, for the gods
are not lenient as of old.

In Ulthar, which lies beyond the river Skai, once dwelt an old man avid to behold the
gods of earth; a man deeply learned in the seven cryptical books of earth, and familiar
with the Pnakotic Manuscripts of distant and frozen Lomar. His name was Barzai the
Wise, and the villagers tell of how he went up a mountain on the night of the strange
eclipse.

Barzai knew so much of the gods that he could tell of their comings and goings, and
guessed so many of their secrets that he was deemed half a god himself. It was he who
wisely advised the burgesses of Ulthar when they passed their remarkable law against
the slaying of cats, and who first told the young priest Atal where it is that black cats go
at midnight on St. John's Eve. Barzai was learned in the lore of the earth's gods, and had
gained a desire to look upon their faces. He believed that his great secret knowledge of
gods could shield him from their wrath, so resolved to go up to the summit of high and
rocky Hatheg-Kla on a night when he knew the gods would be there.

Hatheg-Kla is far in the stony desert beyond Hatheg, for which it is named, and rises
like a rock statue in a silent temple. Around its peak the mists play always mournfully,
for mists are the memories of the gods, and the gods loved Hatheg-Kla when they dwelt
upon it in the old days. Often the gods of earth visit Hatheg-Kla in their ships of clouds,
casting pale vapors over the slopes as they dance reminiscently on the summit under a
clear moon. The villagers of Hatheg say it is ill to climb the Hatheg-Kla at any time, and
deadly to climb it by night when pale vapors hide the summit and the moon; but Barzai
heeded them not when he came from neighboring Ulthar with the young priest Atal,
who was his disciple. Atal was only the son of an innkeeper, and was sometimes afraid;
but Barzai's father had been a landgrave who dwelt in an ancient castle, so he had no
common superstition in his blood, and only laughed at the fearful cotters.

Banzai and Atal went out of Hatheg into the stony desert despite the prayers of
peasants, and talked of earth's gods by their campfires at night. Many days they
traveled, and from afar saw lofty Hatheg-Kla with his aureole of mournful mist. On the
thirteenth day they reached the mountain's lonely base, and Atal spoke of his fears. But
Barzai was old and learned and had no fears, so led the way up the slope that no man
had scaled since the time of Sansu, who is written of with fright in the moldy Pnakotic
Manuscripts.

The way was rocky, and made perilous by chasms, cliffs, and falling stones. Later it
grew cold and snowy; and Barzai and Atal often slipped and fell as they hewed and
plodded upward with staves and axes. Finally the air grew thin, and the sky changed
color, and the climbers found it hard to breathe; but still they toiled up and up,
marveling at the strangeness of the scene and thrilling at the thought of what would
happen on the summit when the moon was out and the pale vapours spread around. For
three days they climbed higher and higher toward the roof of the world; then they
camped to wait for the clouding of the moon.

For four nights no clouds came, and the moon shone down cold through the thin
mournful mist around the silent pinnacle. Then on the fifth night, which was the night of
the full moon, Barzai saw some dense clouds far to the north, and stayed up with Atal to
watch them draw near. Thick and majestic they sailed, slowly and deliberately onward;
ranging themselves round the peak high above the watchers, and hiding the moon and
the summit from view. For a long hour the watchers gazed, whilst the vapours swirled
and the screen of clouds grew thicker and more restless. Barzai was wise in the lore of
earth's gods, and listened hard for certain sounds, but Atal felt the chill of the vapours
and the awe of the night, and feared much. And when Barzai began to climb higher and
beckon eagerly, it was long before Atal would follow.

So thick were the vapours that the way was hard, and though Atal followed at last, he
could scarce see the gray shape of Barzai on the dim slope above in the clouded
moonlight. Barzai forged very far ahead, and seemed despite his age to climb more
easily than Atal; fearing not the steepness that began to grow too great for any save a
strong and dauntless man, nor pausing at wide black chasms that Atal could scarce leap.
And so they went up wildly over rocks and gulfs, slipping and stumbling, and
sometimes awed at the vastness and horrible silence of bleak ice pinnacles and mute
granite steeps.

Very suddenly Barzai went out of Atal's sight, scaling a hideous cliff that seemed to
bulge outward and block the path for any climber not inspired of earth's gods. Atal was
far below, and planning what he should do when he reached the place, when curiously
he noticed that the light had grown strong, as if the cloudless peak and moonlit
meetingplace of the gods were very near. And as he scrambled on toward the bulging
cliff and litten sky he felt fears more shocking than any he had known before. Then
through the high mists he heard the voice of Barzai shouting wildly in delight:
"I have heard the gods. I have heard earth's gods singing in revelry on Hatheg-Kla! The
voices of earth's gods are known to Barzai the Prophet! The mists are thin and the moon
is bright, and I shall see the gods dancing wildly on Hatheg-Kla that they loved in
youth. The wisdom of Barzai hath made him greater than earth's gods, and against his
will their spells and barriers are as naught; Barzai will behold the gods, the proud gods,
the secret gods, the gods of earth who spurn the sight of man!"

Atal could not hear the voices Barzai heard, but he was now close to the bulging cliff
and scanning it for footholds. Then he heard Barzai's voice grow shriller and louder:

"The mist is very thin, and the moon casts shadows on the slope; the voices of earth's
gods are high and wild, and they fear the coming of Barzai the Wise, who is greater than
they...The moon's light flickers, as earth's gods dance against it; I shall see the dancing
forms of the gods that leap and howl in the moonlight...The light is dimmer and the
gods are afraid..."

Whilst Barzai was shouting these things Atal felt a spectral change in all the air, as if
the laws of earth were bowing to greater laws; for though the way was steeper than ever,
the upward path was now grown fearsomely easy, and the bulging cliff proved scarce an
obstacle when he reached it and slid perilously up its convex face. The light of the moon
had strangely failed, and as Atal plunged upward through the mists he heard Barzai the
Wise shrieking in the shadows:

"The moon is dark, and the gods dance in the night; there is terror in the sky, for upon
the moon hath sunk an eclipse foretold in no books of men or of earth's gods...There is
unknown magic on Hatheg-Kla, for the screams of the frightened gods have turned to
laughter, and the slopes of ice shoot up endlessly into the black heavens whither I am
plunging...Hei! Hei! At last! In the dim light I behold the gods of earth!"

And now Atal, slipping dizzily up over inconceivable steeps, heard in the dark a
loathsome laughing, mixed with such a cry as no man else ever heard save in the
Phlegethon of unrelatable nightmares; a cry wherein reverberated the horror and
anguish of a haunted lifetime packed into one atrocious moment:

"The other gods! The other gods! The gods of the outer hells that guard the feeble gods
of earth!...Look away...Go back...Do not see! Do not see! The vengeance of the infinite
abysses...That cursed, that damnable pit...Merciful gods of earth, I am falling into the
sky!"

And as Atal shut his eyes and stopped his ears and tried to hump downward against the
frightful pull from unknown heights, there resounded on Hatheg-Kla that terrible peal of
thunder which awaked the good cotters of the plains and the honest burgesses of
Hatheg, Nir and Ulthar, and caused them to behold through the clouds that strange
eclipse of the moon that no book ever predicted. And when the moon came out at last
Atal was safe on the lower snows of the mountain without sight of earth's gods, or of the
other gods.

Now it is told in the moldy Pnakotic Manuscripts that Sansu found naught but wordless
ice and rock when he did climb Hatheg-Kla in the youth of the world. Yet when the
men of Ulthar and Nir and Hatheg crushed their fears and scaled that haunted steep by
day in search of Barzai the Wise, they found graven in the naked stone of the summit a
curious and cyclopean symbol fifty cubits wide, as if the rock had been riven by some
titanic chisel. And the symbol was like to one that learned men have discerned in those
frightful parts of the Pnakotic Manuscripts which were too ancient to be read. This they
found.

Barzai the Wise they never found, nor could the holy priest Atal ever be persuaded to
pray for his soul's repose. Moreover, to this day the people of Ulthar and Nir and
Hatheg fear eclipses, and pray by night when pale vapors hide the mountain-top and the
moon. And above the mists on Hatheg-Kla, earth's gods sometimes dance reminiscently;
for they know they are safe, and love to come from unknown Kadath in ships of clouds
and play in the olden way, as they did when earth was new and men not given to the
climbing of inaccessible places.

THE OUTSIDER
Unhappy is he to whom the memories of childhood bring only fear and sadness.
Wretched is he who looks back upon lone hours in vast and dismal chambers with
brown hangings and maddening rows of antique books, or upon awed watches in
twilight groves of grotesque, gigantic, and vine-encumbered trees that silently wave
twisted branches far aloft. Such a lot the gods gave to me--to me, the dazed, the
disappointed; the barren, the broken. And yet I am strangely content and cling
desperately to those sere memories, when my mind momentarily threatens to reach
beyond to the other.

I know not where I was born, save that the castle was infinitely old and infinitely
horrible, full of dark passages and having high ceilings where the eye could find only
cobwebs and shadows. The stones in the crumbling corridors seemed always hideously
damp, and there was an accursed smell everywhere, as of the piled-up corpses of dead
generations. It was never light, so that I used sometimes to light candles and gaze
steadily at them for relief, nor was there any sun outdoors, since the terrible trees grew
high above the topmost accessible tower. There was one black tower which reached
above the trees into the unknown outer sky, but that was partly ruined and could not be
ascended save by a well-nigh impossible climb up the sheer wall, stone by stone.

I must have lived years in this place, but I cannot measure the time. Beings must have
cared for my needs, yet I cannot recall any person except myself, or anything alive but
the noiseless rats and bats and spiders. I think that whoever nursed me must have been
shockingly aged, since my first conception of a living person was that of somebody
mockingly like myself, yet distorted, shrivelled, and decaying like the castle. To me
there was nothing grotesque in the bones and skeletons that strewed some of the stone
crypts deep down among the foundations. I fantastically associated these things with
everyday events, and thought them more natural than the coloured pictures of living
beings which I found in many of the mouldy books. From such books I learned all that I
know. No teacher urged or guided me, and I do not recall hearing any human voice in
all those years--not even my own; for although I had read of speech, I had never thought
to try to speak aloud. My aspect was a matter equally unthought of, for there were no
mirrors in the castle, and I merely regarded myself by instinct as akin to the youthful
figures I saw drawn and painted in the books. I felt conscious of youth because I
remembered so little.
Outside, across the putrid moat and under the dark mute trees, I would often lie and
dream for hours about what I read in the books; and would longingly picture myself
amidst gay crowds in the sunny world beyond the endless forests. Once I tried to escape
from the forest, but as I went farther from the castle the shade grew denser and the air
more filled with brooding fear; so that I ran frantically back lest I lose my way in a
labyrinth of nighted silence.

So through endless twilights I dreamed and waited, though I knew not what I waited for.
Then in the shadowy solitude my longing for light grew so frantic that I could rest no
more, and I lifted entreating hands to the single black ruined tower that reached above
the forest into the unknown outer sky. And at last I resolved to scale that tower, fall
though I might; since it were better to glimpse the sky and perish, than to live without
ever beholding day.

In the dank twilight I climbed the worn and aged stone stairs till I reached the level
where they ceased, and thereafter clung perilously to small footholds leading upward.
Ghastly and terrible was that dead, stairless cylinder of rock; black, ruined, and
deserted, and sinister with startled bats whose wings made no noise. But more ghastly
and terrible still was the slowness of my progress; for climb as I might, the darkness
overhead grew no thinner, and a new chill as of haunted and venerable mould assailed
me. I shivered as I wondered why I did not reach the light, and would have looked down
had I dared. I fancied that night had come suddenly upon me, and vainly groped with
one free hand for a window embrasure, that I might peer out and above, and try to judge
the height I had once attained.

All at once, after an infinity of awesome, sightless, crawling up that concave and
desperate precipice, I felt my head touch a solid thing, and I knew I must have gained
the roof, or at least some kind of floor. In the darkness I raised my free hand and tested
the barrier, finding it stone and immovable. Then came a deadly circuit of the tower,
clinging to whatever holds the slimy wall could give; till finally my testing hand found
the barrier yielding, and I turned upward again, pushing the slab or door with my head
as I used both hands in my fearful ascent. There was no light revealed above, and as my
hands went higher I knew that my climb was for the nonce ended; since the slab was the
trapdoor of an aperture leading to a level stone surface of greater circumference than the
lower tower, no doubt the floor of some lofty and capacious observation chamber. I
crawled through carefully, and tried to prevent the heavy slab from falling back into
place, but failed in the latter attempt. As I lay exhausted on the stone floor I heard the
eerie echoes of its fall, hoped when necessary to pry it up again.

Believing I was now at prodigious height, far above the accursed branches of the wood,
I dragged myself up from the floor and fumbled about for windows, that I might look
for the first time upon the sky, and the moon and stars of which I had read. But on every
hand I was disappointed; since all that I found were vast shelves of marble, bearing
odious oblong boxes of disturbing size. More and more I reflected, and wondered what
hoary secrets might abide in this high apartment so many aeons cut off from the castle
below. Then unexpectedly my hands came upon a doorway, where hung a portal of
stone, rough with strange chiselling. Trying it, I found it locked; but with a supreme
burst of strength I overcame all obstacles and dragged it open inward. As I did so there
came to me the purest ecstasy I have ever known; for shining tranquilly through an
ornate grating of iron, and down a short stone passageway of steps that ascended from
the newly found doorway, was the radiant full moon, which I had never before seen
save in dreams and in vague visions I dared not call memories.

Fancying now that I had attained the very pinnacle of the castle, I commenced to rush
up the few steps beyond the door; but the sudden veiling of the moon by a cloud caused
me to stumble, and I felt my way more slowly in the dark. It was still very dark when I
reached the grating--which I tried carefully and found unlocked, but which I did not
open for fear of falling from the amazing height to which I had climbed. Then the moon
came out.

Most demoniacal of all shocks is that of the abysmally unexpected and grotesquely
unbelievable. Nothing I had before undergone could compare in terror with what I now
saw; with the bizarre marvels that sight implied. The sight itself was as simple as it was
stupefying, for it was merely this: instead of a dizzying prospect of treetops seen from a
lofty eminence, there stretched around me on the level through the grating nothing less
than the solid ground, decked and diversified by marble slabs and columns, and
overshadowed by an ancient stone church, whose ruined spire gleamed spectrally in the
moonlight.

Half unconscious, I opened the grating and staggered out upon the white gravel path
that stretched away in two directions. My mind, stunned and chaotic as it was, still held
the frantic craving for light; and not even the fantastic wonder which had happened
could stay my course. I neither knew nor cared whether my experience was insanity,
dreaming, or magic; but was determined to gaze on brilliance and gaiety at any cost. I
knew not who I was or what I was, or what my surroundings might be; though as I
continued to stumble along I became conscious of a kind of fearsome latent memory
that made my progress not wholly fortuitous. I passed under an arch out of that region
of slabs and columns, and wandered through the open country; sometimes following the
visible road, but sometimes leaving it curiously to tread across meadows where only
occasional ruins bespoke the ancient presence of a forgotten road. Once I swam across a
swift river where crumbling, mossy masonry told of a bridge long vanished.

Over two hours must have passed before I reached what seemed to be my goal, a
venerable ivied castle in a thickly wooded park, maddeningly familiar, yet full of
perplexing strangeness to me. I saw that the moat was filled in, and that some of the
well-known towers were demolished, whilst new wings existed to confuse the beholder.
But what I observed with chief interest and delight were the open windows--gorgeously
ablaze with light and sending forth sound of the gayest revelry. Advancing to one of
these I looked in and saw an oddly dressed company indeed; making merry, and
speaking brightly to one another. I had never, seemingly, heard human speech before
and could guess only vaguely what was said. Some of the faces seemed to hold
expressions that brought up incredibly remote recollections, others were utterly alien.

I now stepped through the low window into the brilliantly lighted room, stepping as I
did so from my single bright moment of hope to my blackest convulsion of despair and
realization. The nightmare was quick to come, for as I entered, there occurred
immediately one of the most terrifying demonstrations I had ever conceived. Scarcely
had I crossed the sill when there descended upon the whole company a sudden and
unheralded fear of hideous intensity, distorting every face and evoking the most horrible
screams from nearly every throat. Flight was universal, and in the clamour and panic
several fell in a swoon and were dragged away by their madly fleeing companions.
Many covered their eyes with their hands, and plunged blindly and awkwardly in their
race to escape, overturning furniture and stumbling against the walls before they
managed to reach one of the many doors.

The cries were shocking; and as I stood in the brilliant apartment alone and dazed,
listening to their vanishing echoes, I trembled at the thought of what might be lurking
near me unseen. At a casual inspection the room seemed deserted, but when I moved
towards one of the alcoves I thought I detected a presence there--a hint of motion
beyond the golden-arched doorway leading to another and somewhat similar room. As I
approached the arch I began to perceive the presence more clearly; and then, with the
first and last sound I ever uttered--a ghastly ululation that revolted me almost as
poignantly as its noxious cause--I beheld in full, frightful vividness the inconceivable,
indescribable, and unmentionable monstrosity which had by its simple appearance
changed a merry company to a herd of delirious fugitives.

I cannot even hint what it was like, for it was a compound of all that is unclean,
uncanny, unwelcome, abnormal, and detestable. It was the ghoulish shade of decay,
antiquity, and dissolution; the putrid, dripping eidolon of unwholesome revelation, the
awful baring of that which the merciful earth should always hide. God knows it was not
of this world--or no longer of this world--yet to my horror I saw in its eaten-away and
bone-revealing outlines a leering, abhorrent travesty on the human shape; and in its
mouldy, disintegrating apparel an unspeakable quality that chilled me even more.

I was almost paralysed, but not too much so to make a feeble effort towards flight; a
backward stumble which failed to break the spell in which the nameless, voiceless
monster held me. My eyes bewitched by the glassy orbs which stared loathsomely into
them, refused to close; though they were mercifully blurred, and showed the terrible
object but indistinctly after the first shock. I tried to raise my hand to shut out the sight,
yet so stunned were my nerves that my arm could not fully obey my will. The attempt,
however, was enough to disturb my balance; so that I had to stagger forward several
steps to avoid falling. As I did so I became suddenly and agonizingly aware of the
nearness of the carrion thing, whose hideous hollow breathing I half fancied I could
hear. Nearly mad, I found myself yet able to throw out a hand to ward of the foetid
apparition which pressed so close; when in one cataclysmic second of cosmic
nightmarishness and hellish accident my fingers touched the rotting outstretched paw of
the monster beneath the golden arch.

I did not shriek, but all the fiendish ghouls that ride the nightwind shrieked for me as in
that same second there crashed down upon my mind a single fleeting avalanche of soul-
annihilating memory. I knew in that second all that had been; I remembered beyond the
frightful castle and the trees, and recognized the altered edifice in which I now stood; I
recognized, most terrible of all, the unholy abomination that stood leering before me as
I withdrew my sullied fingers from its own.

But in the cosmos there is balm as well as bitterness, and that balm is nepenthe. In the
supreme horror of that second I forgot what had horrified me, and the burst of black
memory vanished in a chaos of echoing images. In a dream I fled from that haunted and
accursed pile, and ran swiftly and silently in the moonlight. When I returned to the
churchyard place of marble and went down the steps I found the stone trap-door
immovable; but I was not sorry, for I had hated the antique castle and the trees. Now I
ride with the mocking and friendly ghouls on the night-wind, and play by day amongst
the catacombs of Nephren-Ka in the sealed and unknown valley of Hadoth by the Nile. I
know that light is not for me, save that of the moon over the rock tombs of Neb, nor any
gaiety save the unnamed feasts of Nitokris beneath the Great Pyramid; yet in my new
wildness and freedom I almost welcome the bitterness of alienage.

For although nepenthe has calmed me, I know always that I am an outsider; a stranger
in this century and among those who are still men. This I have known ever since I
stretched out my fingers to the abomination within that great gilded frame; stretched out
my fingers and touched a cold and unyielding surface of polished glass.

THE PICTURE IN THE HOUSE

Most horrible of all sights are the little unpainted wooden houses remote from travelled
ways, usually squatted upon some damp grassy slope or leaning against some gigantic
outcropping of rock. Two hundred years and more they have leaned or squatted there,
while the vines have crawled and the trees have swelled and spread. They are almost
hidden now in lawless luxuriances of green and guardian shrouds of shadow; but the
small-paned windows still stare shockingly, as if blinking through a lethal stupor which
wards off madness by dulling the memory of unutterable things.

In such houses have dwelt generations of strange people, whose like the world has never
seen. Seized with a gloomy and fanatical belief which exiled them from their kind, their
ancestors sought the wilderness for freedom. There the scions of a conquering race
indeed flourished free from the restrictions of their fellows, but cowered in an appalling
slavery to the dismal phantasms of their own minds. Divorced from the enlightenment
of civilization, the strength of these Puritans turned into singular channels; and in their
isolation, morbid self-repression, and struggle for life with relentless Nature, there came
to them dark furtive traits from the prehistoric depths of their cold Northern heritage. By
necessity practical and by philosophy stern, these folks were not beautiful in their sins.
Erring as all mortals must, they were forced by their rigid code to seek concealment
above all else; so that they came to use less and less taste in what they concealed. Only
the silent, sleepy, staring houses in the backwoods can tell all that has lain hidden since
the early days, and they are not communicative, being loath to shake off the drowsiness
which helps them forget. Sometimes one feels that it would be merciful to tear down
these houses, for they must often dream.

It was to a time-battered edifice of this description that I was driven one afternoon in
November, 1896, by a rain of such chilling copiousness that any shelter was preferable
to exposure. I had been travelling for some time amongst the people of the Miskatonic
Valley in quest of certain genealogical data; and from the remote, devious, and
problematical nature of my course, had deemed it convenient to employ a bicycle
despite the lateness of the season. Now I found myself upon an apparently abandoned
road which I had chosen as the shortest cut to Arkham, overtaken by the storm at a point
far from any town, and confronted with no refuge save the antique and repellent wooden
building which blinked with bleared windows from between two huge leafless elms
near the foot of a rocky hill. Distant though it is from the remnant of a road, this house
none the less impressed me unfavorably the very moment I espied it. Honest,
wholesome structures do not stare at travellers so slyly and hauntingly, and in my
genealogical researches I had encountered legends of a century before which biased me
against places of this kind. Yet the force of the elements was such as to overcome my
scruples, and I did not hesitate to wheel my machine up the weedy rise to the closed
door which seemed at once so suggestive and secretive.

I had somehow taken it for granted that the house was abandoned, yet as I approached it
I was not so sure, for though the walks were indeed overgrown with weeds, they seemed
to retain their nature a little too well to argue complete desertion. Therefore instead of
trying the door I knocked, feeling as I did so a trepidation I could scarcely explain. As I
waited on the rough, mossy rock which served as a door-step, I glanced at the
neighboring windows and the panes of the transom above me, and noticed that although
old, rattling, and almost opaque with dirt, they were not broken. The building, then,
must still be inhabited, despite its isolation and general neglect. However, my rapping
evoked no response, so after repeating the summons I tried the rusty latch and found the
door unfastened. Inside was a little vestibule with walls from which the plaster was
falling, and through the doorway came a faint but peculiarly hateful odor. I entered,
carrying my bicycle, and closed the door behind me. Ahead rose a narrow staircase,
flanked by a small door probably leading to the cellar, while to the left and right were
closed doors leading to rooms on the ground floor.

Leaning my cycle against the wall I opened the door at the left, and crossed into a small
low-ceiled chamber but dimly lighted by its two dusty windows and furnished in the
barest and most primitive possible way. It appeared to be a kind of sitting-room, for it
had a table and several chairs, and an immense fireplace above which ticked an antique
clock on a mantel. Books and papers were very few, and in the prevailing gloom I could
not readily discern the titles. What interested me was the uniform air of archaism as
displayed in every visible detail. Most of the houses in this region I had found rich in
relics of the past, but here the antiquity was curiously complete; for in all the room I
could not discover a single article of definitely post-revolutionary date. Had the
furnishings been less humble, the place would have been a collector's paradise.

As I surveyed this quaint apartment, I felt an increase in that aversion first excited by
the bleak exterior of the house. Just what it was that I feared or loathed, I could by no
means define; but something in the whole atmosphere seemed redolent of unhallowed
age, of unpleasant crudeness, and of secrets which should be forgotten. I felt disinclined
to sit down, and wandered about examining the various articles which I had noticed.
The first object of my curiosity was a book of medium size lying upon the table and
presenting such an antediluvian aspect that I marvelled at beholding it outside a
museum or library. It was bound in leather with metal fittings, and was in an excellent
state of preservation; being altogether an unusual sort of volume to encounter in an
abode so lowly. When I opened it to the title page my wonder grew even greater, for it
proved to be nothing less rare than Pigafetta's account of the Congo region, written in
Latin from the notes of the sailor Lopex and printed at Frankfurt in 1598. I had often
heard of this work, with its curious illustrations by the brothers De Bry, hence for a
moment forgot my uneasiness in my desire to turn the pages before me. The engravings
were indeed interesting, drawn wholly from imagination and careless descriptions, and
represented negroes with white skins and Caucasian features; nor would I soon have
closed the book had not an exceedingly trivial circumstance upset my tired nerves and
revived my sensation of disquiet. What annoyed me was merely the persistent way in
which the volume tended to fall open of itself at Plate XII, which represented in
gruesome detail a butcher's shop of the cannibal Anziques. I experienced some shame at
my susceptibility to so slight a thing, but the drawing nevertheless disturbed me,
especially in connection with some adjacent passages descriptive of Anzique
gastronomy.

I had turned to a neighboring shelf and was examining its meagre literary contents--an
eighteenth century Bible, a "Pilgrim's Progress" of like period, illustrated with grotesque
woodcuts and printed by the almanack-maker Isaiah Thomas, the rotting bulk of Cotton
Mather's "Magnalia Christi Americana," and a few other books of evidently equal age--
when my attention was aroused by the unmistakable sound of walking in the room
overhead. At first astonished and startled, considering the lack of response to my recent
knocking at the door, I immediately afterward concluded that the walker had just
awakened from a sound sleep, and listened with less surprise as the footsteps sounded
on the creaking stairs. The tread was heavy, yet seemed to contain a curious quality of
cautiousness; a quality which I disliked the more because the tread was heavy. When I
had entered the room I had shut the door behind me. Now, after a moment of silence
during which the walker may have been inspecting my bicycle in the hall, I heard a
fumbling at the latch and saw the paneled portal swing open again.

In the doorway stood a person of such singular appearance that I should have exclaimed
aloud but for the restraints of good breeding. Old, white-bearded, and ragged, my host
possessed a countenance and physique which inspired equal wonder and respect. His
height could not have been less than six feet, and despite a general air of age and
poverty he was stout and powerful in proportion. His face, almost hidden by a long
beard which grew high on the cheeks, seemed abnormally ruddy and less wrinkled than
one might expect; while over a high forehead fell a shock of white hair little thinned by
the years. His blue eyes, though a trifle bloodshot, seemed inexplicably keen and
burning. But for his horrible unkemptness the man would have been as distinguished-
looking as he was impressive. This unkemptness, however, made him offensive despite
his face and figure. Of what his clothing consisted I could hardly tell, for it seemed to
me no more than a mass of tatters surmounting a pair of high, heavy boots; and his lack
of cleanliness surpassed description.

The appearance of this man, and the instinctive fear he inspired, prepared me for
something like enmity; so that I almost shuddered through surprise and a sense of
uncanny incongruity when he motioned me to a chair and addressed me in a thin, weak
voice full of fawning respect and ingratiating hospitality. His speech was very curious,
an extreme form of Yankee dialect I had thought long extinct; and I studied it closely as
he sat down opposite me for conversation.

"Ketched in the rain, be ye?" he greeted. "Glad ye was nigh the haouse en' hed the sense
ta come right in. I calc'late I was alseep, else I'd a heerd ye--I ain't as young as I uster
be, an' I need a paowerful sight o' naps naowadays. Trav'lin fur? I hain't seed many folks
'long this rud sence they tuk off the Arkham stage."

I replied that I was going to Arkham, and apologized for my rude entry into his
domicile, whereupon he continued.

"Glad ta see ye, young Sir--new faces is scurce arount here, an' I hain't got much ta
cheer me up these days. Guess yew hail from Bosting, don't ye? I never ben thar, but I
kin tell a taown man when I see 'im--we hed one fer deestrick schoolmaster in 'eighty-
four, but he quit suddent an' no one never heerd on 'im sence--" here the old man lapsed
into a kind of chuckle, and made no explanation when I questioned him. He seemed to
be in an aboundingly good humor, yet to possess those eccentricities which one might
guess from his grooming. For some time he rambled on with an almost feverish
geniality, when it struck me to ask him how he came by so rare a book as Pigafetta's
"Regnum Congo."The effect of this volume had not left me, and I felt a certain
hesitancy in speaking of it, but curiosity overmastered all the vague fears which had
steadily accumulated since my first glimpse of the house. To my relief, the question did
not seem an awkward one, for the old man answered freely and volubly.

"Oh, that Afriky book? Cap'n Ebenezer Holt traded me thet in 'sixty--eight--him as was
kilt in the war."Something about the name of Ebenezer Holt caused me to look up
sharply. I had encountered it in my genealogical work, but not in any record since the
Revolution. I wondered if my host could help me in the task at which I was laboring,
and resolved to ask him about it later on. He continued.

"Ebenezer was on a Salem merchantman for years, an' picked up a sight o' queer stuff in
every port. He got this in London, I guess--he uster like ter buy things at the shops. I
was up ta his haouse onct, on the hill, tradin' hosses, when I see this book. I relished the
picters, so he give it in on a swap. 'Tis a queer book--here, leave me git on my
spectacles--" The old man fumbled among his rags, producing a pair of dirty and
amazingly antique glasses with small octagonal lenses and steel bows. Donning these,
he reached for the volume on the table and turned the pages lovingly.

"Ebenezer cud read a leetle o' this--'tis Latin--but I can't. I had two er three
schoolmasters read me a bit, and Passon Clark, him they say got draownded in the
pond--kin yew make anything outen it?" I told him that I could, and translated for his
benefit a paragraph near the beginning. If I erred, he was not scholar enough to correct
me; for he seemed childishly pleased at my English version. His proximity was
becoming rather obnoxious, yet I saw no way to escape without offending him. I was
amused at the childish fondness of this ignorant old man for the pictures in a book he
could not read, and wondered how much better he could read the few books in English
which adorned the room. This revelation of simplicity removed much of the ill-defined
apprehension I had felt, and I smiled as my host rambled on:

"Queer haow picters kin set a body thinkin'. Take this un here near the front. Hey yew
ever seed trees like thet, with big leaves a floppin' over an' daown? And them men--
them can't be niggers--they dew beat all. Kinder like Injuns, I guess, even ef they be in
Afriky. Some o' these here critters looks like monkeys, or half monkeys an' half men,
but I never heerd o' nothin' like this un."Here he pointed to a fabulous creature of the
artist, which one might describe as a sort of dragon with the head of an alligator.

"But naow I'll show ye the best un--over here nigh the middle--"The old man's speech
grew a trifle thicker and his eyes assumed a brighter glow; but his fumbling hands,
though seemingly clumsier than before, were entirely adequate to their mission. The
book fell open, almost of its own accord and as if from frequent consultation at this
place, to the repellent twelfth plate showing a butcher's shop amongst the Anzique
cannibals. My sense of restlessness returned, though I did not exhibit it. The especially
bizarre thing was that the artist had made his Africans look like white men--the limbs
and quarters hanging about the walls of the shop were ghastly, while the butcher with
his axe was hideously incongruous. But my host seemed to relish the view as much as I
disliked it.

"What d'ye think o' this--ain't never see the like hereabouts, eh? When I see this I telled
Eb Holt, 'That's suthin' ta stir ye up an' make yer blood tickle.' When I read in Scripter
about slayin'--like them Midianites was slew--I kinder think things, but I ain't got no
picter of it. Here a body kin see all they is to it--I s'pose 'tis sinful, but ain't we all born
an' livin' in sin?--Thet feller bein' chopped up gives me a tickle every time I look at 'im--
I hey ta keep lookin' at 'im--see whar the butcher cut off his feet? Thar's his head on thet
bench, with one arm side of it, an' t'other arm's on the other side o' the meat block."

As the man mumbled on in his shocking ecstasy the expression on his hairy, spectacled
face became indescribable, but his voice sank rather than mounted. My own sensations
can scarcely be recorded. All the terror I had dimly felt before rushed upon me actively
and vividly, and I knew that I loathed the ancient and abhorrent creature so near me
with an infinite intensity. His madness, or at least his partial perversion, seemed beyond
dispute. He was almost whispering now, with a huskiness more terrible than a scream,
and I trembled as I listened.

"As I says, 'tis queer haow picters sets ye thinkin'. D'ye know, young Sir, I'm right sot
on this un here. Arter I got the book off Eb I uster look at it a lot, especial when I'd
heerd Passon Clark rant o' Sundays in his big wig. Onct I tried suthin' funny--here,
young Sir, don't git skeert--all I done was ter look at the picter afore I kilt the sheep for
market--killin' sheep was kinder more fun arter lookin' at it--" The tone of the old man
now sank very low, sometimes becoming so faint that his words were hardly audible. I
listened to the rain, and to the rattling of the bleared, small-paned windows, and marked
a rumbling of approaching thunder quite unusual for the season. Once a terrific flash
and peal shook the frail house to its foundations, but the whisperer seemed not to notice
it.

"Killin' sheep was kinder more fun--but d'ye know, 'twan't quite satisfyin'. Queer haow
a cravin' gits a holt on ye--As ye love the Almighty, young man, don't tell nobody, but I
swar ter Gawd thet picter begun to make me hungry fer victuals I couldn't raise nor buy-
-here, set still, what's ailin' ye?--I didn't do nothin', only I wondered haow 'twud be ef I
did--They say meat makes blood an' flesh, an' gives ye new life, so I wondered ef
'twudn't make a man live longer an' longer ef 'twas more the same--" But the whisperer
never continued. The interruption was not produced by my fright, nor by the rapidly
increasing storm amidst whose fury I was presently to open my eyes on a smoky
solitude of blackened ruins. It was produced by a very simple though somewhat unusual
happening.

The open book lay flat between us, with the picture staring repulsively upward. As the
old man whispered the words "more the same" a tiny splattering impact was heard, and
something showed on the yellowed paper of the upturned volume. I thought of the rain
and of a leaky roof, but rain is not red. On the butcher's shop of the Anzique cannibals a
small red spattering glistened picturesquely, lending vividness to the horror of the
engraving. The old man saw it, and stopped whispering even before my expression of
horror made it necessary; saw it and glanced quickly toward the floor of the room he
had left an hour before. I followed his glance, and beheld just above us on the loose
plaster of the ancient ceiling a large irregular spot of wet crimson which seemed to
spread even as I viewed it. I did not shriek or move, but merely shut my eyes. A
moment later came the titanic thunderbolt of thunderbolts; blasting that accursed house
of unutterable secrets and bringing the oblivion which alone saved my mind.

THE QUEST OF IRANON

"I am Iranon, and come from Aira, a far city that I recall only dimly but seek to find
again. I am a singer of songs that I learned in the far city, and my calling is to make
beauty with the things remembered of childhood. My wealth is in little memories and
dreams, and in hopes that I sing in gardens when the moon is tender and the west wind
stirs the lotus-buds."

When the men of Teloth heard these things they whispered to one another; for though in
the granite city there is no laughter or song, the stern men sometimes look to the
Karthian hills in the spring and think of the lutes of distant Oonai whereof travellers
have told. And thinking thus, they bade the stranger stay and sing in the square before
the Tower of Mlin, though they liked not the colour of his tattered robe, nor the myrrh
in his hair, nor his chaplet of vine-leaves, nor the youth in his golden voice. At evening
Iranon sang, and while he sang an old man prayed and a blind man said he saw a
nimbus over the singer's head. But most of the men of Teloth yawned, and some
laughed and some went to sleep; for Iranon told nothing useful, singing only his
memories, his dreams, and his hopes.

"I remember the twilight, the moon, and soft songs, and the window where I was rocked
to sleep. And through the window was the street where the golden lights came, and
where the shadows danced on houses of marble. I remember the square of moonlight on
the floor, that was not like any other light, and the visions that danced on the
moonbeams when my mother sang to me. And too, I remember the sun of morning
bright above the many-coloured hills in summer, and the sweetness of flowers borne on
the south wind that made the trees sing.

"Oh Aira, city of marble and beryl, how many are thy beauties! How I loved the warm
and fragrant groves across the hyaline Nithra, and the falls of the tiny Kra that flowed
though the verdant valley! In those groves and in the vale the children wove wreathes
for one another, and at dusk I dreamed strange dreams under the yath-trees on the
mountain as I saw below me the lights of the city, and the curving Nithra reflecting a
ribbon of stars.

"And in the city were the palaces of veined and tinted marble, with golden domes and
painted walls, and green gardens with cerulean pools and crystal fountains. Often I
played in the gardens and waded in the pools, and lay and dreamed among the pale
flowers under the trees. And sometimes at sunset I would climb the long hilly street to
the citadel and the open place, and look down upon Aira, the magic city of marble and
beryl, splendid in a robe of golden flame.

"Long have I missed thee, Aira, for I was but young when we went into exile; but my
father was thy King and I shall come again to thee, for it is so decreed of Fate. All
through seven lands have I sought thee, and some day shall I reign over thy groves and
gardens, thy streets and palaces, and sing to men who shall know whereof I sing, and
laugh not nor turn away. For I am Iranon, who was a Prince in Aira."

That night the men of Teloth lodged the stranger in a stable, and in the morning an
archon came to him and told him to go to the shop of Athok the cobbler, and be
apprenticed to him.

"But I am Iranon, a singer of songs, " he said, "and have no heart for the cobbler's
trade."

"All in Teloth must toil," replied the archon, "for that is the law." Then said Iranon:

"Wherefore do ye toil; is it not that ye may live and be happy? And if ye toil only that
ye may toil more, when shall happiness find you? Ye toil to live, but is not life made of
beauty and song? And if ye suffer no singers among you, where shall be the fruits of
your toil? Toil without song is like a weary journey without an end. Were not death
more pleasing?" But the archon was sullen and did not understand, and rebuked the
stranger.

"Thou art a strange youth, and I like not thy face or thy voice. The words thou speakest
are blasphemy, for the gods of Teloth have said that toil is good. Our gods have
promised us a haven of light beyond death, where shall be rest without end, and crystal
coldness amidst which none shall vex his mind with thought or his eyes with beauty. Go
thou then to Athok the cobbler or be gone out of the city by sunset. All here must serve,
and song is folly."

So Iranon went out of the stable and walked over the narrow stone streets between the
gloomy square house of granite, seeking something green, for all was of stone. On the
faces of men were frowns, but by the stone embankment along the sluggish river Zuro
sat a young boy with sad eyes gazing into the waters to spy green budding branches
washed down from the hills by the freshets. And the boy said to him:

"Art thou not indeed he of whom the archons tell, who seekest a far city in a fair land? I
am Romnod, and borne of the blood of Teloth, but am not old in the ways of the granite
city, and yearn daily for the warm groves and the distant lands of beauty and song.
Beyond the Karthian hills lieth Oonai, the city of lutes and dancing, which men whisper
of and say is both lovely and terrible.Thither would I go were I old enough to find the
way, and thither shouldst thou go and thou wouldst sing and have men listen to thee. Let
us leave the city of Teloth and fare together among the hills of spring. Thou shalt shew
me the ways of travel and I will attend thy songs at evening when the stars one by one
bring dreams to the minds of dreamers. And peradventure it may be that Oonai the city
of lutes and dancing is even the fair Aira thou seekest, for it is told that thou hast not
known Aira since the old days, and a name often changeth. Let us go to Oonai, O Iranon
of the golden head, where men shall know our longings and welcome us as brothers, nor
even laugh or frown at what we say." And Iranon answered:

"Be it so, small one; if any in this stone place yearn for beauty he must seek the
mountains and beyond, and I would not leave thee to pine by the sluggish Zuro. But
think not that delight and understanding dwell just across the Karthian hills, or in any
spot thou canst find in a day's, or a year's, or a lustrum's journey. Behold, when I was
small like thee I dwelt in the valley of Narthos by the frigid Xari, where none would
listen to my dreams; and I told myself that when older I would go to Sinara on the
southern slope, and sing to smiling dromedary-men in the marketplace. But when I went
to Sinara I found the dromedary-men all drunken and ribald, and saw that their songs
were not as mine, so I travelled in a barge down the Xari to onyx--walled Jaren. And the
soldiers at Jaren laughed at me and drave me out, so that I wandered to many cities. I
have seen Stethelos that is below the great cataract, and have gazed on the marsh where
Sarnath once stood. I have been to thraa, Ilarnek, and Kadatheron on the winding river
Ai, and have dwelt long in Olathoe in the land of Lomar. But though I have had
listeners sometimes, they have ever been few. and I know that welcome shall wait me
only in Aira, the city of marble and beryl where my father once ruled as King. So for
Aira shall we seek, though it were well to visit distant and lute-blessed Oonai across the
Karthian hills, which may indeed be Aira, though I think not. Aira's beauty is past
imagining, and none can tell of it without rapture, whilst of Oonai the camel-drivers
whisper leeringly."

At the sunset Iranon and small Romnod went forth from Teloth, and for long wandered
amidst the green hills and cool forests. The way was rough and obscure, and never did
they seem nearer to Oonai the city of lutes and dancing; but in the dusk as the stars
came out Iranon would sing of Aira and its beauties and Romnod would listen, so that
they were both happy after a fashion. They ate plentifully of fruit and red berries, and
marked not the passing of time, but many years must have slipped away. Small Romnod
was now not so small, and spoke deeply instead of shrilly, though Iranon was always
the same, and decked his golden hair with vines and fragrant resins found in the woods.
So it came to pass that Romnod seemed older than Iranon, though he had been very
small when Iranon had found him watching for green budding branches in Teloth beside
the sluggish stone-banked Zuro.

Then one night when the moon was full the travellers came to a mountain crest and
looked down upon the myriad light of Oonai. Peasants had told them they were near,
and Iranon knew that this was not his native city of Aira. The lights of Oonai were not
like those of Aira; for they were harsh and glaring, while the lights of Aira shine as
softly and magically as shone the moonlight on the floor by the window where Iranon's
mother once rocked him to sleep with song. But Oonai was a city of lutes and dancing,
so Iranon and Romnod went down the steep slope that they might find men to whom
sings and dreams would bring pleasure. And when they were come into the town they
found rose-wreathed revellers bound from house to house and leaning from windows
and balconies, who listened to the songs of Iranon and tossed him flowers and
applauded when he was done. Then for a moment did Iranon believe he had found those
who thought and felt even as he, though the town was not a hundredth as fair as Aira.

When dawn came Iranon looked about with dismay, for the domes of Oonai were not
golden in the sun, but grey and dismal. And the men of Oonai were pale with revelling,
and dull with wine, and unlike the radient men of Aira. But because the people had
thrown him blossoms and acclaimed his sings Iranon stayed on, and with him Romnod,
who liked the revelry of the town and wore in his dark hair roses and myrtle. Often at
night Iranon sang to the revellers, but he was always as before, crowned only in the vine
of the mountains and remembering the marble streets of Aira and the hyaline Nithra. In
the frescoed halls of the Monarch did he sing, upon a crystal dais raised over a floor that
was a mirror, and as he sang, he brought pictures to his hearers till the floor seemed to
reflect old, beautiful, and half-remembered things instead of the wine-reddened feasters
who pelted him with roses. And the King bade him put away his tattered purple, and
clothed him in satin and cloth-of-gold, with rings of green jade and bracelets of tinted
ivory, and lodged him in a gilded and tapestried chamber on a bed of sweet carven
wood with canopies and coverlets of flower--embroidered silk. Thus dwelt Iranon in
Oonai, the city of lutes and dancing.

It is not known how long Iranon tarried in Oonai, but one day the King brought to the
palace some wild whirling dancers from the Liranian desert, and dusky flute-players
from Drinen in the East, and after that the revellers threw their roses not so much at
Iranon as at the dancers and flute-players. And day by day that Romnod who had been a
small boy in granite Teloth grew coarser and redder with wine, till he dreamed less and
less, and listened with less delight to the songs of Iranon. But though Iranon was sad he
ceased not to sing, and at evening told again of his dreams of Aira, the city of marble
and beryl. Then one night the reddened and fattened Romnod snorted heavily amidst the
poppied silks of his banquet-couch and died writhing, whilst Iranon, pale and slender,
sang to himself in a far corner. And when Iranon had wept over the grave of Romnod
and strewn it with green branches, such as Romnod used to love, he put aside his silks
and gauds and went forgotten out of Oonai the city of lutes and dancing clad only in the
ragged purple in which he had come, and garlanded with fresh vines from the
mountains.

Into the sunset wandered Iranon, seeking still for his native land and for men who
would understand his songs and dreams. In all the cities of Cydathria and in the lands
beyond the Bnazie desert gay-faced children laughed at his olden songs and tattered
robe of purple; but Iranon stayed ever young, and wore wreathes upon his golden head
whilst he sang of Aira, delight of the past and hope of the future.

So came he one night to the squallid cot of an antique shepherd, bent and dirty, who
kept flocks on a stony slope above a quicksand marsh. To this man Iranon spoke, as to
so many others:

"Canst thou tell me where I may find Aira, the city of marble and beryl, where flows the
hyaline nithra and where the falls of the tiny Kra sing to the verdant valleys and hills
forested with yath trees?" and the shepherd, hearing, looked long and strangely at
Iranon, as if recalling something very far away in time, and noted each line of the
stranger's face, and his golden hair, and his crown of vine-leaves. But he was old, and
shook his head as he replied:

"O stranger, I have indeed heard the name of Aira, and the other names thou hast
spoken, but they come to me from afar down the waste of long years. I heard them in
my youth from the lips of a playmate, a beggar's boy given to strange dreams, who
would weave long tales about the moon and the flowers and the west wind. We used to
laugh at him, for we knew him from his birth though he thought himself a King's son.
He was comely, even as thou, but full of folly and strangeness; and he ran away when
small to find those who would listen gladly to his songs and dreams. How often hath he
sung to me of lands that never were, and things that never can be! Of Aira did he speak
much; of Aira and the river Nithra, and the falls of the tiny Kra. There would he ever
say he once dwelt as a Prince, though here we knew him from his birth. Nor was there
ever a marble city of Aira, or those who could delight in strange songs, save in the
dreams of mine old playmate Iranon who is gone."

And in the twilight, as the stars came out one by one and the moon cast on the marsh a
radiance like that which a child sees quivering on the floor as he is rocked to sleep at
evening, there walked into the lethal quicksands a very old man in tattered purple,
crowned with withered vine-leaves and gazing ahead as if upon the golden domes of a
fair city where dreams are understood. That night something of youth and beauty died in
the elder world.

THE RATS IN THE WALLS

On 16 July 1923, I moved into Exham Priory after the last workman had finished his
labours. The restoration had been a stupendous task, for little had remained of the
deserted pile but a shell-like ruin; yet because it had been the seat of my ancestors, I let
no expense deter me. The place had not been inhabited since the reign of James the
First, when a tragedy of intensely hideous, though largely unexplained, nature had
struck down the master, five of his children, and several servants; and driven forth
under a cloud of suspicion and terror the third son, my lineal progenitor and the only
survivor of the abhorred line.

With this sole heir denounced as a murderer, the estate had reverted to the crown, nor
had the accused man made any attempt to exculpate himself or regain his property.
Shaken by some horror greater than that of conscience or the law, and expressing only a
frantic wish to exclude the ancient edifice from his sight and memory, Walter de la
Poer, eleventh Baron Exham, fled to Virginia and there founded the family which by the
next century had become known as Delapore.

Exham Priory had remained untenanted, though later allotted to the estates of the
Norrys family and much studied because of its peculiarly composite architecture; an
architecture involving Gothic towers resting on a Saxon or Romanesque substructure,
whose foundation in turn was of a still earlier order or blend of orders--Roman, and
even Druidic or native Cymric, if legends speak truly. This foundation was a very
singular thing, being merged on one side with the solid limestone of the precipice from
whose brink the priory overlooked a desolate valley three miles west of the village of
Anchester.

Architects and antiquarians loved to examine this strange relic of forgotten centuries,
but the country folk hated it. They had hated it hundreds of years before, when my
ancestors lived there, and they hated it now, with the moss and mould of abandonment
on it. I had not been a day in Anchester before I knew I came of an accursed house. And
this week workmen have blown up Exham Priory, and are busy obliterating the traces of
its foundations. The bare statistics of my ancestry I had always known, together with the
fact that my first American forebear had come to the colonies under a strange cloud. Of
details, however, I had been kept wholly ignorant through the policy of reticence always
maintained by the Delapores. Unlike our planter neighbours, we seldom boasted of
crusading ancestors or other mediaeval and Renaissance heroes; nor was any kind of
tradition handed down except what may have been recorded in the sealed envelope left
before the Civil War by every squire to his eldest son for posthumous opening. The
glories we cherished were those achieved since the migration; the glories of a proud and
honourable, if somewhat reserved and unsocial Virginia line.

During the war our fortunes were extinguished and our whole existence changed by the
burning of Carfax, our home on the banks of the James. My grandfather, advanced in
years, had perished in that incendiary outrage, and with him the envelope that had
bound us all to the past. I can recall that fire today as I saw it then at the age of seven,
with the federal soldiers shouting, the women screaming, and the negroes howling and
praying. My father was in the army, defending Richmond, and after many formalities
my mother and I were passed through the lines to join him.

When the war ended we all moved north, whence my mother had come; and I grew to
manhood, middle age, and ultimate wealth as a stolid Yankee. Neither my father nor I
ever knew what our hereditary envelope had contained, and as I merged into the
greyness of Massachusetts business life I lost all interest in the mysteries which
evidently lurked far back in my family tree. Had I suspected their nature, how gladly I
would have left Exham Priory to its moss, bats and cobwebs!

My father died in 1904, but without any message to leave to me, or to my only child,
Alfred, a motherless boy of ten. It was this boy who reversed the order of family
information, for although I could give him only jesting conjectures about the past, he
wrote me of some very interesting ancestral legends when the late war took him to
England in 1917 as an aviation officer. Apparently the Delapores had a colourful and
perhaps sinister history, for a friend of my son's, Capt. Edward Norrys of the Royal
Flying Corps, dwelt near the family seat at Anchester and related some peasant
superstitions which few novelists could equal for wildness and incredibility. Norrys
himself, of course, did not take them so seriously; but they amused my son and made
good material for his letters to me. It was this legendry which definitely turned my
attention to my transatlantic heritage, and made me resolve to purchase and restore the
family seat which Norrys showed to Alfred in its picturesque desertion, and offered to
get for him at a surprisingly reasonable figure, since his own uncle was the present
owner.

I bought Exham Priory in 1918, but was almost immediately distracted from my plans
of restoration by the return of my son as a maimed invalid. During the two years that he
lived I thought of nothing but his care, having even placed my business under the
direction of partners.

In 1921, as I found myself bereaved and aimless, a retired manufacturer no longer

young, I resolved to divert my remaining years with my new possession. Visiting
Anchester in December, I was entertained by Capt. Norrys, a plump, amiable young
man who had thought much of my son, and secured his assistance in gathering plans
and anecdotes to guide in the coming restoration. Exham Priory itself I saw without
emotion, a jumble of tottering mediaeval ruins covered with lichens and honeycombed
with rooks' nests, perched perilously upon a precipice, and denuded of floors or other
interior features save the stone walls of the separate towers.

As I gradually recovered the image of the edifice as it had been when my ancestors left
it over three centuries before, I began to hire workmen for the reconstruction. In every
case I was forced to go outside the immediate locality, for the Anchester villagers had
an almost unbelievable fear and hatred of the place. The sentiment was so great that it
was sometimes communicated to the outside labourers, causing numerous desertions;
whilst its scope appeared to include both the priory and its ancient family.

My son had told me that he was somewhat avoided during his visits because he was a de
la Poer, and I now found myself subtly ostracized for a like reason until I convinced the
peasants how little I knew of my heritage. Even then they sullenly disliked me, so that I
had to collect most of the village traditions through the mediation of Norrys. What the
people could not forgive, perhaps, was that I had come to restore a symbol so abhorrent
to them; for, rationally or not, they viewed Exham Priory as nothing less than a haunt of
fiends and werewolves.

Piecing together the tales which Norrys collected for me, and supplementing them with
the accounts of several savants who had studied the ruins, I deduced that Exham Priory
stood on the site of a prehistoric temple; a Druidical or ante-Druidical thing which must
have been contemporary with Stonehenge. That indescribable rites had been celebrated
there, few doubted, and there were unpleasant tales of the transference of these rites into
the Cybele worship which the Romans had introduced.

Inscriptions still visible in the sub-cellar bore such unmistakable letters as

'DIV...OPS...MAGNA. MAT...', sign of the Magna Mater whose dark worship was once
vainly forbidden to Roman citizens. Anchester had been the camp of the third Augustan
legion, as many remains attest, and it was said that the temple of Cybele was splendid
and thronged with worshippers who performed nameless ceremonies at the bidding of a
Phrygian priest. Tales added that the fall of the old religion did not end the orgies at the
temple, but that the priests lived on in the new faith without real change. Likewise was
it said that the rites did not vanish with the Roman power, and that certain among the
Saxons added to what remained of the temple, and gave it the essential outline it
subsequently preserved, making it the centre of a cult feared through half the heptarchy.
About 1000 A.D. the place is mentioned in a chronicle as being a substantial stone
priory housing a strange and powerful monastic order and surrounded by extensive
gardens which needed no walls to exclude a frightened populace. It was never destroyed
by the Danes, though after the Norman Conquest it must have declined tremendously,
since there was no impediment when Henry the Third granted the site to my ancestor,
Gilbert de la Poer, First Baron Exham, in 1261.

Of my family before this date there is no evil report, but something strange must have
happened then. In one chronicle there is a reference to a de la Poer as "cursed of God in
1307", whilst village legendry had nothing but evil and frantic fear to tell of the castle
that went up on the foundations of the old temple and priory. The fireside tales were of
the most grisly description, all the ghastlier because of their frightened reticence and
cloudy evasiveness. They represented my ancestors as a race of hereditary daemons
beside whom Gilles de Retz and the Marquis de Sade would seem the veriest tyros, and
hinted whisperingly at their responsibility for the occasional disappearances of villagers
through several generations.

The worst characters, apparently, were the barons and their direct heirs; at least, most
was whispered about these. If of healthier inclinations, it was said, an heir would early
and mysteriously die to make way for another more typical scion. There seemed to be
an inner cult in the family, presided over by the head of the house, and sometimes
closed except to a few members. Temperament rather than ancestry was evidently the
basis of this cult, for it was entered by several who married into the family. Lady
Margaret Trevor from Cornwall, wife of Godfrey, the second son of the fifth baron,
became a favourite bane of children all over the countryside, and the daemon heroine of
a particularly horrible old ballad not yet extinct near the Welsh border. Preserved in
balladry, too, though not illustrating the same point, is the hideous tale of Lady Mary de
la Poer, who shortly after her marriage to the Earl of Shrewsfield was killed by him and
his mother, both of the slayers being absolved and blessed by the priest to whom they
confessed what they dared not repeat to the world.

These myths and ballads, typical as they were of crude superstition, repelled me greatly.
Their persistence, and their application to so long a line of my ancestors, were
especially annoying; whilst the imputations of monstrous habits proved unpleasantly
reminiscent of the one known scandal of my immediate forebears--the case of my
cousin, young Randolph Delapore of Carfax who went among the negroes and became a
voodoo priest after he returned from the Mexican War.

I was much less disturbed by the vaguer tales of wails and howlings in the barren,
windswept valley beneath the limestone cliff; of the graveyard stenches after the spring
rains; of the floundering, squealing white thing on which Sir John Clave's horse had trod
one night in a lonely field; and of the servant who had gone mad at what he saw in the
priory in the full light of day. These things were hackneyed spectral lore, and I was at
that time a pronounced sceptic. The accounts of vanished peasants were less to be
dismissed, though not especially significant in view of mediaeval custom. Prying
curiosity meant death, and more than one severed head had been publicly shown on the
bastions--now effaced--around Exham Priory.

A few of the tales were exceedingly picturesque, and made me wish I had learnt more of
the comparative mythology in my youth. There was, for instance, the belief that a legion
of bat-winged devils kept Witches' Sabbath each night at the priory--a legion whose
sustenance might explain the disproportionate abundance of coarse vegetables harvested
in the vast gardens. And, most vivid of all, there was the dramatic epic of the rats--the
scampering army of obscene vermin which had burst forth from the castle three months
after the tragedy that doomed it to desertion--the lean, filthy, ravenous army which had
swept all before it and devoured fowl, cats, dogs, hogs, sheep, and even two hapless
human beings before its fury was spent. Around that unforgettable rodent army a whole
separate cycle of myths revolves, for it scattered among the village homes and brought
curses and horrors in its train.

Such was the lore that assailed me as I pushed to completion, with an elderly obstinacy,
the work of restoring my ancestral home. It must not be imagined for a moment that
these tales formed my principal psychological environment. On the other hand, I was
constantly praised and encouraged by Capt. Norrys and the antiquarians who
surrounded and aided me. When the task was done, over two years after its
commencement, I viewed the great rooms, wainscoted walls, vaulted ceilings,
mullioned windows, and broad staircases with a pride which fully compensated for the
prodigious expense of the restoration.

Every attribute of the Middle Ages was cunningly reproduced and the new parts
blended perfectly with the original walls and foundations. The seat of my fathers was
complete, and I looked forward to redeeming at last the local fame of the line which
ended in me. I could reside here permanently, and prove that a de la Poer (for I had
adopted again the original spelling of the name) need not be a fiend. My comfort was
perhaps augmented by the fact that, although Exham Priory was mediaevally fitted, its
interior was in truth wholly new and free from old vermin and old ghosts alike.

As I have said, I moved in on 16 July 1923. My household consisted of seven servants

and nine cats, of which latter species I am particularly fond. My eldest cat, "Nigger-
Man", was seven years old and had come with me from my home in Bolton,
Massachusetts; the others I had accumulated whilst living with Capt. Norrys' family
during the restoration of the priory.

For five days our routine proceeded with the utmost placidity, my time being spent
mostly in the codification of old family data. I had now obtained some very
circumstantial accounts of the final tragedy and flight of Walter de la Poer, which I
conceived to be the probable contents of the hereditary paper lost in the fire at Carfax. It
appeared that my ancestor was accused with much reason of having killed all the other
members of his household, except four servant confederates, in their sleep, about two
weeks after a shocking discovery which changed his whole demeanour, but which,
except by implication, he disclosed to no one save perhaps the servants who assisted
him and afterwards fled beyond reach.

This deliberate slaughter, which included a father, three brothers, and two sisters, was
largely condoned by the villagers, and so slackly treated by the law that its perpetrator
escaped honoured, unharmed, and undisguised to Virginia; the general whispered
sentiment being that he had purged the land of an immemorial curse. What discovery
had prompted an act so terrible, I could scarcely even conjecture. Walter de la Poer
must have known for years the sinister tales about his family, so that this material could
have given him no fresh impulse. Had he, then, witnessed some appalling ancient rite,
or stumbled upon some frightful and revealing symbol in the priory or its vicinity? He
was reputed to have been a shy, gentle youth in England. In Virginia he seemed not so
much hard or bitter as harassed and apprehensive. He was spoken of in the diary of
another gentleman adventurer, Francis Harley of Bellview, as a man of unexampled
justice, honour, and delicacy.

On 22 July occurred the first incident which, though lightly dismissed at the time, takes
on a preternatural significance in relation to later events. It was so simple as to be
almost negligible, and could not possibly have been noticed under the circumstances;
for it must be recalled that since I was in a building practically fresh and new except for
the walls, and surrounded by a well-balanced staff of servitors, apprehension would
have been absurd despite the locality.

What I afterward remembered is merely this--that my old black cat, whose moods I
know so well, was undoubtedly alert and anxious to an extent wholly out of keeping
with his natural character. He roved from room to room, restless and disturbed, and
sniffed constantly about the walls which formed part of the Gothic structure. I realize
how trite this sounds--like the inevitable dog in the ghost story, which always growls
before his master sees the sheeted figure--yet I cannot consistently suppress it.
The following day a servant complained of restlessness among all the cats in the house.
He came to me in my study, a lofty west room on the second storey, with groined
arches, black oak panelling, and a triple Gothic window overlooking the limestone cliff
and desolate valley; and even as he spoke I saw the jetty form of Nigger-Man creeping
along the west wall and scratching at the new panels which overlaid the ancient stone.

I told the man that there must be a singular odour or emanation from the old stonework,
imperceptible to human senses, but affecting the delicate organs of cats even through
the new woodwork. This I truly believed, and when the fellow suggested the presence
of mice or rats, I mentioned that there had been no rats there for three hundred years,
and that even the field mice of the surrounding country could hardly be found in these
high walls, where they had never been known to stray. That afternoon I called on Capt.
Norrys, and he assured me that it would be quite incredible for field mice to infest the
priory in such a sudden and unprecedented fashion.

That night, dispensing as usual with a valet, I retired in the west tower chamber which I
had chosen as my own, reached from the study by a stone staircase and short gallery--
the former partly ancient, the latter entirely restored. This room was circular, very high,
and without wainscoting, being hung with arras which I had myself chosen in London.

Seeing that Nigger-Man was with me, I shut the heavy Gothic door and retired by the
light of the electric bulbs which so cleverly counterfeited candles, finally switching off
the light and sinking on the carved and canopied four-poster, with the venerable cat in
his accustomed place across my feet. I did not draw the curtains, but gazed out at the
narrow window which I faced. There was a suspicion of aurora in the sky, and the
delicate traceries of the window were pleasantly silhouetted.

At some time I must have fallen quietly asleep, for I recall a distinct sense of leaving
strange dreams, when the cat started violently from his placid position. I saw him in the
faint auroral glow, head strained forward, fore feet on my ankles, and hind feet stretched
behind. He was looking intensely at a point on the wall somewhat west of the window, a
point which to my eye had nothing to mark it, but toward which all my attention was
now directed.

And as I watched, I knew that Nigger-Man was not vainly excited. Whether the arras
actually moved I cannot say. I think it did, very slightly. But what I can swear to is that
behind it I heard a low, distinct scurrying as of rats or mice. In a moment the cat had
jumped bodily on the screening tapestry, bringing the affected section to the floor with
his weight, and exposing a damp, ancient wall of stone; patched here and there by the
restorers, and devoid of any trace of rodent prowlers.

Nigger-Man raced up and down the floor by this part of the wall, clawing the fallen
arras and seemingly trying at times to insert a paw between the wall and the oaken floor.
He found nothing, and after a time returned wearily to his place across my feet. I had
not moved, but I did not sleep again that night.

In the morning I questioned all the servants, and found that none of them had noticed
anything unusual, save that the cook remembered the actions of a cat which had rested
on her windowsill. This cat had howled at some unknown hour of the night, awaking the
cook in time for her to see him dart purposefully out of the open door down the stairs. I
drowsed away the noontime, and in the afternoon called again on Capt. Norrys, who
became exceedingly interested in what I told him. The odd incidents--so slight yet so
curious--appealed to his sense of the picturesque and elicited from him a number of
reminiscenses of local ghostly lore. We were genuinely perplexed at the presence of
rats, and Norrys lent me some traps and Paris green, which I had the servants place in
strategic localities when I returned.

I retired early, being very sleepy, but was harassed by dreams of the most horrible sort. I
seemed to be looking down from an immense height upon a twilit grotto, knee-deep
with filth, where a white-bearded daemon swineherd drove about with his staff a flock
of fungous, flabby beasts whose appearance filled me with unutterable loathing. Then,
as the swineherd paused and nodded over his task, a mighty swarm of rats rained down
on the stinking abyss and fell to devouring beasts and man alike.

From this terrific vision I was abruptly awakened by the motions of Nigger-Man, who
had been sleeping as usual across my feet. This time I did not have to question the
source of his snarls and hisses, and of the fear which made him sink his claws into my
ankle, unconscious of their effect; for on every side of the chamber the walls were alive
with nauseous sound--the veminous slithering of ravenous, gigantic rats. There was now
no aurora to show the state of the arras--the fallen section of which had been replaced--
but I was not too frightened to switch on the light.

As the bulbs leapt into radiance I saw a hideous shaking all over the tapestry, causing
the somewhat peculiar designs to execute a singular dance of death. This motion
disappeared almost at once, and the sound with it. Springing out of bed, I poked at the
arras with the long handle of a warming-pan that rested near, and lifted one section to
see what lay beneath. There was nothing but the patched stone wall, and even the cat
had lost his tense realization of abnormal presences. When I examined the circular trap
that had been placed in the room, I found all of the openings sprung, though no trace
remained of what had been caught and had escaped.

Further sleep was out of the question, so lighting a candle, I opened the door and went
out in the gallery towards the stairs to my study, Nigger-Man following at my heels.
Before we had reached the stone steps, however, the cat darted ahead of me and
vanished down the ancient flight. As I descended the stairs myself, I became suddenly
aware of sounds in the great room below; sounds of a nature which could not be
mistaken.

The oak-panelled walls were alive with rats, scampering and milling whilst Nigger-Man
was racing about with the fury of a baffled hunter. Reaching the bottom, I switched on
the light, which did not this time cause the noise to subside. The rats continued their
riot, stampeding with such force and distinctness that I could finally assign to their
motions a definite direction. These creatures, in numbers apparently inexhaustible, were
engaged in one stupendous migration from inconceivable heights to some depth
conceivably or inconceivably below.

I now heard steps in the corridor, and in another moment two servants pushed open the
massive door. They were searching the house for some unknown source of disturbance
which had thrown all the cats into a snarling panic and caused them to plunge
precipitately down several flights of stairs and squat, yowling, before the closed door to
the sub-cellar. I asked them if they had heard the rats, but they replied in the negative.
And when I turned to call their attention to the sounds in the panels, I realized that the
noise had ceased.

With the two men, I went down to the door of the sub-cellar, but found the cats already
dispersed. Later I resolved to explore the crypt below, but for the present I merely made
a round of the traps. All were sprung, yet all were tenantless. Satisfying myself that no
one had heard the rats save the felines and me, I sat in my study till morning, thinking
profoundly and recalling every scrap of legend I had unearthed concerning the building
I inhabited. I slept some in the forenoon, leaning back in the one comfortable library
chair which my mediaeval plan of furnishing could not banish. Later I telephoned to
Capt. Norrys, who came over and helped me explore the sub-cellar.

Absolutely nothing untoward was found, although we could not repress a thrill at the
knowledge that this vault was built by Roman hands. Every low arch and massive pillar
was Roman--not the debased Romanesque of the bungling Saxons, but the severe and
harmonious classicism of the age of the Caesars; indeed, the walls abounded with
inscriptions familiar to the antiquarians who had repeatedly explored the place--things
like "P. GETAE. PROP...TEMP...DONA..."and "L. PRAEG...VS...PONTIFI...ATYS..."

The reference to Atys made me shiver, for I had read Catullus and knew something of
the hideous rites of the Eastern god, whose worship was so mixed with that of Cybele.
Norrys and I, by the light of lanterns, tried to interpret the odd and nearly effaced
designs on certain irregularly rectangular blocks of stone generally held to be altars, but
could make nothing of them. We remembered that one pattern, a sort of rayed sun, was
held by students to imply a non-Roman origin suggesting that these altars had merely
been adopted by the Roman priests from some older and perhaps aboriginal temple on
the same site. On one of these blocks were some brown stains which made me wonder.
The largest, in the centre of the room, had certain features on the upper surface which
indicated its connection with fire--probably burnt offerings.

Such were the sights in that crypt before whose door the cats howled, and where Norrys
and I now determined to pass the night. Couches were brought down by the servants,
who were told not to mind any nocturnal actions of the cats, and Nigger-Man was
admitted as much for help as for companionship. We decided to keep the great oak
door--a modern replica with slits for ventilation--tightly closed; and, with this attended
to, we retired with lanterns still burning to await whatever might occur.

The vault was very deep in the foundations of the priory, and undoubtedly far down on
the face of the beetling limestone cliff overlooking the waste valley. That it had been the
goal of the scuffling and unexplainable rats I could not doubt, though why, I could not
tell. As we lay there expectantly, I found my vigil occasionally mixed with half-formed
dreams from which the uneasy motions of the cat across my feet would rouse me.

These dreams were not wholesome, but horribly like the one I had had the night before.
I saw again the twilit grotto, and the swineherd with his unmentionable fungous beasts
wallowing in filth, and as I looked at these things they seemed nearer and more distinct-
-so distinct that I could almost observe their features. Then I did observe the flabby
features of one of them--and awakened with such a scream that Nigger-Man started up,
whilst Capt. Norrys, who had not slept, laughed considerably. Norrys might have
laughed more--or perhaps less--had he known what it was that made me scream. But I
did not remember myself till later. Ultimate horror often paralyses memory in a merciful
way.

Norrys waked me when the phenomena began. Out of the same frightful dream I was
called by his gentle shaking and his urging to listen to the cats. Indeed, there was much
to listen to, for beyond the closed door at the head of the stone steps was a veritable
nightmare of feline yelling and clawing, whilst Nigger-Man, unmindful of his kindred
outside, was running excitedly round the bare stone walls, in which I heard the same
babel of scurrying rats that had troubled me the night before.

An acute terror now rose within me, for here were anomalies which nothing normal
could well explain. These rats, if not the creatures of a madness which I shared with the
cats alone, must be burrowing and sliding in Roman walls I had thought to be solid
limestone blocks...unless perhaps the action of water through more than seventeen
centuries had eaten winding tunnels which rodent bodies had worn clear and
ample...But even so, the spectral horror was no less; for if these were living vermin why
did not Norrys hear their disgusting commotion? Why did he urge me to watch Nigger-
Man and listen to the cats outside, and why did he guess wildly and vaguely at what
could have aroused them?

By the time I had managed to tell him, as rationally as I could, what I thought I was
hearing, my ears gave me the last fading impression of scurrying; which had retreated
still downward, far underneath this deepest of sub-cellars till it seemed as if the whole
cliff below were riddled with questing rats. Norrys was not as sceptical as I had
anticipated, but instead seemed profoundly moved. He motioned to me to notice that the
cats at the door had ceased their clamour, as if giving up the rats for lost; whilst Nigger-
Man had a burst of renewed restlessness, and was clawing frantically around the bottom
of the large stone altar in the centre of the room, which was nearer Norrys' couch than
mine.

My fear of the unknown was at this point very great. Something astounding had
occurred, and I saw that Capt. Norrys, a younger, stouter, and presumably more
naturally materialistic man, was affected fully as much as myself--perhaps because of
his lifelong and intimate familiarity with local legend. We could for the moment do
nothing but watch the old black cat as he pawed with decreasing fervour at the base of
the altar, occasionally looking up and mewing to me in that persuasive manner which he
used when he wished me to perform some favour for him.

Norrys now took a lantern close to the altar and examined the place where Nigger-Man
was pawing; silently kneeling and scraping away the lichens of the centuries which
joined the massive pre-Roman block to the tessellated floor. He did not find anything,
and was about to abandon his efforts when I noticed a trivial circumstance which made
me shudder, even though it implied nothing more than I had already imagined.

I told him of it, and we both looked at its almost imperceptible manifestation with the
fixedness of fascinated discovery and acknowledgment. It was only this--that the flame
of the lantern set down near the altar was slightly but certainly flickering from a draught
of air which it had not before received, and which came indubitably from the crevice
between floor and altar where Norrys was scraping away the lichens.
We spent the rest of the night in the brilliantly-lighted study, nervously discussing what
we should do next. The discovery that some vault deeper than the deepest known
masonry of the Romans underlay this accursed pile, some vault unsuspected by the
curious antiquarians of three centuries, would have been sufficient to excite us without
any background of the sinister. As it was, the fascination became two--fold; and we
paused in doubt whether to abandon our search and quit the priory forever in
superstitious caution, or to gratify our sense of adventure and brave whatever horrors
might await us in the unknown depths.

By morning we had compromised, and decided to go to London to gather a group of

archaeologists and scientific men fit to cope with the mystery. It should be mentioned
that before leaving the sub-cellar we had vainly tried to move the central altar which we
now recognized as the gate to a new pit of nameless fear. What secret would open the
gate, wiser men than we would have to find.

During many days in London Capt. Norrys and I presented our facts, conjectures, and
legendary anecdotes to five eminent authorities, all men who could be trusted to respect
any family disclosures which future explorations might develop. We found most of
them little disposed to scoff but, instead, intensely interested and sincerely sympathetic.
It is hardly necessary to name them all, but I may say that they included Sir William
Brinton, whose excavations in the Troad excited most of the world in their day. As we
all took the train for Anchester I felt myself poised on the brink of frightful revelations,
a sensation symbolized by the air of mourning among the many Americans at the
unexpected death of the President on the other side of the world.

On the evening of 7 August we reached Exham Priory, where the servants assured me
that nothing unusual had occurred. The cats, even old Nigger-Man, had been perfectly
placid, and not a trap in the house had been sprung. We were to begin exploring on the
following day, awaiting which I assigned well-appointed rooms to all my guests.

I myself retired in my own tower chamber, with Nigger-Man across my feet. Sleep
came quickly, but hideous dreams assailed me. There was a vision of a Roman feast like
that of Trimalchio, with a horror in a covered platter. Then came that damnable,
recurrent thing about the swineherd and his filthy drove in the twilit grotto. Yet when I
awoke it was full daylight, with normal sounds in the house below. The rats, living or
spectral, had not troubled me; and Nigger-Man was still quietly asleep. On going down,
I found that the same tranquillity had prevailed elsewhere; a condition which one of the
assembled servants--a fellow named Thornton, devoted to the psychic--rather absurdly
laid to the fact that I had now been shown the thing which certain forces had wished to
show me.

All was now ready, and at 11 A.M. our entire group of seven men, bearing powerful
electric searchlights and implements of excavation, went down to the sub-cellar and
bolted the door behind us. Nigger-Man was with us, for the investigators found no
occasion to despise his excitability, and were indeed anxious that he be present in case
of obscure rodent manifestations. We noted the Roman inscriptions and unknown altar
designs only briefly, for three of the savants had already seen them, and all knew their
characteristics. Prime attention was paid to the momentous central altar, and within an
hour Sir William Brinton had caused it to tilt backward, balanced by some unknown
species of counterweight.
There now lay revealed such a horror as would have overwhelmed us had we not been
prepared. Through a nearly square opening in the tiled floor, sprawling on a flight of
stone steps so prodigiously worn that it was little more than an inclined plane at the
centre, was a ghastly array of human or semi-human bones. Those which retained their
collocation as skeletons showed attitudes of panic fear, and over all were the marks of
rodent gnawing. The skulls denoted nothing short of utter idiocy, cretinism, or primitive
semi-apedom.

Above the hellishly littered steps arched a descending passage seemingly chiselled from
the solid rock, and conducting a current of air. This current was not a sudden and
noxious rush as from a closed vault, but a cool breeze with something of freshness in it.
We did not pause long, but shiveringly began to clear a passage down the steps. It was
then that Sir William, examining the hewn walls, made the odd observation that the
passage, according to the direction of the strokes, must have been chiselled from
beneath.

I must be very deliberate now, and choose my words. After ploughing down a few steps
amidst the gnawled bones we saw that there was light ahead; not any mystic
phosphorescence, but a filtered daylight which could not come except from unknown
fissures in the cliff that over--looked the waste valley. That such fissures had escaped
notice from outside was hardly remarkable, for not only is the valley wholly
uninhabited, but the cliff is so high and beetling that only an aeronaut could study its
face in detail. A few steps more, and our breaths were literally snatched from us by what
we saw; so literally that Thornton, the psychic investigator, actually fainted in the arms
of the dazed men who stood behind him. Norrys, his plump face utterly white and
flabby, simply cried out inarticulately; whilst I think that what I did was to gasp or hiss,
and cover my eyes.

The man behind me--the only one of the party older than I--croaked the hackneyed "My
God!" in the most cracked voice I ever heard. Of seven cultivated men, only Sir William
Brinton retained his composure, a thing the more to his credit because he led the party
and must have seen the sight first.

It was a twilit grotto of enormous height, stretching away farther than any eye could
see; a subterraneous world of limitless mystery and horrible suggestion. There were
buildings and other architectural remains--in one terrified glance I saw a weird pattern
of tumuli, a savage circle of monoliths, a low-domed Roman ruin, a sprawling Saxon
pile, and an early English edifice of wood--but all these were dwarfed by the ghoulish
spectacle presented by the general surface of the ground. For yards about the steps
extended an insane tangle of human bones, or bones at least as human as those on the
steps. Like a foamy sea they stretched, some fallen apart, but others wholly or partly
articulated as skeletons; these latter invariably in postures of daemoniac frenzy, either
fighting off some menace or clutching other forms with cannibal intent.

When Dr Trask, the anthropologist, stopped to classify the skulls, he found a degraded
mixture which utterly baffled him. They were mostly lower than the Piltdown man in
the scale of evolution, but in every case definitely human. Many were of higher grade,
and a very few were the skulls of supremely and sensitively developed types. All the
bones were gnawed, mostly by rats, but somewhat by others of the half-human drove.
Mixed with them were many tiny hones of rats--fallen members of the lethal army
which closed the ancient epic.

I wonder that any man among us lived and kept his sanity through that hideous day of
discovery. Not Hoffman nor Huysmans could conceive a scene more wildly incredible,
more frenetically repellent, or more Gothically grotesque than the twilit grotto through
which we seven staggered; each stumbling on revelation after revelation, and trying to
keep for the nonce from thinking of the events which must have taken place there three
hundred, or a thousand, or two thousand or ten thousand years ago. It was the
antechamber of hell, and poor Thornton fainted again when Trask told him that some of
the skeleton things must have descended as quadrupeds through the last twenty or more
generations.

Horror piled on horror as we began to interpret the architectural remains. The quadruped
things--with their occasional recruits from the biped class--had been kept in stone pens,
out of which they must have broken in their last delirium of hunger or rat-fear. There
had been great herds of them, evidently fattened on the coarse vegetables whose
remains could be found as a sort of poisonous ensilage at the bottom of the huge stone
bins older than Rome. I knew now why my ancestors had had such excessive gardens--
would to heaven I could forget! The purpose of the herds I did not have to ask.

Sir William, standing with his searchlight in the Roman ruin, translated aloud the most
shocking ritual I have ever known; and told of the diet of the antediluvian cult which the
priests of Cybele found and mingled with their own. Norrys, used as he was to the
trenches, could not walk straight when he came out of the English building. It was a
butcher shop and kitchen--he had expected that--but it was too much to see familiar
English implements in such a place, and to read familiar English graffiti there, some as
recent as 1610. I could not go in that building--that building whose daemon activities
were stopped only by the dagger of my ancestor Walter de la Poer.

What I did venture to enter was the low Saxon building whose oaken door had fallen,
and there I found a terrible row of ten stone cells with rusty bars. Three had tenants, all
skeletons of high grade, and on the bony forefinger of one I found a seal ring with my
own coat-of--arms. Sir William found a vault with far older cells below the Roman
chapel, but these cells were empty. Below them was a low crypt with cases of formally
arranged bones, some of them bearing terrible parallel inscriptions carved in Latin,
Greek, and the tongue of Phyrgia.

Meanwhile, Dr Trask had opened one of the prehistoric tumuli, and brought to light
skulls which were slightly more human than a gorilla's, and which bore indescribably
ideographic carvings. Through all this horror my cat stalked unperturbed. Once I saw
him monstrously perched atop a mountain of bones, and wondered at the secrets that
might lie behind his yellow eyes.

Having grasped to some slight degree the frightful revelations of this twilit area--an area
so hideously foreshadowed by my recurrent dream--we turned to that apparently
boundless depth of midnight cavern where no ray of light from the cliff could penetrate.
We shall never know what sightless Stygian worlds yawn beyond the little distance we
went, for it was decided that such secrets are not good for mankind. But there was
plenty to engross us close at hand, for we had not gone far before the searchlights
showed that accursed infinity of pits in which the rats had feasted, and whose sudden
lack of replenishment had driven the ravenous rodent army first to turn on the living
herds of starving things, and then to burst forth from the priory in that historic orgy of
devastation which the peasants will never forget.

God! those carrion black pits of sawed, picked bones and opened skulls! Those
nightmare chasms choked with the pithecanthropoid, Celtic, Roman, and English bones
of countless unhallowed centuries! Some of them were full, and none can say how deep
they had once been. Others were still bottomless to our searchlights, and peopled by
unnamable fancies. What, I thought, of the hapless rats that stumbled into such traps
amidst the blackness of their quests in this grisly Tartarus?

Once my foot slipped near a horribly yawning brink, and I had a moment of ecstatic
fear. I must have been musing a long time, for I could not see any of the party but
plump Capt. Norrys. Then there came a sound from that inky, boundless, farther
distance that I thought I knew; and I saw my old black cat dart past me like a winged
Egyptian god, straight into the illimitable gulf of the unknown. But I was not far behind,
for there was no doubt after another second. It was the eldritch scurrying of those fiend-
born rats, always questing for new horrors, and determined to lead me on even unto
those grinning caverns of earth's centre where Nyarlathotep, the mad faceless god,
howls blindly in the darkness to the piping of two amorphous idiot flute--players.

My searchlight expired, but still I ran. I heard voices, and yowls, and echoes, but above
all there gently rose that impious, insidious scurrying; gently rising, rising, as a stiff
bloated corpse gently rises above an oily river that flows under the endless onyx bridges
to a black, putrid sea.

Something bumped into me--something soft and plump. It must have been the rats; the
viscous, gelatinous, ravenous army that feast on the dead and the living...Why shouldn't
rats eat a de la Poer as a de la Poer eats forbidden things?...The war ate my boy, damn
them all...and the Yanks ate Carfax with flames and burnt Grandsire Delapore and the
secret...No, no, I tell you, I am not that daemon swineherd in the twilit grotto! It was not
Edward Norrys' fat face on that flabby fungous thing! Who says I am a de la Poer? He
lived, but my boy died!...Shall a Norrys hold the land of a de la Poer?...It's voodoo, I tell
you...that spotted snake...Curse you, Thornton, I'll teach you to faint at what my family
do!...'Sblood, thou stinkard, I'll learn ye how to gust...wolde ye swynke me thilke
wys?...Magna Mater! Magna Mater!...Atys...Dia ad aghaidh's ad aodaun...agus bas
dunarch ort! Dhonas 's dholas ort, agus leat-sa!...Ungl unl... rrlh...chchch...

This is what they say I said when they found me in the blackness after three hours;
found me crouching in the blackness over the plump, half--eaten body of Capt. Norrys,
with my own cat leaping and tearing at my throat. Now they have blown up Exham
Priory, taken my Nigger-Man away from me, and shut me into this barred room at
Hanwell with fearful whispers about my heredity and experience. Thornton is in the
next room, but they prevent me from talking to him. They are trying, too, to suppress
most of the facts concerning the priory. When I speak of poor Norrys they accuse me of
this hideous thing, but they must know that I did not do it. They must know it was the
rats; the slithering scurrying rats whose scampering will never let me sleep; the daemon
rats that race behind the padding in this room and beckon me down to greater horrors
than I have ever known; the rats they can never hear; the rats, the rats in the walls.
 THE SHUNNED HOUSE
CONTENTS

I
II
III
IV
V

From even the greatest of horrors irony is seldom absent. Sometimes it enters directly
into the composition of the events, while sometimes it relates only to their fortuitous
position among persons and places. The latter sort is splendidly exemplified by a case in
the ancient city of Providence, where in the late forties Edgar Allan Poe used to sojourn
often during his unsuccessful wooing of the gifted poetess, Mrs. Whitman. Poe
generally stopped at the Mansion House in Benefit Street--the renamed Golden Ball Inn
whose roof has sheltered Washington, Jefferson, and Lafayette--and his favourite walk
led northward along the same street to Mrs. Whitman's home and the neighbouring
hillside churchyard of St. John's whose hidden expanse of eighteenth-century
gravestones had for him a peculiar fascination.

Now the irony is this. In this walk, so many times repeated, the world's greatest master
of the terrible and the bizarre was obliged to pass a particular house on the eastern side
of the street; a dingy, antiquated structure perched on the abruptly rising side hill, with a
great unkept yard dating from a time when the region was partly open country. It does
not appear that he ever wrote or spoke of it, nor is there any evidence that he even
noticed it. And yet that house, to the two persons in possession of certain information,
equals or outranks in horror the wildest phantasy of the genius who so often passed it
unknowingly, and stands starkly leering as a symbol of all that is unutterably hideous.

The house was--and for that matter still is--of a kind to attract the attention of the
curious. Originally a farm or semi-farm building, it followed the average New England
colonial lines of the middle eighteenth century--the prosperous peaked-roof sort, with
two stories and dormerless attic, and with the Georgian doorway and interior paneling
dictated by the progress of taste at that time. It faced south, with one gable end buried to
the lower windows in the eastward rising hill, and the other exposed to the foundations
toward the street. Its construction, over a century and a half ago, had followed the
grading and straightening of the road in that especial vicinity; for Benefit Street--at first
called Back Street--was laid out as a lane winding amongst the graveyards of the first
settlers, and straightened only when the removal of the bodies to the North Burial
Ground made it decently possible to cut through the old family plots.

At the start, the western wall had lain some twenty feet up a precipitous lawn from the
roadway; but a widening of the street at about the time of the Revolution sheared off
most of the intervening space, exposing the foundations so that a brick basement wall
had to be made, giving the deep cellar a street frontage with the door and two windows
above ground, close to the new line of public travel. When the sidewalk was laid out a
century ago the last of the intervening space was removed; and Poe in his walks must
have seen only a sheer ascent of dull grey brick flush with the sidewalk and surmounted
at a height of ten feet by the antique shingled bulk of the house proper.

The farm-like grounds extended back very deeply up the hill, al most to Wheaton Street.
The space south of the house, abutting on Benefit Street, was of course greatly above
the existing sidewalk level, forming a terrace bounded by a high bank wall of damp,
mossy stone pierced by a steep flight of narrow steps which led inward between
canyon-like surfaces to the upper region of mangy lawn, rheumy brick walls, and
neglected gardens whose dismantled cement urns, rusted kettles fallen from tripods of
knotty sticks, and similar paraphernalia set off the weather-beaten front door with its
broken fanlight, rotting Ionic pilasters, and wormy triangular pediment.

What I heard in my youth about the shunned house was merely that people died there in
alarmingly great numbers. That, I was told, was why the original owners had moved out
some twenty years after building the place. It was plainly unhealthy, perhaps because of
the dampness and fungous growth in the cellar, the general sickish smell, the draughts
of the hallways, or the quality of the well and pump water. These things were bad
enough, and these were all that gained belief among the person whom I knew. Only the
notebooks of my antiquarian uncle, Dr. Elihu Whipple, revealed to me at length the
darker, vaguer surmises which formed an undercurrent of folk-lore among old-time
servants and humble folk, surmises which never travelled far, and which were largely
forgotten when Providence grew to be a metropolis with a shifting modern population.

The general fact is, that the house was never regarded by the solid part of the
community as in any real sense "haunted."There were no widespread tales of rattling
chains, cold currents of air, extinguished lights, or faces at the window. Extremists
sometimes said the house was "unlucky," but that is as far as even they went. What was
really beyond dispute is that a frightful proportion of persons died there; or more
accurately, had died there, since after some peculiar happenings over sixty years ago the
building had become deserted through the sheer impossibility of renting it. These
persons were not all cut off suddenly by any one cause; rather did it seem that their
vitality was insidiously sapped, so that each one died the sooner from whatever
tendency to weakness he may have naturally had. And those who did not die displayed
in varying degree a type of anaemia or consumption, and sometimes a decline of the
mental faculties, which spoke ill for the salubriousness of the building. Neighbouring
houses, it must be added, seemed entirely free from the noxious quality.

This much I knew before my insistent questioning led my uncle to show me the notes
which finally embarked us both on our hideous investigation. In my childhood the
shunned house was vacant, with barren, gnarled and terrible old trees, long, queerly pale
grass and nightmarishly misshapen weeds in the high terraced yard where birds never
lingered. We boys used to overrun the place, and I can still recall my youthful terror not
only at the morbid strangeness of this sinister vegetation, but at the eldritch atmosphere
and odour of the dilapidated house, whose unlocked front door was often entered in
quest of shudders. The small-paned windows were largely broken, and a nameless air of
desolation hung round the precarious panelling, shaky interior shutters, peeling
wallpaper, falling plaster, rickety staircases, and such fragments of battered furniture as
still remained. The dust and cobwebs added their touch of the fearful; and brave indeed
was the boy who would voluntarily ascend the ladder to the attic, a vast raftered length
lighted only by small blinking windows in the gable ends, and filled with a massed
wreckage of chests, chairs, and spinning-wheels which infinite years of deposit had
shrouded and festooned into monstrous and hellish shapes.

But after all, the attic was not the most terrible part of the house. It was the dank, humid
cellar which somehow exerted the strongest repulsion on us, even though it was wholly
above ground on the street side, with only a thin door and window-pierced brick wall to
separate it from the busy sidewalk. We scarcely knew whether to haunt it in spectral
fascination, or to shun it for the sake of our souls and our sanity. For one thing, the bad
odour of the house was strongest there; and for another thing, we did not like the white
fungous growths which occasionally sprang up in rainy summer weather from the hard
earth floor. Those fungi, grotesquely like the vegetation in the yard outside, were truly
horrible in their outlines; detestable parodies of toadstools and Indian pipes, whose like
we had never seen in any other situation. They rotted quickly, and at one stage became
slightly phosphorescent; so that nocturnal passers-by sometimes spoke of witch--fires
glowing behind the broken panes of the foetor-spreading windows.

We never--even in our wildest Hallowe'en moods--visited this cellar by night, but in

some of our daytime visits could detect the phosphorescence, especially when the day
was dark and wet. There was also a subtler thing we often thought we detected--a very
strange thing which was, however, merely suggestive at most. I refer to a sort of cloudy
whitish pattern on the dirt floor--a vague, shifting deposit of mould or nitre which we
sometimes thought we could trace amidst the sparse fungous growths near the huge
fireplace of the basement kitchen. Once in a while it struck us that this patch bore an
uncanny resemblance to a doubled-up human figure, though generally no such kinship
existed, and often there was no whitish deposit whatever. On a certain rainy afternoon
when this illusion seemed phenomenally strong, and when, in addition, I had fancied I
glimpsed a kind of thin, yellowish, shimmering exhalation rising from the nitrous
pattern toward the yawning fireplace, I spoke to my uncle about the matter. He smiled at
this odd conceit, but it seemed that his smile was tinged with reminiscence. Later I
heard that a similar notion entered into some of the wild ancient tales of the common
folk--a notion likewise alluding to ghoulish, wolfish shapes taken by smoke from the
great chimney, and queer contours assumed by certain of the sinuous tree--roots that
thrust their way into the cellar through the loose foundation-stones.

II

Not till my adult years did my uncle set before me the notes and data which he had
collected concerning the shunned house. Dr. Whipple was a sane, conservative
physician of the old school, and for all his interest in the place was not eager to
encourage young thoughts toward the abnormal. His own view, postulating simply a
building and location of markedly unsanitary qualities, had nothing to do with
abnormality; but he realized that the very picturesqueness which aroused his own
interest would in a boy's fanciful mind take on all manner of gruesome imaginative
associations.

The doctor was a bachelor; a white-haired, clean-shaven, old-fashioned gentleman, and

a local historian of note, who had often broken a lance with such controversial
guardians of tradition as Sidney S. Rider and Thomas W. Bicknell. He lived with one
manservant in a Georgian homestead with knocker and iron-railed steps, balanced eerily
on the steep ascent of North Court Street beside the ancient brick court and colony
house where his grandfather--a cousin of that celebrated privateersman, Capt. Whipple,
who burnt His Majesty's armed schooner Gaspee in 1772--had voted in the legislature
on May 4, 1776, for the independence of the Rhode Island Colony. Around him in the
damp, low-ceiled library with the musty white paneling, heavy carved overmantel and
small-paned, vine-shaded windows, were the relics and records of his ancient family,
among which were many dubious allusions to the shunned house in Benefit Street. That
pest spot lies not far distant--for Benefit runs ledgewise just above the court house along
the precipitous hill up which the first settlement climbed.

When, in the end, my insistent pestering and maturing years evoked from my uncle the
hoarded lore I sought, there lay before me a strange enough chronicle. Long-winded,
statistical, and drearily genealogical as some of the matter was, there ran through it a
continuous thread of brooding, tenacious horror and preternatural malevolence which
impressed me even more than it had impressed the good doctor. Separate events fitted
together uncannily, and seemingly irrelevant details held mines of hideous possibilities.
A new and burning curiosity grew in me, compared to which my boyish curiosity was
feeble and inchoate. The first revelation led to an exhaustive research, and finally to that
shuddering quest which proved so disastrous to myself and mine. For at last my uncle
insisted on joining the search I had commenced, and after a certain night in that house
he did not come away with me. I am lonely without that gentle soul whose long years
were filled only with honour, virtue, good taste, benevolence, and learning. I have
reared a marble urn to his memory in St. John's churchyard--the place that Poe loved--
the hidden grove of giant willows on the hill, where tombs and headstones huddle
quietly between the hoary bulk of the church and the houses and bank walls of Benefit
Street.

The history of the house, opening amidst a maze of dates, revealed no trace of the
sinister either about its construction or about the prosperous and honourable family who
built it. Yet from the first a taint of calamity, soon increased to boding significance, was
apparent. My uncle's carefully compiled record began with the building of the structure
in 1763, and followed the theme with an unusual amount of detail. The shunned house,
it seems, was first inhabited by William Harris and his wife Rhoby Dexter, with their
children, Elkanah, born in 1755, Abigail, born in 1757, William, Jr., born in 1759, and
Ruth, born in 1761. Harris was a substantial merchant and seaman in the West India
trade, connected with the firm of Obadiah Brown and his nephews. After Brown's death
in 1761, the new firm of Nicholas Brown & Co. made him master of the brig
Prudence, Providence-built, of 120 tons, thus enabling him to erect the new homestead
he had desired ever since his marriage.

The site he had chosen--a recently straightened part of the new and fashionable Back
Street, which ran along the side of the hill above crowded Cheapside--was all that could
be wished, and the building did justice to the location. It was the best that moderate
means could afford, and Harris hastened to move in before the birth of a fifth child
which the family expected. That child, a boy, came in December; but was still-born. Nor
was any child to be born alive in that house for a century and a half.

The next April sickness occurred among the children, and Abigail and Ruth died before
the month was over. Dr. Job Ives diagnosed the trouble as some infantile fever, though
others declared it was more of a mere wasting-away or decline. It seemed, in any event,
to be contagious; for Hannah Bowen, one of the two servants, died of it in the following
June. Eli Liddeason, the other servant, constantly complained of weakness; and would
have returned to his father's farm in Rehoboth but for a sudden attachment for
Mehitabel Pierce, who was hired to succeed Hannah. He died the next year--a sad year
indeed, since it marked the death of William Harris himself, enfeebled as he was by the
climate of Martinique, where his occupation had kept him for considerable periods
during the preceding decade.

The widowed Rhoby Harris never recovered from the shock of her husband's death, and
the passing of her firstborn Elkanah two years later was the final blow to her reason. In
1768 she fell victim to a mild form of insanity, and was thereafter confined to the upper
part of the house, her elder maiden sister, Mercy Dexter, having moved in to take charge
of the family. Mercy was a plain, raw-boned woman of great strength, but her health
visibly declined from the time of her advent. She was greatly devoted to her unfortunate
sister, and had an especial affection for her only surviving nephew William, who from a
sturdy infant had become a sickly, spindling lad. In this year the servant Mehitabel died,
and the other servant, Preserved Smith, left without coherent explanation--or at least,
with only some wild tales and a complaint that he disliked the smell of the place. For a
time Mercy could secure no more help, since the seven deaths and case of madness, all
occurring within five years' space, had begun to set in motion the body of fireside
rumour which later became so bizarre. Ultimately, however, she obtained new servants
from out of town; Ann White, a morose woman from that part of North Kingstown now
set off as the township of Exeter, and a capable Boston man named Zenas Low.

It was Ann White who first gave definite shape to the sinister idle talk. Mercy should
have known better than to hire anyone from the Nooseneck Hill country, for that remote
bit of backwoods was then, as now, a seat of the most uncomfortable superstitions. As
lately as 1892 an Exeter community exhumed a dead body and ceremoniously burnt its
heart in order to prevent certain alleged visitations injurious to the public health and
peace, and one may imagine the point of view of the same section in 1768. Ann's tongue
was perniciously active, and within a few months Mercy discharged her, filling her
place with a faithful and amiable Amazon from Newport, Maria Robbins.

Meanwhile poor Rhoby Harris, in her madness, gave voice to dreams and imaginings of
the most hideous sort. At times her screams became insupportable, and for long periods
she would utter shrieking horrors which necessitated her son's temporary residence with
his cousin, Peleg Harris, in Presbyterian Lane near the new college building. The boy
would seem to improve after these visits, and had Mercy been as wise as she was well-
meaning, she would have let him live permanently with Peleg. Just what Mrs. Harris
cried out in her fits of violence, tradition hesitates to say; or rather, presents such
extravagant accounts that they nullify themselves through sheer absurdity. Certainly it
sounds absurd to hear that a woman educated only in the rudiments of French often
shouted for hours in a coarse and idiomatic form of that language, or that the same
person, alone and guarded, complained wildly of a staring thing which bit and chewed
at her. In 1772 the servant Zenas died, and when Mrs. Harris heard of it she laughed
with a shocking delight utterly foreign to her. The next year she herself died, and was
laid to rest in the North Burial Ground beside her husband.

Upon the outbreak of trouble with Great Britain in 1775, William Harris, despite his
scant sixteen years and feeble constitution, managed to enlist in the Army of
Observation under General Greene; and from that time on enjoyed a steady rise in
health and prestige.

In 1780, as a Captain in Rhode Island forces in New Jersey under Colonel Angell, he
met and married Phebe Hetfield of Elizabethtown, whom he brought to Providence
upon his honourable discharge in the following year.

The young soldier's return was not a thing of unmitigated happiness. The house, it is
true, was still in good condition; and the street had been widened and changed in name
from Back Street to Benefit Street. But Mercy Dexter's once robust frame had
undergone a sag and curious decay, so that she was now a stooped and pathetic figure
with hollow voice and disconcerting pallor--qualities shared to a singular degree by the
one remaining servant Maria. In the autumn of 1782 Phebe Harris gave birth to a still-
born daughter, and on the fifteenth of the next May Mercy Dexter took leave of a useful,
austere, and virtuous life.

William Harris, at last thoroughly convinced of the radically unhealthful nature of his
abode, now took steps toward quitting it and closing it forever. Securing temporary
quarters for himself and wife at the newly opened Golden Ball Inn, he arranged for the
building of a new and finer house in Westminster Street, in the growing part of the town
across the Great Bridge. There, in 1785, his son Dutee was born; and there the family
dwelt till the encroachments of commerce drove them back across the river and over the
hill to Angell Street, in the newer East Side residence district, where the late Archer
Harris built his sumptuous but hideous French-roofed mansion in 1876. William and
Phebe both succumbed to the yellow fever epidemic in 1797, but Dutee was brought up
by his cousin Rathbone Harris, Peleg's son.

Rathbone was a practical man, and rented the Benefit Street house despite William's
wish to keep it vacant. He considered it an obligation to his ward to make the most of all
the boy's property, nor did he concern himself with the deaths and illnesses which
caused so many changes of tenants, or the steadily growing aversion with which the
house was generally regarded. It is likely that he felt only vexation when, in 1804, the
town council ordered him to fumigate the place with sulphur, tar and gum camphor on
account of the much-discussed deaths of four persons, presumably caused by the then
diminishing fever epidemic. They said the place had a febrile smell.

Dutee himself thought little of the house, for he grew up to be a privateersman, and
served with distinction on the Vigilant under Capt. Cahoone in the War of 1812. He
returned unharmed, married in 1814, and became a father on that memorable night of
September 23, 1815, when a great gale drove the waters of the bay over half the town,
and floated a tall sloop well up Westminster Street so that its masts almost tapped the
Harris windows in symbolic affirmation that the new boy, Welcome, was a seaman's
son.

Welcome did not survive his father, but lived to perish gloriously at Fredericksburg in
1862. Neither he nor his son Archer knew of the shunned house as other than a nuisance
almost impossible to rent--perhaps on account of the mustiness and sickly odour of
unkempt old age. Indeed, it never was rented after a series of deaths culminating in
1861, which the excitement of the war tended to throw into obscurity. Carrington
Harris, last of the male line, knew it only as a deserted and somewhat picturesque center
of legend until I told him my experience. He had meant to tear it down and build an
apartment house on the site, but after my account, decided to let it stand, install
plumbing, and rent it. Nor has he yet had any difficulty in obtaining tenants. The horror
has gone.

III

It may well be imagined how powerfully I was affected by the annals of the Harrises. In
this continuous record there seemed to me to brood a persistent evil beyond anything in
nature as I had known it; an evil clearly connected with the house and not with the
family. This impression was confirmed by my uncle's less systematic array of
miscellaneous data--legends transcribed from servant gossip, cuttings from the papers,
copies of death certificates by fellow-physicians, and the like. All of this material I
cannot hope to give, for my uncle was a tireless antiquarian and very deeply interested
in the shunned house; but I may refer to several dominant points which earn notice by
their recurrence through many reports from diverse sources. For example, the servant
gossip was practically unanimous in attributing to the fungous and malodorous cellar of
the house a vast supremacy in evil influence. There had been servants--Ann White
especially--who would not use the cellar kitchen, and at least three well-defined legends
bore upon the queer quasi-human or diabolic outlines assumed by tree-roots and patches
of mould in that region. These latter narratives interested me profoundly, on account of
what I had seen in my boyhood, but I felt that most of the significance had in each case
been largely obscured by additions from the common stock of local ghost lore.

Ann White, with her Exeter superstition, had promulgated the most extravagant and at
the same time most consistent tale; alleging that there must lie buried beneath the house
one of those vampires--the dead who retain their bodily form and live on the blood or
breath of the living--whose hideous legions send their preying shapes or spirits abroad
by night. To destroy a vampire one must, the grandmothers say, exhume it and burn its
heart, or at least drive a stake through that organ; and Ann's dogged insistence on a
search under the cellar had been prominent in bringing about her discharge.

Her tales, however, commanded a wide audience, and were the more readily accepted
because the house indeed stood on land once used for burial purposes. To me their
interest depended less on this circumstance than on the peculiarly appropriate way in
which they dove-tailed with certain other things--the complaint of the departing servant
Preserved Smith, who had preceded Ann and never heard of her, that something "sucked
his breath" at night; the death-certificates of fever victims of 1804, issued by Dr. Chad
Hopkins, and showing the four deceased persons all unaccountably lacking in blood;
and the obscure passages of poor Rhoby Harris's ravings, where she complained of the
sharp teeth of a glassy-eyed, half-visible presence.

Free from unwarranted superstition though I am, these things produced in me an odd
sensation, which was intensified by a pair of widely separated newspaper cuttings
relating to deaths in the shunned house--one from the Providence Gazette and Country-
Journal of April 12, 1815, and the other from the Daily Transcript and Chronicle of
October 27, 1845--each of which detailed an appallingly grisly circumstance whose
duplication was remarkable. It seems that in both instances the dying person, in 1815 a
gentle old lady named Stafford and in 1845 a school-teacher of middle age named
Eleazar Durfee, became transfigured in a horrible way; glaring glassily and attempting
to bite the throat of the attending physician. Even more puzzling, though, was the final
case which put an end to the renting of the house--a series of anaemia deaths preceded
by progressive madnesses wherein the patient would craftily attempt the lives of his
relatives by incisions in the neck or wrists.

This was in 1860 and 1861, when my uncle had just begun his medical practice; and
before leaving for the front he heard much of it from his elder professional colleagues.
The really inexplicable thing was the way in which the victims--ignorant people, for the
ill-smelling and widely shunned house could now be rented to no others--would babble
maledictions in French, a language they could not possibly have studied to any extent. It
made one think of poor Rhoby Harris nearly a century before, and so moved my uncle
that he commenced collecting historical data on the house after listening, some time
subsequent to his return from the war, to the first-hand account of Drs. Chase and
Whitmarsh. Indeed, I could see that my uncle had thought deeply on the subject, and
that he was glad of my own interest--an open-minded and sympathetic interest which
enabled him to discuss with me matters at which others would merely have laughed. His
fancy had not gone so far as mine, but he felt that the place was rare in its imaginative
potentialities, and worthy of note as an inspiration in the field of the grotesque and
macabre.

For my part, I was disposed to take the whole subject with profound seriousness, and
began at once not only to review the evidence, but to accumulate as much as I could. I
talked with the elderly Archer Harris, then owner of the house, many times before his
death in 1916; and obtained from him and his still surviving maiden sister Alice an
authentic corroboration of all the family data my uncle had collected. When, however, I
asked them what connection with France or its language the house could have, they
confessed themselves as frankly baffled and ignorant as I. Archer knew nothing, and all
that Miss Harris could say was that an old allusion her grandfather, Dutee Harris, had
heard of might have shed a little light. The old seaman, who had survived his son
Welcome's death in battle by two years, had not himself known the legend; but recalled
that his earliest nurse, the ancient Maria Robbins, seemed darkly aware of something
that might have lent a weird significance to the French ravings of Rhoby Harris, which
she had so often heard during the last days of that hapless woman. Maria had been at the
shunned house from 1769 till the removal of the family in 1783, and had seen Mercy
Dexter die. Once she hinted to the child Dutee of a somewhat peculiar circumstance in
Mercy's last moments, but he had soon for gotten all about it save that it was something
peculiar. The granddaughter, moreover, recalled even this much with difficulty. She and
her brother were not so much interested in the house as was Archer's son Carrington, the
present owner, with whom I talked after my experience.

Having exhausted the Harris family of all the information it could furnish, I turned my
attention to early town records and deeds with a zeal more penetrating than that which
my uncle had occasionally shown in the same work. What I wished was a
comprehensive history of the site from its very settlement in 1636--or even before, if
any Narragansett Indian legend could be unearthed to supply the data. I found, at the
start, that the land had been part of a long strip of the lot granted originally to John
Throckmorton; one of many similar strips beginning at the Town Street beside the river
and extending up over the hill to a line roughly corresponding with the modern Hope
Street. The Throckmorton lot had later, of course, been much subdivided; and I became
very assiduous in tracing that section through which Back or Benefit Street was later
run. It had, a rumour indeed said, been the Throckmorton graveyard; but as I examined
the records more carefully, I found that the graves had all been transferred at an early
date to the North Burial Ground on the Pawtucket West Road.

Then suddenly I came--by a rare piece of chance, since it was not in the main body of
records and might easily have been missed--upon something which aroused my keenest
eagerness, fitting in as it did with several of the queerest phases of the affair. It was the
record of a lease in 1697, of a small tract of ground to an Etienne Roulet and wife. At
last the French element had appeared--that, and another deeper element of horror which
the name conjured up from the darkest recesses of my weird and heterogeneous reading-
-and I feverishly studied the platting of the locality as it had been before the cutting
through and partial straightening of Back Street between 1747 and 1758. I found what I
had half expected, that where the shunned house now stood, the Roulets had laid out
their graveyard behind a one-story and attic cottage, and that no record of any transfer
of graves existed. The document, indeed, ended in much confusion; and I was forced to
ransack both the Rhode Island Historical Society and Shepley Library before I could
find a local door which the name of Etienne Roulet would unlock. In the end I did find
something; something of such vague but monstrous import that I set about at once to
examine the cellar of the shunned house itself with a new and excited minuteness.

The Roulets, it seemed, had come in 1696 from East Greenwich, down the west shore of
Narragansett Bay. They were Huguenots from Caude, and had encountered much
opposition before the Providence selectmen allowed them to settle in the town.
Unpopularity had dogged them in East Greenwich, whither they had come in 1686, after
the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, and rumour said that the cause of dislike extended
beyond mere racial and national prejudice, or the land disputes which involved other
French settlers with the English in rivalries which not even Governor Andros could
quell. But their ardent Protestantism--too ardent, some whispered--and their evident
distress when virtually driven from the village had been granted a haven; and the
swarthy Etienne Roulet, less apt at agriculture than at reading queer books and drawing
queer diagrams, was given a clerical post in the warehouse at Pardon Tillinghast's
wharf, far south in Town Street. There had, however, been a riot of some sort later on--
perhaps forty years later, after old Roulet's death--and no one seemed to hear of the
family after that.

For a century and more, it appeared, the Roulets had been well remembered and
frequently discussed as vivid incidents in the quiet life of a New England seaport.
Etienne's son Paul, a surly fellow whose erratic conduct had probably provoked the riot
which wiped out the family, was particularly a source of speculation; and though
Providence never shared the witchcraft panics of her Puritan neighbours, it was freely
intimated by old wives that his prayers were neither uttered at the proper time nor
directed toward the proper object. All this had undoubtedly formed the basis of the
legend known by old Maria Robbins. What relation it had to the French ravings of
Rhoby Harris and other inhabitants of the shunned house, imagination or future
discovery alone could determine. I wondered how many of those who had known the
legends realized that additional link with the terrible which my wider reading had given
me; that ominous item in the annals of morbid horror which tells of the creature Jacques
Roulet, of Caude, who in 1598 was condemned to death as a daemoniac but afterward
saved from the stake by the Paris parliament and shut in a madhouse. He had been
found covered with blood and shreds of flesh in a wood, shortly after the killing and
rending of a boy by a pair of wolves. One wolf was seen to lope away unhurt. Surely a
pretty hearthside tale, with a queer significance as to name and place; but I decided that
the Providence gossips could not have generally known of it. Had they known, the
coincidence of names would have brought some drastic and frightened action--indeed,
might not its limited whispering have precipitated the final riot which erased the Roulets
from the town?

I now visited the accursed place with increased frequency; studying the unwholesome
vegetation of the garden, examining all the walls of the building, and poring over every
inch of the earthen cellar floor. Finally, with Carrington Harris's permission, I fitted a
key to the disused door opening from the cellar directly upon Benefit Street, preferring
to have a more immediate access to the outside world than the dark stairs, ground floor
hall, and front door could give. There, where morbidity lurked most thickly, I searched
and poked during long afternoons when the sunlight filtered in through the cobwebbed
above--ground door which placed me only a few feet from the placid sidewalk outside.
Nothing new rewarded my efforts--only the same depressing mustiness and faint
suggestions of noxious odours and nitrous outlines on the floor--and I fancy that many
pedestrians must have watched me curiously through the broken panes.

At length, upon a suggestion of my uncle's, I decided to try the spot nocturnally; and
one stormy midnight ran the beams of an electric torch over the mouldy floor with its
uncanny shapes and distorted, half-phosphorescent fungi. The place had dispirited me
curiously that evening, and I was almost prepared when I saw--or thought I saw--amidst
the whitish deposits a particularly sharp definition of the "huddled form" I had
suspected from boyhood. Its clearness was astonishing and unprecedented--and as I
watched I seemed to see again the thin, yellowish, shimmering exhalation which had
startled me on that rainy afternoon so many years before.

Above the anthropomorphic patch of mould by the fireplace it rose; a subtle, sickish,
almost luminous vapour which, as it hung trembling in the dampness, seemed to
develop vague and shocking suggestions of form, gradually trailing off into nebulous
decay and passing up into the blackness of the great chimney with a foetor in its wake.
It was truly horrible, and the more so to me because of what I knew of the spot.
Refusing to flee, I watched it fade--and as I watched I felt that it was in turn watching
me greedily with eyes more imaginable than visible. When I told my uncle about it he
was greatly aroused; and after a tense hour of reflection, arrived at a definite and drastic
decision. Weighing in his mind the importance of the matter, and the significance of our
relation to it, he insisted that we both test--and if possible destroy--the horror of the
house by a joint night or nights of aggressive vigil in that musty and fungous-cursed
cellar.

IV

On Wednesday, June 25, 1919, after a proper notification of Carrington Harris which
did not include surmises as to what we expected to find, my uncle and I conveyed to the
shunned house two camp chairs and a folding camp cot, together with some scientific
mechanism of greater weight and intricacy. These we placed in the cellar during the
day, screening the windows with paper and planning to return in the evening for our
first vigil. We had locked the door from the cellar to the ground floor; and having a key
to the outside cellar door, we were prepared to leave our expensive and delicate
apparatus--which we had obtained secretly and at great cost--as many days as our vigil
might need to be protracted. It was our design to sit up together till very late, and then
watch singly till dawn in two-hour stretches, myself first and then my companion; the
inactive member resting on the cot.

The natural leadership with which my uncle procured the instruments from the
laboratories of Brown University and the Cranston Street Armory, and instinctively
assumed direction of our venture, was a marvellous commentary on the potential vitality
and resilience of a man of eighty-one. Elihu Whipple had lived according to the
hygienic laws he had preached as a physician, and but for what happened later would be
here in full vigour today. Only two persons suspect what did happen--Carrington Harris
and myself. I had to tell Harris because he owned the house and deserved to know what
had gone out of it. Then, too, we had spoken to him in advance of our quest; and I felt
after my uncle's going that he would understand and assist me in some vitally necessary
public explanations. He turned very pale, but agreed to help me, and decided that it
would now be safe to rent the house.

To declare that we were not nervous on that rainy night of watching would be an
exaggeration both gross and ridiculous. We were not, as I have said, in any sense
childishly superstitious, but scientific study and reflection had taught us that the known
universe of three dimensions embraces the merest fraction of the whole cosmos of
substance and energy. In this case an overwhelming preponderance of evidence from
numerous authentic sources pointed to the tenacious existence of certain forces of great
power and, so far as the human point of view is concerned, exceptional malignancy. To
say that we actually believed in vampires or werewolves would be a carelessly inclusive
statement. Rather must it be said that we were not prepared to deny the possibility of
certain unfamiliar and unclassified modifications of vital force and attenuated matter;
existing very infrequently in three-dimensional space because of its more intimate
connection with other spatial units, yet close enough to the boundary of our own to
furnish us occasional manifestations which we, for lack of a proper vantage-point, may
never hope to understand.

In short, it seemed to my uncle and me that an incontrovertible array of facts pointed to

some lingering influence in the shunned house; traceable to one or another of the ill-
favoured French settlers of two centuries before, and still operative through rare and
unknown laws of atomic and electronic motion. That the family of Roulet had possessed
an abnormal affinity for outer circles of entity--dark spheres which for normal folk hold
only repulsion and terror--their recorded history seemed to prove. Had not, then, the
riots of those bygone seventeen-thirties set moving certain kinetic patterns in the morbid
brain of one or more of them--notably the sinister Paul Roulet--which obscurely
survived the bodies murdered, and continued to function in some multiple-dimensioned
space along the original lines of force determined by a frantic hatred of the encroaching
community?

Such a thing was surely not a physical or biochemical impossibility in the light of a
newer science which includes the theories of relativity and intra-atomic action. One
might easily imagine an alien nucleus of substance or energy, formless or otherwise,
kept alive by imperceptible or immaterial subtractions from the life-force or bodily
tissue and fluids of other and more palpably living things into which it penetrates and
with whose fabric it sometimes completely merges itself. It might be actively hostile, or
it might be dictated merely by blind motives of self-preservation. In any case such a
monster must of necessity be in our scheme of things an anomaly and an intruder,
whose extirpation forms a primary duty with every man not an enemy to the world's
life, health, and sanity.

What baffled us was our utter ignorance of the aspect in which we might encounter the
thing. No sane person had even seen it, and few had ever felt it definitely. It might be
pure energy--a form ethereal and outside the realm of substance--or it might be partly
material; some unknown and equivocal mass of plasticity, capable of changing at will to
nebulous approximations of the solid, liquid, gaseous, or tenuously unparticled states.
The anthropomorphic patch of mould on the floor, the form of the yellowish vapour,
and the curvature of the tree-roots in some of the old tales, all argued at least a remote
and reminiscent connection with the human shape; but how representative or permanent
that similarity might be, none could say with any kind of certainty.

We had devised two weapons to fight it; a large and specially fitted Crookes tube
operated by powerful storage batteries and provided with peculiar screens and
reflectors, in case it proved intangible and opposable only by vigorously destructive
ether radiations, and a pair of military flame-throwers of the sort used in the World War,
in case it proved partly material and susceptible of mechanical destruction--for like the
superstitious Exeter rustics, we were prepared to burn the thing's heart out if heart
existed to burn. All this aggressive mechanism we set in the cellar in positions carefully
arranged with reference to the cot and chairs, and to the spot before the fireplace where
the mould had taken strange shapes. That suggestive patch, by the way, was only faintly
visible when we placed our furniture and instruments, and when we returned that
evening for the actual vigil. For a moment I half-doubted that I had ever seen it in the
more definitely limned form--but then I thought of the legends.

Our cellar vigil began at 10 P.M., daylight saving time, and as it continued we found no
promise of pertinent developments. A weak, filtered glow from the rain-harassed street
lamps outside, and a feeble phosphorescence from the detestable fungi within, showed
the dripping stone of the walls, from which all traces of whitewash had vanished; the
dank, foetid and mildew-tainted hard earth floor with its obscene fungi; the rotting
remains of what had been stools, chairs and tables, and other more shapeless furniture;
the heavy planks and massive beams of the ground floor overhead; the decrepit plank
door leading to bins and chambers beneath other parts of the house; the crumbling stone
staircase with ruined wooden hand-rail; and the crude and cavernous fireplace of
blackened brick where rusted iron fragments revealed the past presence of hooks,
andirons, spit, crane, and a door to the Dutch oven--these things, and our austere cot and
camp chairs, and the heavy and intricate destructive machinery we had brought.

We had, as in my own former explorations, left the door to the street unlocked; so that a
direct and practical path of escape might lie open in case of manifestations beyond our
power to deal with. It was our idea that our continued nocturnal presence would call
forth whatever malign entity lurked there; and that being prepared, we could dispose of
the thing with one or the other of our provided means as soon as we had recognised and
observed it sufficiently. How long it might require to evoke and extinguish the thing, we
had no notion. It occurred to us, too, that our venture was far from safe, for in what
strength the thing might appear no one could tell. But we deemed the game worth the
hazard, and embarked on it alone and unhesitatingly; conscious that the seeking of
outside aid would only expose us to ridicule and perhaps defeat our entire purpose. Such
was our frame of mind as we talked--far into the night, till my uncle's growing
drowsiness made me remind him to lie down for his two-hour sleep.

Something like fear chilled me as I sat there in the small hours alone--I say alone, for
one who sits by a sleeper is indeed alone; perhaps more alone than he can realise. My
uncle breathed heavily, his deep inhalations and exhalations accompanied by the rain
outside, and punctuated by another nerve-racking sound of distant dripping water
within--for the house was repulsively damp even in dry weather, and in this storm
positively swamp-like. I studied the loose, antique masonry of the walls in the fungous-
light and the feeble rays which stole in from the street through the screened windows;
and once, when the noisome atmosphere of the place seemed about to sicken me, I
opened the door and looked up and down the street, feasting my eyes on familiar sights
and my nostrils on wholesome air. Still nothing occurred to reward my watching; and I
yawned repeatedly, fatigue getting the better of apprehension.

Then the stirring of my uncle in his sleep attracted my notice. He had turned restlessly
on the cot several times during the latter half of the first hour, but now he was breathing
with unusual irregularity, occasionally heaving a sigh which held more than a few of the
qualities of a choking moan. I turned my electric flashlight on him and found his face
averted, so rising and crossing to the other side of the cot, I again flashed the light to see
if he seemed in any pain. What I saw unnerved me most surprisingly, considering its
relative triviality. It must have been merely the association of an odd circumstance with
the sinister nature of our location and mission, for surely the circumstance was not in
itself frightful or unnatural. It was merely that my uncle's facial expression, disturbed no
doubt by the strange dreams which our situation prompted, betrayed considerable
agitation, and seemed not at all characteristic of him. His habitual expression was one of
kindly and well-bred calm, whereas now a variety of emotions seemed struggling within
him. I think, on the whole, that it was this variety which chiefly disturbed me. My uncle,
as he gasped and tossed in increasing perturbation and with eyes that had now started
open, seemed not one man but many men, and suggested a curious quality of alienage
from himself.

All at once he commenced to mutter, and I did not like the look of his mouth and teeth
as he spoke. The words were at first indistinguishable, and then--with a tremendous
start--I recognised something about them which filled me with icy fear till I recalled the
breadth of my uncle's education and the interminable translations he had made from
anthropological and antiquarian articles in the Revue des Deux Mondes. For the
venerable Elihu Whipple was muttering in French, and the few phrases I could
distinguish seemed connected with the darkest myths he had ever adapted from the
famous Paris magazine.

Suddenly a perspiration broke out on the sleeper's forehead, and he leaped abruptly up,
half awake. The jumble of French changed to a cry in English, and the hoarse voice
shouted excitedly, "My breath, my breath!" Then the awakening became complete, and
with a subsidence of facial expression to the normal state my uncle seized my hand and
began to relate a dream whose nucleus of significance I could only surmise with a kind
of awe.
He had, he said, floated off from a very ordinary series of dream-pictures into a scene
whose strangeness was related to nothing he had ever read. It was of this world, and yet
not of it--a shadowy geometrical confusion in which could be seen elements of familiar
things in most unfamiliar and perturbing combinations. There was a suggestion of
queerly disordered pictures superimposed one upon an other; an arrangement in which
the essentials of time as well as of space seemed dissolved and mixed in the most
illogical fashion. In this kaleidoscopic vortex of phantasmal images were occasional
snap-shots, if one might use the term, of singular clearness but unaccountable
heterogeneity.

Once my uncle thought he lay in a carelessly dug open pit, with a crowd of angry faces
framed by straggling locks and three-cornered hats frowning down at him. Again he
seemed to be in the interior of a house--an old house, apparently--but the details and
inhabitants were constantly changing, and he could never be certain of the faces or the
furniture, or even of the room itself, since doors and windows seemed in just as great a
state of flux as the more presumably mobile objects. It was queer--damnably queer--and
my uncle spoke almost sheepishly, as if half expecting not to be believed, when he
declared that of the strange faces many had unmistakably borne the features of the
Harris family. And all the while there was a personal sensation of choking, as if some
pervasive presence had spread itself through his body and sought to possess itself of his
vital processes. I shuddered at the thought of those vital processes, worn as they were by
eighty--one years of continuous functioning, in conflict with unknown forces of which
the youngest and strongest system might well be afraid; but in another moment reflected
that dreams are only dreams, and that these uncomfortable visions could be, at most, no
more than my uncle's reaction to the investigations and expectations which had lately
filled our minds to the exclusion of all else.

Conversation, also, soon tended to dispel my sense of strangeness; and in time I yielded
to my yawns and took my turn at slumber. My uncle seemed now very wakeful, and
welcomed his period of watching even though the nightmare had aroused him far ahead
of his allotted two hours. Sleep seized me quickly, and I was at once haunted with
dreams of the most disturbing kind. I felt, in my visions, a cosmic and abysmal
loneness; with hostility surging from all sides upon some prison where I lay confined. I
seemed bound and gagged, and taunted by the echoing yells of distant multitudes who
thirsted for my blood. My uncle's face came to me with less pleasant associations than
in waking hours, and I recall many futile struggles and attempts to scream. It was not a
pleasant sleep, and for a second I was not sorry for the echoing shriek which clove
through the barriers of dream and flung me to a sharp and startled awakeness in which
every actual object before my eyes stood out with more than natural clearness and
reality.

I had been lying with my face away from my uncle's chair, so that in this sudden flash
of awakening I saw only the door to the street, the more northerly window, and the wall
and floor and ceiling toward the north of the room, all photographed with morbid
vividness on my brain in a light brighter than the glow of the fungi or the rays from the
street outside. It was not a strong or even a fairly strong light; certainly not nearly strong
enough to read an average book by. But it cast a shadow of myself and the cot on the
floor, and had a yellowish, penetrating force that hinted at things more potent than
luminosity. This I perceived with unhealthy sharpness despite the fact that two of my
other senses were violently assailed. For on my ears rang the reverberations of that
shocking scream, while my nostrils revolted at the stench which filled the place. My
mind, as alert as my senses, recognised the gravely unusual; and almost automatically I
leaped up and turned about to grasp the destructive instruments which we had left
trained on the mouldy spot before the fireplace. As I turned, I dreaded what I was to see;
for the scream had been in my uncle's voice, and I knew not against what menace I
should have to defend him and myself.

Yet after all, the sight was worse than I had dreaded. There are horrors beyond horrors,
and this was one of those nuclei of all dreamable hideousness which the cosmos saves
to blast an accursed and unhappy few. Out of the fungous-ridden earth steamed up a
vaporous corpse-light, yellow and diseased, which bubbled and lapped to a gigantic
height in vague outlines half human and half monstrous, through which I could see the
chimney and fireplace beyond. It was all eyes--wolfish and mocking--and the rugose
insect-like head dissolved at the top to a thin stream of mist which curled putridly about
and finally vanished up the chimney. I say that I saw this thing, but it is only in
conscious retrospection that I ever definitely traced its damnable approach to form. At
the time it was to me only a seething dimly phosphorescent cloud of fungous
loathsomeness, enveloping and dissolving to an abhorrent plasticity the one object to
which all my attention was focused. That object was my uncle--the venerable Elihu
Whipple--who with blackening and decaying features leered and gibbered at me, and
reached out dripping claws to rend me in the fury which this horror had brought.

It was a sense of routine which kept me from going mad. I had drilled myself in
preparation for the crucial moment, and blind training saved me. Recognising the
bubbling evil as no substance reachable by matter or material chemistry, and therefore
ignoring the flame-thrower which loomed on my left, I threw on the current of the
Crookes tube apparatus, and focussed toward that scene of immortal blasphemousness
the strongest ether radiations which men's art can arouse from the spaces and fluids of
nature. There was a bluish haze and a frenzied sputtering, and the yellowish
phosphorescence grew dimmer to my eyes. But I saw the dimness was only that of
contrast, and that the waves from the machine had no effect whatever.

Then, in the midst of that daemoniac spectacle, I saw a fresh horror which brought cries
to my lips and sent me fumbling and staggering towards that unlocked door to the quiet
street, careless of what abnormal terrors I loosed upon the world, or what thoughts or
judgments of men I brought down upon my head. In that dim blend of blue and yellow
the form of my uncle had commenced a nauseous liquefaction whose essence eludes all
description, and in which there played across his vanishing face such changes of
identity as only madness can conceive. He was at once a devil and a multitude, a
charnel-house and a pageant. Lit by the mixed and uncertain beams, that gelatinous face
assumed a dozen--a score--a hundred--aspects; grinning, as it sank to the ground on a
body that melted like tallow, in the caricatured likeness of legions strange and yet not
strange.

I saw the features of the Harris line, masculine and feminine, adult and infantile, and
other features old and young, coarse and refined, familiar and unfamiliar. For a second
there flashed a degraded counterfeit of a miniature of poor Rhoby Harris that I had seen
in the School of Design Museum, and another time I thought I caught the rawboned
image of Mercy Dexter as I recalled her from a painting in Carrington Harris's house. It
was frightful beyond conception; toward the last, when a curious blend of servant and
baby visages flickered close to the fungous floor where a pool of greenish grease was
spreading, it seemed as though the shifting features fought against themselves, and
strove to form contours like those of my uncle's kindly face. I like to think that he
existed at that moment, and that he tried to bid me farewell. It seems to me I hiccoughed
a farewell from my own parched throat as I lurched out into the street; a thin stream of
grease following me through the door to the rain-drenched sidewalk.

The rest is shadowy and monstrous. There was no one in the soaking street, and in all
the world there was no one I dared tell. I walked aimlessly south past College Hill and
the Athenaeum, down Hopkins Street, and over the bridge to the business section where
tall buildings seemed to guard me as modern material things guard the world from
ancient and unwholesome wonder. Then the grey dawn unfolded wetly from the east,
silhouetting the archaic hill and its venerable steeples, and beckoning me to the place
where my terrible work was still unfinished. And in the end I went, wet, hatless, and
dazed in the morning light, and entered that awful door in Benefit Street which I had left
ajar, and which still swung cryptically in full sight of the early householders to whom I
dared not speak.

The grease was gone, for the mouldy floor was porous. And in front of the fireplace was
no vestige of the giant doubled-up form in nitre. I looked at the cot, the chairs, the
instruments, my neglected hat, and the yellowed straw hat of my uncle. Dazedness was
uppermost, and I could scarcely recall what was dream and what was reality. Then
thought trickled back, and I knew that I had witnessed things more horrible than I had
dreamed. Sitting down, I tried to conjecture as nearly as sanity would let me just what
had happened, and how I might end the horror, if indeed it had been real. Matter it
seemed not to be, nor ether, nor anything else conceivable by mortal mind. What, then,
but some exotic emanation; some vampirish vapour such as Exeter rustics tell of as
lurking over certain church yards? This I felt was the clue, and again I looked at the
floor before the fireplace where the mould and nitre had taken strange forms. In ten
minutes my mind was made up, and taking my hat I set out for home, where I bathed,
ate, and gave by telephone an order for a pick-axe, a spade, a military gas-mask, and six
carboys of sulphuric acid, all to be delivered the next morning at the cellar door of the
shunned house in Benefit Street. After that I tried to sleep; and failing, passed the hours
in reading and in the composition of inane verses to counteract my mood.

At 11 A.M. the next day I commenced digging. It was sunny weather, and I was glad of
that. I was still alone, for as much as I feared the unknown horror I sought, there was
more fear in the thought of telling anybody. Later I told Harris only through sheer
necessity, and because he had heard odd tales from old people which disposed him ever
so little toward belief. As I turned up the stinking black earth in front of the fireplace,
my spade causing a viscous yellow ichor to ooze from the white fungi which it severed,
I trembled at the dubious thoughts of what I might uncover. Some secrets of inner earth
are not good for mankind, and this seemed to me one of them.

My hand shook perceptibly, but still I delved; after a while standing in the large hole I
had made. With the deepening of the hole, which was about six feet square, the evil
smell increased; and I lost all doubt of my imminent contact with the hellish thing
whose emanations had cursed the house for over a century and a half. I wondered what
it would look like--what its form and substance would be, and how big it might have
waxed through long ages of life-sucking. At length I climbed out of the hole and
dispersed the heaped-up dirt, then arranging the great carboys of acid around and near
two sides, so that when necessary I might empty them all down the aperture in quick
succession. After that I dumped earth only along the other two sides; working more
slowly and donning my gas-mask as the smell grew. I was nearly unnerved at my
proximity to a nameless thing at the bottom of a pit.

Suddenly my spade struck something softer than earth. I shuddered and made a motion
as if to climb out of the hole, which was now as deep as my neck. Then courage
returned, and I scraped away more dirt in the light of the electric torch I had provided.
The surface I uncovered was fishy and glassy--a kind of semi-putrid congealed jelly
with suggestions of translucency. I scraped further, and saw that it had form. There was
a rift where a part of the substance was folded over. The exposed area was huge and
roughly cylindrical; like a mammoth soft blue-white stovepipe doubled in two, its
largest part some two feet in diameter. Still more I scraped, and then abruptly I leaped
out of the hole and away from the filthy thing; frantically unstopping and tilting the
heavy carboys, and precipitating their corrosive contents one after another down that
charnel gulf and upon this unthinkable abnormality whose titan elbow I had seen.

The blinding maelstrom of greenish-yellow vapour which surged tempestuously up

from that hole as the floods of acid descended, will never leave my memory. All along
the hill people tell of the yellow day, when virulent and horrible fumes arose from the
factory waste dumped in the Providence River, but I know how mistaken they are as to
the source. They tell, too, of the hideous roar which at the same time came from some
disordered water-pipe or gas main underground--but again I could correct them if I
dared. It was unspeakably shocking, and I do not see how I lived through it. I did faint
after emptying the fourth carboy, which I had to handle after the fumes had begun to
penetrate my mask; but when I recovered I saw that the hole was emitting no fresh
vapours.

The two remaining carboys I emptied down without particular result, and after a time I
felt it safe to shovel the earth back into the pit. It was twilight before I was done, but
fear had gone out of the place. The dampness was less foetid, and all the strange fungi
had withered to a kind of harmless greyish powder which blew ashlike along the floor.
One of earth's nethermost terrors had perished forever; and if there be a hell, it had
received at last the daemon soul of an unhallowed thing. And as I patted down the last
spadeful of mould, I shed the first of many tears with which I have paid unaffected
tribute to my beloved uncle's memory.

The next spring no more pale grass and strange weeds came up in the shunned house's
terraced garden, and shortly afterward Carrington Harris rented the place. It is still
spectral, but its strangeness fascinates me, and I shall find mixed with my relief a queer
regret when it is torn down to make way for a tawdry shop or vulgar apartment building.
The barren old trees in the yard have begun to bear small, sweet apples, and last year the
birds nested in their gnarled boughs.

THE SILVER KEY

He had read much of things as they are, and talked with too many people. Well-meaning
philosophers had taught him to look into the logical relations of things, and analyse the
processes which shaped his thoughts and fancies. Wonder had gone away, and he had
forgotten that all life is only a set of pictures in the brain, among which there is no
difference betwixt those born of real things and those born of inward dreamings, and no
cause to value the one above the other. Custom had dinned into his ears a superstitious
reverence for that which tangibly and physically exists, and had made him secretly
ashamed to dwell in visions. Wise men told him his simple fancies were inane and
childish, and even more absurd because their actors persist in fancying them full of
meaning and purpose as the blind cosmos grinds aimlessly on from nothing to
something and from something back to nothing again, neither heeding nor knowing the
wishes or existence of the minds that flicker for a second now and then in the darkness.

They had chained him down to things that are, and had then explained the workings of
those things till mystery had gone out of the world. When he complained, and longed to
escape into twilight realms where magic moulded all the little vivid fragments and
prized associations of his mind into vistas of breathless expectancy and unquenchable
delight, they turned him instead toward the new-found prodigies of science, bidding him
find wonder in the atom's vortex and mystery in the sky's dimensions. And when he had
failed to find these boons in things whose laws are known and measurable, they told
him he lacked imagination, and was immature because he preferred dream-illusions to
the illusions of our physical creation.

So Carter had tried to do as others did, and pretended that the common events and
emotions of earthy minds were more important than the fantasies of rare and delicate
souls. He did not dissent when they told him that the animal pain of a stuck pig or
dyspeptic ploughman in real life is a greater thing than the peerless beauty of Narath
with its hundred carven gates and domes of chalcedony, which he dimly remembered
from his dreams; and under their guidance he cultivated a painstaking sense of pity and
tragedy.

Once in a while, though, he could not help seeing how shallow, fickle, and meaningless
all human aspirations are, and how emptily our real impulses contrast with those
pompous ideals we profess to hold. Then he would have recourse to the polite laughter
they had taught him to use against the extravagance and artificiality of dreams; for he
saw that the daily life of our world is every inch as extravagant and artificial, and far
less worthy of respect because of its poverty in beauty and its silly reluctance to admit
its own lack of reason and purpose. In this way he became a kind of humorist, for he did
not see that even humour is empty in a mindless universe devoid of any true standard of
consistency or inconsistency.

In the first days of his bondage he had turned to the gentle churchly faith endeared to
him by the naive trust of his fathers, for thence stretched mystic avenues which seemed
to promise escape from life. Only on closer view did he mark the starved fancy and
beauty, the stale and prosy triteness, and the owlish gravity and grotesque claims of
solid truth which reigned boresomely and overwhelmingly among most of its
professors; or feel to the full the awkwardness with which it sought to keep alive as
literal fact the outgrown fears and guesses of a primal race confronting the unknown. It
wearied Carter to see how solemnly people tried to make earthly reality out of old
myths which every step of their boasted science confuted, and this misplaced
seriousness killed the attachment he might have kept for the ancient creeds had they
been content to offer the sonorous rites and emotional outlets in their true guise of
ethereal fantasy.

But when he came to study those who had thrown off the old myths, he found them
even more ugly than those who had not. They did not know that beauty lies in harmony,
and that loveliness of life has no standard amidst an aimless cosmos save only its
harmony with the dreams and the feelings which have gone before and blindly moulded
our little spheres out of the rest of chaos. They did not see that good and evil and beauty
and ugliness are only ornamental fruits of perspective, whose sole value lies in their
linkage to what chance made our fathers think and feel, and whose finer details are
different for every race and culture. Instead, they either denied these things altogether or
transferred them to the crude, vague instincts which they shared with the beasts and
peasants; so that their lives were dragged malodorously out in pain, ugliness, and
disproportion, yet filled with a ludicrous pride at having escaped from something no
more unsound than that which still held them. They had traded the false gods of fear and
blind piety for those of license and anarchy.

Carter did not taste deeply of these modern freedoms; for their cheapness and squalor
sickened a spirit loving beauty alone while his reason rebelled at the flimsy logic with
which their champions tried to gild brute impulse with a sacredness stripped from the
idols they had discarded. He saw that most of them, in common with their cast-off
priestcraft, could not escape from the delusion that life has a meaning apart from that
which men dream into it; and could not lay aside the crude notion of ethics and
obligations beyond those of beauty, even when all Nature shrieked of its
unconsciousness and impersonal unmorality in the light of their scientific discoveries.
Warped and bigoted with preconceived illusions of justice, freedom, and consistency,
they cast off the old lore and the old way with the old beliefs; nor ever stopped to think
that that lore and those ways were the sole makers of their present thoughts and
judgments, and the sole guides and standards in a meaningless universe without fixed
aims or stable points of reference. Having lost these artificial settings, their lives grew
void of direction and dramatic interest; till at length they strove to drown their ennui in
bustle and pretended usefulness, noise and excitement, barbaric display and animal
sensation. When these things palled, disappointed, or grew nauseous through revulsion,
they cultivated irony and bitterness, and found fault with the social order. Never could
they realize that their brute foundations were as shifting and contradictory as the gods of
their elders, and that the satisfaction of one moment is the bane of the next. Calm,
lasting beauty comes only in a dream, and this solace the world had thrown away when
in its worship of the real it threw away the secrets of childhood and innocence.

Amidst this chaos of hollowness and unrest Carter tried to live as befitted a man of keen
thought and good heritage. With his dreams fading under the ridicule of the age he
could not believe in anything, but the love of harmony kept him close to the ways of his
race and station. He walked impassive through the cities of men, and sighed because no
vista seemed fully real; because every flash of yellow sunlight on tall roofs and every
glimpse of balustraded plazas in the first lamps of evening served only to remind him of
dreams he had once known, and to make him homesick for ethereal lands he no longer
knew how to find. Travel was only a mockery; and even the Great War stirred him but
little, though he served from the first in the Foreign Legion of France. For a while he
sought friends, but soon grew weary of the crudeness of their emotions, and the
sameness and earthiness of their visions. He felt vaguely glad that all his relatives were
distant and out of touch with him, for they would not have understood his mental life.
That is, none but his grandfather and great-uncle Christopher could, and they were long
dead.

Then he began once more the writing of books, which he had left off when dreams first
failed him. But here, too, was there no satisfaction or fulfillment; for the touch of earth
was upon his mind, and he could not think of lovely things as he had done of yore.
Ironic humor dragged down all the twilight minarets he reared, and the earthy fear of
improbability blasted all the delicate and amazing flowers in his faery gardens. The
convention of assumed pity spilt mawkishness on his characters, while the myth of an
important reality and significant human events and emotions debased all his high
fantasy into thin--veiled allegory and cheap social satire. His new novels were
successful as his old ones had never been; and because he knew how empty they must
be to please an empty herd, he burned them and ceased his writing. They were very
graceful novels, in which he urbanely laughed at the dreams he lightly sketched; but he
saw that their sophistication had sapped all their life away.

It was after this that he cultivated deliberate illusion, and dabbled in the notions of the
bizarre and the eccentric as an antidote for the commonplace. Most of these, however,
soon showed their poverty and barrenness; and he saw that the popular doctrines of
occultism are as dry and inflexible as those of science, yet without even the slender
palliative of truth to redeem them. Gross stupidity, falsehood, and muddled thinking are
not dream; and form no escape from life to a mind trained above their own level. So
Carter bought stranger books and sought out deeper and more terrible men of fantastic
erudition; delving into arcana of consciousness that few have trod, and learning things
about the secret pits of life, legend, and immemorial antiquity which disturbed him ever
afterward. He decided to live on a rarer plane, and furnished his Boston home to suit his
changing moods; one room for each, hung in appropriate colours, furnished with
befitting books and objects, and provided with sources of the proper sensations of light,
heat, sound, taste, and odour.

Once he heard of a man in the south, who was shunned and feared for the blasphemous
things he read in prehistoric books and clay tablets smuggled from India and Arabia.
Him he visited, living with him and sharing his studies for seven years, till horror
overtook them one midnight in an unknown and archaic graveyard, and only one
emerged where two had entered. Then he went back to Arkham, the terrible witch-
haunted old town of his forefathers in New England, and had experiences in the dark,
amidst the hoary willows and tottering gambrel roofs, which made him seal forever
certain pages in the diary of a wild-minded ancestor. But these horrors took him only to
the edge of reality, and were not of the true dream country he had known in youth; so
that at fifty he despaired of any rest or contentment in a world grown too busy for
beauty and too shrewd for dreams.

Having perceived at last the hollowness and futility of real things, Carter spent his days
in retirement, and in wistful disjointed memories of his dream-filled youth. He thought
it rather silly that he bothered to keep on living at all, and got from a South American
acquaintance a very curious liquid to take him to oblivion without suffering. Inertia and
force of habit, however, caused him to defer action; and he lingered indecisively among
thoughts of old times, taking down the strange hangings from his walls and refitting the
house as it was in his early boyhood--purple panes, Victorian furniture, and all.

With the passage of time he became almost glad he had lingered, for his relics of youth
and his cleavage from the world made life and sophistication seem very distant and
unreal; so much so that a touch of magic and expectancy stole back into his nightly
slumbers. For years those slumbers had known only such twisted reflections of every--
day things as the commonest slumbers know, but now there returned a flicker of
something stranger and wilder; something of vaguely awesome imminence which took
the form of tensely clear pictures from his childhood days, and made him think of little
inconsequential things he had long forgotten. He would often awake calling for his
mother and grandfather, both in their graves a quarter of a century.

Then one night his grandfather reminded him of the key. The grey old scholar, as vivid
as in life, spoke long and earnestly of their ancient line, and of the strange visions of the
delicate and sensitive men who composed it. He spoke of the flame-eyed Crusader who
learnt wild secrets of the Saracens that held him captive; and of the first Sir Randolph
Carter who studied magic when Elizabeth was queen. He spoke, too, of that Edmund
Carter who had just escaped hanging in the Salem witchcraft, and who had placed in an
antique box a great silver key handed down from his ancestors. Before Carter awaked,
the gentle visitant had told him where to find that box; that carved oak box of archaic
wonder whose grotesque lid no hand had raised for two centuries.

In the dust and shadows of the great attic he found it, remote and forgotten at the back
of a drawer in a tall chest. It was about a foot square, and its Gothic carvings were so
fearful that he did not marvel no person since Edmund Carter had dared to open it. It
gave forth no noise when shaken, but was mystic with the scent of unremembered
spices. That it held a key was indeed only a dim legend, and Randolph Carter's father
had never known such a box existed. It was bound in rusty iron, and no means was
provided for working the formidable lock. Carter vaguely understood that he would find
within it some key to the lost gate of dreams, but of where and how to use it his
grandfather had told him nothing.

An old servant forced the carven lid, shaking as he did so at the hideous faces leering
from the blackened wood, and at some unplaced familiarity. Inside, wrapped in a
discoloured parchment, was a huge key of tarnished silver covered with cryptical
arabesques; but of any legible explanation there was none. The parchment was
voluminous, and held only the strange hieroglyphs of an unknown tongue written with
an antique reed. Carter recognized the characters as those he had seen on a certain
papyrus scroll belonging to that terrible scholar of the South who had vanished one
midnight in a nameless cemetery. The man had always shivered when he read this
scroll, and Carter shivered now.

But he cleaned the key, and kept it by him nightly in its aromatic box of ancient oak.
His dreams were meanwhile increasing in vividness, and though showing him none of
the strange cities and incredible gardens of the old days, were assuming a definite cast
whose purpose could not be mistaken. They were calling him back along the years, and
with the mingled wills of all his fathers were pulling him toward some hidden and
ancestral source. Then he knew he must go into the past and merge himself with old
things, and day after day he thought of the hills to the north where haunted Arkham and
the rushing Miskatonic and the lonely rustic homestead of his people lay.

In the brooding fire of autumn Carter took the old remembered way past graceful lines
of rolling hill and stone-walled meadow, distant vale and hanging woodland, curving
road and nestling farmstead, and the crystal windings of the Miskatonic, crossed here
and there by rustic bridges of wood or stone. At one bend he saw the group of giant
elms among which an ancestor had oddly vanished a century and a half before, and
shuddered as the wind blew meaningly through them. Then there was the crumbling
farmhouse of old Goody Fowler the witch, with its little evil windows and great roof
sloping nearly to the ground on the north side. He speeded up his car as he passed it,
and did not slacken till he had mounted the hill where his mother and her fathers before
her were born, and where the old white house still looked proudly across the road at the
breathlessly lovely panorama of rocky slope and verdant valley, with the distant spires
of Kingsport on the horizon, and hints of the archaic, dream-laden sea in the farthest
background.

Then came the steeper slope that held the old Carter place he had not seen in over forty
years. Afternoon was far gone when he reached the foot, and at the bend half way up he
paused to scan the outspread countryside golden and glorified in the slanting floods of
magic poured out by a western sun. All the strangeness and expectancy of his recent
dreams seemed present in this hushed and unearthly landscape, and he thought of the
unknown solitudes of other planets as his eyes traced out the velvet and deserted lawns
shining undulant between their tumbled walls, and clumps of faery forest setting off far
lines of purple hills beyond hills, and the spectral wooded valley dipping down in
shadow to dank hollows where trickling waters crooned and gurgled among swollen and
distorted roots.

Something made him feel that motors did not belong in the realm he was seeking, so he
left his car at the edge of the forest, and putting the great key in his coat pocket walked
on up the hill. Woods now engulfed him utterly, though he knew the house was on a
high knoll that cleared the trees except to the north. He wondered how it would look, for
it had been left vacant and untended through his neglect since the death of his strange
great-uncle Christopher thirty years before. In his boyhood he had revelled through long
visits there, and had found weird marvels in the woods beyond the orchard.

Shadows thickened around him, for the night was near. Once a gap in the trees opened
up to the right, so that he saw off across leagues of twilight meadow and spied the old
Congregational steeple on Central Hill in Kingsport; pink with the last flush of day, the
panes of the little round windows blazing with reflected fire. Then, when he was in deep
shadow again, he recalled with a start that the glimpse must have come from childish
memory alone, since the old white church had long been torn down to make room for
the Congregational Hospital. He had read of it with interest, for the paper had told about
some strange burrows or passages found in the rocky hill beneath.

Through his puzzlement a voice piped, and he started again at its familiarity after long
years. Old Benijah Corey had been his Uncle Christopher's hired man, and was aged
even in those far-off times of his boyhood visits. Now he must be well over a hundred,
but that piping voice could come from no one else. He could distinguish no words, yet
the tone was haunting and unmistakable. To think that "Old Benijy" should still be
alive!

"Mister Randy! Mister Randy! Wharbe ye? D'ye want to skeer yer Aunt Marthy plumb
to death? Hain't she tuld ye to keep nigh the place in the arternoon an' git back afur
dark? Randy! Ran...dee!...He's the beatin'est boy fer runnin' off in the woods I ever see;
haff the time a-settin' moonin' raound that snake-den in the upper timberlot!...Hey yew,
Ran...dee!"

Randolph Carter stopped in the pitch darkness and rubbed his hand across his eyes.
Something was queer. He had been somewhere he ought not to be; had strayed very far
away to places where he had not belonged, and was now inexcusably late. He had not
noticed the time on the Kingsport steeple, though he could easily have made it out with
his pocket telescope; but he knew his lateness was something very strange and
unprecedented. He was not sure he had his little telescope with him, and put his hand in
his blouse pocket to see. No, it was not there, but there was the big silver key he had
found in a box somewhere. Uncle Chris had told him something odd once about an old
unopened box with a key in it, but Aunt Martha had stopped the story abruptly, saying it
was no kind of thing to tell a child whose head was already too full of queer fancies. He
tried to recall just where he had found the key, but something seemed very confused. He
guessed it was in the attic at home in Boston, and dimly remembered bribing Parks with
half his week's allowance to help him open the box and keep quiet about it; but when he
remembered this, the face of Parks came up very strangely, as if the wrinkles of long
years had fallen upon the brisk little Cockney.

"Ran...dee! Ran...dee! Hi! Hi! Randy!"

A swaying lantern came around the black bend, and old Benijah pounced on the silent
and bewildered form of the pilgrim.

"Durn ye, boy, so thar ye be! Ain't ye got a tongue in yer head, that ye can't answer a
body! I ben callin' this haff hour, an' ye must a heerd me long ago! Dun't ye know yer
Aunt Marthy's all a-fidget over yer bein' off arter dark? Wait till I tell yer Uncle Chris
when he gits hum! Ye'd orta know these here woods ain't no fitten place to be traipsin'
this hour! They's things abroad what dun't do nobody no good, as my gran'-sir knowed
afur me. Come, Mister Randy, or Hannah wunt keep supper no longer!"

So Randolph Carter was marched up the road where wondering stars glimmered
through high autumn boughs. And dogs barked as the yellow light of small-paned
windows shone out at the farther turn, and the Pleiades twinkled across the open knoll
where a great gambrel roof stood black against the dim west. Aunt Martha was in the
doorway, and did not scold too hard when Benijah shoved the truant in. She knew Uncle
Chris well enough to expect such things of the Carter blood. Randolph did not show his
key, but ate his supper in silence and protested only when bedtime came. He sometimes
dreamed better when awake, and he wanted to use that key.

In the morning Randolph was up early, and would have run off to the upper timberlot if
Uncle Chris had not caught him and forced him into his chair by the breakfast table. He
looked impatiently around the low-pitched room with the rag carpet and exposed beams
and corner--posts, and smiled only when the orchard boughs scratched at the leaded
panes of the rear window. The trees and the hills were close to him, and formed the
gates of that timeless realm which was his true country.

Then, when he was free, he felt in his blouse pocket for the key; and being reassured,
skipped off across the orchard to the rise beyond, where the wooded hill climbed again
to heights above even the treeless knoll. The floor of the forest was mossy and
mysterious, and great lichened rocks rose vaguely here and there in the dim light like
Druid monoliths among the swollen and twisted trunks of a sacred grove. Once in his
ascent Randolph crossed a rushing stream whose falls a little way off sang runic
incantations to the lurking fauns and aegipans and dryads.

Then he came to the strange cave in the forest slope, the dreaded "snake-den" which
country folk shunned, and away from which Benijah had warned him again and again. It
was deep; far deeper than anyone but Randolph suspected, for the boy had found a
fissure in the farthermost black corner that led to a loftier grotto beyond--a haunting
sepulchral place whose granite walls held a curious illusion of conscious artifice. On
this occasion he crawled in as usual, lighting his way with matches filched from the
sitting-room matchsafe, and edging through the final crevice with an eagerness hard to
explain even to himself. He could not tell why he approached the farther wall so
confidently, or why he instinctively drew forth the great silver key as he did so. But on
he went, and when he danced back to the house that night he offered no excuses for his
lateness, nor heeded in the least the reproofs he gained for ignoring the noon-tide
dinner-horn altogether.

Now it is agreed by all the distant relatives of Randolph Carter that something occurred
to heighten his imagination in his tenth year. His cousin, Ernest B. Aspinwall, Esq., of
Chicago, is fully ten years his senior; and distinctly recalls a change in the boy after the
autumn of 1883. Randolph had looked on scenes of fantasy that few others can ever
have beheld, and stranger still were some of the qualities which he showed in relation to
very mundane things. He seemed, in fine, to have picked up an odd gift of prophecy;
and reacted unusually to things which, though at the time without meaning, were later
found to justify the singular impressions. In subsequent decades as new inventions, new
names, and new events appeared one by one in the book of history, people would now
and then recall wonderingly how Carter had years before let fall some careless word of
undoubted connection with what was then far in the future. He did not himself
understand these words, or know why certain things made him feel certain emotions;
but fancied that some unremembered dream must be responsible. It was as early as 1897
that he turned pale when some traveller mentioned the French town of Belloy-en-
Santerre, and friends remembered it when he was almost mortally wounded there in
1916, while serving with the Foreign Legion in the Great War.

Carter's relatives talk much of these things because he has lately disappeared. His little
old servant Parks, who for years bore patiently with his vagaries, last saw him on the
morning he drove off alone in his car with a key he had recently found. Parks had
helped him get the key from the old box containing it, and had felt strangely affected by
the grotesque carvings on the box, and by some other odd quality he could not name.
When Carter left, he had said he was going to visit his old ancestral country around
Arkham.
Half way up Elm Mountain, on the way to the ruins of the old Carter place, they found
his motor set carefully by the roadside; and in it was a box of fragrant wood with
carvings that frightened the countrymen who stumbled on it. The box held only a queer
parchment whose characters no linguist or palaeographer has been able to decipher or
identify. Rain had long effaced any possible footprints, though Boston investigators had
something to say about evidences of disturbances among the fallen timbers of the Carter
place. It was, they averred, as though someone had groped about the ruins at no distant
period. A common white handkerchief found among forest rocks on the hillside beyond
cannot be identified as belonging to the missing man.

There is talk of apportioning Randolph Carter's estate among his heirs, but I shall stand
firmly against this course because I do not believe he is dead. There are twists of time
and space, of vision and reality, which only a dreamer can divine; and from what I know
of Carter I think he has merely found a way to traverse these mazes. Whether or not he
will ever come back, I cannot say. He wanted the lands of dream he had lost, and
yearned for the days of his childhood. Then he found a key, and I somehow believe he
was able to use it to strange advantage.

I shall ask him when I see him, for I expect to meet him shortly in a certain dream-city
we both used to haunt. It is rumoured in Ulthar, beyond the River Skai, that a new king
reigns on the opal throne of Ilek-Vad, that fabulous town of turrets atop the hollow
cliffs of glass overlooking the twilight sea wherein the bearded and finny Gnorri build
their singular labyrinths, and I believe I know how to interpret this rumour. Certainly, I
look forward impatiently to the sight of that great silver key, for in its cryptical
arabesques there may stand symbolised all the aims and mysteries of a blindly
impersonal cosmos.

THE STATEMENT OF RANDOLPH CARTER

I repeat to you, gentlemen, that your inquisition is fruitless. Detain me here forever if
you will; confine or execute me if you must have a victim to propitiate the illusion you
call justice; but I can say no more than I have said already. Everything that I can
remember, I have told you with perfect candour. Nothing has been distorted or
concealed, and if anything remains vague, it is only because of the dark cloud which has
come over my mind--that cloud and the nebulous nature of the horrors which brought it
upon me.

Again I say, I do not know what has become of Harley Warren, though I think--almost
hope--that he is in peaceful oblivion, if there be anywhere so blessed a thing. It is true
that I have for five years been his closest friend, and a partial sharer of his terrible
researches into the unknown. I will not deny, though my memory is uncertain and
indistinct, that this witness of yours may have seen us together as he says, on the
Gainsville pike, walking toward Big Cypress Swamp, at half past 11 on that awful
night. That we bore electric lanterns, spades, and a curious coil of wire with attached
instruments, I will even affirm; for these things all played a part in the single hideous
scene which remains burned into my shaken recollection. But of what followed, and of
the reason I was found alone and dazed on the edge of the swamp next morning, I must
insist that I know nothing save what I have told you over and over again. You say to me
that there is nothing in the swamp or near it which could form the setting of that
frightful episode. I reply that I knew nothing beyond what I saw. Vision or nightmare it
may have been--vision or nightmare I fervently hope it was--yet it is all that my mind
retains of what took place in those shocking hours after we left the sight of men. And
why Harley Warren did not return, he or his shade--or some nameless thing I cannot
describe--alone can tell.

As I have said before, the weird studies of Harley Warren were well known to me, and
to some extent shared by me. Of his vast collection of strange, rare books on forbidden
subjects I have read all that are written in the languages of which I am master; but these
are few as compared with those in languages I cannot understand. Most, I believe, are in
Arabic; and the fiend-inspired book which brought on the end--the book which he
carried in his pocket out of the world--was written in characters whose like I never saw
elsewhere. Warren would never tell me just what was in that book. As to the nature of
our studies--must I say again that I no longer retain full comprehension? It seems to me
rather merciful that I do not, for they were terrible studies, which I pursued more
through reluctant fascination than through actual inclination. Warren always dominated
me, and sometimes I feared him. I remember how I shuddered at his facial expression
on the night before the awful happening, when he talked so incessantly of his theory,
why certain corpses never decay, but rest firm and fat in their tombs for a thousand
years. But I do not fear him now, for I suspect that he has known horrors beyond my
ken. Now I fear for him.

Once more I say that I have no clear idea of our object on that night. Certainly, it had
much to do with something in the book which Warren carried with him--that ancient
book in undecipherable characters which had come to him from India a month before--
but I swear I do not know what it was that we expected to find. Your witness says he
saw us at half past 11 on the Gainsville pike, headed for Big Cypress Swamp. This is
probably true, but I have no distinct memory of it. The picture seared into my soul is of
one scene only, and the hour must have been long after midnight; for a waning crescent
moon was high in the vaporous heavens.

The place was an ancient cemetery; so ancient that I trembled at the manifold signs of
immemorial years. It was in a deep, damp hollow, overgrown with rank grass, moss,
and curious creeping weeds, and filled with a vague stench which my idle fancy
associated absurdly with rotting stone. On every hand were the signs of neglect and
decrepitude, and I seemed haunted by the notion that Warren and I were the first living
creatures to invade a lethal silence of centuries. Over the valley's rim a wan, waning
crescent moon peered through the noisome vapors that seemed to emanate from unheard
of catacombs, and by its feeble, wavering beams I could distinguish a repellent array of
antique slabs, urns, cenotaphs, and mausoleum facades; all crumbling, moss-grown, and
moisture-stained, and partly concealed by the gross luxuriance of the unhealthy
vegetation.

My first vivid impression of my own presence in this terrible necropolis concerns the
act of pausing with Warren before a certain half-obliterated sepulcher and of throwing
down some burdens which we seemed to have been carrying. I now observed that I had
with me an electric lantern and two spades, whilst my companion was supplied with a
similar lantern and a portable telephone outfit. No word was uttered, for the spot and the
task seemed known to us; and without delay we seized our spades and commenced to
clear away the grass, weeds, and drifted earth from the flat, archaic mortuary. After
uncovering the entire surface, which consisted of three immense granite slabs, we
stepped back some distance to survey the charnel scene; and Warren appeared to make
some mental calculations. Then he returned to the sepulcher, and using his spade as a
lever, sought to pry up the slab lying nearest to a stony ruin which may have been a
monument in its day. He did not succeed, and motioned to me to come to his assistance.
Finally our combined strength loosened the stone, which we raised and tipped to one
side.

The removal of the slab revealed a black aperture, from which rushed an effluence of
miasmal gases so nauseous that we started back in horror. After an interval, however,
we approached the pit again, and found the exhalations less unbearable. Our lanterns
disclosed the top of a flight of stone steps, dripping with some detestable ichor of the
inner earth, and bordered by moist walls encrusted with niter. And now for the first time
my memory records verbal discourse, Warren addressing me at length in his mellow
tenor voice; a voice singularly unperturbed by our awesome surroundings.

"I'm sorry to have to ask you to stay on the surface," he said, "but it would be a crime to
let anyone with your frail nerves go down there. You can't imagine, even from what you
have read and from what I've told you, the things I shall have to see and do. It's fiendish
work, Carter, and I doubt if any man without ironclad sensibilities could ever see it
through and come up alive and sane. I don't wish to offend you, and Heaven knows I'd
be glad enough to have you with me; but the responsibility is in a certain sense mine,
and I couldn't drag a bundle of nerves like you down to probable death or madness. I tell
you, you can't imagine what the thing is really like! But I promise to keep you informed
over the telephone of every move--you see I've enough wire here to reach to the center
of the earth and back!"

I can still hear, in memory, those coolly spoken words; and I can still remember my
remonstrances. I seemed desperately anxious to accompany my friend into those
sepulchral depths, yet he proved inflexibly obdurate. At one time he threatened to
abandon the expedition if I remained insistent; a threat which proved effective, since he
alone held the key to the thing. All this I can still remember, though I no longer know
what manner of thing we sought. After he had obtained my reluctant acquiescence in his
design, Warren picked up the reel of wire and adjusted the instruments. At his nod I
took one of the latter and seated myself upon an aged, discolored gravestone close by
the newly uncovered aperture. Then he shook my hand, shouldered the coil of wire, and
disappeared within that indescribable ossuary.

For a minute I kept sight of the glow of his lantern, and heard the rustle of the wire as he
laid it down after him; but the glow soon disappeared abruptly, as if a turn in the stone
staircase had been encountered, and the sound died away almost as quickly. I was alone,
yet bound to the unknown depths by those magic strands whose insulated surface lay
green beneath the struggling beams of that waning crescent moon.

I constantly consulted my watch by the light of my electric lantern, and listened with
feverish anxiety at the receiver of the telephone; but for more than a quarter of an hour
heard nothing. Then a faint clicking came from the instrument, and I called down to my
friend in a tense voice. Apprehensive as I was, I was nevertheless unprepared for the
words which came up from that uncanny vault in accents more alarmed and quivering
than any I had heard before from Harley Warren. He who had so calmly left me a little
while previously, now called from below in a shaky whisper more portentous than the
loudest shriek:

"God! If you could see what I am seeing!"

I could not answer. Speechless, I could only wait. Then came the frenzied tones again:

"Carter, it's terrible--monstrous--unbelievable!"

This time my voice did not fail me, and I poured into the transmitter a flood of excited
questions. Terrified, I continued to repeat, "Warren, what is it? What is it?"

Once more came the voice of my friend, still hoarse with fear, and now apparently
tinged with despair:

"I can't tell you, Carter! It's too utterly beyond thought--I dare not tell you--no man
could know it and live--Great God! I never dreamed of this!"

Stillness again, save for my now incoherent torrent of shuddering inquiry. Then the
voice of Warren in a pitch of wilder consternation:

"Carter! for the love of God, put back the slab and get out of this if you can! Quick!--
leave everything else and make for the outside--it's your only chance! Do as I say, and
don't ask me to explain!"

I heard, yet was able only to repeat my frantic questions. Around me were the tombs
and the darkness and the shadows; below me, some peril beyond the radius of the
human imagination. But my friend was in greater danger than I, and through my fear I
felt a vague resentment that he should deem me capable of deserting him under such
circumstances. More clicking, and after a pause a piteous cry from Warren:

"Beat it! For God's sake, put back the slab and beat it, Carter!"

Something in the boyish slang of my evidently stricken companion unleashed my

faculties. I formed and shouted a resolution, "Warren, brace up! I'm coming down!" But
at this offer the tone of my auditor changed to a scream of utter despair:

"Don't! You can't understand! It's too late--and my own fault. Put back the slab and run-
-there's nothing else you or anyone can do now!"

The tone changed again, this time acquiring a softer quality, as of hopeless resignation.
Yet it remained tense through anxiety for me.

"Quick--before it's too late!"

I tried not to heed him; tried to break through the paralysis which held me, and to fulfil
my vow to rush down to his aid. But his next whisper found me still held inert in the
chains of stark horror.

"Carter--hurry! It's no use--you must go--better one than two--the slab--"

A pause, more clicking, then the faint voice of Warren:

"Nearly over now--don't make it harder--cover up those damned steps and run for your
life--you're losing time--so long, Carter--won't see you again."

Here Warren's whisper swelled into a cry; a cry that gradually rose to a shriek fraught
with all the horror of the ages--

"Curse these hellish things--legions--My God! Beat it! Beat it! BEAT IT!"

After that was silence. I know not how many interminable eons I sat stupefied;
whispering, muttering, calling, screaming into that telephone. Over and over again
through those eons I whispered and muttered, called, shouted, and screamed, "Warren!
Warren! Answer me--are you there?"

And then there came to me the crowning horror of all--the unbelievable, unthinkable,
almost unmentionable thing. I have said that eons seemed to elapse after Warren
shrieked forth his last despairing warning, and that only my own cries now broke the
hideous silence. But after a while there was a further clicking in the receiver, and I
strained my ears to listen. Again I called down, "Warren, are you there?" and in answer
heard the thing which has brought this cloud over my mind. I do not try, gentlemen, to
account for that thing--that voice--nor can I venture to describe it in detail, since the first
words took away my consciousness and created a mental blank which reaches to the
time of my awakening in the hospital. Shall I say that the voice was deep; hollow;
gelatinous; remote; unearthly; inhuman; disembodied? What shall I say? It was the end
of my experience, and is the end of my story. I heard it, and knew no more--heard it as I
sat petrified in that unknown cemetery in the hollow, amidst the crumbling stones and
the falling tombs, the rank vegetation and the miasmal vapors--heard it well up from the
innermost depths of that damnable open sepulcher as I watched amorphous,
necrophagous shadows dance beneath an accursed waning moon.

And this is what it said:

"You fool, Warren is DEAD!"

THE STRANGE HIGH HOUSE IN THE MIST

Now north of archaic Kingsport the crags climb lofty and curious, terrace on terrace, till
the northernmost hangs in the sky like a gray frozen wind-cloud. Alone it is, a bleak
point jutting in limitless space, for there the coast turns sharp where the great
Miskatonic pours out of the plains past Arkham, bringing woodland legends and little
quaint memories of New England's hills. The sea-folk of Kingsport look up at that cliff
as other sea-folk look up at the pole--star, and time the night's watches by the way it
hides or shows the Great Bear, Cassiopeia and the Dragon. Among them it is one with
the firmament, and truly, it is hidden from them when the mist hides the stars or the sun.

Some of the cliffs they love, as that whose grotesque profile they call Father Neptune,
or that whose pillared steps they term "The Causeway"; but this one they fear because it
is so near the sky. The Portuguese sailors coming in from a voyage cross themselves
when they first see it, and the old Yankees believe it would be a much graver matter
than death to climb it, if indeed that were possible. Nevertheless there is an ancient
house on that cliff, and at evening men see lights in the small-paned windows.

The ancient house has always been there, and people say One dwells within who talks
with the morning mists that come up from the deep, and perhaps sees singular things
oceanward at those times when the cliff's rim becomes the rim of all earth, and solemn
buoys toll free in the white aether of faery. This they tell from hearsay, for that
forbidding crag is always unvisited, and natives dislike to train telescopes on it. Summer
boarders have indeed scanned it with jaunty binoculars, but have never seen more than
the gray primeval roof, peaked and shingled, whose eaves come nearly to the gray
foundations, and the dim yellow light of the little windows peeping out from under
those eaves in the dusk. These summer people do not believe that the same One has
lived in the ancient house for hundreds of years, but can not prove their heresy to any
real Kingsporter. Even the Terrible Old Man who talks to leaden pendulums in bottles,
buys groceries with centuried Spanish gold, and keeps stone idols in the yard of his
antediluvian cottage in Water Street can only say these things were the same when his
grandfather was a boy, and that must have been inconceivable ages ago, when Belcher
or Shirley or Pownall or Bernard was Governor of His Majesty's Province of the
Massachusetts-Bay.

Then one summer there came a philosopher into Kingsport. His name was Thomas
Olney, and he taught ponderous things in a college by Narragansett Bay. With stout
wife and romping children he came, and his eyes were weary with seeing the same
things for many years, and thinking the same well-disciplined thoughts. He looked at
the mists from the diadem of Father Neptune, and tried to walk into their white world of
mystery along the titan steps of The Causeway. Morning after morning he would lie on
the cliffs and look over the world's rim at the cryptical aether beyond, listening to
spectral bells and the wild cries of what might have been gulls. Then, when the mist
would lift and the sea stand out prosy with the smoke of steamers, he would sigh and
descend to the town, where he loved to thread the narrow olden lanes up and down hill,
and study the crazy tottering gables and odd-pillared doorways which had sheltered so
many generations of sturdy sea-folk. And he even talked with the Terrible Old Man,
who was not fond of strangers, and was invited into his fearsomely archaic cottage
where low ceilings and wormy panelling hear the echoes of disquieting soliloquies in
the dark small hours.

Of course it was inevitable that Olney should mark the gray unvisited cottage in the sky,
on that sinister northward crag which is one with the mists and the firmament. Always
over Kingsport it hung, and always its mystery sounded in whispers through Kingsport's
crooked alleys. The Terrible Old Man wheezed a tale that his father had told him, of
lightning that shot one night up from that peaked cottage to the clouds of higher heaven;
and Granny Orne, whose tiny gambrel-roofed abode in Ship Street is all covered with
moss and ivy, croaked over something her grandmother had heard at second-hand,
about shapes that flapped out of the eastern mists straight into the narrow single door of
that unreachable place--for the door is set close to the edge of the crag toward the ocean,
and glimpsed only from ships at sea.

At length, being avid for new strange things and held back by neither the Kingsporter's
fear nor the summer boarder's usual indolence, Olney made a very terrible resolve.
Despite a conservative training--or because of it, for humdrum lives breed wistful
longings of the unknown--he swore a great oath to scale that avoided northern cliff and
visit the abnormally antique gray cottage in the sky. Very plausibly his saner self argued
that the place must be tenanted by people who reached it from inland along the easier
ridge beside the Miskatonic's estuary. Probably they traded in Arkham, knowing how
little Kingsport liked their habitation or perhaps being unable to climb down the cliff on
the Kingsport side. Olney walked out along the lesser cliffs to where the great crag
leaped insolently up to consort with celestial things, and became very sure that no
human feet could mount it or descend it on that beetling southern slope. East and north
it rose thousands of feet perpendicular from the water so only the western side, inland
and toward Arkham, remained.

One early morning in August Olney set out to find a path to the inaccessible pinnacle.
He worked northwest along pleasant back roads, past Hooper's Pond and the old brick
powder-house to where the pastures slope up to the ridge above the Miskatonic and give
a lovely vista of Arkham's white Georgian steeples across leagues of river and meadow.
Here he found a shady road to Arkham, but no trail at all in the seaward direction he
wished. Woods and fields crowded up to the high bank of the river's mouth, and bore
not a sign of man's presence; not even a stone wall or a straying cow, but only the tall
grass and giant trees and tangles of briars that the first Indian might have seen. As he
climbed slowly east, higher and higher above the estuary on his left and nearer and
nearer the sea, he found the way growing in difficulty till he wondered how ever the
dwellers in that disliked place managed to reach the world outside, and whether they
came often to market in Arkham.

Then the trees thinned, and far below him on his right he saw the hills and antique roofs
and spires of Kingsport. Even Central Hill was a dwarf from this height, and he could
just make out the ancient graveyard by the Congregational Hospital beneath which
rumor said some terrible caves or burrows lurked. Ahead lay sparse grass and scrub
blueberry bushes, and beyond them the naked rock of the crag and the thin peak of the
dreaded gray cottage. Now the ridge narrowed, and Olney grew dizzy at his loneness in
the sky, south of him the frightful precipice above Kingsport, north of him the vertical
drop of nearly a mile to the river's mouth. Suddenly a great chasm opened before him,
ten feet deep, so that he had to let himself down by his hands and drop to a slanting
floor, and then crawl perilously up a natural defile in the opposite wall. So this was the
way the folk of the uncanny house journeyed betwixt earth and sky!

When he climbed out of the chasm a morning mist was gathering, but he clearly saw the
lofty and unhallowed cottage ahead; walls as gray as the rock, and high peak standing
bold against the milky white of the seaward vapors. And he perceived that there was no
door on this landward end, but only a couple of small lattice windows with dingy bull's-
eye panes leaded in seventeenth century fashion. All around him was cloud and chaos,
and he could see nothing below the whiteness of illimitable space. He was alone in the
sky with this queer and very disturbing house; and when he sidled around to the front
and saw that the wall stood flush with the cliff's edge, so that the single narrow door
was not to be reached save from the empty aether, he felt a distinct terror that altitude
could not wholly explain. And it was very odd that shingles so worm-eaten could
survive, or bricks so crumbled still form a standing chimney.

As the mist thickened, Olney crept around to the windows on the north and west and
south sides, trying them but finding them all locked. He was vaguely glad they were
locked, because the more he saw of that house the less he wished to get in. Then a
sound halted him. He heard a lock rattle and a bolt shoot, and a long creaking follow as
if a heavy door were slowly and cautiously opened. This was on the oceanward side that
he could not see, where the narrow portal opened on blank space thousands of feet in
the misty sky above the waves.

Then there was heavy, deliberate tramping in the cottage, and Olney heard the windows
opening, first on the north side opposite him, and then on the west just around the
corner. Next would come the south windows, under the great low eaves on the side
where he stood; and it must be said that he was more than uncomfortable as he thought
of the detestable house on one side and the vacancy of upper air on the other. When a
fumbling came in the nearer casements he crept around to the west again, flattening
himself against the wall beside the now opened windows. It was plain that the owner
had come home; but he had not come from the land, nor from any balloon or airship that
could be imagined. Steps sounded again, and Olney edged round to the north; but before
he could find a haven a voice called softly, and he knew he must confront his host.

Stuck out of the west window was a great black-bearded face whose eyes were
phosphorescent with the imprint of unheard-of sights. But the voice was gentle, and of a
quaint olden kind, so that Olney did not shudder when a brown hand reached out to help
him over the sill and into that low room of black oak wainscots and carved Tudor
furnishings. The man was clad in very ancient garments, and had about him an
unplaceable nimbus of sea-lore and dreams of tall galleons. Olney does not recall many
of the wonders he told, or even who he was; but says that he was strange and kindly,
and filled with the magic of unfathomed voids of time and space. The small room
seemed green with a dim aqueous light, and Olney saw that the far windows to the east
were not open, but shut against the misty aether with dull panes like the bottoms of old
bottles.

That bearded host seemed young, yet looked out of eyes steeped in the elder mysteries;
and from the tales of marvelous ancient things he related, it must be guessed that the
village folk were right in saying he had communed with the mists of the sea and the
clouds of the sky ever since there was any village to watch his taciturn dwelling from
the plain below. And the day wore on, and still Olney listened to rumors of old times
and far places, and heard how the kings of Atlantis fought with the slippery blasphemies
that wriggled out of rifts in ocean's floor, and how the pillared and weedy temple of
Poseidon is still glimpsed at midnight by lost ships, who knew by its sight that they are
lost. Years of the Titans were recalled, but the host grew timid when he spoke of the
dim first age of chaos before the gods or even the Elder Ones were born, and when the
other gods came to dance on the peak of Hatheg-Kia in the stony desert near Ulthar,
beyond the River Skai.

It was at this point that there came a knocking on the door; that ancient door of nail-
studded oak beyond which lay only the abyss of white cloud. Olney started in fright, but
the bearded man motioned him to be still, and tiptoed to the door to look out through a
very small peephole. What he saw he did not like, so pressed his fingers to his lips and
tiptoed around to shut and lock all the windows before returning to the ancient settle
beside his guest. Then Olney saw lingering against the translucent squares of each of the
little dim windows in succession a queer black outline as the caller moved inquisitively
about before leaving; and he was glad his host had not answered the knocking. For there
are strange objects in the great abyss, and the seeker of dreams must take care not to stir
up or meet the wrong ones.

Then the shadows began to gather; first little furtive ones under the table, and then
bolder ones in the dark panelled corners. And the bearded man made enigmatical
gestures of prayer, and lit tall candles in curiously wrought brass candle-sticks.
Frequently he would glance at the door as if he expected someone, and at length his
glance seemed answered by a singular rapping which must have followed some very
ancient and secret code. This time he did not even glance through the peep-hole, but
swung the great oak bar and shot the bolt, unlatching the heavy door and flinging it
wide to the stars and the mist.

And then to the sound of obscure harmonies there floated into that room from the deep
all the dreams and memories of earth's sunken Mighty Ones. And golden flames played
about weedy locks, so that Olney was dazzled as he did them homage. Trident-bearing
Neptune was there, and sportive tritons and fantastic nereids, and upon dolphins' backs
was balanced a vast crenulate shell wherein rode the gay and awful form of primal
Nodens, Lord of the Great Abyss. And the conchs of the tritons gave weird blasts, and
the nereids made strange sounds by striking on the grotesque resonant shells of
unknown lurkers in black seacaves. Then hoary Nodens reached forth a wizened hand
and helped Olney and his host into the vast shell, whereat the conchs and the gongs set
up a wild and awesome clamor. And out into the limitless aether reeled that fabulous
train, the noise of whose shouting was lost in the echoes of thunder.

All night in Kingsport they watched that lofty cliff when the storm and the mists gave
them glimpses of it, and when toward the small hours the little dim windows went dark
they whispered of dread and disaster. And Olney's children and stout wife prayed to the
bland proper god of Baptists, and hoped that the traveller would borrow an umbrella and
rubbers unless the rain stopped by morning. Then dawn swam dripping and mist-
wreathed out of the sea, and the buoys tolled solemn in vortices of white aether. And at
noon elfin horns rang over the ocean as Olney, dry and lightfooted, climbed down from
the cliffs to antique Kingsport with the look of far places in his eyes. He could not recall
what he had dreamed in the skyperched hut of that still nameless hermit, or say how he
had crept down that crag untraversed by other feet. Nor could he talk of these matters at
all save with the Terrible Old Man, who afterward mumbled queer things in his long
white beard; vowing that the man who came down from that crag was not wholly the
man who went up, and that somewhere under that gray peaked roof, or amidst
inconceivable reaches of that sinister white mist, there lingered still the lost spirit of him
who was Thomas Olney.

And ever since that hour, through dull dragging years of grayness and weariness, the
philosopher has labored and eaten and slept and done uncomplaining the suitable deeds
of a citizen. Not any more does he long for the magic of farther hills, or sigh for secrets
that peer like green reefs from a bottomless sea. The sameness of his days no longer
gives him sorrow and well-disciplined thoughts have grown enough for his imagination.
His good wife waxes stouter and his children older and prosier and more useful, and he
never fails to smile correctly with pride when the occasion calls for it. In his glance
there is not any restless light, and all he ever listens for solemn bells or far elfin horns it
is only at night when old dreams are wandering. He has never seen Kingsport again, for
his family disliked the funny old houses and complained that the drains were impossibly
bad. They have a trim bungalow now at Bristol Highlands, where no tall crags tower,
and the neighbors are urban and modern.

But in Kingsport strange tales are abroad, and even the Terrible Old Man admits a thing
untold by his grandfather. For now, when the wind sweeps boisterous out of the north
past the high ancient house that is one with the firmament, there is broken at last that
ominous, brooding silence ever before the bane of Kingsport's maritime cotters. And old
folk tell of pleasing voices heard singing there, and of laughter that swells with joys
beyond earth's joys; and say that at evening the little low windows are brighter than
formerly. They say, too, that the fierce aurora comes oftener to that spot, shining blue in
the north with visions of frozen worlds while the crag and the cottage hang black and
fantastic against wild coruscations. And the mists of the dawn are thicker, and sailors
are not quite so sure that all the muffled seaward ringing is that of the solemn buoys.

Worst of all, though, is the shrivelling of old fears in the hearts of Kingsport's young
men, who grow prone to listen at night to the north wind's faint distant sounds. They
swear no harm or pain can inhabit that high peaked cottage, for in the new voices
gladness beats, and with them the tinkle of laughter and music. What tales the sea-mists
may bring to that haunted and northernmost pinnacle they do not know, but they long to
extract some hint of the wonders that knock at the cliff-yawning door when clouds are
thickest. And patriarchs dread lest some day one by one they seek out that inaccessible
peak in the sky, and learn what centuried secrets hide beneath the steep shingled roof
which is part of the rocks and the stars and the ancient fears of Kingsport. That those
venturesome youths will come back they do not doubt, but they think a light may be
gone from their eyes, and a will from their hearts. And they do not wish quaint
Kingsport with its climbing lanes and archaic gables to drag listless down the years
while voice by voice the laughing chorus grows stronger and wilder in that unknown
and terrible eyrie where mists and the dreams of mists stop to rest on their way from the
sea to the skies.

They do not wish the souls of their young men to leave the pleasant hearths and
gambrel-roofed taverns of old Kingsport, nor do they wish the laughter and song in that
high rocky place to grow louder. For as the voice which has come has brought fresh
mists from the sea and from the north fresh lights, so do they say that still other voices
will bring more mists and more lights, till perhaps the olden gods (whose existence they
hint only in whispers for fear the Congregational parson shall hear} may come out of
the deep and from unknown Kadath in the cold waste and make their dwelling on that
evilly appropriate crag so close to the gentle hills and valleys of quiet, simple fisher
folk. This they do not wish, for to plain people things not of earth are unwelcome; and
besides, the Terrible Old Man often recalls what Olney said about a knock that the lone
dweller feared, and a shape seen black and inquisitive against the mist through those
queer translucent windows of leaded bull's-eyes.

All these things, however, the Elder Ones only may decide; and meanwhile the morning
mist still comes up by that lovely vertiginous peak with the steep ancient house, that
gray, low-eaved house where none is seen but where evening brings furtive lights while
the north wind tells of strange revels. White and feathery it comes from the deep to its
brothers the clouds, full of dreams of dank pastures and caves of leviathan. And when
tales fly thick in the grottoes of tritons, and conchs in seaweed cities blow wild tunes
learned from the Elder Ones, then great eager vapors flock to heaven laden with lore;
and Kingsport, nestling uneasy in its lesser cliffs below that awesome hanging sentinel
of rock, sees oceanward only a mystic whiteness, as if the cliff's rim were the rim of all
earth, and the solemn bells of the buoys tolled free in the aether of faery.

THE STREET
Men of strength and honour fashioned that Street: good valiant men of our blood who
had come from the Blessed Isles across the sea. At first it was but a path trodden by
bearers of water from the woodland spring to the cluster of houses by the beach. Then,
as more men came to the growing cluster of houses and looked about for places to
dwell, they built cabins along the north side, cabins of stout oaken logs with masonry on
the side toward the forest, for many Indians lurked there with fire-arrows. And in a few
years more, men built cabins on the south side of the Street.

Up and down the Street walked grave men in conical hats, who most of the time carried
muskets or fowling pieces. And there were also their bonneted wives and sober
children. In the evening these men with their wives and children would sit about
gigantic hearths and read and speak. Very simple were the things of which they read and
spoke, yet things which gave them courage and goodness and helped them by day to
subdue the forest and till the fields. And the children would listen and learn of the laws
and deeds of old, and of that dear England which they had never seen or could not
remember.

There was war, and thereafter no more Indians troubled the Street. The men, busy with
labour, waxed prosperous and as happy as they knew how to be. And the children grew
up comfortable, and more families came from the Mother Land to dwell on the Street.
And the children's children, and the newcomers' children, grew up. The town was now a
city, and one by one the cabins gave place to houses--simple, beautiful houses of brick
and wood, with stone steps and iron railings and fanlights over the doors. No flimsy
creations were these houses, for they were made to serve many a generation. Within
there were carven mantels and graceful stairs, and sensible, pleasing furniture, china,
and silver, brought from the Mother Land.

So the Street drank in the dreams of a young people and rejoiced as its dwellers became
more graceful and happy. Where once had been only strength and honour, taste and
learning now abode as well. Books and paintings and music came to the houses, and the
young men went to the university which rose above the plain to the north. In the place
of conical hats and small-swords, of lace and snowy periwigs, there were cobblestones
over which clattered many a blooded horse and rumbled many a gilded coach; and brick
sidewalks with horse blocks and hitching-posts.

There were in that Street many trees: elms and oaks and maples of dignity; so that in the
summer, the scene was all soft verdure and twittering bird-song. And behind the houses
were walled rose-gardens with hedged paths and sundials, where at evening the moon
and stars would shine bewitchingly while fragrant blossoms glistened with dew.

So the Street dreamed on, past wars, calamities, and change. Once, most of the young
men went away, and some never came back. That was when they furled the old flag and
put up a new banner of stripes and stars. But though men talked of great changes, the
Street felt them not, for its folk were still the same, speaking of the old familiar things in
the old familiar accounts. And the trees still sheltered singing birds, and at evening the
moon and stars looked down upon dewy blossoms in the walled rose-gardens.

In time there were no more swords, three-cornered hats, or periwigs in the Street. How
strange seemed the inhabitants with their walking--sticks, tall beavers, and cropped
heads! New sounds came from the distance--first strange puffings and shrieks from the
river a mile away, and then, many years later, strange puffings and shrieks and
rumblings from other directions. The air was not quite so pure as before, but the spirit of
the place had not changed. The blood and soul of their ancestors had fashioned the
Street. Nor did the spirit change when they tore open the earth to lay down strange
pipes, or when they set up tall posts bearing weird wires. There was so much ancient
lore in that Street, that the past could not easily be forgotten.

Then came days of evil, when many who had known the Street of old knew it no more,
and many knew it who had not known it before, and went away, for their accents were
coarse and strident, and their mien and faces unpleasing. Their thoughts, too, fought
with the wise, just spirit of the Street, so that the Street pined silently as its houses fell
into decay, and its trees died one by one, and its rose-gardens grew rank with weeds and
waste. But it felt a stir of pride one day when again marched forth young men, some of
whom never came back. These young men were clad in blue.

With the years, worse fortune came to the Street. Its trees were all gone now, and its
rose-gardens were displaced by the backs of cheap, ugly new buildings on parallel
streets. Yet the houses remained, despite the ravages of the years and the storms and
worms, for they had been made to serve many a generation. New kinds of faces
appeared in the Street, swarthy, sinister faces with furtive eyes and odd features, whose
owners spoke unfamiliar words and placed signs in known and unknown characters
upon most of the musty houses. Push-carts crowded the gutters. A sordid, undefinable
stench settled over the place, and the ancient spirit slept.

Great excitement once came to the Street. War and revolution were raging across the
seas; a dynasty had collapsed, and its degenerate subjects were flocking with dubious
intent to the Western Land. Many of these took lodgings in the battered houses that had
once known the songs of birds and the scent of roses. Then the Western Land itself
awoke and joined the Mother Land in her titanic struggle for civilization. Over the cities
once more floated the old flag, companioned by the new flag, and by a plainer, yet
glorious tricolour. But not many flags floated over the Street, for therein brooded only
fear and hatred and ignorance. Again young men went forth, but not quite as did the
young men of those other days. Something was lacking. And the sons of those young
men of other days, who did indeed go forth in olive-drab with the true spirit of their
ancestors, went from distant places and knew not the Street and its ancient spirit.

Over the seas there was a great victory, and in triumph most of the young men returned.
Those who had lacked something lacked it no longer, yet did fear and hatred and
ignorance still brood over the Street; for many had stayed behind, and many strangers
had come from distance places to the ancient houses. And the young men who had
returned dwelt there no longer. Swarthy and sinister were most of the strangers, yet
among them one might find a few faces like those who fashioned the Street and
moulded its spirit. Like and yet unlike, for there was in the eyes of all a weird,
unhealthy glitter as of greed, ambition, vindictiveness, or misguided zeal. Unrest and
treason were abroad amongst an evil few who plotted to strike the Western Land its
death blow, that they might mount to power over its ruins, even as assassins had
mounted in that unhappy, frozen land from whence most of them had come. And the
heart of that plotting was in the Street, whose crumbling houses teemed with alien
makers of discord and echoed with the plans and speeches of those who yearned for the
appointed day of blood, flame and crime.

Of the various odd assemblages in the Street, the Law said much but could prove little.
With great diligence did men of hidden badges linger and listen about such places as
Petrovitch's Bakery, the squalid Rifkin School of Modern Economics, the Circle Social
Club, and the Liberty Cafe. There congregated sinister men in great numbers, yet
always was their speech guarded or in a foreign tongue. And still the old houses stood,
with their forgotten lore of nobler, departed centuries; of sturdy Colonial tenants and
dewy rose-gardens in the moonlight. Sometimes a lone poet or traveler would come to
view them, and would try to picture them in their vanished glory; yet of such travelers
and poets there were not many.

The rumour now spread widely that these houses contained the leaders of a vast band of
terrorists, who on a designated day were to launch an orgy of slaughter for the
extermination of America and of all the fine old traditions which the Street had loved.
Handbills and papers fluttered about filthy gutters; handbills and papers printed in many
tongues and in many characters, yet all bearing messages of crime and rebellion. In
these writings the people were urged to tear down the laws and virtues that our fathers
had exalted, to stamp out the soul of the old America--the soul that was bequeathed
through a thousand and a half years of Anglo-Saxon freedom, justice, and moderation.
It was said that the swart men who dwelt in the Street and congregated in its rotting
edifices were the brains of a hideous revolution, that at their word of command many
millions of brainless, besotted beasts would stretch forth their noisome talons from the
slums of a thousand cities, burning, slaying, and destroying till the land of our fathers
should be no more. All this was said and repeated, and many looked forward in dread to
the fourth day of July, about which the strange writings hinted much; yet could nothing
be found to place the guilt. None could tell just whose arrest might cut off the damnable
plotting at its source. Many times came bands of blue-coated police to search the shaky
houses, though at last they ceased to come; for they too had grown tired of law and
order, and had abandoned all the city to its fate. Then men in olive-drab came, bearing
muskets, till it seemed as if in its sad sleep the Street must have some haunting dreams
of those other days, when musketbearing men in conical hats walked along it from the
woodland spring to the cluster of houses by the beach. Yet could no act be performed to
check the impending cataclysm, for the swart, sinister men were old in cunning.

So the Street slept uneasily on, till one night there gathered in Petrovitch's Bakery, and
the Rifkin School of Modern Economics, and the Circle Social Club, and Liberty Cafe,
and in other places as well, vast hordes of men whose eyes were big with horrible
triumph and expectation. Over hidden wires strange messages traveled, and much was
said of still stranger messages yet to travel; but most of this was not guessed till
afterward, when the Western Land was safe from the peril. The men in olive-drab could
not tell what was happening, or what they ought to do; for the swart, sinister men were
skilled in subtlety and concealment.
And yet the men in olive-drab will always remember that night, and will speak of the
Street as they tell of it to their grandchildren; for many of them were sent there toward
morning on a mission unlike that which they had expected. It was known that this nest
of anarchy was old, and that the houses were tottering from the ravages of the years and
the storms and worms; yet was the happening of that summer night a surprise because
of its very queer uniformity. It was, indeed, an exceedingly singular happening, though
after all, a simple one. For without warning, in one of the small hours beyond midnight,
all the ravages of the years and the storms and the worms came to a tremendous climax;
and after the crash there was nothing left standing in the Street save two ancient
chimneys and part of a stout brick wall. Nor did anything that had been alive come alive
from the ruins. A poet and a traveler, who came with the mighty crowd that sought the
scene, tell odd stories. The poet says that all through the hours before dawn he beheld
sordid ruins indistinctly in the glare of the arc-lights; that there loomed above the
wreckage another picture wherein he could describe moonlight and fair houses and elms
and oaks and maples of dignity. And the traveler declares that instead of the place's
wonted stench there lingered a delicate fragrance as of roses in full bloom. But are not
the dreams of poets and the tales of travelers notoriously false?

There be those who say that things and places have souls, and there be those who say
they have not; I dare not say, myself, but I have told you of the Street.

THE TEMPLE
Manuscript Found On The Coast Of Yucatan

On August 20, 1917, I, Karl Heinrich, Graf von Altberg-Ehrenstein, Lieutenant-

Commander in the Imperial German Navy and in charge of the submarine U-29, deposit
this bottle and record in the Atlantic Ocean at a point to me unknown but probably
about N. Latitude 20 degrees, W. Longitude 35 degrees, where my ship lies disabled on
the ocean floor. I do so because of my desire to set certain unusual facts before the
public; a thing I shall not in all probability survive to accomplish in person, since the
circumstances surrounding me are as menacing as they are extraordinary, and involve
not only the hopeless crippling of the U-29, but the impairment of my iron German will
in a manner most disastrous.

On the afternoon of June 18, as reported by wireless to the U-61, bound for Kiel, we
torpedoed the British freighter Victory, New York to Liverpool, in N. Latitude 45
degrees 16 minutes, W. Longitude 28 degrees 34 minutes; permitting the crew to leave
in boats in order to obtain a good cinema view for the admiralty records. The ship sank
quite picturesquely, bow first, the stem rising high out of the water whilst the hull shot
down perpendicularly to the bottom of the sea. Our camera missed nothing, and I regret
that so fine a reel of film should never reach Berlin. After that we sank the lifeboats
with our guns and submerged.

When we rose to the surface about sunset, a seaman's body was found on the deck,
hands gripping the railing in curious fashion. The poor fellow was young, rather dark,
and very handsome; probably an Italian or Greek, and undoubtedly of the Victory's
crew. He had evidently sought refuge on the very ship which had been forced to destroy
his own--one more victim of the unjust war of aggression which the English pig-dogs
are waging upon the Fatherland. Our men searched him for souvenirs, and found in his
coat pocket a very odd bit of ivory carved to represent a youth's head crowned with
laurel. My fellow-officer, Lieutenant Kienze, believed that the thing was of great age
and artistic value, so took it from the men for himself. How it had ever come into the
possession of a common sailor neither he nor I could imagine.

As the dead man was thrown overboard there occurred two incidents which created
much disturbance amongst the crew. The fellow's eyes had been closed; but in the
dragging of his body to the rail they were jarred open, and many seemed to entertain a
queer delusion that they gazed steadily and mockingly at Schmidt and Zimmer, who
were bent over the corpse. The Boatswain Muller, an elderly man who would have
known better had he not been a superstitious Alsatian swine, became so excited by this
impression that he watched the body in the water; and swore that after it sank a little it
drew its limbs into a swimming position and sped away to the south under the waves.
Kienze and I did not like these displays of peasant ignorance, and severely reprimanded
the men, particularly Muller.

The next day a very troublesome situation was created by the indisposition of some of
the crew. They were evidently suffering from the nervous strain of our long voyage, and
had had bad dreams. Several seemed quite dazed and stupid; and after satisfying myself
that they were not feigning their weakness, I excused them from their duties. The sea
was rather rough, so we descended to a depth where the waves were less troublesome.
Here we were comparatively calm, despite a somewhat puzzling southward current
which we could not identify from our oceanographic charts. The moans of the sick men
were decidedly annoying; but since they did not appear to demoralize the rest of the
crew, we did not resort to extreme measures. It was our plan to remain where we were
and intercept the liner Dacia, mentioned in information from agents in New York.

In the early evening we rose to the surface, and found the sea less heavy. The smoke of
a battleship was on the northern horizon, but our distance and ability to submerge made
us safe. What worried us more was the talk of Boatswain Muller, which grew wilder as
night came on. He was in a detestably childish state, and babbled of some illusion of
dead bodies drifting past the undersea portholes; bodies which looked at him intensely,
and which he recognized in spite of bloating as having seen dying during some of our
victorious German exploits. And he said that the young man we had found and tossed
overboard was their leader. This was very gruesome and abnormal, so we confined
Muller in irons and had him soundly whipped. The men were not pleased at his
punishment, but discipline was necessary. We also denied the request of a delegation
headed by Seaman Zimmer, that the curious carved ivory head be cast into the sea.

On June 20, Seaman Bohin and Schmidt, who had been ill the day before, became
violently insane. I regretted that no physician was included in our complement of
officers, since German lives are precious; but the constant ravings of the two concerning
a terrible curse were most subversive of discipline, so drastic steps were taken. The
crew accepted the event in a sullen fashion, but it seemed to quiet Muller; who
thereafter gave us no trouble. In the evening we released him, and he went about his
duties silently.

In the week that followed we were all very nervous, watching for the Dacia. The tension
was aggravated by the disappearance of Muller and Zimmer, who undoubtedly
committed suicide as a result of the fears which had seemed to harass them, though they
were not observed in the act of jumping overboard. I was rather glad to be rid of Muller,
for even his silence had unfavorably affected the crew. Everyone seemed inclined to be
silent now, as though holding a secret fear. Many were ill, but none made a disturbance.
Lieutenant Kienze chafed under the strain, and was annoyed by the merest trifle--such
as the school of dolphins which gathered about the U-29 in increasing numbers, and the
growing intensity of that southward current which was not on our chart.

It at length became apparent that we had missed the Dacia altogether. Such failures are
not uncommon, and we were more pleased than disappointed, since our return to
Wilhelmshaven was now in order. At noon June 28 we turned northeastward, and
despite some rather comical entanglements with the unusual masses of dolphins, were
soon under way.

The explosion in the engine room at 2 A.M. was wholly a surprise. No defect in the
machinery or carelessness in the men had been noticed, yet without warning the ship
was racked from end to end with a colossal shock. Lieutenant Kienze hurried to the
engine room, finding the fuel-tank and most of the mechanism shattered, and Engineers
Raabe and Schneider instantly killed. Our situation had suddenly become grave indeed;
for though the chemical air regenerators were intact, and though we could use the
devices for raising and submerging the ship and opening the hatches as long as
compressed air and storage batteries might hold out, we were powerless to propel or
guide the submarine. To seek rescue in the life-boats would be to deliver ourselves into
the hands of enemies unreasonably embittered against our great German nation, and our
wireless had failed ever since the Victory affair to put us in touch with a fellow U-boat
of the Imperial Navy.

From the hour of the accident till July 2 we drifted constantly to the south, almost
without plans and encountering no vessel. Dolphins still encircled the U-29, a somewhat
remarkable circumstance considering the distance we had covered. On the morning of
July 2 we sighted a warship flying American colors, and the men became very restless
in their desire to surrender. Finally Lieutenant Menze had to shoot a seaman named
Traube, who urged this un-German act with especial violence. This quieted the crew for
the time, and we submerged unseen.

The next afternoon a dense flock of sea-birds appeared from the south, and the ocean
began to heave ominously. Closing our hatches, we awaited developments until we
realized that we must either submerge or be swamped in the mounting waves. Our air
pressure and electricity were diminishing, and we wished to avoid all unnecessary use
of our slender mechanical resources; but in this case there was no choice. We did not
descend far, and when after several hours the sea was calmer, we decided to return to
the surface. Here, however, a new trouble developed; for the ship failed to respond to
our direction in spite of all that the mechanics could do. As the men grew more
frightened at this undersea imprisonment, some of them began to mutter again about
Lieutenant Kienze's ivory image, but the sight of an automatic pistol calmed them. We
kept the poor devils as busy as we could, tinkering at the machinery even when we
knew it was useless.

Kienze and I usually slept at different times; and it was during my sleep, about 5 A.M.,
July 4, that the general mutiny broke loose. The six remaining pigs of seamen,
suspecting that we were lost, had suddenly burst into a mad fury at our refusal to
surrender to the Yankee battleship two days before, and were in a delirium of cursing
and destruction. They roared like the animals they were, and broke instruments and
furniture indiscriminately; screaming about such nonsense as the curse of the ivory
image and the dark dead youth who looked at them and swam away. Lieutenant Kienze
seemed paralyzed and inefficient, as one might expect of a soft, womanish Rhinelander.
I shot all six men, for it was necessary, and made sure that none remained alive.

We expelled the bodies through the double hatches and were alone in the U-29. Kienze
seemed very nervous, and drank heavily. It was decided that we remain alive as long as
possible, using the large stock of provisions and chemical supply of oxygen, none of
which had suffered from the crazy antics of those swine-hound seamen. Our compasses,
depth gauges, and other delicate instruments were ruined; so that henceforth our only
reckoning would be guess work, based on our watches, the calendar, and our apparent
drift as judged by any objects we might spy through the portholes or from the conning
tower. Fortunately we had storage batteries still capable of long use, both for interior
lighting and for the searchlight. We often cast a beam around the ship, but saw only
dolphins, swimming parallel to our own drifting course. I was scientifically interested in
those dolphins; for though the ordinary Delphinus delphis is a cetacean mammal, unable
to subsist without air, I watched one of the swimmers closely for two hours, and did not
see him alter his submerged condition.

With the passage of time Kienze and I decided that we were still drifting south,
meanwhile sinking deeper and deeper. We noted the marine fauna and flora, and read
much on the subject in the books I had carried with me for spare moments. I could not
help observing, however, the inferior scientific knowledge of my companion. His mind
was not Prussian, but given to imaginings and speculations which have no value. The
fact of our coming death affected him curiously, and he would frequently pray in
remorse over the men, women, and children we had sent to the bottom; forgetting that
all things are noble which serve the German state. After a time he became noticeably
unbalanced, gazing for hours at his ivory image and weaving fanciful stories of the lost
and forgotten things under the sea. Sometimes, as a psychological experiment, I would
lead him on in the wanderings, and listen to his endless poetical quotations and tales of
sunken ships. I was very sorry for him, for I dislike to see a German suffer; but he was
not a good man to die with. For myself I was proud, knowing how the Fatherland would
revere my memory and how my sons would be taught to be men like me.

On August 9, we espied the ocean floor, and sent a powerful beam from the searchlight
over it. It was a vast undulating plain, mostly covered with seaweed, and strewn with
the shells of small mollusks. Here and there were slimy objects of puzzling contour,
draped with weeds and encrusted with barnacles, which Kienze declared must be
ancient ships lying in their graves. He was puzzled by one thing, a peak of solid matter,
protruding above the oceanbed nearly four feet at its apex; about two feet thick, with flat
sides and smooth upper surfaces which met at a very obtuse angle. I called the peak a bit
of outcropping rock, but Kienze thought he saw carvings on it. After a while he began
to shudder, and turned away from the scene as if frightened; yet could give no
explanation save that he was overcome with the vastness, darkness, remoteness,
antiquity, and mystery of the oceanic abysses. His mind was tired, but I am always a
German, and was quick to notice two things: that the U-29 was standing the deep-sea
pressure splendidly, and that the peculiar dolphins were still about us, even at a depth
where the existence of high organisms is considered impossible by most naturalists.
That I had previously overestimated our depth, I was sure; but none the less we must
still have been deep enough to make these phenomena remarkable. Our southward
speed, as gauged by the ocean floor, was about as I had estimated from the organisms
passed at higher levels.

It was at 3:15 PM., August 12, that poor Kienze went wholly mad. He had been in the
conning tower using the searchlight when I saw him bound into the library compartment
where I sat reading, and his face at once betrayed him. I will repeat here what he said,
underlining the words he emphasized: "He is calling! He is calling! I hear him! We must
go!" As he spoke he took his ivory image from the table, pocketed it, and seized my arm
in an effort to drag me up the companionway to the deck. In a moment I understood that
he meant to open the hatch and plunge with me into the water outside, a vagary of
suicidal and homicidal mania for which I was scarcely prepared. As I hung back and
attempted to soothe him he grew more violent, saying: "Come now--do not wait until
later; it is better to repent and be forgiven than to defy and be condemned."Then I tried
the opposite of the soothing plan, and told him he was mad--pitifully demented. But he
was unmoved, and cried: "If I am mad, it is mercy. May the gods pity the man who in
his callousness can remain sane to the hideous end! Come and be mad whilst he still
calls with mercy!"

This outburst seemed to relieve a pressure in his brain; for as he finished he grew much
milder, asking me to let him depart alone if I would not accompany him. My course at
once became clear. He was a German, but only a Rhinelander and a commoner; and he
was now a potentially dangerous madman. By complying with his suicidal request I
could immediately free myself from one who was no longer a companion but a menace.
I asked him to give me the ivory image before he went, but this request brought from
him such uncanny laughter that I did not repeat it. Then I asked him if he wished to
leave any keepsake or lock of hair for his family in Germany in case I should be
rescued, but again he gave me that strange laugh. So as he climbed the ladder I went to
the levers and, allowing proper time-intervals, operated the machinery which sent him
to his death. After I saw that he was no longer in the boat I threw the searchlight around
the water in an effort to obtain a last glimpse of him since I wished to ascertain whether
the water-pressure would flatten him as it theoretically should, or whether the body
would be unaffected, like those extraordinary dolphins. I did not, however, succeed in
finding my late companion, for the dolphins were massed thickly and obscuringly about
the conning tower.

That evening I regretted that I had not taken the ivory image surreptitiously from poor
Kienze's pocket as he left, for the memory of it fascinated me. I could not forget the
youthful, beautiful head with its leafy crown, though I am not by nature an artist. I was
also sorry that I had no one with whom to converse. Kienze, though not my mental
equal, was much better than no one. I did not sleep well that night, and wondered
exactly when the end would come. Surely, I had little enough chance of rescue.

The next day I ascended to the conning tower and commenced the customary
searchlight explorations. Northward the view was much the same as it had been all the
four days since we had sighted the bottom, but I perceived that the drifting of the U-29
was less rapid. As I swung the beam around to the south, I noticed that the ocean floor
ahead fell away in a marked declivity, and bore curiously regular blocks of stone in
certain places, disposed as if in accordance with definite patterns. The boat did not at
once descend to match the greater ocean depth, so I was soon forced to adjust the
searchlight to cast a sharply downward beam. Owing to the abruptness of the change a
wire was disconnected, which necessitated a delay of many minutes for repairs; but at
length the light streamed on again, flooding the marine valley below me.

I am not given to emotion of any kind, but my amazement was very great when I saw
what lay revealed in that electrical glow. And yet as one reared in the best Kultur of
Prussia, I should not have been amazed, for geology and tradition alike tell us of great
transpositions in oceanic and continental areas. What I saw was an extended and
elaborate array of ruined edifices; all of magnificent though unclassified architecture,
and in various stages of preservation. Most appeared to be of marble, gleaming whitely
in the rays of the searchlight, and the general plan was of a large city at the bottom of a
narrow valley, with numerous isolated temples and villas on the steep slopes above.
Roofs were fallen and columns were broken, but there still remained an air of
immemorially ancient splendor which nothing could efface.

Confronted at last with the Atlantis I had formerly deemed largely a myth, I was the
most eager of explorers. At the bottom of that valley a river once had flowed; for as I
examined the scene more closely I beheld the remains of stone and marble bridges and
sea-walls, and terraces and embankments once verdant and beautiful. In my enthusiasm
I became nearly as idiotic and sentimental as poor Kienze, and was very tardy in
noticing that the southward current had ceased at last, allowing the U-29 to settle slowly
down upon the sunken city as an airplane settles upon a town of the upper earth. I was
slow, to, in realizing that the school of unusual dolphins had vanished.

In about two hours the boat rested in a paved plaza close to the rocky wall of the valley.
On one side I could view the entire city as it sloped from the plaza down to the old
river-bank; on the other side, in startling proximity, I was confronted by the richly
ornate and perfectly preserved facade of a great building, evidently a temple, hollowed
from the solid rock. Of the original workmanship of this titanic thing I can only make
conjectures. The facade, of immense magnitude, apparently covers a continuous hollow
recess; for its windows are many and widely distributed. In the center yawns a great
open door, reached by an impressive flight of steps, and surrounded by exquisite
carvings like the figures of Bacchanals in relief. Foremost of all are the great columns
and frieze, both decorated with sculptures of inexpressible beauty; obviously portraying
idealized pastoral scenes and processions of priests and priestesses bearing strange
ceremonial devices in adoration of a radiant god. The art is of the most phenomenal
perfection, largely Hellenic in idea, yet strangely individual. It imparts an impression of
terrible antiquity, as though it were the remotest rather than the immediate ancestor of
Greek art. Nor can I doubt that every detail of this massive product was fashioned from
the virgin hillside rock of our planet. It is palpably a part of the valley wall, though how
the vast interior was ever excavated I cannot imagine. Perhaps a cavern or series of
caverns furnished the nucleus. Neither age nor submersion has corroded the pristine
grandeur of this awful fane--for fane indeed it must be--and today after thousands of
years it rests untarnished and inviolate in the endless night and silence of an ocean-
chasm.

I cannot reckon the number of hours I spent in gazing at the sunken city with its
buildings, arches, statues, and bridges, and the colossal temple with its beauty and
mystery. Though I knew that death was near, my curiosity was consuming; and I threw
the searchlight beam about in eager quest. The shaft of light permitted me to learn many
details, but refused to show anything within the gaping door of the rock-hewn temple;
and after a time I turned off the current, conscious of the need of conserving power. The
rays were now perceptibly dimmer than they had been during the weeks of drifting. And
as if sharpened by the coming deprivation of light, my desire to explore the watery
secrets grew. I, a German, should be the first to tread those eon--forgotten ways!

I produced and examined a deep-sea diving suit of jointed metal, and experimented with
the portable light and air regenerator. Though I should have trouble in managing the
double hatches alone, I believed I could overcome all obstacles with my scientific skill
and actually walk about the dead city in person.

On August 16 I effected an exit from the U-29, and laboriously made my way through
the ruined and mud-choked streets to the ancient river. I found no skeletons or other
human remains, but gleaned a wealth of archeological lore from sculptures and coins.
Of this I cannot now speak save to utter my awe at a culture in the full noon of glory
when cave-dwellers roamed Europe and the Nile flowed unwatched to the sea. Others,
guided by this manuscript if it shall ever be found, must unfold the mysteries at which I
can only hint. I returned to the boat as my electric batteries grew feeble, resolved to
explore the rock temple on the following day.

On the 17th, as my impulse to search out the mystery of the temple waxed still more
insistent, a great disappointment befell me; for I found that the materials needed to
replenish the portable light had perished in the mutiny of those pigs in July. My rage
was unbounded, yet my German sense forbade me to venture unprepared into an utterly
black interior which might prove the lair of some indescribable marine monster or a
labyrinth of passages from whose windings I could never extricate myself. All I could
do was to turn on the waning searchlight of the U-29, and with its aid walk up the
temple steps and study the exterior carvings. The shaft of light entered the door at an
upward angle, and I peered in to see if I could glimpse anything, but all in vain. Not
even the roof was visible; and though I took a step or two inside after testing the floor
with a staff, I dared not go farther. Moreover, for the first time in my life I experienced
the emotion of dread. I began to realize how some of poor Kienze's moods had arisen,
for as the temple drew me more and more, I feared its aqueous abysses with a blind and
mounting terror. Returning to the submarine, I turned off the lights and sat thinking in
the dark. Electricity must now be saved for emergencies.

Saturday the 18th I spent in total darkness, tormented by thoughts and memories that
threatened to overcome my German will. Kienze had gone mad and perished before
reaching this sinister remnant of a past unwholesomely remote, and had advised me to
go with him. Was, indeed, Fate preserving my reason only to draw me irresistibly to an
end more horrible and unthinkable than any man has dreamed of? Clearly, my nerves
were sorely taxed, and I must cast off these impressions of weaker men.

I could not sleep Saturday night, and turned on the lights regardless of the future. It was
annoying that the electricity should not last out the air and provisions. I revived my
thoughts of euthanasia, and examined my automatic pistol. Toward morning I must
have dropped asleep with the lights on, for I awoke in darkness yesterday afternoon to
find the batteries dead. I struck several matches in succession, and desperately regretted
the improvidence which had caused us long ago to use up the few candles we carried.
After the fading of the last match I dared to waste, I sat very quietly without a light. As I
considered the inevitable end my mind ran over preceding events, and developed a
hitherto dormant impression which would have caused a weaker and more superstitious
man to shudder. The head of the radiant god in the sculptures on the rock temple is the
same as that carven bit of ivory which the dead sailor brought from the sea and which
poor Kienze carried back into the sea.

I was a little dazed by this coincidence, but did not become terrified. It is only the
inferior thinker who hastens to explain the singular and the complex by the primitive
shortcut of supernaturalism. The coincidence was strange, but I was too sound a
reasoner to connect circumstances which admit of no logical connection, or to associate
in any uncanny fashion the disastrous events which had led from the Victory affair to
my present plight. Feeling the need of more rest, I took a sedative and secured some
more sleep. My nervous condition was reflected in my dreams, for I seemed to hear the
cries of drowning persons, and to see dead faces pressing against the portholes of the
boat. And among the dead faces was the living, mocking face of the youth with the
ivory image.

I must be careful how I record my awakening today, for I am unstrung, and much
hallucination is necessarily mixed with fact. Psychologically my case is most
interesting, and I regret that it cannot be observed scientifically by a competent German
authority. Upon opening my eyes my first sensation was an overmastering desire to visit
the rock temple; a desire which grew every instant, yet which I automatically sought to
resist through some emotion of fear which operated in the reverse direction. Next there
came to me the impression of light amidst the darkness of dead batteries, and I seemed
to see a sort of phosphorescent glow in the water through the porthole which opened
toward the temple. This aroused my curiosity, for I knew of no deep--sea organism
capable of emitting such luminosity.

But before I could investigate there came a third impression which because of its
irrationality caused me to doubt the objectivity of anything my senses might record. It
was an aural delusion; a sensation of rhythmic, melodic sound as of some wild yet
beautiful chant or choral hymn, coming from the outside through the absolutely sound--
proof hull of the U-29. Convinced of my psychological and nervous abnormallty, I
lighted some matches and poured a stiff dose of sodium bromide solution, which
seemed to calm me to the extent of dispelling the illusion of sound. But the
phosphorescence remained, and I had difficulty in repressing a childish impulse to go to
the porthole and seek its source. It was horribly realistic, and I could soon distinguish by
its aid the familiar objects around me, as well as the empty sodium bromide glass of
which I had had no former visual impression in its present location. This last
circumstance made me ponder, and I crossed the room and touched the glass. It was
indeed in the place where I had seemed to see it. Now I knew that the light was either
real or part of an hallucination so fixed and consistent that I could not hope to dispel it,
so abandoning all resistance I ascended to the conning tower to look for the luminous
agency. Might it not actually be another U-boat, offering possibilities of rescue?

It is well that the reader accept nothing which follows as objective truth, for since the
events transcend natural law, they are necessarily the subjective and unreal creations of
my overtaxed mind. When I attained the conning tower I found the sea in general far
less luminous than I had expected. There was no animal or vegetable phosphorescence
about, and the city that sloped down to the river was invisible in blackness. What I did
see was not spectacular, not grotesque or terrifying, yet it removed my last vestige of
trust in my consciousness. For the door and windows of the undersea temple hewn from
the rocky hill were vividly aglow with a flickering radiance, as from a mighty altar-
flame far within.

Later incidents are chaotic. As I stared at the uncannily lighted door and windows, I
became subject to the most extravagant visions--visions so extravagant that I cannot
even relate them. I fancied that I discerned objects in the temple; objects both stationary
and moving; and seemed to hear again the unreal chant that had floated to me when first
I awaked. And over all rose thoughts and fears which centered in the youth from the sea
and the ivory image whose carving was duplicated on the frieze and columns of the
temple before me. I thought of poor Kienze, and wondered where his body rested with
the image he had carried back into the sea. He had warned me of something, and I had
not heeded--but he was a soft-headed Rhinelander who went mad at troubles a Prussian
could bear with ease.

The rest is very simple. My impulse to visit and enter the temple has now become an
inexplicable and imperious command which ultimately cannot be denied. My own
German will no longer controls my acts, and volition is henceforward possible only in
minor matters. Such madness it was which drove Kienze to his death, bare-headed and
unprotected in the ocean; but I am a Prussian and a man of sense, and will use to the last
what little will I have. When first I saw that I must go, I prepared my diving suit,
helmet, and air regenerator for instant donning, and immediately commenced to write
this hurried chronicle in the hope that it may some day reach the world. I shall seal the
manuscript in a bottle and entrust it to the sea as I leave the U-29 for ever.

I have no fear, not even from the prophecies of the madman Kienze. What I have seen
cannot be true, and I know that this madness of my own will at most lead only to
suffocation when my air is gone. The light in the temple is a sheer delusion, and I shall
die calmly like a German, in the black and forgotten depths. This demoniac laughter
which I hear as I write comes only from my own weakening brain. So I will carefully
don my suit and walk boldly up the steps into the primal shrine, that silent secret of
unfathomed waters and uncounted years.

THE TERRIBLE OLD MAN

The inhabitants of Kingsport say and think many things about the Terrible Old Man
which generally keep him safe from the attention of gentlemen like Mr. Ricci and his
colleagues, despite the almost certain fact that he hides a fortune of indefinite magnitude
somewhere about his musty and venerable abode. He is, in truth, a very strange person,
believed to have been a captain of East India clipper ships in his day; so old that no one
can remember when he was young, and so taciturn that few know his real name. Among
the gnarled trees in the front yard of his aged and neglected place he maintains a strange
collection of large stones, oddly grouped and painted so that they resemble the idols in
some obscure Eastern temple. This collection frightens away most of the small boys
who love to taunt the Terrible Old Man about his long white hair and beard, or to break
the small--paned windows of his dwelling with wicked missiles; but there are other
things which frighten the older and more curious folk who sometimes steal up to the
house to peer in through the dusty panes. These folk say that on a table in a bare room
on the ground floor are many peculiar bottles, in each a small piece of lead suspended
pendulum-wise from a string. And they say that the Terrible Old Man talks to these
bottles, addressing them by such names as Jack, Scar--Face, Long Tom, Spanish Joe,
Peters, and Mate Ellis, and that whenever he speaks to a bottle the little lead pendulum
within makes certain definite vibrations as if in answer.

Those who have watched the tall, lean, Terrible Old Man in these peculiar
conversations, do not watch him again. But Angelo Ricci and Joe Czanek and Manuel
Silva were not of Kingsport blood; they were of that new and heterogeneous alien stock
which lies outside the charmed circle of New England life and traditions, and they saw
in the Terrible Old Man merely a tottering, almost helpless grey-beard, who could not
walk without the aid of his knotted cane, and whose thin, weak hands shook pitifully.
They were really quite sorry in their way for the lonely, unpopular old fellow, whom
everybody shunned, and at whom all the dogs barked singularly. But business is
business, and to a robber whose soul is in his profession, there is a lure and a challenge
about a very old and very feeble man who has no account at the bank, and who pays for
his few necessities at the village store with Spanish gold and silver minted two centuries
ago.

Messrs. Ricci, Czanek, and Silva selected the night of April 11th for their call. Mr.
Ricci and Mr. Silva were to interview the poor old gentleman, whilst Mr. Czanek waited
for them and their presumable metallic burden with a covered motor-car in Ship Street,
by the gate in the tall rear wall of their host's grounds. Desire to avoid needless
explanations in case of unexpected police intrusions prompted these plans for a quiet
and unostentatious departure.

As prearranged, the three adventurers started out separately in order to prevent any evil-
minded suspicions afterward. Messrs. Ricci and Silva met in Water Street by the old
man's front gate, and although they did not like the way the moon shone down upon the
painted stones through the budding branches of the gnarled trees, they had more
important things to think about than mere idle superstition. They feared it might be
unpleasant work making the Terrible Old Man loquacious concerning his hoarded gold
and silver, for aged sea--captains are notably stubborn and perverse. Still, he was very
old and very feeble, and there were two visitors. Messrs. Ricci and Silva were
experienced in the art of making unwilling persons voluble, and the screams of a weak
and exceptionally venerable man can be easily muffled. So they moved up to the one
lighted window and heard the Terrible Old Man talking childishly to his bottles with
pendulums. Then they donned masks and knocked politely at the weather-stained oaken
door.

Waiting seemed very long to Mr. Czanek as he fidgeted restlessly in the covered motor-
car by the Terrible Old Man's back gate in Ship Street. He was more than ordinarily
tender-hearted, and he did not like the hideous screams he had heard in the ancient
house just after the hour appointed for the deed. Had he not told his colleagues to be as
gentle as possible with the pathetic old sea-captain? Very nervously he watched that
narrow oaken gate in the high and ivy-clad stone wall. Frequently he consulted his
watch, and wondered at the delay. Had the old man died before revealing where his
treasure was hidden, and had a thorough search become necessary? Mr. Czanek did not
like to wait so long in the dark in such a place. Then he sensed a soft tread or tapping on
the walk inside the gate, heard a gentle fumbling at the rusty latch, and saw the narrow,
heavy door swing inward. And in the pallid glow of the single dim street-lamp he
strained his eyes to see what his colleagues had brought out of that sinister house which
loomed so close behind. But when he looked, he did not see what he had expected; for
his colleagues were not there at all, but only the Terrible Old Man leaning quietly on his
knotted cane and smiling hideously. Mr. Czanek had never before noticed the colour of
that man's eyes; now he saw that they were yellow.

Little things make considerable excitement in little towns, which is the reason that
Kingsport people talked all that spring and summer about the three unidentifiable
bodies, horribly slashed as with many cutlasses, and horribly mangled as by the tread of
many cruel boot-heels, which the tide washed in. And some people even spoke of things
as trivial as the deserted motor-car found in Ship Street, or certain especially inhuman
cries, probably of a stray animal or migratory bird, heard in the night by wakeful
citizens. But in this idle village gossip the Terrible Old Man took no interest at all. He
was by nature reserved, and when one is aged and feeble, one's reserve is doubly strong.
Besides, so ancient a sea-captain must have witnessed scores of things much more
stirring in the far-off days of his unremembered youth.

The Thing on the Doorstep

CONTENTS

I
II
III
IV
V

It is true that I have sent six bullets through the head of my best friend, and yet I hope to
show by this statement that I am not his murderer. At first I shall be called a madman--
madder than the man I shot in his cell at the Arkham Sanitarium. Later some of my
readers will weigh each statement, correlate it with the known facts, and ask themselves
how I could have believed otherwise than I did after facing the evidence of that horror--
that thing on the doorstep.

Until then I also saw nothing but madness in the wild tales I have acted on. Even now I
ask myself whether I was misled--or whether I am not mad after all. I do not know--but
others have strange things to tell of Edward and Asenath Derby, and even the stolid
police are at their wits' ends to account for that last terrible visit. They have tried weakly
to concoct a theory of a ghastly jest or warning by discharged servants, yet they know in
their hearts that the truth is something infinitely more terrible and incredible.

So I say that I have not murdered Edward Derby. Rather have I avenged him, and in so
doing purged the earth of a horror whose survival might have loosed untold terrors on
all mankind. There are black zones of shadow close to our daily paths, and now and
then some evil soul breaks a passage through. When that happens, the man who knows
must strike before reckoning the consequences.
I have known Edward Pickman Derby all his life. Eight years my junior, he was so
precocious that we had much in common from the time he was eight and I was sixteen.
He was the most phenomenal child scholar I have ever known, and at seven was writing
verse of a sombre, fantastic, almost morbid cast which astonished the tutors surrounding
him. Perhaps his private education and coddled seclusion had something to do with his
premature flowering. An only child, he had organic weaknesses which startled his
doting parents and caused them to keep him closely chained to their side. He was never
allowed out without his nurse, and seldom had a chance to play unconstrainedly with
other children. All this doubtless fostered a strange secretive life in the boy, with
imagination as his one avenue of freedom.

At any rate, his juvenile learning was prodigious and bizarre; and his facile writings
such as to captivate me despite my greater age. About that time I had leanings toward
art of a somewhat grotesque cast, and I found in this younger child a rare kindred spirit.
What lay behind our joint love of shadows and marvels was, no doubt, the ancient,
mouldering, and subtly fearsome town in which we live--witch-cursed, legend-haunted
Arkham, whose huddled, sagging gambrel roofs and crumbling Georgian balustrades
brood out the centuries beside the darkly muttering Miskatonic.

As time went by I turned to architecture and gave up my design of illustrating a book of

Edward's demoniac poems, yet our comradeship suffered no lessening. Young Derby's
odd genius developed remarkably, and in his eighteenth year his collected nightmare-
lyrics made a real sensation when issued under the title Azathoth and Other Horrors. He
was a close correspondent of the notorious Baudelairean poet Justin Geoffrey, who
wrote The People of the Monolith and died screaming in a madhouse in 1926 after a
visit to a sinister, ill-regarded village in Hungary.

In self-reliance and practical affairs, however, Derby was greatly retarded because of his
coddled existence. His health had improved, but his habits of childish dependence were
fostered by over-careful parents, so that he never travelled alone, made independent
decisions, or assumed responsibilities. It was early seen that he would not be equal to a
struggle in the business or professional arena, but the family fortune was so ample that
this formed no tragedy. As he grew to years of manhood he retained a deceptive aspect
of boyishness. Blond and blue-eyed, he had the fresh complexion of a child; and his
attempt to raise a moustache were discernible only with difficulty. His voice was soft
and light, and his unexercised life gave him a juvenile chubbiness rather than the
paunchiness of premature middle age. He was of good height, and his handsome face
would have made him a notable gallant had not his shyness held him to seclusion and
bookishness.

Derby's parents took him abroad every summer, and he was quick to seize on the
surface aspects of European thought and expression. His Poe-like talents turned more
and more toward the decadent, and other artistic sensitiveness and yearnings were half-
aroused in him. We had great discussions in those days. I had been through Harvard,
had studied in a Boston architect's office, had married, and had finally returned to
Arkham to practise my profession--settling in the family homestead in Saltonstall Street
since my father had moved to Florida for his health. Edward used to call almost every
evening, till I came to regard him as one of the household. He had a characteristic way
of ringing the doorbell or sounding the knocker that grew to be a veritable code signal,
so that after dinner I always listened for the familiar three brisk strokes followed by two
more after a pause. Less frequently I would visit at his house and note with envy the
obscure volumes in his constantly growing library.

Derby went through Miskatonic University in Arkahm since his parents would not let
him board away from them. He entered at sixteen and completed his course in three
years, majoring in English and French literature and receiving high marks in everything
but mathematics and the sciences. He mingled very little with the other students, though
looking enviously at the "daring" or "Bohemian" set--whose superficially "smart"
language and meaningless ironic pose he aped, and whose dubious conduct he wished
he dared adopt.

What he did do was to become an almost fanatical devotee of subterranean magical lore,
for which Miskatonic's library was and is famous. Always a dweller on the surface of
phantasy and strangeness, he now delved deep into the actual runes and riddles left by a
fabulous past for the guidance or puzzlement of posterity. He read things like the
frightful Book of Eibon, the Unaussprechlichen Kulten of von Junzt, and the forbidden
Necronomicon of the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred, though he did not tell his parents he
had seen them. Edward was twenty when my son and only child was born, and seemed
pleased when I named the newcomer Edward Derby Upton after him.

By the time he was twenty-five Edward Derby was a prodigiously learned man and a
fairly well known poet and fantaisiste though his lack of contacts and responsibilities
had slowed down his literary growth by making his products derivative and over-
bookish. I was perhaps his closest friend--finding him an inexhaustible mine of vital
theoretical topics, while he relied on me for advice in whatever matters he did not wish
to refer to his parents. He remained single--more through shyness, inertia, and parental
protectiveness than through inclination--and moved in society only to the slightest and
most perfunctory extent. When the war came both health and ingrained timidity kept
him at home. I went to Plattsburg for a commission but never got overseas.

So the years wore on. Edward's mother died when he was thirty-four and for months he
was incapacitated by some odd psychological malady. His father took him to Europe,
however, and he managed to pull out of his trouble without visible effects. Afterward he
seemed to feel a sort of grotesque exhilaration, as if of partial escape from some unseen
bondage. He began to mingle in the more "advanced" college set despite his middle age,
and was present at some extremely wild doings--on one occasion paying heavy
blackmail (which he borrowed of me) to keep his presence at a certain affair from his
father's notice. Some of the whispered rumors about the wild Miskatonic set were
extremely singular. There was even talk of black magic and of happenings utterly
beyond credibility.

II

Edward was thirty-eight when he met Asenath Waite. She was, I judge, about twenty-
three at the time; and was taking a special course in mediaeval metaphysics at
Miskatonic. The daughter of a friend of mine had met her before--in the Hall School at
Kingsport--and had been inclined to shun her because of her odd reputation. She was
dark, smallish, and very good-looking except for overprotuberant eyes; but something in
her expression alienated extremely sensitive people. It was, however, largely her origin
and conversation which caused average folk to avoid her. She was one of the Innsmouth
Waites, and dark legends have clustered for generations about crumbling, half-deserted
Innsmouth and its people. There are tales of horrible bargains about the year 1850, and
of a strange element "not quite human" in the ancient families of the run-down fishing
port--tales such as only old--time Yankees can devise and repeat with proper
awesomeness.

Asenath's case was aggravated by the fact that she was Ephraim Waite's daughter--the
child of his old age by an unknown wife who always went veiled. Ephraim lived in a
half-decayed mansion in Washington Street, Innsmouth, and those who had seen the
place (Arkham folk avoid going to Innsmouth whenever they can) declared that the attic
windows were always boarded, and that strange sounds sometimes floated from within
as evening drew on. The old man was known to have been a prodigious magical student
in his day, and legend averred that he could raise or quell storms at sea according to his
whim. I had seen him once or twice in my youth as he came to Arkham to consult
forbidden tomes at the college library, and had hated his wolfish, saturnine face with its
tangle of iron-grey beard. He had died insane--under rather queer circumstances--just
before his daughter (by his will made a nominal ward of the principal) entered the Hall
School, but she had been his morbidly avid pupil and looked fiendishly like him at
times.

The friend whose daughter had gone to school with Asenath Waite repeated many
curious things when the news of Edward's acquaintance with her began to spread about.
Asenath, it seemed, had posed as a kind of magician at school; and had really seemed
able to accomplish some highly baffling marvels. She professed to be able to raise
thunderstorms, though her seeming success was generally laid to some uncanny knack
at prediction. All animals markedly disliked her, and she could make any dog howl by
certain motions of her right hand. There were times when she displayed snatches of
knowledge and language very singular--and very shocking--for a young girl; when she
would frighten her schoolmates with leers and winks of an inexplicable kind, and would
seem to extract an obscene zestful irony from her present situation.

Most unusual, though, were the well-attested cases of her influence over other persons.
She was, beyond question, a genuine hypnotist. By gazing peculiarly at a fellow-student
she would often give the latter a distinct feeling of exchanged personality--as if the
subject were placed momentarily in the magician's body and able to stare half across the
room at her real body, whose eyes blazed and protruded with an alien expression.
Asenath often made wild claims about the nature of consciousness and about its
independence of the physical frame--or at least from the life-processes of the physical
frame. Her crowning rage, however, was that she was not a man; since she believed a
male brain had certain unique and far-reaching cosmic powers. Given a man's brain, she
declared, she could not only equal but surpass her father in mastery of unknown forces.

Edward met Asenath at a gathering of "intelligentsia" held in one of the students' rooms,
and could talk of nothing else when he came to see me the next day. He had found her
full of the interests and erudition which engrossed him most, and was in addition wildly
taken with her appearance. I had never seen the young woman, and recalled casual
references only faintly, but I knew who she was. It seemed rather regrettable that Derby
should become so upheaved about her; but I said nothing to discourage him, since
infatuation thrives on opposition. He was not, he said, mentioning her to his father.
In the next few weeks I heard of very little but Asenath from young Derby. Others now
remarked Edward's autumnal gallantry, though they agreed that he did not look even
nearly his actual age, or seem at all inappropriate as an escort for his bizarre divinity. He
was only a trifle paunchy despite his indolence and self-indulgence, and his face was
absolutely without lines. Asenath, on the other hand, had the premature crow's feet
which come from the exercises of an intense will.

About this time Edward brought the girl to call on me, and I at once saw that his interest
was by no means one-sided. She eyed him continually with an almost predatory air, and
I perceived that their intimacy was beyond untangling. Soon afterward I had a visit from
old Mr. Derby, whom I had always admired and respected. He had heard the tales of his
son's new friendship, and had wormed the whole truth out of "the boy."Edward meant to
marry Asenath, and had even been looking at houses in the suburbs. Knowing my
usually great influence with his son, the father wondered if I could help to break the ill-
advised affair off; but I regretfully expressed my doubts. This time it was not a question
of Edward's weak will but of the woman's strong will. The perennial child had
transferred his dependence from the parental image to a new and stronger image, and
nothing could be done about it.

The wedding was performed a month later--by a justice of the peace, according to the
bride's request. Mr. Derby, at my advice, offered no opposition, and he, my wife, my
son, and I attended the brief ceremony--the other guests being wild young people from
the college. Asenath had bought the old Crowninshield place in the country at the end of
High Street, and they proposed to settle there after a short trip to Innsmouth, whence
three servants and some books and household goods were to be brought. It was probably
not so much consideration for Edward and his father as a personal wish to be near the
college, its library, and its crowd of "sophisticates," that made Asenath settle in Arkham
instead of returning permanently home.

When Edward called on me after the honeymoon I thought he looked slightly changed.
Asenath had made him get rid of the undeveloped moustache, but there was more than
that. He looked soberer and more thoughtful, his habitual pout of childish rebelliousness
being exchanged for a look almost of genuine sadness. I was puzzled to decide whether
I liked or disliked the change. Certainly he seemed for the moment more normally adult
than ever before. Perhaps the marriage was a good thing--might not the change of
dependence form a start toward actual neutralisaton, leading ultimately to responsible
independence? He came alone, for Asenath was very busy. She had brought a vast store
of books and apparatus from Innsmouth (Derby shuddered as he spoke the name), and
was finishing the restoration of the Crowninshield house and grounds.

Her home--in that town--was a rather disgusting place, but certain objects in it had
taught him some surprising things. He was progressing fast in esoteric lore now that he
had Asenath's guidance. Some of the experiments she proposed were very daring and
radical--he did not feel at liberty to describe them--but he had confidence in her powers
and intentions. The three servants were very queer--an incredibly aged couple who had
been with old Ephraim and referred occasionally to him and to Asenath's dead mother in
a cryptic way, and a swarthy young wench who had marked anomalies of feature and
seemed to exude a perpetual odour of fish.

III
For the next two years I saw less and less of Derby. A fortnight would sometimes slip
by without the familiar three-and-two strokes at the front door; and when he did call--or
when, as happened with increasing infrequency, I called on him--he was very little
disposed to converse on vital topics. He had become secretive about those occult studies
which he used to describe and discuss so minutely, and preferred not to talk of his wife.
She had aged tremendously since her marriage, till now--oddly enough--she seemed the
elder of the two. Her face held the most concentratedly determined expression I had
ever seen, and her whole aspect seemed to gain a vague, unplaceable repulsiveness. My
wife and son noticed it as much as I, and we all ceased gradually to call on her--for
which, Edward admitted in one of his boyishly tactless moments, she was unmitigatedly
grateful. Occasionally the Derbys would go on long trips--ostensibly to Europe, though
Edward sometimes hinted at obscurer destinations.

It was after the first year that people began talking about the change in Edward Derby. It
was very casual talk, for the change was purely psychological; but it brought up some
interesting points. Now and then, it seemed Edward was observed to wear an expression
and to do things wholly incompatible with his usual flabby nature. For example--
although in the old days he could not drive a car, he was now seen occasionally to dash
into or out of the old Crowninshield driveway with Asenath's powerful Packard,
handling it like a master, and meeting traffic entanglements with a skill and
determination utterly alien to his accustomed nature. In such cases he seemed always to
be just back from some trip or just starting on one--what sort of trip, no one could guess,
although he mostly favoured the Innsmouth road.

Oddly, the metamorphosis did not seem altogether pleasing. People said he looked too
much like his wife, or like old Ephraim Waite himself, in these moments--or perhaps
these moments seemed unnatural because they were so rare. Sometimes, hours after
starting out in this way, he would return listlessly sprawled on the rear seat of the car
while an obviously hired chauffeur or mechanic drove. Also, his preponderant aspect on
the streets during his decreasing round of social contacts (including, I may say, his calls
on me) was the old-time indecisive one--its irresponsible childishness even more
marked than in the past. While Asenath's face aged, Edward--aside from those
exceptional occasions--actually relaxed into a kind of exaggerated immaturity, save
when a trace of the new sadness or understanding would flash across it. It was really
very puzzling. Meanwhile the Derbys almost dropped out of the gay college circle--not
through their own disgust, we heard, but because something about their present studies
shocked even the most callous of the other decadents.

It was in the third year of the marriage that Edward began to hint openly to me of a
certain fear and dissatisfaction. He would let fall remarks about things "going too far,"
and would talk darkly about the need of "gaining his identity."At first I ignored such
references, but in time I began to question him guardedly, remembering what my
friend's daughter had said about Asenath's hypnotic influence over the other girls at
school--the cases where students had thought they were in her body looking across the
room at themselves. This questioning seemed to make him at once alarmed and grateful,
and once he mumbled something about having a serious talk with me later. About this
time old Mr. Derby died, for which I was afterward very thankful. Edward was badly
upset, though by no means disorganized. He had seen astonishingly little of his parent
since his marriage, for Asenath had concentrated in herself all his vital sense of family
linkage. Some called him callous in his loss--especially since those jaunty and confident
moods in the car began to increase. He now wished to move back into the old family
mansion, but Asenath insisted on staying in the Crowninshield house to which she had
become well adjusted.

Not long afterward my wife heard a curious thing from a friend--one of the few who had
not dropped the Derbys. She had been out to the end of High Street to call on the
couple, and had seen a car shoot briskly out of the drive with Edward's oddly confident
and almost sneering face above the wheel. Ringing the bell, she had been told by the
repulsive wench that Asenath was also out; but had chanced to look at the house in
leaving. There, at one of Edward's library windows, she had glimpsed a hastily
withdrawn face--a face whose expression of pain, defeat, and wistful hopelessness was
poignant beyond description. It was--incredibly enough in view of its usual domineering
cast--Asenath's; yet the caller had vowed that in that instant the sad, muddled eyes of
poor Edward were gazing out from it.

Edward's calls now grew a trifle more frequent, and his hints occasionally became
concrete. What he said was not to be believed, even in centuried and legend-haunted
Arkham; but he threw out his dark lore with a sincerity and convincingness which made
one fear for his sanity. He talked about terrible meetings in lonely places, of cyclopean
ruins in the heart of the Maine woods beneath which vast staircases led down to abysses
of nighted secrets, of complex angles that led through invisible walls to other regions of
space and time, and of hideous exchanges of personality that permitted explorations in
remote and forbidden places, on other worlds, and in different space--time continua.

He would now and then back up certain crazy hints by exhibiting objects which utterly
nonplussed me--elusively coloured and bafflingly textured objects like nothing ever
heard of on earth, whose insane curves and surfaces answered no conceivable purpose,
and followed no conceivable geometry. These things, he said, came "from outside"; and
his wife knew how to get them. Sometimes--but always in frightened and ambiguous
whisper--he would suggest things about old Ephraim Waite, whom he had seen
occasionally at the college library in the old days. These adumbrations were never
specific, but seemed to revolve around some especially horrible doubt as to whether the
old wizard were really dead--in a spiritual as well as corporeal sense.

At times Derby would halt abruptly in his revelations, and I wondered whether Asenath
could possibly have divined his speech at a distance and cut him off through some
unknown sort of telepathic mesmerism--some power of the kind she had displayed at
school. Certainly, she suspected that he told me things, for as the weeks passed she tried
to stop his visits with words and glances of a most inexplicable potency. Only with
difficulty could he get to see me, for although he would pretend to be going somewhere
else, some invisible force would generally clog his motions or make him forget his
destination for the time being. His visits usually came when Asenath was way--"away in
her own body," as he once oddly put it. She always found out later--the servants
watched his goings and coming--but evidently she thought it inexpedient to do anything
drastic.

IV

Derby had been married more than three years on that August day when I got that
telegram from Maine. I had not seen him for two months, but had heard he was away
"on business."Asenath was supposed to be with him, though watchful gossip declared
there was someone upstairs in the house behind the doubly curtained windows. They
had watched the purchases made by the servants. And now the town marshal of
Chesuncook had wired of the draggled madman who stumbled out of the woods with
delirious ravings and screamed to me for protection. It was Edward--and he had been
just able to recall his own name and address.

Chesuncook is close to the wildest, deepest, and least explored forest belt in Maine, and
it took a whole day of feverish jolting through fantastic and forbidding scenery to get
there in a car. I found Derby in a cell at the town farm, vacillating between frenzy and
apathy. He knew me at once, and began pouring out a meaningless, half-incoherent
torrent of words in my direction.

"Dan, for God's sake! The pit of the shoggoths! Down the six thousand steps...the
abomination of abominations...I never would let her take me, and then I found myself
there--Ia! Shub-Niggurath!--The shape rose up from the altar, and there were five
hundred that howled--The Hooded Thing bleated 'Kamog! Kamog!'--that was old
Ephraim's secret name in the coven--I was there, where she promised she wouldn't take
me--A minute before I was locked in the library, and then I was there where she had
gone with my body--in the place of utter blasphemy, the unholy pit where the black
realm begins and the watcher guards the gate--I saw a shoggoth--it changed shape--I
can't stand it--I'll kill her if she ever sends me there again--I'll kill that entity--her, him,
it--I'll kill it! I'll kill it with my own hands!"

It took me an hour to quiet him, but he subsided at last. The next day I got him decent
clothes in the village, and set out with him for Arkham. His fury of hysteria was spent,
and he was inclined to be silent, though he began muttering darkly to himself when the
car passed through Augusta--as if the sight of a city aroused unpleasant memories. It
was clear that he did not wish to go home; and considering the fantastic delusions he
seemed to have about his wife--delusions undoubtedly springing from some actual
hypnotic ordeal to which he had been subjected--I thought it would be better if he did
not. I would, I resolved, put him up myself for a time; no matter what unpleasantness it
would make with Asenath. Later I would help him get a divorce, for most assuredly
there were mental factors which made this marriage suicidal for him. When we struck
open country again Derby's muttering faded away, and I let him nod and drowse on the
seat beside me as I drove.

During our sunset dash through Portland the muttering commenced again, more
distinctly than before, and as I listened I caught a stream of utterly insane drivel about
Asenath. The extent to which she had preyed on Edward's nerves was plain, for he had
woven a whole set of hallucinations around her. His present predicament, he mumbled
furtively, was only one of a long series. She was getting hold of him, and he knew that
some day she would never let go. Even now she probably let him go only when she had
to, because she couldn't hold on long at a time. She constantly took his body and went to
nameless places for nameless rites, leaving him in her body and locking him upstairs--
but sometimes she couldn't hold on, and he would find himself suddenly in his own
body again in some far-off, horrible, and perhaps unknown place. Sometimes she'd get
hold of him again and sometimes she couldn't. Often he was left stranded somewhere as
I had found him--time and again he had to find his way home from frightful distances,
getting somebody to drive the car after he found it.
The worst thing was that she was holding on to him longer and longer at a time. She
wanted to be a man--to be fully human--that was why she got hold of him. She had
sensed the mixture of fine-wrought brain and weak will in him. Some day she would
crowd him out and disappear with his body--disappear to become a great magician like
her father and leave him marooned in that female shell that wasn't even quite human.
Yes, he knew about the Innsmouth blood now. There had been traffick with things from
the sea--it was horrible...And old Ephraim--he had known the secret, and when he grew
old did a hideous thing to keep alive--he wanted to live forever--Asenath would
succeed--one successful demonstration had taken place already.

As Derby muttered on I turned to look at him closely, verifying the impression of

change which an earlier scrutiny had given me. Paradoxically, he seemed in better shape
than usual--harder, more normally developed, and without the trace of sickly flabbiness
caused by his indolent habits. It was as if he had been really active and properly
exercised for the first time in his coddled life, and I judged that Asenath's force must
have pushed him into unwonted channels of motion and alertness. But just now his
mind was in a pitiable state; for he was mumbling wild extravagances about his wife,
about black magic, about old Ephraim, and about some revelation which would
convince even me. He repeated names which I recognized from bygone browsings in
forbidden volumes, and at times made me shudder with a certain thread of mythological
consistency--or convincing coherence--which ran through his maundering. Again and
again he would pause, as if to gather courage for some final and terrible disclosure.

"Dan, Dan, don't you remember him--wild eyes and the unkempt beard that never
turned white? He glared at me once, and I never forgot it. Now she glares that way. And
I know why! He found it in the Necronomicon--the formula. I don't dare tell you the
page yet, but when I do you can read and understand. Then you will know what has
engulfed me. On, on, on, on--body to body to body--he means never to die. The life-
glow--he knows how to break the link...it can flicker on a while even when the body is
dead. I'll give you hints and maybe you'll guess. Listen, Dan--do you know why my
wife always takes such pains with that silly backhand writing? Have you ever seen a
manuscript of old Ephraim's? Do you want to know why I shivered when I saw some
hasty notes Asenath had jotted down?

"Asenath--is there such a person? Why did they half-think there was poison in old
Ephraim's stomach? Why do the Gilmans whisper about the way he shrieked--like a
frightened child--when he went mad and Asenath locked him up in the padded attic
room where--the other--had been? Was it old Ephraim's soul that was locked in? Who
locked in whom? Why had he been looking for months for someone with a fine mind
and a weak will?--Why did he curse that his daughter wasn't a son? Tell me? Daniel
Upton--what devilish exchange was perpetrated in the house of horror where that
blasphemous monster had his trusting, weak-willed half-human child at his mercy?
Didn't he make it permanent--as she'll do in the end with me? Tell me why that thing
that calls itself Asenath writes differently off guard, so that you can't tell its script from-
-"

Then the thing happened. Derby's voice was rising to a thin treble scream as he raved,
when suddenly it was shut off with an almost mechanical click. I thought of those other
occasions at my home when his confidences had abruptly ceased--when I had half-
fancied that some obscure telepathic wave of Asenath's mental force was intervening to
keep him silent. This, though, was something altogether different--and, I felt, infinitely
more horrible. The face beside me was twisted almost unrecognizably for a moment,
while through the whole body there passed a shivering motion--as if all the bones,
organs, muscles, nerves, and glands were adjusting themselves to a radically different
posture, set of stresses, and general personality.

Just where the supreme horror lay, I could not for my life tell; yet there swept over me
such a swamping wave of sickness and repulsion--such a freezing, petrifying sense of
utter alienage and abnormality--that my grasp of the wheel grew feeble and uncertain.
The figure beside me seemed less like a lifelong friend than like some monstrous
intrusion from outer space--some damnable, utterly accursed focus of unknown and
malign cosmic forces.

I had faltered only a moment, but before another moment was over my companion had
seized the wheel and forced me to change places with him. The dusk was now very
thick, and the lights of Portland far behind, so I could not see much of his face. The
blaze of his eyes, though, was phenomenal; and I knew that he must now be in that
queerly energized state--so unlike his usual self--which so many people had noticed. It
seemed odd and incredible that listless Edward Derby--he who could never assert
himself, and who had never learned to drive--should be ordering me about and taking
the wheel of my own car, yet that was precisely what had happened. He did not speak
for some time, and in my inexplicable horror I was glad he did not.

In the lights of Biddeford and Saco I saw his firmly set mouth, and shivered at the blaze
of his eyes. The people were right--he did look damnably like his wife and like old
Ephraim when in these moods. I did not wonder that the moods were disliked--there
was certainly something unnatural in them, and I felt the sinister element all the more
because of the wild ravings I had been hearing. This man, for all my lifelong knowledge
of Edward Pickman Derby, was a stranger--an intrusion of some sort from the black
abyss.

He did not speak until we were on a dark stretch of road, and when he did his voice
seemed utterly unfamiliar. It was deeper, firmer, and more decisive than I had ever
known it to be; while its accent and pronunciation were altogether changed--though
vaguely, remotely, and rather disturbingly recalling something I could not quite place.
There was, I thought, a trace of very profound and very genuine irony in the timbre--not
the flashy, meaninglessly jaunty pseudo-irony of the callow "sophisticate," which Derby
had habitually affected, but something grim, basic, pervasive, and potentially evil. I
marvelled at the self-possession so soon following the spell of panic-struck muttering.

"I hope you'll forget my attack back there, Upton," he was saying. "You know what my
nerves are, and I guess you can excuse such things. I'm enormously grateful, of course,
for this lift home.

"And you must forget, too, any crazy things I may have been saying about my wife--and
about things in general. That's what comes from overstudy in a field like mine. My
philosophy is full of bizarre concepts, and when the mind gets worn out it cooks up all
sorts of imaginary concrete applications. I shall take a rest from now on--you probably
won't see me for some time, and you needn't blame Asenath for it.
"This trip was a bit queer, but it's really very simple. There are certain Indian relics in
the north wood--standing stones, and all that--which mean a good deal in folklore, and
Asenath and I are following that stuff up. It was a hard search, so I seem to have gone
off my head. I must send somebody for the car when I get home. A month's relaxation
will put me on my feet."

I do not recall just what my own part of the conversation was, for the baffling alienage
of my seatmate filled all my consciousness. With every moment my feeling of elusive
cosmic horror increased, till at length I was in a virtual delirium of longing for the end
of the drive. Derby did not offer to relinquish the wheel, and I was glad of the speed
with which Portsmouth and Newburyport flashed by.

At the junction where the main highway runs inland and avoids Innsmouth, I was half-
afraid my driver would take the bleak shore road that goes through that damnable place.
He did not, however, but darted rapidly past Rowley and Ipswich toward our
destination. We reached Arkham before midnight, and found the lights still on at the old
Crowninshield house. Derby left the car with a hasty repetition of his thanks, and I
drove home alone with a curious feeling of relief. It had been a terrible drive--all the
more terrible because I could not quite tell why--and I did not regret Derby's forecast of
a long absence from my company.

The next two months were full of rumours. People spoke of seeing Derby more and
more in his new energized state, and Asenath was scarcely ever in to her callers. I had
only one visit from Edward, when he called briefly in Asenath's car--duly reclaimed
from wherever he had left it in Maine--to get some books he had lent me. He was in his
new state, and paused only long enough for some evasively polite remarks. It was plain
that he had nothing to discuss with me when in this condition--and I noticed that he did
not even trouble to give the old three-and-two signal when ringing the doorbell. As on
that evening in the car, I felt a faint, infinitely deep horror which I could not explain; so
that his swift departure was a prodigious relief.

In mid-September Derby was away for a week, and some of the decadent college set
talked knowingly of the matter--hinting at a meeting with a notorious cult-leader, lately
expelled from England, who had established headquarters in New York. For my part I
could not get that strange ride from Maine out of my head. The transformation I had
witnessed had affected me profoundly, and I caught myself again and again trying to
account for the thing--and for the extreme horror it had inspired in me.

But the oddest rumours were those about the sobbing in the old Crowninshield house.
The voice seemed to be a woman's, and some of the younger people thought it sounded
like Asenath's. It was heard only at rare intervals, and would sometimes be choked off
as if by force. There was talk of an investigation, but this was dispelled one day when
Asenath appeared in the streets and chatted in a sprightly way with a large number of
acquaintances--apologizing for her recent absence and speaking incidentally about the
nervous breakdown and hysteria of a guest from Boston. The guest was never seen, but
Asenath's appearance left nothing to be said. And then someone complicated matters by
whispering that the sobs had once or twice been in a man's voice.
One evening in mid-October, I heard the familiar three-and-two ring at the front door.
Answering it myself, I found Edward on the steps, and saw in a moment that his
personality was the old one which I had not encountered since the day of his ravings on
that terrible ride from Chesuncook. His face was twitching with a mixture of odd
emotions in which fear and triumph seemed to share dominion, and he looked furtively
over his shoulder as I closed the door behind him.

Following me clumsily to the study, he asked for some whiskey to steady his nerves. I
forbore to question him, but waited till he felt like beginning whatever he wanted to say.
At length he ventured some information in a choking voice.

"Asenath has gone, Dan. We had a long talk last night while the servants were out, and I
made her promise to stop preying on me. Of course I had certain--certain occult
defences I never told you about. She had to give in, but got frightfully angry. Just
packed up and started for New York--walked right out to catch the eight-twenty in to
Boston. I suppose people will talk, but I can't help that. You needn't mention that there
was any trouble--just say she's gone on a long research trip.

"She's probably going to stay with one of her horrible groups of devotees. I hope she'll
go west and get a divorce--anyhow, I've made her promise to keep away and let me
alone. It was horrible, Dan--she was stealing my body--crowding me out--making a
prisoner of me. I lay low and pretended to let her do it, but I had to be on the watch. I
could plan if I was careful, for she can't read my mind literally, or in detail. All she
could read of my planning was a sort of general mood of rebellion--and she always
thought I was helpless. Never thought I could get the best of her...but I had a spell or
two that worked."

Derby looked over his shoulder and took some more whiskey.

"I paid off those damned servants this morning when they got back. They were ugly
about it, and asked questions, but they went. They're her kin--Innsmouth people--and
were hand and glove with her. I hope they'll let me alone--I didn't like the way they
laughed when they walked away. I must get as many of Dad's old servants again as I
can. I'll move back home now.

"I suppose you think I'm crazy, Dan--but Arkham history ought to hint at things that
back up what I've told you--and what I'm going to tell you. You've seen one of the
changes, too--in your car after I told you about Asenath that day coming home from
Maine. That was when she got me--drove me out of my body. The last thing I remember
was when I was all worked up trying to tell you what that she-devil is. Then she got me,
and in a flash I was back at the house--in the library where those damned servants had
me locked up--and in that cursed fiend's body that isn't even human...You know it was
she you must have ridden home with--that preying wolf in my body--You ought to have
known the difference!"

I shuddered as Derby paused. Surely, I had known the difference--yet could I accept an
explanation as insane as this? But my distracted caller was growing even wilder.

"I had to save myself--I had to, Dan! She'd have got me for good at Hallowmass--they
hold a Sabbat up there beyond Chesuncook, and the sacrifice would have clinched
things. She'd have got me for good--she'd have been I, and I'd have been she--forever--
too late--My body'd have been hers for good--She'd have been a man, and fully human,
just as she wanted to be--I suppose she'd have put me out of the way--killed her own ex-
body with me in it, damn her, just as she did before--just as she did, or it did before--"
Edward's face was now atrociously distorted, and he bent it uncomfortably close to
mine as his voice fell to a whisper.

"You must know what I hinted in the car--that she isn't Asenath at all, but really old
Ephraim himself. I suspected it a year and a half ago, and I know it now. Her
handwriting shows it when she goes off guard--sometimes she jots down a note in
writing that's just like her father's manuscripts, stroke for stroke--and sometimes she
says things that nobody but an old man like Ephraim could say. He changed forms with
her when he felt death coming--she was the only one he could find with the right kind of
brain and a weak enough will--he got her body permanently, just as she almost got
mine, and then poisoned the old body he'd put her into. Haven't you seen old Ephraim's
soul glaring out of that she-devil's eyes dozens of times--and out of mine when she has
control of my body?"

The whisperer was panting, and paused for breath. I said nothing; and when he resumed
his voice was nearer normal. This, I reflected, was a case for the asylum, but I would
not be the one to send him there. Perhaps time and freedom from Asenath would do its
work. I could see that he would never wish to dabble in morbid occultism again.

"I'll tell you more later--I must have a long rest now. I'll tell you something of the
forbidden horrors she led me into--something of the age-old horrors that even now are
festering in out-of-the-way corners with a few monstrous priests to keep them alive.
Some people know things about the universe that nobody ought to know, and can do
things that nobody ought to be able to do. I've been in it up to my neck, but that's the
end. Today I'd burn that damned Necronomicon and all the rest if I were librarian at
Miskatonic.

"But she can't get me now. I must get out of that accursed house as soon as I can, and
settle down at home. You'll help me, I know, if I need help. Those devilish servants, you
know--and if people should get too inquisitive about Asenath. You see, I can't give them
her address...Then there are certain groups of searchers--certain cults, you know--that
might misunderstand our breaking up...some of them have damnably curious ideas and
methods. I know you'll stand by me if anything happens--even if I have to tell you a lot
that will shock you..."

I had Edward stay and sleep in one of the guest-chambers that night, and in the morning
he seemed calmer. We discussed certain possible arrangements for his moving back into
the Derby mansion, and I hoped he would lose no time in making the change. He did
not call the next evening, but I saw him frequently during the ensuing weeks. We talked
as little as possible about strange and unpleasant things, but discussed the renovation of
the old Derby house, and the travels which Edward promised to take with my son and
me the following summer.

Of Asenath we said almost nothing, for I saw that the subject was a peculiarly
disturbing one. Gossip, of course, was rife; but that was no novelty in connection with
the strange menage at the old Crowninshield house. One thing I did not like was what
Derby's banker let fall in an over-expansive mood at the Miskatonic Club--about the
cheques Edward was sending regularly to a Moses and Abigail Sargent and a Eunice
Babson in Innsmouth. That looked as if those evil-faced servants were extorting some
kind of tribute from him--yet he had not mentioned the matter to me.

I wished that the summer--and my son's Harvard vacation--would come, so that we

could get Edward to Europe. He was not, I soon saw, mending as rapidly as I had hoped
he would; for there was something a bit hysterical in his occasional exhilaration, while
his moods of fright and depression were altogether too frequent. The old Derby house
was ready by December, yet Edward constantly put off moving. Though he hated and
seemed to fear the Crowninshield place, he was at the same time queerly enslaved by it.
He could not seem to begin dismantling things, and invented every kind of excuse to
postpone action. When I pointed this out to him he appeared unaccountably frightened.
His father's old butler--who was there with other reacquired servants--told me one day
that Edward's occasional prowlings about the house, and especially down cellar, looked
odd and unwholesome to him. I wondered if Asenath had been writing disturbing
letters, but the butler said there was no mail which could have come from her.

VI

It was about Christmas that Derby broke down one evening while calling on me. I was
steering the conversation toward next summer's travels when he suddenly shrieked and
leaped up from his chair with a look of shocking, uncontrollable fright--a cosmic panic
and loathing such as only the nether gulfs of nightmare could bring to any sane mind.

"My brain! My brain! God, Dan--it's tugging--from beyond--knocking--clawing--that

she-devil--even now--Ephraim--Kamog! Kamog!--The pit of the shoggoths--Ia! Shub-
Niggurath! The Goat with a Thousand Young!...

"The flame--the flame--beyond body, beyond life--in the earth--oh, God!"

I pulled him back to his chair and poured some wine down his throat as his frenzy sank
to a dull apathy. He did not resist, but kept his lips moving as if talking to himself.
Presently I realized that he was trying to talk to me, and bent my ear to his mouth to
catch the feeble words.

"Again, again--she's trying--I might have known--nothing can stop that force; not
distance nor magic, nor death--it comes and comes, mostly in the night--I can't leave--
it's horrible--oh, God, Dan, if you only knew as I do just how horrible it is..."

When he had slumped down into a stupor I propped him with pillows and let normal
sleep overtake him. I did not call a doctor, for I knew what would be said of his sanity,
and wished to give nature a chance if I possibly could. He waked at midnight, and I put
him to bed upstairs, but he was gone by morning. He had let himself quietly out of the
house--and his butler, when called on the wire, said he was at home pacing about the
library.

Edward went to pieces rapidly after that. He did not call again, but I went daily to see
him. He would always be sitting in his library, staring at nothing and having an air of
abnormal listening. Sometimes he talked rationally, but always on trivial topics. Any
mention of his trouble, of future plans, or of Asenath would send him into a frenzy. His
butler said he had frightful seizures at night, during which he might eventually do
himself harm.

I had a long talk with his doctor, banker, and lawyer, and finally took the physician with
two specialist colleagues to visit him. The spasms that resulted from the first questions
were violent and pitiable--and that evening a closed car took his poor struggling body to
the Arkham Sanitarium. I was made his guardian and called on him twice weekly--
almost weeping to hear his wild shrieks, awesome whispers, and dreadful, droning
repetitions of such phrases as "I had to do it--I had to do it--it'll get me--it'll get me--
down there--down there in the dark--Mother! Mother! Dan! Save me--save me--"

How much hope of recovery there was, no one could say, but I tried my best to be
optimistic. Edward must have a home if he emerged, so I transferred his servants to the
Derby mansion, which would surely be his sane choice. What to do about the
Crowninshield place with its complex arrangements and collections of utterly
inexplicable objects I could not decide, so left it momentarily untouched--telling the
Derby household to go over and dust the chief rooms once a week, and ordering the
furnace man to have a fire on those days.

The final nightmare came before Candlemas--heralded, in cruel irony, by a false gleam
of hope. One morning late in January the sanitarium telephoned to report that Edward's
reason had suddenly come back. His continuous memory, they said, was badly
impaired; but sanity itself was certain. Of course he must remain some time for
observation, but there could be little doubt of the outcome. All going well, he would
surely be free in a week.

I hastened over in a flood of delight, but stood bewildered when a nurse took me to
Edward's room. The patient rose to greet me, extending his hand with a polite smile; but
I saw in an instant that he bore the strangely energized personality which had seemed so
foreign to his own nature--the competent personality I had found so vaguely horrible,
and which Edward himself had once vowed was the intruding soul of his wife. There
was the same blazing vision--so like Asenath's and old Ephraim's--and the same firm
mouth; and when he spoke I could sense the same grim, pervasive irony in his voice--
the deep irony so redolent of potential evil. This was the person who had driven my car
through the night five months before--the person I had not seen since that brief call
when he had forgotten the oldtime doorbell signal and stirred such nebulous fears in
me--and now he filled me with the same dim feeling of blasphemous alienage and
ineffable cosmic hideousness.

He spoke affably of arrangements for release--and there was nothing for me to do but
assent, despite some remarkable gaps in his recent memories. Yet I felt that something
was terribly, inexplicably wrong and abnormal. There were horrors in this thing that I
could not reach. This was a sane person--but was it indeed the Edward Derby I had
known? If not, who or what was it--and where was Edward? Ought it to be free or
confined--or ought it to be extirpated from the face of the earth? There was a hint of the
abysmally sardonic in everything the creature said--the Asenath-like eyes lent a special
and baffling mockery to certain words about the early liberty earned by an especially
close confinement! I must have behaved very awkwardly, and was glad to beat a retreat.
All that day and the next I racked my brain over the problem. What had happened?
What sort of mind looked out through those alien eyes in Edward's face? I could think
of nothing but this dimly terrible enigma, and gave up all efforts to perform my usual
work. The second morning the hospital called up to say that the recovered patient was
unchanged, and by evening I was close to a nervous collapse--a state I admit, though
others will vow it coloured my subsequent vision. I have nothing to say on this point
except that no madness of mine could account for all the evidence.

VII

It was in the night--after that second evening--that stark, utter horror burst over me and
weighted my spirit with a black, clutching panic from which it can never shake free. It
began with a telephone call just before midnight. I was the only one up, and sleepily
took down the receiver in the library. No one seemed to be on the wire, and I was about
to hang up and go to bed when my ear caught a very faint suspicion of sound at the
other end. Was someone trying under great difficulties to talk? As I listened I thought I
heard a sort of half--liquid bubbling noise--"glub...glub...glub"--which had an odd
suggestion of inarticulate, unintelligible word and syllable divisions. I called "Who is
it?" But the only answer was "glub... glub...glub-glub."I could only assume that the
noise was mechanical; but fancying that it might be a case of a broken instrument able
to receive but not to send, I added, "I can't hear you. Better hang up and try
Information."Immediately I heard the receiver go on the hook at the other end.

This, I say, was just about midnight. When the call was traced afterward it was found to
come from the old Crowninshield house, though it was fully half a week from the
housemaid's day to be there. I shall only hint what was found at that house--the
upheaval in a remote cellar storeroom, the tracks, the dirt, the hastily rifled wardrobe,
the baffling marks on the telephone, the clumsily used stationery, and the detestable
stench lingering over everything. The police, poor fools, have their smug little theories,
and are still searching for those sinister discharged servants--who have dropped out of
sight amidst the present furore. They speak of a ghoulish revenge for things that were
done, and say I was included because I was Edward's best friend and adviser.

Idiots! Do they fancy those brutish clowns could have forged that handwriting? Do they
fancy they could have brought what later came? Are they blind to the changes in that
body that was Edward's? As for me, I now believe all that Edward Derby ever told me.
There are horrors beyond life's edge that we do not suspect, and once in a while man's
evil prying calls them just within our range. Ephraim--Asenath--that devil called them
in, and they engulfed Edward as they are engulfing me.

Can I be sure that I am safe? Those powers survive the life of the physical form. The
next day--in the afternoon, when I pulled out of my prostration and was able to walk
and talk coherently--I went to the madhouse and shot him dead for Edward's and the
world's sake, but can I be sure till he is cremated? They are keeping the body for some
silly autopsies by different doctors--but I say he must be cremated. He must be
cremated--he who was not Edward Derby when I shot him. I shall go mad if he is not,
for I may be the next. But my will is not weak--and I shall not let it be undermined by
the terrors I know are seething around it. One life--Ephraim, Asenath, and Edward--who
now? I will not be driven out of my body...I will not change souls with that bullet-
ridden lich in the madhouse!
But let me try to tell coherently of that final horror. I will not speak of what the police
persistently ignored--the tales of that dwarfed, grotesque, malodorous thing met by at
least three wayfarers in High Street just before two o'clock, and the nature of the single
footprints in certain places. I will say only that just about two the doorbell and knocker
waked me--doorbell and knocker both, applied alternately and uncertainly in a kind of
weak desperation, and each trying to keep Edward's old signal of three-and-two strokes.

Roused from sound sleep, my mind leaped into a turmoil. Derby at the door--and
remembering the old code! That new personality had not remembered it...was Edward
suddenly back in his rightful state? Why was he here in such evident stress and haste?
Had he been released ahead of time, or had he escaped? Perhaps, I thought as I flung on
a robe and bounded downstairs, his return to his own self had brought raving and
violence, revoking his discharge and driving him to a desperate dash for freedom.
Whatever had happened, he was good old Edward again, and I would help him!

When I opened the door into the elm-arched blackness a gust of insufferably foetid wind
almost flung me prostrate. I choked in nausea, and for a second scarcely saw the
dwarfed, humped figure on the steps. The summons had been Edward's, but who was
this foul, stunted parody? Where had Edward had time to go? His ring had sounded only
a second before the door opened.

The caller had on one of Edward's overcoats--its bottom almost touching the ground,
and its sleeves rolled back yet still covering the hands. On the head was a slouch hat
pulled low, while a black silk muffler concealed the face. As I stepped unsteadily
forward, the figure made a semi-liquid sound like that I had heard over the telephone--
"glub...glub..."--and thrust at me a large, closely written paper impaled on the end of a
long pencil. Still reeling from the morbid and unaccountable foetor, I seized the paper
and tried to read it in the light from the doorway.

Beyond question, it was in Edward's script. But why had he written when he was close
enough to ring--and why was the script so awkward, coarse and shaky? I could make
out nothing in the dim half light, so edged back into the hall, the dwarf figure clumping
mechanically after but pausing on the inner door's threshold. The odour of this singular
messenger was really appalling, and I hoped (not in vain, thank God!) that my wife
would not wake and confront it.

Then, as I read the paper, I felt my knees give under me and my vision go black. I was
lying on the floor when I came to, that accursed sheet still clutched in my fear-rigid
hand. This is what it said.

"Dan--go to the sanitarium and kill it. Exterminate it. It isn't Edward Derby any more.
She got me--it's Asenath--and she has been dead three months and a half. I lied when I
said she had gone away. I killed her. I had to. It was sudden, but we were alone and I
was in my right body. I saw a candlestick and smashed her head in. She would have got
me for good at Hallowmass.

"I buried her in the farther cellar storeroom under some old boxes and cleaned up all the
traces. The servants suspected next morning, but they have such secrets that they dare
not tell the police. I sent them off, but God knows what they--and others of the cult--
will do.
"I thought for a while I was all right, and then I felt the tugging at my brain. I knew
what it was--I ought to have remembered. A soul like hers--or Ephraim's--is half
detached, and keeps right on after death as long as the body lasts. She was getting me--
making me change bodies with her--seizing my body and putting me in that corpse of
hers buried in the cellar.

"I knew what was coming--that's why I snapped and had to go to the asylum. Then it
came--I found myself choked in the dark--in Asenath's rotting carcass down there in the
cellar under the boxes where I put it. And I knew she must be in my body at the
sanitarium--permanently, for it was after Hallowmass, and the sacrifice would work
even without her being there--sane, and ready for release as a menace to the world. I
was desperate, and in spite of everything I clawed my way out.

"I'm too far gone to talk--I couldn't manage to telephone--but I can still write. I'll get
fixed up somehow and bring this last word and warning. Kill that fiend if you value the
peace and comfort of the world. See that it is cremated. If you don't, it will live on and
on, body to body forever, and I can't tell you what it will do. Keep clear of black magic,
Dan, it's the devil's business. Goodbye--you've been a great friend. Tell the police
whatever they'll believe--and I'm damnably sorry to drag all this on you. I'll be at peace
before long--this thing won't hold together much more. Hope you can read this. And kill
that thing--kill it.

Yours--Ed."

It was only afterward that I read the last half of this paper, for I had fainted at the end of
the third paragraph. I fainted again when I saw and smelled what cluttered up the
threshold where the warm air had struck it. The messenger would not move or have
consciousness any more.

The butler, tougher-fibred than I, did not faint at what met him in the hall in the
morning. Instead, he telephoned the police. When they came I had been taken upstairs
to bed, but the--other mass--lay where it had collapsed in the night. The men put
handkerchiefs to their noses.

What they finally found inside Edward's oddly-assorted clothes was mostly liquescent
horror. There were bones, too--and a crushed-in skull. Some dental work positively
identified the skull as Asenath's.

THE TOMB
In relating the circumstances which have led to my confinement within this refuge for
the demented, I am aware that my present position will create a natural doubt of the
authenticity of my narrative. It is an unfortunate fact that the bulk of humanity is too
limited in its mental vision to weigh with patience and intelligence those isolated
phenomena, seen and felt only by a psychologically sensitive few, which lie outside its
common experience. Men of broader intellect know that there is no sharp distinction
betwixt the real and the unreal; that all things appear as they do only by virtue of the
delicate individual physical and mental media through which we are made conscious of
them; but the prosaic materialism of the majority condemns as madness the flashes of
super-sight which penetrate the common veil of obvious empiricism.
My name is Jervas Dudley, and from earliest childhood I have been a dreamer and a
visionary. Wealthy beyond the necessity of a commercial life, and temperamentally
unfitted for the formal studies and social recreations of my acquaintances, I have dwelt
ever in realms apart from the visible world; spending my youth and adolescence in
ancient and little-known books, and in roaming the fields and groves of the region near
my ancestral home. I do not think that what I read in these books or saw in these fields
and groves was exactly what other boys read and saw there; but of this I must say little,
since detailed speech would but confirm those cruel slanders upon my intellect which I
sometimes overhear from the whispers of the stealthy attendants around me. It is
sufficient for me to relate events without analysing causes.

I have said that I dwelt apart from the visible world, but I have not said that I dwelt
alone. This no human creature may do; for lacking the fellowship of the living, he
inevitably draws upon the companionship of things that are not, or are no longer, living.
Close by my home there lies a singular wooded hollow, in whose twilight deeps I spent
most of my time; reading, thinking and dreaming. Down its moss-covered slopes my
first steps of infancy were taken, and around its grotesquely gnarled oak trees my first
fancies of boyhood were woven. Well did I come to know the presiding dryads of those
trees, and often have I watched their wild dances in the struggling beams of waning
moon--but of these things I must not now speak. I will tell only of the lone tomb in the
darkest of the hillside thickets; the deserted tomb of the Hydes, an old and exalted
family whose last direct descendant had been laid within its black recesses many
decades before my birth.

The vault to which I refer is an ancient granite, weathered and discoloured by the mists
and dampness of generations. Excavated back into the hillside, the structure is visible
only at the entrance. The door, a ponderous and forbidding slab of stone, hangs upon
rusted iron hinges, and is fastened ajar in a queerly sinister way by means of heavy iron
chains and padlocks, according to a gruesome fashion of half a century ago. The abode
of the race whose scions are inurned had once crowned the declivity which holds the
tomb, but had long since fallen victim to the flames which sprang up from a disastrous
stroke of lighting. Of the midnight storm which destroyed this gloomy mansion, the
older inhabitants of the region sometimes speak in hushed and uneasy voices; alluding
to what they call "divine wrath" in a manner that in later years vaguely increased the
always strong fascination which I felt for the forest-darkened sepulchre. One man only
had perished in the fire. When the last of the Hydes was buried in this place of shade
and stillness, the sad urnful of ashes had come from a distant land; to which the family
had repaired when the mansion burned down. No one remains to lay flowers before the
granite portal, and few care to brave the depressing shadows which seem to linger
strangely about the water-worn stones.

I shall never forget the afternoon when first I stumbled upon the half-hidden house of
the dead. It was in mid-summer, when the alchemy of Nature transmutes the sylvan
landscape to one vivid and almost homogeneous mass of green; when the senses are
well-nigh intoxicated with the surging seas of moist verdure and the subtly indefinable
odours of the soil and the vegetation. In such surroundings the mind loses its
perspective; time and space become trivial and unreal, and echoes of a forgotten
prehistoric past beat insistently upon the enthralled consciousness. All day I had been
wandering through the mystic groves of the hollow; thinking thoughts I need not
discuss, and conversing with things I need not name. In years a child of ten, I had seen
and heard many wonders unknown to the throng; and was oddly aged in certain
respects. When, upon forcing my way between two savage clumps of briers, I suddenly
encountered the entrance of the vault, I had no knowledge of what I had discovered. The
dark blocks of granite, the door so curiously ajar, and the funereal carvings above the
arch, aroused in me no associations of mournful or terrible character. Of graves and
tombs I knew and imagined much, but had on account of my peculiar temperament been
kept from all personal contact with churchyards and cemeteries. The strange stone
house on the woodland slope was to me only a source of interest and speculation; and
its cold, damp interior, into which I vainly peered through the aperture so tantalisingly
left, contained for me no hint of death or decay. But in that instant of curiosity was born
the madly unreasoning desire which has brought me to this hell of confinement. Spurred
on by a voice which must have come from the hideous soul of the forest, I resolved to
enter the beckoning gloom in spite of the ponderous chains which barred my passage. In
the waning light of day I alternately rattled the rusty impediments with a view to
throwing wide the stone door, and essayed to squeeze my slight form through the space
already provided; but neither plan met with success. At first curious, I was not frantic;
and when in the thickening twilight I returned to my home, I had sworn to the hundred
gods of the grove that at any cost I would some day force an entrance to the black chilly
depths that seemed calling out to me. The physician with the iron-grey beard who
comes each day to my room once told a visitor that this decision marked the beginnings
of a pitiful monomania; but I will leave final judgement to my readers when they shall
have learnt all.

The months following my discovery were spent in futile attempts to force the
complicated padlock of the slightly open vault, and in carefully guarded inquiries
regarding the nature and history of the structure. With the traditionally receptive ears of
the small boy, I learned much; though an habitual secretiveness caused me to tell no one
of my information or my resolve. It is perhaps worth mentioning that I was not at all
surprised or terrified on learning of the nature of the vault. My rather original ideas
regarding life and death had caused me to associate the cold clay with the breathing
body in a vague fashion; and I felt that the great sinister family of the burned-down
mansion was in some way represented within the stone space I sought to explore.
Mumbled tales of the weird rites and godless revels of bygone years in the ancient hall
gave to me a new and potent interest in the tomb, before whose door I would sit for
hours at a time each day. Once I thrust a candle within the nearly closed entrance, but
could see nothing save a flight of damp stone steps leading downward. The odour of the
place repelled yet bewitched me. I felt I had known it before, in a past remote beyond
all recollection; beyond even my tenancy of the body I now possess.

The year after I first beheld the tomb, I stumbled upon a worm-eaten translation of
Plutarch's Lives in the book-filled attic of my home. Reading the life of Theseus, I was
much impressed by that passage telling of the great stone beneath which the boyish hero
was to find his tokens of destiny whenever he should become old enough to lift its
enormous weight. This legend had the effect of dispelling my keenest impatience to
enter the vault, for it made me feel that the time was not yet ripe. Later, I told myself, I
should grow to a strength and ingenuity which might enable me to unfasten the heavily
chained door with ease; but until then I would do better by conforming to what seemed
the will of Fate.
Accordingly my watches by the dank portal became less persistent, and much of my
time was spent in other though equally strange pursuits. I would sometimes rise very
quietly in the night, stealing out to walk in those churchyards and places of burial from
which I had been kept by my parents. What I did there I may not say, for I am not now
sure of the reality of certain things; but I know that on the day after such a nocturnal
ramble I would often astonish those about me with my knowledge of topics almost
forgotten for many generations. It was after a night like this that I shocked the
community with a queer conceit about the burial of the rich and celebrated Squire
Brewster, a maker of local history who was interred in 1711, and whose slate headstone,
bearing a graven skull and crossbones, was slowly crumbling to power. In a moment of
childish imagination I vowed not only that the undertaker, Goodman Simpson, had
stolen the silver-buckled shoes, silken hose, and satin small-clothes of the deceased
before burial; but that the Squire himself, not fully inanimate, had turned twice in his
mound-covered coffin on the day of interment.

But the idea of entering the tomb never left my thoughts; being indeed stimulated by the
unexpected genealogical discover that my own maternal ancestry possessed at least a
slight link with the supposedly extinct family of the Hydes. Last of my paternal race, I
was likewise the last of this older and more mysterious line. I began to feel that the
tomb was mine, and to look forward with hot eagerness to the time when I might pass
within that stone door and down those slimy stone steps in the dark. I now formed the
habit of listening very intently at the slightly open portal, choosing my favourite hours
of midnight stillness for the odd vigil. By the time I came of age, I had made a small
clearing in the thicket before the mould-stained facade of the hillside, allowing the
surrounding vegetation to encircle and overhang the space like the walls and roof of
sylvan bower. This bower was my temple, the fastened door my shrine, and here I
would like outstretched on the mossy ground, thinking strange thoughts and dreaming
of strange dreams.

The night of the first revelation was a sultry one. I must have fallen asleep from fatigue,
for it was with a distinct sense of awakening that I heard the voices. Of those tones and
accents I hesitate to speak; of their quality I will not speak; but I may say that they
presented certain uncanny differences in vocabulary, pronunciation, and mode of
utterance. Every shade of New England dialect, from the uncouth syllables of the
Puritan colonists to the precise rhetoric of fifty years ago, seemed represented in that
shadowy colloquy, though it was only later that I noticed the fact. At the time, indeed,
my attention was distracted from this matter by another phenomenon; a phenomenon so
fleeting that I could not take oath upon its reality. I barely fancied that as I awoke, a
light had been hurriedly extinguished within the sunken sepulchre. I do not think I was
either astounded or panic-stricken, but I know that I was greatly and permanently
changed that night. Upon returning home I went with much directness to a rotting chest
in the attic, wherein I found the key which next day unlocked with ease the barrier I had
so long stormed in vain.

It was in the soft glow of late afternoon that I first entered the vault on the abandoned
slope. A spell was upon me, and my heart leaped with an exultation I can but ill
describe. As I closed the door behind me and descended the dripping steps by the light
of my lone candle, I seemed to know the way; and though the candle sputtered with the
stifling reek of the place, I felt singularly at home in the musty, charnel-house air.
Looking about me, I beheld many marble slabs bearing coffins, or the remains of
coffins. Some of these were sealed and intact, but others had nearly vanished, leaving
the silver handles and plates isolated amidst certain curious heaps of whitish dust. Upon
one plate I read the name of Sir Geoffrey Hyde, who had come from Sussex in 1640 and
died here a few years later. In a conspicuous alcove was one fairly well-preserved and
untenanted casket, adorned with a single name which brought to me both a smile and a
shudder. An odd impulse caused me to climb upon the broad slab, extinguish my
candle, and lie down within the vacant box.

In the grey light of dawn I staggered from the vault and locked the chain of the door
behind me. I was no longer a young man, though but twenty-one winters had chilled my
bodily frame. Early-rising villagers who observed my homeward progress looked at me
strangely, and marvelled at the signs of ribald revelry which they saw in one whose life
was known to be sober and solitary. I did not appear before my parents till after a long
and refreshing sleep.

Henceforward I haunted the tomb each night; seeing, hearing, and doing things I must
never reveal. My speech, always susceptible to environmental influences, was the first
thing to succumb to the change; and my suddenly acquired archaism of diction was
soon remarked upon. Later a queer boldness and recklessness came into my demeanour,
till I unconsciously grew to possess the bearing of a man of the world despite my
lifelong seclusion. My formerly silent tongue waxed voluble with the easy grace of a
Chesterfield or the godless cynicism of a Rochester. I displayed a peculiar erudition
utterly unlike the fantastic, monkish lore over which I had pored in youth; and covered
the flyleaves of my books with facile impromptu epigrams which brought up
suggestions of Gay, Prior, and the sprightliest of Augustan wits and rimesters. One
morning at breakfast I came close to disaster by declaiming in palpably liquourish
accents an effusion of eighteenth--century Bacchanalian mirth; a bit of Georgian
playfulness never recorded in a book, which ran something like this:

Come hither, my lads, with your tankards of ale,

And drink to the present before it shall fail;

Pile each on your platter a mountain of beef,

For 'tis eating and drinking that bring us relief:

So fill up your glass,

So life will soon pass;

When you're dead ye'll ne'er drink to your king or your lass!

Anacreon had a red nose, so they say;

But what's a red nose if ye're happy and gay?

Gad split me! I'd rather be red whilst I'm here,

Than white as a lily--and dead half a year!

So Betty, my miss,

Come give me kiss;

In hell there's no innkeeper's daughter like this!

Young Harry, propp'd up just as straight as he's able,

Will soon lose his wig and slip under the table;

But fill up your goblets and pass 'em around--

Better under the table than under the ground!

So revel and chaff

As ye thirstily quaff:

Under six feet of dirt 'tis less easy to laugh!

The fiend strike me blue! I'm scarce able to walk,

And damn me if I can stand upright or talk!

Here, landlord, bid Betty to summon a chair;

I'll try home for a while, for my wife is not there!

So lend me a hand;

I'm not able to stand,

But I'm gay whilst I linger on top of the land!

About this time I conceived my present fear of fire and thunderstorms. Previously
indifferent to such things, I had now an unspeakable horror of them; and would retire to
the innermost recesses of the house whenever the heavens threatened an electrical
display. A favourite haunt of mine during the day was the ruined cellar of the mansion
that had burned down, and in fancy I would picture the structure as it had been in its
prime. On one occasion I startled a villager by leading him confidently to a shallow sub-
cellar, of whose existence I seemed to know in spite of the fact that it had been unseen
and forgotten for many generations.

At last came that which I had long feared. My parents, alarmed at the altered manner
and appearance of their only son, commenced to exert over my movements a kindly
espionage which threatened to result in disaster. I had told no one of my visits to the
tomb, having guarded my secret purpose with religious zeal since childhood; but now I
was forced to exercise care in threading the mazes of the wooded hollow, that I might
throw off a possible pursuer. My key to the vault I kept suspended from a cord about
my neck, its presence known only to me. I never carried out of the sepulchre any of the
things I came upon whilst within its walls.

One morning as I emerged from the damp tomb and fastened the chain of the portal
with none too steady hand, I beheld in an adjacent thicket the dreaded face of a watcher.
Surely the end was near; for my bower was discovered, and the objective of my
nocturnal journeys revealed. The man did not accost me, so I hastened home in an effort
to overhear what he might report to my careworn father. Were my sojourns beyond the
chained door about to be proclaimed to the world? Imagine my delighted astonishment
on hearing the spy inform my parent in cautious whisper that I had spent the night in the
bower outside the tomb; my sleep-filmed eyes fixed upon the crevice where the
padlocked portal stood ajar! By what miracle had the watcher been thus deluded? I was
now convinced that a supernatural agency protected me. Made bold by this heaven-sent
circumstance, I began to resume perfect openness in going to the vault; confident that
no one could witness my entrance. For a week I tasted to the full the joys of that charnel
conviviality which I must not describe, when the thing happened, and I was borne away
to this accursed abode of sorrow and monotony.

I should not have ventured out that night; for the taint of thunder was in the clouds, and
hellish phosphorescence rose from the rank swamp at the bottom of the hollow. The call
of the dead, too, was different. Instead of the hillside tomb, it was the charred cellar on
the crest of the slope whose presiding daemon beckoned to me with unseen fingers. As I
emerged from an intervening grove upon the plain before the ruin, I beheld in the misty
moonlight a thing I had always vaguely expected. The mansion, gone for a century,
once more reared its stately height to the raptured vision; every window ablaze with the
splendour of many candles. Up the long drive rolled the coaches of the Boston gentry,
whilst on foot came a numerous assemblage of powdered exquisites from the
neighbouring mansions. With this throng I mingled, though I knew I belonged with the
hosts rather than the guests. Inside the hall were music, laughter, and wine on every
hand. Several faces I recognised; though I should have known them better had they been
shrivelled or eaten away by death and decomposition. Amidst a wild and reckless
throng I was the wildest and most abandoned. Gay blasphemy poured in torrents from
my lips, and in my shocking sallies I heeded no law of God, Man, or Nature. Suddenly a
peal of thunder, resonant even above the din of the swinish revelry, clave the very roof
and laid a hush of fear upon the boisterous company. Red tongues of flame and searing
gusts of heat engulfed the house; and the roysterers, struck with terror at the descent of a
calamity which seemed to transcend the bounds of unguided Nature, fled shrieking into
the night. I alone remained, riveted to my seat by a grovelling fear which I had never
felt before. And then a second horror took possession of my soul. Burnt alive to ashes,
my body dispersed by the four winds, I might never lie in the tomb of Hydes! Was not
my coffin prepared for me? Had I not a right to rest till eternity amongst the descendants
of Sir Geoffrey Hyde? Aye! I would claim my heritage of death, even though my soul
go seeking through the ages for another corporeal tenement to represent it on that vacant
slab in the alcove of the vault. Jervas Hyde should never share the sad fate of Palinurus!

As the phantom of the burning house faded, I found myself screaming and struggling
madly in the arms of two men, one of whom was the spy who had followed me to the
tomb. Rain was pouring down in torrents, and upon the southern horizon were flashes of
the lightning that had so lately passed over our heads. My father, his face lined with
sorrow, stood by as I shouted my demands to be laid within the tomb; frequently
admonishing my captors to treat me as gently as they could. A blackened circle on the
floor of the ruined cellar told of a violent stroke from the heavens; and from this spot a
group of curious villagers with lanterns were prying a small box of antique
workmanship which the thunderbolt had brought to light. Ceasing my futile and now
objectless writhing, I watched the spectators as they viewed the treasure-trove, and was
permitted to share in their discoveries. The box, whose fastenings were broken by the
stroke which had unearthed it, contained many papers and objects of value; but I had
eyes for one thing alone. It was the porcelain miniature of a young man in a smartly
curled bag-wig, and bore the initials "J.H."The face was such that as I gazed, I might
well have been studying my mirror.

On the following day I was brought to this room with the barred windows, but I have
been kept informed of certain things through an aged and simple-minded servitor, for
whom I bore a fondness in infancy, and who like me loves the churchyard. What I have
dared relate of my experiences within the vault has brought me only pitying smiles. My
father, who visits me frequently, declares that at no time did I pass the chained portal,
and swears that the rusted padlock had not been touched for fifty years when he
examined it. He even says that all the village knew of my journeys to the tomb, and that
I was often watched as I slept in the bower outside the grim facade, my half-open eyes
fixed on the crevice that leads to the interior. Against these assertions I have no tangible
proof to offer, since my key to the padlock was lost in the struggle on that night of
horrors. The strange things of the past which I learnt during those nocturnal meetings
with the dead he dismisses as the fruits of my lifelong and omnivorous browsing
amongst the ancient volumes of the family library. Had it not been for my old servant
Hiram, I should have by this time become quite convinced of my madness.

But Hiram, loyal to the last, has held faith in me, and has done that which impels me to
make public at least a part of my story. A week ago he burst open the lock which chains
the door of the tomb perpetually ajar, and descended with a lantern into the murky
depths. On a slab in an alcove he found an old but empty coffin whose tarnished plate
bears the single word "Jervas". In that coffin and in that vault they have promised me I
shall be buried.

THE TRANSITION OF JUAN ROMERO

Of the events which took place at the Norton Mine on October eighteenth and
nineteenth, 1894, I have no desire to speak. A sense of duty to science is all that impels
me to recall, in the last years of my life, scenes and happenings fraught with a terror
doubly acute because I cannot wholly define it. But I believe that before I die I should
tell what I know of the--shall I say transition--of Juan Romero.

My name and origin need not be related to posterity; in fact, I fancy it is better that they
should not be, for when a man suddenly migrates to the States or the Colonies, he leaves
his past behind him. Besides, what I once was is not in the least relevant to my
narrative; save perhaps the fact that during my service in India I was more at home
amongst white-bearded native teachers than amongst my brother--officers. I had delved
not a little into odd Eastern lore when overtaken by the calamities which brought about
my new life in America's vast West--a life wherein I found it well to accept a name--my
present one--which is very common and carries no meaning.
In the summer and autumn of 1894 I dwelt in the drear expanses of the Cactus
Mountains, employed as a common labourer at the celebrated Norton Mine, whose
discovery by an aged prospector some years before had turned the surrounding region
from a nearly unpeopled waste to a seething cauldron of sordid life. A cavern of gold,
lying deep beneath a mountain lake, had enriched its venerable finder beyond his
wildest dreams, and now formed the seat of extensive tunneling operations on the part
of the corporation to which it had finally been sold. Additional grottoes had been found,
and the yield of yellow metal was exceedingly great; so that a mighty and
heterogeneous army of miners toiled day and night in the numerous passages and rock
hollows. The Superintendent, a Mr. Arthur, often discussed the singularity of the local
geological formations; speculating on the probable extent of the chain of caves, and
estimating the future of the titanic mining enterprises. He considered the auriferous
cavities the result of the action of water, and believed the last of them would soon be
opened.

It was not long after my arrival and employment that Juan Romero came to the Norton
Mine. One of the large herd of unkempt Mexicans attracted thither from the
neighbouring country, he at first attracted attention only because of his features; which
though plainly of the Red Indian type, were yet remarkable for their light colour and
refined conformation, being vastly unlike those of the average "greaser" or Piute of the
locality. It is curious that although he differed so widely from the mass of Hispanicised
and tribal Indians, Romero gave not the least impression of Caucasian blood. It was not
the Castilian conquistador or the American pioneer, but the ancient and noble Aztec,
whom imagination called to view when the silent peon would rise in the early morning
and gaze in fascination at the sun as it crept above the eastern hills, meanwhile
stretching out his arms to the orb as if in the performance of some rite whose nature he
did not himself comprehend. But save for his face, Romero was not in any way
suggestive of nobility. Ignorant and dirty, he was at home amongst the other brown-
skinned Mexicans; having come (so I was afterward told) from the very lowest sort of
surroundings. He had been found as a child in a crude mountain hut, the only survivor
of an epidemic which had stalked lethally by. Near the hut, close to a rather unusual
rock fissure, had lain two skeletons, newly picked by vultures, and presumably forming
the sole remains of his parents. No one recalled their identity, and they were soon
forgotten by the many. Indeed, the crumbling of the adobe hut and the closing of the
rock-fissure by a subsequent avalanche had helped to efface even the scene from
recollection. Reared by a Mexican cattle-thief who had given him his name, Juan
differed little from his fellows.

The attachment which Romero manifested toward me was undoubtedly commenced

through the quaint and ancient Hindoo ring which I wore when not engaged in active
labour. Of its nature, and manner of coming into my possession, I cannot speak. It was
my last link with a chapter of my life forever closed, and I valued it highly. Soon I
observed that the odd-looking Mexican was likewise interested; eyeing it with an
expression that banished all suspicion of mere covetousness. Its hoary hieroglyphs
seemed to stir some faint recollection in his untutored but active mind, though he could
not possibly have beheld their like before. Within a few weeks after his advent, Romero
was like a faithful servant to me; this notwithstanding the fact that I was myself but an
ordinary miner. Our conversation was necessarily limited. He knew but a few words of
English, while I found my Oxonian Spanish was something quite different from the
patois of the peon of New Spain.
The event which I am about to relate was unheralded by long premonitions. Though the
man Romero had interested me, and though my ring had affected him peculiarly, I think
that neither of us had any expectation of what was to follow when the great blast was set
off. Geological considerations had dictated an extension of the mine directly downward
from the deepest part of the subterranean area; and the belief of the Superintendent that
only solid rock would be encountered, had led to the placing of a prodigious charge of
dynamite. With this work Romero and I were not connected, wherefore our first
knowledge of extraordinary conditions came from others. The charge, heavier perhaps
than had been estimated, had seemed to shake the entire mountain. Windows in shanties
on the slope outside were shattered by the shock, whilst miners throughout the nearer
passages were knocked from their feet. Jewel Lake, which lay above the scene of action,
heaved as in a tempest. Upon investigation it was seen that a new abyss yawned
indefinitely below the seat of the blast; an abyss so monstrous that no handy line might
fathom it, nor any lamp illuminate it. Baffled, the excavators sought a conference with
the Superintendent, who ordered great lengths of rope to be taken to the pit, and spliced
and lowered without cessation till a bottom might be discovered.

Shortly afterward the pale-faced workmen apprised the Superintendent of their failure.
Firmly though respectfully, they signified their refusal to revisit the chasm or indeed to
work further in the mine until it might be sealed. Something beyond their experience
was evidently confronting them, for so far as they could ascertain, the void below was
infinite. The Superintendent did not reproach them. Instead, he pondered deeply, and
made plans for the following day. The night shift did not go on that evening.

At two in the morning a lone coyote on the mountain began to howl dismally. From
somewhere within the works a dog barked an answer; either to the coyote--or to
something else. A storm was gathering around the peaks of the range, and weirdly
shaped clouds scudded horribly across the blurred patch of celestial light which marked
a gibbous moon's attempts to shine through many layers of cirro-stratus vapours. It was
Romero's voice, coming from the bunk above, that awakened me, a voice excited and
tense with some vague expectation I could not understand:

"Madre de Dios!--el sonido--ese sonido--oiga Vd!--lo oye Vd?--señor, THAT

SOUND!"

I listened, wondering what sound he meant. The coyote, the dog, the storm, all were
audible; the last named now gaining ascendancy as the wind shrieked more and more
frantically. Flashes of lightning were visible through the bunk-house window. I
questioned the nervous Mexican, repeating the sounds I had heard:

"El coyote--el perro--el viento?"

But Romero did not reply. Then he commenced whispering as in awe:

"El ritmo, señor--el ritmo de la tierra--THAT THROB DOWN IN THE GROUND!"

And now I also heard; heard and shivered and without knowing why. Deep, deep, below
me was a sound--a rhythm, just as the peon had said--which, though exceedingly faint,
yet dominated even the dog, the coyote, and the increasing tempest. To seek to describe
it was useless--for it was such that no description is possible. Perhaps it was like the
pulsing of the engines far down in a great liner, as sensed from the deck, yet it was not
so mechanical; not so devoid of the element of the life and consciousness. Of all its
qualities, remoteness in the earth most impressed me. To my mind rushed fragments of
a passage in Joseph Glanvil which Poe has quoted with tremendous effect:

".....the vastness, profundity, and unsearchableness of His works, which have a depth in
them greater than the well of Democritus."

Suddenly Romero leaped from his bunk, pausing before me to gaze at the strange ring
on my hand, which glistened queerly in every flash of lightning, and then staring
intently in the direction of the mine shaft. I also rose, and both of us stood motionless
for a time, straining our ears as the uncanny rhythm seemed more and more to take on a
vital quality. Then without apparent volition we began to move toward the door, whose
rattling in the gale held a comforting suggestion of earthly reality. The chanting in the
depths--for such the sound now seemed to be--grew in volume and distinctness; and we
felt irresistibly urged out into the storm and thence to the gaping blackness of the shaft.

We encountered no living creature, for the men of the night shift had been released from
duty, and were doubtless at the Dry Gulch settlement pouring sinister rumours into the
ear of some drowsy bartender. From the watchman's cabin, however, gleamed a small
square of yellow light like a guardian eye. I dimly wondered how the rhythmic sound
had affected the watchman; but Romero was moving more swiftly now, and I followed
without pausing.

As we descended the shaft, the sound beneath grew definitely composite. It struck me as
horribly like a sort of Oriental ceremony, with beating of drums and chanting of many
voices. I have, as you are aware, been much in India. Romero and I moved without
material hesitancy through drifts and down ladders; ever toward the thing that allured
us, yet ever with a pitifully helpless fear and reluctance. At one time I fancied I had
gone mad--this was when, on wondering how our way was lighted in the absence of
lamp or candle, I realized that the ancient ring on my finger was glowing with eerie
radiance, diffusing a pallid lustre through the damp, heavy air around.

It was without warning that Romero, after clambering down one of the many wide
ladders, broke into a run and left me alone. Some new and wild note in the drumming
and chanting, perceptible but slightly to me, had acted on him in a startling fashion; and
with a wild outcry he forged ahead unguided in the cavern's gloom. I heard his repeated
shrieks before me, as he stumbled awkwardly along the level places and scrambled
madly down the rickety ladders. And frightened as I was, I yet retained enough of my
perception to note that his speech, when articulate, was not of any sort known to me.
Harsh but impressive polysyllables had replaced the customary mixture of bad Spanish
and worse English, and of these, only the oft repeated cry "Huitzilopotchli" seemed in
the least familiar. Later I definitely placed that word in the works of a great historian--
and shuddered when the association came to me.

The climax of that awful night was composite but fairly brief, beginning just as I
reached the final cavern of the journey. Out of the darkness immediately ahead burst a
final shriek from the Mexican, which was joined by such a chorus of uncouth sound as I
could never hear again and survive. In that moment it seemed as if all the hidden terrors
and monstrosities of earth had become articulate in an effort to overwhelm the human
race. Simultaneously the light from my ring was extinguished, and I saw a new light
glimmering from lower space but a few yards ahead of me. I had arrived at the abyss,
which was now redly aglow, and which had evidently swallowed up the unfortunate
Romero. Advancing, I peered over the edge of that chasm which no line could fathom,
and which was now a pandemonium of flickering flame and hideous uproar. At first I
beheld nothing but a seething blur of luminosity; but then shapes, all infinitely distant,
began to detach themselves from the confusion, and I saw--was it Juan Romero?--but
God! I dare not tell you what I saw!..Some power from heaven, coming to my aid,
obliterated both sights and sounds in such a crash as may be heard when two universes
collide in space. Chaos supervened, and I knew the peace of oblivion.

I hardly know how to continue, since conditions so singular are involved; but I will do
my best, not even trying to differentiate betwixt the real and the apparent. When I
awakened, I was safe in my bunk and the red glow of dawn was visible at the window.
Some distance away the lifeless body of Juan Romero lay upon a table, surrounded by a
group of men, including the camp doctor. The men were discussing the strange death of
the Mexican as he lay asleep; a death seemingly connected in some way with the
terrible bolt of lightning which had struck and shaken the mountain. No direct cause
was evident, and an autopsy failed to show any reason why Romero should not be
living. Snatches of conversation indicated beyond a doubt that neither Romero nor I had
left the bunk-house during the night; that neither of us had been awake during the
frightful storm which had passed over the Cactus range. That storm, said men who had
ventured down the mine shaft, had caused extensive caving-in, and had completely
closed the deep abyss which had created so much apprehension the day before. When I
asked the watchman what sounds he had heard prior to the mighty thunderbolt; he
mentioned a coyote, a dog, and the snarling mountain wind--nothing more. Nor do I
doubt his word.

Upon the resumption of work, Superintendent Arthur called upon some especially
dependable men to make a few investigations around the spot where the gulf had
appeared. Though hardly eager, they obeyed, and a deep boring was made. Results were
very curious. The roof of the void, as seen when it was open, was not by any means
thick; yet now the drills of the investigators met what appeared to be a limitless extent
of solid rock. Finding nothing else, not even gold, the Superintendent abandoned his
attempts; but a perplexed look occasionally steals over his countenance as he sits
thinking at his desk.

One other thing is curious. Shortly after waking on that morning after the storm, I
noticed the unaccountable absence of my Hindoo ring from my finger. I had prized it
greatly, yet nevertheless felt a sensation of relief at its disappearance. If one of my
fellow-miners appropriated it, he must have been quite clever in disposing of his booty,
for despite advertisements and a police search, the ring was never seen again. Somehow
I doubt if it was stolen by mortal hands, for many strange things were taught me in
India.

My opinion of my whole experience varies from time to time. In broad daylight, and at
most seasons I am apt to think the greater part of it a mere dream; but sometimes in the
autumn, about two in the morning when the winds and animals howl dismally, there
comes from inconceivable depths below a damnable suggestion of rhythmical
throbbing..and I feel that the transition of Juan Romero was a terrible one indeed.
 THE TREE
Many years ago, when the hillside villa was new and resplendent, there dwelt within it
the two sculptors Kalos and Musides. From Lydia to Neapolis the beauty of their work
was praised, and none dared say that the one excelled the other in skill. The Hermes of
Kalos stood in a marble shrine in Corinth, and the Pallas of Musides surmounted a pillar
in Athens near the Parthenon. All men paid homage to Kalos and Musides, and
marvelled that no shadow of artistic jealousy cooled the warmth of their brotherly
friendship.

But though Kalos and Musides dwelt in unbroken harmony, their natures were not alike.
Whilst Musides revelled by night amidst the urban gaieties of Tegea, Kalos would
remain at home; stealing away from the sight of his slaves into the cool recesses of the
olive grove. There he would meditate upon the visions that filled his mind, and there
devise the forms of beauty which later became immortal in breathing marble. Idle folk,
indeed, said that Kalos conversed with the spirits of the grove, and that his statues were
but images of the fauns and dryads he met there for he patterned his work after no living
model.

So famous were Kalos and Musides, that none wondered when the Tyrant of Syracuse
sent to them deputies to speak of the costly statue of Tyche which he had planned for
his city. Of great size and cunning workmanship must the statue be, for it was to form a
wonder of nations and a goal of travellers. Exalted beyond thought would be he whose
work should gain acceptance, and for this honor Kalos and Musides were invited to
compete. Their brotherly love was well known, and the crafty Tyrant surmised that
each, instead of concealing his work from the other, would offer aid and advice; this
charity producing two images of unheard of beauty, the lovelier of which would eclipse
even the dreams of poets.

With joy the sculptors hailed the Tyrant's offer, so that in the days that followed their
slaves heard the ceaseless blows of chisels. Not from each other did Kalos and Musides
conceal their work, but the sight was for them alone. Saving theirs, no eyes beheld the
two divine figures released by skillful blows from the rough blocks that had imprisoned
them since the world began.

At night, as of yore, Musides sought the banquet halls of Tegea whilst Kalos wandered
alone in the olive grove. But as time passed, men observed a want of gaiety in the once
sparkling Musides. It was strange, they said amongst themselves that depression should
thus seize one with so great a chance to win art's loftiest reward. Many months passed
yet in the sour face of Musides came nothing of the sharp expectancy which the
situation should arouse.

Then one day Musides spoke of the illness of Kalos, after which none marvelled again
at his sadness, since the sculptors' attachment was known to be deep and sacred.
Subsequently many went to visit Kalos, and indeed noticed the pallor of his face; but
there was about him a happy serenity which made his glance more magical than the
glance of Musides who was clearly distracted with anxiety and who pushed aside all the
slaves in his eagerness to feed and wait upon his friend with his own hands. Hidden
behind heavy curtains stood the two unfinished figures of Tyche, little touched of late
by the sick man and his faithful attendant.
As Kalos grew inexplicably weaker and weaker despite the ministrations of puzzled
physicians and of his assiduous friend, he desired to be carried often to the grove which
he so loved. There he would ask to be left alone, as if wishing to speak with unseen
things. Musides ever granted his requests, though his eyes filled with visible tears at the
thought that Kalos should care more for the fauns and the dryads than for him. At last
the end drew near, and Kalos discoursed of things beyond this life. Musides, weeping,
promised him a sepulchre more lovely than the tomb of Mausolus; but Kalos bade him
speak no more of marble glories. Only one wish now haunted the mind of the dying
man; that twigs from certain olive trees in the grove be buried by his resting place--
close to his head. And one night, sitting alone in the darkness of the olive grove, Kalos
died. Beautiful beyond words was the marble sepulchre which stricken Musides carved
for his beloved friend. None but Kalos himself could have fashioned such basreliefs,
wherein were displayed all the splendours of Elysium. Nor did Musides fail to bury
close to Kalos' head the olive twigs from the grove.

As the first violence of Musides' grief gave place to resignation, he labored with
diligence upon his figure of Tyche. All honour was now his, since the Tyrant of
Syracuse would have the work of none save him or Kalos. His task proved a vent for his
emotion and he toiled more steadily each day, shunning the gaieties he once had
relished. Meanwhile his evenings were spent beside the tomb of his friend, where a
young olive tree had sprung up near the sleeper's head. So swift was the growth of this
tree, and so strange was its form, that all who beheld it exclaimed in surprise; and
Musides seemed at once fascinated and repelled.

Three years after the death of Kalos, Musides despatched a messenger to the Tyrant, and
it was whispered in the agora at Tegea that the mighty statue was finished. By this time
the tree by the tomb had attained amazing proportions, exceeding all other trees of its
kind, and sending out a singularly heavy branch above the apartment in which Musides
labored. As many visitors came to view the prodigious tree, as to admire the art of the
sculptor, so that Musides was seldom alone. But he did not mind his multitude of
guests; indeed, he seemed to dread being alone now that his absorbing work was done.
The bleak mountain wind, sighing through the olive grove and the tomb-tree, had an
uncanny way of forming vaguely articulate sounds.

The sky was dark on the evening that the Tyrant's emissaries came to Tegea. It was
definitely known that they had come to bear away the great image of Tyche and bring
eternal honour to Musides, so their reception by the proxenoi was of great warmth. As
the night wore on a violent storm of wind broke over the crest of Maenalus, and the men
from far Syracuse were glad that they rested snugly in the town. They talked of their
illustrious Tyrant, and of the splendour of his capital and exulted in the glory of the
statue which Musides had wrought for him. And then the men of Tegea spoke of the
goodness of Musides, and of his heavy grief for his friend and how not even the coming
laurels of art could console him in the absence of Kalos, who might have worn those
laurels instead. Of the tree which grew by the tomb, near the head of Kalos, they also
spoke. The wind shrieked more horribly, and both the Syracusans and the Arcadians
prayed to Aiolos.

In the sunshine of the morning the proxenoi led the Tyrant's messengers up the slope to
the abode of the sculptor, but the night wind had done strange things. Slaves' cries
ascended from a scene of desolation, and no more amidst the olive grove rose the
gleaming colonnades of that vast hall wherein Musides had dreamed and toiled. Lone
and shaken mourned the humble courts and the lower walls, for upon the sumptuous
greater peristyle had fallen squarely the heavy overhanging bough of the strange new
tree, reducing the stately poem in marble with odd completeness to a mound of
unsightly ruins. Strangers and Tegeans stood aghast, looking from the wreckage to the
great, sinister tree whose aspect was so weirdly human and whose roots reached so
queerly into the sculptured sepulchre of Kalos. And their fear and dismay increased
when they searched the fallen apartment, for of the gentle Musides, and of the
marvellously fashioned image of Tyche, no trace could be discovered. Amidst such
stupendous ruin only chaos dwelt, and the representatives of two cities left
disappointed; Syracusans that they had no statue to bear home, Tegeans that they had no
artist to crown. However, the Syracusans obtained after a while a very splendid statue in
Athens, and the Tegeans consoled themselves by erecting in the agora a marble temple
commemorating the gifts, virtues, and brotherly piety of Musides.

But the olive grove still stands, as does the tree growing out of the tomb of Kalos, and
the old bee-keeper told me that sometimes the boughs whisper to one another in the
night wind, saying over and over again. "Oida! Oida!--I know! I know!"

THE UNNAMABLE
With this friend, Joel Manton, I had often languidly disputed. He was principal of the
East High School, born and bred in Boston and sharing New England's self-satisfied
deafness to the delicate overtones of life. It was his view that only our normal, objective
experiences possess any esthetic significance, and that it is the province of the artist not
so much to rouse strong emotion by action, ecstasy, and astonishment, as to maintain a
placid interest and appreciation by accurate, detailed transcripts of everyday affairs.
Especially did he object to my preoccupation with the mystical and the unexplained; for
although believing in the supernatural much more fully than I, he would not admit that
it is sufficiently commonplace for literary treatment. That a mind can find its greatest
pleasure in escapes from the daily treadmill, and in original and dramatic
recombinations of images usually thrown by habit and fatigue into the hackneyed
patterns of actual existence, was something virtually incredible to his clear, practical,
and logical intellect. With him all things and feelings had fixed dimensions, properties,
causes, and effects; and although he vaguely knew that the mind sometimes holds
visions and sensations of far less geometrical, classifiable, and workable nature, he
believed himself justified in drawing an arbitrary line and ruling out of court all that
cannot be experienced and understood by the average citizen. Besides, he was almost
sure that nothing can be really "unnamable." It didn't sound sensible to him.

Though I well realized the futility of imaginative and metaphysical arguments against
the complacency of an orthodox sun-dweller, something in the scene of this afternoon
colloquy moved me to more than usual contentiousness. The crumbling slate slabs, the
patriarchal trees, and the centuried gambrel roofs of the witch-haunted old town that
stretched around, all combined to rouse my spirit in defense of my work; and I was soon
carrying my thrusts into the enemy's own country. It was not, indeed, difficult to begin a
counter-attack, for I knew that Joel Manton actually half clung to many old-wives'
superstitions which sophisticated people had long outgrown; beliefs in the appearance
of dying persons at distant places, and in the impressions left by old faces on the
windows through which they had gazed all their lives. To credit these whisperings of
rural grandmothers, I now insisted, argued a faith in the existence of spectral substances
on the earth apart from and subsequent to their material counterparts. It argued a
capability of believing in phenomena beyond all normal notions; for if a dead man can
transmit his visible or tangible image half across the world, or down the stretch of the
centuries, how can it be absurd to suppose that deserted houses are full of queer sentient
things, or that old graveyards teem with the terrible, unbodied intelligence of
generations? And since spirit, in order to cause all the manifestations attributed to it,
cannot be limited by any of the laws of matter, why is it extravagant to imagine
psychically living dead things in shapes--or absences of shapes--which must for human
spectators be utterly and appallingly "unnamable"? "Common sense" in reflecting on
these subjects, I assured my friend with some warmth, is merely a stupid absence of
imagination and mental flexibility.

Twilight had now approached, but neither of us felt any wish to cease speaking. Manton
seemed unimpressed by my arguments, and eager to refute them, having that confidence
in his own opinions which had doubtless caused his success as a teacher; whilst I was
too sure of my ground to fear defeat. The dusk fell, and lights faintly gleamed in some
of the distant windows, but we did not move. Our seat on the tomb was very
comfortable, and I knew that my prosaic friend would not mind the cavernous rift in the
ancient, root-disturbed brickwork close behind us, or the utter blackness of the spot
brought by the intervention of a tottering, deserted seventeenth-century house between
us and the nearest lighted road. There in the dark, upon that riven tomb by the deserted
house, we talked on about the "unnamable" and after my friend had finished his scoffing
I told him of the awful evidence behind the story at which he had scoffed the most.

My tale had been called The Attic Window, and appeared in the January, 1922, issue of
Whispers. In a good many places, especially the South and the Pacific coast, they took
the magazines off the stands at the complaints of silly milk-sops; but New England
didn't get the thrill and merely shrugged its shoulders at my extravagance. The thing, it
was averred, was biologically impossible to start with; merely another of those crazy
country mutterings which Cotton Mather had been gullible enough to dump into his
chaotic Magnalia Christi Americana, and so poorly authenticated that even he had not
ventured to name the locality where the horror occurred. And as to the way I amplified
the bare jotting of the old mystic--that was quite impossible, and characteristic of a
flighty and notional scribbler! Mather had indeed told of the thing as being born, but
nobody but a cheap sensationalist would think of having it grow up, look into people's
windows at night, and be hidden in the attic of a house, in flesh and in spirit, till
someone saw it at the window centuries later and couldn't describe what it was that
turned his hair gray. All this was flagrant trashiness, and my friend Manton was not
slow to insist on that fact. Then I told him what I had found in an old diary kept
between 1706 and 1723, unearthed among family papers not a mile from where we were
sitting; that, and the certain reality of the scars on my ancestor's chest and back which
the diary described. I told him, too, of the fears of others in that region, and how they
were whispered down for generations; and how no mythical madness came to the boy
who in 1793 entered an abandoned house to examine certain traces suspected to be
there.

It had been an eldritch thing--no wonder sensitive students shudder at the Puritan age in
Massachusetts. So little is known of what went on beneath the surface--so little, yet
such a ghastly festering as it bubbles up putrescently in occasional ghoulish glimpses.
The witchcraft terror is a horrible ray of light on what was stewing in men's crushed
brains, but even that is a trifle. There was no beauty; no freedom--we can see that from
the architectural and household remains, and the poisonous sermons of the cramped
divines. And inside that rusted iron straitjacket lurked gibbering hideousness,
perversion, and diabolism. Here, truly, was the apotheosis of The Unnamable.

Cotton Mather, in that demoniac sixth book which no one should read after dark,
minced no words as he flung forth his anathema. Stern as a Jewish prophet, and
laconically un-amazed as none since his day could be, he told of the beast that had
brought forth what was more than beast but less than man--the thing with the blemished
eye--and of the screaming drunken wretch that hanged for having such an eye. This
much he baldly told, yet without a hint of what came after. Perhaps he did not know, or
perhaps he knew and did not dare to tell. Others knew, but did not dare to tell--there is
no public hint of why they whispered about the lock on the door to the attic stairs in the
house of a childless, broken, embittered old man who had put up a blank slate slab by an
avoided grave, although one may trace enough evasive legends to curdle the thinnest
blood.

It is all in that ancestral diary I found; all the hushed innuendoes and furtive tales of
things with a blemished eye seen at windows in the night or in deserted meadows near
the woods. Something had caught my ancestor on a dark valley road, leaving him with
marks of horns on his chest and of apelike claws on his back; and when they looked for
prints in the trampled dust they found the mixed marks of split hooves and vaguely
anthropoid paws. Once a post-rider said he saw an old man chasing and calling to a
frightful loping, nameless thing on Meadow Hill in the thinly moonlit hours before
dawn, and many believed him. Certainly, there was strange talk one night in 1710 when
the childless, broken old man was buried in the crypt behind his own house in sight of
the blank slate slab. They never unlocked that attic door, but left the whole house as it
was, dreaded and deserted. When noises came from it, they whispered and shivered; and
hoped that the lock on that attic door was strong. Then they stopped hoping when the
horror occurred at the parsonage, leaving not a soul alive or in one piece. With the years
the legends take on a spectral character--I suppose the thing, if it was a living thing,
must have died. The memory had lingered hideously--all the more hideous because it
was so secret.

During this narration my friend Manton had become very silent, and I saw that my
words had impressed him. He did not laugh as I paused, but asked quite seriously about
the boy who went mad in 1793, and who had presumably been the hero of my fiction. I
told him why the boy had gone to that shunned, deserted house, and remarked that he
ought to be interested, since he believed that windows retained latent images of those
who had sat at them. The boy had gone to look at the windows of that horrible attic,
because of tales of things seen behind them, and had come back screaming maniacally.

Manton remained thoughtful as I said this, but gradually reverted to his analytical mood.
He granted for the sake of argument that some unnatural monster had really existed, but
reminded me that even the most morbid perversion of nature need not be unnamable or
scientifically indescribable. I admired his clearness and persistence, and added some
further revelations I had collected among the old people. Those later spectral legends, I
made plain, related to monstrous apparitions more frightful than anything organic could
be; apparitions of gigantic bestial forms sometimes visible and sometimes only tangible,
which floated about on moonless nights and haunted the old house, the crypt behind it,
and the grave where a sapling had sprouted beside an illegible slab. Whether or not such
apparitions had ever gored or smothered people to death, as told in uncorroborated
traditions, they had produced a strong and consistent impression; and were yet darkly
feared by very aged natives, though largely forgotten by the last two generations--
perhaps dying for lack of being thought about. Moreover, so far as esthetic theory was
involved, if the psychic emanations of human creatures be grotesque distortions, what
coherent representation could express or portray so gibbous and infamous a nebulosity
as the specter of a malign, chaotic perversion, itself a morbid blasphemy against nature?
Molded by the dead brain of a hybrid nightmare, would not such a vaporous terror
constitute in all loathsome truth the exquisitely, the shriekingly unnamable?

The hour must now have grown very late. A singularly noiseless bat brushed by me, and
I believe it touched Manton also, for although I could not see him I felt him raise his
arm. Presently he spoke.

"But is that house with the attic window still standing and deserted?"

"Yes," I answered, "I have seen it."

"And did you find anything there--in the attic or anywhere else?"

"There were some bones up under the eaves. They may have been what that boy saw--if
he was sensitive he wouldn't have needed anything in the window-glass to unhinge him.
If they all came from the same object it must have been an hysterical, delirious
monstrosity. It would have been blasphemous to leave such bones in the world, so I
went back with a sack and took them to the tomb behind the house. There was an
opening where I could dump them in. Don't think I was a fool--you ought to have seen
that skull. It had four-inch horns, but a face and jaw something like yours and mine."

At last I could feel a real shiver run through Manton, who had moved very near. But his
curiosity was undeterred.

"And what about the window-panes?"

"They were all gone. One window had lost its entire frame, and in all the others there
was not a trace of glass in the little diamond apertures. They were that kind--the old
lattice windows that went out of use before 1700. I don't believe they've had any glass
for a hundred years or more--maybe the boy broke 'em if he got that far; the legend
doesn't say."

Manton was reflecting again.

"I'd like to see that house, Carter. Where is it? Glass or no glass, I must explore it a
little. And the tomb where you put those bones, and the other grave without an
inscription--the whole thing must be a bit terrible."

"You did see it--until it got dark."

My friend was more wrought upon than I had suspected, for at this touch of harmless
theatricalism he started neurotically away from me and actually cried out with a sort of
gulping gasp which released a strain of previous repression. It was an odd cry, and all
the more terrible because it was answered. For as it was still echoing, I heard a creaking
sound through the pitchy blackness, and knew that a lattice window was opening in that
accursed old house beside us. And because all the other frames were long since fallen, I
knew that it was the grisly glassless frame of that demoniac attic window.

Then came a noxious rush of noisome, frigid air from that same dreaded direction,
followed by a piercing shriek just beside me on that shocking rifted tomb of man and
monster. In another instant I was knocked from my gruesome bench by the devilish
threshing of some unseen entity of titanic size but undetermined nature; knocked
sprawling on the root-clutched mold of that abhorrent graveyard, while from the tomb
came such a stifled uproar of gasping and whirring that my fancy peopled the rayless
gloom with Miltonic legions of the misshapen damned. There was a vortex of withering,
ice-cold wind, and then the rattle of loose bricks and plaster; but I had mercifully fainted
before I could learn what it meant.

Manton, though smaller than I, is more resilient; for we opened our eyes at almost the
same instant, despite his greater injuries. Our couches were side by side, and we knew
in a few seconds that we were in St. Mary's Hospital. Attendants were grouped about in
tense curiosity, eager to aid our memory by telling us how we came there, and we soon
heard of the farmer who had found us at noon in a lonely field beyond Meadow Hill, a
mile from the old burying ground, on a spot where an ancient slaughterhouse is reputed
to have stood. Manton had two malignant wounds in the chest, and some less severe
cuts or gougings in the back. I was not so seriously hurt, but was covered with welts and
contusions of the most bewildering character, including the print of a split hoof. It was
plain that Manton knew more than I, but he told nothing to the puzzled and interested
physicians till he had learned what our injuries were. Then he said we were the victims
of a vicious bull--though the animal was a difficult thing to place and account for.

After the doctors and nurses had left, I whispered an awe struck question:

"Good God, Manton, but what was it? Those scars--was it like that?"

And I was too dazed to exult when he whispered back a thing I had half expected--

"No--it wasn't that way at all. It was everywhere--a gelatin--a slime yet it had shapes, a
thousand shapes of horror beyond all memory. There were eyes--and a blemish. It was
the pit--the maelstrom--the ultimate abomination. Carter, it was the unnamable!

THE WHITE SHIP

I am Basil Elton, keeper of the North Point light that my father and grandfather kept
before me. Far from the shore stands the gray lighthouse, above sunken slimy rocks that
are seen when the tide is low, but unseen when the tide is high. Past that beacon for a
century have swept the majestic barques of the seven seas. In the days of my
grandfather there were many; in the days of my father not so many; and now there are
so few that I sometimes feel strangely alone, as though I were the last man on our
planet.
From far shores came those white-sailed argosies of old; from far Eastern shores where
warm suns shine and sweet odors linger about strange gardens and gay temples. The old
captains of the sea came often to my grandfather and told him of these things which in
turn he told to my father, and my father told to me in the long autumn evenings when
the wind howled eerily from the East. And I have read more of these things, and of
many things besides, in the books men gave me when I was young and filled with
wonder.

But more wonderful than the lore of old men and the lore of books is the secret lore of
ocean. Blue, green, gray, white or black; smooth, ruffled, or mountainous; that ocean is
not silent. All my days have I watched it and listened to it, and I know it well. At first it
told to me only the plain little tales of calm beaches and near ports, but with the years it
grew more friendly and spoke of other things; of things more strange and more distant
in space and time. Sometimes at twilight the gray vapors of the horizon have parted to
grant me glimpses of the ways beyond; and sometimes at night the deep waters of the
sea have grown clear and phosphorescent, to grant me glimpses of the ways beneath.
And these glimpses have been as often of the ways that were and the ways that might
be, as of the ways that are; for ocean is more ancient than the mountains, and freighted
with the memories and the dreams of Time.

Out of the South it was that the White Ship used to come when the moon was full and
high in the heavens. Out of the South it would glide very smoothly and silently over the
sea. And whether the sea was rough or calm, and whether the wind was friendly or
adverse, it would always glide smoothly and silently, its sails distant and its long
strange tiers of oars moving rhythmically. One night I espied upon the deck a man,
bearded and robed, and he seemed to beckon me to embark for far unknown shores.
Many times afterward I saw him under the full moon, and ever did he beckon me.

Very brightly did the moon shine on the night I answered the call, and I walked out over
the waters to the White Ship on a bridge of moonbeams. The man who had beckoned
now spoke a welcome to me in a soft language I seemed to know well, and the hours
were filled with soft songs of the oarsmen as we glided away into a mysterious South,
golden with the glow of that full, mellow moon.

And when the day dawned, rosy and effulgent, I beheld the green shore of far lands,
bright and beautiful, and to me unknown. Up from the sea rose lordly terraces of
verdure, tree-studded, and shewing here and there the gleaming white roofs and
colonnades of strange temples. As we drew nearer the green shore the bearded man told
me of that land, the land of Zar, where dwell all the dreams and thoughts of beauty that
come to men once and then are forgotten. And when I looked upon the terraces again I
saw that what he said was true, for among the sights before me were many things I had
once seen through the mists beyond the horizon and in the phosphorescent depths of
ocean. There too were forms and fantasies more splendid than any I had ever known;
the visions of young poets who died in want before the world could learn of what they
had seen and dreamed. But we did not set foot upon the sloping meadows of Zar, for it
is told that he who treads them may nevermore return to his native shore.

As the White Ship sailed silently away from the templed terraces of Zar, we beheld on
the distant horizon ahead the spires of a mighty city; and the bearded man said to me,
"This is Thalarion, the City of a Thousand Wonders, wherein reside all those mysteries
that man has striven in vain to fathom."And I looked again, at closer range, and saw that
the city was greater than any city I had known or dreamed of before. Into the sky the
spires of its temples reached, so that no man might behold their peaks; and far back
beyond the horizon stretched the grim, gray walls, over which one might spy only a few
roofs, weird and ominous, yet adorned with rich friezes and alluring sculptures. I
yearned mightily to enter this fascinating yet repellent city, and besought the bearded
man to land me at the stone pier by the huge carven gate Akariel; but he gently denied
my wish, saying, "Into Thalarion, the City of a Thousand Wonders, many have passed
but none returned. Therein walk only daemons and mad things that are no longer men,
and the streets are white with the unburied bones of those who have looked upon the
eidolon Lathi, that reigns over the city."So the White Ship sailed on past the walls of
Thalarion, and followed for many days a southward-flying bird, whose glossy plumage
matched the sky out of which it had appeared.

Then came we to a pleasant coast gay with blossoms of every hue, where as far inland
as we could see basked lovely groves and radiant arbors beneath a meridian sun. From
bowers beyond our view came bursts of song and snatches of lyric harmony,
interspersed with faint laughter so delicious that I urged the rowers onward in my
eagerness to reach the scene. And the bearded man spoke no word, but watched me as
we approached the lily-lined shore. Suddenly a wind blowing from over the flowery
meadows and leafy woods brought a scent at which I trembled. The wind grew stronger,
and the air was filled with the lethal, charnel odor of plague-stricken towns and
uncovered cemeteries. And as we sailed madly away from that damnable coast the
bearded man spoke at last, saying, "This is Xura, the Land of Pleasures Unattained."

So once more the White Ship followed the bird of heaven, over warm blessed seas
fanned by caressing, aromatic breezes. Day after day and night after night did we sail,
and when the moon was full we would listen to soft songs of the oarsmen, sweet as on
that distant night when we sailed away from my far native land. And it was by
moonlight that we anchored at last in the harbor of Sona-Nyl, which is guarded by twin
headlands of crystal that rise from the sea and meet in a resplendent arch. This is the
Land of Fancy, and we walked to the verdant shore upon a golden bridge of
moonbeams.

In the Land of Sona-Nyl there is neither time nor space, neither suffering nor death; and
there I dwelt for many aeons. Green are the groves and pastures, bright and fragrant the
flowers, blue and musical the streams, clear and cool the fountains, and stately and
gorgeous the temples, castles, and cities of Sona-Nyl. Of that land there is no bound, for
beyond each vista of beauty rises another more beautiful. Over the countryside and
amidst the splendor of cities can move at will the happy folk, of whom all are gifted
with unmarred grace and unalloyed happiness. For the aeons that I dwelt there I
wandered blissfully through gardens where quaint pagodas peep from pleasing clumps
of bushes, and where the white walks are bordered with delicate blossoms. I climbed
gentle hills from whose summits I could see entrancing panoramas of loveliness, with
steepled towns nestling in verdant valleys, and with the golden domes of gigantic cities
glittering on the infinitely distant horizon. And I viewed by moonlight the sparkling sea,
the crystal headlands, and the placid harbor wherein lay anchored the White Ship.

It was against the full moon one night in the immemorial year of Tharp that I saw
outlined the beckoning form of the celestial bird, and felt the first stirrings of unrest.
Then I spoke with the bearded man, and told him of my new yearnings to depart for
remote Cathuria, which no man hath seen, but which all believe to lie beyond the basalt
pillars of the West. It is the Land of Hope, and in it shine the perfect ideals of all that we
know elsewhere; or at least so men relate. But the bearded man said to me, "Beware of
those perilous seas wherein men say Cathuria lies. In Sona-Nyl there is no pain or death,
but who can tell what lies beyond the basalt pillars of the West?" Natheless at the next
full moon I boarded the White Ship, and with the reluctant bearded man left the happy
harbor for untraveled seas.

And the bird of heaven flew before, and led us toward the basalt pillars of the West, but
this time the oarsmen sang no soft songs under the full moon. In my mind I would often
picture the unknown Land of Cathuria with its splendid groves and palaces, and would
wonder what new delights there awaited me. "Cathuria," I would say to myself, "is the
abode of gods and the land of unnumbered cities of gold. Its forests are of aloe and
sandalwood, even as the fragrant groves of Camorin, and among the trees flutter gay
birds sweet with song. On the green and flowery mountains of Cathuria stand temples of
pink marble, rich with carven and painted glories, and having in their courtyards cool
fountains of silver, where purr with ravishing music the scented waters that come from
the grotto-born river Narg. And the cities of Cathuria are cinctured with golden walls,
and their pavements also are of gold. In the gardens of these cities are strange orchids,
and perfumed lakes whose beds are of coral and amber. At night the streets and the
gardens are lit with gay lanthorns fashioned from the three--colored shell of the tortoise,
and here resound the soft notes of the singer and the lutanist. And the houses of the
cities of Cathuria are all palaces, each built over a fragrant canal bearing the waters of
the sacred Narg. Of marble and porphyry are the houses, and roofed with glittering gold
that reflects the rays of the sun and enhances the splendor of the cities as blissful gods
view them from the distant peaks. Fairest of all is the palace of the great monarch
Dorieb, whom some say to be a demi-god and others a god. High is the palace of
Dorieb, and many are the turrets of marble upon its walls. In its wide halls many
multitudes assemble, and here hang the trophies of the ages. And the roof is of pure
gold, set upon tall pillars of ruby and azure, and having such carven figures of gods and
heroes that he who looks up to those heights seems to gaze upon the living Olympus.
And the floor of the palace is of glass, under which flow the cunningly lighted waters of
the Narg, gay with gaudy fish not known beyond the bounds of lovely Cathuria."

Thus would I speak to myself of Cathuria, but ever would the bearded man warn me to
turn back to the happy shore of Sona-Nyl; for Sona-Nyl is known of men, while none
hath ever beheld Cathuria.

And on the thirty-first day that we followed the bird, we beheld the basalt pillars of the
West. Shrouded in mist they were, so that no man might peer beyond them or see their
summits--which indeed some say reach even to the heavens. And the bearded man again
implored me to turn back, but I heeded him not; for from the mists beyond the basalt
pillars I fancied there came the notes of singers and lutanists; sweeter than the sweetest
songs of Sona-Nyl, and sounding mine own praises; the praises of me, who had
voyaged far from the full moon and dwelt in the Land of Fancy. So to the sound of
melody the White Ship sailed into the mist betwixt the basalt pillars of the West. And
when the music ceased and the mist lifted, we beheld not the Land of Cathuria, but a
swift-rushing resistless sea, over which our helpless barque was borne toward some
unknown goal. Soon to our ears came the distant thunder of falling waters, and to our
eyes appeared on the far horizon ahead the titanic spray of a monstrous cataract,
wherein the oceans of the world drop down to abysmal nothingness. Then did the
bearded man say to me, with tears on his cheek, "We have rejected the beautiful Land of
Sona-Nyl, which we may never behold again. The gods are greater than men, and they
have conquered."And I closed my eyes before the crash that I knew would come,
shutting out the sight of the celestial bird which flapped its mocking blue wings over the
brink of the torrent.

Out of that crash came darkness, and I heard the shrieking of men and of things which
were not men. From the East tempestuous winds arose, and chilled me as I crouched on
the slab of damp stone which had risen beneath my feet. Then as I heard another crash I
opened my eyes and beheld myself upon the platform of that lighthouse whence I had
sailed so many aeons ago. In the darkness below there loomed the vast blurred outlines
of a vessel breaking up on the cruel rocks, and as I glanced out over the waste I saw that
the light had failed for the first time since my grandfather had assumed its care.

And in the later watches of the night, when I went within the tower, I saw on the wall a
calendar which still remained as when I had left it at the hour I sailed away. With the
dawn I descended the tower and looked for wreckage upon the rocks, but what I found
was only this: a strange dead bird whose hue was as of the azure sky, and a single
shattered spar, of a whiteness greater than that of the wave-tips or of the mountain
snow.

And thereafter the ocean told me its secrets no more; and though many times since has
the moon shone full and high in the heavens, the White Ship from the South came never
again.

THROUGH THE GATES OF THE SILVER KEY

Chapter One

In a vast room hung with strangely figured arras and carpeted with Bonkhata rugs of
impressive age and workmanship, four men were sitting around a document-strewn
table. From the far corners, where odd tripods of wrought iron were now and then
replenished by an incredibly aged Negro in somber livery, came the hypnotic fumes of
olibanum; while in a deep niche on one side there ticked a curious, coffin--shaped clock
whose dial bore baffling hieroglyphs and whose four hands did not move in consonance
with any time system known on this planet. It was a singular and disturbing room, but
well fitted to the business then at hand. For there, in the New Orleans home of this
continent's greatest mystic, mathematician and orientalist, there was being settled at last
the estate of a scarcely less great mystic, scholar, author and dreamer who had vanished
from the face of the earth four years before.

Randolph Carter, who had all his life sought to escape from the tedium and limitations
of waking reality in the beckoning vistas of dreams and fabled avenues of other
dimensions, disappeared from the sight of man on the seventh of October, 1928, at the
age of fifty-four. His career had been a strange and lonely one, and there were those
who inferred from his curious novels many episodes more bizarre than any in his
recorded history. His association with Harley Warren, the South Carolina mystic whose
studies in the primal Naacal language of the Himalayan priests had led to such
outrageous conclusions, had been close. Indeed, it was he who--one mist-mad, terrible
night in an ancient graveyard--had seen Warren descend into a dank and nitrous vault,
never to emerge. Carter lived in Boston, but it was from the wild, haunted hills behind
hoary and witch-accursed Arkham that all his forebears had come. And it was amid
these ancient, cryptically brooding hills that he had ultimately vanished.

His old servant, Parks--who died early in 1930--had spoken of the strangely aromatic
and hideously carven box he had found in the attic, and of the indecipherable
parchments and queerly figured silver key which that box had contained: matters of
which Carter had also written to others. Carter, he said, had told him that this key had
come down from his ancestors, and that it would help him to unlock the gates to his lost
boyhood, and to strange dimensions and fantastic realms which he had hitherto visited
only in vague, brief, and elusive dreams. Then one day Carter took the box and its
contents and rode away in his car, never to return.

Later on, people found the car at the side of an old, grass-grown road in the hills behind
crumbling Arkham--the hills where Carter's forebears had once dwelt, and where the
ruined cellar of the great Carter homestead still gaped to the sky. It was in a grove of tall
elms nearby that another of the Carters had mysteriously vanished in 1781, and not far
away was the half-rotted cottage where Goody Fowler, the witch, had brewed her
ominous potions still earlier. The region had been settled in 1692 by fugitives from the
witchcraft trials in Salem, and even now it bore a name for vaguely ominous things
scarcely to be envisaged. Edmund Carter had fled from the shadow of Gallows Hill just
in time, and the tales of his sorceries were many. Now, it seemed, his lone descendant
had gone somewhere to join him!

In the car they found the hideously carved box of fragrant wood, and the parchment
which no man could read. The silver key was gone--presumably with Carter. Further
than that there was no certain clue. Detectives from Boston said that the fallen timbers
of the old Carter place seemed oddly disturbed, and somebody found a handkerchief on
the rock-ridged, sinisterly wooded slope behind the ruins near the dreaded cave called
the Snake Den.

It was then that the country legends about the Snake Den gained a new vitality. Farmers
whispered of the blasphemous uses to which old Edmund Carter the wizard had put that
horrible grotto, and added later tales about the fondness which Randolph Carter himself
had had for it when a boy. In Carter's boyhood the venerable gambrel-roofed homestead
was still standing and tenanted by his great-uncle Christopher. He had visited there
often, and had talked singularly about the Snake Den. People remembered what he had
said about a deep fissure and an unknown inner cave beyond, and speculated on the
change he had shown after spending one whole memorable day in the cavern when he
was nine. That was in October, too--and ever after that he had seemed to have a
uncanny knack at prophesying future events.

It had rained late in the night that Carter vanished, and no one was quite able to trace his
footprints from the car. Inside the Snake Den all was amorphous liquid mud, owing to
the copious seepage. Only the ignorant rustics whispered about the prints they thought
they spied where the great elms overhang the road, and on the sinister hillside near the
Snake Den, where the handkerchief was found. Who could pay attention to whispers
that spoke of stubby little tracks like those which Randolph Carter's square-toed boots
made when he was a small boy? It was as crazy a notion as that other whisper--that the
tracks of old Benijah Corey's peculiar heelless boots had met the stubby little tracks in
the road. Old Benijah had been the Carters' hired man when Randolph was young; but
he had died thirty years ago.

It must have been these whispers plus Carter's own statement to Parks and others that
the queerly arabesqued silver key would help him unlock the gates of his lost boyhood--
which caused a number of mystical students to declare that the missing man had
actually doubled back on the trail of time and returned through forty-five years to that
other October day in 1883 when he had stayed in the Snake Den as a small boy. When
he came out that night, they argued, he had somehow made the whole trip to 1928 and
back; for did he not thereafter know of things which were to happen later? And yet he
had never spoken of anything to happen after 1928.

One student--an elderly eccentric of Providence, Rhode Island, who had enjoyed a long
and close correspondence with Carter--had a still more elaborate theory, and believed
that Carter had not only returned to boyhood, but achieved a further liberation, roving at
will through the prismatic vistas of boyhood dream. After a strange vision this man
published a tale of Carter's vanishing in which he hinted that the lost one now reigned as
king on the opal throne of Ilek-Vad, that fabulous town of turrets atop the hollow cliffs
of glass overlooking the twilight sea wherein the bearded and finny Gniorri build their
singular labyrinths.

It was this old man, Ward Phillips, who pleaded most loudly against the apportionment
of Carter's estate to his heirs--all distant cousins--on the ground that he was still alive in
another time--dimension and might well return some day. Against him was arrayed the
legal talent of one of the cousins, Ernest K. Aspinwall of Chicago, a man ten years
Carter's senior, but keen as a youth in forensic battles. For four years the contest had
raged, but now the time for apportionment had come, and this vast, strange room in
New Orleans was to be the scene of the arrangement.

It was the home of Carter's literary and financial executor--the distinguished Creole
student of mysteries and Eastern antiquities, Etienne-Laurent de Marigny. Carter had
met de Marigny during the war, when they both served in the French Foreign Legion,
and had at once cleaved to him because of their similar tastes and outlook. When, on a
memorable joint furlough, the learned young Creole had taken the wistful Boston
dreamer to Bayonne, in the south of France, and had shown him certain terrible secrets
in the nighted and immemorial crypts that burrow beneath that brooding, eon-weighted
city, the friendship was forever sealed. Carter's will had named de Marigny as executor,
and now that avid scholar was reluctantly presiding over the settlement of the estate. It
was sad work for him, for like the old Rhode Islander he did not believe that Carter was
dead. But what weight had the dreams of mystics against the harsh wisdom of the
world?

Around the table in that strange room in the old French Quarter sat the men who
claimed an interest in the proceedings. There had been the usual legal advertisements of
the conference in papers wherever Carter's heirs were thought to live; yet only four now
sat listening to the abnormal ticking of that coffin-shaped clock which told no earthly
time, and to the bubbling of the courtyard fountain beyond half-curtained, fan-lighted
windows. As the hours wore on, the faces of the four were half shrouded in the curling
fumes from the tripods, which, piled recklessly with fuel, seemed to need less and less
attention from the silently gliding and increasingly nervous old Negro.

There was Etienne de Marigny himself--slim, dark, handsome, mustached, and still
young. Aspinwall, representing the heirs, was white-haired, apoplectic-faced, side-
whiskered, and portly. Phillips, the Providence mystic, was lean, gray, long-nosed,
clean-shaven, and stoop--shouldered. The fourth man was non-committal in age--lean,
with a dark, bearded, singularly immobile face of very regular contour, bound with the
turban of a high-caste Brahman and having night-black, burning, almost irisless eyes
which seemed to gaze out from a vast distance behind the features. He had announced
himself as the Swami Chandraputra, an adept from Benares, with important information
to give; and both de Marigny and Phillips--who had corresponded with him--had been
quick to recognize the genuineness of his mystical pretensions. His speech had an oddly
forced, hollow, metallic quality, as if the use of English taxed his vocal apparatus; yet
his language was as easy, correct and idiomatic as any native Anglo-Saxon's. In general
attire he was the normal European civilian, but his loose clothes sat peculiarly badly on
him, while his bushy black beard, Eastern turban, and large, white mittens gave him an
air of exotic eccentricity.

De Marigny, fingering the parchment found in Carter's car, was speaking.

"No, I have not been able to make anything of the parchment. Mr. Phillips, here, also
gives it up. Colonel Churchward declares it is not Naacal, and it looks nothing at all like
the hieroglyphics on that Easter Island war-club. The carvings on that box, though, do
strangely suggest Easter Island images. The nearest thing I can recall to these parchment
characters--notice how all the letters seem to hang down from horizontal word-bar--is
the writing in a book poor Harley Warren once had. It came from India while Carter and
I were visiting him in 1919, and he never would tell us anything about it--said it would
be better if we didn't know, and hinted that it might have come originally from some
place other than the Earth. He took it with him in December, when he went down into
the vault in that old graveyard--but neither he nor the book ever came to the surface
again. Some time ago I sent our friend here--the Swami Chandraputra--a memory-
sketch of some of those letters, and also a photostatic copy of the Carter parchment. He
believes he may be able to shed light on them after certain references and consultations.

"But the key--Carter sent me a photograph of that. Its curious arabesques were not
letters, but seem to have belonged to the same culture-tradition as the parchment. Carter
always spoke of being on the point of solving the mystery, though he never gave details.
Once he grew almost poetic about the whole business. That antique silver key, he said,
would unlock the successive doors that bar our free march down the mighty corridors of
space and time to the very Border which no man has crossed since Shaddad with his
terrific genius built and concealed in the sands of Arabia Pettraea the prodigious domes
and uncounted minarets of thousand-pillared Irem. Half-starved dervishes--wrote
Carter--and thirst-crazed nomads have returned to tell of that monumental portal, and of
the hand that is sculptured above the keystone of the arch, but no man has passed and
retraced his steps to say that his footprints on the garnet-strewn sands within bear
witness to his visit. The key, he surmised, was that for which the cyclopean sculptured
hand vainly grasps.
"Why Carter didn't take the parchment as well as the key, we can not say. Perhaps he
forgot it--or perhaps he forbore to take it through recollection of one who had taken a
book of like characters into a vault and never returned. Or perhaps it was really
immaterial to what he wished to do."

As de Marigny paused, old Mr. Phillips spoke a harsh, shrill voice.

"We can know of Randolph Carter's wandering only what we dream. I have been to
many strange places in dreams, and have heard many strange and significant things in
Ulthar, beyond the River Skai. It does not appear that the parchment was needed, for
certainly Carter reentered the world of his boyhood dreams, and is now a king in Ilek-
Vad."

Mr. Aspinwall grew doubly apoplectic-looking as he sputtered: "Can't somebody shut

the old fool up? We've had enough of these moonings. The problem is to divide the
property, and it's about time we got to it."

For the first time Swami Chandraputra spoke in his queerly alien voice.

"Gentlemen, there is more to this matter than you think. Mr. Aspinwall does not do well
to laugh at the evidence of dreams. Mr. Phillips has taken an incomplete view--perhaps
because he has not dreamed enough. I, myself, have done much dreaming. We in India
have always done that, just as all the Carters seem to have done it. You, Mr. Aspinwall,
as a maternal cousin, are naturally not a Carter. My own dreams, and certain other
sources of information, have told me a great deal which you still find obscure. For
example, Randolph Carter forgot that parchment which he couldn't decipher--yet it
would have been well for him had he remembered to take it. You see, I have really
learned pretty much what happened to Carter after he left his car with the silver key at
sunset on that seventh of October, four years ago."

Aspinwall audibly sneered, but the others sat up with heightened interest. The smoke
from the tripods increased, and the crazy ticking of that coffin-shaped clock seemed to
fall into bizarre patterns like the dots and dashes of some alien and insoluble telegraph
message from outer space. The Hindoo leaned back, half closed his eyes, and continued
in that oddly labored yet idiomatic speech, while before his audience there began to
float a picture of what had happened to Randolph Carter.

Chapter Two

The hills beyond Arkham are full of a strange magic--something, perhaps, which the old
wizard Edmund Carter called down from the stars and up from the crypts of nether earth
when he fled there from Salem in 1692. As soon as Randolph Carter was back among
them he knew that he was close to one of the gates which a few audacious, abhorred and
alien-souled men have blasted through titan walls betwixt the world and the outside
absolute. Here, he felt, and on this day of the year, he could carry out with success the
message he had deciphered months before from the arabesques of that tarnished and
incredibly ancient silver key. He knew now how it must be rotated, and how it must be
held up to the setting sun, and what syllables of ceremony must be intoned into the void
at the ninth and last turning. In a spot as close to a dark polarity and induced gate as
this, it could not fail in its primary functions. Certainly, he would rest that night in the
lost boyhood for which he had never ceased to mourn.

He got out of the car with the key in his pocket, walking up-hill deeper and deeper into
the shadowy core of that brooding, haunted countryside of winding road, vine-grown
stone wall, black woodland, gnarled, neglected orchard, gaping-windowed, deserted
farm-house, and nameless nun. At the sunset hour, when the distant spires of Kingsport
gleamed in the ruddy blaze, he took out the key and made the needed turnings and
intonations. Only later did he realize how soon the ritual had taken effect.

Then in the deepening twilight he had heard a voice out of the past: Old Benijah Corey,
his great-uncle's hired man. Had not old Benijah been dead for thirty years? Thirty years
before when. What was time? Where had he been? Why was it strange that Benijah
should be calling him on this seventh of October 1883? Was he not out later than Aunt
Martha had told him to stay? What was this key in his blouse pocket, where his little
telescope--given him by his father on his ninth birthday, two months before--ought to
be? Had he found it in the attic at home? Would it unlock the mystic pylon which his
sharp eye had traced amidst the jagged rocks at the back of that inner cave behind the
Snake Den on the hill? That was the place they always coupled with old Edmund Carter
the wizard. People wouldn't go there, and nobody but him had ever noticed or squirmed
through the root-choked fissure to that great black inner chamber with the pylon. Whose
hands had carved that hint of a pylon out of the living rock? Old Wizard Edmund's--or
others that he had conjured up and commanded?

That evening little Randolph ate supper with Uncle Chris and Aunt Martha in the old
gambrel-roofed farm-house.

Next morning he was up early and out through the twisted-boughed apple orchard to the
upper timber lot where the mouth of the Snake Den lurked black and forbidding
amongst grotesque, overnourished oaks. A nameless expectancy was upon him, and he
did not even notice the loss of his handkerchief as he fumbled in his blouse pocket to
see if the queer silver key was safe. He crawled through the dark orifice with tense,
adventurous assurance, lighting his way with matches taken from the sitting-room. In
another moment he had wriggled through the root--choked fissure at the farther end, and
was in the vast, unknown inner grotto whose ultimate rock wall seemed half like a
monstrous and consciously shapen pylon. Before that dank, dripping wall he stood
silent and awestruck, lighting one match after another as he gazed. Was that stony bulge
above the keystone of the imagined arch really a gigantic sculptured hand? Then he
drew forth the silver key, and made motions and intonations whose source he could only
dimly remember. Was anything forgotten? He knew only that he wished to cross the
barrier to the untrammeled land of his dreams and the gulfs where all dimensions
dissolved in the absolute.

Chapter Three

What happened then is scarcely to be described in words. It is full of those paradoxes,

contradictions and anomalies which have no place in waking life, but which fill our
more fantastic dreams and are taken as matters of course till we return to our narrow,
rigid, objective world of limited causation and tri-dimensional logic. As the Hindoo
continued his tale, he had difficulty in avoiding what seemed--even more than the
notion of a man transferred through the years to boyhood--an air of trivial, puerile
extravagance. Mr. Aspinwall, in disgust, gave an apoplectic snort and virtually stopped
listening.

For the rite of the silver key, as practiced by Randolph Carter in that black, haunted
cave within a cave, did not prove unavailing. From the first gesture and syllable an aura
of strange, awesome mutation was apparent--a sense of incalculable disturbance and
confusion in time and space, yet one which held no hint of what we recognize as motion
and duration. Imperceptibly, such things as age and location ceased to have any
significance whatever. The day before, Randolph Carter had miraculously leaped a gulf
of years. Now there was no distinction between boy and man. There was only the entity
Randolph Carter, with a certain store of images which had lost all connection with
terrestrial scenes and circumstances of acquisition. A moment before, there had been an
inner cave with vague suggestions of a monstrous arch and gigantic sculptured hand on
the farther wall. Now there was neither cave nor absence of cave; neither wall nor
absence of wall. There was only a flux of impressions not so much visual as cerebral,
amidst which the entity that was Randolph Carter experienced perceptions or
registrations of all that his mind revolved on, yet without any clear consciousness of the
way in which he received them.

By the time the rite was over, Carter knew that he was in no region whose place could
be told by Earth's geographers, and in no age whose date history could fix; for the
nature of what was happening was not wholly unfamiliar to him. There were hints of it
in the cryptical Pnakotic fragments, and a whole chapter in the forbidden Necronomicon
of the mad Arab, Abdul Alhazred, had taken on significance when he had deciphered
the designs graven on the silver key. A gate had been unlocked--not, indeed, the
Ultimate Gate, but one leading from Earth and time to that extension of Earth which is
outside time, and from which in turn the Ultimate Gate leads fearsomely and perilously
to the last Void which is outside all earths, all universes, and all matter.

There would be a Guide--and a very terrible one; a Guide who had been an entity of
Earth millions of years before, when man was undreamed of, and when forgotten shapes
moved on a steaming planet building strange cities among whose last, crumbling ruins
the first mammals were to play. Carter remembered what the monstrous Necronomicon
had vaguely and disconcertingly adumbrated concerning that Guide:

"And while there are those," the mad Arab had written, "who have dared to seek
glimpses beyond the Veil, and to accept HIM as guide, they would have been more
prudent had they avoided commerce with HIM; for it is written in the Book of Thoth
how terrific is the price of a single glimpse. Nor may those who pass ever return, for in
the vastnesses transcending our world are shapes of darkness that seize and bind. The
Affair that shambleth about in the night, the evil that defieth the Elder Sign, the Herd
that stand watch at the secret portal each tomb is known to have and that thrive on that
which groweth out of the tenants thereof:--all these Blacknesses are lesser than HE
WHO guardeth the Gateway: HE WHO will guide the rash one beyond all the worlds
into the Abyss of unnamable devourers. For He is 'UMR AT-TAWIL, the Most Ancient
One, which the scribe rendereth as THE PROLONGED OF LIFE."

Memory and imagination shaped dim half-pictures with uncertain outlines amidst the
seething chaos, but Carter knew that they were of memory and imagination only. Yet he
felt that it was not chance which built these things in his consciousness, but rather some
vast reality, ineffable and undimensioned, which surrounded him and strove to translate
itself into the only symbols he was capable of grasping. For no mind of Earth may grasp
the extensions of shape which interweave in the oblique gulfs outside time and the
dimensions we know.

There floated before Carter a cloudy pageantry of shapes and scenes which he somehow
linked with Earth's primal, eon-forgotten past. Monstrous living things moved
deliberately through vistas of fantastic handiwork that no sane dream ever held, and
landscapes bore incredible vegetation and cliffs and mountains and masonry of no
human pattern. There were cities under the sea, and denizens thereof; and towers in
great deserts where globes and cylinders and nameless winged entities shot off into
space, or hurtled down out of space. All this Carter grasped, though the images bore no
fixed relation to one another or to him. He himself had no stable form or position, but
only such shifting hints of form and position as his whirling fancy supplied.

He had wished to find the enchanted regions of his boyhood dreams, where galleys sail
up the river Oukranos past the gilded spires of Thran, and elephant caravans tramp
through perfumed jungles in Kied, beyond forgotten palaces with veined ivory columns
that sleep lovely and unbroken under the moon. Now, intoxicated with wider visions, he
scarcely knew what he sought. Thoughts of infinite and blasphemous daring rose in his
mind, and he knew he would face the dreaded Guide without fear, asking monstrous and
terrible things of him.

All at once the pageant of impressions seemed to achieve a vague kind of stabilization.
There were great masses of towering stone, carven into alien and incomprehensible
designs and disposed according to the laws of some unknown, inverse geometry. Light
filtered from a sky of no assignable colour in baffling, contradictory directions, and
played almost sentiently over what seemed to be a curved line of gigantic hieroglyphed
pedestals more hexagonal than otherwise, and surmounted by cloaked, ill-defined
shapes.

There was another shape, too, which occupied no pedestal, but which seemed to glide or
float over the cloudy, floor-like lower level. It was not exactly permanent in outline, but
held transient suggestions of something remotely preceding or paralleling the human
form, though half as large again as an ordinary man. It seemed to be heavily cloaked,
like the shapes on the pedestals, with some neutral-coloured fabric; and Carter could not
detect any eye-holes through which it might gaze. Probably it did not need to gaze, for it
seemed to belong to an order of beings far outside the merely physical in organization
and faculties.

A moment later Carter knew that this was so, for the Shape had spoken to his mind
without sound or language. And though the name it uttered was a dreaded and terrible
one, Randolph Carter did not flinch in fear.

Instead, he spoke back, equally without sound or language, and made those obeisances
which the hideous Necronomicon had taught him to make. For this shape was nothing
less than that which all the world has feared since Lomar rose out of the sea, and the
Children of the Fire Mist came to Earth to teach the Elder Lore to man. It was indeed
the frightful Guide and Guardian of the Gate--'UMR AT-TAWIL, the ancient one,
which the scribe rendereth the PROLONGED OF LIFE.

The Guide knew, as he knew all things, of Carter's quest and coming, and that this
seeker of dreams and secrets stood before him unafraid. There was no horror or
malignity in what he radiated, and Carter wondered for a moment whether the mad
Arab's terrific blasphemous hints came from envy and a baffled wish to do what was
now about to be done. Or perhaps the Guide reserved his horror and malignity for those
who feared. As the radiations continued, Carter eventually interpreted them in the form
of words.

"I am indeed that Most Ancient One," said the Guide, "of whom you know. We have
awaited you--the Ancient Ones and I. You are welcome, even though long delayed. You
have the key, and have unlocked the First Gate. Now the Ultimate Gate is ready for your
trial. If you fear, you need not advance. You may still go back unharmed, the way you
came. But if you chose to advance--"

The pause was ominous, but the radiations continued to be friendly. Carter hesitated not
a moment, for a burning curiosity drove him on.

"I will advance," he radiated back, "and I accept you as my Guide."

At this reply the Guide seemed to make a sign by certain motions of his robe which may
or may not have involved the lifting of an arm or some homologous member. A second
sign followed, and from his well-learned lore Carter knew that he was at last very close
to the Ultimate Gate. The light now changed to another inexplicable colour, and the
shapes on the quasi-hexagonal pedestals became more clearly defined. As they sat more
erect, their outlines became more like those of men, though Carter knew that they could
not be men. Upon their cloaked heads there now seemed to rest tall, uncertainly
coloured miters, strangely suggestive of those on certain nameless figures chiseled by a
forgotten sculptor along the living cliffs of a high, forbidden mountain in Tartary; while
grasped in certain folds of their swathings were long sceptres whose carven heads
bodied forth a grotesque and archaic mystery.

Carter guessed what they were and whence they came, and Whom they served; and
guessed, too, the price of their service. But he was still content, for at one mighty
venture he was to learn all. Damnation, he reflected, is but a word bandied about by
those whose blindness leads them to condemn all who can see, even with a single eye.
He wondered at the vast conceit of those who had babbled of the malignant Ancient
Ones, as if They could pause from their everlasting dreams to wreak a wrath on
mankind. As well, he might a mammoth pause to visit frantic vengeance on an
angleworm. Now the whole assemblage on the vaguely hexagonal pillars was greeting
him with a gesture of those oddly carven sceptres and radiating a message which he
understood:

"We salute you, Most Ancient One, and you, Randolph Carter, whose daring has made
you one of us."

Carter saw now that one of the pedestals was vacant, and a gesture of the Most Ancient
One told him it was reserved for him. He saw also another pedestal, taller than the rest,
and at the center of the oddly curved line--neither semicircle nor ellipse, parabola nor
hyperbola--which they formed, This, he guessed, was the Guide's own throne. Moving
and rising in a manner hardly definable, Carter took his seat; and as he did so he saw
that the Guide had seated himself.

Gradually and mistily it became apparent that the Most Ancient One was holding
something--some object clutched in the outflung folds of his robe as if for the sight, or
what answered for sight, of the cloaked Companions. It was a large sphere, or apparent
sphere, of some obscurely iridescent metal, and as the Guide put it forward a low,
pervasive half-impression of sound began to rise and fall in intervals which seemed to
be rhythmic even though they followed no rhythm of Earth. There was a suggestion of
chanting or what human imagination might interpret as chanting. Presently the quasi-
sphere began to grow luminous, and as it gleamed up into a cold, pulsating light of
unassignable colour, Carter saw that its flickerings conformed to the alien rhythm of the
chant. Then all the mitered, scepter-bearing Shapes on the pedestals commenced a
slight, curious swaying in the same inexplicable rhythm, while nimbuses of
unclassifiable light--resembling that of the quasi-sphere--played around their shrouded
heads.

The Hindoo paused in his tale and looked curiously at the tall, coffin-shaped clock with
the four hands and hieroglyphed dial, whose crazy ticking followed no known rhythm
of Earth.

"You, Mr. de Marigny," he suddenly said to his learned host, "do not need to be told the
particularly alien rhythm to which those cowled Shapes on the hexagonal pillars
chanted and nodded. You are the only one else--in America--who has had a taste of the
Outer Extension. That clock--I suppose it was sent to you by the Yogi poor Harley
Warren used to talk about--the seer who said that he alone of living men had been to
Yian-Ho, the hidden legacy of eon-old Leng, and had borne certain things away from
that dreadful and forbidden city. I wonder how many of its subtler properties you know?
If my dreams and readings be correct, it was made by those who knew much of the First
Gateway. But let me go on with my tale."

At last, continued the Swami, the swaying and the suggestion of chanting ceased, the
lambent nimbuses around the now drooping and motionless heads faded, while the
cloaked shapes slumped curiously on their pedestals. The quasi-sphere, however,
continued to pulsate with inexplicable light. Carter felt that the Ancient Ones were
sleeping as they had been when he first saw them, and he wondered out of what cosmic
dreams his coming had aroused them. Slowly there filtered into his mind the truth that
this strange chanting ritual had been one of instruction, and that the Companions had
been chanted by the Most Ancient One into a new and peculiar kind of sleep in order
that their dreams might open the Ultimate Gate to which the silver key was a passport.
He knew that in the profundity of this deep sleep they were contemplating unplumbed
vastnesses of utter and absolute outsideness, and that they were to accomplish that
which his presence had demanded.

The Guide did not share this sleep, but seemed still to be giving instructions in some
subtle, soundless way. Evidently he was implanting images of those things which he
wished the Companions to dream: and Carter knew that as each of the Ancient Ones
pictured the prescribed thought, there would be born the nucleus of a manifestation
visible to his earthly eyes. When the dreams of all the Shapes had achieved a oneness,
that manifestation would occur, and everything he required be materialized, through
concentration. He had seen such things on Earth--in India, where the combined,
projected will of a circle of adepts can make a thought take tangible substance, and in
hoary Atlaanat, of which few even dare speak.

Just what the Ultimate Gate was, and how it was to be passed, Carter could not be
certain; but a feeling of tense expectancy surged over him. He was conscious of having
a kind of body, and of holding the fateful silver key in his hand. The masses of towering
stone opposite him seemed to possess the evenness of a wall, toward the centre of which
his eyes were irresistibly drawn. And then suddenly he felt the mental currents of the
Most Ancient One cease to flow forth.

For the first time Carter realized how terrific utter silence, mental and physical, may be.
The earlier moments had never failed to contain some perceptible rhythm, if only the
faint, cryptical pulse of the Earth's dimensional extension, but now the hush of the abyss
seemed to fall upon everything. Despite his intimations of body, he had no audible
breath, and the glow of 'Umr at-Tawil's quasi-sphere had grown petrifiedly fixed and
unpulsating. A potent nimbus, brighter than those which had played round the heads of
the Shapes, blazed frozenly over the shrouded skull of the terrible Guide.

A dizziness assailed Carter, and his sense of lost orientation waxed a thousandfold. The
strange lights seemed to hold the quality of the most impenetrable blacknesses heaped
upon blacknesses while about the Ancient Ones, so close on their pseudo-hexagonal
thrones, there hovered an air of the most stupefying remoteness. Then he felt himself
wafted into immeasurable depths, with waves of perfumed warmth lapping against his
face. It was as if he floated in a torrid, rose-tinctured sea; a sea of drugged wine whose
waves broke foaming against shores of brazen fire. A great fear clutched him as he half
saw that vast expanse of surging sea lapping against its far off coast. But the moment of
silence was broken--the surgings were speaking to him in a language that was not of
physical sound or articulate words.

"The Man of Truth is beyond good and evil," intoned the voice that was not a voice.
'The Man of Truth has ridden to All-Is-One. The Man of Truth has learned that Illusion
is the One Reality, and that Substance is the Great Impostor."

And now, in that rise of masonry to which his eyes had been so irresistibly drawn, there
appeared the outline of a titanic arch not unlike that which he thought he had glimpsed
so long ago in that cave within a cave, on the far, unreal surface of the three-
dimensioned Earth. He realized that he had been using the silver key--moving it in
accord with an unlearned and instinctive ritual closely akin to that which had opened the
Inner Gate. That rose-drunken sea which lapped his cheeks was, he realized, no more or
less than the adamantine mass of the solid wall yielding before his spell, and the vortex
of thought with which the Ancient Ones had aided his spell. Still guided by instinct and
blind determination, he floated forward--and through the Ultimate Gate.

Chapter Four

Randolph Carter's advance through the cyclopean bulk of masonry was like a dizzy
precipitation through the measureless gulfs between the stars. From a great distance he
felt triumphant, godlike surges of deadly sweetness, and after that the rustling of great
wings, and impressions of sound like the chirpings and murmurings of objects unknown
on Earth or in the solar system. Glancing backward, he saw not one gate alone but a
multiplicity of gates, at some of which clamoured Forms he strove not to remember.

And then, suddenly, he felt a greater terror than that which any of the Forms could give-
-a terror from which he could not flee because it was connected with himself. Even the
First Gateway had taken something of stability from him, leaving him uncertain about
his bodily form and about his relationship to the mistily defined objects around him, but
it had not disturbed his sense of unity. He had still been Randolph Carter, a fixed point
in the dimensional seething. Now, beyond the Ultimate Gateway, he realized in a
moment of consuming fright that he was not one person, but many persons.

He was in many places at the same time. On Earth, on October 7, 1883, a little boy
named Randolph Carter was leaving the Snake Den in the hushed evening light and
running down the rocky slope, and through the twisted-boughed orchard toward his
Uncle Christopher's house in the hills beyond Arkham; yet at that same moment, which
was also somehow in the earthly year of 1928, a vague shadow not less Randolph Carter
was sitting on a pedestal among the Ancient Ones in Earth's transdimensional extension.
Here, too, was a third Randolph Carter, in the unknown and formless cosmic abyss
beyond the Ultimate Gate. And elsewhere, in a chaos of scenes whose infinite
multiplicity and monstrous diversity brought him close to the brink of madness, were a
limitless confusion of beings which he knew were as much himself as the local
manifestation now beyond the Ultimate Gate.

There were Carters in settings belonging to every known and suspected age of Earth's
history, and to remoter ages of earthly entity transcending knowledge, suspicion, and
credibility; Carters of forms both human and non-human, vertebrate and invertebrate,
conscious and mindless, animal and vegetable. And more, there were Carters having
nothing in common with earthly life, but moving outrageously amidst backgrounds of
other planets and systems and galaxies and cosmic continua; spores of eternal life
drifting from world to world, universe to universe, yet all equally himself. Some of the
glimpses recalled dreams--both faint and vivid, single and persistent--which he had had
through the long years since he first began to dream; and a few possessed a haunting,
fascinating and almost horrible familiarity which no earthly logic could explain.

Faced with this realization, Randolph Carter reeled in the clutch of supreme horror--
horror such as had not been hinted even at the climax of that hideous night when two
had ventured into an ancient and abhorred necropolis under a waning moon and only
one had emerged. No death, no doom, no anguish can arouse the surpassing despair
which flows from a loss of identity. Merging with nothingness is peaceful oblivion; but
to be aware of existence and yet to know that one is no longer a definite being
distinguished from other beings--that one no longer has a self--that is the nameless
summit of agony and dread.

He knew that there had been a Randolph Carter of Boston, yet could not be sure
whether he--the fragment or facet of an entity beyond the Ultimate Gate--had been that
one or some other. His self had been annihilated; and yet he--if indeed there could, in
view of that utter nullity of individual existence, be such a thing as he--was equally
aware of being in some inconceivable way a legion of selves. It was as though his body
had been suddenly transformed into one of those many--limbed and many-headed
effigies sculptured in Indian temples, and he contemplated the aggregation in a
bewildered attempt to discern which was the original and which the additions--if indeed
(supremely monstrous thought!) there were any original as distinguished from other
embodiments.

Then, in the midst of these devastating reflections, Carter's beyond--the-gate fragment

was hurled from what had seemed the nadir of horror to black, clutching pits of a horror
still more profound. This time it was largely external--a force of personality which at
once confronted and surrounded and pervaded him, and which in addition to its local
presence, seemed also to be a part of himself, and likewise to be co--existent with all
time and conterminous with all space. There was no visual image, yet the sense of entity
and the awful concept of combined localism and identity and infinity lent a paralyzing
terror beyond anything which any Carter-fragment had hitherto deemed capable of
existing.

In the face of that awful wonder, the quasi-Carter forgot the horror of destroyed
individuality. It was an All-in-One and One-in-All of limitless being and self--not
merely a thing of one space-time continuum, but allied to the ultimate animating
essence of existence's whole unbounded sweep--the last, utter sweep which has no
confines and which outreaches fancy and mathematics alike. It was perhaps that which
certain secret cults of Earth had whispered of as Yog-Sothoth, and which has been a
deity under other names; that which the crustaceans of Yuggoth worship as the Beyond-
One, and which the vaporous brains of the spiral nebulae know by an untranslatable
sign--yet in a flash the Carter-facet realized how slight and fractional all these
conceptions are.

And now the Being was addressing the Carter-facet in prodigious waves that smote and
burned and thundered--a concentration of energy that blasted its recipient with well-
nigh unendurable violence, and that paralleled in an unearthly rhythm the curious
swaying of the Ancient Ones, and the flickering of the monstrous lights, in that baffling
region beyond the First Gate. It was as though suns and worlds and universes had
converged upon one point whose very position in space they had conspired to annihilate
with an impact of resistless fury. But amidst the greater terror one lesser terror was
diminished; for the searing waves appeared somehow to isolate the Beyond-the-Gate
Carter from his infinity of duplicates--to restore, as it were, a certain amount of the
illusion of identity. After a time the hearer began to translate the waves into speech-
forms known to him, and his sense of horror and oppression waned. Fright became pure
awe, and what had seemed blasphemously abnormal seemed now only ineffably
majestic.

"Randolph Carter," it seemed to say, "my manifestations on your planet's extension, the
Ancient Ones, have sent you as one who would lately have returned to small lands of
dream which he had lost, yet who with greater freedom has risen to greater and nobler
desires and curiosities. You wished to sail up golden Oukranos, to search out forgotten
ivory cities in orchid-heavy Kied, and to reign on the opal throne of Ilek-Vad, whose
fabulous towers and numberless domes rise mighty toward a single red star in a
firmament alien to your Earth and to all matter. Now, with the passing of two Gates,
you wish loftier things. You would not flee like a child from a scene disliked to a dream
beloved, but would plunge like a man into that last and inmost of secrets which lies
behind all scenes and dreams.

"What you wish, I have found good; and I am ready to grant that which I have granted
eleven times only to beings of your planet--five times only to those you call men, or
those resembling them. I am ready to show you the Ultimate Mystery, to look on which
is to blast a feeble spirit. Yet before you gaze full at that last and first of secrets you may
still wield a free choice, and return if you will through the two Gates with the Veil still
unrent before our eyes."

Chapter Five

A sudden shutting-off of the waves left Carter in a chilling and awesome silence full of
the spirit of desolation. On every hand pressed the illimitable vastness of the void; yet
the seeker knew that the Being was still there. After a moment he thought of words
whose mental substance he flung into the abyss: "I accept. I will not retreat."

The waves surged forth again, and Carter knew that the Being had heard. And now there
poured from that limitless Mind a flood of knowledge and explanation which opened
new vistas to the seeker, and prepared him for such a grasp of the cosmos as he had
never hoped to possess. He was told how childish and limited is the notion of a tri-
dimensional world, and what an infinity of directions there are besides the known
directions of up-down, forward-backward, right-left. He was shown the smallness and
tinsel emptiness of the little Earth gods, with their petty, human interests and
connections--their hatreds, rages, loves and vanities; their craving for praise and
sacrifice, and their demands for faiths contrary to reason and nature.

While most of the impressions translated themselves to Carter as words there were
others to which other senses gave interpretation. Perhaps with eyes and perhaps with
imagination he perceived that he was in a region of dimensions beyond those
conceivable to the eye and brain of man. He saw now, in the brooding shadows of that
which had been first a vortex of power and then an illimitable void, a sweep of creation
that dizzied his senses. From some inconceivable vantagepoint he looked upon
prodigious forms whose multiple extensions transcended any conception of being, size
and boundaries which his mind had hitherto been able to hold, despite a lifetime of
cryptical study. He began to understand dimly why there could exist at the same time
the little boy Randolph Carter in the Arkham farm-house in 1883, the misty form on the
vaguely hexagonal pillar beyond the First Gate, the fragment now facing the Presence in
the limitless abyss, and all the other Carters his fancy or perception envisaged.

Then the waves increased in strength and sought to improve his understanding,
reconciling him to the multiform entity of which his present fragment was an
infinitesimal part. They told him that every figure of space is but the result of the
intersection by a plane of some corresponding figure of one more dimension--as a
square is cut from a cube, or a circle from a sphere. The cube and sphere, of three
dimensions, are thus cut from corresponding forms of four dimensions, which men
know only through guesses and dreams; and these in turn are cut from forms of five
dimensions, and so on up to the dizzy and reachless heights of archetypal infinity. The
world of men and of the gods of men is merely an infinitesimal phase of an infinitesimal
thing--the three-dimensional phase of that small wholeness reached by the First Gate,
where 'Umr at-Tawil dictates dreams to the Ancient Ones. Though men hail it as reality,
and brand thoughts of its many-dimensioned original as unreality, it is in truth the very
opposite. That which we call substance and reality is shadow and illusion, and that
which we call shadow and illusion is substance and reality.

Time, the waves went on, is motionless, and without beginning or end. That it has
motion and is the cause of change is an illusion. Indeed, it is itself really an illusion, for
except to the narrow sight of beings in limited dimensions there are no such things as
past, present and future. Men think of time only because of what they call change, yet
that too is illusion. All that was, and is, and is to be, exists simultaneously.

These revelations came with a god-like solemnity which left Carter unable to doubt.
Even though they lay almost beyond his comprehension, he felt that they must be true in
the light of that final cosmic reality which belies all local perspectives and narrow
partial views; and he was familiar enough with profound speculations to be free from
the bondage of local and partial conceptions. Had his whole quest not been based upon
a faith in the unreality of the local and partial?

After an impressive pause the waves continued, saying that what the denizens of few-
dimensioned zones call change is merely a function of their consciousness, which views
the external world from various cosmic angles. As the Shapes produced by the cutting
of a cone seem to vary with the angles of cutting--being circle, ellipse, parabola or
hyperbola according to that angle, yet without any change in the cone itself--so do the
local aspects of an unchanged--and endless reality seem to change with the cosmic
angle of regarding. To this variety of angles of consciousness the feeble beings of the
inner worlds are slaves, since with rare exceptions they can not learn to control them.
Only a few students of forbidden things have gained inklings of this control, and have
thereby conquered time and change. But the entities outside the Gates command all
angles, and view the myriad parts of the cosmos in terms of fragmentary change-
involving perspective, or of the changeless totality beyond perspective, in accordance
with their will.

As the waves paused again, Carter began to comprehend, vaguely and terrifiedly, the
ultimate background of that riddle of lost individuality which had at first so horrified
him. His intuition pieced together the fragments of revelation, and brought him closer
and closer to a grasp of the secret. He understood that much of the frightful revelation
would have come upon him--splitting up his ego amongst myriads of earthly
counterparts inside the First Gate, had not the magic of 'Umr at-Tawil kept it from him
in order that he might use the silver key with precision for the Ultimate Gate's opening.
Anxious for clearer knowledge, he sent out waves of thought, asking more of the exact
relationship between his various facets--the fragment now beyond the Ultimate Gate,
the fragment still on the quasi-hexagonal pedestal beyond the First Gate, the boy of
1883, the man of 1928, the various ancestral beings who had formed his heritage and
the bulwark of his ego, amid the nameless denizens of the other eons and other worlds
which that first hideous flash ultimate perception had identified with him. Slowly the
waves of the Being surged out in reply, trying to make plain what was almost beyond
the reach of an earthly mind.

All descended lines of beings of the finite dimensions, continued the waves, and all
stages of growth in each one of these beings, are merely manifestations of one
archetypal and eternal being in the space outside dimensions. Each local being--son,
father, grandfather, and so on--and each stage of individual being--infant, child, boy,
man--is merely one of the infinite phases of that same archetypal and eternal being,
caused by a variation in the angle of the consciousness-plane which cuts it. Randolph
Carter at all ages; Randolph Carter and all his ancestors, both human and pre-human,
terrestrial and pre-terrestrial; all these were only phases of one ultimate, eternal "Carter"
outside space and time--phantom projections differentiated only by the angle at which
the plane of consciousness happened to cut the eternal archetype in each case.

A slight change of angle could turn the student of today into the child of yesterday;
could turn Randolph Carter into that wizard, Edmund Carter who fled from Salem to the
hills behind Arkham in 1692, or that Pickman Carter who in the year 2169 would use
strange means in repelling the Mongol hordes from Australia; could turn a human
Carter into one of those earlier entities which had dwelt in primal Hyperborea and
worshipped black, plastic Tsathoggua after flying down from Kythamil, the double
planet that once revolved around Arcturus; could turn a terrestrial Carter to a remotely
ancestral and doubtfully shaped dweller on Kythamil itself, or a still remoter creature of
trans-galactic Stronti, or a four-dimensioned gaseous consciousness in an older space-
time continuum, or a vegetable brain of the future on a dark, radioactive comet of
inconceivable orbit--so on, in endless cosmic cycle.

The archetype, throbbed the waves, are the people of the Ultimate Abyss--formless,
ineffable, and guessed at only by rare dreamers on the low-dimensioned worlds. Chief
among such was this informing Being itself...which indeed was Carter's own archetype.
The gutless zeal of Carter and all his forebears for forbidden cosmic secrets was a
natural result of derivation from the Supreme Archetype. On every world all great
wizards, all great thinkers, all great artists, are facets of It.

Almost stunned with awe, and with a kind of terrifying delight, Randolph Carter's
consciousness did homage to that transcendent Entity from which it was derived. As the
waves paused again he pondered in the mighty silence, thinking of strange tributes,
stranger questions, and still stranger requests. Curious concepts flowed conflictingly
through a brain dazed with unaccustomed vistas and unforeseen disclosures. It occurred
to him that, if these disclosures were literally true, he might bodily visit all those
infinitely distant ages and parts of the universe which he had hitherto known only in
dreams, could he but command the magic to change the angle of his consciousness-
plane. And did not the silver key supply that magic? Had it not first changed him from a
man in 1928 to a boy in 1883, and then to something quite outside time? Oddly, despite
his present apparent absence of body; he knew that the key was still with him.

While the silence still lasted, Randolph Carter radiated forth the thoughts and questions
which assailed him. He knew that in this ultimate abyss he was equidistant from every
facet of his archetype--human or non-human, terrestrial or extra-terrestrial, galactic or
trans-galactic; and his curiosity regarding the other phases of his being--especially those
phases which were farthest from an earthly 1928 in time and space, or which had most
persistently haunted his dreams throughout life--was at fever heat He felt that his
archetypal Entity could at will send him bodily to any of these phases of bygone and
distant life by changing his consciousness-plane and despite the marvels he had
undergone he burned for the further marvel of walking in the flesh through those
grotesque and incredible scenes which visions of the night had fragmentarily brought
him.

Without definite intention he was asking the Presence for access to a dim, fantastic
world whose five multi-coloured suns, alien constellations, dizzily black crags, clawed,
tapir-snouted denizens, bizarre metal towers, unexplained tunnels, and cryptical floating
cylinders had intruded again and again upon his slumbers. That world, he felt vaguely,
was in all the conceivable cosmos the one most freely in touch with others; and he
longed to explore the vistas whose beginnings he had glimpsed, and to embark through
space to those still remoter worlds with which the clawed, snouted denizens trafficked.
There was no time for fear. As at all crises of his strange life, sheer cosmic curiosity
triumphed over everything else.

When the waves resumed their awesome pulsing, Carter knew that his terrible request
was granted. The Being was telling him of the nighted gulfs through which he would
have to pass of the unknown quintuple star in an unsuspected galaxy around which the
alien world revolved, and of the burrowing inner horrors against which the clawed,
snouted race of that world perpetually fought. It told him, too, of how the angle of his
personal consciousness-plane, and the angle of his consciousness-plane regarding the
space-time elements of the sought--for world, would have to be tilted simultaneously in
order to restore to that world the Carter-facet which had dwelt there.

The Presence wanted him to be sure of his symbols if he wished ever to return from the
remote and alien world he had chosen, and he radiated back an impatient affirmation;
confident that the silver key, which he felt was with him and which he knew had tilted
both world and personal planes in throwing him back to 1883, contained those symbols
which were meant. And now the Being, grasping his impatience signified its readiness
to accomplish the monstrous precipitation. The waves abruptly ceased, and there
supervened a momentary stillness tense with nameless and dreadful expectancy.

Then, without warning, came a whirring and drumming that swelled to a terrific
thundering. Once again Carter felt himself the focal point of an intense concentration of
energy which smote and hammered and seared unbearably in the now-familiar rhythm
of outer space, and which he could not classify as either the blasting heat of a blazing
star, or the all-petrifying cold of the ultimate abyss. Bands and rays of colour utterly
foreign to any spectrum of our universe played and wove and interlaced before him, and
he was conscious of a frightful velocity of motion. He caught one fleeting glimpse of a
figure sitting alone upon a cloudy throne more hexagonal than otherwise...

Chapter Six

As the Hindoo paused in his story he saw that de Marigny and Phillips were watching
him absorbedly. Aspinwall pretended to ignore the narrative and kept his eyes
ostentatiously on the papers before him. The alien-rhythmed ticking of the coffin-
shaped clock took on a new and portentous meaning, while the fumes from the choked,
neglected tripods wove themselves into fantastic and inexplicable shapes, and formed
disturbing combinations with the grotesque figures of the draft-swayed tapestries. The
old Negro who had tended them was gone--perhaps some growing tension had
frightened him out of the house. An almost apologetic hesitancy hampered the speaker
as he resumed in his oddly labored yet idiomatic voice.
"You have found these things of the abyss hard to believe," he said, "but you will find
the tangible and material things ahead still barer. That is the way of our minds. Marvels
are doubly incredible when brought into three dimensions from the vague regions of
possible dream. I shall not try to tell you much--that would be another and very
different story. I will tell only what you absolutely have to know."

Carter, after that final vortex of alien and polychromatic rhythm, had found himself in
what for a moment he thought was his old insistent dream. He was, as many a night
before, walking amidst throngs of clawed, snouted beings through the streets of a
labyrinth of inexplicably fashioned metal under a plate of diverse solar colour; and as he
looked down he saw that his body was like those of the others--rugose, partly
squamous, and curiously articulated in a fashion mainly insect-like yet not without a
caricaturish resemblance to the human outline. The silver key was still in his grasp,
though held by a noxious-looking claw.

In another moment the dream-sense vanished, and he felt rather as one just awakened
from a dream. The ultimate abyss--the Being--the entity of absurd, outlandish race
called Randolph Carter on a world of the future not yet born--some of these things were
parts of the persistent recurrent dreams of the wizard Zkauba on the planet Yaddith.
They were too persistent--they interfered with his duties in weaving spells to keep the
frightful Dholes in their burrows, and became mixed up with his recollections of the
myriad real worlds he had visited in light--beam envelopes. And now they had become
quasi-real as never before. This heavy, material silver key in his right upper claw, exact
image of one he had dreamt about meant no good. He must rest and reflect, and consult
the tablets of Nhing for advice on what to do. Climbing a metal wall in a lane off the
main concourse, he entered his apartment and approached the rack of tablets.

Seven day-fractions later Zkauba squatted on his prism in awe and half despair, for the
truth had opened up a new and conflicting set of memories. Nevermore could he know
the peace of being one entity. For all time and space he was two: Zkauba the wizard of
Yaddith, disgusted with the thought of the repellent earth-mammal Carter that he was to
be and had been, and Randolph Carter, of Boston on the Earth, shivering with fright at
the clawed, mantel thing which he had once been, and had become again.

The time units spent on Yaddith, croaked the Swami--whose laboured voice was
beginning to show signs of fatigue--made a tale in themselves which could not be
related in brief compass. There were trips to Stronti and Mthura and Kath, and other
worlds in the twenty-eight galaxies accessible to the light-beam envelopes of the
creatures of Yaddith, and trips back and forth through eons of time with the aid of the
silver key and various other symbols known to Yaddith's wizards. There were hideous
struggles with the bleached viscous Dholes in the primal tunnels that honeycombed the
planet. There were awed sessions in libraries amongst the massed lore of ten thousand
worlds living and dead. There were tense conferences with other minds of Yaddith,
including that of the Arch-Ancient Buo. Zkauba told no one of what had befallen his
personality, but when the Randolph Carter facet was uppermost he would study
furiously every possible means of returning to the Earth and to human form, and would
desperately practice human speech with the alien throat-organs so ill adapted to it.

The Carter-facet had soon learned with horror that the silver key was unable to effect
his return to human form. It was, as he deduced too late from things he remembered,
things he dreamed, and things he inferred from the lore of Yaddith, a product of
Hyperborea on Earth; with power over the personal consciousness-angles of human
beings alone. It could, however, change the planetary angle and send the user at will
through time in an unchanged body. There had been an added spell which gave it
limitless powers it otherwise lacked; but this, too, was a human discovery--peculiar to a
spatially unreachable region, and not to be duplicated by the wizards of Yaddith. It had
been written on the undecipherable parchment in the hideously carven box with the
silver key, and Carter bitterly lamented that he had left it behind. The now inaccessible
Being of the abyss had warned him to be sure of his symbols, and had doubtless thought
he lacked nothing.

As time wore on he strove harder and harder to utilize the monstrous lore of Yaddith in
finding a way back to the abyss and the omnipotent Entity. With his new knowledge he
could have done much toward reading the cryptic parchment; but that power, under
present conditions, was merely ironic. There were times, however, when the Zkauba-
facet was uppermost and when he strove to erase the conflicting Carter-memories which
troubled him.

Thus long spaces of time wore on--ages longer than the brain of man could grasp, since
the beings of Yaddith die only after prolonged cycles. After many hundreds of
revolutions the Carter-facet seemed to gain on the Zkauba-facet, and would spend vast
periods calculating the distance of Yaddith in space and time from the human Earth that
was to be. The figures were staggering eons of light-years beyond counting but the
immemorial lore of Yaddith fitted Carter to grasp such things. He cultivated the power
of dreaming himself momentarily Earthward, and learned many things about our planet
that he had never known before. But he could not dream the needed formula on the
missing parchment.

Then at last he conceived a wild plan of escape from Yaddith--which began when he
found a drug that would keep his Zkauba-facet always dormant, yet with out dissolution
of the knowledge and memories of Zkauba. He thought that his calculations would let
him perform a voyage with a light-wave envelope such as no being of Yaddith had ever
performed--a bodily voyage through nameless eons and across incredible galactic
reaches to the solar system and the Earth itself.

Once on Earth, though in the body of a clawed, snouted thing, he might be able
somehow to find and finish deciphering the strangely hieroglyphed parchment he had
left in the car at Arkham; and with its aid--and the key's--resume his normal terrestrial
semblance.

He was not blind to the perils of the attempt. He knew that when he had brought the
planet-angle to the right (a thing impossible to do while hurtling through space),
Yaddith would be a dead world dominated by triumphant Dholes, and that his escape in
the light-wave envelope would be a matter of grave doubt. Likewise was he aware of
how he must achieve suspended animation, in the manner of an adept, to endure the
eon-long flight through fathomless abysses. He knew, too, that--assuming his voyage
succeeded--he must immunize himself to the bacterial and other earthly conditions
hostile to a body from Yaddith. Furthermore, he must provide a way of feigning human
shape on Earth until he might recover and decipher the parchment and resume that
shape in truth. Otherwise he would probably be discovered and destroyed by the people
in horror as a thing that should not be. And there must be some gold--luckily obtainable
on Yaddith--to tide him over that period of quest.

Slowly Carter's plans went forward. He prepared a light-wave envelope of abnormal

toughness, able to stand both the prodigious time--transition and the unexampled flight
through space. He tested all his calculations, and sent forth his Earthward dreams again
and again, bringing them as close as possible to 1928. He practiced suspended
animation with marvelous success. He discovered just the bacterial agent he needed, and
worked out the varying gravity-stress to which he must become used. He artfully
fashioned a waxen mask and loose costume enabling him to pass among men as a
human being of a sort, and devised a doubly potent spell with which to hold back the
Dholes at the moment of his starting from the dead, black Yaddith of the inconceivable
future. He took care, too, to assemble a large supply of the drugs--unobtainable on
Earth--which would keep his Zkauba-facet in abeyance till he might shed the Yaddith
body, nor did he neglect a small store of gold for earthly use.

The starting-day was a time of doubt and apprehension. Carter climbed up to his
envelope-platform, on the pretext of sailing for the triple star Nython, and crawled into
the sheath of shining metal. He had just room to perform the ritual of the silver key, and
as he did so he slowly started the levitation of his envelope. There was an appalling
seething and darkening of the day, and hideous racking of pain. The cosmos seemed to
reel irresponsibly, and the other constellations danced in a black sky.

All at once Carter felt a new equilibrium. The cold of interstellar gulfs gnawed at the
outside of his envelope, and he could see that he floated free in space--the metal
building from which he had started having decayed years before. Below him the ground
was festering with gigantic Dholes; and even as he looked, one reared up several
hundred feet and leveled a bleached, viscous end at him. But his spells were effective,
and in another moment he was falling away from Yaddith, unharmed.

Chapter Seven

In that bizarre room in New Orleans, from which the old black servant had instinctively
fled, the odd voice of Swami Chandraputra grew hoarser still.

"Gentlemen," he continued, "I will not ask you to believe these things until I have
shown you special proof. Accept it, then, as a myth, when I tell you of the thousands of
light-years--thousands of years of time, and uncounted billions of miles that Randolph
Carter hurtled through space as a nameless, alien entity in a thin envelope of electron-
activated metal. He timed his period of suspended animation with utmost care, planning
to have it end only a few years before the time of landing on the Earth in or near 1928.

"He will never forget that awakening. Remember, gentlemen, that before that eon-long
sleep he had lived consciously for thousands of terrestrial years amidst the alien and
horrible wonders of Yaddith. There was a hideous gnawing of cold, a cessation of
menacing dreams, and a glance through the eye-plates of the envelope. Stars, clusters,
nebulae, on every hand--and at last their outline bore some kinship to the constellations
of Earth that he knew.
"Some day his descent into the solar system may be told. He saw Kynath and Yuggoth
on the rim, passed close to Neptune and glimpsed the hellish white fungi that spot it,
learned an untellable secret from the close-glimpsed mists of Jupiter, and saw the horror
on one of the satellites, and gazed at the cyclopean ruins that sprawl over Mars' ruddy
disc. When the Earth drew near he saw it as a thin crescent which swelled alarmingly in
size. He slackened speed, though his sensations of homecoming made him wish to lose
not a moment. I will not try to tell you of these sensations as I learned them from Carter.

"Well, toward the last Carter hovered about in the Earth's upper air waiting till daylight
came over the Western Hemisphere. He wanted to land where he had left--near the
Snake Den in the hills behind Arkham. If any of you have been away from home long--
and I know one of you has--I leave it to you how the sight of New England's rolling
hills and great elms and gnarled orchards and ancient stone walls must have affected
him.

"He came down at dawn in the lower meadow of the old Carter place, and was thankful
for the silence and solitude. It was autumn, as when he had left, and the smell of the
hills was balm to his soul. He managed to drag the metal envelope up the slope of the
timber lot into the Snake Den, though it would not go through the weed-choked fissure
to the inner cave. It was there also that he covered his alien body with the human
clothing and waxen mask which would be necessary. He kept the envelope here for over
a year, till certain circumstances made a new hiding-place necessary.

"He walked to Arkham--incidentally practicing the management of his body in human

posture and against terrestrial gravity--and had his gold changed to money at a bank. He
also made some inquiries--posing as a foreigner ignorant of much English--and found
that the year was 1930, only two years after the goal he had aimed at.

"Of course, his position was horrible. Unable to assert his identity, forced to live on
guard every moment, with certain difficulties regarding food, and with a need to
conserve the alien drug which kept his Zkauba-facet dormant, he felt that he must act as
quickly as possible. Going to Boston and taking a room in the decaying West End,
where he could live cheaply and inconspicuously, he at once established inquiries
concerning Randolph Carter's estate and effects. It was then that he learned how anxious
Mr. Aspinwall, here, was to have the estate divided, and how valiantly Mr. de Marigny
and Mr. Phillips strove to keep it intact."

The Hindoo bowed, though no expression crossed his dark, tranquil, and thickly
bearded face.

"Indirectly," he continued, "Carter secured a good copy of the missing parchment and
began working on its deciphering. I am glad to say that I was able to help in all this--for
he appealed to me quite early, and through me came in touch with other mystics
throughout the world. I went to live with him in Boston--a wretched place in Chambers
Street. As for the parchment--I am pleased to help Mr. de Marigny in his perplexity. To
him let me say that the language of those hieroglyphics is not Naacal, but R'lyehian,
which was brought to Earth by the spawn of Cthulhu countless ages ago. It is, of coarse,
a translation--there was an Hyperborean original millions of years earlier in the primal
tongue of Tsath-yo.
"There was more to decipher than Carter had looked for, but at no time did he give up
hope. Early this year he made great strides through a book he imported from Nepal, and
there is no question but that he will win before long. Unfortunately, however, one
handicap has developed--the exhaustion of the alien drug which keeps the Zkauba-facet
dormant. This is not, however, as great a calamity as was feared. Carter's personality is
gaining in the body, and when Zkauba comes uppermost--for shorter and shorter
periods, and now only when evoked by some unusual excitement--he is generally too
dazed to undo any of Carter's work. He can not find the metal envelope that would take
him back to Yaddith, for although he almost did, once, Carter hid it anew at a time
when the Zkanba-facet was wholly latent. All the harm he has done is to frighten a few
people and create certain nightmare rumors among the Poles and Lithuanians of
Boston's West End. So far, he had never injured the careful disguise prepared by the
Carter-facet, though he sometimes throws it off so that parts have to be replaced. I have
seen what lies beneath--and it is not good to see.

"A month ago Carter saw the advertisement of this meeting, and knew that he must act
quickly to save his estate. He could not wait to decipher the parchment and resume his
human form. Consequently he deputed me to act for him.

"Gentlemen, I say to you that Randolph Carter is not dead; that he is temporarily in an
anomalous condition, but that within two or three months at the outside he will be able
to appear in proper form and demand the custody of his estate. I am prepared to offer
proof if necessary. Therefore I beg that you will adjourn this meeting for an indefinite
period."

Chapter Eight

De Marigny and Phillips stared at the Hindoo as if hypnotized, while Aspinwall emitted
a series of snorts and bellows. The old attorney's disgust had by now surged into open
rage and he pounded the table with an apoplectically veined fist. When he spoke, it was
in a kind of bark.

"How long is this foolery to be borne? I've listened an hour to this madman--this faker--
and now he has the damned effrontery to say Randolph Carter is alive--to ask us to
postpone the settlement for no good reason! Why don't you throw the scoundrel out, de
Marigny? Do you mean to make us all the butts of a charlatan or idiot?"

De Marigny quietly raised his hand and spoke softly.

"Let us think slowly and dearly. This has been a very singular tale, and there are things
in it which I, as a mystic not altogether ignorant, recognize as far from impossible.
Furthermore--since 1930 I have received letters from the Swami which tally with his
account."

As he paused, old Mr. Phillips ventured a word.

"Swami Chandraputra spoke of proofs. I, too, recognize much that is significant in this
story, and I have myself had many oddly corroborative letters from the Swami during
the last two years; but some of these statements are very extreme. Is there not something
tangible which can be shown?"
At last the impassive-faced Swami replied, slowly and hoarsely, and drawing an object
from the pocket of his loose coat as he spoke.

"While none of you here has ever seen the silver key itself, Messrs. de Marigny and
Phillips have seen photographs of it. Does this look familiar to you?"

He fumblingly laid on the table, with his large, white-mittened hand, a heavy key of
tarnished silver--nearly five inches long, of unknown and utterly exotic workmanship,
and covered from end to end with hieroglyphs of the most bizarre description. De
Marigny and Phillips gasped.

"That's it!" cried de Marigny. "The camera doesn't lie. I couldn't be mistaken!"

But Aspinwall had already launched a reply.

"Fools! What does it prove? If that's really the key that belonged to my cousin, it's up to
this foreigner--this damned nigger--to explain how he got it! Randolph Carter vanished
with the key four years ago. How do we know he wasn't robbed and murdered? He was
half crazy himself, and in touch with still crazier people.

"Look here, you nigger--where did you get that key? Did you kill Randolph Carter?"

The Swami's features, abnormally placid, did not change; but the remote, irisless black
eyes behind them blazed dangerously. He spoke with great difficulty.

"Please control yourself, Mr. Aspinwall. There is another form of proof that I could
give, but its effect upon everybody would not be pleasant. Let us be reasonable. Here
are some papers obviously written since 1930, and in the unmistakable style of
Randolph Carter."

He clumsily drew a long envelope from inside his loose coat and handed it to the
sputtering attorney as de Marigny and Phillips watched with chaotic thoughts and a
dawning feeling of supernal wonder.

"Of course the handwriting is almost illegible--but remember that Randolph Carter now
has no hands well adapted to forming human script."

Aspinwall looked through the papers hurriedly, and was visibly perplexed, but he did
not change his demeanor. The room was tense with excitement and nameless dread and
the alien rhythm of the coffin--shaped clock had an utterly diabolic sound to de Marigny
and Phillips, though the lawyer seemed affected not at all.

Aspinwall spoke again. "These look like clever forgeries. If they aren't, they may mean
that Randolph Carter has been brought under the control of people with no good
purpose. There's only one thing to do--have this faker arrested. De Marigny, will you
telephone for the police?"

"Let us wait," answered their host. "I do not think this case calls for the police. I have a
certain idea. Mr. Aspinwall, this gentleman is a mystic of real attainments. He says he is
in the confidence of Randolph Carter. Will it satisfy you if he can answer certain
questions which could be answered only by one in such confidence? I know Carter, and
can ask such questions. Let me get a book which I think will make a good test."

He turned toward the door to the library, Phillips dazedly following in a kind of
automatic way. Aspinwall remained where he was, studying closely the Hindoo who
confronted him with abnormally impassive face. Suddenly, as Chandraputra clumsily
restored the silver key to his pocket the lawyer emitted a guttural shout.

"Hey, by Heaven I've got it! This rascal is in disguise. I don't believe he's an East Indian
at all. That face--it isn't a face, but a mask! I guess his story put that into my head, but
it's true. It never moves, and that turban and beard hide the edges. This fellow's a
common crook! He isn't even a foreigner--I've been watching his language. He's a
Yankee of some sort. And look at those mittens--he knows his fingerprints could be
spotted. Damn you, I'll pull that thing off--"

"Stop!" The hoarse, oddly alien voice of the Swami held a tone beyond all mere earthly
fright "I told you there was another form of proof which I could give if necessary, and I
warned you not to provoke me to it. This red-faced old meddler is right; I'm not really
an East Indian. This face is a mask, and what it covers is not human. You others have
guessed--I felt that minutes ago. It wouldn't be pleasant if I took that mask off--let it
alone. Ernest, I may as well tell you that I am Randolph Carter."

No one moved. Aspinwall snorted and made vague motions. De Marigny and Phillips,
across the room, watched the workings of the red face and studied the back of the
turbaned figure that confronted him. The clock's abnormal ticking was hideous and the
tripod fumes and swaying arras danced a dance of death. The half-choking lawyer broke
the silence.

"No you don't, you crook--you can't scare me! You've reasons of your own for not
wanting that mask off. Maybe we'd know who you are. Off with it--"

As he reached forward, the Swami seized his hand with one of his own clumsily
mittened members, evoking a curious cry of mixed pain and surprise. De Marigny
started toward the two, but paused confused as the pseudo-Hindoo's shout of protest
changed to a wholly inexplicable rattling and buzzing sound. Aspinwall's red face was
furious, and with his free hand he made another lunge at his opponent's bushy beard.
This time he succeeded in getting a hold, and at his frantic tug the whole waxen visage
came loose from the turban and clung to the lawyer's apoplectic fist.

As it did so, Aspinwall uttered a frightful gurgling cry, and Phillips and de Marigny saw
his face convulsed with a wilder, deep and more hideous epilepsy of stark panic than
ever they had seen on human countenance before. The pseudo-Swami had meanwhile
released his other hand and was standing as if dazed, making buzzing noises of a most
abnormal quality. Then the turbaned figure slumped oddly into a posture scarcely
human, and began a curious, fascinated sort of shuffle toward the coffin-shaped clock
that ticked out its cosmic and abnormal rhythm. His now uncovered face was turned
away, and de Marigny and Phillips could not see what the lawyer's act had disclosed.
Then their attention was turned to Aspinwall, who was sinking ponderously to the floor.
The spell was broken--but when they reached the old man he was dead.
Turning quickly to the shuffling Swami's receding back, de Marigny saw one of the
great white mittens drop listlessly off a dangling arm. The fumes of the olibanum were
thick, and all that could be glimpsed of the revealed hand was something long and
black...Before the Creole could reach the retreating figure, old Mr. Phillips laid a hand
on his shoulder.

"Don't!" he whispered, "We don't know what we're up against. That other facet, you
know--Zkauba, the wizard of Yaddith..."

The turbaned figure had now reached the abnormal clock, and the watchers saw though
the dense fumes a blurred black claw fumbling with the tall, hieroglyphed door. The
fumbling made a queer, clicking sound. Then the figure entered the coffin-shaped case
and pulled the door shut after it.

De Marigny could no longer be restrained, but when he reached and opened the clock it
was empty. The abnormal ticking went on, beating out the dark, cosmic rhythm which
underlies all mystical gate-openings. On the floor the great white mitten, and the dead
man with a bearded mask clutched in his hand, had nothing further to reveal.

A year passed, and nothing has been heard of Randolph Carter. His estate is still
unsettled. The Boston address from which one "Swami Chandraputra" sent inquiries to
various mystics in 1930-31-32 was indeed tenanted by a strange Hindoo, but he left
shortly before the date of the New Orleans conference and has never been seen since.
He was said to be dark, expressionless, and bearded, and his landlord thinks the swarthy
mask--which was duly exhibited--looked very much like him. He was never, however,
suspected of any connection with the nightmare apparitions whispered of by local Slavs.
The hills behind Arkham were searched for the "metal envelope," but nothing of the sort
was ever found. However, a clerk in Arkham's First National Bank does recall a queer
turbaned man who cashed an odd bit of gold bullion in October, 1930.

De Marigny and Phillips scarcely know what to make of the business. After all, what
was proved?

There was a story. There was a key which might have been forged from one of the
pictures Carter had freely distributed in 1928. There were papers--all indecisive. There
was a masked stranger, but who now living saw behind the mask? Amidst the strain and
the olibanum fumes that act of vanishing in the clock might easily have been a dual
hallucination. Hindoos know much of hypnotism. Reason proclaims the "Swami" a
criminal with designs on Randolph Carter's estate. But the autopsy said that Aspinwall
had died of shock. Was it rage alone which caused it? And some things in that story...

In a vast room hung with strangely figured arras and filled with olibanum fumes,
Etienne Laurent de Marigny often sits listening with vague sensations to the abnormal
rhythm of that hieroglyphed, coffin-shaped clock.

WHAT THE MOON BRINGS

It was in the spectral summer when the moon shone down on the old garden where I
wandered; the spectral summer of narcotic flowers and humid seas of foliage that bring
wild and many-coloured dreams. And as I walked by the shallow crystal stream I saw
unwonted ripples tipped with yellow light, as if those placid waters were drawn on in
resistless currents to strange oceans that are not in the world. Silent and sparkling,
bright and baleful, those moon-cursed waters hurried I knew not whither; whilst from
the embowered banks white lotos-blossoms fluttered one by one in the opiate night-
wind and dropped despairingly into the stream, swirling away horribly under the arched,
carven bridge, and staring back with the sinister resignation of calm, dead faces.

And as I ran along the shore, crushing sleeping flowers with heedless feet and
maddened ever by the fear of unknown things and the lure of the dead faces, I saw that
the garden had no end under that moon; for where by day the walls were, there stretched
now only new vistas of trees and paths, flowers and shrubs, stone idols and pagodas,
and bendings of the yellow-litten stream past grassy banks and under grotesque bridges
of marble. And the lips of the dead lotos-faces whispered sadly, and bade me follow,
nor did I cease my steps till the stream became a river, and joined amidst marshes of
swaying reeds and beaches of gleaming sand the shore of a vast and nameless sea.

Upon that sea the hateful moon shone, and over its unvocal waves weird perfumes
breeded. And as I saw therein the lotos-faces vanish, I longed for nets that I might
capture them and learn from them the secrets which the moon had brought upon the
night. But when that moon went over to the west and the still tide ebbed from the sullen
shore, I saw in that light old spires that the waves almost uncovered, and white columns
gay with festoons of green seaweed. And knowing that to this sunken place all the dead
had come, I trembled and did not wish again to speak with the lotos-faces.

Yet when I saw afar out in the sea a black condor descend from the sky to seek rest on a
vast reef, I would fain have questioned him, and asked him of those whom I had known
when they were alive. This I would have asked him had he not been so far away, but he
was very far, and could not be seen at all when he drew nigh that gigantic reef.

So I watched the tide go out under that sinking moon, and saw gleaming the spires, the
towers, and the roofs of that dead, dripping city. And as I watched, my nostrils tried to
close against the perfume--conquering stench of the world's dead; for truly, in this
unplaced and forgotten spot had all the flesh of the churchyards gathered for puffy sea-
worms to gnaw and glut upon.

Over these horrors the evil moon now hung very low, but the puffy worms of the sea
need no moon to feed by. And as I watched the ripples that told of the writhing of
worms beneath, I felt a new chill from afar out whither the condor had flown, as if my
flesh had caught a horror before my eyes had seen it.

Nor had my flesh trembled without cause, for when I raised my eyes I saw that the
waters had ebbed very low, shewing much of the vast reef whose rim I had seen before.
And when I saw that the reef was but the black basalt crown of a shocking eikon whose
monstrous forehead now shown in the dim moonlight and whose vile hooves must paw
the hellish ooze miles below, I shrieked and shrieked lest the hidden face rise above the
waters, and lest the hidden eyes look at me after the slinking away of that leering and
treacherous yellow moon.
And to escape this relentless thing I plunged gladly and unhesitantly into the stinking
shallows where amidst weedy walls and sunken streets fat sea-worms feast upon the
world's dead.

POLARIS
Into the North Window of my chamber glows the Pole Star with uncanny light. All
through the long hellish hours of blackness it shines there. And in the autumn of the
year, when the winds from the north curse and whine, and the red-leaved trees of the
swamp mutter things to one another in the small hours of the morning under the horned
waning moon, I sit by the casement and watch that star. Down from the heights reels the
glittering Cassiopeia as the hours wear on, while Charles' Wain lumbers up from behind
the vapour-soaked swamp trees that sway in the night wind. Just before dawn Arcturus
winks ruddily from above the cemetery on the low hillock, and Coma Berenices
shimmers weirdly afar off in the mysterious east; but still the Pole Star leers down from
the same place in the black vault, winking hideously like an insane watching eye which
strives to convey some strange message, yet recalls nothing save that it once had a
message to convey. Sometimes, when it is cloudy, I can sleep.

Well do I remember the night of the great Aurora, when over the swamp played the
shocking corruscations of the daemon light. After the beam came clouds, and then I
slept.

And it was under a horned waning moon that I saw the city for the first time. Still and
somnolent did it lie, on a strange plateau in a hollow between strange peaks. Of ghastly
marble were its walls and its towers, its columns, domes, and pavements. In the marble
streets were marble pillars, the upper parts of which were carven into the images of
grave bearded men. The air was warm and stirred not. And overhead, scarce ten degrees
from the zenith, glowed that watching Pole Star. Long did I gaze on the city, but the day
came not. When the red Aldebaran, which blinked low in the sky but never set, had
crawled a quarter of the way around the horizon, I saw light and motion in the houses
and the streets. Forms

strangely robed, but at once noble and familiar, walked abroad and under the horned
waning moon men talked wisdom in a tongue which I understood, though it was unlike
any language which I had ever known. And when the red Aldebaran had crawled more
than half-way around the horizon, there were again darkness and silence.

When I awaked, I was not as I had been. Upon my memory was graven the vision of the
city, and within my soul had arisen another and vaguer recollection, of whose nature I
was not then certain. Thereafter, on the cloudy nights when I could not sleep, I saw the
city often; sometimes under the hot, yellow rays of a sun which did not set, but which
wheeled low in the horizon. And on the clear nights the Pole Star leered as never before.

Gradually I came to wonder what might be my place in that city on the strange plateau
betwixt strange peaks. At first content to view the scene as an all-observant uncorporeal
presence, I now desired to define my relation to it, and to speak my mind amongst the
grave men who conversed each day in the public squares. I said to myself, "This is no
dream, for by what means can I prove the greater reality of that other life in the house of
stone and brick south of the sinister swamp and the cemetery on the low hillock, where
the Pole Star peeps into my north window each night?"

One night as I listened to the discourses in the large square containing many statues, I
felt a change; and perceived that I had at last a bodily form. Nor was I a stranger in the
streets of Olathoe, which lies on the plateau of Sarkia, betwixt the peaks of Noton and
Kadiphonek. It was my friend Alos who spoke, and his speech was one that pleased my
soul, for it was the speech of a true man and patriot. That night had the news come of
Daikos' fall, and of the advance of the Inutos; squat, hellish yellow fiends who five
years ago had appeared out of the unknown west to ravage the confines of our kingdom,
and to besiege many of our towns. Having taken the fortified places at the foot of the
mountains, their way now lay open to the plateau, unless every citizen could resist with
the strength of ten men. For the squat creatures were mighty in the arts of war, and
knew not the scruples of honour which held back our tall, grey-eyed men of Lomar
from ruthless conquest.

Alos, my friend, was commander of all the forces on the plateau, and in him lay the last
hope of our country. On this occasion he spoke of the perils to be faced and exhorted
the men of Olathoe, bravest of the Lomarians, to sustain the traditions of their ancestors,
who when forced to move southward from Zobna before the advance of the great ice
sheet (even as our descendents must some day flee from the land of Lomar) valiantly
and victoriously swept aside the hairy, long-armed, cannibal Gnophkehs that stood in
their way. To me Alos denied the warriors part, for I was feeble and given to strange
faintings when subjected to stress and hardships. But my eyes were the keenest in the
city, despite the long hours I gave each day to the study of the Pnakotic manuscripts and
the wisdom of the Zobnarian Fathers; so my friend, desiring not to doom me to inaction,
rewarded me with that duty which was second to nothing in importance. To the
watchtower of Thapnen he sent me, there to serve as the eyes of our army. Should the
Inutos attempt to gain the citadel by the narrow pass behind the peak Noton and thereby
surprise the garrison, I was to give the signal of fire which would warn the waiting
soldiers and save the town from immediate disaster.

Alone I mounted the tower, for every man of stout body was needed in the passes
below. My brain was sore dazed with excitement and fatigue, for I had not slept in
many days; yet was my purpose firm, for I loved my native land of Lomar, and the
marble city Olathoe that lies betwixt the peaks Noton and Kadiphonek.

But as I stood in the tower's topmost chamber, I beheld the horned waning moon, red
and sinister, quivering through the vapours that hovered over the distant valley of
Banof. And through an opening in the roof glittered the pale Pole Star, fluttering as if
alive, and leering like a fiend and tempter. Methought its spirit whispered evil counsel,
soothing me to traitorous somnolence with a damnable rhythmical promise which it
repeated over and over:

Slumber, watcher, till the spheres.

Six and twenty thousand years
Have revolv'd, and I return
To the spot where now I burn.
Other stars anon shall rise
To the axis of the skies;
Stars that soothe and stars that bless
With a sweet forgetfulness:
Only when my round is o'er
Shall the past disturb thy door.

Vainly did I struggle with my drowsiness, seeking to connect these strange words with
some lore of the skies which I had learnt from the Pnakotic manuscripts. My head,
heavy and reeling, drooped to my breast, and when next I looked up it was in a dream,
with the Pole Star grinning at me through a window from over the horrible and swaying
trees of a dream swamp. And I am still dreaming. In my shame and despair I sometimes
scream frantically, begging the dream-creatures around me to waken me ere the Inutos
steal up the pass behind the peak Noton and take the citadel by surprise; but these
creatures are daemons, for they laugh at me and tell me I am not dreaming. They mock
me whilst I sleep, and whilst the squat yellow foe may be creeping silently upon us. I
have failed in my duties and betrayed the marble city of Olathoe; I have proven false to
Alos, my friend and commander. But still these shadows of my dreams deride me. They
say there is no land of Lomar, save in my nocturnal imaginings that in these realms
where the Pole Star shines high, and red Aldebaran crawls low around the horizon, there
has been naught save ice and snow for thousands of years of years, and never a man
save squat, yellow creatures, blighted by the

cold, called "Esquimaux."

And as I writhe in my guilty agony, frantic to save the city whose peril every moment
grows, and vainly striving to shake off this unnatural dream of a house of stone and
brick south of a sinister swamp and a cemetery on a low hillock, the Pole Star, evil and
monstrous, leers down from the black vault, winking hideously like an insane watching
eye which strives to convey some message, yet recalls nothing save that it once had a
message to convey.

THE VERY OLD FOLK

From a letter written to "Melmoth" (Donald Wandrei) on Thursday, November 3, 1927

It was a flaming sunset or late afternoon in the tiny provincial town of Pompelo, at the
foot of the Pyrenees in Hispania Citerior. The year must have been in the late republic,
for the province was still ruled by a senatorial proconsul instead of a prætorian legate of
Augustus, and the day was the first before the Kalends of November. The hills rose
scarlet and gold to the north of the little town, and the westering sun shone ruddily and
mystically on the crude new stone and plaster buildings of the dusty forum and the
wooden walls of the circus some distance to the east. Groups of citizens--broad-browed
Roman colonists and coarse-haired Romanised natives, together with obvious hybrids of
the two strains, alike clad in cheap woollen togas--and sprinklings of helmeted
legionaries and coarse-mantled, black-bearded tribesmen of the circumambient
Vascones--all thronged the few paved streets and forum; moved by some vague and ill-
defined uneasiness.

I myself had just alighted from a litter, which the Illyrian bearers seemed to have
brought in some haste from Calagurris, across the Iberus to the southward. It appeared
that I was a provincial quæstor named L. Cælius Rufus, and that I had been summoned
by the proconsul, P. Scribonius Libo, who had come from Tarraco some days before.
The soldiers were the fifth cohort of the XIIth legion, under the military tribune Sex.
Asellius; and the legatus of the whole region, Cn. Balbutius, had also come from
Calagurris, where the permanent station was.

The cause of the conference was a horror that brooded on the hills. All the townsfolk
were frightened, and had begged the presence of a cohort from Calagurris. It was the
Terrible Season of the autumn, and the wild people in the mountains were preparing for
the frightful ceremonies which only rumour told of in the towns. They were the very old
folk who dwelt higher up in the hills and spoke a choppy language which the Vascones
could not understand. One seldom saw them; but a few times a year they sent down
little yellow, squint-eyed messengers (who looked like Scythians) to trade with the
merchants by means of gestures, and every spring and autumn they held the infamous
rites on the peaks, their howlings and altar-fires throwing terror into the villages.
Always the same--the night before the Kalends of Maius and the night before the
Kalends of November. Townsfolk would disappear just before these nights, and would
never be heard of again. And there were whispers that the native shepherds and farmers
were not ill-disposed toward the very old folk--that more than one thatched hut was
vacant before midnight on the two hideous Sabbaths.

This year the horror was very great, for the people knew that the wrath of the very old
folk was upon Pompelo. Three months previously five of the little squint-eyed traders
had come down from the hills, and in a market brawl three of them had been killed. The
remaining two had gone back wordlessly to their mountains--and this autumn not a
single villager had disappeared. There was menace in this immunity. It was not like the
very old folk to spare their victims at the Sabbath. It was too good to be normal, and the
villagers were afraid.

For many nights there had been a hollow drumming on the hills, and at last the ædile
Tib. Annæus Stilpo (half native in blood) had sent to Balbutius at Calagurris for a
cohort to stamp out the Sabbath on the terrible night. Balbutius had carelessly refused,
on the ground that the villagers' fears were empty, and that the loathsome rites of hill
folk were of no concern to the Roman People unless our own citizens were menaced. I,
however, who seemed to be a close friend of Balbutius, had disagreed with him;
averring that I had studied deeply in the black forbidden lore, and that I believed the
very old folk capable of visiting almost any nameless doom upon the town, which after
all was a Roman settlement and contained a great number of our citizens. The
complaining ædile's own mother Helvia was a pure Roman, the daughter of M. Helvius
Cinna, who had come over with Scipio's army. Accordingly I had sent a slave--a nimble
little Greek called Antipater--to the proconsul with letters, and Scribonius had heeded
my plea and ordered Balbutius to send his fifth cohort, under Asellius, to Pompelo;
entering the hills at dusk on the eve of November's Kalends and stamping out whatever
nameless orgies he might find-- bringing such prisoners as he might take to Tarraco for
the next proprætor's court. Balbutius, however, had protested, so that more
correspondence had ensued. I had written so much to the proconsul that he had become
gravely interested, and had resolved to make a personal inquiry into the horror.

He had at length proceeded to Pompelo with his lictors and attendants; there hearing
enough rumours to be greatly impressed and disturbed, and standing firmly by his order
for the Sabbath's extirpation. Desirous of conferring with one who had studied the
subject, he ordered me to accompany Asellius' cohort--and Balbutius had also come
along to press his adverse advice, for he honestly believed that drastic military action
would stir up a dangerous sentiment of unrest amongst the Vascones both tribal and
settled.

So here we all were in the mystic sunset of the autumn hills--old Scribonius Libo in his
toga prætexta, the golden light glancing on his shiny bald head and wrinkled hawk face,
Balbutius with his gleaming helmet and breastplate, blue-shaven lips compressed in
conscientiously dogged opposition, young Asellius with his polished greaves and
superior sneer, and the curious throng of townsfolk, legionaries, tribesmen, peasants,
lictors, slaves, and attendants. I myself seemed to wear a common toga, and to have no
especially distinguishing characteristic. And everywhere horror brooded. The town and
country folk scarcely dared speak aloud, and the men of Libo's entourage, who had been
there nearly a week, seemed to have caught something of the nameless dread. Old
Scribonius himself looked very grave, and the sharp voices of us later comers seemed to
hold something of curious inappropriateness, as in a place of death or the temple of
some mystic god.

We entered the prætorium and held grave converse. Balbutius pressed his objections,
and was sustained by Asellius, who appeared to hold all the natives in extreme contempt
while at the same time deeming it inadvisable to excite them. Both soldiers maintained
that we could better afford to antagonise the minority of colonists and civilised natives
by inaction, than to antagonise a probable majority of tribesmen and cottagers by
stamping out the dread rites.

I, on the other hand, renewed my demand for action, and offered to accompany the
cohort on any expedition it might undertake. I pointed out that the barbarous Vascones
were at best turbulent and uncertain, so that skirmishes with them were inevitable
sooner or later whichever course we might take; that they had not in the past proved
dangerous adversaries to our legions, and that it would ill become the representatives of
the Roman People to suffer barbarians to interfere with a course which the justice and
prestige of the Republic demanded. That, on the other hand, the successful
administration of a province depended primarily upon the safety and good-will of the
civilised element in whose hands the local machinery of commerce and prosperity
reposed, and in whose veins a large mixture of our own Italian blood coursed. These,
though in numbers they might form a minority, were the stable element whose
constancy might be relied on, and whose cooperation would most firmly bind the
province to the Imperium of the Senate and the Roman People. It was at once a duty and
an advantage to afford them the protection due to Roman citizens; even (and here I shot
a sarcastic look at Balbutius and Asellius) at the expense of a little trouble and activity,
and of a slight interruption of the draught-playing and cock-fighting at the camp in
Calagurris. That the danger to the town and inhabitants of Pompelo was a real one, I
could not from my studies doubt. I had read many scrolls out of Syria and Ægyptus, and
the cryptic towns of Etruria, and had talked at length with the bloodthirsty priest of
Diana Aricina in his temple in the woods bordering Lacus Nemorensis. There were
shocking dooms that might be called out of the hills on the Sabbaths; dooms which
ought not to exist within the territories of the Roman People; and to permit orgies of the
kind known to prevail at Sabbaths would be but little in consonance with the customs of
those whose forefathers, A. Postumius being consul, had executed so many Roman
citizens for the practice of the Bacchanalia--a matter kept ever in memory by the
Senatus Consultum de Bacchanalibus, graven upon bronze and set open to every eye.
Checked in time, before the progress of the rites might evoke anything with which the
iron of a Roman pilum might not be able to deal, the Sabbath would not be too much for
the powers of a single cohort. Only participants need be apprehended, and the sparing of
a great number of mere spectators would considerably lessen the resentment which any
of the sympathising country folk might feel. In short, both principle and policy
demanded stern action; and I could not doubt but that Publius Scribonius, bearing in
mind the dignity and obligations of the Roman People, would adhere to his plan of
despatching the cohort, me accompanying, despite such objections as Balbutius and
Asellius---speaking indeed more like provincials than Romans--might see fit to offer
and multiply.

The slanting sun was now very low, and the whole hushed town seemed draped in an
unreal and malign glamour. Then P. Scribonius the proconsul signified his approval of
my words, and stationed me with the cohort in the provisional capacity of a centurio
primipilus; Balbutius and Asellius assenting, the former with better grace than the latter.
As twilight fell on the wild autumnal slopes, a measured, hideous beating of strange
drums floated down from afar in terrible rhythm. Some few of the legionarii shewed
timidity, but sharp commands brought them into line, and the whole cohort was soon
drawn up on the open plain east of the circus. Libo himself, as well as Balbutius,
insisted on accompanying the cohort; but great difficulty was suffered in getting a
native guide to point out the paths up the mountain. Finally a young man named
Vercellius, the son of pure Roman parents, agreed to take us at least past the foothills.
We began to march in the new dusk, with the thin silver sickle of a young moon
trembling over the woods on our left. That which disquieted us most was the fact that
the Sabbath was to be held at all. Reports of the coming cohort must have reached the
hills, and even the lack of a final decision could not make the rumour less alarming--yet
there were the sinister drums as of yore, as if the celebrants had some peculiar reason to
be indifferent whether or not the forces of the Roman People marched against them. The
sound grew louder as we entered a rising gap in the hills, steep wooded banks enclosing
us narrowly on either side, and displaying curiously fantastic tree-trunks in the light of
our bobbing torches. All were afoot save Libo, Balbutius, Asellius, two or three of the
centuriones, and myself, and at length the way became so steep and narrow that those
who had horses were forced to leave them; a squad of ten men being left to guard them,
though robber bands were not likely to be abroad on such a night of terror. Once in a
while it seemed as though we detected a skulking form in the woods nearby, and after a
half-hour's climb the steepness and narrowness of the way made the advance of so great
a body of men--over 300, all told--exceedingly cumbrous and difficult. Then with utter
and horrifying suddenness we heard a frightful sound from below. It was from the
tethered horses--they had screamed, not neighed, but screamed...and there was no light
down there, nor the sound of any human thing, to shew why they had done so. At the
same moment bonfires blazed out on all the peaks ahead, so that terror seemed to lurk
equally well before and behind us. Looking for the youth Vercellius, our guide, we
found only a crumpled heap weltering in a pool of blood. In his hand was a short sword
snatched from the belt of D. Vibulanus, a subcenturio, and on his face was such a look
of terror that the stoutest veterans turned pale at the sight. He had killed himself when
the horses screamed... he, who had been born and lived all his life in that region, and
knew what men whispered about the hills. All the torches now began to dim, and the
cries of frightened legionaries mingled with the unceasing screams of the tethered
horses. The air grew perceptibly colder, more suddenly so than is usual at November's
brink, and seemed stirred by terrible undulations which I could not help connecting with
the beating of huge wings. The whole cohort now remained at a standstill, and as the
torches faded I watched what I thought were fantastic shadows outlined in the sky by
the spectral luminosity of the Via Lactea as it flowed through Perseus, Cassiopeia,
Cepheus, and Cygnus. Then suddenly all the stars were blotted from the sky--even
bright Deneb and Vega ahead, and the lone Altair and Fomalhaut behind us. And as the
torches died out altogether, there remained above the stricken and shrieking cohort only
the noxious and horrible altar-flames on the towering peaks; hellish and red, and now
silhouetting the mad, leaping, and colossal forms of such nameless beasts as had never a
Phrygian priest or Campanian grandam whispered of in the wildest of furtive tales. And
above the nighted screaming of men and horses that dæmonic drumming rose to louder
pitch, whilst an ice-cold wind of shocking sentience and deliberateness swept down
from those forbidden heights and coiled about each man separately, till all the cohort
was struggling and screaming in the dark, as if acting out the fate of Laocoön and his
sons. Only old Scribonius Libo seemed resigned. He uttered words amidst the
screaming, and they echo still in my ears. "Malitia vetus...malitia vetus
est...venit...tandem venit..." ("Wickedness of old...it is wickedness of
old...happened...happened at last...")

And then I waked. It was the most vivid dream in years, drawing upon wells of the
subconscious long untouched and forgotten. Of the fate of that cohort no record exists,
but the town at least was saved--for encyclopædias tell of the survival of Pompelo to
this day, under the modern Spanish name of Pompelona...

Yrs for Gothick Supremacy--

C . IVLIVS . VERVS . MAXIMINVS.

THE END